Chapter 941
Ikenga stayed silent as he gazed up at the torn sky, his hand resting reassuringly on young Ikelos’s shoulder while Mahu stood close beside them.
"Have you all had your fun?" he asked, his tone filled with curiosity.
"Fun?" Jaus echoed, his lip curling in mild distaste. "Let us not flatter the mortals, brother. What fun is there to be found in a world of mud, sweat, and screaming cattle? I watched a colony of surface-dwellers scramble like ants over spilled sugar, praying to empty air while their neighbors drowned them out. It is a thoroughly miserable, wretched sight."
He leaned back, his form shimmering with the restless energy of the deep sea. "There is no joy in the squalor itself. The mortal plane is a cramped, fragile cage. But the thrill..." A sharp grin cut across his features. "The thrill of stepping out of our own cage? Of dropping the leash and moving through their wretched little kingdoms as absolute phantoms, completely unbound by divine law? That is intoxicating. The world below is nothing, but the freedom to tread upon it at a whim? That is everything."
Crepuscular chuckled and crossed his arms over his chest. "Jaus is entirely right," he remarked as he squinted up at the bleeding sky. "A miserable sight indeed. Dust, blood, and endless repetition. The architecture is crude, and the lifespans are pathetic. I have spent centuries watching them crawl through the dirt, now after many centuries nothing changes of their insignificance."
He tilted his head, the blinding white light of his eyes flashing. "And yet, knowing that we are here because we chose to be, that the door behind us is wide open and no higher power can snap their fingers and drag us back to our realm that is where the excitement lies. The mortal world shaped without our interference, I now look forward to what it would look like after our action today."
Ikenga shared a smile at his words and looked at Keles who shrugged as played with Ikelos who was still held by Mahu "I have yet to understand Roth’s interest in the taste of mortal blood" she said as she licked her lips.
All eyes turned to her but none could see through her veil but Ikenga having spent enough time knew she was grinning under that veil.
"The taste of freedom was sweet," Ikenga murmured, his hands clenching and unclenching "Now, it is time to remind them who holds the leash."
Just as he said those words, the world fell dark. Not the comforting, familiar darkness of the night where the sun retreats, stars puncture the open sky, and the moon takes over the duty of providing a gentle, guiding light.
This was something entirely unnatural, a profound, absolute absence. It was a total darkness where nothing could be seen, swallowing every glint. No light was able to get through, stubborn or otherwise. Even the heavy brass lamp on the desk, casting its usual warm glow, felt constricted, its illumination trapped in a tiny, suffocating sphere that refused to stretch outward as it rightfully should. The darkness possessed a physical density, absorbing the very essence of sight.
Keles took action with no words, Ikenga responded in kind as, at the exact time darkness fell, as if triggered by a hidden pulse within the blackness, a seismic shift occurred across the globe.
From every corner of Nana, in every place teeming with life, roaming the savannas, or nesting in remote wilderness, even the menagerie was stirred. Deep blue plants tore upward through the earth, erupting through asphalt, forest floors, and palace courtyards alike. They bloomed in seconds in the pitch-black world.
From the heart of eachblossom, thick plumes of pale mist began to diffuse, curling into the air like waking smoke. If an observer were to look down at the world of Nana from the cold vacuum of space, they would watch in sheer horror as the vibrant blue-green planet was slowly choked out, entirely covered by a shifting, ghostly blanket of pale mist.
In less time than it takes to draw a breath, the transition completed, Humans and countless creatures across Nana, their minds barely beginning to process the unnatural blackout, felt a heavy weight press down behind their eyes. Before panic could fully take root, consciousness slipped away. They drifted into an instantaneous, profound sleep, collapsing where they stood.
As they hit the ground, unsuspecting and vulnerable, the earth answered. Thick, fibrous roots surged from the soil, weaving intricate, protective cages around their slumbering figures. These living cradles cocooned them tightly, shielding their bodies from the disaster about to unfold.
Within moments, the noise died. Nana fell utterly silent, save for the shuddering breath of those who still were awake.
The only beings left awake and uncaptured by the mist were the paragons. But their survival brought no comfort, only a cold, creeping dread.
The instant the darkness fell, every ongoing battle froze mid-strike. Every instinct warned them that this shadow was different, it mocked their very being. It carried a strange, suffocating frequency that made the paragons feel fragile, stripping away their invulnerability and replacing it with the raw, terrifying vulnerability of flesh and bone.
For beings whose senses had evolved beyond mortal limits, the darkness was a sensory nightmare, those airborne suddenly lost all equilibrium, unable to distinguish up from down, plunging them into a vertigo-inducing freefall of panic.
Most devastating of all, sparking a wave of terror that rippled through every race, creed, and faction of the paragons, was the sudden, absolute severance from their domain spaces.
It was not that their power had vanished entirely. It was still at reach but that distinction made the terror worse.
They could still feel the phantom hum of their abilities, they could still weakly tap into the fundamental laws they once commanded. But the anchor was gone. They were no longer able to exert their individual reality over the physical world, an exertion that, under normal circumstances, spontaneously manifested as their sprawling, all-powerful domain spaces.
In the center of a desolate plateau, a paragon spun around wildly. Her boots ground against the dirt. She felt a phantom brush of air behind her, a shift in the pressure indicating someone or something standing right at her back.
She whipped around toward the sensation, but the presence had already shifted. She jerked her head to the sky, then to the right, then to the left.
Without sight, without the refinement of her senses, she was reduced to a blind animal, spinning in place and chasing phantom instincts in the pitch black.
She was far from alone. Across the entire world of Nana, every paragon suffered the exact same agonizing helplessness. They were all trapped in the same game of blind man’s buff, gripped by the skin-crawling sensation that they were completely surrounded. The darkness wasn’t empty, it was crowded.
As seconds bled into eternity, that haunting sensation grew exponentially wilder.
They felt the very air come alive, shifting and breathing against their skin. They felt the soil beneath their boots pulse with a collective, terrifying heartbeat. Everything around them in the suffocating darkness, every blade of grass, every grain of dust, every whisper of the pale mist was suddenly intensely, oppressively alive.
The world itself seemed to have woken up, and it was closing in quickly on them.
Just as the psychological weight of the living darkness threatened to break their resolve, a brilliant flash pierced the gloom. From the distant corner of the world where the ongoing conflict of the rings raged, a massive ball of blinding illumination erupted. It was born directly from the conceptual law of one of the paragons, a primal manifestation of raw brilliance trying to reclaim the space.
For a fleeting second, relief washed over the stranded paragons scattered across Nana. The harsh, searing radiance allowed them to make out the silhouettes of their surroundings, casting away the suffocating claustrophobia of the blind panic.
That relief died before it could fully take root.
Out of the deep expanse of the shadows, a colossal bird head, composed of pure, consuming darkness tore through the air. With a single, silent motion, it lunged forward and swallowed both the brilliant ball of light and the paragon who birthed it.
The world plunged instantly back into total, unyielding blackness. Every heart stopped, every breath paused in collective horror. The horrifying image of that shadowy bird’s maw was burned indelibly into the minds of every living paragon, a nightmare etched onto their consciousness.
Before the terror could even subside, a second, earth-shaking anomaly manifested in the dark.
A colossal astral form towered over the landscape, a titan forged of molten rock and raging lava, glowing with a fierce, destructive heat. But the spectacle lasted only a heartbeat. The exact same grim fate repeated itself. The paragon controlling the molten titan let out a single, abrupt shout of sheer disbelief before they, too, vanished completely, wiped from existence and leaving behind nothing but empty space.