The drop was instantaneous, but time dilated under the suffocating weight of sheer terror.
The dark ocean below didn’t look like water. It looked like a starving, abyssal maw waiting to consume reality itself. It possessed a grotesque, suffocating aura—a toxic, ancient dread that made the air freeze in Rain’s lungs.
She knew what that water did. It didn’t just drown a person; it rotted the soul, dissolved the Tether, and erased a contractor’s existence until not even a corpse remained.
Above them, the compressed lightning core detonated with a thunderous BOOM!
The shockwave tore through the sky, but Rain couldn’t even brace herself. Overstimulating her body to force Lightning Space into a hyper-compressed core had completely fried her nervous system. Paralysis locked her muscles.
She couldn’t move a finger, couldn’t channel a spark, couldn’t even scream. She could only plummet, completely helpless, her wide, horrified eyes fixed on the horrific expanse of black water rushing up to swallow her whole.
Beside her, the Azure Class Ravager was unconscious, its radiant light fading into a sickly, dim flicker.
They hurtled past Floating Island Two—a charred, broken mass of land that had already been battered by the collateral shockwaves of their fight on Island Three. Rain’s mind screamed at her body to move, but her limbs remained useless lead. The ocean’s malevolent pressure expanded, smelling of decay and absolute oblivion.
Up on Island Three, disaster hit Sen.
He saw Rain falling and desperately raised his blade to open a spatial portal to catch her, timing her trajectory. But the massive explosion broke the island’s already warping gravitational pull completely. The three-hundred-meter landmass violently bucked, tilting at a horrifying ninety-degree angle.
"Dammit—!"
The sudden gravitational shear hurled Sen backward. He was dragged like a rag doll straight through the burning forest, his body smashing through trees and jagged debris, skin tearing and bones cracking as the island began to capsize in the sky.
Blood in his mouth, his usual easygoing composure completely shattered, Sen threw himself off the tilting edge of the falling island.
He plummeted into freefall behind them. The burning, collapsing Island Three was descending right above his head like a falling mountain, but Sen didn’t care. He didn’t even register the crushing shadow of the landmass above him. His bloodshot eyes were locked entirely on Rain, who was seconds away from touching the nightmare below.
Reaching into his coat with trembling, blood-soaked fingers, Sen pulled out a pair of specialized glasses—an artifact earned from his very first Astral Trial. He slammed them onto his face. The lenses clicked, zooming in with mechanical precision, pinning his sight directly onto the agonizingly small gap of air right above the ocean surface.
If he opened a rift there, Rain would fall into the portal instead of the water, and he could pull her through to safety.
"Move... MOVE!" Sen roared.
He poured every drop of his remaining Astral power into his weapon—an Eclipser Tier-3 Katana. The blade ignited, glowing like a blinding, burning ember as dense spatial energy wrapped around the steel. Holding the glowing katana, he moved it through his hands like fluid water, drawing the blade back with violent precision to slice through the fabric of reality itself.
He swung with maximum force, aiming to carve a massive Spatial Tear straight to the ocean’s surface.
CLANG!
A sound like a mountain shattering echoed across the sky.
The space directly above the cursed ocean refused to bend. The horrifying atmospheric pressure and unnatural laws of the deadly water repelled the spatial distortion. Instead of tearing open a portal, Sen’s Tier-3 katana violently snapped in half.
The resulting spatial backlash detonated directly in Sen’s face. The blast wave sent him flying upward through the air, his chest caving as he coughed out a heavy spray of blood.
Through blurred, agonizing vision, Sen watched in sheer horror as his broken blade fell away.
Down below, the limp body of the wolf hit the surface first, instantly swallowed by the pitch-black abyss without even a splash. A heartbeat later, Rain’s paralyzed form plunged beneath the dark, terrifying surface of the deadly ocean, and the black waters closed completely over her head.
Meanwhile, hiding in the descending island that was burning, there was a man with mechanical wings, and beside him was Steven, who watched with a smile on his face.
"Wow. The famous Eclipser Rain is dead. I wonder how the world will react to this news. No matter."
"Master, what should we do?"
Steven just looked at him and said nothing. "But we have to leave now. We don’t want to be late for the temple, do we?"
And with that, the man opened his wings as he carried Steven high into the clouds. Steven looked down at the descending island that was about to hit the second before looking at the ocean.
"That’s what you get for playing the hero."
With that, he looked away.