It was pitch black.
Arthur’s body felt as heavy as lead, subrged in an unseen ocean.
He didn’t know where he was, what had happened, and for a mont, even who he was.
His confusion was profound, his mind tangled, as though sothing had scrambled his thoughts.
Eventually, his senses returned to normal and his disoriented mind slowly aligned itself, allowing him to barely pry his eyes open.
The instant he tried to push himself up, pain shot through his body like a bolt of lightning.
The source was obvious.
A jagged piece of shrapnel, twisted tal, was embedded deep in his left calf, deep enough to stick out the other end.
Without hesitation, he grabbed it and yanked it free, causing silver blood to spurt. He then held his hand over the wound.
|¬Rewind. ¬|
Cosmic energy gathered and his leg was rewound to a ti before the injury existed.
Finally, Arthur rose to his feet, but his drenched clothes clung uncomfortably to his skin, the sound of rumbling waves echoing behind him.
He turned, and his eyes widened in shock.
A sea stretched out before him—a literal red sea.
The boy focused his spatial power in his eyes, zooming his vision to search the distant horizon, but the sea of crimson stretched on endlessly.
Nothing but blood-red waters as far as his enhanced sight could see.
He looked to the sky, dark clouds swirling ominously overhead, devoid of stars, sun, or anything familiar.
The cosmic energy in the air was thick, denser than what he’d felt on most Pri Worlds.
"Am I on an Apex world?"
The sheer concentration of cosmic energy reminded him of his ho world, Aeturn, an Apex world. But sothing about this place felt off, unsettling.
"...am I even on a world?"
His thoughts drifted back to the explosion—the singularity of cosmic energy that should have obliterated the entire spaceship.
He glanced down at the Stellar Guard, the cosmic artifact strapped to his arm and sure enough, one of its charges was depleted.
"So...I actually took fatal damage?"
The artifact had saved him, but what about the others?
He pressed a hand to his temple, thoughts of Evan, Beatrix, and Artemisia flooding his mind. Unlike him, they didn’t have the protection of the Stellar Guard.
"So..."
’...everyone’s dead?’
He didn’t dare voice the thought for fear it might beco reality.
"Where the fuck am I?"
The ambient energy concentration around him was ridiculous but the boy couldn’t help but notice that the majority of the law energies here were more on the negative side of the polarity spectrum.
Arthur took a step forward but faltered, his body betraying him as he collapsed back to the ground.
His breath ca in shallow gasps as he tried to steady himself, forcing himself calm.
He needed to think clearly. To Analyse everything.
Cosmic energy had rapidly concentrated, exploding into a singularity that ripped through everything. The ship was gone, undoubtedly destroyed. But what happened after that?
He vaguely rembered feeling the laws of the universe go haywire. In that split second, the very fabric of space-ti had shattered.
His ti powers, which relied on manipulating the law of ti, had ceased to function altogether since the law of ti itself broke.
After the blinding light consud him, there was nothing. The gap between then and now was a void of uncertainty.
And now, here he was. Alone. On this desolate shore, with no signs of life in sight.
With effort, Arthur pulled himself back to his feet, and just then, a thought struck him.
"Wait, we had those tokens, didn’t we?"
Reaching into his subspace, Arthur felt the familiar pull of spatial energy.
But this ti, in addition to the negative attribution of the ambient spatial energy, the laws of space were heavier, and denser, making it harder to distort space into the spatial portal he used to access his subspace.
"I’m definitely on an Apex world."
Arthur was 110% sure of it now.
The cosmic energy density and the strange resistance confird it beyond doubt.
He reached inside his subspace, pulling out the token from the Denerth sect. Staring down at the small, unassuming object, he infused it with magic power.
These tokens allowed party mbers to link their vitals, letting them sense each other’s life signals.
Naturally, Arthur’s party consisted of Artemisia, Evan, Beatrix, Crim, and Hibiki.
After so ti, the signals registered and his eyes widened in shock as five life signals blinked to life on the token’s display. They were alive.
All of them.
"That’s good."
He muttered softly to himself, though the words didn’t capture the full weight of his relief.
Saying that Arthur was relieved was an understatent. ’Relieved’ was a misnor that didn’t quite explain how he felt at the mont.
’Guess I’m a lot more attached than I thought...’
The weight lifted off his shoulders felt almost unreal.
When he pulled out the token from the Denerth Sect, he had been grasping at the thinnest thread of belief that they might still be alive. And against all odds, they were.
But that raised a question—how?
Arthur stared at his hand, where the Stellar Guard still reflected the missing charge.
’I switched the Stellar Guard’s state to ’active’, is that why? But that doesn’t consu a charge, does it?’
"Lostvayne. Celestia."
