Volume 4—Chapter 118: Descend
At the edge of the world, where distance and direction lost all meaning, three figures stood in silence, their eyes fixed on the trembling sphere suspended among the branches of the World Tree.
Below them, the projection of that world shuddered.
Violet fractures spread across its skies. Cities glimmered like broken glass. The scar left by Nidhogg’s emergence still pulsed through the structure of reality, each ripple threatening to widen the cracks even further.
The first to break the silence was the youngest among them.
A little girl, youthful in appearance and clutching a worn teddy bear against her chest, tilted her head as she watched the chaos below.
“What is this development?” she asked.
The man beside her narrowed his gaze at the unstable world.
“Well, that confirms it,” he said at last. “The vessel truly is in that world.”
A mature woman standing nearby turned her eyes toward him, calm but sharp.
“How can you be so sure?”
The man’s expression remained fixed on the projection.
“Zephyra,” he said evenly, “I’m certain now. Nidhogg only seeks one thing.”
Zephyra studied him for a moment, then shifted her gaze back toward the world hanging below the branches.
“I see,” she said softly. “That does make sense.”
The little girl frowned, tightening her grip on the teddy bear.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “What does that even mean?”
Zephyra turned toward her, her expression patient.
“Well, Notia,” she said, “Nidhogg has only ever been interested in a single thing.”
At that, the man slowly lifted his gaze toward the vast expanse surrounding them.
His eyes followed the endless branches stretching beyond sight, each one carrying worlds like fruit born from divine law.
Then he spoke.
“The World Tree.”
Notia blinked.
She gave a slow nod, finally understanding.
“Then, Ouranos, should we descend now?” Notia asked, holding her teddy bear close.
“No… it’s still dangerous,” Ouranos said. “If we descend now, we’ll be vulnerable. There’s a chance we could lose our sense of self.”
“So we really have to wait until everything settles?” Zephyra asked.
“Precisely… though…” Ouranos narrowed his eyes. “I have a feeling that moment could come at any second.”
His gaze shifted to a specific battlefield.
Times Square, New York.
“We would be blind to ignore those two.”
Below, two figures were locked in battle.
One wore witch-like attire, dark robes sweeping behind her as she moved with unnatural precision. The other looked like nothing more than an ordinary middle school girl, almost absurdly out of place in the middle of Times Square’s destruction.
Yet the battle between them was on an entirely different level.
Every clash twisted the space around them. Light bent, the street cracked, and even the fractures hanging in the sky seemed to react to their power. The monsters flooding the square kept their distance from the centre of that fight, recoiling every time the two exchanged blows.
Then the flow changed.
The middle school girl raised her hand.
A massive sphere formed around them.
It spread in an instant, swallowing both fighters and sealing them inside a space cut off from the outside world.
The moment it closed, the law of causality outside began to calm.
The chain reactions tearing through the city slowed. The unstable ripples in reality stopped spreading beyond that point, as if everything causing the distortion had been forced into that sealed space.
“This is our chance,” Ouranos said.
He turned to the others.
“Notia, Zephyra… we descend now.”
Notia looked at the sphere below.
“What was that sphere?”
“I’m not sure,” Zephyra said. “Some kind of dimensional prison?”
“Not exactly wrong,” Ouranos replied. “But it’s not entirely right either.”
He kept his eyes on the sealed battlefield.
“Just think of it like this, everything inside that sphere now follows a different law of nature than the outside.”
And with that, the three of them descend.
Meanwhile…
In Tsukuru City, the battle had shifted into a grim rhythm.
Irana swept her arm forward, and a line of ice spikes burst through the air, piercing a sky serpent as it lunged toward her. The creature shattered into frozen fragments before the pieces were swallowed by the storm of poison drifting around them.
Another serpent came from above.
Irana spun, releasing a burst of cryokinetic frost that locked its body solid before sending it crashing down toward the ruined streets below.
Then she paused.
Her eyes narrowed as she looked around the battlefield.
“Is it just me, or are there no new monsters now?” Irana asked.
Beside her, Elizabeth rode on a thick flowering vine twisting through the air, thorned branches lashing out to tear apart another serpent that came too close.
“If you mean the variety of monsters, then yes, I agree,” Elizabeth said. “But these flying snakes keep coming. Not to mention the miasma.”
Irana froze another serpent mid-flight, but this time she kept watching after it shattered.
Elizabeth was right.
The portals had stopped producing the other creatures. Only sky serpents.
And they were not spreading across the battlefield at random.
A serpent shot past Elizabeth.
Its jaws opened, but instead of striking the nearest target, it curved sharply through the air and lunged straight for Irana.
Irana barely raised an ice wall in time.
The serpent smashed into it, exploding into shards of frost and shadow.
Elizabeth’s eyes sharpened.
“…That one ignored me.”
Another portal opened.
Three serpents burst out at once.
Elizabeth’s vines lashed upward to intercept them, but the creatures twisted around her attacks as if she barely existed.
All three dove at Irana.
Irana reacted instantly, forming a ring of ice blades around herself, cutting two apart. The third slipped through and forced her to drop lower in the sky.
Only then did the pattern become impossible to ignore.
“They’re not attacking whoever is closest,” Elizabeth said.
Irana looked up just as another wave of serpents poured from the poison clouds above.
Every single one angled toward her.
A chill ran through her that had nothing to do with her own power.
“…They’re targeting me.”
Irana clenched her fist, frost gathering around her arm.
“But why me?”
“I don’t know why,” Elizabeth said, eyes fixed on the serpents closing in, “but this works in our favour.”
She raised her smartwatch and quickly opened a direct channel.
“Viola.”
The response came almost instantly.
A distortion flickered beside them, and within seconds, Viola appeared.
“Hello,” Viola said.
“No time to explain,” Elizabeth said. “Take Irana and keep teleporting in a circle around the city.”
Viola didn’t waste a second asking why.
Viola reached out, grabbed Irana’s hand and in the next instant, both of them vanished.
Comments (0)
Please login or sign up to post a comment.