Chapter 204: The Last Two
The arrival of the Abyss was sudden.
One day, the world was beginning to grow accustomed to its new reality, a reality where the impossible had become real. Humans were gaining powers. Beasts were becoming more intelligent and stronger than normal. Entire habitats were changing into something never seen before.
And the next day, a calamity descended upon the world.
The sky split open. A strange energy began pouring through the cracks, an energy that corrupted every living thing it touched. Humans lost their minds. Beasts lost theirs too. Even nature itself twisted into something that was anything but pleasant to look at.
Panic spread faster than anyone could contain it, and the entire world mobilized against this new threat. one of unknown origin, wielding power so crushing it killed ninety percent of all living beings within months.
The special division found itself buried under an avalanche of crises almost overnight, and soon enough, even they were overwhelmed.
It was in that apocalyptic climate that the first rays of humanity’s hope began to appear: powerful individuals, human and otherwise, with rare abilities or power levels far beyond the rest of the Awakened.
They fought. They tried to push back the calamity, and for a brief while, they even succeeded. But it didn’t last. One by one, they fell, and with each fall, the survivors were filtered further and further, until only the strongest remained, until, finally, only two remained to lead what was left of the resistance.
Evan, who had reached the rank of Demi-God. And Seraphine, who had reached the rank of Paragon.
The resistance held for a long time, months that stretched into years, but one thing never changed. The death toll never truly slowed. It dipped, here and there, but never stopped, because the Abyss didn’t limit itself to sending its usual creatures. Those, too, climbed in rank, soon reaching Demi-God level themselves.
With his mastery over Space and Time, Evan had reached a level of power that allowed him to surpass others of the same rank. This allowed him to keep a large portion of the Demigods at bay.
Seraphine, however, could not do the same.
After a decade, she too finally reached the rank of Demigod, something that should have been a relief.
It wasn’t.
If anything, it became a tragedy, because not long after, she perished by the first true God the Abyss sent forth.
It broke something in Evan.
He had watched everyone he’d come to know over those years die, one after another, until even Seraphine, the one closest to him, was gone.
After that, he stopped bothering to hold the battlefield together, stopped planning so the last few humans wouldn’t die to void corruption. He simply gave himself over to rage and fury, forgetting, for a time, that all of this was only a fragment of the past.
Years passed. Then decades. The world stopped being what it once was. Almost no trace of life remained in it, it was ruined, corrupted by void energy beyond any measure.
Evan may have been the only one still alive by then, and he no longer cared. He had killed several gods of the Abyss by that point, and sealed away many more on the very planet that had become a prison for everyone left on it.
And it was in the middle of all this that a single particle of life appeared, one whose intensity was strong enough to be felt from every corner of that dead world.
A plant had been born.
Yes, a plant that, despite the void energy saturating the very air, grew within days into a tall stalk, then within a few more into something resembling a tree. And the tree kept growing, and growing, until in less than a month, a towering, colossal tree stood in the middle of that dead world. One that didn’t go unnoticed by any of the world’s remaining residents, though they never got the chance to approach it. The moment any of them appeared, they were brutally cut down by the one who had been hunting them the entire time.
Evan.
He wasn’t who he used to be. He stood tall now, nearly 190 centimeters, his hair long and unkempt, his clothes worn and torn in a dozen places, clothes that did nothing to hide the trained, sculpted body of the living god he had long since become.
His face was sharp, almost perfect, and utterly devoid of emotion. No lines, no wrinkles, nothing to suggest his expression had changed even once in all those years.
He stared at the colossal tree with indifference.
His eyes lingered on it for only a second, examining it before moving beyond its surface and quickly locating the source of energy at its core.
And there, he finally saw her.
Seraphine. She wasn’t dead.
Quite the opposite.
The intensity of the energy she was emitting was no longer that of a Demigod.
She had become a true God, in every sense of the word.
Evan would later discover, once she woke, that this had been a mechanism of self-preservation she had developed, one that had gone far beyond anything she herself could have expected
It had placed her into a state of temporary death, allowing her to remain alive while recovering all of her strength.
It should have brought her back to consciousness after a while. Instead, that "while" turned into decades. And in those decades, something changed, the mechanism did far more than it had ever been built to do, and it carried her all the way up in rank.
Evan understood why. Seraphine’s concept was life itself, the one thing this dead world lacked entirely. She had absorbed fragments of the vital energy left behind by every living being that had died.
Seraphine, however, wasn’t happy about any of it.
The world they had sworn to protect was already gone. They had lost. But Evan told her not everything was lost, he told her he’d spent this last stretch of time searching for a way to fix it all, and that he had found one.
A way that should give them back the life they used to have. A way that would save the world from its already-sealed fate. A way they both attempted together, but whose outcome turned out to be something else entirely.
Could they save their world? Yes.
But only at the cost of giving up the lives they knew.
Seraphine only understood this when the first cycle began.
Evan was no longer with her.
She was the only one who returned to a world not yet touched by the Abyss, a world that, even so, was no longer the simple planet it had once been, but one steeped in mana, where every being born into it from that point on would come into existence already immersed in it.
Seraphine found herself in a world where she no longer had any connection to anything.
Even the last person she had left had been lost within the folds of time.
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