FREE USE in Primitive World

Sensing something coming its way, the bruised, bleeding dome of the heavens answered with apocalyptic hostility as if asking how dare something intrude in its way.

The crimson-black fractures tore open wider, vomiting a localized tempest of cosmic wrath that blackened the clouds and turned the air into a boiling cauldron of packed power about to explode any second.

The cracks in the void bled raw, blinding violet lightning that arced across the clouds, snapping ancient ironwood trunks on the surrounding ridges without even touching them.

The bedrock beneath Sol’s feet began to groan, boulders around the pond began to lift off the dirt, vibrating violently in mid-air before disintegrating into fine powder as the sheer, repulsive force between two incomprehensible existence planes warped the very concept of weight.

Every hair on Sol’s body stood on end. The marrow in his bones screamed a violent, instinctual alarm.

His crimson eyes dilated until barely a ring of red remained, teeth grinding so hard he could taste iron. He dropped his weight, digging his heels three inches into the crumbling ground, his muscles bunching into tight, iron knots as his Layer 3 Peak core flared to absolute capacity.

Beside him, Zephyra didn’t even try to rise; she curled into the dirt, clamping both hands over her bleeding ears, her lips moving in frantic, silent incantations.

In the center of the hollow, Veylara’s defiant roar choked off, her lungs starved of air as the descending executioner’s block came within a hair’s breadth of the rising phantom.

The two colossal forces converged. The distance shrank to inches. Three inches. One inch. A hair’s breadth.

The tension stretched taut like a drawn bowstring made of thunder, the kind of unbearable, agonizing apex where the entire continent seemed to suck in a final, dying breath before being wiped off the map.

The four-pointed phantom collided dead-on with the descending, crimson-black ceiling of heavenly wrath.

The divine compass spun once.

CLINK.

The sound was tiny. It carried neither weight nor thunder... just a tiny, hollow tick, like a single dry pebble slipping over the lip of a bottomless well, or the faint gear of a clock turning in a vast, empty hall.

Sol braced himself. He tensed his muscles, neck cords bulging like thick roots, clenching his teeth, fully expecting an earth-shattering detonation that would level the entire clearing and vaporize the forest for leagues around. He waited for the shockwave, the fire, the catastrophic tear in reality.

...And nothing happened.

Absolute, dead stillness.

The cataclysm didn’t detonate. The world didn’t shatter into fire and blinding white ruin. There was no roaring shockwave, no tearing of the sky, no apocalyptic blast to tear the flesh from their bones.

The moment the four-pointed compass touched the crimson-black sky, the furious, ancient heavenly restrictions that had been acting like enraged, omnipotent gods simply... froze.

It was an instantaneous, jarring halt that defied every law of momentum. The suffocating gravity that had been flattening the hollow vanished so abruptly that the dirt beneath Sol’s feet didn’t even settle... it simply ceased to be pressed.

The bleeding fractures running through the sky froze mid-tear, their violent crimson light dimming into dull, lifeless rust.

The oppressive, suffocating gravity vanished in the span of a single heartbeat.

It was as if a pack of rabid, barking wolves had charged full-speed into the darkness, howling for slaughter, only to round the corner and find themselves face-to-face with the primordial ancestor of all predators.

A silent wave of incomprehensible antiquity rippled outward from the four dark points of the compass... an aura so vast, so undeniably supreme, that the localized rules of this tiny, backwater continental basin felt utterly pitiful by comparison.

It carried no hostility, no wrath, and no pride... only the cold, indifferent authority of something that had existed before the first star caught fire, before the weave was spun, before the concept of a ”heavenly law” had even been conceived.

Faced with an existence that stood outside and above all creation, the furious, ancient restriction of this continental basin suddenly felt like a petty, screaming child throwing rocks at an unmoving mountain.

Beneath the shadow of Orphos, the angry crimson-black sky began to shrink.

The bruised purple-black void shrank back, folding inward like charred parchment. The crimson fractures whittled down, melting away like thin ice cast into a roaring hearth.

The suffocating malice that had threatened to turn Veylara into dust suddenly lost every ounce of its arrogance, tucking its tail between its legs and slinking back, retreating into the upper atmosphere as if begging forgiveness for ever having dared to look down into this clearing.

The realm’s hard decree, the unyielding law that had barred mortals from Layer 5 for eons quietly broke its gaze, turned around, and ran, completely terrified of the relic hovering above the trees.

Within three breaths, the sky returned to normal.

The stars shone clear and untroubled. The pale silver moonlight spilled gently through the leaves of the surviving willows, glinting off the tranquil surface of the half-empty pond.

The oppressive doom was gone, leaving only the cool, crisp mountain breeze sweeping through the clearing.

It was so clean, so tranquil, and so utterly devoid of violence that the terrifying apocalypse of a heartbeat ago felt like nothing more than a feverish, shared hallucination.

WHOOSH.

Having casually swatted the wrath of the heavens aside like an annoying fly, the massive four-pointed phantom of the compass contracted into a tiny, harmless spark of golden light and slipped back between Sol’s brows, settling silently back into the depths of his mind as if it had never moved at all.

Sol stood frozen in the dirt, his mouth slightly open, blinking up at the peaceful, undisturbed night sky.

”That’s... it?” Sol muttered under his breath, scratching his cheek in sheer, dazed disbelief. ”You throw a fit like the world is ending, and you tuck your tail the second a broken compass looks at you?”

Beside him, Zephyra was still pressed against the ground, trembling from head to toe, her face covered in cold sweat.