So, what caused the delay at the beginning of the month?
Remember when I mentioned that I was sick? Well, the fever and the flu completely wrecked my immune system, and I ended up with a stomach infection that basically knocked me flat.
I had to go to the hospital, take medication specifically for my stomach, and spent a while dealing with vomiting and diarrhea. It wasn't pretty, but I'm doing much better now.
Thank you all so much for your patience. I truly appreciate it!
(P)(A)(T)/CalleumArtori.
[...]---[...]
Life... is made of choices. Choices that carry consequences, whether good or bad.
That is what we are — the sum of everything we have decided, every success and every mistake.
It is those choices that shape who we become and give meaning to our path. Species does not matter.
Maybe it is the successes. More likely, it is the mistakes.
But in the end... they are the best thing we have.
As for myself, I considered myself someone who had far more mistakes than successes. I tried to be cautious and always think once, twice, or even three times before making any kind of important decision.
But in the end, whether I wanted to or not, I always ended up making mistakes.
I made a choice one day after arriving in Terraria, and it almost cost me my life against the Mother Slime in the dungeon.
I made a choice in Jille, and it almost cost me my life against some random goblin that nearly decapitated me.
I made a choice in Winterhord, and it almost cost me my life against Deerclops, who nearly froze all my internal organs.
I made a choice during the Blood Moon, and it almost cost me my life... many times.
I made a choice when I stepped through the gate... The result was no different...
After studying the portal with Jinn for nearly another hour, I was thinking about ending the stream.
It was daytime in practice, but for all my viewers, it was probably close to one or two in the morning, given that running halfway across the planet had completely thrown the time zone into chaos.
But in the end, I decided not to, and I had a good reason for it... or almost.
I wanted to show the other side of the gate to the stream.
Of course, there were already the images and footage from the recordings I had made by sending cameras strapped to the Nightmares to the other side, but I wanted a live recording from there before ending the stream.
It would also serve as a small test: I would go to the other side for just a few seconds, one minute at most, and look around to get a sense of things with my own eyes.
To see what the world on the other side was like, what kinds of energies filled the air, whether I could feel anything abnormal and/or observe the reaction of the gods on that side.
To know what I should expect in general and everything else, just a quick trip.
Gripping the Slick Cane, I waved at Ozma, who had left his students and approached, then turned to Jinn.
"Shall we?" I asked.
Curious as always, she was coming with me. Ozma would come as well, more because staying on this side and having his connection to his Nightmare body severed might cause problems than for any other reason.
He had not returned to the Spiritual Realm and preferred to go on his own two legs — or almost — because, in his own words: "If it is to see new places, let it be with the eyes I carry within myself. Cameras were a great creation, but they also created a false sense of travel for those who see beautiful landscapes only through images on screens and pixels."
Beautiful words, deep meaning. In a way, I agreed with him. I just did not know whether I should feel offended that my eyes were being compared to the screen of a scroll/phone, but oh well.
I would have offered for Shizuka to come if I were not worried that the change in environment might affect her. As much as Jinn and I had done tests before, this was different.
The human body already starts having problems if it goes up or down one or two kilometers. Literally changing planets, even if in theory it should not cause any problems, was something I would rather avoid in practice. I did not want the veins in Shizuka's brain starting to form bubbles.
Gripping the Slick Cane in my right hand, I walked toward the portal with Ozma and Jinn by my side.
I went first, taking the first step into the portal. I thought I would come out on the other side, in the Special Region. That was how it had gone in every test I had done, whether with ordinary objects, Nightmares, or animals like the rabbits and squirrels I had thrown into the portal.
Unlike all the tests, I found myself on what looked like a straight bridge made of darkness, with circular walls, like a mountain tunnel, but formed from dark purple smoke slowly swirling around.
Instantly, I knew something was wrong. There was no way not to.
Then I felt a gaze fall upon me. Not through my own senses — that gaze was distant enough that I would not have noticed it on my own.
I only realized it because my title of [The Streamer] gave me that perception: something was watching me without my permission.
