76

The End of the Beginning

Everything was bright. That was all he knew. An endless light, surrounding him.

A thousand memories stirred within—of other places, people, and creatures. Of a deadened land, the Penumbra. And of Yindra.

The feeling resolved into touch, warmth; into the smell of ozone, of a passing storm. He could breathe again, and as his lungs expanded, he could sense his body.

There was so much energy in the air that Rian felt like he was standing inside the sun. But it wasn’t unbearable. It was only warm.

When he opened his eyes, everything came surging back into sharp relief: the Penumbra, the arena.

The dead forests, the red sky, the floating mirrors.

He could hear the wind moving across the landscape, the subtle breaths of people nearby, and even the movement of distant creatures.

He looked down at his hands, still encased in the Mecha-Gauntlets. His arms were more muscular than ever, wound as tightly as steel wire.

And his clothes, once a set of short-sleeved Monk robes, were now a stark black martial arts uniform.

The air around him crackled with electricity, small arcs of lightning leaving afterimages as if they were traveling paths of broken space—artifacts of a universe once shattered, now mended.

When he looked up, Kat and Maia were staring at him in horror.

Kat stuttered. “Rian, you’re…”

I’m alive?

He glanced at some System text that he’d missed. There was a ton of it, though several of the text boxes were unreadable, cracked like glass. He looked at the top-most message.

You have learned Mirage: Flux!

Mirage: Flux (Level 1 [MAX])

667 MP

Cooldown: 60 seconds

Activation cost: 1 Colorless Tesseract

When cast, allows player to temporarily redistribute their inherent attribute points. All changes revert after 60 seconds or can be canceled by using 1 Colorless Tesseract.

What is going on? When he mouthed the words, something felt wrong. He ran his tongue along his teeth.

He had fangs.

“What just happened?” he said. It felt like he had to be extra careful not to bite his mouth just from talking.

When he cautiously reached up and touched the top of his head, four horns were protruding from his scalp.

He tried to open his inventory but couldn’t. He tried to open his stat page, surprised to find that it was viewable. The first thing he noticed was that he couldn’t see his attributes anymore. The lower half of his page was cracked like broken glass.

The second thing he noticed was that his level was far, far higher than it had been before.

And the third was a species attribute.

Cobalt

[Moonlight]

Level 64 Monk

Species: Human-Novai

HP: 4801/5765

…

The surreality of it hadn’t begun to hit him. He hadn’t become Corvis, or swapped bodies with him, as he’d initially thought.

They had merged.

Corvis, who had been dying from interfering in their fight, had woven his power into Rian’s body using his obsidian staff. It had looked to Rian as if Corvis had bridged several parallel universes to do so.

Rian had never seen Corvis’s true level, but he’d estimated it at somewhere in the upper 80s according to what they’d fought upon entering the Penumbra.

That would put my level at…halfway between mine and his.

Drawing Rian out of his stream of thoughts, Devon groaned. He was still lying there, pinned beneath the original obsidian staff. There was no sign of the second one—or Corvis—anywhere.

Blood welled from Devon’s chest and rolled from his mouth. “It’s not fair,” he mumbled. He was quietly crying. “I can’t believe you actually….”

Why’s there so much blood? He doesn’t look like he’s in pain, just shocked, but…

The System wasn’t answering him, of course. It wasn’t offering much information since he’d entered the Penumbra. And yet Rian had the distinct feeling that he’d stepped outside the game, that he was seeing things from an entirely different perspective.

Everything felt different: the way the wind touched his skin, how the sliver of sunlight emerging past Yindra’s tower warmed his face. It felt more solid, somehow. Less hollow. Unified.

When he paid closer attention to how his body felt, it struck him all at once.

He could feel pain—not just the anticipation of it, but the cold, harsh ache in his bones, the strain in his muscles from fighting. The cuts across his skin. Old scars that didn’t belong to him.

And when he directed his attention elsewhere, he could hear the obsidian staff calling to him.

Rian brought up his arm and slowly reached, splaying his fingers.

The Eye of Ezre upon the staff’s top end opened, and the air burned.

