-Chapter twenty-one-

Vanity of the Four Kings

Jason took out two.

Andrew took out one.

That’s three.

Taylor took out two, so that’s five.

But there’s six of them, Diana thought wearily as she guarded the other Trinity members, waiting for Taylor to return.

He seemed to be able to deal with the Apocalypse quite well, with that strange pressure from his Magic.

It was the same when she engaged them from earlier as well.

She felt some sort of overwhelming pressure coming down on her.

Authority, as Jason called it.

If she wants to survive against one of the Apocalypse, she has to grasp this new power as well.

Just as she was wondering how to do so, they heard a loud crash and looked up to find, standing on one of the rooftops of a nearby skyscraper, an ominous monster looking down at them.

The final, remaining Apocalypse, Diana thought. Just what she didn’t want to happen.

Saliva dropped down it’s rotting, bloodied and malformed mouth as it’s mutated body gave a thundering roar.

A real unpleasant sight to see.

Diana can’t fall behind the others.

If they have already manifested their principles, she can too.

It suddenly rapidly lashed out with a long range attack at their group. In response to the dozens of purple boulders coming her way, Diana erected the best barrier she could, with the help of Aira and Mercy.

The blow struck into the wall made of magic repeatedly, cracking it with each impact, putting enormous strain on the mages trying to resist it.

This can’t go on, Diana thought as her Mana was rapidly drained from her.

Like Taylor did, she needs to go on the offensive, but with an attack that will actually have an effect. An attack fused with the power of her principle.

As the attack continued to rain down on her, her mind churned and churned it’s cogs and gears to think.

If she would have to guess, her principle is probably that of destruction.

After all, she had a destructive nature.

To fuse with destruction… what a ridiculous sentence, Diana thought with a scoff as her body began to glow purple.

Right. She will destroy anything she wills.

A vow she had actually made a long time ago.

“Diana,” Mercy called to her as they both resisted the barrier.

“I’m okay,” Diana answered with a small smile, turning back to the Apocalypse and focusing her mind.

Connect to the cloud. The principle itself.

And send an attack out.

She slashed her hand before her, at the apocalypse and the space began to tear itself followed after.

Purple dimensional rifts appeared and popped like bubbles continuously, rushing forward at the Apocalypse, like the chemical reaction of a blast.

It blew up in the Apocalypse’s face as it took the full force of the blow.

The attack ceased, and the cloud created from the attack quickly dispersed to reveal the sky clear of the Apocalypse.

“Is it dead?” Diana heard someone ask.

“It’s not,” she answered over her shoulder. Just being hit by an attack of destruction is not enough to trigger her authority to destroy her target.

The killing blow comes now.

She honed in on the fallen Apocalypse and reached it, slamming her palm into it for a second.

It reacted immediately, swinging widely into her upper torso.

A dust cloud was sent kicking up, and for a delicate moment, the remaining members of the Trinity could not see the result of the skirmish.

A sudden gust of wind soon followed and quelled the gray mist away, revealing Diana standing on her two feet, coughing.

The Apocalypse, with a loud rear, returned upright to its feet and took off into the sky, attempting a final, large attack.

“Heh,” Diana coughed. “You’re already finished.”

A mark appeared where Diana had touched earlier, first appearing as a small purple line.

Gradually, but before the Apocalypse could cast it’s attack, the lines spread until they completely swallowed the entire body.

The frozen Apocalypse immediately faded into dust, taken out by Diana’s authority of destruction.

Diana finally let her lungs go and dropped to her knees, gasping to catch her breath.

“Well done, Diana,” she turned to see Taylor smiling to her, having appeared at some point.

“So you were here…” she sighed, slowly picking herself back up.

“Yeah. I got back quite early. There were some deaths from before we returned but I revived them. Seems no harm done,” Taylor remarked.

“Right… I still feel bad for being late…” Diana mumbled, as the two slowly returned to the HQ.

