Silence.
Not peace—silence.
The abyss hung gutted, its skin peeled back by the clash of shard and god. Reality itself had been erased in the blast, leaving only fragments of broken light drifting through an endless wound.
Vemy floated at the center of it, body cracked like porcelain, Prismarine bleeding from his veins in fractured streams. The Ring of Defiance was gone, but its echo clung to him—each shard of it orbiting faint, like dying stars refusing to fade.
[Abyssal Reading Error.]
[Containment State: Lost.]
The System's voice faltered, glitching in his skull, yet Vemy still breathed. Still burned. Still defied.
From the ruins of the void, something stirred.
Not the Abyssal Warden—it was gone, its form erased in the collision. What remained was worse.
A figure rose from the fracture, its body sculpted of collapsing halos, its presence stitched from screams of silence. Where the Warden had been a god of symmetry, this was broken geometry—every ring jagged, every line bent, a hymn that had been shattered and crudely sung again.
And in its core burned something deeper. Older. A shard of eternity itself.
Vemy's vision blurred, his grip on his spear trembling, yet his lips twisted into a bloodied grin.
"…So you're still standing too, huh?"
The figure tilted, rings grinding against themselves like rusted steel. A voice emerged—not thunder, not divinity, but a layered chorus of broken echoes.
"No longer Warden. No longer Balance.
I am… what remains.
The First Ring-Bearer."
The abyss trembled anew.
Vemy forced himself upright, shards spinning closer around him, wings flickering in and out of form. His body was breaking, but his fire refused to bow.
"Then I'll break you too."
The First Ring-Bearer extended a hand, and the void rippled like water pulled toward a drowning whirlpool.
The battle wasn't over.
It had only just begun.
[New Threat Registered: First Ring-Bearer]
[Warning: Uncatalogued Entity.]
[System Directive: SURVIVE.]