A distant, hellish scream resounded. Rian could feel it resonating within him, with everything nearby. The Obliteration keyword of the staff, the glare of the Eye, gazed into his soul. It called into the void and sang a melody of annihilation.

Devon exploded.

Fragments of his body went flying, then circled back around as if the explosion had reversed itself. A black hole opened within the Eye of Ezre, and all of Devon was pulled in, limbs spiraling into it like being flushed down a drain.

The Eye closed. The staff shuddered as if struggling to contain something before shattering into hundreds of pieces. The Eye remained at first, hovering, then disappeared into a small, momentary vortex.

Rian stood there a moment, confused. Then he recalled something Kat had told him about unique Godly Fragments—how items crafted with them were set to expire after a certain amount of time, at which point the item would break and the fragment would reenter circulation within the game.

All that remained of the staff were obsidian shards, shining black glass on the ground.

Rian looked down at his arms again. Despite everything, he still felt like himself. It didn’t feel like Corvis’s presence or personality had melded perfectly with him. But when he searched his thoughts, there were memories—new ones. Of a life he’d never lived. Of a harsh journey, survival beneath a red sky. Of divine revelation, the moment Yindra had chosen Corvis to become one of her Loyalists.

It was Corvis’s life, flashing before Rian’s eyes as if his final moments had come.

Rian didn’t understand. He hadn’t fulfilled his promise yet. He was supposed to kill the Godslayer before Corvis handed everything over to him—though Rian hadn’t really anticipated that had meant all of Corvis.

Maybe Devon had truly been the Godslayer. And then a memory echoed through Rian, nothing more than a feeling, but it struck him with such conviction. It was what Corvis had believed with unfailing certainty.

It’s inevitable now, the feeling said. The future is clear.

The path you’re on will lead to the Godslayer’s destruction.

Imagery flashed through Rian’s mind. A tower of black like Corvis’s staff piercing a tundra. A sky-bound ring of blue. Clouds rushing away against hurricane winds. The sense of power, the divine majesty of the sight brought tears to his eyes. All of it was wrapped up within Yindra’s presence.

It was a vision of the Godslayer’s demise—and it wasn’t here, but elsewhere.

Yindra had given Corvis a glimpse of the future the moment before he had sacrificed himself.

“It is done,” Ossyra said with great effort as if she’d been holding her breath. Her words broke the silence that Rian had only now noticed. But when he reflected on it, the silence had lasted just a few seconds.

Time hadn’t slowed down. It was that he was thinking much, much faster than before.

“You’ve fully integrated with this world, Rian,” Ossyra said. “Your body is now permanent. It is no longer just a Vessel.”

“Permanent? But I thought I was already—”

“It means you have transcended the System. No more half-sync. No more Cognitive Mirror. No more playing the GMs’ games. Your power can now exceed the boundaries that they artificially placed around your Vessel. Welcome,” she said, smiling, “to the post-game.” She gestured to him—to his body. “Try it, Rian. Feel the power.”

He threw a jab and felt the air part around his fist. It was so fast that he had trouble seeing his own motion, and his body felt so light that there was almost no strain despite the speed. Though he couldn’t see his stats directly, he could tell that his Power, Agility, and Perception had massively increased.

The wounds on his body had already healed as well. He hadn’t noticed before, but his HP was steadily ticking back up to full without any apparent healing spells.

He wondered if he had access to Corvis’s class skills or even his massive inventory, but it didn’t seem so. His inventory hadn’t changed, and there was no feeling of having mental access to something new like he usually did with skills, and he had no way of checking for sure with portions of his System disabled.

“Your half-human, half-novai body has some extra perks to it,” Ossyra said. “We novai have inherent regenerative abilities and a particularly high Perception stat. But that’s only the beginning.”

As she spoke, Kat and Maia began to venture closer, caution in their eyes. It seemed they were afraid to come between Ossyra and him.

Ossyra stepped closer to him as well. “You can channel temporal energy now, Rian. You’ve obtained Yindra alignment. You should be able to harness fragments of the System itself, something that normal Vessels can only dream of doing.”

He wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but he gave it a try anyway, concentrating on…something new. A distant feeling. When he focused, he could feel a radiant energy suffusing the air, his body, and everything and everyone nearby.

