The Unwanted Shadow(1)
To grasp the sheer absurdity of what had just unfolded within the Abyssal Rift, one first had to understand what the Abyss truly was.
The Abyss was not a world.
It was not a realm.
It was the Void given form.
A forgotten graveyard drifting between countless realities, where shattered dimensions, extinct civilizations, and broken laws of existence were discarded to decay for eternity.
Everything abandoned by creation eventually found its way into the Abyss.
And once something fell into that endless darkness...
It never returned unchanged.
Within this place, strength was never measured by levels.
Nor by titles.
Nor by meaningless numbers.
Power was defined by only one thing.
The weight of existence.
The greater one's existence, the more reality itself bent beneath their presence.
At the lowest depths wandered the Crawlers.
Mindless creatures driven by nothing but endless hunger, devouring anything unfortunate enough to cross their path.
Above them stood the Hounds.
Predators born solely to hunt.
Relentless.
Merciless.
Patient enough to stalk prey for years if necessary.
Higher still were the Behemoths and the Goliaths.
Monstrous calamities created by the Abyss itself.
Each one was the living embodiment of catastrophe.
The mere act of one awakening was enough to erase entire human cities from existence.
Even nations feared the possibility of encountering one.
Yet all of them...
Every beast.
Every monster.
Every calamity.
Were insignificant before those who ruled the deepest layers of the Abyss.
Far below, where even darkness was crushed into nothingness...
Where light itself was reduced to black dust beneath impossible pressure...
There existed only a handful of beings.
The true sovereigns of the Abyss.
S-Rank Entities.
Existences so overwhelming that even reality instinctively rejected their presence.
Every one of them possessed authority capable of rewriting the fate of worlds.
Every one of them was a disaster beyond mortal comprehension.
Vespera was one of those beings.
A Void Succubus.
Not a common demon, but a member of the Abyssal Aristocracy.
A race forged within the dying hearts of corrupted stars, tempered beneath pressures capable of collapsing dimensions.
In her true domain...
A single beat of her obsidian wings could fracture an entire continent.
A single glance from her radiant crimson eyes could bring the oceans of a lesser world to a violent boil.
She was a living catastrophe.
A being born from nightmares and temptation.
An existence so terrifying that even gods chose not to meet her gaze.
Which only made the current situation infinitely more humiliating.
Why...
Why was an S-Rank Entity of the Deep Abyss being sent flying across a cavern by nothing more than an oversized magma lizard?
The answer was painfully simple.
Dimensional Suppression.
Earth was nothing more than a Shallow Zone.
Its planetary mana density was laughably thin, protected by incomplete cosmic laws left behind by a Dimensional Merge that had only just begun.
The moment Vespera crossed from the Deep Abyss into Earth's Rift, the world instinctively rejected her existence.
It was no different from forcing a blazing star into a fragile glass bottle.
The System immediately intervened.
Her Abyssal Core was sealed beneath countless invisible chains.
Ninety-five percent of her true power disappeared in an instant.
Every breath became unbearably heavy.
Every movement felt unnaturally sluggish.
Every fragment of mana she controlled fought against the world's oppressive laws.
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She was experiencing the cosmic equivalent of dragging a deep-sea leviathan onto dry land.
A creature that should have ruled the abyssal depths...
Reduced to gasping beneath an unfamiliar sky.
Her overwhelming physical strength had fallen from World-Ender to barely City-Breaker.
Her once limitless mana reserves were crippled.
Her absolute authority over space itself had been completely sealed.
Even folding reality with a thought had become impossible.
Meanwhile...
The Rank-A Abyssal Behemoth before her suffered from none of those restrictions.
It had been born inside this volcanic abyss.
It breathed the surrounding mana.
It hunted here.
It ruled here.
Every stone.
Every river of molten magma.
Every current of mana favored the beast.
It was fighting on its own throne.
The battle had never been fair.
Not because the Behemoth was stronger.
But because one side fought while wrapped in countless invisible chains.
The other fought completely free.
Boom!
The Behemoth's colossal tail slammed into Vespera's side like a falling mountain.