It was the first time I had ever had that insight. Normally, I noticed every gaze on my own, without outside help. I had even been able to hide without outside help as well, as had been the case with 'The Eye.'
This time, no.
I felt that I would not be able to hide on my own, because the place where I was standing was directly connected to whoever was watching me — as if I were a mosquito landing on someone's arm. It was impossible to hide, because I was directly touching whoever was looking at me.
Then my instincts screamed at me to move. My spirituality exploded, warning me of danger coming from some unknown place.
I was certain that if I did nothing, I would die. There was no maybe, no if, no but. The result of not reacting was death.
I had a tiny fraction of a single millisecond, perhaps less, to decide what to do.
I managed to perform four actions.
The first was to throw the Shadow Puppet backward, grabbing Jinn and Ozma, who was halfway through the portal, and hurling them back to Earth.
The second was activating both the Transparent World and my Demon Slayer Mark at the same time.
The Transparent World gave me a greater sense of where the danger was coming from — directly above my head. I felt as though something was falling onto me, while at the same time there was nothing there.
It also heightened my perception and, together with the Demon Slayer Mark, strengthened my entire body and senses, giving me a tiny extension of time to react.
My third action was to equip myself. The window of time was so short, and my instincts were screaming so loudly, that I had no time to think and instinctively grabbed two items from inside the Voidbag: the Bone Helm and the Teardrop Cleaver.
The Bone Helm was the most reactive item I had. At this point, it was practically a part of me. It appeared on my head, covering the upper part of my face instantly.
As for the Teardrop Cleaver, I swapped it with the Slick Cane, spending even less time than it would have taken to simply pull it out of the inventory.
My fourth and final action was to strike upward. I twisted and wrenched my right arm and wrist so suddenly and violently that I felt my muscles burn and my bones creak.
I turned the tip of the Teardrop Cleaver upward and impaled whatever was attacking me, which appeared the very next moment: a massive illusory hand, roughly five meters long, made of something that looked like mist, divinity, souls, tormented faces, death, and much more — all of it pointing to a single place: the underworld.
I recognized Hardy's essence in that hand. Her hand.
The only reason I had managed to react was because I acted beforehand.
I foresaw something that distorted space-time and the relationship between cause and effect so severely that the sequence changed from "the hand went to him and struck him" to "the hand struck him, therefore it must have gone to him."
There was not really an "in-between." There was no moment in which the hand formed, came toward me, and hit me. It simply happened, as if it had always been there.
And even that window of foresight was so pitifully small that I barely had time to react.
The Teardrop Cleaver collided with the massive hand, partially interrupting the temporal distortion. What should have hit me with absolute certainty instead struck my weapon first.
'Drip... Drop...'
The hand's time slowed by the slightest amount when the eye of the blade wept, transferring that time to me. That sharpened my perception even further — which, in that moment, was both a blessing and a curse.
Because with my perception accelerated to the extreme, I was able to fully feel the impact when the physical, metaphysical, and conceptual weight of that hand came crashing down on me.
Even with the first point of impact being the tip of the Teardrop Cleaver, I felt the full weight of that hand in every part of my body.
It was as if a gigantic mountain had been hurled directly onto me. The pressure was physical, spiritual, and conceptual all at once.
My entire frame was crushed. My bones cracked all at once, fractures racing up my legs into my ribs, neck, and arms. I felt my skull crack, resisting more only because of the Bone Helm, which split in half as it took the impact in my place.
My muscles tore under the strain, my flesh ripped apart, and the skin on my face and limbs split open.
I spat out a thick mouthful of blood. Blood streamed from my only eye, staining my vision, already blurred by the impact. From the cracks in my skin and from the empty socket of my left eye beneath the eyepatch, an orange mist began to leak out continuously, mixing with my blood.
The essence of the underworld that made up the attack seeped into my body through every open wound, like worms devouring the rotten flesh of an abandoned corpse.
It was a cursed energy that sent chills through me, rushing straight into my organs. Its primary target was where vitality was greatest: my heart.
