Prologue (2): The Final Spectacle
The moment the spatial corridor snapped shut behind me, the foundation beneath my boots ceased to exist.
The air pressure dropped so low that all noise was instantly faded out. There was no grand explosion from the sky, only a silent chaos that shattered the surrounding continental shelves, tilting them upward like broken plates.
Left with nothing to stand on, I remained suspended in the empty vacuum. My breathing remained steady and undisturbed by the cataclysm around me.
This is it, I thought. My final stage.
I had hit an unyielding wall at the peak of my power. The universe offered no further power to harness for me, slowly damning my physical body to a decay. I could not simply wither away in wait for a merciful fate without trying anything.
I had to carve out my chance now. This battle was not a graveyard of mine ambitions but it is just an anchor of my life forward.
The presences watching me need to see me die. They needed absolute and undeniable proof that the Leon had been erased from the universe. Else they would never stop hunting the remnants of me.
I exhaled slowly as I locked my gaze onto the tearing space. Through the folds of space, three colossal distortions tore through.
To my right, the material plane ruptured, opening raw void as Vaelen forced his way through the tear. The Titan manifested as a mountain sized entity of shifting, geometric crystal that twisted space into unnatural angles.
No mortal features graced his divine form. In the place of a face, a singular vertical fissure burned into his crystalline head like a crushing eye that blinded the naked sight.
"Ten centuries, Leon...," Vaelen’s voice manifested as a direct, heavy mental contamination, speaking not to be heard but to crush my consciousness.
"Ten centuries I have haunted you across the cosmos. Every scrap of authority you possess is a dead relic. It will not help you today."
To Vaelen’s flank, the starlight died completely as Scylla crept through the torn fabric of space. She was a coiling abomination of void and her multi fold eyes stared with unblinking and horrifying hunger.
Sticky tendrils came out of her body, snapping like black tendons as they attached onto the exposed planetary core below.
"My son... my son is gone!" Scylla hissed as her agonizing grief destabilized the surroundings as she stared at the scattered fragments of the lamp I had deliberately destroyed in the keep.
"Leon! I will dissolve your very awareness into absolute nothingness to repay this blood debt!"
"Step aside, you decaying old relics. The old era breaks today!" a loud and irreverent roar echoed through the void.
Kaelos descended like a blinding star. The newly ascended Astral Phoenix was a turbulent vortex of hot plasma tracing a multi-winged avian silhouette.
"Your myth will end with my flare, Leon!" Kaelos crowed as the plasma around his beak twisted into a smug grin. "The cosmos will remember me as the one who pulled down the legendary Leon! Try not to die too fast, I need this to look good for the history books."
A third? I had accounted for grief and I had accounted for hatred but I had not accounted for ambition.
Kaelos hadn’t come for grief, or for ten centuries of hatred. He’d come for the story he’d get to tell afterward.
A fledgling who was aiming to soar on someone else’s fall.
It didn’t change the plan. It only meant I would have to bleed a little more convincingly to sell it to one more witness than I had planned for.
I did not offer them the satisfaction of a reply.
Instead, I slowly rotated my forearms as the gauntlets hummed with a dim purple luminescence. The sealing runes etched into the metal began to spin in reverse while loosening the heavy constraints that I had self imposed on myself.
Kaelos came first. Seeking to cement his nascent glory, the young Astral Phoenix condensed his plasma vortex into a singular, hyper dense lance of conceptual fire, launching it instantly toward my chest.
My left hand shifted. The Nebula Anchor slammed forward, catching the white hot lance squarely in my bare palm.
The collision detonated in silence. The heat was brutal and threatened to melt the very marrow of my bones but I stayed suspended in the void.
I channeled my essence through my arm circulating it backward through my chest to ease the immediate pressure. Then I twisted my wrist to reverse launch the lance back towards Kaelos.
The violent back fire tore upward in reverse, rupturing Kaelos’s bird silhouette.
His plasma wings flickered violently, shedding unstable sparks as his core destabilized. He shrieked, a sound that strong that it shattered nearby asteroids as he scrambled backward.
"Mundane resistance," Vaelen’s mass echoed through the vacuum.
The vertical fissure of his eye flared, dropping a localized gravitational field around me, one hundred thousand times the density of the previous gravitational force.