The impact shattered the cavern wall.
Stone exploded in every direction.
Her body tore through layers of jagged bedrock before crashing to a halt.
Crack!
One of her obsidian wings bent at an unnatural angle.
The second splintered moments later.
For an instant...
Silence filled the cavern.
The Behemoth let out a victorious roar that shook the molten lake beneath it.
Vespera slowly pushed herself upright.
Black blood glittering with fragments of starlight dripped from the corner of her lips.
She looked at the blood.
Then at the beast.
Her crimson eyes narrowed.
There was no fear.
Not even a trace.
Only rage.
Pure.
Absolute.
World-ending rage.
The surrounding mana trembled.
The temperature inside the cavern plummeted despite the rivers of magma flowing nearby.
Her patience...
Had finally run out.
I...
Lost?
To this?
Her lips curled into a smile.
It wasn't amused.
It wasn't graceful.
It was terrifying.
A smile that belonged to something no world should ever witness.
I am Vespera.
A Void Succubus.
One of the Abyssal Aristocracy.
I have watched civilizations disappear into the Void.
I have stood beneath dying stars.
I have walked through battlefields where even gods ceased to exist.
...And this oversized reptile dares to strike me?
Unforgivable.
She slowly closed her eyes.
Ignoring the pain.
Ignoring the chains wrapped around her very soul.
She reached toward the deepest part of her Abyssal Core.
Toward the overwhelming power sealed beneath the world's suppression.
Toward the blazing heart that could reduce worlds to ashes.
One chain...
Then another...
Began to tremble.
Soul Burn.
A forbidden Abyssal technique.
By sacrificing her own life force, she could forcefully shatter the Dimensional Suppression binding her existence.
For a few brief moments...
She would reclaim her true power.
The Behemoth would cease to exist before it could even comprehend death.
The price, however, was equally absolute.
Her soul would be drained to its limit.
She would fall into a coma that could last a hundred years.
She didn't care.
Her pride demanded blood.
The air grew heavy with the scent of ozone and burning marrow.
Vespera drew a ragged, desperate breath. Around her, the subterranean sea of magma began to defy gravity, floating upward in glowing, incandescent spheres as her suppressed True Cosmic Authority leaked into the atmosphere. She was ready to ignite her very soul.
And then, the mortal pulled the trigger.
BOOM—!
It was not a sound; it was an execution.
A streak of white-hot, kinetic violence ripped through the cavernous abyss. It completely bypassed the Magma Behemoth's supposedly impenetrable volcanic armor, boring cleanly through its temporal bone and violently detonating its brain stem.
The colossal, towering apex predator stiffened. A split second later, its massive skull erupted from the inside out in a geyser of black blood and melted stone.
Vespera stopped her Soul Burn mid-ignition.
The backlash made her cough up a mist of dark blood, but she didn't even notice. Trembling, she pushed herself up from the smoking rubble, wiping the crimson from her pale lips, her mind completely blank. She stared in utter disbelief as the shattered, headless corpse of the Behemoth collapsed forward, triggering a massive tidal wave of lava.
Slowly, her gaze traced the trajectory of the phantom bullet.
Through the thick, swirling sulfur smoke, across a thousand meters of empty, lethal space, her crimson eyes locked onto a tiny, insignificant human silhouette lying prone on a distant, crumbling ridge.
A mortal.
A mortal with a completely shattered mana core, holding a crude weapon of primitive, un-enchanted metal.
He hadn't just saved her from burning her own soul to ashes.
He had stolen her kill.
For the first time in ten thousand years, Vespera, the Void Succubus Queen, felt an emotion that was entirely alien to her divine nature.
Unadulterated, intoxicating curiosity.
***
A thousand meters away, up on the high ridge, Kaelen Cross was currently dealing with the brutal reality of basic physics.
"Fuck," Kael hissed through clenched teeth.
He didn't scream.
He didn't scream because screaming wasted oxygen, and oxygen was the only thing keeping him conscious right now.
His face was deathly pale, a cold sweat washing across his heavily scarred forehead.
Rolling onto his back against the jagged, razor-sharp stone, he gasped for air like a drowning man.
