The world vanished beneath her feet without warning.
One moment, the crusted, blood-soaked ground was a scarlet smear under her frantic pace. The next, there was nothing.
A sharp, absolute edge, and then open, sickening air.
She fell.
The wind tore at her, a roar in her ears. Below, stretching to a curved, impossible horizon, was a vast, still expanse of deep, venous red. It was... an ocean? The drop was so immense her mind struggled to frame it for a few seconds.
Curling up, she instinctively conjured a massive amount of mana throughout and around her to redistribute the force and strengthen the durability of her body.
Staring down, a detached, academic thought surfaced through the numbness: The Kármán line is a hundred kilometers up—this was immensely longer.
Cross-referencing with Virgil's memories, this was always the case. This world was many times bigger than Earth—something she had forgotten over the years. In fact, it was so large that even with Virgil's God-like power and influence—he didn't conquer every inch of it. He mainly focused on human centres and resource-rich areas, bridging gaps with the power of teleportation.
.
.
.
Around half an hour later, despite the forcefield and body enhancement, the impact was still a colossal, jarring slap that drove the air from her lungs.
The forcefield inevitably broke, and everything became a thick, warm, suffocating darkness.
It was in her ears, a muffled, pulsing yell. It was in her nose, a cloying, metallic sweetness that clung to the back of her throat. It pressed against her eyelids, a warm, insistent pressure.
She was suspended in a substance that moved with a sluggish, organic weight, coating every inch of her skin in a slick, clinging film.
She kicked upwards, panic lending a new, sharp edge to her strength. Eventually, finally—her head broke the surface and she gasped, dragging in air that was tainted with the same iron stench.
A trickle of the fluid found its way into her mouth. The taste was foul, a concentrated essence of rust and old, rotten meat. She spat, violently, over and over, but the ghost of the flavor remained, a greasy smear on her tongue.
Treading the thick liquid, she looked at herself. She was painted, head to toe, in a glistening, deep crimson. Her hair was a heavy, sodden mass, plastered to her neck and shoulders, dripping slow, syrupy drops back into the ocean.
The feeling was beyond unclean. It was a violation. The fluid threatened to seep into every fold of her skin, every crease, every pore. Being naked amplified the feeling a thousandfold; there was no barrier, nothing between her and this perverse, intimate coating. A shudder wracked her frame, so powerful it was almost a convulsion.
Disgusting.
She looked back towards where she had fallen from. By instinctively enhancing her eyes with mana, she could see everything. A floating mass hung in the scarlet sky over the clouds—impossibly high, like an invading extraterrestrial moon. From its underside, a floating mist of the same red poured down into the ocean, creating fogs of nightmare proportions.
Here, in the open sea, there were no floating pieces of the dead. It was just the blood, vast and endless. But that was no comfort. She needed to be out. Now.
'Where the hell is Antikleia?!'
That land mass—it was abandoned. She wasn't here.
A hot, sharp frustration boiled up in her chest, cutting through the revulsion—anger at this entire filthy, insane situation. The image of him came unbidden: a hand raised, an arena freezing.
Fueled by that anger and a desperate, primal need for something, anything solid and clean, she acted without thinking. She faced away from the floating island, thrust a hand out towards the horizon, and willed the world to change.
There was no incantation, no gesture beyond that instinctive reach. It was like flexing a muscle she never knew she had, but one that answered with terrifying alacrity. It felt seamless. Natural.
The effect was instantaneous and absolute.
A sound like a thousand windows shattering filled the air, a great, groaning crack that raced out from her position. The thick, roiling ocean in front of her turned from deep red to a solid, dark, opaque maroon. The change spread with impossible speed, freezing the swells into sharp, jagged peaks and motionless troughs, a chaotic, frozen seascape stretching for kilometers until it vanished into a bloody haze.
She swam the short distance to the newly formed edge and hauled herself onto the frozen surface. The cold of it was a comfort against the warm film on her skin. She crawled a few feet from the edge, then her body betrayed her again. She retched, dry heaves wracking her frame, her stomach cramping around nothing but the phantom taste of iron.
'Disgusting. Disgusting. Disgusting...'
The word became a mantra, a frantic, obsessive rhythm in her head as she scrubbed at her arms and face with her bare hands, succeeding only in smearing the substance, making it feel even more present. 'Disgustingdisgustingdisgusting—'
She forced herself to stop, to breathe, to look at what she had done.
The ice was not a neat, contained circle. It was a sprawling, chaotic field, a new geography of congealed blood that reached to the horizon.
The scale of it finally registered. She had not created an ice floe. She had altered the state of a small part of an ocean. The power had answered her disgust with a cataclysm.
A cold that had nothing to do with the ice seeped into her. That had been her first spell. There had been no struggle, no fumbling. It had been as simple as wishing for something and having the universe comply.
She thought of the memories she carried: entire ecosystems withering under a casually raised hand, the complex tapestry of a man's body unraveled into dust for a moment's curiosity.
This was not just a tool. It was a fundamental force, and she had just tapped into it with the unthinking ease of a child turning on a tap. A fire that could scorch the world once again, and her instinct had been to use it to build a sidewalk.
She sat on the frozen, bloody plain.
———
Serena stood upon the plain of frozen blood, a stark dark island in a sea of crimson. She could hear the faint, wet crackle of her own creation.
She began to walk. After all, what else was there to do?
For kilometers, once again, the silence was her only companion, punctuated by the occasional low groan from the depths of her frozen platform. When the ice finally ended, she stopped at its jagged edge, toes curling over the lip. The thick fluid lapped lazily.
'As simple as willing the world to change.'
She focused on the area directly in front of her. Not a grand, wide-spanning spell, but a careful, precise application. A thought, a nudge of that force within her.
The water rippled, then stilled, turning a darker matte shade as it solidified. A new shelf of ice, precisely one meter wide and three long, formed seamlessly from the old. She stepped onto it. Another thought. More steps.
It took an hour of deliberate, patient focus—creating a step, walking, creating another—before the process became instinct. After some point, she was no longer consciously commanding the power. It was an extension of her will, as natural as breathing.