Chương 322: Chapter 321 - Void Hunt

They stood on top of the carriage. The void stretched in every direction around them, purple and vast and without a horizon in the conventional sense. Debris drifted past at irregular intervals, some of it small enough to step on, some of it large enough to have its own slow gravity. The surface of the carriage roof was narrow and the wind coming off the void's current was cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. Lucid looked into the distance.

Something was moving out past where the void's depth made shapes difficult to hold. It was not a fish. He had been bracing for another pearl fish situation and it was not that. He exhaled.

"Void creatures are Unfaithful," Arthur said. He was standing with his arms crossed, scanning the same distance. The wind moved his hair and he did not react to it. Lucid activated the Chain of Heart. The ambient world shifted around him, the metaphysical layer sliding over the physical one. He had grown accustomed to the transition. Colors changed. The debris in the void took on faint traces of thread, most of them grey and inert. He looked toward the moving shape. The threads attached to it were purple.

Unfaithful confirmed. But what stopped him was the shape itself, now visible through the metaphysical layer with more clarity. Not a fish. Not any of the configurations he had catalogued from the beta rift or the encounters since. A snake. Long and enormous and moving through the void with the unhurried ease of something that had no predators.

"It is a snake," he said.

"A snake?" Arthur repeated. Ayame looked across the void without expression, assessing the distance and trajectory with the focused attention she gave things she was preparing to act on. Lucid turned his head to check the angle of approach and the pain arrived immediately. A sharp and familiar throb behind his left eye that spread across the back of his skull in the next breath. A loud ringing filled his ears, clean and high, blocking everything else for a moment.

'Damn it.' A pair of hands caught his shoulders before he registered moving.

"Are you alright?" Arthur asked. Lucid shook his head once to clear it and straightened. The ringing faded to the edges but did not fully leave.

'Why am I this dependent on her.' The thought came with more force than he intended it to. He pushed it down. He exhaled.

"It is an A rank." Arthur's grip on his shoulders eased but did not drop immediately.

"Similar to what we fought in the beta rift at Vex," Lucid added. Arthur nodded and released him. He turned back toward the void. The three of them stood side by side on the carriage roof. Lucid looked at Arthur, then at Ayame. Both had come a long distance from where they had been when he first encountered them. Arthur had been unawakened then, a prodigy working with raw capability and no access to the system that governed the upper tiers. That had changed inside the Zeta rift.

Lucid remembered the moment clearly, or the aftermath of it. What Arthur had since done with that awakening, the fleet he had apparently managed in Lucid's absence, spoke to something in him that had been waiting for the right pressure to activate. He looked at Ayame. She was holding a red dagger, already in a low stance, her weight distributed and settled. She had awakened recently as well. He could not recall the exact moment it had registered for him.

What he remembered was finding her on a cliff above a beachline, and the particular quality of the air around her in that moment. He had filed the question of when and how it had happened into a slot in his mind marked for later and had not returned to it. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. He filed it again now. The snake in the void was A rank. That was a functional problem and he turned his attention back toward it.

'A rank. Manageable in the beta rift with support. Now, without Alice, with a persistent ringing in his left ear and a nosebleed that had stopped twice and started a third time since morning.' He thought about what he knew about the tier structure. He had read it in fragments, in documents from the academy and in the Gospel he had found. The full outline existed somewhere in the back of his mind where he had stored everything he could not immediately use. Latent was the floor.

Those who carried fate essence but could not channel it. Above that were the Awakened whom could wield fate essence properly. Above them was Enlightened, which split internally into five ranks: Initiate, Ascendant, Eminent, Archon, and Primordial. Most people who made it to Enlightened stopped at Initiate. Ascendants were rare enough to hold real authority.

One Ascendant in a room with five Initiates was a dangerous room for the Initiates, though that comparison was an overstatement since personal traits and titles shifted every calculation. Eminent ranks were usually leaders of significant institutions, capable of influencing collective faith and consciousness, their power extending outward into the people around them rather than concentrating in themselves alone. Archon was where the tiers started to approach something else entirely. Governance.

Authority over systems and forces rather than individuals. The beginning of something adjacent to godhood. And then Primordial. He had seen it written in the Gospel and it had not clicked fully until now, standing on the roof of a train in the void with the ringing still fading from his ears and a snake the size of a small building moving toward them from the distance. A Primordial wielded authority over the foundational architecture of how things worked.

The passive trait he carried, the Divine Unchained Heart, was not an application of power or a special technique. It was a sovereignty. That was what the text had said and he had read it and moved past it because it had not yet meant anything he could hold. It meant something now. Every person he had encountered since arriving. Ivy. Arthur. Ayame. Lyssandra. Elara. Neptune. Mercyros, who had been an Archon and had put him through a black hole more than once. He had survived all of it.

Not through skill, not through preparation, not through anything that could be taught or trained into someone. He had survived because the chain kept rebuilding him, kept the cycle running, kept him functional through encounters that should have been final. He was at the top of the structure. And he had only just realized it, in pieces, through repeated encounters he had survived without fully understanding why. The memories of Mercyros were still corrupted at the edges.

Whatever had happened inside the singularity had left gaps that the regeneration cycle had not filled. But the shape of what he now understood was clear enough. If he chose to, he could end a concept. He stood on the carriage roof and looked at the enormous void snake approaching from the distance and thought that the timing of this particular realization was genuinely absurd.

"Grade?" Arthur asked, pulling him back.

"A rank," Lucid said again.

"Same class as the Unfaithful in the beta rift. The thread color is identical."

"We fought that with more people," Arthur noted.

"We did."

"And you are currently bleeding again." Lucid pressed the back of his wrist to his nose.

"Bit." Ayame had not looked away from the snake. Her stance had not changed. The red dagger in her hand was steady.

"It has not changed direction," she said.

"It is tracking the carriage."

"Tracking it or moving parallel to it?" Lucid asked.

"Tracking," she said.

"The angle has been adjusting for the last two minutes." Arthur looked at Lucid. The expression on his face was the one he wore when he was working out whether the situation was manageable or whether it was the other kind. He had a reliable instinct for that distinction and right now his expression was sitting in the uncertain middle.

"Valen is inside," Arthur said.

"He will stay inside," Lucid replied.

"He will stay inside until he decides there is something interesting happening outside." Lucid considered that.

"Someone should go tell him to stay inside."

"I am not going down there," Arthur said. They both looked at Ayame. She did not look back.

"I am not the one who let him in." Nobody had a counter to that. The snake covered another significant portion of the distance between them, moving in a slow and even undulation, its purple thread-signature bright enough now that Lucid could read it through the metaphysical layer without fully activating the chain. He wiped his nose on his wrist again and assessed what he had available. Alice was absent. The chain could run passive functions, healing at a reduced rate, basic perception at reduced range.

Offensive applications were going to cost him in headaches and bleeding. The ringing had returned faintly in his left ear. Arthur was awakened. Ayame was awakened and carrying a blood dagger. An A rank Unfaithful in the void, with no walls and no enclosed space to use for positioning.

"Alright," he said.