Soren laughed, going to clap the shoulder of Shindo before thinking better of it.
Shindo was reeking of blood and sweat and Soren wasn’t going to get anywhere near him until he took a nice, long shower.
Meric rushed over, riding the vines that shortened the distance between them in moments.
“Sit!” Meric commanded, pressing his hands on Shindo in an attempt to push him down so that he could heal him.
“There are wounds all over!”
Shindo lifted an eyebrow before looking at Soren questioningly.
He didn’t know any of these people but trusted Soren’s judgement, complying with the frantic man.
A soft, metallic sound came from beside Soren as Captain Valen pulled her sword from the ground and flicked the blood off the edge with a sharp snap of her wrist.
“We cannot stay here long,” Captain Valen said, her voice tense.
“The others are waiting back in the restaurant.
We have to get back as soon as possible.
You activated the Anchor on this island, right?”
Shindo looked at the captain before nodding.
“Yeah, I did.”
Meric looked like he wanted to argue, probably wanting to heal her before leaving but thought better of it.
She had sharp judgement and knew her own body so if she said so, they probably had to leave.
“Other Abyssal Creatures probably heard the noise, “she said, looking into the dark streets of Vulcanis.
“And I wouldn’t doubt if a more fearsome creature than the Echoed Transcendent came—it was far too weak to be one, anyways.
It likely borrowed the authority of a stronger King.”
Soren swallowed hard.
He didn’t want to think about the devastation a true werewolf King could bring.
“Soren,” Captain Valen called, gesturing to his sword.
“Look at the dream sword and tell us how the situation at the Nexus is.
If we travel across the Starlight Abyss and they activate the Nexus, we won’t follow them back to Vulcanis.
We’ll be stuck in the Abyss.”
He shivered at her explanation, quickly focusing the reflection to show the Empress and her fight.
He definitely didn’t want to stay here a day longer and if he got stranded in the Abyss for eternity… He didn’t want to think about it.
The dream sword warped before settling on the Empress.
She was right standing before the Nexus Guardian with her small army, about to challenge it.
Captain Valen nodded at the reflection.
“Okay, we have time.
If we leave right now, we can make it to the restaurant.
If she fails, we might have to travel to the Nexus and challenge it ourselves,” she said, turning to look at Shindo with narrowed eyes.
“We have three Transcendents after all.
Our chances are decent.”
Meric withdrew his hands from Shindo as he cast a disapproving glance towards the dried blood coming from the captain’s nose.
“Are you sure?
A trip now right after fighting an Echoed Transcendent while your entropy is unstable is unwise, Captain!”
Rivor interjected himself and agreed.
“It might be smarter if we travel after you recover your reserves.
My reserves aren’t optimal either.”
“My entropy is over half-way full,” she dismissed, wiping the blood from her face.
“Rivor, you guys protect Soren while Shindo protects the rear and I protect the front.
Meric, you can continue to focus on healing Shindo”
They sighed before nodding, giving up on arguing with Captain Valen.
Soren could only feel useless at the current moment.
He never really depended on someone else before in his life until today and that was all he was doing currently.
He felt useless in the midsts of the Ascended.
“Shindo, can you walk?” she asked.
He rolled his shoulders, testing the mended muscles where Meric’s healing had closed the worst of the tearing.
“Yes, I’m all good.”
“Good,” she replied before pausing and looking at Shindo deeply in his eyes.
“And for whatever reason you’re not using your entropy… I hope if the time comes, you will use it.”
With that, she nodded at Shindo before turning around and walking towards the eastern edge of the island they came from.
It seemed she didn’t want to pressure Shindo into giving her an answer but if the time arose, she wanted him to know that she expected the full strength of the Transcendent.
Soren felt a small chill go down his spine.
He knew that Captain Valen was strong from what Meric told him but to think that Shindo was also that strong without using entropy… How strong was he?
Not to mention Rivor who he dismissed as inferior to the Captain.