I felt my heart tear under that violent invasion and, in the very next thousandth of a second, it simply exploded inside my chest, causing, by far, the greatest pain I had ever felt in my life.
The Chalice within my heart melted into blood and began to flow through my veins.
The only reason it was just my heart that exploded, and not all of my organs, was because of Echo Humanitatis and Divine Anathema, which fought against the invading energy within me.
Then, that frozen and distorted moment in time passed. I could react again.
Immediately, I grasped the sensation of the Chalice and commanded it, using it as a "tip" to make all my blood follow it, circulating through my body in an almost manual way just to keep me functioning.
I manifested and created the eight black hands of the Bone Helm around me.
At the same instant I moved them, I forced the Moon Shield out from within my left wrist. The shield emerged, tearing through my flesh and completely destroying the sleeve of my suit, already in tatters.
Seven of the eight black hands shot toward Hardy's giant hand.
Five of them grabbed each of the five fingers, driving their own shadowy digits into the "skin" and resisting the absurd weight as they were destroyed and rebuilt thousands of times in an instant.
Two larger ones closed in around the wrist of the illusory hand, one on each side, locking its structure in place. The eighth hand grabbed the handle of the Teardrop Cleaver along with my right hand, acting as extra support for my shattered wrist.
It was thanks to the Ring of the Last Slime that my hand and wrist on that arm had not turned into pulp, reinforcing that area just enough to withstand the impact.
With that combined strength, I moved my arm and pushed the weapon forward, tearing further into that structure's "skin" and driving the blade deep into the palm, opening a gash.
From the seven Bone Helm hands in contact with her "skin," eyes opened and stared at the hand in a maddened frenzy. From their pupils, rows of teeth formed into mouths that opened and began to bite into it.
From within those mouths, Shadowflame erupted. The purple fire twisted into aggressive tendrils that latched onto the souls and tormented faces trapped within the giant hand.
The flames began to burn them, consuming their sins and pulling the souls into the Shadowflame, while the fire itself seemed to emanate pure hatred for that underworld—simply because it was not its own.
My underworld.
A feminine scream of surprise, pain, and fury echoed from an impossibly distant place. The impact, along with the shock and, likely, the pain, made the hand recoil for a single, fleeting instant.
That was all I had. It was all I needed.
Knowing my body would endure no more than another second before turning into a mass of flesh and then into dust, I seized the opportunity.
I reacted and made the Moon Shield bite into the empty space beneath me. At the same time, I partially used the powers of Apprentice. I let instinctive knowledge take over, aided by the "consciousness" within the "brain" of my soul, and shaped the blood I was losing to create an illusory "door," formed from spirals of blood and eyes.
The ground beneath me opened in the shape of a door.
With nothing below me, the distorted space and pressure were enough to launch me, making me experience what it would be like to be a celestial body, expelled from its solar system by gravity.
As, through the Chalice, I seized the blood pouring from my body in waves and dragged it along with me into the dark abyss, I stared at the hand above.
I etched every sensation I could feel into my memory.
Then the door above closed, at the exact instant the hand fell once more, while I plunged into the darkness.
I will not forget this… Goddess…
Wrong choice…
[…]
POV: Third person.
The human fell.
Expelled from the distorted space, his body plunged into the endless darkness between dimensions. There was no ceiling, no walls, no ground. Only an absolute, silent void.
Gravity did not exist there in any coherent way, but the force of his expulsion kept him hurtling through the abyss like a comet.
His physical state was catastrophic.
Without a heart, his blood had to be pumped manually, consciously.
His flesh was torn apart, the muscles of his chest and arms ripped down to the bone. His skin remained covered in deep fissures that slowly began to glow orange.
From every exposed crack and from the empty cavity of his left eye, a dense orange mist leaked continuously, mixing with the blood that flowed out of his body and floated in droplets in the absence of gravity, following him even as he moved at kilometers per second in his fall.
His skull creaked, held together only by the fractured remnants of the Bone Helm.
His right wrist was broken and twisted at an unnatural angle. His right forearm was snapped in half, the arm hanging by strands of muscle and flesh.
