The mont Jayden walked through the front door of the house, the sheer, crushing exhaustion of the day finally caught up to him.
Between outrunning a state-of-the-art supertrain, encountering a reality-bending witch, and subjugating an entire colony of Earth Smashers under his new vanguard, Cain, his physical and ntal limits had been stretched to the absolute breaking point.
He bypassed the kitchen entirely, having decided to skip dinner, and trudged up the stairs. He entered his room and collapsed face-first onto his mattress, not even bothering to take off his jacket.
He wanted nothing more than to just sleep. But his mind refused to shut down.
His thoughts spun in a dizzying vortex, spiraling back to a single entity.
Coraline.
The strange, terrifyingly powerful woman who had casually paused his vocal cords and wiped a man’s mory. She had dropped nas and concepts that shattered his understanding of reality. The Great Schism. Kyberia, the creator of the Systems. Realm One. Dead gods.
The whole thing was driving him nuts. He needed to know more. To understand what these terms ant.
Groaning in frustration, Jayden rolled onto his back and pulled his holotab from his pocket. The blue light illuminated his tired face as he began digging through the global holonet, searching for ancient world mythologies.
He found exactly what everyone else knew: the standard texts of Hor and Hesiod. Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, the Olympians ruling from a mountaintop. But that didn’t align with what Coraline had implied.
Digging deeper into encrypted forums and buried historical data, he finally stumbled upon a heavily redacted, anonymous digital archive. The author claid that the mainstream mythological texts everyone knew was nothing but a fabrication—a distorted mory of a forgotten tiline. According to the archive, the true myth of their world involved only two core Olympian gods ruling their realm: Apollo and Artemis.
Jayden’s breath hitched. It perfectly aligned with the bedti stories his mother used to tell him—stories about the Twin Gods being the ultimate overseers of their realm.
He sat up slightly, the gears in his head turning. Coraline had also ntioned that she travel across realms. That ans if this world was just one realm ruled by the Twin Gods, then there were other realms ruled by other different pantheons. And this Kyberia, the goddess of technology must have co from one of those other realms.
He continued his research, surfing through the web. But when he tried to search for the "Great Schism" or what force could have possibly killed immortal gods, he hit a massive firewall. There was nothing about those topics. They weren’t even in the archive he found.
The only other scrap of useful lore he gleaned from the archive was a ntion of a "Celestial Order"—a coalition of surviving deities and powerful beings tasked with maintaining cosmic balance after the death of the Twin Gods. It was sowhat like a governnt organization, but for celestials. And it was headed by the goddess Frigga.
Jayden tried to trace the IP address of the archive’s author, hoping to ask them more questions directly, but it bounced off a dozen proxy servers before dead-ending in a defunct satellite feed. The author had left no na, no contact, nothing.
It was a dead end.
He scrolled through the text one last ti in frustration. Then his eyes caught a passing footnote about an ancient dispute Apollo once had with Brunhilde, the Valkyrie Queen
Jayden eyes widened. His mind instantly traced back to a particular soone he knew.
Ava.
She was a Valkyrie. And during their past few concerts, she had practically exuded a deep, innate understanding of ancient combat and lore. If anyone knew the hidden history of their world, it was her. She could have the answers to his many questions.
Satisfied that he finally had a lead, Jayden tossed the holotab onto his nightstand and let the darkness take him, falling into a peaceful slumber.
The next morning, Jayden woke up feeling entirely rejuvenated. Before his eyes even fully opened, a massive cascade of silver text flooded his vision.
[Alert! Subpack mbers killed multiple targets]
[Total Exp received: 1500 Exp]
[Bonded Beast (Skye) has eliminated multiple targets]
[Base Exp earned: 1300]
[Soul Bond Bonus (x2). Base Exp has been doubled]
[You have received 2600 Exp]
[Exp: 7,860/8500]
Jayden smirked, stretching his arms above his head. The Exp gain from his pack beasts had increased significantly. And it was no doubt due to the addition of Cain. The rare beast had obviously taken his leadership role very seriously, organizing the Earth Smashers into an incredibly efficient hit squad. And combined with his army here in Erald city and Skye’s off-world hunting spree, Jayden’s passive inco was skyrocketing.
