Planet Aethel – The Final Hour
The sky wept ashes. Not rain, not snow—fine gray particulate that had once been cities, forests, and bones. It settled on everything, a filthy shroud over a dying world. The air tasted of ozone and iron, the metallic tang of spilled blood so profound it seemed the very soil had been fertilized with it.
Damian's hands, calloused and scarred from a decade of fighting, trembled not from fear, but from exhaustion. He channeled another wave of Shadow Tendrils, his darkness affinity manifesting as viscous black ropes that erupted from the cracked concrete floor of the abandoned factory. They snared three advancing Void-Stalkers—beasts that looked like nightmares given canine form, with obsidian hides and eyes that pulsed with violet energy. With a wrench of will, he squeezed. Bones crunched wetly before the creatures dissolved into wiskes of evaporating mana.
"Incoming left flank!" roared Karacus, his voice a gravelly baritone that echoed in the vast, derelict space. A wall of glacial ice, etched with the faint, shimmering sigils of his Ice Dragon Bloodline, erupted from the ground, impaling a scuttling horror with too many legs. The temperature in the section plummeted.
Damian didn't need to look to know Rooley was already acting. A bubble of distorted air—a localized Time Dilation Field—encapsulated a cluster of rushing beasts, slowing them to a snail's crawl. Lyra's arrows, tipped with searing light affinity, found their throats and eyes with surgical precision before they could even raise their claws.
"Status, Mina!" Kirian barked, his earth magic causing tremors that tripped up another wave. He stood like a bastion, rock armor coating his body.
From the center of their crumbling fortress, surrounded by scavenged machinery humming with unstable energy, Mina's voice was a tense, focused thread. "Seventy percent! The core is stabilizing, but the dimensional matrix is fluctuating with the planet's death throes! I need time!"
Time. The one currency they had spent to its last, bitter dreg.
Five years ago, the Great Rift had torn open over what was left of their capital. Not a dungeon gate, but a cataclysmic fissure in reality itself. The beasts that poured forth weren't just monsters; they were an extinction event. Governments fell. Guilds were shattered like glass. The Universal System—the Akashi Records that governed magic and progression—seemed to offer no salvation, only a cold, numerical tally of the dying.
And then the Cult of the Shattered Seal had revealed itself. Their dogma was a madman's mercy: Aethel was a prison, a Cage. True freedom lay only in annihilation, in rejoining the void from which all things came. They hadn't just welcomed the beasts; they'd guided them, sabotaged defenses, and hunted the last pockets of resistance—like Damian's team.
The Six. Once, they'd been students at the now-dust Astral Spire Academy. Now, they were the last flicker of a candle in a hurricane.
"They've found us!" Lyra called from her sniper perch on a rusted gantry, her silver hair matted with grime and blood. "Cultists. Two dozen. Led by a 5th Order Channeler. They're bypassing the outer ruins."
A cold dread, sharper than Karacus's ice, speared through Damian. A 5th Order. On Aethel, where mana density was lethally thin, that was near-godhood. Their leader, a man they knew only as The Inquisitor, had personally hunted them across continents.
"We hold," Damian said, his voice surprisingly calm. It was the calm of the precipice. "We hold until Mina is done. That's the mission."
The next hour was a blur of pain, light, and roaring magic.
The Cultists wore robes the color of dried blood. Their magic was corrosive, entropy-based, eating away at Karacus's ice and Kirian's stone. The 5th Order Channeler, a gaunt woman with eyes like smoldering coals, didn't even enter the building. She stood outside, weaving a spell that made the very air scream. The factory walls began to unravel, molecules disassociating into shimmering dust.
Rooley was a tempest of silver energy, hair turned white from temporal strain. He'd throw Time Lock spells, freezing cultists in mid-stride for Kirian to crush or Lyra to pierce. He'd rewind minor wounds on his comrades, but each reversal cost him. Blood trickled from his nose, his capillaries protesting the cosmic law-breaking.
Karacus fought like the dragon in his lineage. Frost aura billowed from him, his skin taking on a pale, scaly sheen, his nails elongating into claws. He met the cultist vanguard head-on, a whirlwind of frozen vengeance. But a entropy-laced whip caught his shoulder, and they all heard his gasp as the frost there died, leaving necrotic, blackened flesh.
"Ninety-five percent!" Mina's cry was both triumph and despair.
The Inquisitor finally moved. He simply walked through the disintegrating wall. He was tall, clad in dark armor that seemed to drink the little light remaining. His presence was a pressure, a weight that made Damian's shadow affinity cower within him.
"Little rats," the Inquisitor's voice was a dry rustle, like pages turning in a tomb. "You think to flee the Cage? There is no outside. Only the embrace of the Void is real."
