Year 840 After the Third Omni War. Unknown Cosmic Coordinates.
The scent of honey glazed lotus tarts always made her want to cry.
In the timeline that had burned to ash, it was just a dessert.
But now, it felt like a tombstone.
Anna remembered sitting in the sunlit gardens of the Celestial Palace, the warm breeze tugging at her hair.
Across from her, Crown Princess Angelica had been laughing, her elegant silver rapier resting against the pristine white table.
"You are so serious lately, Annabella,"
Angelica had teased, pouring a cup of golden tea.
"The dispute with the Primordial Empire is nothing but negotiations and politics now. The fighting is over. You can afford to smile."
Anna had smiled.
She had forced the corners of her mouth upward even as her soul screamed.
She smiled because she knew exactly what was going to happen in three days.
She knew that the sky would crack.
She knew that Sir Coal would be torn in half defending the courtyard.
And she knew that Angelica would use her own body as a human shield to protect Anna, her blood soaking into the pristine white stones of the garden.
Anna knew how Angelica would die because she still had the nightmares of the day the Realm fell.
To be a regressor was not a blessing of foresight.
It was a curse of carrying a ruined world on your shoulders.
The agonizing burden of looking at the people you love and knowing exactly what they sound like when they scream.
Anna fought, she bled, and she burned her soul to rewinding the clock just to buy them one more afternoon in the sun.
She had to fix it.
She had to make it right this time.
She took the teacup from her sister, her hands trembling slightly.
"I am smiling, sister,"
Anna had whispered.
CRACK.
The memory shattered.
The scent of lotus tea was violently replaced by the suffocating metallic stench of ancient rot.
Princess Annabella was thrown backward as her spine slamming into the marble pillar of the VIP promenade.
She coughed spitting a mouthful of golden blood onto the floor.
Her pristine white gown was ruined stained.
Before her stood the mini boss, a colossal, hulking amalgamation of calcified bone, necrotic armor, and dozens of human like arms.
Its mismatched eyes swirled with cosmic madness.
The horde of lesser horrors writhed behind it as a sea of teeth and tentacles completely flooding the beautiful corridor.
The escape pods launched, Anna thought, her mind calculating with cold detached precision.
Angelica is safe.
Sir Vance is with her.
They will reach the Primordial Empire or the Mystic world where Zeon is.
But the Celestial Royal Cruiser was lost.
The dimensional breach was widening.
If Anna fell here, the eldritch entities would assimilate the ship.
They would use its Divine Warp Core to track the escape pods or worse, crash the corrupted dreadnought directly into the heart of the Celestial Realm to jumpstart the apocalypse early.
She could not let the Abyss claim the ship.
"I am the Shield of the Realm,"
Anna whispered to herself.
Her Divine Core, battered and exhausted from the sheer trauma of the fight, flared back to life.
Her aura didn’t glow with the gentle, healing warmth of typical Celestial magic.
The Aura she had now burned with dense golden fire, a holy light compressed by her desperation.
The mini boss roared, launching itself forward.
Its massive, scythe like arms brought down a cross slash capable of cleaving a mountain in half.
Anna didn’t block as she slipped beneath the strike with impossible speed.
She condensed her aura into a blade of light around her hand and drove it directly into the creature’s kneecap.
The beast shrieked, buckling forward.
Anna used the monster’s falling momentum as a springboard.
She leaped off its thigh, diving straight into the sea of horrors blocking the corridor.
"Get out of my way!"
Anna roared.
She was a meteor of golden fire tearing through the dark.
She sliced through tentacles, incinerated necrotic flesh, and shattered bone armor.
Every step was a desperate struggle.
Claws raked across her arms as teeth tore at the hem of her dress.
The sheer numbers were overwhelming her down like a drowning swimmer in a sea of tar.
She broke through the horde, sprinting down the spiraling maintenance stairwell toward the lowest decks of the cruiser.
"WARNING. CONTAINMENT BREACH IN ENGINEERING SECTOR,"
the ship’s automated voice blared, the red emergency lights painting Anna’s blood streaked face.
She reached the massive, circular blast doors of the Engine Room.
The metal was already beginning to warp with thick black veins of corrupted sludge creeping along the seams.
With a burst of divine strength, Anna grabbed the manual locking wheel and violently wrenched it open.
She threw herself inside slamming her hand onto the emergency lockdown terminal the second she crossed the threshold.
The heavy doors slammed shut behind her sealing the room.
Immediately, the deafening sound of monstrous fists and claws began to batter the titanium from the outside.
Anna stumbled, falling to her knees on the metal grating.
She was gasping for air, her vision blurring.
Her Divine Core was cracking, the golden light flickering like a dying candle.
In the center of the room pulsed the ship’s heart:
The Divine Warp Core.
It was a massive spinning sphere of a star contained within rings of runic gold.
It hummed with the power to fold space and time generating enough energy to move the colossal ship across realms in a matter of hours.
BOOM.
The blast doors behind her bowed inward.
Anna forced herself to stand.
She limped toward the glowing sphere.
"Override safety protocols,"
Anna commanded.
"Voice recognition confirmed: Princess Annabella,"
the ship’s AI responded gently.
"Warning. Manual override of the Divine Warp Core will result in catastrophic failure and immediate spatial detonation. Do you wish to proceed?"
BOOM.
A massive bone scythe pierced through the center of the blast doors missing Anna’s back by inches.
The necrotic sludge began to pour through the gap as the endless sea of mismatched eyes glaring at her from the dark.
"Proceed,"
Anna whispered.
"Safety limiters disengaged. Core overload in ten seconds."
Anna placed both of her blood stained hands directly against the spinning rings of the Warp Core.
The sheer heat of the star instantly scorched her palms but she didn’t pull away.
As she pushed Divine Core into the machine to accelerate the blast.
"I’m sorry, Angelica,"
Anna smiled, tears finally spilling and evaporating instantly in the intense heat.
"I hope you are finally safe in this timeline."
The blast doors shattered completely.
The mini boss lunged into the room with its jaws unhinging to consume her.
But the Divine Warp Core went critical.
A sphere of blinding white light expanded from the center of the room.
The sheer magnitude of the explosion devoured the acoustics of the universe.
The Celestial Royal Cruiser was instantly vaporized.
The blast shattered the local fabric of reality, instantly incinerating the eldritch mini boss and every horror on board.
The explosion tore a massive fissure in the vacuum of space as a chaotic cosmic warp bleeding with the colors of a dying nebula.
Anna did not burn as her final divine mana acted as shield, preserving her body just as the ship collapsed around her.
But the kinetic force was absolute.
Anna was thrown backward losing consciousness.
Her glowing golden aura faded to a dim ember.
Like a broken porcelain doll, Anna drifted silently into the cosmic tear.
She left her reality behind as the dimensionality weight dissolved Reality into meta qualitative transcendences tearing through the meta logical realms
Overlooking Anna’s suffering from Boundless theological pinnacles was Fabula , the Queen of Black Thorns .
The uncreated, self sufficient transcendent source waiting to overwrite the fundamental laws of Anna’s Regressions with a tragedy.