262 The Eclipse
262 The Eclipse
Guesswork reached for the remote and turned the television on, trying to sound casual despite the blaring alarms echoing through the building.
“Who knows?” he said with forced optimism. “Might just be a wrong forecast.”
It sounded less like confidence and more like wishful thinking, especially with the entire office complex screaming red alert through the intercom system.
The news channel was already broadcasting emergency footage.
A shaken reporter spoke rapidly while the camera panned across burning streets.
“—breaking news coming in from multiple major cities across the globe. Authorities are reporting widespread arson, riots, and violent incidents that began moments after the unprecedented eclipse appeared in the sky.”
The footage switched to chaotic scenes.
Cars burned in the middle of intersections. People ran through the streets while others attacked each other without hesitation. One man tackled another and tore at his throat with his teeth before moving to assault someone else nearby.
My stomach tightened.
“It has to be the Entity,” I muttered, wincing at the screen.
The broadcast cut to another camera feed.
A wild-eyed man stood atop a vehicle, arms raised toward the darkened sun.
“Glory to the End!” he screamed hysterically. “The Exodus has begun! Only the faithful will be accepted in the new world! Rejoice beneath the dark sun!”
Guesswork frowned as he moved toward his desk.
“The red alert isn’t because of the eclipse,” he said while activating a holographic computer display.
Layers of data appeared in the air above the desk as he scanned them quickly.
“Damn it,” he muttered. “This world is isolated right now. If we need reinforcements from outside, we won’t be able to get them immediately.”
He began typing commands at high speed.
“I’ll coordinate with Nicole and anyone else I can reach,” he continued. “What about you?”
Before I could answer, the television suddenly erupted into static.
The news feed vanished.
In its place appeared the image of a hooded man whose features were almost completely obscured by shadow.
Guesswork cursed immediately.
“Fuck. Someone just hijacked the broadcast network,” he said while checking another screen. “This looks global.”
The hooded figure leaned closer to the camera.
“Greetings,” he said calmly. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am a faithful servant of the Church of the End.”
His tone carried a strange mixture of pride and contempt.
“For years you have called us a cult,” he continued. “A group of inferior, narrow-minded fools clinging to superstition.”
The man chuckled softly.
“But we are not something so crude. Our faith is pure. Our devotion is true. While you mocked us, we prepared for this day.”
I walked toward the television.
Instead of stopping in front of it, I stepped directly into the screen. The world bent around me. Rather than entering the television itself, my intangibility followed the signal back to its origin. The distance between here and the broadcast location folded like paper.
I emerged through the lens of the camera.
The cultist recoiled in shock as I literally crawled out of the equipment and landed on my feet in the middle of their broadcast room.
There were only two people present, the hooded speaker and the cameraman.
“I must be seeing a ghost,” whispered the cameraman with wide eyes.
I straightened slowly.
“No, I’m plenty alive,” I said. “And the name is Eclipse.”
I briefly glanced toward the camera before swinging my right hand through the air. Warp folded along my arm like a blade. The strike removed the cameraman’s head instantly. His body collapsed beside the tripod while my hand dripped with blood. I phased the blood away from my skin and shook my fingers lightly.
Then I turned toward the speaker.
He immediately dropped to his knees.
“Please!” he cried. “Save me! My lord will protect me!”
His voice shook as he pressed his forehead against the floor.
“Please don’t kill me! God will smite you down if you touch his servant!”
I considered my options. I could try to play the hero or I could continue the role the world already believed I belonged to. I thought about it carefully.
“O ye of lost f-faith,” remarked the cultist. “If you spare me, my god shall g-grant you salvation!”
In the end, the choice didn’t really matter. All that mattered was keeping this world safe and killing the Entity. I stepped forward and tore the cultist’s heart out of his chest. The organ beat once in my hand before I tossed it aside.
I turned toward the camera.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” I said calmly.
My fist phased forward and crushed the camera into fragments.
With a thought and a little more effort, I teleported.
The concept behind it was surprisingly simple once I understood the essence of my power. Intangibility wasn’t just about phasing through objects. At a higher level, it meant phasing through distance itself. If I treated the space between Point A and Point B as something that could be made intangible, then crossing it became trivial.