He raised a hand. Darkness deeper than Damian's, an absolute nothingness, gathered in his palm. It was the void between stars, the silence after death. Annihilation-Type Spell: Event Horizon Seed.
"Go!" Kirian bellowed, slamming his hands onto the ground. A colossal earthen spire, the last of his strength, erupted beneath the Inquisitor, aiming to impale him. The dark lord merely flicked his wrist. The spire turned to sand.
But it bought two seconds.
Lyra unleashed her Ultimate: Phoenix's Volley. A single, beautiful arrow of condensed sunlight shot forth, not at the Inquisitor, but at the crumbling ceiling above him. It detonated in a sunburst, bringing tons of ferro-concrete down in a cataclysmic avalanche, separating them from the main force.
"The device is active! Now!" Mina screamed.
The machine behind her—a grotesque masterpiece of salvaged rune-crystals, void-whale capacitors, and stolen Cultist teleportation tech—hummed to a crescendo. At its heart, a tear in reality, small and unstable, shimmered like a vertical pool of mercury. The Dimensional Breach Generator. It would send them somewhere. Anywhere but here.
The cost was absolute. It required all their remaining mana, channeled through the machine's focus. There would be no power left to fight.
"Lyra, Kirian, with us!" Damian shouted, already backing toward the portal.
Lyra dropped from the gantry, landing lightly beside Mina, her bowstring broken. Kirian's rock armor cracked and fell away, revealing a face gaunt with exhaustion. But they didn't move toward the portal.
Kirian looked at Damian, then at Rooley, Karacus, and Mina. A sad, proud smile touched his lips. "The machine needs a stable anchor for five minutes to ensure your coordinates aren't pure chaos. It needs a constant mana feed."
"No…" Mina whispered, understanding dawning. "The design, I fixed the draw issue, I—"
"You fixed it for four," Lyra said softly, nocking one last, ordinary arrow. Her eyes, fierce and green, met each of theirs. "Four to escape. Two to hold the door. That was always the math."
The Inquisitor's darkness was already eating through the rubble pile. Cults poured in from other holes.
"You can't!" Karacus roared, surging forward, but Kirian slammed a now-weakened earthen wall between them.
"Go!" Kirian's voice broke with finality. "Find a better world. Tell stories where the Cage is just a myth."
Lyra fired her last arrow at a cultist, then drew twin daggers. "Make it count."
There were no more words. There was no time for them. The look exchanged in that fraction of a second—a decade of friendship, loss, love, and fury—said everything.
Damian, his heart a block of ice, grabbed Mina's arm. Rooley, tears cutting clean lines through the grime on his face, grabbed Karacus. They turned and ran the last ten meters toward the shimmering tear.
Behind them, they heard Kirian's defiant roar, the clash of Lyra's blades, and the chilling, amused chuckle of the Inquisitor.
They leapt.
The world did not fade. It shattered.
There was no light, no dark. There was sensation beyond sense. It felt like being pulled through the eye of a needle made of screaming galaxies. Damian felt his body—his soul—stretch, thin, and begin to fray. He heard not sounds, but the concepts of sounds: Mina's scream was a chord of terror, Rooley's gasp a ripple in entropy, Karacus's roar a shard of absolute cold.
He felt connections snap. The tie to Aethel. The faint, comforting presence of the Universal System's local node. The warm, bright threads that were Lyra and Kirian… they didn't snap. They were cauterized, leaving phantom-limb agony in his spirit.
Then came the impact.
Not onto ground, but into self. It was a violent, cramming compression. He was a vast, frayed tapestry being forced into a small, tight, unfinished frame.
---
Consciousness returned in fits and starts, a dripping faucet in a silent room.
First came touch. The scratch of coarse linen. The soft give of a mattress. A dull, pervasive ache in every minuscule part of his being, deeper than bone, a soul-deep bruise.
Then sound. Distant birdsong. The murmur of voices from another room. The creak of floorboards.
Smell. Lavender and beeswax. Honeysuckle through an open window. The clean, dull scent of stone. No ozone. No blood.
Panic, swift and electric. Where? Prison? Cult?
Damian's eyes flew open.
He saw a ceiling of wooden beams and white plaster. Sunlight, gentle and golden, streamed through a window, illuminating dancing dust motes. He was in a small, tidy bedroom. A simple wardrobe, a writing desk, a shelf with a few carved wooden toys.
He tried to sit up. Agony lanced through him, a white-hot wire drawn through his core. He collapsed back with a gasp that came out as a weak, childish wheeze.
Childish.
He looked at his hands, resting on the linen coverlet.
They were small. Pale. Soft. The scars from years of combat, the calluses from gripping a shadow-forged dagger—gone.
A wave of vertigo worse than the dimensional travel hit him. He was in the body of a child. Seven, maybe eight years old.
Reincarnation? Soul Transmigration?
