Three hundred seconds.
In the high-stakes world of the Silver Church, five minutes was enough time to rewrite the history of a kingdom. For Kyle, it was the ticking clock of his family's extinction.
He dragged his parents' golden bubbles toward the "Folded Space" where the Mirror-Wight had been defeated. The space was still warped, a tear in the fabric of reality that was currently unstable and flickering with chaotic energy.
"Malakar," Kyle shouted into the void of his own mind. "Talk to me! How do I stabilize this? How do I hide them before that monster arrives?"
"You want to build a Grave of Fate?" The ghost's voice sounded genuinely impressed, tinged with a dark curiosity. "It requires a sacrifice, little scavenger. Not a life—that would be too simple. It requires a 'Possibility'. You must give up your own chance at a normal, human fate to anchor this void."
[PROPOSAL: CREATE SUB-DIMENSION 'THE VOID ASYLUM'.]
[REQUIREMENT: PERMANENT SEALING OF YOUR 'HUMANITY' STAT & 500 FATE UNITS.]
[RESULT: A HIDDEN DIMENSION ACCESSIBLE ONLY BY THE FATE-DEVOURER. TIME FLOWS 10X SLOWER INSIDE.]
"Do it," Kyle snapped. He didn't hesitate. "I don't need humanity. It didn't save Oakhaven. It didn't stop the Knights from burning my world. If I have to be a monster to keep them alive, then I'll be the worst one this world has ever seen."
[HUMANITY SEALED. STAT IS NOW: [LOCKED / VOID].]
Kyle slammed his blackened palms into the epicenter of the folded space. The dark energy from his Crimson Eye poured out like ink into a bowl of water, turning the ground into a swirling obsidian vortex. The air warped and groaned, forming a massive dome of shifting shadows that swallowed his father, his mother, and the unconscious Mia.
[VOID ASYLUM CREATED.]
[TENANTS: 3 (STABILIZED).]
[MAINTENANCE COST: 100 FATE UNITS PER HOUR.]
As the dome vanished, becoming completely invisible to the physical and spiritual eye, a blinding, oppressive light descended from the heavy clouds above.
The rain didn't just stop; it evaporated instantly. The wind died as if choked by an invisible hand. A man in robes of pure, woven sunlight floated down from the heavens, his feet never touching the ash. He carried a staff topped with a weeping eye made of solid gold—the symbol of the High Inquisitors.
[TARGET: ARCH-INQUISITOR VANE (LEVEL 68 - SAINT REALM)]
[THREAT LEVEL: INSTANT ERASURE.]
Vane looked around the empty, blackened crater with an expression of polite, clinical boredom. He looked at Kyle—a small, battered boy with snow-white hair, blackened arms, and a terrifying, nebula-filled eye.
"So," Vane said, his voice echoing with a divine authority that made Kyle's bones vibrate. "The little glitch has been quite busy. Where are the others, child? The Mirror-Construct? The parents we intended to use as anchors for the Great Seal?"
Kyle stood his ground, his small frame trembling from the sheer weight of Vane's aura. His [Ghost-Walker] trait was flickering wildly, struggling to keep him anchored to the physical plane.
"They are gone," Kyle said, his voice cold and steady. "Beyond your reach. Beyond your 'God's' reach."
Vane smiled, a movement of the lips that held no warmth. "Nothing is beyond the reach of the Silver Church. We are the architects of this world's blueprint. You? You are just a smudge of ink. A mistake that needs to be corrected."
Vane raised his staff. A beam of "Holy Erasure"—pure, concentrated causality meant to delete a target from history—shot toward Kyle.
Kyle didn't try to dodge. He knew the beam tracked the soul, not the body. Instead, he used his last reserves of energy to [Fate-Rip] his own connection to the ground and the air.
He didn't move left or right. He moved sideways into the void-gap of reality. The beam passed through the space where he had been a microsecond before, incinerating a line of trees for three miles behind him.
"Interesting," Vane mused, his eyes narrowing. "A Level 11 boy using Saint-level spatial displacement? No... it's not you. It's that eye. It's eating the very logic of my attack before it lands."
Vane moved faster than Kyle's brain could process. In a blur of golden light, the Inquisitor was standing directly in front of him, his hand gripping Kyle's throat with the strength of a mountain.
"I will peel that eye from your skull," Vane whispered, his face inches from Kyle's. "And I will watch your threads scream as I feed them into the Eternal Flame."
But Kyle didn't scream. He smiled—a bloody, jagged smile that reached his dark eye.
"You're a Saint," Kyle choked out, blood bubbling at his lips. "Your fate is... very heavy. Very delicious. I wonder... how many years of life does a Saint's staff hold?"
[SKILL ACTIVATED: ULTIMATE SCAVENGE (CORE-TARGETING).]
Kyle didn't try to kill Vane. He knew he couldn't. Instead, he channeled every ounce of the "Causality Debt" he had taken from the Mirror-Wight and the Ritual into his hand. He grabbed the thread of Vane's staff—the conduit of his holy power.
CRACK.
The golden eye on the staff shattered. The holy energy inside it, built up over eighty years of prayer and sacrifice, suddenly lost its container. It exploded outward in a chaotic, blinding surge of raw power.
[SYSTEM ALERT: MASSIVE UNSANCTIONED ENERGY ABSORPTION IN PROGRESS!]
[LEVEL UP: 11 ---> 15... 20... 25!]
[WARNING: SOUL CAPACITY EXCEEDED! HOST IS DISINTEGRATING!]
The explosion threw Vane back, his divine robes scorched, his face twisted in genuine, primal rage for the first time in centuries. Kyle was sent flying into the darkness of the forest like a broken doll, his body a mass of shattered bones and glowing crimson cracks.
But he had done it. He had scavenged the tool of a Saint.
As he tumbled into the darkness of a deep, jagged ravine, his consciousness fading into the grey mist, a final message flickered before his eyes—a message that signaled the end of his childhood and the birth of a legend.
[YOU HAVE DEFIED THE ARCH-INQUISITOR]
[TITLE ACQUIRED:ENEMY OF THE HEAVENS]