For eras, the largest moon Erna was a planetary corpse chained into orbit. And now, it was breaking. The crack Lysameria had carved through Erna destroyed it and it fell hours later.
At first, Erna split cleanly. Then the moon began to collapse with gravity folding against itself and tectonic plates the size of continents grinding together. Chunks the size of cities were ejected first, spinning end over end like molten debris. There was so much dust that the night sky turned into a second sun forming from friction alone.
From the surface of Spheraphase, the sky caught fire.
In the lower coast of Nesmarone, it was an ordinary day.
Markets were open. Children ran through the streets with sugar fruit in their hands. Wind chimes clinked lazily between buildings. The sea was calm in hindsight. A fisherman paused mid-step, frowning at how the waves had gone still, as if the ocean itself was holding its breath. Someone pointed upward.
At first, it looked like a star falling.
Before long, clouds were incinerated into red vapor as the object tore through the upper atmosphere. Buildings began to shake from the pressure wave arriving seconds ahead of the asteroid itself.
People ran. They didn't make it far.
The asteroid... no, the fragment of the moon hit the town. There was no explosion. The ground simply ceased to exist. The town vanished in a blink of an eye. Streets, homes, people, history, all of it was gone. The crater left behind glowed white-hot.
Nesmarone Lower Coast was erased from the world.
All across Spheraphase, the apocalypse unfolded in real time.
The skies burned in shades no one had names for. Oceans rose in walls miles high, dragged upward by the passing debris before crashing back down, flooding coastlines that had stood for millennia.
And then suddenly, everything stopped. Every meteorite, fragment and speck of lunar dust froze mid-fall. People stared in disbelief as extinction hung motionless above them, close enough to see molten rock dripping molten lava.
That was when massive blue holograms appeared.
They unfolded across the heavens, wrapping the atmosphere in concentric rings of data and runes. No matter where one stood, the message was there.
A voice followed.
[WORLD ALERT. SENTIENT SYSTEM SPHERAPHASE DETECTED.]
[STATUS: CRITICAL.]
Letters the size of mountains appeared on the sky.
[CATASTROPHIC EVENT IDENTIFIED:
MOON DESTRUCTION - ERNA PROJECTED EXTINCTION RATE: 71.3%]
People screamed. Some fell to their knees. Some laughed hysterically, unable to process it. Others just stared upward as their eyes reflected the end of everything they had ever known.
[EMeRgeNcy PrOtoCoL InItiAtEd]
REQUESTING AUTHORIZATION FROM SENTIENT WORLD SPHERAPHASE.]
ACCESS REQUIRED: GRAVITATIONAL DOMINION.]
For a fraction of a second, the world hesitated before Spheraphase answered. Gravity shifted. Everyone felt it.
It wasn't like falling or rising. It was like reality reorienting, like the concept of "down" was being renegotiated. Buildings groaned. Seas stabilized. Bones ached as if the world had briefly loosened its grip on them. The frozen meteorites reversed course.
One by one, then all at once, the fragments of Erna tore themselves free from the atmosphere, ripping upward with thunderous shockwaves. Sonic booms cascaded across continents as debris punched back through cloud layers, leaving spirals of vacuum behind them.
People were thrown off their feet as the gravitational backlash rippled through the surface. Entire cities felt like they were being lifted, only to be slammed back down as balance reasserted itself.
From orbit, Spheraphase manifested it.
A colossal, luminous ring was encircling the planet. The remaining debris slammed into its influence field and was flung harmlessly into distant trajectories, ejected into the void.
The holograms spoke one last time.
[THREAT NEUTRALIZED. WORLD STABILITY RESTORED.]
A final line appeared, colder than anything before it.
[CASUALTIES CONFIRMED: 2,364,837 SPHERAPHASIANS]
Across Spheraphase, the survivors stood beneath a wounded sky, breathing ash-filled air, knowing-deep down-that the world was so close to extinction. For a while, the world thought it was over.
The skies were still burning, yes. The oceans were wounded. Entire regions were gone but the ring of debris held. Gravity had stabilized. People were alive. Survivors clung to one another amid rubble and ash, whispering that they had endured the end of the world and lived to tell it.
That was when the blue light died and something else forced its way in.
The sky glitched.
The red-stained heavens fractured into segments. The sun smeared across the continents in broken afterimages. Massive crimson holograms erupted across the sky again but these were wrong. Faces appeared for half a second and vanished screaming. The air itself tasted metallic.
A voice came but it was not as normal as before.
[SOUL ACQUISITION CONFIRMED.]
The words carved themselves into the sky in fractured crimson light. People froze. Some screamed immediately. Others didn't understand yet and that was worse.
[SOULS CAPTURED: 24,364,837 SPHERAPHASIANS]
Across the world in places where mass death had occurred, people felt it most clearly. There was a pulling sensation on their souls.
Mothers clutched their chests, gasping, saying they could hear voices calling their names from very far away. Graves cracked open not from resurrection but from absence, as if whatever once lingered there had been forcibly extracted. Children cried that the sky was watching them.
They weren't wrong.
[SOUL ENERGY THRESHOLD MET.]
The crimson holograms expanded.
[WORLD-ALTERING PHENOMENON APPROVED.]
Then came the words that froze even the Deities or Mopheria.
[THE SECOND EPOCH CYCLE IS UNDERWAY.]
Across Spheraphase, ancient constructs awakened without permission. Every Divine and civilian working for a Dynasty began to glow. In hidden realms, beings who had sworn never to interfere opened their eyes.
[INITIATING EMERGENCY PROTOCOL.]
The sky shattered into cascading layers of crimson data, each one rewriting itself faster than the last. The burning clouds pixelated, broke apart and reassembled into something horrifyingly precise.
New text emerged.
[PARTICIPANTS SELECTED: 1,263,736,372]
A billion souls from all realms of Spheraphase felt it at once. Some collapsed convulsing as runes branded themselves into their existence. Others felt a sudden, terrible clarity as if something had reached into them and decided they were useful. Ordinary Essentia and Ascenders felt their Tethers stir unnaturally. Divines heard whispers of systems that did not belong to Spheraphase.
High above, the crimson holograms stabilized at last. And then slowly, the final message appeared. The words burned themselves into the sky so deeply that even closing one's eyes did nothing to stop them from being seen.
[GLORY BE TO ■■■■, THE EXPELLED SUPREME ENTITY OF SPHERAPHASE.]
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And that is a wrap for Volume Four.
Volume 5 will be available on April Fools with 6-10 chapters opening sequence. Time for the Second Epoch Cycle to begin!
Anyway, for spoilers, this is going to be the longest volume of The Ingenius Aeterium Prince with three parts instead of two. Oh, and all the mysteries will be solved like the Timeskipping Events, Erna Isles, the ORS and other stuff that has been mysterious from the beginning. After all, anyone with a brain would have realized from the beginning that this is a paradox...
And we have to leave it there. So, see you then! And thanks for reading TIAP!