All I needed was a clear image of the destination.
If the picture in my mind was stable enough, I could simply remove the space between here and there.
I had no real idea what the limits of my current power were. Intangibility-30 had already broken every framework we used to measure abilities. The old rating system simply didn’t apply anymore.
Still, I doubted my power worked the same way Griffin’s mutated Chimera Source did. Her abilities rewrote biology and physics through raw mutation. Mine bent reality by phasing its structure.
They were different principles.
I opened my eyes slowly. A wave of nausea rolled through my stomach from the sudden displacement. The sky above me was dark.
Below me stretched the Devil’s Triangle.
I hovered silently above it for a moment.
The place had changed.
What used to be a bizarre patch of exposed seabed had expanded drastically. The ocean had withdrawn even farther from the region, revealing an enormous triangular scar on the planet’s surface.
Now that I thought about it, the reason this place had always been important suddenly became obvious.
Briana’s Trench.
The deepest trench in the world sat directly within this region. If the Cult of the End had built an underwater base here years ago, it actually made perfect sense. Whatever they were searching for had always been buried deep below this exact location.
I descended slowly and landed on the exposed ground.
“Who’s in charge here?” I called out. “Bring me to your highest commanding officer.”
Several people nearby turned toward me immediately.
Judging by their reactions, my face wasn’t exactly recognizable anymore.
A group of technicians and security personnel stared at me with obvious confusion.
One of them frowned.
“Which faction are you from?”
Another worker crossed his arms.
“Walking in here like you own the place. Someone clearly lacks respect in his bones.”
A third man glanced at my suit.
“Looks like Company style tailoring,” he muttered. “Maybe he’s one of theirs.”
I resisted the urge to sigh. Maybe I should have worn the porcelain mask. Apparently even the Company personnel stationed here didn’t recognize me.
A sudden gust of wind swept across the trench. A cape descended from the air and landed nearby, hovering slightly above the ground with controlled flight.
“What’s the problem here?” he asked sharply. “I’m the current overseer of this site.”
He looked around at the gathered personnel.
“What’s going on?”
Before anyone else could answer, a voice spoke from behind the crowd.
A red-scaled lizardman stepped out from one of the nearby buildings, casually sipping coffee from a paper cup. He wore a Company uniform and looked like he had just come out for a break. The moment his eyes landed on me, he froze. His cup slipped from his hand and hit the ground. His eyes widened so much I thought they might fall out of his skull.
“Greetings, Boss!” he shouted loudly. “It’s good to see you are back!”
Redscale.
I remembered him now. One of the prisoners we had freed from the Box.
The reaction immediately caused murmurs to spread through the surrounding personnel. There were far more people stationed here than the last time I had seen this place. Security forces, engineers, and an alarming number of lab coats filled the area.
Clearly the site had grown into something important over the past two years.
I turned my attention back to the flying GDF cape.
“What’s your name?” I asked calmly.
He straightened slightly.
“I’m sorry,” he said cautiously, “but I’m going to have to ask you to stand down until we verify—”
I removed his flight by phasing the distance between him and the ground.
It took less than a thought.
The air stopped supporting him and he dropped unceremoniously to the ground.
I looked down at him.
“I could make it so you’re buried underneath this trench,” I said quietly. “Disassembled atom by atom by the ocean bed you’re standing on.”
The murmuring around us suddenly intensified.
Someone whispered nervously.
“Wait… that’s him.”
Another voice followed.
“I thought Eclipse was dead.”
A third person leaned closer to their friend.
“He disappeared two years ago. What is he doing here?”
The GDF cape slowly pushed himself back to his feet. To his credit, he didn’t look frightened. He looked stubborn. His voice remained steady.
“How do I know you’re the real one?” he asked. “There have been multiple Eclipse impersonators over the past two years. For all I know, you’re just another one of them.”
He made a damn good point.