He showered quickly, threw on a fresh set of clothes, and headed straight out the door. He didn’t have ti for a full breakfast; he began sprinting and made a beeline straight for the Pod Den, arriving there in less than a minute and entering.
He paid for his session, slipped into the sleek VR pod, and felt the familiar, tingling sensation of his consciousness being digitized. The neon-lit lobby of the combat server materialized around him.
He imdiately pulled up his friend list, located Ava’s gar tag, and sent a direct Private Battle Request. Then he waited.
Five minutes passed, but there was still no response from her. He sighed, leaning against a digital pillar. "Of course," he thought. "It’s not like she spends her entire life in a ga pod."
Just as he contemplated leaving the ga, a sharp chi echoed in his ears.
[Player: Valkyrie has accepted your request]
[Transporting to Arena...]
The neon lobby dissolved into a blinding white light. When Jayden’s vision cleared, he found himself standing on a pristine, white-sand beach. The sky was painted in the brilliant hues of a digital sunset, and the rhythmic sound of crashing waves echoed off massive, jagged black rocks scattered along the shoreline.
Sitting gracefully atop the highest rock, watching the digital tide roll in, was Ava. Her avatar was clad in a simple, elegant white sumr gown that caught the ocean breeze.
Jayden walked up to the base of the rock and chuckled. "Do you look this beautiful in real life, too?" he teased.
Ava didn’t miss a beat. She glanced down over her shoulder, a trademark British smirk playing on her lips. "Do you want to find out?" she chuckled.
"Maybe so other ti," Jayden deflected smoothly with a grin.
Ava hopped down from the rock, landing softly on the sand. "So. Why did you summon ? I’m very sure you didn’t drag in here just to complint my dress. And you don’t have your battle face on, so I take it we’re not here to fight either."
"You’re right," Jayden admitted, stuffing his hands into his pockets. "I didn’t co to fight. I simply have so questions I was hoping you could provide answers too."
Ava let out a dramatic sigh, crossing her arms. "Jayden, I’ve told you all I can about your family’s bloodline. If you want more answers about the Lycan hierarchy, you need to go talk to Kate or Castor yourself."
"No. It’s not about that," Jayden said.
"So what is it, then?" Ava asked, preparing to launch into a teasing joke.
Jayden looked her dead in the eye and dropped the bomb. "The Great Schism."
Ava froze. Her playful deanor shattered instantly. Her eyes narrowed, and the ambient sound of the crashing waves suddenly seed very far away.
"Where did you hear that from?" she asked, her voice deadly serious.
Jayden caught the imdiate shift in her tone. That was a confirmation that she knew what it was. Good.
"It isn’t important where I heard it," he said smoothly. "What’s important is that I need to know what it is."
Ava stared at him for a long, heavy mont, clearly debating whether to kick him from the arena or answer. Finally, she let out a defeated breath and walked toward the water’s edge.
"The Great Schism was a cataclysmic event that occurred eons ago," she began, her voice taking on the cadence of a storyteller reciting a sacred text, "It happened after Chaos descended upon the original Earth and shattered the relativity of the universe. The world was reset, and the once singular universe was divided into a massive collection of parallel, overlapping worlds we now refer to as realms."
Jayden walked up beside her, astounded. It all made perfect sense now. "So basically... the universe was turned into a multiverse?"
Ava nodded. "Yes. And the gods were separated," she confird, looking out at the digital horizon. "They were allocated in duos or small groups to each newly ford realm to watch over it, to govern it, and to prevent the tiline from collapsing again."
Jayden humd, putting everything together. "So the Twin Gods... Apollo and Artemis. They were the ones appointed here. To our realm," he concluded.
"Yes," Ava said. She then kicked a spray of digital sand into the water and shrugged. "Or, at least, that’s how the story goes. It’s probably just a bunch of ancient nonsense."
Jayden raised an eyebrow. "You don’t believe it?"
Ava laughed softly. "I don’t know, honestly. My mum simply used to tell those stories when I was little to scare into behaving a good girl. She always warned that if I did naughty things, Chaos would descend again and punish ."
Jayden chuckled at the thought of a young, rebellious Ava being scolded by a divine warrior. Then he thought about sothing he saw the previous night when researching.
He turned to her. "Ava, your mum doesn’t happen to be Brunhilde, does she?"
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