On the other side of the globe, back in Africa, two figures tread over destroyed earth, returning to the point where the Magic leylines met, and converged the strongest.

“Set the altar back down,” Jason nodded to Andrew, who with Magic, whipped it out for a gate and plopped it onto the ground.

Jason scanned it and several golden screens jumped up in his vision.

Not long passed when the two heard a whoosh and glanced over to see Taylor and Diana had returned.

“Welcome back you two. Good work out there… are the rest of the Trinity members alright?” he hesitantly asked.

“Well…” Diana sullenly responded.

“Our spouses were safe, we got there in time. Some of the other members passed, but of course I revived them,” Taylor answered.

“Right…” Jason chuckled. “Will of the Heavens, I suppose. They weren’t mentally traumatised, were they?”

“No, uhh, they died rather painlessly, thankfully… and I revived them before too much time had passed. Their mental fortitude was resilient enough to come out unscathed. We’ve all taken fatal injuries before, after all,” Taylor responded.

“Good, good,” Jason nodded. “They shouldn’t be such weaklings at least in mentality. They’re worthy of their positions,” he exhaled. “As for this altar,” he turned back to face it. “It should be going off anytime now.”

“Jason, don’t you think the Perished are going to retaliate, now that we took out the Apocalypse?”

“I… don’t know,” Jason sighed. “You would normally think they are. But… this fight with the Apocalypse… it was too easy. Even if we are already demigods, the fight should’ve been harder. When they arrived, it should have spelled disaster. Entire nations should be destroyed the moment they descend. Why in the world… did they arrive so early? And why in the world were they so weak?” Jason clenched his fists.

“Does anything right now line up with the future or past, from your cloud memories?” Taylor asked with a raised eyebrow.

“…I was cut off when the Masters entered this atlar. Right now, I’m operating independently,” Jason spoke.

“Right… well… we can only wait for this atlar to activate then,” Taylor sighed.

They waited and waited, idling as time passed.

After a long while, the altar suddenly lit up and the four rose to their feet, gazing at the large beacon in awe.

“It’s… a paradoxum beacon!” Jason exclaimed.

The paradoxum beacon was the spell they had managed to develop to allow their drifting future souls navigate the infinite number of timelines.

Each different branch where a timeline divulges or deviates, a different thing takes place.

Everytime something different takes places, the timeline splits into two. With this rapid and exponential multiplication, an infinite number of timelines result in different versions where the most unbelievable things take place. That is the degree of deviation their multiverse experiences.

The four’s aim was to either find or create a timeline where the Perished did not exist.

The issue was, the Perished were transcended beings of causality who existed outside of time. All timelines.

Slaying them ‘in one timeline’ was impossible simply for the fact that they did not exist any timeline at all, yet exist in all at once.

Such was their enemy.

When the four first began to send themselves back in time, it was hard to rendezvous up with each other in the correct timeline.

The reason was because their spell did not turn back time nor send them back time. Instead, their spell would extract their soul and send it to another dimension where a different version of themselves existed, and their consciousness would then seize that body.

By returning to the past in a dimension that was yet to take place, the four could deviate the flow of events as much as they want to find a solution.

That was where the paradoxum beacon spell would come in.

When one member made it to a viable timeline, they could set up a paradoxum beacon, under the right circumstances.

The beacon will attract the drifting versions of the person’s future selves.

“But this beacon is… breaking through our entire multiverse!” Jason exclaimed as the sky shattered above them from the tower of light.

The Provenance realm, the Chaos realm, Nejire, even Paradise or Heaven, they were all within this multiverse.

But this beacon just broke through this multiverse into another Universe.

“Could it be…” Jason gasped. “The Primordial Realm?”

The sun shone brightly down on a prosperous kingdom built into the mountains of the continent that will be come to known as Africa thousands of years later.

Golden sandstone, iron and metal walls formed a grand castle built into the innermost parts of the large city.

Though the heat intensely swarmed the nation, it had an abundance of water and incredibly impressive, advanced water workways primal man was not even close to capable of achieving.