The memory of Paleman impersonating me flashed through my mind. Back then he nearly assassinated me, dragged my name through the mud, and almost hurt the people I cared about by pretending to be me. That stunt alone had poisoned my reputation in ways I still hadn’t fully repaired.
Hell, I had Chad impersonate me myself whenever I needed to disappear off world.
That explained the hostility surrounding me now.
Several SRC special forces soldiers already had their weapons trained on my chest. GDF personnel followed their lead, forming a defensive perimeter around the trench command site. The only ones not immediately aiming at me were the Company capes, and even they looked painfully uncertain about whether they should intervene.
There were probably formal procedures for dealing with impersonators. Authentication channels, command verification, or some bureaucratic ritual designed to prevent exactly this kind of situation.
Instead, I had simply appeared out of nowhere and demanded control.
The entire point of faking my death had been to kill Eclipse as an identity. If things went well, I wanted to leave that life behind after my job was done.
But what did I do the moment I came back?
I hijacked a broadcast, killed a cultist on camera while pretending to reassure the public, and then showed up here ignoring every protocol in place.
I rubbed my forehead briefly.
“We’re out of time,” I said finally. “I’m sorry, but I’m taking command.”
The GDF overseer stiffened.
“I respect your sense of responsibility,” I continued calmly, “but this situation is out of your hands.”
Before he could respond, a Company employee sprinted out of one of the nearby buildings holding a laptop.
“It’s true!” he shouted breathlessly. “It’s really him! Confirmation came directly from the chairwoman!”
He turned the screen toward the crowd.
Nicole’s face appeared on the display.
She looked exhausted, her hair messy as if she had just woken up in the middle of the night.
“I don’t even have time to scold you,” she said irritably. “What’s—”
The screen abruptly dissolved into static. At the same moment, shadows swept across the trench. Everyone instinctively looked upward as more than a dozen massive ships hovered above us. It was the height of what I’d describe interstellar engineering.
Someone near me shouted in panic.
“It’s a bombardment! Take cover!”
The ships opened fire.
Fiery streams of energy weapons rained down toward the trench command site. The blasts struck with enough power that even high-tier invulnerability capes would struggle to survive direct hits.
I reacted instantly.
The space beneath us became intangible.
Every discharge phased through the ground instead of detonating on impact.
The earth trembled violently as the attacks tore through deeper layers of rock and soil. Chunks of the trench floor collapsed inward as the structural integrity of the exposed seabed failed.
Then the ships launched their second wave.
Dozens of metallic spheres fell from the sky. They struck the ground and rolled briefly before lighting up. Each sphere disassembled itself mid-air, unfolding into circular portal frames. Cultists began pouring out of them.
I had expected the Cult of the End to rely purely on fanaticism and brute force. Instead they arrived with technology sophisticated enough to rival established powers.
“Flyers, take it low!” I shouted across the battlefield. “SRC special forces, focus on their deployed superpowered units!”
The combat zone erupted into chaos.
“Projectile capes, target the spheres before more troops deploy! Anyone confident in their durability, cover the ground teams!”
Energy blasts and power effects filled the air.
Every sphere and cultist that entered my line of sight phased downward into the seabed as if gravity had suddenly decided to betray them.
But the cultists adapted quickly.
Flak bursts exploded around me, and dense smokescreens spread through the air to block my vision.
They had clearly prepared for someone like me.
I ascended higher into the sky to gain a better view of the battlefield.
From above, the Briana’s Trench looked like a war zone already collapsing into itself. The cultists weren’t just attacking randomly. Several groups were escorting a single figure through the chaos.
The man running at the center of their formation had explosives strapped across his entire body.
A suicide bomber.
I accelerated.
Space folded as I phased into superspeed.
In the next instant I grabbed the fanatic by the collar and hurled him upward directly toward one of the hovering ships.
He detonated against its hull.
The explosion should have torn through the vessel.
Instead, a thick energy barrier flared to life and absorbed the blast.
Below me, the remaining cultists screamed their devotion.
“Glory to the End!” they shouted while charging forward. “The dark sun rises!”
Several of them leapt directly at me. However, it was futile. I glanced down. Their bodies phased into the trench floor before they could even reach striking distance.