87

Of Lightning

It felt like Yindra was taking control of gravity again—levitating Rian against his will. But nothing else happened. It wasn’t even that drastic, only a steady upward pull. But Rian had a strange suspicion that he hadn’t been Yindra’s target.

“What did you just do?” he shouted.

“Oh, you’ll find out soon enough.” The dark sphere encasing Yindra began to fade.

The portal to Miriad was still intact. Rian kept looking toward it, expecting to see his mom coming through it again, but she wasn’t there.

He didn’t understand. If Mom had been sent through the portal, she should’ve ended up back in Miriad. It would’ve been as simple as going through the portal again to rejoin the fight.

Yindra laughed. “My, my. It seems your hubris has come back to bite you, Rian. You pulling all that energy through the portal destabilized it. I guess you’d better hope that Emily made it through before things went awry. Otherwise there’s no telling which universe she could’ve ended up in.”

Yindra casually floated down to stand levelly with him in the air. Even with all the latent power in Rian’s body shining onto the surrounding space like a dim star, there was no fear at all in Yindra.

“We’re stuck here now, Rian,” she said. “There’s no going back. In a few days, that portal will close for good on its own. And now you’re all alone. Mommy’s not coming to help you this time.”

“I don’t need anyone’s help anymore,” Rian said. “And neither is anyone coming to help you. You killed all your Loyalists to absorb their power. Even Tsenira’s dead, by the look of it. No one’s coming back from Purgatory.”

“Oh, don’t you worry, Rian. We’ll make plenty of friends in the millennia to come.”

“There’s no future for you. I can still defeat you on my own.”

In the process of fusing with every Godly Fragment of Goam, Rian had gained access to hundreds of new Mirage skills, but none of them mattered. He didn’t need any of them. All he had to do now was hit Yindra once, and it would be over. Even she couldn’t withstand an attack with infinite Strength behind it regardless of their level difference.

“You’re right,” Yindra admitted. “But can is different than will. You’re a fool to think that you can touch me, with or without the loyal side of you holding back. All that unthinkable Power and you’re still just a flawed human. You have all the Strength but none of the Dexterity to wield it.”

That was true. Even when he tried to use Mirage: Flux to redistribute his infinite Strength into other stats, it wasn’t working. The System couldn’t handle it, throwing an overflow error.

But that was fine.

“You’re wrong about one thing,” Rian said, and Yindra’s smirk faltered to the merest degree. She was only beginning to read the truth from his mind.

“I didn’t fuse with just Goam,” he said.

“What?”

And then Rian’s second self, which he had parked on the surface of the tundra minutes ago, punched the ground and ended the longest Mirage: Cancel he had ever sustained.

Mirage: Cancel still obeyed the rules of the System. It wouldn’t end until he took damage from an external attack or attacked something. He’d had some close calls with the jets, their missiles and gunfire, and even the raining ice pillars, but he’d gotten through unscathed. Even pain didn’t necessarily signify damage—especially considering that everyone’s Vessels were naturally immune to pain itself. And even if he’d taken damage from the Goam crafting method, it didn’t end Mirage: Cancel because the System hadn’t considered it an attack. It was a predesignated way of crafting items.

And in a parallel universe, unseen by Yindra or anyone else, Rian had positioned his other self carefully to stay out of danger and simultaneously perform the same thing that his primary self had: the Goam crafting method.

But with the Godly Fragments of Ezre instead.

Breath of Goam hadn’t just fulfilled its purpose in resonating with every Goam fragment. The Ezre fragments were equally as available.

Still, Rian had found it peculiar that the quintessential Ezre stat was Dexterity. As far as he knew, Ezre was the alignment for offensive magical classes. But he also knew there was overlap in the stat system. The division had never been perfect. Multiple classes used multiple stats.

Because the Four had originally been one being.

As Rian’s split selves now recombined, the strain on the System built to a breaking point. The energy that suffused everything now wasn’t the raw overwhelming grit of Strength but an ethereal field of light that had always been in the background of the System. It was everywhere, formless yet massive like the air itself, an endless potential. An infinite voltage.

LEVEL UP x40! (Lv. 108→148)

Boundless energy rippled through Rian as yet another godly soul combined with him. He felt his body align with an ambient field, and suddenly he was weightless despite the unending reservoir of Strength within him.

Cobalt

Level 148 Monk

Species: Human-Novai-Demigod of Strength and Lightning

HP: 9999/9999

—

Strength: ∞

[Power: ∞]

[Endurance: ∞]

—

Dexterity: ∞

[Agility: ∞]

[Accuracy: ∞]

…

Ezre was the god of Lightning.

Rian saw the overlap between magical offense and Dexterity a little better. It was the essence of movement. It was momentum. Energy in motion. It could generate other things, become a source of Power in its own right.

And with two godly souls within him, Rian not only had control over the inward flow of temporal energy but the outward flow as well. And it was that ability, at its core, that was the foundation of all magic in Miriad: the imparting of energy onto the surrounding fabric of space-time.

Dexterity was control. And when it reached a high enough level, not even Rian’s body could contain it. The boundary between him and the universe had become unstable. His control extended beyond himself.

