"Did it work?" Kyle opened his eyes and looked around him. As far as he could see, there was nothing, just like the abyss had been; the only difference was the solitary, baleful star that hung above them in the suffocating firmament. The black, glass-like ground beneath their feet was unnaturally leveled.
"I never imagined your soul world to be like this," Luke walked up to him, his boots clicking sharply against the obsidian floor.
"Vaygar, where are you?" Kyle sent through the tethered mental link they shared.
*Above you*, Vaygar sent back, his voice vibrating like a low-frequency hum in Kyle's consciousness.
Above Kyle and Luke, two massive, predatory eyes stared down at them from the upper reaches of the darkness.
"How'd you get up there?" Kyle asked, tilting his head back.
"I can freely control my size in your soul world, so I chose this to preserve our mana."
There were so many things Kyle wanted to test in his newly forged domain to see if his manifestation mirrored the dreaded architecture of the Dark Lord's. Waving his hand, a heavy, obsidian throne materialized behind him.
"Luke, try casting a spell," Kyle commanded.
"Sure."
Luke formed an intermediate fire spell in his palm. The instant the flames flickered to life, Kyle snapped his fingers, nullifying the construct completely.
*Looks like I can prevent magic from being used, but that consumes a horrifying amount of mana.*
Kyle carried out a series of swift, calculated tests. The feedback loop of the soul world was absolute: spells he cast here manifested with terrifying potency and forged themselves at near-instant speed. Conversely, the spells of those he deemed opponents were severely handicapped, their structures unstable and sluggish.
Yet, there were hard rules to this absolute domain. Spells of the exact same rank as his own were far less affected than those of lower circles. Furthermore, the higher an entity's rank, the more mana Kyle's soul world bled to sustain their foreign presence within his boundaries. The crushing drain on his reserves made it painfully obvious why his core was depleting at a catastrophic rate just keeping Luke and Ignis anchored here.
When his mana reserves dropped dangerously close to the bottom, the entire soul world fractured like brittle glass, shattering inward and dumping them violently back onto the scarred, metallic floor of the real-world training ground.
"Does the time vary inside a soul world?" Luke asked, catching his breath.
"There's only one way to find out." Kyle peered out the reinforced viewport of the training hall. "It flows the same."
"I should better get going. Got to prepare for the engagement party."
"Alright."
After Luke had departed, Kyle sat in the quiet gloom, letting his thoughts drift back over the terrifying implications of the past two years. The proofs kept piling up, weaving a undeniable web that suggested the Dark Lord and he were, in some fundamental, terrifying way, the exact same entity.
"Vaygar, do you know anything about your creator?" Kyle asked quietly.
"My memories of him are hazy," the beast rumbled through their link. "I'm only able to recall a few things—like how he commanded me to wait for you in Stormcove. But I do remember him saying that it was best if I didn't have my memories all at once. He said the stronger I become, the more of those buried fragments I'm able to unlock."
A knot of cold disappointment tightened in Kyle's chest. He dusted off his training kit, feeling the immense weight of the universe pressing down on his shoulders, and left the hall. Because the spatial distance Vaygar could now maintain from him had grown exponentially over the years, Kyle left the colossal beast resting in the safety of the training arena until his mana recovered enough to safely revert into his compact cub form.
Back at the main house, the estate was a labyrinth of frantic motion. The halls buzzed with the frantic footsteps of royal servants dispatched on Queen Isolde's direct orders. She had decreed that the engagement must be a spectacle of unmatched grandeur and dizzying luxury, sparing no expense to broadcast their political dominance.
*The more I claw my way up to catch up to him, the larger the abyssal power difference between us seems to grow,* Kyle thought bitterly, his jaw tightening. *And here I foolishly thought I would finally surpass him with the hero's power.*
"Luke, mind lending me a hand?"
Distracting him from his dark reverie, Olivia materialized beside him, forcefully thrusting a towering stack of decorative sheets into his arms. She lingered, trying to bridge the unspoken gap between them, her golden eyes searching his face.
"Why are you so gloomy?" she asked, noticing his distant expression.
"Nothing. Just... nervous about my engagement," he lied smoothly.
"There's nothing to be nervous about."
"It's funny coming from someone who still lacks the spine to confront her own feelings," Luke shot back with a teasing smirk.
While the maids in charge of the grand ballroom buzzed around waiting for Olivia—who immediately squawked in indignation and began chasing her brother down the corridor—the rest of the estate's preparations were swiftly finalized.
Since Cerci had not yet arrived at the capital, Kyle decided he could no longer wait. He scrawled a brief, cryptic letter and slipped it into Olivia's room, leaving word that he would return within two days before packing light and slipping out into the night toward his former home.
Kyle spent the rest of the dark hours pressing hard against the northern frontier, eating up miles as he traveled toward the jagged, forsaken borders of the kingdom.
By midnight, the biting chill and exhaustion forced him to make camp. He pressed into the desolate, poisoned expanse of the Wastelands of Mordo, carving out a subterranean earth dome beneath the skeletal branches of a withered, dead tree. Inside the protective pocket of stone and soil, he rested his head against Vaygar's thick, warm obsidian fur and let the exhaustion pull him under.
*Vaygar... what's going on?*
Kyle bolted upright in the pitch-black enclosure, his heart hammering against his ribs as a wave of raw, primal panic bled through their shared mental link.
*Something is approaching. Fast. And it is unfathomably colossal.*
Kyle leaped to his feet, instantly flooding the surrounding earth with his spatial mana sense. The warning didn't even have time to fully register in his mind before the ground beneath them violently heaved upward.
*Boom!*
The earth erupted in a geyser of pulverized stone and toxic dust. A massive, nightmarish maw—lined with rows of jagged, dripping chitinous spikes—slammed shut precisely where Kyle had been a split second prior. Reacting with inhuman, instinctual speed, Kyle twisted his trajectory mid-air, his boots kicking off a falling slab of rock as he vaulted up into the branches of the decaying tree.
"What in the abyss is that?!" Vaygar roared through the link, his massive frame shifting as he spat a torrent of dark spatial energy, deflecting a hail of venomous bone-spikes that rained down from the creature's segmented hide.
The ancient, withered tree beneath them shuddered violently, its roots snapping like dry twigs as the ground continued to sink into a rapidly widening sinkhole.
Knowing they couldn't hold ground, Kyle and Vaygar launched themselves upward, shooting like arrows toward the smog-choked night sky. But the beast was faster. A colossal, armored leviathan of the earth—a towering behemoth of flesh and carapace—lunged out of the dust storm, its gargantuan body coiling through the air to deliberately block their only route of escape.
Kyle didn't hesitate. His eyes flashed a brilliant, blinding gold as he drew upon the absolute limit of his 7th-circle core. Twisting his momentum in mid-air, a shimmering blade of condensed blue ice materialized in his grip. With a guttural shout, he hurled himself directly at the descending monstrosity, driving the ice sword deep into the creature's thick, armored carapace.
*Screeech!*
Using his own falling weight and the razor-sharp edge of his blade, Kyle dragged the sword downward along the beast's spine, slicing through layered scales like parchment and carving a ghastly, gaping trench into its flesh. Thick, phosphorescent green blood geysered from the wound, sizzling violently as it hit the dead earth below.
For a fraction of a second, as the beast thrashed in agonizing fury and turned its blind, multi-eyed head directly toward him in the dark.