“Close your eyes,” Ossyra said.

He listened, perceived the flowing energy more clearly now. After a moment, he entered Meditation.

He could hear the clinking of Ossyra’s pocket watch as she moved nearer. “Now draw it close,” she said.

As if it was listening to his will, the energy in the environment surged toward him. When it met his skin with an electric feeling, he opened his eyes. A golden haze surrounded him like slow-burning flames.

It was the same aura as that of a golden tesseract. But it felt limitless, like he could keep drawing it toward himself until the entire air was saturated with energy.

“And pull it in,” Ossyra said.

Power flooded his body. He noticed something he never had before: an empty space, a hollow feeling within him on a level that was beyond physical.

Temporal energy filled it completely. He felt whole in a way like never before, like he’d been dying of thirst for so long that he’d forgotten what water was. It was so all-consuming, so gratifying, that he could even feel stability returning to the System itself—long enough for System text to crowd his sight before vanishing again.

LEVEL UP! (Lv. 64→65)

Combo Attack level MAX! (Lv. 10)

Meditate level MAX! (Lv. 10)

Counter Critical level MAX! (Lv. 10)

Earthen Resonance level MAX! (Lv. 10)

Spirit Fists level MAX! (Lv. 10)

Charge Punch level MAX! (Lv. 10)

Vital Strike level MAX! (Lv. 10)

Parry level MAX! (Lv. 10)

He almost had to laugh at how easy it was, how much power he felt. It was like he was using cheat codes. And that probably wasn’t too far off from what he was doing, bending the System to his will.

The stat boosts he got from leveling up seemed automatic now as if he could no longer assign attribute points, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t care. The taste of power he was experiencing was unlike anything that had come before.

It felt…intoxicating.

He wanted more of it already.

Ossyra smiled. “And that,” she said, “is the power of a human-novai Vessel.”

Rian turned to see Kat and Maia nearby, both of them still staring at him with worry. Up close, they were covered in scrapes, cuts, and burns from their fight against Devon. Some of the wounds were still bleeding.

“Is it…still you?” Kat said.

“Yeah, I—I think,” Rian said. But the truth was that even he wasn’t sure.

Kat and Maia stepped around, looking him up and down as if to take it all in. But all he could focus on was their wounds. Their HP bars weren’t full. It was like they were walking around oblivious to their injuries.

“Kat, you’re—” He stuttered, and she glanced up at him. “You’re hurt.”

“What?” She glanced aside at where her HP bar would be on her HUD. “No, I’m not.”

They couldn’t see it.

“My HP’s at full,” Kat said quietly, confused.

With dread, Rian thought, Has it always been like this? All the violence. The blood.

They’d never been able to see it.

Maia peered at Kat, then jostled her staff and cast a healing spell on the both of them. Their wounds closed and the bleeding stopped, but their clothes were still bloodstained.

“Any different?” Maia asked.

Kat shook her head, but all Rian could do was stare. It was like their Vessels and their perceptions of themselves had de-synced from each other.

Of course, he thought. They can’t feel pain. Vessels can’t even perceive it. But the Miracian natives can.

He felt a horrible chill.

And they always could.

Maia seemed to relax. She stepped up to Rian and lifted his arm as if to inspect just how muscular he’d gotten. Then she stared at Ossyra. “Well, I have no idea what’s going on right now,” Maia said, “but it looks like he won the match at least. Right?”

“Yes,” Ossyra said. “Rian will now advance to the final round of Fata Morgana S. It will soon be time to unleash his true potential.”

Rian flexed his hands. Yet again, something was different—a new feeling, like his body was getting heavier if he thought a certain way. Like gravity was steadily increasing on him. But it wasn’t a change in gravity.

It was the force of his body being pushed upwards into levitation.

I can…fly?

He focused on the feeling, tried to reproduce it. Corvis had been floating around all day, but Rian hadn’t considered that it would take practice.

He got a few feet off the ground, then lost his balance and fell, crash-landing. Kat and Maia stepped back, frightened again.

Sitting there and feeling humbled, he thought, Well, this seems vaguely familiar. It was like he was back in the plains outside Thile Harbor again, learning how to control his Vessel for the first time.

