Chapter 19

The forest had gone silent.

Malrik's headless body remained slumped against a broken tree, but elsewhere—deep within a war-torn valley where dusk never lifted—his soul drifted unshackled.

He walked.

A phantom of himself. His hair fluttered without wind. No blood stained his skin, no weight pressed on his shoulders, yet something deeper—colder—was coiled around his ribs like a noose tightening breath by breath.

Around him, war waged without pause.

The battlefield was a smear of ash and blood, where steel met chitin and spells carved trails of fire through the rotting dusk. But Malrik did not bleed. He did not breathe. He walked, unseen and untouched, like a shade with purpose.

Smoke coiled in the air, laced with the stench of burning meat and acid spit. The carcasses of armored knights lay twisted alongside the shattered remains of titanic ants, their hollow thoraxes still twitching as if refusing death. Vampires leapt from corpse to corpse with predatory grace, blades glinting red beneath the spell-streaked sky. One sank its fangs into a shrieking witch mid-incantation, her spell scattering like sparks in wind.

Malrik moved through it all.

His pace was slow, deliberate—not cautious, but focused, like a man trying to listen to something no one else could hear. His eyes didn't linger on the dying or the killers. Not unless a spell caught his peripheral, some strange arc of twisted light that defied or forged elements. A spectral axeblade that split a dozen shadows at once. A prayer woven into frost, cracking momentum with each syllable.

But even these only earned passing glances.

He was watching the ground.

Not the dirt. Not the shattered bones and mud-caked sigils drawn in human blood. He was looking through it.

And what he saw made his jaw clench.

Beneath the surface, deep as the marrow of the earth, were circles. Magic circles. No—layers of them. Spirals, triangles, ancient scripts packed so densely they seemed to pulse as if alive. As if breathing. No one else saw them, no vampire, no knight, no dying man gasping his last breath—which he claimed by bringing him a swift death through mana poisoning.

Only him.

And they were wrong.

Not just unfamiliar. Wrong. Lines twisted back on themselves. Runes clashed in contradiction. Some sections flickered as if they hadn't finished forming—or as if they were rewriting themselves constantly, shifting to match some eldritch rhythm.

His stomach turned.

He paused, feet phasing half into a split corpse beneath him. A knight's crushed chestplate creaked, but there was no weight on it—Malrik's body wasn't real. Still, his mind recoiled as if he had stepped in something alive.

He knelt slowly.

The moment his fingers hovered near the soil, the nausea surged. An iron taste filled his throat. The air felt thick, syrupy. Hot.

He blinked—and the lines beneath the surface pulsed.

Once.

Twice.

And something looked back.

He gritted his teeth as a wave of dizziness slammed into him. The world spun. The battlefield groaned beneath him, though no one else noticed. Ghouls screamed, knights roared, the heavens cracked open with Aero's and Vaeloria heated clash—and still, only Malrik could feel the world itself tilting.

He gagged.

It felt like he hadn't eaten in days—his limbs hollow, his thoughts brittle—yet his stomach churned with a sick, swollen weight, as if he'd just devoured two full meals of spoiled meat and boiling oil. His gut clenched against itself. Vomit splashed onto the soil.

His breath came ragged, uneven.

His vision now split by a jagged crack down the middle—half real, half something else.

Something beneath.

Far below.

Where light had no dominion and even rot had been forgotten, a chamber pulsed with rhythm not of this world. Not a place. A wound. Carved into the world like a curse that could never scar over.

In the center stood a vampire.

She wore no armor. No crown. Only a thin silk robe that shimmered with threads of blood, her eyes pools of black without end. Her bare feet stood at the edge of a pit filled with blood—thick, dark, and endless. It breathed. Literally breathed. Each slow inhalation made the air around it warp and pull, as if the abyss itself hungered.

Behind her stretched a field of bodies—an impossible sea of the dead. Human corpses lay tangled with dark elves, trolls, and beastmen, their forms twisted, some crushed beyond recognition, others perfectly preserved in death as if frozen mid-scream. The mass pulsed faintly, not from life, but from something truly demonic.

Out of the pit rose an altar of flesh—slick, veined, and bleeding from a thousand cracks. Hovering just above it, untouched yet tethered by unseen force, was a single white core. It pulsed steadily, slowly, absorbing the blood that oozed up through the altar's wounds. The core drank everything it was offered, every drop, just as it had when submerged in the unholy nectar below. The blood didn't stain it. No matter how much it consumed, the core remained white.

"Goodbye, hero," the vampire said softly.

She didn't smile. Didn't mourn. It was a statement, not a farewell.

And then—

The dungeon roared.

Not a sound. Not a noise.

A reality shift. Like the entire world inhaled around a scream too vast to hold—leaving it to scream too, and—

Malrik screamed with it.

His knees slammed into the ground—phantom or not, it felt real. The world lurched sideways. Blood gushed from his nose, thick and fast. His eyes stung—then wept crimson. Behind his brow, something split. A white-hot pain surged, stabbing, tearing, clawing its way into his skull like barbed wire dragged through bone.

He toppled to the side, fingers scrabbling at the dirt, where the magic circles now blazed like suns beneath the surface—each one screaming in silence. His rings snapped. One by one. Like glass under pressure, like bones breaking from the inside. Then they returned—shoved back onto his fingers by some unseen force. And broke again. And returned again. Over and over, cracking louder each time, a cruel rhythm to the agony.

