What had once been a glorious capital of the Greymark Duchy, one of the three largest cities in the empire, was now nothing more than rubble, crushed, flattened, and finally buried beneath the great Stump that until minutes ago had been its very foundation.
Most of the residents had managed to flee the city in ti, many of them making it down from the Stump entirely, but for those who had held out hoping for the best, or who had simply been left behind, there was no pleasant end.
Everyone had gathered in the battlefield, now almost entirely stripped of beasts and filled only with corpses, human and beast alike, while the survivors didn’t even have the luxury of grieving for the catastrophe their city had just faced.
Not when it seed like everything that had already happened was only the beginning of their nightmare.
"By the six gods... what is happening?" soone said, staring up at what was unfolding in the sky above.
Before everyone’s eyes, the sky was cracking. And with each crack an invisible pressure made itself felt, not oppressive, but sothing different, sothing that froze the souls of those present. Nothing about it suggested that whatever was happening was a good thing. On the contrary, every single person felt as though a knife had been pressed to their throat as they watched.
"Ah, to hell with it, just kill already, I’ve got nothing left to lose," said one man, who, even without fully understanding what was happening, understood enough to know they were in serious trouble.
He was a D-rank adventurer in the city, a fairly high rank that afforded decent earnings and a respectable status.
He was soone who had always loved living a simple life, far from the problems of the world, but he had a family, and for that family he had pushed himself, worked hard, beco what he was now. All to secure a good life for them, even at the cost of the occasional hunt against beasts that pushed right up against the limits of what he could handle.
But none of that mattered anymore.
His family?
Gone.
His ho, together with them, had beco their tomb.
Only he remained.
It was clear he was having a ntal breakdown, and he wasn’t the only one. But the strange phenonon in the sky didn’t seem to care about any of that, continuing its course as pieces of reality itself cracked and fell away.
Yet if on one side there were those who had already given up hope, on the other there were those who hadn’t.
At the front of the survivor group, three figures were commanding the remaining adventurers. Many had been killed in battle, even more by the Duke’s own hand rather than the beasts. Now only a handful remained, the luckiest ones, if one could even call them that, and of those, only a portion were still ntally stable enough to think clearly and follow orders.
"Evacuate this area imdiately! No one is to remain here, understood?!" shouted a tall, bald middle-aged man.
He was one of the council mbers, a B-rank who had been fighting one of the five Beast Lords. He had a vague idea of what that phenonon in the sky was, and precisely because of that he had a very bad feeling, so he wasted no ti and tried to get everyone as far away as possible.
"About three kiloters north of here there’s a fishing village. Go there and wait for further instructions."
While giving orders he was consulting with the other two surviving B-ranks, all three of them working out the details of the evacuation plan together.
They had ultimately decided to send one of them ahead with a portion of the adventurers toward the village, while the other two and the remaining combat-ready adventurers stayed behind.
The decision left many puzzled, particularly the adventurers who couldn’t understand why they were being asked to stay. It felt as though they were preparing to fight.
But at this point...
what was even left to fight?
***
While this was happening, at the Academy, the Dean, who had returned nearly two months ago, was reviewing reports analyzing the Hollow corpse he had suppressed in Lirath when suddenly an alarm rang.
The sa one as last ti. The very one that had been silent for centuries and had resonated just a short while ago, now it was sounding again.
’This... in the na of the gods, what the hell is happening to this kingdom?’ he thought, frustrated, as he rushed once more toward the control room. But unlike last ti, when he arrived he found everyone frozen in place, staring at a magical projection at the center of the hall.
He could tell they were all terrified, which made him even more uneasy about what was happening. But when he raised his eyes to see precisely what had put them all in that state, his own eyes couldn’t help but narrow.
’This... how is this possible?’ The projection showed the kingdom’s map, currently focused on the Greymark Duchy, and there near the capital a red dot had appeared, similar to what had happened when the traces of void energy showed up in Lirath. But this ti it was different.
It wasn’t the trace of a simple thread of void energy, the kind that had led to the discovery of a small portal and allowed that being to enter the city.
No. This ti it was sothing worse. Much worse than before. The point was already larger than the one in Lirath, and worse still, it was growing, already covering the duchy’s capital entirely on the map.
That could only an one thing. It wasn’t a simple trace of void energy. This was a full-scale eruption of it, which could only an one thing.
A large scale portal was opening there.
In other words, sothing far worse than what he had gone to deal with last ti was about to happen, and he had no idea whether the kingdom would co out of it intact.
The void energy signature this ti was far more concentrated and powerful, its fluctuations traveling far and wide, no longer limited to the kingdom of Solren but reaching into other kingdoms as well.
In various monitoring stations that had remained silent for who knew how long, alarms were now sounding, with people losing their composure as they analyzed the incoming data. And regardless of who they were, the mont they received the results of those fluctuation analyses, their expressions darkened, and every kingdom began alerting its most powerful.
The energy wasn’t coming from their territories. But that didn’t an they ignored it. What it represented was far too dangerous for anyone to remain calm.
They say humanity never learns from its mistakes, that history books are rely confirmation of how much humanity loves retracing its own steps, for better or for worse.
But that wasn’t entirely true. There was one thing no kingdom in human territory would ever have dared to do, and that was ignore this. Because the last ti they had, it wasn’t long before it reached them too, and what that brought is all history now, written into the books and annals of every kingdom, just as it was written into the minds of the most powerful.
***
The sky did not stop cracking.
The fractures widened, multiplied, spread in every direction like cracks across a mirror struck dead center, and from within those fractures sothing seeped through. A light that was not light. A color with no precise na, a violet so dark it was almost black, pulsing, alive, as if it were breathing.
The vortex was visible to the naked eye now.
Enormous. Silent. Suspended above what remained of BranLeaf like an open wound in the sky.
No one spoke.
No one moved.
The survivors stared upward with clenched jaws and wide eyes, and the pressure radiating from that thing was not oppressive in any physical sense, it didn’t crush the body, didn’t make it hard to breathe. It was sothing different. Deeper. Sothing that went straight for the soul and gripped it, like a cold hand that had reached inside and had no intention of letting go.
Then trails began falling from the vortex.
Dark filants, almost smoke, almost matter, impossible to say precisely what they were.
They descended slowly, too slowly for sothing falling, as if the air itself were trying to hold them back.
So struck the ruins of the great Stump and crashed against them, sending clouds of dust and debris into the air. Others stopped mid-air, suspended at an indefinite height, motionless for just a mont, then continued downward anyway, as if they had simply decided to ignore every law that governed the rest of the world.
They didn’t stop coming. More and more, relentless.
The vortex kept opening, and the streaks kept falling, one after another, in ever greater numbers.
And then they took shape.
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