Further into the grand castle, up the warp gates at the end, leading to the highest floors of the castle’s spires, one particular black haired ruler was relaxing on his couch.

It was still fifteen years before he begins to raise his disciple. He has ample time to find a solution to the mess his future / past self has made.

It has yet to be made yet already has been made.

There is no stopping it.

The only way is to overcome this obstacle.

One cannot avoid death when death actively pursues it. Like fate.

Causality has an incredible authority as a principle.

Just as he was wondering about the matter, he felt a whisp of his future soul tug at him.

“Third one this week,” he thought to himself as he gently tapped it with his fingertip.

With the infinite number of timelines out there, it’s difficult to find which one is the right one to go down. But it’s different when you can try through trial and error.

Somehow, they will find a way to break through the defenses of Causality.

This soul whisp seemed to be originating from a somewhat decent timeline to attempt a resistance. At least, it makes for a good foundation to start from scratch.

“Alright then,” Kyle breathed and flicked the soul whisp away. “Go on.”

He infused it with his Mana and it shot back into the nothingness.

Kyle leant back down, beaming to himself.

“Hehe… I can’t believe I just keep doing this for forty years before I get sealed away for all of eternity, until hopefully I successfully get woken up?” he chuckled and then sighed.

“Well… here goes… I wonder what Rachel’s having for lunch. The world that existed in the far future, after our deaths and our influence had completely disappeared… it looked interesting. I suppose the Perished are coming from a somewhat understandable perspective. Their execution is absolutely horrible though.”

Jason and the other three’s eyes were suddenly blinded as the altar suddenly went overloaded.

A cloud of dust was sent up in the air, blocking view of everything as the roaring wind howled.

After a moment and everything died down, the four heard a harsh coughing, and quickly cleared the dust cloud away to find Kyle standing alone in front of the altar.

“Kyle?” Jason stepped forward to see he was severely injured, covered in blood and weakened.

Jason immediately cast a healing spell on him to see it had no effect. Somehow the young man was still standing on his feet as he slowly stepped forward.

“What the?” Jason raised an eyebrow, confused.

Diana appeared beside him with a floating purple window, wearing a concerned expression.

“Jason, his Magic power is off the charts, but none of his physical numbers have gone up. It’s a fleshly, human body trying to channel more energy than our universe even has the capacity to hold!” she exclaimed.

It meant his body was about to explode in any second.

Kyle’s painful, eyes of agony rose to meet Jason’s, and suddenly, the howling wind around them and the glaring sun disappeared.

Instead, Jason suddenly found himself transported to some strange plane made of… nothing.

It was only white endlessly stretching out beyond what eyes could see.

Jason’s eyes returned to in of front of him, only to widen when they landed on a somewhat different looking Kyle, sitting down on a comfortable red-cushion couch, smiling at him patiently.

“Welcome back again, Jason,” he smiled and looked down at his watch. “For the 100’000’000’000th time,” he added with a chuckle.

“Are you…?” Jason narrowed his eyes.

“Yes. Currently, we are in a constructed soul-realm, allowing me to converse with you with no hindrances,” Kyle smiled.

“We failed…” Jason’s fists clenched. “Our last ditch attempt,” he scoffed. “We got you killed. I never stopped to consider if your human bodies could sustain the power of your souls or not.”

“Well,” Kyle shrugged. “You’re blameless. You were desperate. And the Perished are a formidable foe whom even we are trying to find a way to dispatch.” Kyle looked off into the distance and then sighed. “I know the pain of losing a loved one. I know how often you’ve relived your life, experiencing those traumas over and over again. How you quote-and-quote sold your soul to the devil,” Kyle chuckled. “It’s funny, my grandfather is Satan. I never met him but… it’s just funny to hear.”

Jason grit his teeth.

“I’ve never come this far before. This whole time, I was just working to the goal of reviving you six. I never thought about what to do after even a successful revival results in failure… we’re back to the first square…” he despondently looked at his feet.

