Chapter 220. Dark Star Thresh
"What in the hell... the Dark Star?" Noah's eyes nearly bulged out of his head as he stared at the newly revealed experience card. The artwork was a nightmare rendered in celestial ink: Dark Star Thresh, a towering abomination of cosmic entropy, raising a skeletal, star-forged hand to birth a swirling, hungry black hole.
He had expected power, but this? This was something else entirely. Even as a temporary experience, the weight of this card was staggering. In the bleak lore of the Dark Star universe, every 'being' was a twisted incarnation of a collapsed sun or a consumed world. They were astral entities, once-living celestial bodies warped by the unfathomable gravity of the Dark Star itself into sentient harbingers of the end.
Dark Star Thresh was the high priest of this annihilation. He didn't just kill; he offered the universe back to the void, serving a 'deity' of absolute nothingness. In that cold, silent expanse, he stood as a lord of shadow, leading the legions of the Dark Star in an eternal crusade to snuff out every light in the multiverse, locked in a war with the radiant figures of the Cosmic Court.
'But Thresh isn't the only one,' Noah thought, his mind racing through the hierarchy of that dark pantheon. 'Cosmic Lux and Dark Cosmic Jhin... their status, their raw output... they might even dwarf him.'
Lux had been a beacon of the Cosmic Court before the darkness seduced her, turning her into the Queen of the Dark Court. And Jhin? Jhin was a cosmic entity who saw the collapse of reality not as a tragedy, but as the ultimate performance art. Noah actually preferred Jhin—there was an elegance to his madness, a terrifying charisma. Given that Noah already possessed the Jhin template, a Dark Cosmic Jhin card would have been a match made in a broken heaven.
Yet, holding the Thresh card, Noah felt a cold chill of absolute confidence. In this corner of the multiverse, the number of beings who could truly stand against the High Priest of the Dark Star could be counted on one hand, and most of them—like Eternity—had long since withdrawn from the petty squabbles of mortals.
His fingers trembled slightly as he turned the card over. Thirty minutes. It wasn't much, but in the hands of a master, half an hour was an eternity. On Earth, the looming threat of the Celestial Awakening had been a heavy shroud over his thoughts. He had worried that if Arishem the Judge himself descended to reclaim his prize, Noah's current strength might be found wanting. But now? Now he was ready to "discuss" the laws of physics with a Celestial, using the crushing gravity of a black hole as his opening argument.
"This," Noah breathed, his voice a rasp of awe, "is easily the greatest haul I've had in years." He spun the card between his fingers, feeling the latent, world-ending energy humming beneath the surface. He felt an itch—a desperate, gnawing urge to activate it right now, to feel the stars die at his command. But he gritted his teeth and forced the feeling down. This was his nuclear option. His ultimate deterrent.
"Deep breaths, Noah. Calm the storm."
He inhaled sharply, and as he did, he drew in the swirling eddies of violet mist that had begun to churn violently around him, agitated by his own surging emotions.
With a focused effort of will, he clamped down on his magical core, forcing the turbulent space around him to settle. The mist slowed, then stilled, becoming a placid lake of purple fog under his absolute command. His recent fusion with the World Rune had granted him a level of control that prevented his raw power from tearing holes in reality—at least, for now.
"Enough. If I keep looking at it, I'll use it," he muttered, banishing the Thresh card back into the safety of his inventory.
There were only two cards left to reveal. After that, it was time to return to the blue marble he called home. He checked his internal clock; barely ten minutes had passed since he began his pursuit of Corvus. Earth would still be in the throes of the aftermath, but with Lissandra there, he had little doubt about the safety of his interests.
[Hero Experience Card Acquired (2 Hours): Undead Crusader, Sion]
[Hero Experience Card Acquired (2 Hours): Burning Vengeance, Brand]
"Sion and Brand?" Noah murmured, studying the twin visages on the cards. One was a wall of rotting meat and rusted iron; the other, a pillar of primordial flame. "The fire spirit might actually be quite useful."
Sion, the Undead Crusader, was a juggernaut of old Noxus, a warlord so terrifying that even death couldn't hold him. Resurrected by the shadowy cabal known as the Black Rose, he had become a mindless engine of siege, a titan of war who knew neither pain nor mercy.
But it was Brand who truly caught Noah's eye. Once a man of the Freljord, Brand's soul had been a tinderbox of resentment. Born to a village that hated him for his father's sins, he had been an outcast until he met the wandering archmage, Ryze.
As Ryze's apprentice, he had begun to learn the path of the mage, and for a moment, it seemed he might find peace. But then, Ryze discovered a shard of a World Rune. The temptation was too great. The power sang to the darkness already festering in the boy's heart. Brand reached out and touched the raw essence of creation, and in that instant, the apprentice died. His flesh was consumed, his soul incinerated by a fire that could not be quenched.
Before Ryze's horrified eyes, a creature of pure, vengeful flame arose from the ashes. It was no longer the boy he had saved from the frozen wastes, nor the friend he had come to love. It was the Burning Vengeance—a spirit of ruin that sought only to watch the world turn to ash.
Noah considered the Sion card little more than a curiosity—a blunt instrument for a blunt job. But Brand? Brand was a creature born of World Rune energy. His power was a direct counter, a chaotic echo that could challenge even Ryze himself, provided the archmage wasn't tapping into his own runes.
"It's time," Noah nodded, his resolve hardening. "Earth has waited long enough."
His Teleportation spell was still on its agonizingly slow cooldown, but with the Tesseract—the Space Stone—clutched in his hand, the limitations of mortal magic felt like distant memories. He wouldn't need a simple blink. He would tear a hole through the fabric of the cosmos.
He stood upon the cold iron platform suspended in the void, the stars of a distant galaxy glittering like cold diamonds above him. He squeezed the blue cube, and the Tesseract responded with a low, thrumming vibration that shook his very bones. A portal of brilliant, electric blue swirled into existence before him, its edges sparking with trans-dimensional lightning.
"Perfect," Noah whispered. He stepped into the shimmering gateway, his form dissolving into light as he began the long journey home.
At that very moment, in a corner of the universe so remote it had no name, a rift in reality groaned and spat out a dense, pulsing globule of violet matter. It tumbled through the vacuum, caught in a gravitational eddy, and slammed into the surface of a nearby, desolate planet.
A local scavenger—a spindly, multi-eyed creature—crept toward the smoking impact crater, its curiosity piqued by the strange, fleshy object that had fallen from the stars. It barely had time to blink before a barbed tentacle whipped out from the mass, skewering the creature through its chest. The violet globule unfurled like a rotting flower, dragging the screaming scavenger into its center. A sickening sound of wet crunching filled the air, and then, silence. On the surface of the now-bloated mass, a pair of cruel, yellow eyes snapped open, burning with a hunger that would not be satisfied.
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Dark Star, Thresh
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