Are you familiar with that frustrating feeling when you’re in a ditch you can’t get out of by yourself, so you call a friend to help.
But while that friend does end up coming, they take their sweet goddamn ti doing so?
In that mont, you’re not sure whether you want to be more thankful or beat the everliving shit out of them.
That was exactly the internal crisis I had to go through when I held Aurieth again after a little over a month.
But all that tension bled out of soon, replaced by a confident calm as the golden blade glowed brighter in response to my Essence.
I grinned and spun in mid-air before cartwheeling down, letting gravity do its work while also building imnse montum on my own.
The God took a single step back as I crashed with the force of a falling teor, cratering the frozen ground under the flattening weight of my greatsword.
The fallen deity imdiately retaliated by snapping his warhamr at . I blocked with Aurieth, although the impact still shook my arm and flicked away several feet back.
I landed with a perfect backflip, imdiately forming a small glacier to offer proper footing.
In that ti, I had not only created another ice arm to replace the one that broke earlier, but had also switched Aurieth into its bow form.
Yes, bow form.
Because it’d been so long since I used my Divine Sword, and I’m fairly certain you’ve forgotten all about its enchantnts, here’s a quick rundown:
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[Na]: Aurieth, the Divine Blade
[Rank]: Undefined (Soulbound Artifact)
[Type]: Armant
[Item]: Artifact
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[Enchantnt]:
1. [Final Gambit] – When the wielder faces mortal peril, Aurieth’s power surges exponentially, turning the tide of battle in their favor. The closer to death, the greater its lethality.
2. [Trinity] – Aurieth can seamlessly shift between three forms: an Executioner Greatsword, Twin Single-edged Longswords, and a Regal Bow.
3. [Celestial Furnace] – Converts the wielder’s raw Essence into pure light energy, fueling devastating attacks imbued with divine brilliance.
4. [Conduit] – While held, Aurieth subtly enhances the wielder’s Essence absorption, accelerating recovery and strengthening their reserves.
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Ah, truly, what a spectacle of craftsmanship it was~!
"I missed you so much, buddy!" I murmured, nocking one fire arrow after another and letting them loose in blistering succession like an artillery battery.
The arrows were imbued with the effects of [Celestial Furnace], so not only were they being shot like beams of light, but their destructive capabilities had also increased tenfold.
Dear gods, this whole hellish journey would’ve been so much easier if I’d just had this sword with from the start!
Oh, speaking of gods, the God used his trident in my answer and summoned a vast tidal wave that rose before him.
The arrows — greatly enhanced by Aurieth’s enchantnt and my own Essence — hit that curling waterfall like a flurry of missiles.
A series of steam explosions and violent splashes triggered, completely shredding the tsunami that was about to follow suit after that tidal wave.
Massive plus of superheated vapor hissed upward, veiling the entire battlefield in a misty fog.
But I didn’t stop firing. Not until that sa serrated disk blade from before ripped through the haze and ca spiraling toward .
Of course, unlike before, I was ready. I quickly switched Aurieth back into its greatsword form and unleashed a blinding pillar of light from its tip, catching the speeding disk dead-on with the force of a supernova.
The collision resulted in a high-pitched whine of tal.
But the serrated disk still did not stop. It just kept on coming, parting the torrential beam of light as it ground its way toward my skull.
My effort wasn’t in vain, though. Its spin was slowing down slightly.
Noticing that, I tilted my greatsword just a fraction of a degree. Instead of eting the disk in a frontal contest, I let it slide along the flat of the golden blade.
The screech of tal on tal was loud enough to scrape my eardrums, but it diverted the disk’s trajectory.
The disk whistled past my ear, taking a lock of hair with it, and carved a clean, mile-long trench through the frozen sea behind .
But in doing so, I was left off-balance.
The God capitalized on that slip-up by barreling through the fog. I had only a mont to widen my eyes before he drove his obsidian stake of a needle into my chest... impaling on the spot.
...Or that’s what would’ve happened.
In reality, my form shriveled and disintegrated into twinkling specks of black light, like dark fireflies scattering in the night.
