Formless Ascension: My Affinity Is Limitless

Nothing in the human experience could have ever prepared him for the sight. Seeing a towering, monumental wall of vibrant blue light completely filling your whole vision in every single direction — infinite to the left, infinite to the right, and shooting straight up towards the sky until it disappeared into the heavy clouds — was something else entirely.

It was a phenomenon so daunting and terrifyingly massive that Uhtred paused in his tracks, feeling a surprising bout of megalophobia hit him, even though he wasn’t particularly a person who suffered from such a fear.

The absolute scale of it had still gotten to him, but he quickly adapted his mind, reorienting to the sight and accepting it as a permanent part of this new integrated reality.

Uhtred’s focus sharpened instantly, and he brought his presence entirely back into the current situation as he neared the border itself. He stopped a safe distance before he could reach the line of the blue barrier and silently climbed up a massive tree, staying well within the shadows of the tree line to look across the distance and observe the situation first.

Already, he knew things were incredibly grim based on his journey to this place. Along the way, he had seen the scattered, bloody remains of humans. Gory sights of people who had desperately struggled before dying from vicious beast attacks, and likely even from confrontations with other humans.

Those were individuals who had foolishly ventured out of the safe zone into the forest without having the proper class grade or strength to protect themselves, and they had simply died.

Their bodies would be eaten clean by the wild beasts overnight, and they would simply become another number, a faceless statistic among the many who Uhtred was sure would die across the coming days as humanity struggled to adapt.

As he perched silently within the tree and looked across the distance toward the border line itself, his eyes picked up several figures standing at consecutive, widely spaced intervals on the other side of the blue wall of light, manning the border from within the safe zone.

They were actively watching the tree line for any movement, keeping an eye out for any figure or beast that might be coming close to the boundary. But the act of guarding the line wasn’t what grabbed Uhtred’s attention. Rather, it was their raw appearance itself.

While Uhtred wasn’t normally one to judge a book by its cover, in this specific case, he was openly judging them by how they looked. These individuals looked absolutely nothing like soldiers, police officers, or respectable officials who would have normally been the ones to take control of a crisis, assuming the old laws and governmental structures on Earth were still intact.

Instead, these were people who looked like hardened criminals, convicts, and street thugs from their previous lives before the integration. If these were the types of people currently manning the border and patrolling the safe zone, Uhtred could only imagine how crazy and unraveled the situation must be on the inside.

It wasn’t particularly surprising anyway, since the System itself had named his mandatory quest ”Your Law, Your Order,” explicitly stating that the old world’s hierarchies were completely dead. Now it was simply the strong who got to decide what the rules were.

Individual strength was the only thing that counted, and Uhtred knew that his own current strength could go a long way in stabilizing or dictating things here — though his major gripe was that he still didn’t have enough knowledge on what was happening inside.

Right now there were two options available to him. He could either go in there directly, guns blazing, flaunting his level and charging all the way through without knowing the current state of things on ground, or he could take his time, enter the safe zone somewhat low-key, and thoroughly understand the situation before kicking into action and deciding what to do.

The latter scenario appealed to him much more, as it would provide him with a better opportunity to directly identify who the key players were, who he needed to kill, and what specific problems he needed to rectify were.

Yes, Uhtred was already actively thinking about the necessity of killing people. And surprisingly, he wasn’t feeling any particular aversion to it. He thought he would feel some lingering hesitation or moral conflict, but in reality, his mind remained perfectly calm.

Perhaps it was just his first brutal battle with those wolves that had completely desensitized him to the concept of taking a life. But even though these were humans he was thinking about killing right now, he didn’t feel bothered by the prospect at all.

Well, I won’t need to kill anyone if the situation doesn’t call for it, he muttered quietly to himself as he climbed down from the tree. He wasn’t a psychopath who was going to go around murdering people just for the sake of it, but he would not hesitate for a single moment if there were people who truly deserved it. This was, after all, his law and his order to establish.

Dressed in his sleek, black custom survival clothes with his massive obsidian star-metal battle-axe resting firmly on his shoulder, Uhtred calmly strode out of the tree line and walked toward the blue border a short distance away.

The moment he came out into the open, he instantly grabbed the attention of the individuals manning the border. Loud shouting erupted from the guards across the distance as they caught sight of him, their voices aggressive as they tried to intimidate him into halting.

”Stop right there! State your name and purpose!” one barked loudly. ”Lower your pace and stay where you are!”

Uhtred calmly raised his hands in a loose gesture of surrender, but he didn’t slow his walking pace whatsoever, continuing straight forward with a steady, relaxed stride.

Because his hands were up in the air, however, the individuals at the border kept their weapons pointed toward him but desisted from charging out, interpreting the gesture as a sign of compliance, though they remained incredibly on edge.