The underworld essence of Hardy still crawled through his veins, waging an internal war against his racial traits.
Everything around him was cold…
Apocryph. "The Mist of Nothingness."
A lethal shadow-like mist, composed of Dark Matter originating directly from the Void. It drifted slowly through the space between dimensions, devouring any source of light or heat.
The moment the human plunged through the darkness, the mist reacted to his presence. Like thousands of intangible worms, strands of shadow stretched out and wrapped around his bloodied body.
Apocryph did not inflict physical pain. It simply drained life.
The moment it made contact, the human's massive vitality began to be devoured voraciously. The Dark Matter mist seeped into his exposed wounds, seeking to eradicate the remnants of life his body struggled to maintain.
His already pale skin began to take on a gray, lifeless hue.
He couldn't scream. His lungs had collapsed and were filled with blood. The space around him had no atmosphere. It was cold—freezing.
In his arm, shoulder, and left eye, the "void" left behind by the bite of 'The Eye' reacted to the "void" of the Mist of Nothingness. Like a black hole devouring cosmic dust, the null fissures began absorbing the Apocryph at high speed.
As the Dark Matter was drawn in, the frigid pressure that was stripping the human's vitality slowed. However, the "void" in his left arm and shoulder began expanding at an alarming rate, devouring flesh, muscle, blood, and Aura.
The "void" in his left eye, however, remained inert.
Clenching his cracked teeth and dislocating his jaw even further in the process, the human's right eye ignited in a bright orange glow that seemed to push back the Mist of Nothingness.
Around him, Shadowflame erupted with ferocity, burning around his body and driving away the "cold" of the "void."
With a mental command, the human split his internal defenses into two fronts.
He seized Echo Humanitatis and directed it to his left arm and shoulder, causing veins, symbols, and blood-red markings to emerge across his skin, rapidly circulating around the "void" holes.
Over that barrier, he layered nightmare energy, forcing the manifestation of hundreds of thousands of tiny Nightmare eyes. They opened and closed frantically, staring in madness at the abyss carved into his own flesh and blood.
Under the weight of those countless gazes, the advance of the "void" slowed drastically, though it still crept forward.
Within his ravaged interior, the human commanded Divine Anathema to attack the frigid invasion of the underworld, using Anima as support. Divine Anathema surged against what was divine within the essence of death, drawing straight golden lines across blood and remaining organs, covering his entire internal structure.
Anima purged what was impure and malignant, wrapping around him like a warm embrace—the manifestation of the collective subconscious focused purely on the continuation of the human species.
Keeping the human alive.
Around the golden lines, silver ones—equally straight, but thinner—began to form. Like a mesh, gold and silver intertwined, creating an internal armor that burned away the frigid energy of Hardy's underworld.
Grasping Shadowflame mentally, he pulled it into his own body. The purple flame began to burn within with the same fury as outside, consuming and annihilating the energy still devouring his vitality.
Manifesting more Nightmares, he forced the droplets of his own floating blood to act as tears in the absence of gravity.
'Drip… Drop…'
From those drops of bloody tears, thousands of small eyes opened, staring into the darkness of the surrounding Apocryph. They imposed a rule: if there was observation, there was existence.
If it existed, it was not void.
The Mist of Nothingness was forced to retreat even further.
With the external "void" pushed back, the expansion in his shoulder slowed, and the underworld energy contained internally, the human extended his senses to calculate his fall.
Not to scan the "void" around him, but to track where his body would land.
Keeping the Demon Slayer Mark active demanded an extreme toll on his already deteriorating vitality. Yet deactivating it was unthinkable; the enhanced physical attributes granted by the mark were the only thing preventing his body from completely falling apart.
The mark also acted as a crucial source of "heat" against the crushing "cold" of the "void."
As long as he remained trapped in that interdimensional limbo, he was at a stalemate. The deterioration had been partially contained, but he was still, undeniably, dying.
Using potions, the ability of the ring that bore his name, the ability of the Ring of the Last Slime, or the Blood Orbs—would be useless.
