----Chapter 42----
Amid the ruin, shadows moved carefully.
Smoke lingered over the ruined battlefield, curling around shattered stone and scorched wood. Shadows moved carefully through the wreckage.
Anon and Gorak stepped into the debris-strewn clearing, their dark cult robes brushing the ground, tattered and stained with ash.
Though Gorak commanded swarms of insects with unnatural precision, he was still human beneath the robes—a mortal man with scarred flesh, muscles coiled, and breath visible in the cold air.
His crimson eyes glinted with hunger and impatience, hands flexing as if ready to strike, while Anon's icy gaze traced invisible threads of probability and timing, calculating every possibility.
-----
Meanwhile, Azre and Rietta faced each other across the ruined village. Golden threads coiled along Azre's body, and Executioner's Blade hummed with radiant power. She stood poised, wings unfurling in a display of Valkyrie might.
Rietta snarled, eyes crimson with rage.
"You're just a mortal. I… I'm far stronger than you!"
Azre's gaze was calm.
"Not anymore. This is where it ends."
The battle reignited with cataclysmic force. Rietta lashed out with chains and rot, trying to ensnare Azre, her dark miasma writhing like living shadow.
But Azre moved like sunlight cutting through smoke, precise, relentless, unstoppable. Each swing of her Executioner's Blade shredded the corruption, the golden threads of her power unraveling Rietta's twisted magic with ease.
"Impossible!" Rietta screamed.
"You're nothing but a fragile mortal!"
"I am, but not anynore" Azre replied, aura blazing.
She lunged, wings spread wide, golden threads slicing through the air. Her blade found its mark, tearing through Rietta's grotesque, tentacled form.
At the last moment, as Rietta began to crumble into ashes, she whispered, voice ragged.
"If you're the beacon of hope, then why didn't you save me back then?"
Azre froze, watching the burning remains. Executioner's Blade glimmered once more.
Then a memory not her own flooded her mind. A young girl in a slum pressed against cold, dirty walls, malnourished, beaten, bruised. Her mother was a prostitute and her father a drunkard who punished her at whim. She whispered to the void.
"Help," but no one answered.
In the trash-strewn alley, she discovered a black gem.
It's beauty was magnetic, almost alive. Her father noticed and tried to snatch it, intending to sell it. She refused. He struck her, slamming her against the wall, blood dripping. Yet the gem chose her.
She reached for it, trembling, and nothing happened to her. Her father cried out in pain as his body decayed. The girl ran, clutching the gem, eyes wide with awe.
Azre's chest tightened. She realized the depth of the pain that had forged Rietta, the suffering, the rage, and the darkness. But it did not excuse what Rietta had done.
Then a final vision crossed Azre's mind.
What if she had met Rietta back then and managed to take her hands and offer her a new path? Would it have made a difference?
Azre exhaled slowly.
"It is over. You can rest now.
----
Gorak cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders, a savage grin spreading across his face.
"My hands are itching to settle the score with that pirate," he muttered, claws flexing.
"When she comes, I am tearing her apart."
Anon did not answer immediately. His eyes unfocused for the briefest instant as he invoked his hidden sight. Time thinned around him. A fleeting glimpse unfolded.
Brooke rushing through the ruins. The clash that would follow. The inevitable convergence of paths. The vision lasted less than a heartbeat, but it was enough.
"They will come on their own," Anon said quietly.
"We wait."
Gorak snorted.
"Hah. Finally something fun."
Excitement surged through him. With careless strength, he tossed Tharen's body onto the mossy ground. Tharen landed hard, unable to move, his body locked in paralysis though his mind remained painfully awake.
Gorak crouched and opened a small metal capsule at his belt. Inside, something writhed. He lifted it between his claws with pride. A Crimson Mantris bug unfolded its needle-like limbs, wings buzzing with a thin, hungry hum.
"My precious little hunter," Gorak chuckled.
"This will end that pirate quickly. I will twist her mana veins and she will not even fire those annoying twig guns of hers."
He laughed, low and wicked.
"Easy win."
The sound scraped against Anon's mind. His gaze locked onto the insect, and the world tilted. Pain speared through his skull. Static flooded his vision.
The present blurred as memories he had buried clawed their way back to the surface.
A boy stood alone in a frozen courtyard. Himself. Younger. Smaller. His hands trembled as instructors shook their heads in disappointment.
Nullborn.
The word echoed like a curse.
No mana. No spark. No future.
Laughter followed him through the halls of Grandaelia. Students shoved him aside, mocking his dream of becoming a wizard. He remembered the bruises hidden beneath his sleeves, the insults carved deeper than any wound.
Every night he buried himself in books, clinging to theories of time and magic like lifelines, refusing to let the world crush the fragile flame inside him.
Then her face emerged from the haze.
Viyin.
She listened when no one else would. While others sneered, she sat beside him and asked questions about his research. Her eyes shone with genuine curiosity. A prodigy admired by the academy, yet she treated him as an equal.
From the sidelines, he watched her rise higher and higher, pride swelling in his chest. Her victories felt like shared triumphs.
She was hope made human. The memory twisted.
