MAGUS INFINITE

[ True Name: Drh?_...Error]

[ Time Arc?: 1.9086.009.223.221 ]

[Soul Condition: Welded — Stable — >¡?Error?¡?Error?<

This was all I could see before my status screen collapsed into a flickering mess, filled with static crawling across its surface like a living thing, and I could see characters that were not part of any language I knew.

[ Warning: Local reality parameters anomalous. System integration compromised. Please reset— ] - I have touched the center of the sky..?Error?<

The screen glitched, and for a moment, I saw something that was not my status screen. A vast, incomprehensible shape, a collection of light, shadow, and blood that stretched across the void, so vast it made the heavens small, and at its center, something that might have been a thousand eyes, and all of them were watching me.

Then the screen cleared and vanished, and no matter how I tried, it no longer responded, leaving me with my heart hammering in my chest.

”What was that?” I whispered, but no one answered me. My soul that usually held two beings was now silent, leaving me alone in the dark, standing before infinity... afraid.

It was as if the foundation that I thought was infallible had just been taken away from me, and I did not know what to do from here. What was a True Name, or Time Arc? Was the system tied to my world, and if I left it, would that connection be severed? What would happen if I was killed in space? Would I still be able to return via the loop? How close was the loop connected with the system? Were they working together, or was there something more to all of this?

I looked up, and the burning stars felt too distant; the only thing around me was darkness, and I had a great desire to jump from this Caelith that was pushing me into the darkness, into my world below that was ending. Somehow fighting and dying to a demon god now seemed infinitely better than proceeding deeper into this darkness.

With that thought in mind, I began to walk towards the edge of the pyramid, my lightning ensuring my feet did not leave the black surface of the pyramid, because there was no gravity in space, and I was terrified that I would be thrown off the surface of the pyramid and lost in the darkness of eternity forever.

As I reached the edge of the pyramid and looked down, or was it up? Direction here was becoming weird... I saw my world below me, and the frown on my face deepened, because it did not look right. I did not expect to have travelled really far from the planet below, and I expected to see my continent, a lot of ocean and maybe other closer continents... but I was wrong.

The world had vanished into the distance; it was still massive and dominated my visual field, but the problem was that I could see all of it, and I knew I had not been traveling for long. So either the pyramid was moving faster than I thought, or I had spent more time here, or maybe there was something distorting my sight... none of these options were good, because it reduced my chance of returning home, but the more I looked, the less this seemed a concern with everything I was witnessing.

I had paid enough attention in astronomy and geography to know the shape of a planet, and it was usually roughly spherical, but what I was looking at was a hemisphere?

I blinked, not sure if I was hallucinating, but I was not wrong; it was as if someone had taken a gigantic sword and cut the world in two!

No, perhaps this was just visual distortion, the same way the planet now looks incredibly distant in my eyes even though I had just barely left the atmosphere. Should I not be seeing the moon... in fact, where was the moon?

The more I looked, the less I understood what I was looking at, and before my eyes, the hemisphere remained the same, but nothing had changed. I could not see any moon, and all I saw was half a world. Were all the maps wrong, or was there something about space that distorted how vision worked?

If I looked closer, I could see Aelmar, my continent, and the way I was able to recognize my continent from this distance was due to a wave of darkness and fire covering it. I may have been pushed into space, but the destruction of my world had not ended.

At the corner of my eye, I saw a red streak, like a meteor heading towards the Caelith, and I focused on it for a few seconds, and I realized it was the second Thul.

It appeared injured, far more than what I had inflicted upon it, and the demon was beating its wings in panic while burning its flesh to serve as propulsion, as if it was running from the void.

I stepped back and watched it fly over me and slam into the ground thousands of meters away, before I looked back towards the darkness and I did not see any sign of pursuit.

The dread I was feeling in my heart grew, and I turned towards the demon that had collapsed and took a Stormstep towards it. I barely crossed a hundred meters, as my lightning seemed to be under an incredible amount of pressure.

When I reached the demon, I could see that it was dying; deep wounds that resisted its incredible healing filled its body, and as I stepped closer to it, I realized the demon was blind, as it lifted its head to look at me, and its eyes were white as if they had been bleached inside its eye socket.

I froze when I saw those eyes; it was as if the demon had seen something that it should not see, and for that it had suffered. Then I heard its whispering, and I could hardly make any meaning from its words, but they caused goosebumps to break across my skin, and I had an intuition that listening to more of those whispers would drive me mad.

Holding my palm before its head, I condensed a bolt of Tribulation Lightning and shot it into its skull, and I thought that in the moment before the demon died, it thanked me.

I could not confirm if what I heard was correct when a flood of essence poured into me, and I fell to my knees.

[ Stored Essence: 502,900 → 674,872/500,000 ]

I held a scream at the back of my throat when I felt the fifth earth gate beginning to crack.