It would be like pouring water into a bucket full of holes, especially considering that his heart no longer existed and the only thing keeping his blood circulating was the Chalice—and even that was a temporary, desperate measure.
To begin recovering, he needed to land somewhere outside that limbo. He needed to escape the Mist of Nothingness.
Twisting his fractured neck, he activated the Transparent World against the "nothing."
The orange glow in his right eye intensified until it resembled a burning flame. His perception expanded, revealing microscopic threads connecting the abyss to distant worlds and dimensions.
All of them impossibly remote, except for three: Heaven, Earth, and Hell.
Heaven and Earth were "above" him. Even though he was not truly "below," but rather in something "in between," the concept of Earth and Heaven placed them above him, making his "fall" an obstacle to returning to those spaces.
That was not the case for Hell.
Being conceptually tied "below" by belief, Hell lay "beneath" Earth and Heaven, making his "fall" a natural path toward it.
The only problem was time.
He would inevitably reach Hell, but distance and time there were abstract. The impact could come in three hours—or three millennia.
And even if it were three hours, he was not sure he could last that long. His consciousness was already beginning to waver as he forced himself to stay alive.
Pushing his mind to its absolute limit, the human's thoughts accelerated.
His brain, half-melted from operating at extreme levels, throbbed. The sharp pain was easily ignored—it did not compare to the pain he felt throughout his entire body, inside and out, especially from the absence of his heart.
A second option came easily—not from his own thoughts, but from a "voice":
'Space, Sealing, Alternate Worlds.'
'Door!'
The "consciousness" tied to the "brain" of his soul transmitted the instinctive solution.
With the instinctive knowledge he possessed, there was a possibility of opening a far more solid "door," capable of taking him much farther than the previous one—a high-sequence ability that allowed travel between dimensions.
The price, however, would be the permanent crippling of that "consciousness," eliminating any chance of future recovery.
On top of that, the human had no idea where that "Door" would lead.
He could end up in a parallel Earth, on some planet in a distant galaxy, or inside a black hole in a foreign universe.
The possibilities of salvation and damnation were equal: infinite.
Leaving that option as a last resort, the human moved his left arm—his right was nearly useless—and grabbed something from the Voidbag: a ticket.
It was one of his tickets to Rainbow worlds. This one, specifically, bore the symbol of three overlapping circles on the back.
In theory, the human was no longer in the Amalgam World. So he could travel to another world. In practice, he still was—and until a week had passed, he could not enter another mission or return to Terraria.
However, that restriction applied only to the stream's own missions and flash missions. There was nothing about Rainbow tickets.
He could feel that if he tore that ticket, he would indeed be teleported. He knew the destination was dangerous—something had blocked the stream's previous invitation to that world—but it was still a chance.
The other option was the ticket he had obtained in Jille months ago, whose destination and danger level he did not know.
It was a choice between a known risk and absolute chaos.
Feeling his vision blur and his consciousness begin to fade, the human did not hesitate.
Surrounded by pure, absolute darkness, a phrase came to his mind: The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown…
All the options before him were terrible. He chose the least terrible one.
He brought the ticket to his mouth and bit down. His broken jaw barely had the strength, but it was enough.
He pulled—and tore the paper.
The space around him collapsed and warped instantly, exploding into a kaleidoscope of infinite colors that shredded the Mist of Nothingness with ease.
Then, from that "void" where nothing should survive, the human who endured vanished.
And everything returned to silence.
[…]
Somewhere in the depths of the underworld.
Hardy ground her teeth, a sharp sound echoing through the empty expanse of her domain. Her eyes were fixed entirely on her own right hand.
There was a deep cut in the center of her palm. Divine blood flowed continuously, and the wound simply refused to close.
"That filthy creature touched me…" she snarled. "It wounded me…"
It had all begun as nothing more than a whim. She opened that portal simply because she wanted something new in her world—something that might stir her interest and break her boredom.
Knowing it would take months, perhaps years, for anything significant to happen, she barely paid attention during the first few hours. She expected it to remain that way for much longer. It was by pure chance that she noticed the anomaly: the imperial army of Sadera had halted its advance at the very beginning of the invasion.