“Don’t be too solemn yet, Jason,” Kyle answered him. “Success can only be attained after failure.”

“We have failed, though!” Jason shouted back. “Over and over again, we’ve failed. When is it enough?”

Kyle shook his head.

“I mean when you’re trying to make progress. This is your first attempt at reviving us, right? You say a successful revival resulted in failure, but it was actually a failed revival from the get-go. Make a second attempt, go on. We won’t hold you accountable for what happens. This time, think about what you need to do in order for the problem with our flesh to be resolved,” he smiled.

“…How can a human body even…?”

“I just wanted you to know, all of your actions are not of consequence, alright? This multiverse is your oyster. You can do as you please here,” Kyle assured him.

“You… came from outside this multiverse, right? That altar broke through this multiverse,” Jason asked.

“That’s right,” Kyle smirked smugly. “You’re always quite intuitive. Yes, I’ll be truthful. Where you currently exist, together with the Perished, is within a box we created. We copy-pasted our timeline into a parallel dimension, essentially creating a simulation of what would happen if the Perished were to come to exist. Of course, we are unable to stop the Perished from coming to exist, so the only way forward now is to find the correct timeline in which we can succeed, despite the Perished coming into existence. The other Masters and I have no way of resisting being sealed away. Such is the power of fate, we are already destined to be turned into humans. Now, fate depends on whether we can find a way to return after becoming humans. You understand, right?” he explained to Jason.

For a long moment, he stayed silent, before he finally spoke.

“So we don’t actually exist? We’re just a virtual simulation in another multiverse, created purely by you six?” Jason asked.

“You do exist,” Kyle reassured him. “Just not yet. The future has to pass, yet has already passed. I’m sure you get what I mean?” he raised an eyebrow.

“I see… for the current you, what time is it?” Jason asked.

“Fifteen years yet to go before I and the others select our disciples,” Kyle answered.

“If you know they’re going to do this to you, why would you still choose to raise them? If you know the future, you can change the future by changing the past, no!?” Jason asked him.

“Even if I chose not to raise my disciple, that’s only for this timeline. What about all the other timelines and different versions of myself? If even one of them chooses to raise Levi, the rest of us are doomed, and he will end up becoming one of the Perished, subsequently attaining paracausal status and no longer being bound by time. His existence is guaranteed because he existed all along, and he existed all along because his existence is guaranteed,” Kyle explained yet again.

“Can’t you sync up all the timelines like I have through the Provenance realm? And then make sure all versions of yourself make the same choice not to raise the Perished?” Jason asked.

“Firstly, that would result in a future where you four never come to exist, because the change is far too great. And secondly, the so-called Provenance realm is the admin console we made to manage your timelines. There’s no such thing for the primordial realm, as we didn’t create this realm, we were created by this realm. How do you suggest we sync up all timelines? We are independent existences,” Kyle sighed.

“So you can’t even sync up all the timelines, yet the Perished are able to become paracausal beings somehow?” Jason lowly growled.

“That’s right… they sent themselves interdimensional when they sealed us, and gradually became twisted from there,” Kyle responded.

“Why in the hell did your so-called admin console require blood sacrifices to enter? For us, I only entered by chance because we destroyed the entire world,” Jason questioned him.

“Oh, that. Yes, well, that would’ve been a spell-hack the Perished use. It’s a glyph similar to the seraph glyph, called blood-bypass. It allows the user to substitute certain requirements with blood, souls and negative energy instead. It’s sort of like black magic, it’s not very pleasant. The Perished with their usage allowed them to break through the defences and create a backdoor into one of the console’s datadrives,” Kyle told him.

“Right…” Jason sighed, rubbing his forehead.

“There’s something else I need you to know,” the other black-haired young man continued. “You are the key to winning this war, Jason. Not to say that we created you, but you are definitely better than anything we expected to be born in our divination. With you on the case, we have a significantly higher chance of victory over the Perished.”

