A few hours ago.
Captain Veil pressed his hand against the wound in his chest and watched the sky come apart above Sector 89.
The blood seeping between his fingers was warm and steady and not slowing down the way he needed it to. Three of his people were already dead — not wounded, not incapacitated, dead, killed by the spiritual contamination alone in the first moment the Void Cavity cracked open. He was a Tier 6 warrior and the proximity had done this to him. He didn't want to think about what it had done to them.
A month. They had spent a month tracking this Abyss Cultist cell through Thornhaven's shadow networks, following the evidence through seven dead ends and two false locations before they finally pinpointed the hideout today. He had briefed his team this morning with the specific satisfaction of a man who had done the hard work and was now going to collect the result.
Then they went in and found the Blood Hierophant waiting.
Tier 5 warrior. S-rank origin talent. A profession so rare that Captain Veil had only read about it in Warrior Association threat classification documents — the Blood Hierophant, a class built around a single forbidden technique called Blood Sacrifice. The cultist had not tried to fight them or flee. He had simply smiled and activated the technique, and in the seconds that followed he consumed every cultist in the building, every civilian he had secretly murdered and stored in the basement over the preceding weeks, reducing them all to raw life force and channeling it into a single purpose.
Tearing open a gateway to a specific dimension of the Eternal Abyss.
By the time Captain Veil understood what he was looking at, the Void Cavity was already open and the thing behind it was already looking through.
"King-Tier," he whispered.
Above Tier 9 existed King-Tier entities — beings that operated at a level of power that made planetary destruction a casual byproduct of their movement rather than an intentional act. Above them stood Demigods, walking catastrophes capable of obliterating the solar system given time. And the thing pressing through the dimensional tear above Thornhaven was King-Tier, and the city's lord was not in the city. He had entered a King-Tier dungeon that had opened directly outside the walls two days ago, taking several of the city's top fighters with him.
Captain Veil looked at his surviving team members — four of them, all critically wounded, all still standing through the specific stubbornness of people who had not yet decided to fall down.
"Domains," he said. "Merge them. Now."
They understood immediately. For Tier 3 and above, domain deployment during combat wasn't optional — it was mandatory, the difference between a battle and a city-destroying incident. A warrior's domain contained the shockwaves and stray energy of their techniques within a defined space, preventing the force from radiating outward unchecked. Without it, every exchange between high-tier warriors would level everything within kilometers. The four of them resonated their domains together, the merged field spreading outward and pressing against the ground-level shockwaves already emanating from the Void Cavity's opening.
It helped. It was not enough, but it helped.
From the ramparts above the city walls, the situation had already gone critical. The sealed Abyssal Rifts surrounding Thornhaven's perimeter had begun resonating with the dimensional tear — the Void Cavity acting like a signal that woke every contained rift simultaneously. Abyssal Spawn broke through containment protocols in waves, their eyes blazing with the specific crimson of things that had been given permission to do what they existed to do. They hit the walls like a tide.
"OPEN FIRE!"
Artillery cannons answered from the ramparts with the sustained thunder of weapons designed for exactly this situation. The majority of Abyssal Spawn were obliterated before reaching effective range — bodies dissolving in the blast radius of high-grade shells, the ground between the rifts and the walls becoming something that nothing survived crossing at speed. Those that made it through the barrage met garrison warriors in brutal melee at the base of the walls, both sides fighting with the specific intensity of people who understood exactly what happened if the other side won.
Captain Veil watched all of it and could do nothing. He pressed harder on the wound and kept his eyes on the sky.
The figures appeared in the airspace above the city without transition — materializing from displacement techniques so fast that the visual effect was simply absence and then presence, with nothing between. Their combined spiritual pressure hit the air below them like a physical weight, the life-force magnetic fields of Tier 7, 8, and 9 warriors burning at intensities that made looking directly at any of them genuinely painful.
Their domains deployed simultaneously and merged with each other in the same instant, a coordinated field expanding outward through the upper atmosphere and pressing against the Void Cavity's radiating energy from every direction. The planet's surface registered the effect as a sudden reduction in the ambient pressure that had been building since the cavity opened — from something that could crack planets to something that merely rattled windows. Without those merged domains, the battle shockwaves alone that were about to take place would have stripped the atmosphere from a hemisphere.
This was the reality of 300 years of war with the Eternal Abyss. Every day the planet existed was a slim miracle. Tier 8 and above combat produced stray energy that could obliterate the planet as an incidental consequence of a missed strike. The fact that anything was still standing after three centuries of this was less a testament to careful fighting and more a testament to the mandatory domain protocols that every high-tier warrior drilled into instinct before they were ever allowed to fight at full power. Even so, the margin between a normal day and a planetary extinction event was thinner than most civilians ever understood.
The conversation between the figures in the sky lasted less than a millisecond. Tier 7 warriors moved and thought at 0.05 times the speed of light. Tier 8 at 0.15c. The white-haired elder at the front — Tier 9, moving at 0.5c — processed the entire situation and formulated three strategic responses before the sound of the Void Cavity's opening had finished traveling from its source to his position.
"The city lord is not in the city," Gareth Ironveil said, his voice tight. "He entered the king tier dungeon."
"Then we are the only ones left to defend," the dignified woman beside him said.
"I have already called for reinforcement," the white-haired elder said. "Another King-Tier will arrive in two seconds."
"Two seconds." The middle-aged swordsman's voice was flat with the specific flatness of someone doing unfavorable mathematics. "The cavity could stabilize in two seconds. If a King-Tier descends fully into our dimension for even a single second before reinforcement arrives—"
"It will destroy this planet," the dignified woman finished. "We cannot stall. We cannot drag it to space — the shockwaves of a King-Tier battle in atmosphere would sterilize the surface."
"Then we go all out," the white-haired elder said. "Destroy the cavity before it stabilizes. No stalling. Everything we have, now."
"Agreed."
The entire exchange had taken 0.003 milliseconds. Less than a human blink.
Nova was still processing the appearance of the figures in the sky when everything happened at once.
In the Skyrail car, still gripping the overhead bar, he felt the millisecond of stillness that preceded the assault — the specific held-breath quality of things aligning before they moved — and made a decision with the same speed.
He pushed Absolute Insight into full overload.
Not the measured activation he used during normal comprehension sessions. Not the careful, sustained deployment he maintained during technique analysis. He flooded it — every drop of spirit power he had, channeled into his divine-tier comprehension talent at maximum capacity simultaneously, his eyes blazing with rainbow light intense enough that the passenger beside him flinched and moved away.
He knew that tier 7 and above battle generally lasted for a few question. But this situation was complex. In short he had reached the same conclusion of the cultivators in the sky. They wouldn't wait for the king tier abyssal monster to descend, so he reached the conclusion that they would most likely destroy the void cavity before it stabilized. So he had less than a second of time to work with.
One second. That was what he had. One second of Tier 7, 8, and 9 warriors fighting at fractions of light speed, deploying techniques and laws that civilian eyes couldn't even parse as events rather than outcomes.
Absolute Insight devoured it all.