Soren shook his head to clear his thoughts before he moved to follow the captain across the streets as they traced back the way they came from.
Not much happened on the way back to the edge but something was throbbing in his head and he couldn’t pinpoint why.
Something on his chest started burning as he gripped his necklace to try to calm himself.
Although they occasionally met different wolves they met at the cathedral and other weak Abyssal Creatures.
Nothing much else of note happened until they reached the cliff.
Before them lay the edge of the island to the Starlight Abyss.
The same eerily beautiful sight lay before them.
The Starlight Abyss below them while the infinite expanse of black and purple auroras above them.
The swirling black void within the horizon was nowhere to be seen but Soren knew better than to look at any of them too deeply lest his mind explode in pain.
Soren shivered as he felt the biting cold eat into him again but this time, he was prepared and tried to ignore it.
However, he felt this weird, impending doom that he couldn’t shake off since he left the Cathedral of The Heavenly Angel.
Soren looked down at the dream sword.
Its polished steel flickered before it warped to a steady reflection.
“The fight between the Empress and the guardian has started,” Soren said, his voice tense as he stared into the blade.
“The Empress just made contact with the Guardian.”
Captain Valen nodded, not turning around to look at him before stepping off the cliff.
A thud sounded below her boots.
“Then we cross now,” she said, walking confidently across the abyss below them.
“Single file and keep your footing.
We’ll return back to Vulcanis.
I’m sure of it.”
The others followed, stepping into the faint blue steps that Captain Valen created as they tensely walked across the invisible bridge.
Soren marched on in silence as the cliffs of the island behind them began to shrink, bringing the sense of impending doom Soren couldn’t shake off.
He didn’t have this feeling the first time crossing the invisible bridge so he couldn’t think of a reason why he was feeling it now.
‘Must be because I’m excited to be back at the restaurant safe and sound.’
By the time they were halfway, Soren was sweating and he started hyperventilating.
“Captain Valen,” he called breathlessly, heart beating wildly in his chest.
“Can we… hurry up?
Something feels… off.”
She looked back and saw his condition, narrowing her eyes.
Something was off and she didn’t know what.
She nodded and picked up the pace to a normal sprint, trusting the judgement of Soren.
Something was wrong and she didn’t know what.
Unbeknownst to everyone on the bridge, the Empress laid the final strike on the Nexus Guardian, slaying it.
A chill surrounded the world around the people on the bridge, causing everyone to fall silent as they sweated profusely.
Shindo clenched his fists as his presence became darker.
Suddenly, a bright, brilliant white light shined around him as he stared at the opposite island.
Captain Valen clenched her sword and spoke without turning her head.
“Something… is coming.”
The dull lights that filled the streets of Vulcanis flickered before vanishing.
The freezing cold air plummeted instantly, filling Soren with not only mundane cold but a mystical dread.
A ripple appeared at the edge of the island before a lone, towering figure seemed to walk between the rifts of the fabric of reality.
It didn’t walk as much as reality altered itself to accommodate its presence, the space around it bending.
It was an entity of pure cosmic nightmare.
The entity was completely black in figure—a reflection of the space around it—but humanoid in shape.
It possessed dark, broken wings behind its colossal dark armor and in the center of its chest, a pulsing red circle glowed.
Monstrous, dark tendrils flared wildly from its head like a crown of living shadows, warping the light around it.
Behind it, a dark, nebulous sphere loomed ominously over the world, casting a menacing presence that suffocated the world.
The moment its presence touched the world, Captain Valen and Rivor dropped to one knee as blood trickled from their nose and every single orifice.
Shindo remained standing, the radiant white glow flaring as he glared defiantly at the creature that loomed over the island.
The authority of the werewolf, an Echoed Transcendent, was like a raindrop compared to the ocean of absolute dominion radiating from the monstrosity.
Meric fell forward onto their hands and knees, unable to lift his head before collapsing and collapsing.
Soren, on the other hand, could only stare with wide eyes at the creature.
The necklace he wore flared wildly.