Jason gave Kyle a look of doubt.

“Me? What’s so special about me? Just ‘cause I’ve fused with the admin console?” he asked the other young man.

“No, no,” Kyle laughed and shook his head. “It’s because you are their natural enemy, Jason! Your principle is not corruption. It’s actually change.”

“What?” Jason answered in bewilderment.

“You’ve mistaken the power you hold, lad,” Kyle told him firmly. “You did not ‘fuse’ with the admin console. You hacked it. It’s similar to corruption, but really, you changed our software, leaving your imprint on all of them,” he nodded to him.

“To the Perished who are paracausal beings, attempting to trigger their authority over causality and use fate as their weapon, you are their natural nemesis. Because you are change. Jason, we believe you can change the grim future awaiting us. We believe you will be the hero to save the Primordial realm from the tyranny of the Perished,” Kyle assured him.

“Everything you’ve done is not in vain. And I’m sure you’re already aware, but originally, we wanted to leave this place to our six disciples, and that was how we got into this mess, in the very first cycle. Never expected that desire to result in the demise of our own essences,” he shrugged. “Either way, someday we still hope to use the altar to leave this realm unscathed behind. Now, it’s just a way for you four to make it back to our primordial realm, your true home, where your loved ones await. We’ll be watching,” Kyle smiled brightly. “So work hard. Everything you’ve done until now is not in vain. It’s only the beginning.”

Everything began to shine around Jason, and he looked around him in shock.

“W-wait! I still have things I need to ask-!” he called out but Kyle only smiled, until Jason found himself standing before the altar again.

He gasped for air, to see the bloodied Kyle collapse to the ground.

“He’s not breathing!” Diana called.

“He’s gone,” Taylor clicked his tongue. “Shit. No Magic is working on him. And his soul’s gone now.”

“Fuck… where are the other five?” Andrew asked.

“They’re in the same shape,” Jason answered, grinding his teeth. “Goddamn it.”

He looked up, to find overhead, the sky had darkened, and a smiling face appeared in the clouds, mocking down at them.

“They think they’ve won…” Jason cackled. “They think they’ve won…” he keeled over, almost going hysterical.

Diana looked up at the cloud with displeasure.

“Are they coming down now?” she asked.

“They can’t, that’s why they need us,” Jason answered, standing back upright again. “With that face, I’m sure they must be saying ‘see? It didn’t work. Now be obedient’, to us. It makes me want to punch them so much more,” he said lowly.

“Jason… what do we do now?” Taylor asked.

“…Andrew, pack up the altar,” Jason said as he conjured a warp gate. “We conscript. Well, Taylor? What do you think? What’s a way for a human vessel to be able to channel unimaginable power?” he asked over his shoulder as Andrew sucked up the altar.

Taylor thought for a long time, unable to answer.

“Well… we would need to do research to have any idea,” he finally settled on his response.

“Good,” Jason grinned, satisfied with Taylor’s answer. “So, well? Let’s fucking go. There are people waiting for us, right?”

While Mercy and other students were busy rebuilding the headquarters, they all heard a whoosh from atop the rubble, and looked up to see four figures descend from the sky.

After coming out a fight where their lives were risked, the two had disappeared without a trace and without a word.

She covered her eyes from the sun as she watched them gently reach the ground.

Running up to them, Mercy saw all four of them were somewhat tattered and battered, including Taylor with a couple of bruises and some dried blood here and there.

Holding back her tears, she struggled a smile for him, to see him looking back down at her warmly.

“Hey… it’s all alright,” he reached up to her cheek, gently wiping away her tear. “Everything’s okay. Sorry we scared you.”

“Of course, yes, it’s all okay. I was just worried about you four,” she giggled back, wiping her eyes dry and smiling back at him.

“It’s good to see you’re safe. Welcome back home.”

“Yeah,” Taylor nodded with a beam. “I’m back.”