At first, Hardy thought it was just something random, or some foolish reason of mortals.
Even so, she sent her apostle to investigate. What she discovered was unexpected. The invasion had been thwarted by something the few survivors—soldiers who had been near the portal and managed to escape—called: "The presence of the physical incarnation of death and madness."
That caught her attention. As a goddess, she could not interfere directly or cross the portal to see for herself. So she ordered her apostle to kill the survivors. If she truly wanted to know what had happened, she would have to investigate the memories engraved within their souls.
With the souls in hand, she was able to feel what they had felt when the human arrived and stopped the invasion.
The absolute terror of facing something that was the very antithesis of human life. The fear brought on by the mere presence of a being. As she accessed those memories, she felt his gaze. Hardy even considered that he might be a god from the other side—or, at the very least, a formidable champion of some unknown pantheon, or a great apostle.
The idea excited her. It was something new. She wanted to meet him.
So she marked the portal with a small trick: if something bearing the same presence and existence as that being passed through, instead of going to the other side, the coordinates would shift and the portal would open directly into an isolated region of her underworld.
With that done, she waited. It did not take long before that being truly passed through.
But the instant he crossed the threshold and she was able to observe his existence directly, Hardy hated him with every fiber of her being.
The presence of The Human, when perceived by something non-human, was undeniably repulsive.
To Hardy, it was an affront to everything she was.
A creature that, now seen without the distortion of mortal memory, seemed as though it had been made specifically to kill what was divine. His mortal shell was not ugly, but in essence, he was the most disgusting thing Hardy had ever witnessed.
He exuded an aura of death and madness that reminded her of Emroy, yet it was far more vile, far more tainted, provoking a deep, visceral nausea.
All her excitement vanished. She no longer wished to speak to that mortal. She did not want to see him, nor even remember that he existed.
Like a filthy fly that had landed on her table, she decided to crush him.
To leave no chance of escape, Hardy seized the entirety of her underworld's existence and condensed it into a single attack.
She altered the very sequence of events, crushing him with the conceptual weight of the entire underworld in one instant—with a single slap—to obliterate that human like the insect he was.
But… the insect had fought back.
Fought back in such a way that, upon striking him, the damage somehow transferred to her own body.
"Why won't it close…?" she muttered to herself, her voice wavering between anger and pain. "Why…? Why…? Why?!"
Hardy stared at the wound.
With her left hand, she gripped her own right wrist tightly.
The wound bled without end and was clearly becoming infected. Strange, straight golden lines had rooted themselves into the flesh of her palm. They advanced slowly and painfully—but they advanced.
They spread by eroding the area around the wound, nullifying her divinity and preventing any attempt at regeneration.
Staring at her wrist, she watched the blood gather along the edges of the cut.
The droplets slipped free from her palm and fell into the darkness below.
'Drip…'
They descended slowly. Strangely slowly, as if time around the wound itself were distorted, falling in silence like tears.
'…Drop…'
Wrong choice…
[…]
In Limgrave, within the Lands Between, Melina gazed upon the night sky. At her side stood her faithful companion, Torrent.
She remained motionless beneath the shadow of the cliffs.
She wore a brown traveling cloak. Her hair was short, wavy, and a pale shade of pink. Her face bore delicate features and fair skin, her expression calm and neutral.
Her left eye remained permanently closed, marked by a dark, claw-shaped scar.
Her right eye, a pale gray, watched the horizon.
The sky of the Lands Between was vast and oppressive.
Motionless stars dotted the darkness, partially dimmed by the presence of the colossal Full Moon hanging above—silent as a distant deity.
But dominating the entire horizon and devouring the night with its unwavering radiance stood the massive Erdtree. Its golden branches bathed the continent in the constant light of Order.
"This doesn't look good…" Melina murmured, her soft voice cutting through the silence of the plains.
Her single visible eye was fixed upward.
A comet tore through the atmosphere, descending rapidly toward the earth.