He could now apply stats externally—to his surroundings.

As soon as the transformation was complete, Rian wasted no time. He imparted some of his Strength onto the battlefield. His body was leaking so much energy that he could tell it was enough to destroy everything if he let it out all at once.

So he reinforced the land. He cast some of his Endurance into the ground, the tundra, and even the air itself. Everything except Yindra. Just enough to prevent the world beneath him from vaporizing from what he was about to do.

When he kicked off the air itself and flew toward Yindra, he moved so fast that the world blurred. Everything in his body strained under the acceleration. It felt like a surging river was passing through him. The air in front of him ignited from compression and the surface of his skin burned away only to heal back instantly. The world had distorted around him, things further away getting darker, things closer getting brighter. Everything was compressing into a line.

He was moving at almost the speed of light.

When he drew back his arm for a punch, space itself rippled in anticipation as if the energy about to be unleashed was leaking into the present from the future.

And as he hurtled toward Yindra, in that infinitesimal sliver of time and space between them, he knew that she had already trapped him.

He wasn’t heading toward her anymore. She had curved his path, altering the shape of space around herself to send him off course. But instead of being flung off into the sky or miles into the Earth, he was being pulled around. He was still traveling in a straight line, but it only appeared that way to him. He was orbiting her, as if Yindra was working to keep the two of them contained.

“Keep pushing yourself,” she said, “and you’ll die just like he did. Scattered into oblivion.”

He didn’t understand. The System was still intact and his Accuracy was infinite. He couldn’t miss. His Dexterity was high enough to affect fate itself. If Yindra was manipulating space to avoid the punch, then—

It was no longer a matter of whether or not the punch would connect. It was a matter of when. Yindra was manipulating time: she was widening the temporal gap between herself and the punch’s impact, and the gap was somehow only getting larger.

Darkness had enveloped half of everything, leaving a wall of nothingness to Rian’s left and all the light of the world distorting itself to fit onto his right.

Yindra had opened a black hole between them to deflect his punch.

Even as Rian attempted to slow down, time was only accelerating further around them. It wasn’t just the effect of his relativistic Dash. The unfathomable increase in gravity that was pulling him around was also slowing down time relative to everything outside of where he was.

Which meant time was speeding up for everything else. Both of them were inside the gravity well of a black hole, close enough for time dilation to take effect.

When Rian finally realized that as long as he intended to attack Yindra, she would only stretch time further, he changed his target—he intended to miss now, and the System reciprocated, ending Yindra’s spell. She had dodged his punch by forcing him to redirect it. Otherwise, she could’ve extended time itself seemingly forever.

When the black hole finally dissipated, he and Yindra were floating in the air again. Rian let the punch miss, and he dispersed all the built-up temporal energy as much as he could, scattering it through the System so that it didn’t destroy the world.

They weren’t in the same place anymore; it couldn’t have been. The tundra was now a frozen hellscape. The sky was dark but for the lightning that jumped between storm clouds hundreds of miles tall. Ice formations the size of mountains covered the land. The air was different—it was thinner, and the temperature was so far below freezing that Rian’s body heat was sapped away instantly.

It looked like they were on an entirely different planet, but Rian knew the truth. They hadn’t gone anywhere. Even Yindra had found it amusing: through the storms, her laughter filled the skies.

They had landed millions of years in the future.

***

“This,” Yindra shouted, spreading her arms as lightning crashed incessantly around them, reflections shining off countless crystal facets of raining ice. “This is what will become of things. This is the future you’re working so hard to protect! What do you see, Rian?”

He saw a world that humanity had moved on from.

“Wrong,” Yindra said. “So wrong you are. This is the end of it—of everything. This world is a grave, and what you’re seeing is the kingdom I’ll build atop it.”

Jagged glaciers of ice casting mountainous shadows beneath the lightning. Hail like broken glass in hurricane winds, a never-ending maelstrom.

“I pushed the Earth out of orbit of the Sun,” Yindra said. “I gave your world the future it deserves: a lonely, pitiful existence as you hurtle forever into the void!”

Rian ignored her. It might’ve been true that time was irreversible. A one-way road. There was no going back, no undoing what had already happened.

But that was only true on Earth. It was only true outside of the Mirage System.

Rian had experienced it firsthand: it was possible to open bridges between the past and future under certain conditions. The conversation with his mom was proof of it.

If he was going to return to the past, then he had to accept that he couldn’t change the future. He had to bind that promise onto the Mirage System itself and enforce it with absolute authority.

Faith. That was all he could rely on. Faith that humanity would live on elsewhere when their world died, when this world of ice came to be. It was already happening—had already been happening. Yindra’s actions had only sped things up.

Rian had to let this future come to pass. In exchange, he could only avert other things in the present. Indeed, he sensed nothing of Yindra’s presence beyond herself here, in the future. Whatever had happened, Yindra was no longer a part of this world, and even she was in denial of it. Rian could sense it with his Perception, a tinge of fear on the outskirts of her mind. This was not a world that she was reigning over.

So Rian cast out his field of godly control, latched onto the Mirage System, and opened a rift in time.