The central red orb in the creature’s chest flared and a voice echoed not in Soren’s ears, but directly into his mind and soul—a sound that caused Soren to cry out in pain.
It wasn’t any human language but words that transcended the boundaries of language and understanding.
“It begins, Champion of Order.”
The dark tendrils surrounding its head writhed as it raised its warped arms, the mere movement crushing the city below it.
“This moment in Tyme marks the beginning of the Convergence of Fate.”
The abyssal titan tilted its terrifying frame towards Soren, an inescapable weight that pressed against Soren’s very soul.
“Tell me, rightful heir of the Order Essence… can you withstand its burden?”
The titan’s chest pulsed with an oppressive crimson light, bringing a world-rendering weight along with it.
The invisible bridge underneath them groaned and the void around them screamed under the titan’s might.
Captain Valen stood at the forefront, her arms outstretched with veins bulging along her neck as she tried to manipulate whatever she could to lessen the burden but it was almost entirely for naught.
Soren dropped to both knees as the [Royal Guard’s Armor] groaned underneath the weight of the tyrannical aura before shattering entirely, spraying into a shower of sparks and metal.
The Nonexistence Essences shattered next, filling Soren with an impure mixture of different pathway Essences.
Before Soren could pass out, he found that all the pressure around him vanished.
He collapsed, free from the titanic weight before he looked around, seeing himself back at the island they found Shindo at.
Surrounding him was Meric and Rivor—the former unconscious and bloodied while the latter stood, blood pouring from his orifices but glaring into the Abyss.
‘We can’t survive this,’ Soren realized through the blinding pain.
‘Not like this.’
His pulse thundered in his ears.
He felt a burning pain spread from his chest as he screamed out in pain.
He tore off his cloak and shirt to see what the burning sensation was to see it was his necklace.
It was humming and pulsing a brilliant white light where a stream of yellow, red, and other colors flowed into the white orb held by the necklace—the power from the Nonexistence Essences.
He tried to yank it off him but found that he couldn’t, no matter how much strength he put it.
The pain simply continued enveloping him with the fury of a thousand suns and knives striking at him constantly.
He screamed out as his body broke down, bleeding from every pore with a white light glowing from every opening.
In front of him, within the grand expanse of the void between islands, Shindo’s illuminating light shone brighter.
Shindo screamed, clasping his hands together in front of the god-like creature.
Shindo’s radiance shone as bright as a star, illuminating the entirety of the fragment of Vulcanis in its white light.
It caused the titan to pause before it closed its outstretched ‘palm’ at Shindo and Valen.
The world folded, the void between islands warping as the insidious titan willed the space to simply collapse.
It did not obey.
The combined authority of Valen and Shindo kept the collapse at bay, causing great strain upon the two who were already exhausted.
Shindo opened his hands glowing with a thick white radiance and channeled it to his legs, jumping.
He should’ve crossed the distance between the bridge and the creature in a moment but reality was different.
No matter how close Shindo should’ve gotten to the creature, he seemed to never close the gap—an infinite distance.
‘The god isn’t even here,’ Valen and Shindo both thought at the same time, faces paling.
It was merely a projection—an avatar that manifested through the tear of the Order Break reversal, projecting across what could possibly be an infinite distance across the Abyss.
A fraction of its true strength.
Shindo unleashed a blinding white ray at the titan, a power that would’ve annihilated most things in Atheo.
The titan merely brushed it off as a minor annoyance and opened its arms, motioning for a clap.
An agonizing scream tore through the Abyss, echoing throughout the two islands.
A pillar of white erupted from Soren as the white orb pushed against his chest cracked, spilling a white stream into his heart.
His veins flared white and his hair turned from jet-black into a white sheen, burning away the weak mortal limits in his flesh and soul.
The overwhelming and crushing weight of the titan’s presence somewhat subsided as Soren became something more.
He broke the Order of Awakening.
He was an Awakened.
At the opposite end of the bridge, the giant avatar felt the disruption from Soren’s awakening and turned its gaze to him.