It was small for a celestial body, yet intensely bright. Its core burned with a vivid, aggressive orange, dragging behind it a violent tail of purple and blood-red fire.
As Melina watched its descent, she noticed that a small fragment seemed to break away from the main core, abruptly altering its trajectory and falling in another direction, vanishing beyond the horizon.
The main body, however, maintained its steep path.
Judging the angle of descent, she estimated the impact point: somewhere in the shallow waters of Agheel Lake. As far as she remembered, that was the hunting ground of the Flying Dragon Agheel.
Melina turned her face toward the spectral steed beside her. Torrent let out a low snort, scraping his hoof against the ground.
"Should we go check what that is?" she asked.
Torrent did not respond, only shook his head slightly.
Whatever that comet was, it was not normal. It could not be—after all, her brother held the entire sky in place, keeping it as still as a vast and beautiful painting.
Something told Melina that this comet marked the beginning of a great change in the Lands Between.
Even from that distance, she could feel the energy and presence emanating from that orange glow. It overflowed with an irrational amount of madness, yet paradoxically carried a massive, undeniable essence of humanity.
And that humanity called to her.
No, she thought, slowly shaking her head. First, my purpose.
She decided to continue her journey.
Her immediate destination was the Stranded Graveyard and the surroundings of the Gatefront Ruins. She was already close, and she could feel something calling to her from that region as well—the faint presence of a newly arrived Tarnished.
"Once we are done with what we came to do," Melina said to Torrent, without taking her eyes off the horizon, "we will investigate where that comet fell."
She watched the orange and purple trail for a few more seconds, until the glow vanished behind the hills and cliffs in the direction of the lake.
Silently, Melina turned and dissolved into the air in golden particles.
Wrong choice…
[…]
High atop the southern ruins, the Flying Dragon Agheel slept.
His rest was shattered by a dull boom that made the ancient stones of his nest tremble.
Opening his immense, bright yellow-orange reptilian eyes, the dragon raised his head, feeling the vibration of the impact echo through the earth—coming straight from the shallow waters of his domain.
Agheel drew in the night air into his colossal lungs, tasting the scent of whatever had fallen from the sky. It was not the smell of local wildlife or pathetic soldiers.
It was an absurd stench of death.
A foul, profane essence that defied the natural cycle of those lands.
To the dragon, that scent of death and usurpation meant only one thing: a Tarnished. Another fallen one returning to claim power, daring to step into his domain with the intent to kill.
An invader, his instincts decreed.
With a guttural roar that made the air around him tremble, Agheel spread his massive wings.
Launching himself from his perch into the night sky, the beast took flight toward the lake he had long claimed as his territory, ready to incinerate the arrogant intruder.
Wrong choice…
[…]
The human fell.
Tearing through the sky like a blazing meteor, his body slammed violently into the surface of Agheel Lake.
The shallow waters erupted upward, forming a massive crater of mud and stone at the lakebed and raising a dense cloud of scalding vapor born from the friction and heat of his fall.
The usually smooth passage between dimensions had, this time, been brutal. The inertia of his descent—normally something simple to deal with if the human had been in better physical and mental condition—persisted even as the kaleidoscope carried him out of the "void."
Reentry into the atmosphere, combined with his injuries and the crushing pressure, caused his right arm to give way.
Bone and flesh tore apart halfway along the forearm. His hand—along with the two rings on his fingers and the handle of the Teardrop Cleaver he still gripped with corpse-like strength—was torn free from his body.
That was the fragment of the comet that split off and fell in another direction across the horizon.
The impact against the lakebed did not significantly injure him. He had already surpassed the physical threshold where the damage from a simple fall would matter.
The shock only further degraded his appearance.
His suit was nothing more than soaked shreds—torn, burned, and stained with blood and mud—clinging to his body.
His skin was deeply cracked, taking on a gray, lifeless hue, a direct result of having his vitality drained by the Mist of Nothingness and the underworld aura corroding him from within.
What was not gray was deathly pale, a reflection of the blood he had nearly exhausted in his fight to survive.
