The world was still.
Ariel sat in its silence, cradling what remained of Ilya. His fingers trembled as they ran through her blood-matted hair, brushing the strands back like a ritual. Her skin was cold. Her eyes, hollow. The last warmth of her breath had long since vanished into the void.
And he had been the one to end it.
A scream clawed its way up his throat, but it couldn't escape. It coiled in his chest, festering, venomous, heavier than anything he had ever carried. Then, without warning, it erupted—a raw, jagged sound that tore into the dead sky.
"No… No no no no no…!"
He buried his face into her neck, sobbing. Screaming. Shattering.
His grip tightened until her fragile form bent beneath it, as if he could squeeze life back into her bones. Madness gnawed at his mind, peeling it apart thread by thread. Every breath was a punishment. Every second she remained cold in his arms was another nail hammered into his soul.
"I did this… I did this…!"
The despair wasn't poetic. It was monstrous. Ugly. Unrelenting.
"Ilya…"
The name tore from his throat like broken glass. A sob, raw and jagged, slipped free, the first of many. His body trembled. The air around him wept as if the world itself dared to mourn with him.
His body shook, blood boiling, the scream now too vast to be held in a single throat. The air trembled. The ground cracked. Reality itself—fractured.
A thin line of light tore through the sky, zig-zagging like broken glass.
And then it all shattered.
The world fell apart.
Colors bled into black.
The illusion—meticulously crafted, perfectly cruel—crumbled.
Darkness greeted him. Cold, endless darkness. And then—
He remembered.
The bird.
The obsidian feathers that shimmered like oil-slicked void. Wings too vast for the sky. Eyes like dying stars. A beast that pulsed with godhood and ancient judgment.
The Colossus.
He was still in the trial.
The pain clung to him, the guilt still fresh—but clarity flooded in with it. Memories slammed into his skull like tidal waves, and along with them came knowledge.
Not words.
Not a screen.
Just understanding.
His soul throbbed with it.
Attributes.
Powers.
Forbidden Truths.
But no interface. No system.
The Quiet Witness—the divine system carved into the world's bones—was silent.
Because it could not touch him.
His soul, untethered from the divine script, rejected its code like poison. He could not bind himself to anything. He could not be classified, ranked, or owned.
He was alone.
And yet—there was something. A part of him that even the divine could not chain.
His Origin Ability.
It whispered to him in a voice older than gods.
A power that could erase him from the world entirely.
To use it outside the Trials was to become nothing.
Unseen. Forgotten.
Undone.
But within the Trials…
He could wield it.
His hand lifted, trembling. Not in fear—but in knowing. He wasn't broken anymore. Not entirely. His grief had burnt away the illusion, and what remained now was a shell filled with fire and rage so vast that could shatter the fabric of space itself.
The black colossus stood before him still.
Its voice, when it came, wasn't sound.
It was pressure. Meaning. Weight. An otherworldly voice filled with authority over the laws of the world.
"Huh? Someone escaped my illusion?"
Ariel looked up, eyes hollow yet burning. He did not respond with words.
He stood.
The ground cracked beneath his feet, unable to contain the weight of the void that pulsed within him. The air itself screamed as space shattered with every breath he took. Veins of white nothingness slithered across the battlefield sky, breaking through the illusion like cracks on a glass canvas.
Ariel remembered.
He wasn't in a hospital. He wasn't in a city under siege. He wasn't holding his dead sister in his arms.
No—this was a battlefield. A relic of an ancient war, now twisted by a follower of the God of Death. A war where two nations, long dead and forgotten, had each raised a champion who had ascended to rank 8—true gods walking the soil of mortals. It was their battle, a bloodbath so rich in death it had attracted something darker than the gods themselves.
The black bird—a colossus, a harbinger—had feasted on the chaos. It had buried the world in illusion so deep even gods couldn't crawl out.
But Ariel had.
Tears still clung to his face. The memory of Ilya—of her warmth, her smile, the blood on his hands—was fresh, carved into the marrow of his being. And from that pain, a storm was born.
His aura erupted.
It didn't ripple or explode—it tore. It sheared through the battlefield, sundering sky and earth, forcing the very laws of the world to bend. Space fractured with each of his steps, opening fissures to nowhere, bleeding silence and pressure that crushed all lesser things.
The cost of using his Origin Ability stirred—a whisper of erasure, a touch of annihilation. Even in the trial world, where rules were looser and reality was thinner, it reached for him. But it wasn't enough. Not yet. Not now.
The bird shrieked, Its feathers twitching with instinctual dread.
From one of the spatial rifts behind Ariel, something emerged.
A creature—not born, but birthed from the concept of obliteration. Draped in shadows that shimmered like collapsing galaxies, its presence twisted gravity itself. Even the battlefield—this twisted echo of history—held its breath.
The creature bowed low, facing Ariel with a reverence that bordered on worship. Not a slave. Not a summon.
A herald.
A mirror to what Ariel was becoming.
Ariel's voice cracked like thunder. Calm, low, and ancient.
"Give him the worst hell possible."
The creature turned. The battlefield watched.
Even the colossus bird—the one who had feasted on death for eons, whose illusions had undone gods—shrank. Its talons scratched at the ground, ready to flee, but space no longer obeyed it.
The beast of void walked, each step dragging celestial scars through the earth. The ground behind it decayed into static. Reality itself rejected its presence.
Billions of souls—spectral remnants of soldiers and monsters long gone—watched in stunned silence. Even the rank 8 gods, reflections of ancient power, trembled. Their divine cores shuddered, instinct warning them:
This thing should not exist.
The void creature reached the bird.
And let out an earth shattering shriek.