Before the terror could fully root, a cold, blue, translucent screen materialized in the center of his vision. It was utterly alien in its clarity and silence, devoid of the faint golden hue of the Universal System.
[Interdimensional Soul-Vessel Synchronization Complete.]
[Host Designation: Damian (Soul-Origin: Aethel-Prime) successfully integrated into compatible biological vessel.]
[Warning: Critical Soul Fracture detected. Spiritual Cohesion at 12%.]
[Cause: Unshielded transit through decaying dimensional breach under hostile universal laws.]
[Consequence: Native affinity circuits severed. High-order mana channels collapsed. Connection to Universal System (Akashi Records)… NOT FOUND.]
A pit opened in his stomach. He was crippled. Cut off.
The screen scrolled.
[Analyzing host's unique soul-signature…]
[Signature aligned with Conceptual Authority: Darkness.]
[Error: No compatible System interface found.]
[Initiating contingency protocol…]
[Forging personalized paradigm…]
[Paradigm established: MONARCH OF DARKNESS SYSTEM (Prototype v0.1) initiated.]
[Primary Objective: Soul Reconstruction.]
[Secondary Objective: Re-establish Dominance over Darkness.]
[Welcome, Damian.]
He stared, breath catching. A personal system. Not the Akashi Records, but something born from his own shattered soul and whatever had happened during the jump.
A soft knock at the door. "Young master? Are you awake? You gave us quite a fright." The voice was female, gentle, and unfamiliar.
Damian had no time. He willed the screen away. It dissolved. He took a frantic, steadying breath, forcing decades of survival instinct over the panic of a child's body and a fractured soul. He had to assess. He had to adapt.
"I… I'm awake," he called out, his voice high, clear, and unbearably young.
The door opened. A woman in her forties, with a kind, worried face and hair tied in a practical bun, entered. She wore a simple servant's dress. Her aura, to Damian's newly dulled senses, felt faint—a non-Awakened or a very low 1st Order.
"Oh, thank the ancestors," she sighed, bustling over to feel his forehead. "You've been asleep for three days ever since you fell from the old oak tree. How do you feel?"
Fell from a tree. A cover story imprinted by the transmigration? Or just coincidence?
"Tired," Damian murmured, which was the profound truth. "Achy."
"That's to be expected, young master. You gave your father a terrible scare. He's been checking on you every hour." She smoothed his covers. "I'll fetch some broth. Lord Aldric will want to know you're awake."
She left, and Damian was alone again.
Lord Aldric. Father. A noble house.
He slowly, painfully, pushed himself up to lean against the headboard. He looked out the window at a peaceful courtyard, at a world that was not ending. The Cage of Aethel was behind him. Lyra and Kirian were behind him.
The grief was a physical weight, but he shackled it. He had to survive. He had to get stronger. He had to find the others. Mina, Rooley, Karacus. They were out there somewhere, in their own new bodies, with their own shattered souls and personal systems.
He focused inward, toward the faint, bruised core of his being, and silently summoned it.
The Monarch of Darkness System screen reappeared.
[Status: Damian]
- Age: 8 Years (Vessel)
- Soul Age: 28 Years (Estimated)
- Race: Human (Vessel)
- Bloodline: [Locked – Soul Fracture]
- Affinity: [Locked – Soul Fracture. Primary: Darkness (Corrupted). Secondary: (Unknown)]
- Soul Integrity: 12%
- Current Order: N/A (System Incompatible)
- Monarch System Rank: Initiate
[Available Functions:]
- Status
- Soul Diagnosis
- Inventory (Soul-Bound – 0/4 Slots)
- Quest Log
He selected Quest Log.
A single entry glowed.
[Foundational Quest: The First Breath of Shadow]
Objective: Fully awaken to the world's mana. Synchronize your fractured darkness with the ambient energy of this new reality.
Success Condition: Achieve Mana Perception and form a Shadow Spark.
Reward: Unlock Soul Reconstruction Path I, System Function: Dark Sense.
Failure: Continued spiritual decay. Permanent lock on affinity.
[Note: Standard Awakening Age on this world is 12 years. Your Monarch System allows for earlier initiation, but at increased risk due to Soul Fracture. Proceed with extreme caution.]
Four years. He had four years before the normal awakening. Four years to hide, to learn, to heal, and to prepare in a noble household he knew nothing about, in a body that was not his own, with a system that was his alone.
He heard heavier footsteps approaching down the hall. Firm, authoritative. Lord Aldric. His new "father."
Damian closed the screen. The child's face he now wore settled into a careful, neutral mask. The eyes that looked toward the door, however, held the weary, calculating resolve of a man who had escaped the end of one world, only to be thrown into the deadly games of another.
The story of Damian, Monarch of Darkness, began not with a roar, but with the silent, patient gathering of shadows in a sunlit room.
[End of Chapter 1]