The wasteland was dead.
Five Divine Executors lay in the dust, their golden blood cooling against the
cracked stone. The immediate threat was neutralized. The tactical objective was
achieved.
Cain stood in the center of the crater.
Shut it down.
He sent the command through his mind, attempting to pull the thick, suffocating
black mist back into the reservoir at the base of his spine. He needed to stop
the flow. He needed to stabilize his core.
The Black Veil did not recede.
Cain gritted his teeth, his hand trembling as he reached down and gripped the
hilt of the short knife still embedded in his left thigh. He ripped it out.
He expected the sharp, blinding flash of pain to ground him. He expected the
agony to shock his nervous system back into human parameters, just as it had
done to break the hallucination of Aera.
There was no pain.
The black mist instantly surged into the open wound, sealing the torn flesh with
raw, corruptive mana. It didn't heal the injury; it simply bypassed the nervous
system entirely, deleting the sensation of pain.
Cain's breath caught in his throat.
Pain was a biological necessity. It was a warning system. Without it, a soldier
didn't know when his body was breaking. The Black Veil wasn't just enhancing his
physical output anymore—it was actively overwriting his human biology.
[ Soul Integrity: 26.3% ]
The translucent numbers flickered in his mind, the text glitching, the edges of
the font bleeding into static.
He was losing the anchor.
Cain dropped the bloody knife. It hit the ground.
Then, it bounced upward.
Cain stared at it. The knife didn't fall back down. It floated slowly toward the
sky, spinning lazily in the air.
He looked around the crater.
The golden blood of the Executors wasn't soaking into the dirt anymore. It was
peeling off the rocks, drifting upward like reverse rain. A massive slab of
petrified wood, weighing several tons, slowly detached itself from the earth and
began to hover.
The air pressure didn't feel heavy. It felt absent.
The Black Veil pouring from Cain's body was so dense, so fundamentally opposed
to the laws of the world, that reality itself was beginning to malfunction
around his existence.
Gravity was inverting. Colors were bleeding into negative hues. The pale
sunlight shifted into a sickly, bruised purple.
The world was glitching.
Cain tried to take a step forward. His foot didn't touch the ground. He was
suspended, his body caught in the localized collapse of physics.
He couldn't feel his hands. He couldn't feel his heartbeat. The memories of Han
Jae-Won—the mud, the gunfire, the military drills—began to fray at the edges,
dissolving into the overwhelming, deafening roar of the Black Veil's instinct.
Then, the sky shattered.
It didn't tear like a cloud. It shattered like a pane of glass struck by a
hammer. Massive, jagged black fissures ripped across the purple atmosphere,
revealing an endless, blinding white void beyond the sky.
The Gods were looking down.
They didn't possess human faces. They were vast, incomprehensible masses of
light and absolute law, peering through the cracks in reality.
The sheer weight of their gaze pressed down on the wasteland. It wasn't an
attack. It was the crushing pressure of administrators attempting to quarantine
a catastrophic virus.
"Anomaly containment failed," a voice echoed. It didn't come from the sky. It
vibrated directly within the marrow of Cain's bones. "Initiating continental
erasure. Sever the region."
They weren't going to fight him.
They were going to delete the entire wasteland, and everything in a hundred-mile
radius, off the face of the world.