It brought its hands together.
“Soren!
MOVE!” Shindo roared, but across the great distance and no foothold, he was powerless to intervene
A wave of annihilating spatial disruption surged towards the island—a rumbling rush of spatial frenzy that atomized everything it touched.
Soren stared at it and tried to grasp at anything he could do to prevent his annihilation but a freshly ascended Awakened could only cower at a god-like Abyssal Creature.
Captain Valen looked back.
She saw death itself rushing towards Rivor, Meric, and Soren—and made her choice in a heartbeat.
She jumped up, her hair valiantly flowing in the static void, and poured everything into Vector Shift.
The oncoming wave of annihilation hit her spatial barrier and bent, shearing around her body in a thin, V-shaped cone of safety.
Behind her, the island was utterly disintegrated as building, stone, and earth vanished into mere atoms, leaving only the tiny patch of rock beneath Soren’s and the other’s feet and a pulsing blue rift.
Soren and the others were safe.
Realizing what she was doing to herself, Soren only felt horror.
“NO!” He screamed, his voice breaking as he watched Captain Valen withstand the full force of a god’s strike.
Captain Valen turned her head slightly towards them, her brilliant purple eyes dimming as her lips formed a final, quiet command:
“Live… all of you.”
She expended all her entropy completely.
The annihilating shockwave ended just as she did.
Abruptly and with finality.
“Valen!” Soren screamed, watching as her body fell into the Starlight Abyss below.
As her lifeless body began to fall into the depths of the void below, Shindo’s figure grazed the spatial steps before he blurred and caught her falling form before she could slip into the Starlight Abyss.
The entropy imbued into the bridge remained but was slowly fading.
The titan stilled as it watched the pitiful humans mourn.
It was entirely unfazed by the desperate resistance of the two Transcendents, making it seem like no amount of Transcendents could ever hope to defeat it.
If the creature somehow got into Atheo… There would be no thing that could contain it other than, quite possibly, the Heavenly Angel itself.
Soren stared up at the cosmic nightmare, his fists clenched so tightly his nails bit into his palms and caused them to bleed.
Although he had not known Captain Valen for a long time, all he could feel was respect and comradeship with her.
He barely got to know her before she perished just like that.
It didn’t even make sense to him.
Why would a creature of that caliber even bother looking at them?
They were like air particles, utterly and completely powerless under the might of the creature.
The Convergence of Fate.
That’s what it said.
Soren felt his soul churn as he stared at the titan.With every second he stood in the presence of the Abyssal Titan, he felt a dormant power surge with ferocity but he had no idea how to channel it.
It frustrated him with no end that he became an Awakened but he could do nothing with the power he possessed.
“Soren!” Shindo called, still holding the captain.
“You better become stronger!
I will put my faith in you!
My life depends on it!”
An intangible, white thread snapped with a finality into place that anchored Soren’s spirituality directly to Shindo’s.
Following that, Soren felt a rush of knowledge flood his feeble mind: Shindo is part of the Lesser Saint of Faith Pathway and chose to have faith in Soren.
That meant that Shindo’s strength was now tethered to his absolute faith in Soren’s potential.
Beyond that, Soren instinctively knew he would only understand more as he became stronger.
A couple islands away, a beacon of ethereal blue light shot into the Void above, signalling the activation of the Nexus.
Across the floating islands, the activated Anchors resonated in harmony, blazing with a blinding blue light.
The Abyssal Titan’s avatar began to fade into a drifting purple mist, its featureless gaze remaining fixed on Soren until the very end.
“You mark either the beginning or end of existence,” the Titan echoed in Soren’s mind, heavy and ancient.
“I have simply initiated the beginning of the Convergence.”
The beacons flashed before the Void above and the Starlight Abyss shattered with a deafening intensity, giving way to the brilliant, golden atmosphere of Atheo.
The dark ambience faded as the Abyssal Titan vanished from sight and the fractured landmasses smashed back together in a chaotic, grinding reunion.