The space visibly cracked, warping into a dark hue as it sought to compress my physical vessel.
Simultaneously, Scylla’s webbings shot forward in different intersecting points. Fueled by her blind rage she wrapped her black webbings tightly around my limbs, locking my core into a single space.
My physical form cracked under the twin assault. A fine crimson mist sprayed from my pores. The pressure inside my skull was huge as my vision began to blur into a sea of red.
Not yet, I told myself. I began fighting back the darkness creeping into my mind. I need them closer. I need their absolute certainty.
Kaelos, recovering from the backdraft, saw my body fracturing and sensed an opening.
He was eager to deliver the finishing blow as he lunged forward. He transformed his entire body into a raging and hot claw of plasma aiming directly at my neck.
At the exact same time, Scylla slithered inward as her massive void webbings slammed down toward my ribs to deliver a blow of absolute annihilation. While Vaelen shifted his colossal crystal bulk closer to ensure my physical frame was completely crushed under his pressure.
They thought they had trapped a cornered beast. They thought I was desperate, broken and defeated but they were completely wrong.
As their attacks swarmed on me, I stopped resisting the gravitational pressure. I let the black gravity webbing pull me forward, using their own kinetic momentum against them.
My left hand shot out like a breaking spring as I bypassed the Kaelos’s plasma claw entirely to clamp directly onto the vertical fissure of Vaelen’s crystalline head.
Simultaneously, my right arm whipped around, driving the heavy Nebula Anchor deep into the segmented joints of Scylla’s main void webbings, locking her to my position.
I have you, I thought, as a savage smile broke through the blood on my lips.
With both of them physically anchored to me and Kaelos diving directly into the strike zone, I triggered the final sequence of the Nebula Anchor.
The gauntlets did not explode outward, this time they imploded inward.
The sealing runes tore directly through my veins, shredding my internal essence, my legacy and my soul from the inside out. I forced all of my remaining essence into a single point, turning my own body into like a dense point.
The kinetic backlash of the explosion tore directly through the three beings, throwing them violently backward into the void.
Black and pressurized essence seeped from Scylla’s shattered exoskeleton as she screeched in agony, most of her webbings bursting into dark mist.
Vaelen groaned heavily through the void as multiple and deep fractures webbed across his crystal peaks. His massive chunks of lustrous body sheared off and began to dissolve into nothing.
Kaelos was flung wide into the orbit of a distant asteroid belt. His plasma silhouette dimmed to a pathetic and flickering ember. His newly ascended ego was thoroughly shattered.
A heavy and suffocating silence settled over the empty space.
I watched them reel through, my consciousness thinning by the second. They were broken, scattered and none of them were in any state to stop a final blow.
Some old, quiet part of me wanted to stretch out my hand, to use the last dying embers of my spark to finish them completely.
But a plan built over decades does not survive a single moment of spite.
Three dead beings of their stature would raise questions that no one asked of one dead man.
If they died, the hidden entities would investigate the anomaly. But if they lived as wounded and humiliated, they would tell the story exactly the way I needed the universe to hear it. They would testify to my absolute death.
That was the last thought I recognized as fully mine.
Then, the final blinding light claimed the remaining pieces of my awareness as I felt myself dissolve into the blank, quiet vacuum.
"The essence...," Kaelos’s voice or what was left of him reached me. It was delayed as the shape of the words I heard started to cut off. "Did we... did we reap his essence?"
The question reached me but it was already coming apart. I couldn’t hold onto it long enough to understand it.
"There is nothing left to reap," Scylla clicked weakly. Her single remaining eye scanned the emptiness with a hollow fury.
"The space-time folds of the surroundings are utterly destroyed. Not even a whisper of his soul remains."
Good, I thought, or something that used to be a thought, thinning at the edges.
"It is over," Vaelen’s voice came, distant and low, a fading hum through something that no longer had walls to carry sound. "Centuries of defiance, ended by our hands. The threat to my ascension is cleared."
A strange emptiness lingered in the space I had occupied.
The prying entities recorded the scene with absolute finality.
I was dead.
End Of Prologue
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A name was erased,
A fate came to its end.
So the heavens closed their book,
and turned the page.
They never noticed
the ink
had already begun
writing
a new Chapter.
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