Chapter 112: Out of Time...
[Warning: Specialized S-Rank Void Assassins spawned. Target locked on the weakest lifeform in the immediate vicinity.]
[Target: Maya.]
The red system warning pulsed violently against Zen’s retinas, casting a bloody glow over his vision.
The ground shook violently with a deep, heavy vibration that felt like it was going to rip the warded obsidian command table right out of the floor.
This wasn’t a natural earthquake; it was a focused tear in the fabric of space, happening because the planetary seal was fracturing.
Reclaiming sixty-seven per cent of Lyra’s Aether fragment had restored Zen’s core to Low A-Rank, but the universe was already correcting the imbalance.
The planetary anchor had weakened, and the Void was violently capitalising on the rupture.
Zen didn’t panic, though. His mind, now reinforced by Lyra’s fragment, processed the incoming threat in milliseconds. He looked toward the corner of the tent. Maya was still sleeping peacefully inside the sensory ward, totally oblivious to the spatial collapse happening around her.
She was the weakest link. The Void didn’t care about the A-Rank warlord standing in the centre of the room; it wanted to sever his anchor.
"Zen..." Lyra whispered, her voice still trembling from the aftershocks of their barely just-concluded sex session.
Even though she was physically drained, and her naked skin was flushed and slick with sweat, the Goddess of the Aether Domain snapped instantly into survival mode.
She felt the spatial fabric tearing and realised the danger.
With a single, effortless flex of his newly stabilized Low A-Rank core, Zen commanded his mana. He didn’t unleash a destructive wave of energy; instead, he manipulated the space directly surrounding his body.
A localised spatial pocket ripped open in a flash of crackling indigo runes and warped light.
In less than a second, his Imperial battle gear, made of dark steel plate infused with star metal and gravity runes, materialised directly onto his body. The armor snapped into place with a series of sharp, metallic clicks, fitting him perfectly. The First Mortal Ruler was fully armed before Lyra could even blink.
Lyra didn’t waste time. Reaching into the remaining thirty-three percent of the Aether core still residing in her heart, she summoned her star-woven dress. The fabric materialized around her bare form in a swirl of gravity-warped purple light.
She didn’t try to stand. Instead, she pointed her pale hand toward Maya’s cot.
"Aether Shield: Absolute Void," Lyra commanded.
The air surrounding Maya’s bed folded inward. The light was bent, wrapping the cot in a dense, pitch-black gravity dome. It was an unbreakable physical barrier, isolating Maya from the dimensional plane of the tent. If the assassins wanted her, they would have to crush Lyra’s gravity core first.
A split second later, the breach happened.
The S-Rank Void Assassins didn’t walk through the front entrance of the pavilion... they didn’t need to. The coordinates of the broken seal were directly inside the tent, and the Void used the tear to bypass every physical defence.
The air tore open like wet fabric, and three jagged, bleeding black rifts appeared in the space between the obsidian table and Maya’s bed.
The assassins stepped out, looking like tall humanoid creatures, with their bodies formed from shifting Void matter. Their bodies absorbed the light in the room, appearing only as flickering silhouettes.
In their hands, they held long, jagged blades of spatial negation... deadly weapons capable of cutting through physical matter, magical wards, and souls alike.
They completely ignored Zen and Lyra. Their faceless heads locked onto the pitch-black gravity dome protecting Maya, and they lunged forward with terrifying speed.
Outside the pavilion, the camp was a warzone.
The moment the planetary seal fractured, the resulting shockwave violently corrupted the mana in the atmosphere. The sky above the Abyssal Trench split open, raining down thousands of mutated Void beasts directly onto the Ares and Crown troops.
From the distance, the deafening roars of the horde and the screams of Valeria’s broadsword echoed through the valley.
Aurelia’s mana-cannons fired in rapid succession, shaking the earth as they held the collapsing perimeter. The troops were completely bogged down, fighting for their lives against an unexpected onslaught, entirely unaware that the real threat had bypassed them and dropped directly into the command tent.
Zen stepped in front of the leading assassin.