The entire right side of his torso felt like it had been pulverized by a runaway hyper-train.
The recoil of the Vanguard MK-IV, combined with the explosive backlash of forcing unstable, corrupted monster-core mana through a fractured, non-magical chamber, had been catastrophic.
His right shoulder was completely dislocated, the joint popped violently out of its socket and resting somewhere near his collarbone.
Speaking of his collarbone, a hairline fracture was currently sending blinding, white-hot spikes of agony straight into his nervous system with every single heartbeat.
He glanced to his side.
The thick, star-metal barrel of the Vanguard rifle was glowing a blinding magnesium-white, completely warped, melted, and ruined. It was a one-and-done shot.
A weapon meant to kill gods, reduced to a melted pipe.
"Worth it," Kael grunted, spitting a thick wad of dark blood onto the rock.
He reached over with his trembling left hand, gripping his limp, throbbing right arm.
He didn't have a high-tier holy saint healer. He didn't even have a basic-ass med-kit.
He just had his teeth, his spite, and a pain tolerance forged in the deepest pits of hell.
Biting down hard on the collar of his tattered leather shirt, Kael wedged his heavy boot against a protruding stalagmite to anchor his weight.
He gripped his right wrist, twisted the arm violently back toward the proper angle, and slammed his entire body weight forward into the stone wall.
CRACK—!
The sickening, wet, crunching sound of the bone slamming back into the socket echoed through the lonely ridge.
Kael let out a muffled, agonizing groan into the fabric of his shirt, his entire body shuddering uncontrollably as his vision turned pitch black for two whole seconds.
He lay there, forcing his racing heart to slow down, forcing the blinding agony to recede into a dull, manageable, familiar throb.
When he finally opened his eyes, a sleek, translucent holographic screen was flickering frantically in his peripheral vision.
[Current Live Viewers: 64,812 (VIRAL TRENDING!)]
The chat box was moving so fast it looked like a cascading waterfall of white light. Kael tapped the side of his neck, slowing down the stream's translation matrix.
[User Zark: DID HE JUST RESET HIS OWN DISLOCATED SHOULDER WITH RAW WILLPOWER?! NO MANA? NO HEALING MAGIC?! WHAT IS THIS MONSTER?!]
[Star_Dust_69: The crunch... Oh my god, I heard the bone crunch through my neural-link. Mommy please pick me up I'm scared, this guy is unhinged😭]
[Weapons_Nut_44: THE MADMAN! HE ACTUALLY MELTED A STAR-METAL BARREL TO FORCE A MANA-OVERLOAD SHOT! THE CHAMBER PRESSURE SHOULD HAVE BLOWN HIS HEAD OFF! HE DEFIED THE LAWS OF WEAPONSMITHING!]
[Bet-Master: I'm officially broke. I bet against the mortal again. I am literally writing this from a cardboard box on an orbital space station. Someone pass the space-ramen.]
[DragonBoredom: A mortal who embraces pain like an old friend. You are a treasure, Kaelen Cross. A dark, beautiful, degenerate treasure.]
[DragonBoredom has donated 5,000 Cosmic Points!]
Kael let out a slow, ragged exhale.
Sixty-four thousand viewers. And a heavy donation from an old-timer.
He was officially on the radar of the cosmos.
He finally had the points he needed to start repairing his shattered mana core properly, but he couldn't do it here.
Sector 4 was too exposed. The death-throe explosion of a Magma Behemoth would draw every apex predator within a ten-mile radius inside the hour.
He needed to get to the Mid-Level Checkpoint and bypass the security gates to reach Sector 3.
Kael slowly pushed himself up to his feet, completely ignoring the screaming protests of his fractured collarbone.
With a swift kick of his boot, he sent the melted, useless Vanguard rifle spinning off the ridge, watching it clatter down into the pitch-black abyss below.
He reached back, checking the heavy, eighty-pound mechanical crossbow strapped tightly to his back.
Vengeance was still perfectly intact.
Pulling the hood of his Shadow-Weave cloak over his head, Kaelen prepared to melt back into the darkness.