Ossyra laughed. It was strangely melodious, almost comforting to hear. “Now that you’ve had your fun,” she said, “I need you to listen carefully, Rian. There’s not much time left, and what happens next is critical. After you defeat Trini, you—”

Everything shifted.

A dozen parallel universes suddenly moved again as if Ossyra’s words had broken reality, the sound of a hundred panes of glass sliding against each other.

Space distorted at several points around the arena, forming portals.

“Oh,” Ossyra said. “This isn’t good. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to disappear for a moment.” She turned toward Kat and Maia. “I suggest you log out. Leave the Penumbra. Immediately.”

“But—” Rian started.

“There’s nothing more they can do for you,” Ossyra told him. “Something wicked is coming. An enormous amount of power is gathering here. Whatever it is, it’s enough to potentially break the System. It’s not worth risking their lives over.” The ghost of a smirk played at her lips. “And besides, where you’re going, there isn’t much that can help you.”

Ossyra vanished, but Rian had the sense that she was still there, just invisible.

“You’re not gonna explain anything or…” Rian sighed.

Kat and Maia looked at each other, then at him.

“You’ve really been stuck in the game, this whole time?” Kat said. “You can’t log out?”

Rian nodded. “I was afraid to tell you—to tell anyone.”

“I—” Kat glanced away, chewed her lip. “I saw your obituary.”

Silence hung in the air between them all. Hearing that was horrifying in ways that Rian couldn’t fully grasp.

He finally had outside confirmation that his Earth body was dead.

Kat shook her head. “What should we do? It sounded like Ossyra meant…that we’re risking our actual lives if we stay.”

“Yeah,” Rian said, “it doesn’t sound good. You should go. I don’t really know what’s happening yet,” to me or to us, he thought, “but I think we can trust her.”

Kat stepped up to him and they hugged each other. She felt so frail in his arms—not that she was. It was that he was so much stronger now that he was afraid of hurting her.

But she wouldn’t even know, Rian thought, and it was mortifying. She can’t feel pain. She can’t even see her Vessel’s injuries.

“I’m sorry,” Kat said. “I didn’t mean to push you away, before. I didn’t know there was so much going on with you and—”

“It’s okay. I’ll see you in the Overworld once this is all done. We’ll catch up then.”

Someone emerged through a portal at the far end of the arena. As Kat backed away from Rian, they all turned to watch. It was a man in plate armor with giant white wings that were tattered and burnt. He landed and started running toward the group.

Is that…

Rian squinted, then realized he didn’t need to. He could see so much further than before; he just needed to focus properly.

The man running toward them was Pitune. The Paladin that Rian had sparred with in Nostdal.

“Y’all better hurry up the teary goodbye,” Maia said. “That guy’s closing in on us pretty fast, and I have a real bad feeling about it.”

Rian still wanted to ask them so many things—about the Sacred Quest, what it entailed, why Kat had embarked on it in the first place, and why the System was supposedly so aggressive toward anyone who participated in it. But there just wasn’t enough time.

At the very least, he’d gotten something from it. There were two uses remaining for Breath of Goam.

Kat met his gaze. “What about you? Are you really staying here?”

“Whatever’s coming, I don’t have a choice,” Rian said. “I have to face it.” He glanced at the black tower eclipsing the sun. “I didn’t come all this way just to back out now.”

Kat nodded, but there was reluctance in her eyes. Even Maia seemed concerned.

Rian hoped they couldn’t see the fear settling into him.

Everything was changing—had begun to change—in ways that he didn’t feel ready for. He was still adapting to this new body, still processing the loss of Corvis. And now that he and Kat were being forced to part ways again, he found himself suddenly afraid that everything was about to change even further, hurtling down unforeseen paths toward destinations he’d never expected.

Please, Rian thought. Just a little more. Stay with me for just a bit longer. But the sound of approaching footsteps from Pitune was the ticking of a clock that counted down the moments they had left.

“Rian,” Kat said. She looked like she wished to tell him something. “Good luck.”

She and Maia logged out in a swirl of blue particles.

Rian wiped his eyes and turned to face the newcomer.