Raven shifted Lilian fully into the crook of her arm, checking her once with a glance that missed nothing, making sure her daughter was okay. Raven saw that Lilian’s pulse was unstable but present, blood-mana fractured yet not extinguished, and once she was sure her daughter was alright, she turned and hurled Lilian back without ceremony.
Lilian sailed through the air, wrapped instinctively in Raven’s aura like an invisible cradle, landing hard but safely beside Albedo as he struggled to stay upright. The mont Lilian was out of reach, Raven stepped forward alone.
The Abyssal Monstrosity finished forcing itself halfway through the breach.
Its scream was not sound but pressure, a layered vibration that crawled across bone and soul alike. The chamber warped around it, stone bending inward as if bowing, ritual debris lifting and dissolving into black ash before it could hit the ground.
What erged was a torso the size of a fortress tower, rib-like spines curving outward, void-flesh stitched together by veins of writhing Abyssal law. Its single visible eye opened, a collapsing star of hunger that fixed instantly on Raven.
It recognized her, which should not of even been possible, and once again brought more questions to what the Everglades were doing with this ritual, but they wouldn’t get these answers anymore.
Raven exhaled slowly, planting her boots into the shattered stone. Her aura changed, not expanding and not flaring, but instead compressing, folding inward until the pressure around her beca absolute. The air scread as it was crushed flat around her body, every Abyssal current snapping like severed threads.
"So," Raven said quietly, blade lowering at her side, "you’re what they were so desperate to crawl toward."
The Monstrosity answered by striking.
A limb like a cathedral spire tore free from the void, slamming downward with enough force to collapse a city block. The impact obliterated the chamber floor, sending shockwaves ripping outward in concentric rings. Magnus and the remaining Everglade elders were flung like broken dolls, shields shattering as they smashed into the far walls.
Raven vanished anwhile, as the strike pulverized nothing but her afterimages, as she reappeared above the Monstrosity’s eye, already mid-swing, her blade cutting not flesh but concept.
The slash carved a glowing fault line across the creature’s face, severing Abyssal authority rather than matter. The Monstrosity reeled, its scream distorting into sothing fractured as void-blood erupted upward like a black geyser.
Raven landed on its shoulder and drove her blade down again and again, each strike precise, surgical, aid at joints where Abyssal law intersected with summoned structure. She wasn’t overpowering it. She was dismantling it.
The Monstrosity retaliated, its body unraveling into a storm of limbs and tendrils, reality itself tearing as Abyssal mass tried to crush her from every direction. Entire sections of the chamber ceased to exist, swallowed into nothingness where its presence passed.
Raven walked through it.
Every step she took imposed her will over the Abyss’s. Tendrils that touched her aura disintegrated instantly, reduced to inert sludge as their connection to the Abyss was severed.
She seized one massive limb with her free hand, muscles tightening once, and tore it free from the creature’s body with a sound like a collapsing mountain.
She flung it back through the breach. The Abyss howled in response, the portal destabilizing violently as sothing on the other side recoiled.
"You don’t belong here," Raven said, her voice carrying cleanly through the chaos. "And I’m done being patient."
She raised her blade.
The aura around her condensed further, collapsing into a singular, lethal edge that split the chamber down the center. For an instant, everything froze, the Monstrosity, the falling debris, even the Abyssal breach itself.
Then Raven swung viciously, the slash erasing outward as a line of absolute annihilation carved through the Monstrosity’s torso, severing it cleanly from the breach, cutting through void-flesh, bone, and Abyssal law as if they were illusions.
The upper half of the creature convulsed once, its eye widening in sothing like disbelief before the severed mass imploded inward, collapsing into a vortex of dying Abyssal energy.
The backlash tore through the chamber.
Albedo barely managed to stay conscious as the pressure spiked. He staggered backward, one arm wrapped tightly around Lilian as he forced his legs to move, dragging her away from the collapsing battlefield. Blood blurred his vision, but he didn’t stop. He couldn’t.
Every instinct scread that staying even a second longer would be fatal. Behind him, Raven wasn’t finished.
The breach itself began to resist, Abyssal tendrils clawing outward as if trying to pull Raven in, trying to reclaim what was lost. The Abyss pushed back, furious, desperate.
Raven stepped into the pull. Her boots crossed the threshold of the summoning circle, aura flaring outward for the first ti since the battle began. The pressure reversed violently, Abyssal currents collapsing inward under the weight of her presence.
She drove her blade into the center of the breach.
"Go back," Raven said.
The words weren’t a command. They were a verdict as the breach imploded, Abyssal energy scread as it folded in on itself, the portal collapsing into a singularity before detonating in a shockwave of lightless force. Raven was thrown backward through the chamber, skidding across the ruined floor before slamming to a halt against a fractured wall.
Silence followed as the Monstrosity was gone.
The Abyssal presence vanished as if it had never been there, leaving behind nothing but scorched stone, warped ley lines, and the broken remnants of the Everglade Clan’s ambition.
The remaining elders lay dead or dying, their borrowed power severed, their bodies failing rapidly without Abyssal reinforcent.
Magnus crawled weakly across the rubble, eyes wide, mouth opening and closing soundlessly as he stared at the empty space where the Monstrosity had been.
Raven stood tall, blood dripping from a dozen wounds she hadn’t bothered to close, but her posture remained unbroken, gaze cold as she walked toward Magnus. She stopped in front of him, looking down with quiet contempt.
"You were never chosen," she said. "You were used."
Her blade flashed once.
Magnus fell still.
Far from the ritual chamber, Albedo finally stumbled through a collapsing corridor and out into open air, dropping to one knee as the last of his strength gave out. He held Lilian tightly as she gasped, coughing weakly, blood-mana slowly stabilizing within her.
The night sky above the Northern Region churned violently as corrupted ley lines began to settle, Abyssal influence burning away under the backlash of the failed summoning.
Lilian’s fingers tightened weakly in his sleeve.
"We’re... alive," she murmured, disbelief threading her voice.
Albedo let out a shaky breath, pressing his forehead briefly against hers. "Yeah," he said hoarsely. "We are."
Behind them, far in the distance, a final shockwave rolled outward as the ritual site collapsed completely, burying the Everglade Clan’s legacy under stone and silence.
And sowhere within the ruins, Raven stood alone amid the destruction, blade resting at her side, watching the last echoes of the Abyss fade from the world.
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