Time stuttered.

A knight collapsed in front of him, clutching his chest—dead before he hit the ground. But before Malrik could even blink, the corpse was gone—replaced by a witch mid-incantation, who turned into smoke. The clouded sky above split open, revealing a blazing sun so bright it burned his retinas—and then, it was night.

The battlefield vanished. In its place, the town square. Music, laughter, streamers fluttering in the wind. Villagers danced, drank, kissed. A festival in full swing. Then screams—ants pouring through the streets like a tide, tearing the cobblestones red.

Malrik's hands shrank.

His arms reversed, skin crawling over bone.

His teeth fell out of his mouth, gums softening.

He was an infant—raw, voiceless, blind.

Until he wasn't.

Time lurched forward again, slamming years back into his frame. Bones stretched. Flesh surged. Muscles wove themselves from string to steel. He aged in seconds, breathing like someone drowning in his own body.

"The hell!?" he choked.

Time rewound and twisted. His lover's authority activated at once, reacting to the chaos—but it only fractured the moment further. Thousands of maps flared into being, all around him—his consorts, their icons scattered across the astral web. The pieces shifted with the terrain, flickering, phasing in and out of stability.

Some aged, some regressed.

Some fell screaming, others vanished without ever being born.

The fragments collapsed. The maps flickered. Then they were gone.

"Damn it!!" Malrik roared, power hemorrhaging.

He felt the decay beginning—his essence unwinding, his core not even present to anchor him.

Still… he had one final card to play.

He had played with the knowledge buried in Eleryn's memories—stitched into his own, her secrets now his to wield. He had unraveled the components of the ritual through Fuyumi's moonlight magic, each thread revealing more of the forbidden truth.

He came to understand the path whispered in fear by even the oldest races:

The forbidden method—forming an essence core through sheer will.

Not through guidance, not through harmony, but through defiance.

A path only a fool, or someone forsaken by all, would dare walk.

A demon's gamble.

But he didn't care anymore.

Even if the odds were one percent.

"I'm already falling apart," he muttered. "Might as well bet everything."

It wasn't courage that pushed him forward.

It was desperation—tempered by something deeper.

The chaos around him cracked reality like shattered glass, and through the seams, moonlight sliced its way in. It burned unnaturally bright, even beneath a sky that could no longer decide if it was day or night.

He reached for it.

And pulled.

Moonlight surged through his skin, burning white-hot.

It burrowed through his veins, his nerves, his bones. Every muscle spasmed violently, every tendon shrieked under the pressure of foreign essence. His abdomen clenched—his flesh pulling inward toward a spiraling point just beneath his navel.

Then came the voice.

A whisper that didn't echo—but carved.

"Throughout the primal garden, the Mother-Goddess sang,

With daughters four who bore her name in twain:

Mysera of Light, with breath of the stars,

Nalinth of Dark, who wept behind bars.

Velryss of Time, her touch made things end,

And Kaora of Space, whose arms would bend.

But one stood apart, though born of glory—

The fifth was not named in the garden's fame.

Tell me, child…

Which one didn't belong~?"

Malrik clenched his jaw.

The rhyme was wrong.

It didn't rhyme cleanly—not like the other goddesses.

Yes, in this moment, he was speaking directly to a Pillar of Creation.

Was this foolishness? No.

Maybe if it had been another goddess, he would've simply left—bitter, but resigned to the loss of his consorts.

But this was a goddess of neutral alignment.

One who granted faith to anyone she deemed a future asset, unwilling to let them be forgotten.

It was deliberate.

Off-rhythm.

Meant to make you think.

He looked up at the moon—still there, still impossibly present.

"The moon…" he murmured. "The daughter sealed in absence. The… mother of essence."

The voice hesitated. "What was her name…?"

As if in answer, a panel appeared before him. A clean rectangular slate of violet crystal, floating in midair. Elegant black runes pulsed along its edges.

And then, it resolved.

──────

Name: Nythea

Race: ???

Class: ???

Level: ???

EXP: ??? / ???

Alignment: ???

Affiliation: ???

Title(s): ???

???

???

──────

HP: ??? / ???

MP: ??? / ???

Stamina: ??? / ???

Strength: ???

Dexterity: ???

Vitality: ???

Intelligence: ???

Charisma: ???

[ESS: ???] (???)

──────

ABILITIES 

???

???

???

???

???

???

──────

Only one line was clear.

...Nythea

His breath caught in his throat.

"Her name was Nythea," he whispered.

And the world stopped.

Sound vanished.

Time halted.

Color bent and peeled away like paint washed in acid. He stood in pure blackness now—a void beyond perception. Nothing but the whisper of moonlight glowed above him, and even that was just a faint dot.

Until the dot moved.

It grew.

It blinked.

A massive figure took shape in the shadows. So vast it made mountains look like grains of salt. She rose, carved from the absence of all things. A giantess, unmoving, her body cloaked in folds of unseeable light, her brow glimmering.

The moon was no longer in the sky.

It was on her forehead.

The pale iris of her third eye.

Malrik could barely breathe.

His power fell away from him like old skin. His knees gave out. He dropped, bowing without meaning to.

Then, as darkness swallowed him, he saw one last thing:

A ring appeared on the giantess's ring finger—slender, silver, eternal.

And in the heartbeat before he lost consciousness, he smiled.

Because he knew:

She'd accepted him.

And the core?

It would be hers.