With his restored Aether magic, he folded the space between them. In a fraction of a millisecond, he vanished and reappeared directly in the path of the lead monster.
The assassin reacted instantly, thrusting its spatial negation blade toward Zen’s throat.
Instead of dodging, Zen raised a single hand and traced a complex, geometric pattern in the air using his fingers.
"Gravity Lock," he muttered coldly.
A localized gravity well, ten times more crushing than the pressure Lyra had used to compress his pathways, slammed into the assassin. The monster’s blade froze inches from Zen’s face as the sheer atmospheric weight caused the space around it to harden like solid glass.
Before the creature could slip back into the Void, Zen closed his fist.
The locked space twisted violently. As the air sheared inward, the assassin’s head was cleanly severed from its shoulders, disintegrating into a cloud of harmless black ash before it could hit the floor.
The remaining two assassins adjusted their trajectory mid-air. Realizing Zen was the primary obstacle, they split up: one lunged at his flank with a blade humming with spatial decay, while the other bypassed him entirely, throwing itself toward Maya’s gravity shield.
"Lyra," Zen commanded.
"Understood," Lyra rasped.
She clenched her hand, causing the gravity dome around Maya’s cot to pulse. A localised repulsion field erupted outward, slamming into the assassin and slowing its advance for a split second.
That was all the time Zen needed.
He ignored the assassin attacking his flank. Instead of defending, he folded space again, swapping his physical coordinates with the air directly behind the monster trying to attack Maya.
The assassin flanking him struck empty air, its blade cutting through a lingering indigo afterimage.
Zen materialised behind the second assassin. He didn’t use his sword; he grabbed the creature by the back of its neck, his hand pulsing with raw spatial logic.
"Deconstruct," Zen whispered.
Using the logic fragment he had just retrieved, Zen analysed the magical structure of the Void matter holding the assassin together and simply rewrote the laws of physics in the immediate area.
The assassin let out a silent, horrified shriek as its body fell apart, turning into a harmless stream of unrefined mana that Zen’s core immediately absorbed.
The final assassin, realizing it was outmatched, tried to retreat. It stepped backward, sinking into the bleeding rift it had emerged from.
"You don’t leave," Zen said, thrusting his hand forward and grabbing the edge of the spatial rift.
With a sharp tug, Zen pulled the rift closed, shearing space shut. The assassin, caught halfway through, was sliced clean in two. Its upper torso collapsed to the stone floor before dissolving into dust.
Silence returned to the tent.
The three S-Rank assassins were gone, reduced to ash. The warded obsidian table was cracked down the middle, and the air was thick with the scent of ozone and burnt mana.
Lyra collapsed back against the cracked table, catching her breath. She stared at Zen, her violet eyes wide with a mixture of physical exhaustion and deep, intellectual awe.
He had handled three S-Rank threats without breaking a sweat, without destroying the tent, and without triggering another spatial collapse. The way he had manipulated the gravity wells and spatial coordinates was so precise it was beyond anything she could have calculated.
A violent crash shattered the entrance of the pavilion.
The heavy, warded tent flaps were torn aside as Valeria burst in. Her crimson armor was spattered with thick black blood, and her golden broadsword vibrated with a lethal, high-frequency hum. Aurelia and Selene rushed in close behind, looking pale and their mana flaring defensively.
They expected to find a tragedy. They expected to find Zen dead, or Maya taken.
Instead, they found Zen standing in the ruined room in his dark Imperial armor as he stepped over the fading ash of the three S-Rank Void Assassins. In his arms, he held Maya, who had just been released from the gravity shield.
She was yawning, rubbing her eyes, completely unaware of the danger that had just passed.
Valeria lowered her broadsword, staring at the scene before her in shock. "Zen... what happened here?"
"They bypassed the front lines," Zen stated. "They spawned directly inside the tent coordinates. The Anchor Paradox is in effect."
He looked at the five Goddesses, his dark eyes locking onto each of them in turn.
"We are out of time," Zen declared. "And if we stay together, we are going to destroy this world faster than the Void."