He summoned his two swords and imdiately directed the question to Lostvayne, with Celestia acting as the translator.
However, Lostvayne couldn’t provide an answer. Lucifer, the original owner of the Stellar Guard, had never activated its ’active’ state without using it, so there was no way to know if switching it on consud a charge, even if it wasn’t used.
Sighing, he unsummoned them and placed a hand on his chin, thinking.
That singularity had definitely packed enough power to kill him—yet here he was. Not only that, the others had survived as well.
He hadn’t protected the others with the Stellar Guard either.
Arthur had intended to use the minute he’d estimated before the singularity exploded to shield everyone with the Stellar Guard, but that plan was thwarted when the singularity exploded prematurely, robbing him of the ti he needed to act.
The last thing he rembered was the overwhelming white light engulfing everything, and then—nothing.
The mory cut off like a severed thread and how he ended up on this shore, alive, was still a mystery.
Shaking his head, Arthur quickly refocused on the current situation and infused his spatial power into the token, activating the feature that allowed him to sense the general directions of his party mbers.
They were spread out, scattered across the landmass.
He used spatial power to know which way was north, and there, deep into the land was Evan.
Farther to the northwest was Artemisia. To the west, Beatrix and Crim were separated by so distance, and to the east, Hibiki—significantly more isolated from the others.
Arthur mulled over their locations. He’d have to choose who to regroup with first. He looked north, toward Evan.
"Evan?"
The na hung in the air as he weighed his decision.
"No."
In the end, he decided otherwise, turning his gaze east. He decided to move in an anti-clockwise direction—first east to Hibiki, then north to Evan, onward to Artemisia in the northwest, and finally west to Beatrix and Crim.
It was a logical path, a route that would gather his scattered team one by one. Now that he knew their locations, the plan felt solid.
’Tsk...to think I still have the ntal capacity to be calculating in this situation...’
Arthur clicked his tongue as he thought of the real reason he wanted to start from the east, before stowing the token in his subspace and raising his right hand to activate the Cosmic Teleporter.
Before anything else, he needed to know where he was. The singularity explosion had broken spaceti itself, so he theorized that it must have sucked them in and scattered them randomly across the universe.
To be sure of that, he needed to find his current location.
The Cosmic Teleporter was a high-level Cosmic Artifact, able to read the ambient cosmic energy around him and automatically impute his current location coordinates.
To travel, though, he would also need to input a set of destination coordinates. Lucifer had already provided him with several—the coordinates to planet Aramis in the Valmone universe, and another planet in the Draco Sirus universe.
He also had the coordinates to return to the Varona realm in the Hell universe.
As a Cosmic Artifact, the Cosmic Teleporter organized coordinates according to a Cosmic scale;
Multiverse: Universe Cluster: Universe: Galaxy Cluster: Galaxy, and finally, the celestial body he stood upon.
Everything seed normal up to the galaxy level, aning he was still within it. But where exactly in Orithyia was he? That part remained unclear.
What’s more, the Cosmic Teleporter displayed coordinates wavering between two sets of values.
The difference was subtle, just a single number off in the final figures, but it kept shifting between them before settling on one.
Arthur narrowed his eyes as he accessed his spatial law comprehensions, quickly piecing together the anomaly.
"I think I’m in a different dinsion..."
This was an issue of overlapping coordinates, where two dinsional planes occupied the sa spatial region, yet remained separate from each other.
The only divergence was in the final set of figures, the tell-tale sign of two dinsions coexisting in the sa area without interacting.
Arthur realized that, though he was still within the Orithyia Galaxy, he was no longer on the primary dinsional plane.
He channelled energy into the Cosmic Teleporter and activated it.
**BOOM!
As he wished, a Cosmic Gate began tearing open before him, ripping apart spaceti as it ford.
But before the portal could fully stabilize, Arthur halted the process, saving the energy as the Teleporter reabsorbed it into its crystal.
"That’s good. I can leave whenever I want."
Satisfied at the knowledge that he wasn’t trapped, he nodded to himself. Now he could focus on regrouping with the others.
Arthur turned his gaze east, preparing to track down Hibiki.
Softly, he released his spatial power, blending it with the ambient cosmic energy of his surroundings.
He let the energy flow outward, creating a three-dinsional map in his mind that updated as he walked. The more he moved, the clearer his ntal map beca, gradually filling in with details of his environnt.
Crossing the vast beach, Arthur reached the edge of a forest, its density shifting from thick clusters of trees to sparser patches.
He turned back briefly to the Red Sea behind him, chuckling at the surreal scene.
"Well, here goes my shipwrecked, deserted island—or continent—exploration."
And with that, Arthur stepped into the forest.
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