Blood that still dripped from his body—yet more was being produced with every passing second.
Face down in the muddy, bloodied water, the right side of his face buried in mud as the water flowed back into the crater around him, the human remained motionless—no breath, no heartbeat.
To anyone watching—to everyone watching—he was, undeniably, dead.
Then his chest moved. A quick, sharp motion—not a breath, not a heartbeat.
The human was laughing.
A laugh that began short and low, breathless. His lungs were torn like a cheap plastic bag, his vocal cords frayed like old, waterlogged yarn.
And yet, he laughed. Without a heart, he laughed.
The sound came out broken, rasping, utterly inhuman—almost nonexistent—and yet… he laughed.
He laughed like a free man after years in chains.
He laughed like a condemned man in the moments before execution.
He laughed like a sane man in the middle of a crowd of madmen.
When he finally stopped, he parted his broken lips and spoke in a hoarse, faltering voice:
"How… insignificant…"
Amid the pain and madness, he had gained an insight—a realization that, though he had always known it, made him laugh the moment he truly understood it.
Like someone who breathes unconsciously and, upon noticing it, becomes aware of it.
The human recognized his own insignificance.
After all, it had taken nothing more than a simple slap—from a random goddess, from an unknown world—to reduce him to this state.
Lost in that thought, something within him aligned—like an old cog in an even older machine, long dormant, slowly beginning to turn once more.
He had never been important. Not to 'Them'…
Never to 'Him'…
Hadn't it always been that way…?
The human lifted his face slightly from the mud. His broken neck hung crooked. He looked up at the night sky above, at the branches of the strange, massive golden tree, at the colossal Full Moon.
Something passed overhead. He ignored it.
His split lips curved into a faint, genuinely joyful smile.
His voice came out low, dragged—as if each word had to be torn from his own flesh:
"Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth… nothing is bred that is weaker than man."
And that simple statement filled him with pride.
Gripping the ground with his left hand, the human slowly rose.
Torn muscles, shattered bones, twisted legs, half a right arm missing, no heart, lungs in pieces, organs shredded, brain damaged.
Dripping blood, the human planted his feet in the blood-soaked mud and faced the enormous dragon standing less than ten meters ahead.
The left side of his face was covered by the Bone Helm. On the right, the mask had split in half, exposing his pale skin. His single eye burned with such an intense orange that no pupil or sclera could be distinguished.
Unblinking, unwavering, the human stared at the dragon.
Then, in a gentle tone, he asked:
"Tell me…"
"…wilt thou behold just how fragile man truly is?"
Agheel's answer to that innocent question was a roar.
… Wrong choice.
[...]---[...]
I said there'd be action, didn't I?
Well, I've been wanting to send Devas somewhere more serious for a while now. The Amalgama world was always meant to be a mid-arc setting. Of course, it'll show up again plenty of times—especially since the Shadow Puppet is there.
I'm not ignoring GATE either—I've got a few things planned for that world.
As for Hardy's strength, GATE doesn't really explain a damn thing about its gods. So I improvised and made her an actual goddess, not just a buffed-up mage. She's not the strongest, but she's far from weak, as you've seen.
And finally, Elden Ring. I was unsure whether to send Devas there, to Hell, or to the other Rainbow ticket.
Hell was the first option I ruled out. Two reasons—first: I didn't think the hell of that world deserved what Devas is about to do. It's too good to waste there.
Second: it would mess with some future elements, since if he went to Hell now, the "first contact" effect I have planned for later would lose its impact.
He'll go there, of course—just not yet.
As for the other Rainbow ticket, I didn't choose it simply because I think Elden Ring will work better both in the short and long term. He'll use it at some point, just later.
I won't drag this out—I'm already writing the next chapter. It's 4 a.m., and since I've got Friday off, I want to keep going a bit longer. I'm genuinely having fun writing this arc and thinking through these ideas.
Ah, yeah—mini spoiler: Devas is going to start moving differently from this chapter onward.
Good night, and enjoy the chapter!
PS: Devas—completely, absolutely, devastatingly fucked—vs. Agheel.