Whispers. Jealous eyes. A circle of students plotting in the shadows. He saw the Crimson Mantris again, identical to the one buzzing in Gorak's grasp. He watched helplessly as the trap unfolded in the academy stadium. Viyin's simple spell spiraled out of control. Fire bloomed into catastrophe. The explosion shattered screams into the air.
Afterward came the accusations. The cold stares.
The verdict. Expelled.
He saw her trembling hands, her fear of her own power, the light in her eyes dimming. Something inside him broke that day.
The next memories came drenched in darkness.
Midnight corridors. Silent footsteps. Doors creaking open. He moved like a shadow through the dormitories, blade in hand. One by one, he ended the lives of those who had destroyed her. There was no hesitation. No mercy. Only the steady rhythm of vengeance. By dawn, his hands were stained and his soul irreversibly changed.
He ran. Wanted. Hunted. Hollow.
In that abyss he met Dieval, who reached out to him with a promise.
"I can fix what the world denied you," Dieval had said.
"I can give you power beyond mana itself." Hex alchemy.
Time bending to his will in exchange for pieces of his life, his emotions, his very existence. An impossible bargain. A terrible salvation.
Anon accepted.
The memories slammed back into the present. The forest seemed to recoil as his aura erupted, a storm of warped time coiling around him. His chest tightened with a grief he had never truly escaped.
He had tried to erase this pain, to bury it beneath centuries of borrowed power, yet the insect dragged it all back into the light.
His eyes burned as he stared at the Crimson Mantris in Gorak's hand. Beneath the fury lay something deeper and more fragile. Regret. Love. A wound that had never healed.
The Nullborn scholar who once dreamed of greatness stood frozen between past and present, a storm contained within human skin.
His wrath sharpened into something precise and terrible, forged from loss and longing.
And in the trembling silence of the clearing, the tragedy of who he had been and what he had become pressed down on him like winter itself.
----
Anon moved before Gorak could even register the shift in the air.
His hand shot out and clamped around Gorak's forearm. Fingers dug into hardened muscle like iron hooks. The ground beneath Anon's boots cracked as his aura surged, dark currents of warped time coiling around his arm. Every line of his body screamed tension. He was utterly serious.
The Crimson Mantris buzzed frantically between Gorak's claws.
"Put it away," Anon said.
His voice was low and steady, but it carried a weight that bent the silence around them.
Gorak blinked in surprise, then snarled. He tried to yank his arm back. It did not move. Anon's grip tightened. Muscles in his jaw flexed, and the air grew heavy, as if time itself resisted Gorak's struggle.
"What is your problem?" Gorak growled.
"It is just a weapon."
"It is not just a weapon," Anon replied. His eyes were cold, but a storm churned behind them.
"Drop it. Now."
The insect's wings whined louder. Gorak's grin returned, sharp and defiant.
"You are ordering me?" he scoffed.
"Since when did you grow fangs, scholar?"
A pulse of distorted time rippled outward from Anon. Leaves froze mid-fall. The buzzing of the insect stuttered, skipping like a broken sound. Gorak felt it then, a pressure pressing against his skin, subtle but suffocating.
His grin faltered.
Anon stepped closer, their faces inches apart.
"I said drop it."
For a heartbeat, it looked like Gorak might obey. Then pride flared in his crimson eyes.
"No."
He twisted violently, claws flashing. The Crimson Mantris shot into the air as Gorak swung his free arm toward Anon's head. Anon tilted sideways with inhuman precision. The strike carved through the space where he had been, splitting a tree behind him.
Time lurched.
Anon drove his elbow into Gorak's ribs. The impact thundered through the clearing. Gorak skidded backward, heels gouging trenches in the moss. The insect circled above them, its hungry hum slicing through the tension.
Gorak bared his teeth.
"So you do want to fight."
"If that is what it takes," Anon said.
The air between them thickened, charged with the promise of violence. Shadows warped around Anon's feet, and Gorak's muscles bulged as he lowered into a predatory stance.
Tharen lay forgotten on the ground between them, the clearing poised on the edge of eruption.
Then space tore open.
A circle of absolute black split the air with a sharp crack. A void portal blossomed beside Tharen, its edges rippling like liquid night. Cold wind rushed out of it, carrying the scent of distant places.
Rubal stepped through first, eyes wide and alert. Brooke followed a heartbeat later, twin guns already drawn. Her gaze locked instantly onto Gorak and Anon, taking in the fractured ground and the storm of power swirling between them.
Everything froze.
Gorak's attention snapped to the newcomers, a feral smile spreading across his face.
"Well," he rumbled.
"The prey walks into my hands."
Anon's grip loosened just enough for Gorak to pull back. The moment between them shattered, the near fight suspended but not forgotten. His eyes flicked to Brooke and Rubal, calculations racing behind his calm expression.
Brooke stepped forward, guns aimed at Gorak, her stance unwavering.
The void portal hissed softly behind them as it began to close.
The confrontation that had almost exploded between Anon and Gorak shifted, redirected toward the new arrivals.
Brooke's eyes hardened as she stepped in front of Rubal, guns steady in her hands.
"You should have finished me when you had the chance."
Gorak's grin stretched wide, eyes burning with savage delight.
"Good. I was hoping you'd say that."