It was thanks to a Card I had taken from Lily.
[Grave Mistake
- Effect: Creates a short-lived shadow clone that dissipates into dark motes upon impact. The caster is invisible for three seconds after activation.]
The God’s obsidian stake passed through nothing but empty air and fading embers.
He had overextended.
And the montum of his heavy body was now carrying him forward into the space I had just occupied.
And as the fog swirled around his confused, six-ard, multi-headed silhouette, I appeared directly above him.
I had used those three seconds of invisibility to jump high.
He didn’t have ti to look up as the dazzling blade of my greatsword ca down in a vertical slash to burst open his skull like a guillotine.
Swooo—!!
"Wha—?!"
But my sword t no resistance as it dissected the fallen deity. It just felt like cutting air.
The God’s form rippled like a reflection in a disturbed pond, and I realized I had made a grave mistake of my own.
It turned out, the God had pulled the exact sa trick on .
He had created a mirage.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. My eyes darted frantically to find him, but he was nowhere to be found.
Until...
Behind .
I couldn’t even turn.
The air pressure behind my shoulder blades spiked. The real God erged from the fog, and the next thing I knew, a thick spike of glassy obsidian was jutting out of my chest.
My back, my spine, my lungs, my heart, and even my soul — the needle’s jagged point pierced it all.
I looked down at it, blood spraying from my mouth in a violent cough.
I don’t rember feeling pain.
Don’t get wrong, it was painful as fuck. That’s the best way I could try and describe what it feels like being staked through your heart.
But I just don’t rember it.
What I do rember is thinking, ’Oh... this is it.’
The prophecy was fulfilled.
As a teeth-clattering chill started seeping into my very bones and darkness began encroaching on the edges of my vision... I had no doubt left that I was going to die now.
It was only the question of when.
My breath was breaking. It’s a suffocating sensation when you physically feel your lungs rapidly filling with blood.
But what really gets to you is when you try to inhale as much air as possible, but your breath starts getting shorter and shorter.
It feels like drowning, just so much more agonizing.
I tried to stay awake, to resist the comfortable embrace of death, but my eyelids felt like lead.
At last, I couldn’t keep them open.
My struggle to stay conscious turned into slow blinks, and with each blink, my awareness started fading into a colorless void.
But naturally, I wasn’t going to die yet.
How would I be telling this story if I were, you know... dead?
Okay, yeah, I did die. But not just then.
Because just then, sothing miraculous happened.
When I forced my eyes open for what I thought would be the final ti, I saw... sothing.
Before , the entire battlefield was now half-translucent, overlapped by an endless lattice of glowing strings that stretched for as far as the world itself stretched.
Glowing strings...
Wait!
...No.
Upon a closer look, I realized those strings were made of... letters?
Yes! Small, repetitive sets of letters.
They were everywhere — intersecting, overlaying, and weaving into one another in patterns so complex I had to squint to see them. And my... brain hurt the more I did.
They made up everything, like atoms but on a more conceptual level.
So strings, like the ones knitting together the small glacier under or the silver sea beyond it, were as thick as chains.
Other strings, like those creating the broken shards of ice or the drops of blood on my body, were as thin as spider silk.
Yes, by the way, my own body was fabricated from the interconnected weave of those tiny letters as well.
Each one of them — those runes, those letters, those... codes — shimred in colors I didn’t have nas for, in hues that felt wrong to gaze upon.
It was as if my eyes were translating sothing they were never ant to see.
...Because they indeed were not.
I realized a couple of things at that mont.
First was that the ice, the fog, the God, and my own impaled body were all just outlines — projections cast by sothing far more fundantal.
The second was that the world had... peeled away before my gaze.
Peeled... That was the only word that ca to mind. Like sothing had taken reality by the corners and lifted it just a little, enough for to glimpse what was underneath.
Straight away, I was reminded of Rexerd’s journals and what I had read in those pages.
He had ntioned a layer of existence called the Underrality. I didn’t fully understand what it ant back then.
I did now.
This was it...
This was the foundation atop which the entire physical plane was built, the building block of everything that is.
This was the Underrality.
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