Chapter 754: Interlude 9 – 2: Eternal Vigilance
"We’re the ones who decided to do this for Eternity, so we can’t complain now, can we?"
Ranus spoke as they emerged at a different point in reality, in the middle of seemingly infinite darkness.
The only source of light in this endless darkness was the woman beside Ranus, and her mere presence sparked the birth of stars.
Within seconds, cosmic energy condensed, igniting brilliant stars that illuminated the space and revealed that which couldn’t be seen in the darkness.
A massive, gaping crack in reality.
"Oh, this one’s rather big," Ranus muttered.
And indeed, it was. Far larger than the usual.
It was a crack in the fabric of existence itself.
But wait. What caused this crack to appear?
To answer that question, we need to backtrack to the story Jamie once told Arthur—about the ’First Defenders’.
The ones who suppressed the Cosmic Force of Chaos when it dominated the Cosmos eons ago.
Of the original six First Defenders, only four were still alive. Two of them were here now, floating in space, staring at the crack tearing open reality.
A crack born as a consequence of their own actions.
When they attempted to suppress Chaos, the Cosmic Force naturally resisted.
It didn’t want to be suppressed. It wanted to dominate everything that was, so it fought back.
This resistance was one of the reasons why the Eternals had extracted Chaos’ power in the form of Concepts, all to weaken the Cosmic Force.
But even though the woman staring at the crack had been the one to tear out Chaos’ Cosmic Power of Creation, that didn’t mean Chaos had entirely lost its ability to ’Create’.
In retaliation against the First Defenders who tried to suppress it using its own power, Chaos created.
Chaos created most of the entities now known throughout the Cosmos as ’Cosmic Horrors’.
**BOOM!!!
The Rift suddenly exploded, and the hole torn through existence itself grew wider as a massive, spiked tentacle emerged from the depths of non-existence.
It clawed at space, tearing through the fabric of space-time to anchor itself into existence.
From the hole, half a dozen more tentacles emerged, ripping apart space as they tried to widen the breach and crawl into existence.
Just then, a cosmic gate opened beside Ranus, and from it emerged a grey-haired, middle-aged-looking man with dull grey, vertically slit eyes.
He was dressed in an elaborate ensemble of robes, resembling a medieval king about to attend a royal feast.
His eyes instantly locked onto the thing before him, struggling to crawl its way into existence from the depths of non-existence.
One of the many spawn of the Void god, birthed from Chaos during the Cosmic Force’s reign over the Cosmos eons ago.
The Crawling Chaos.
An entity that could be considered as one of the first ’Envoys of Chaos’.
Its goal was simple: Spread ’Chaos’ in the Cosmos, thereby bolstering the Cosmic Force’s influence until it could finally break free from the Eternals’ suppression.
But of course, there was no way the Eternals would just sit back and let that happen now, was there?
In fact, this was not the first attempt of Cosmic Horrors to break into the Cosmos from whatever void lay beyond.
Some Cosmic Horrors already existed within the Cosmos, though those were relatively docile, at least for now.
Naturally, each one was kept under strict surveillance by the Eternals and the Aggressors. After all, every Cosmic Horror was a spawn of the Void god, the emissary of Chaos, birthed to propagate its influence across the Cosmos.
The Crawling Chaos now facing the three Eternals was just one of many that had persistently tried to force its way into the Cosmos to wreak havoc.
As he stared at it, the grey-haired Eternal, Akasha, muttered a curse.
"It’s just a mere foul spawn of Chaos and yet..."
Ranus, hearing him, arched an eyebrow.
"Mere? Come on, Akasha. Haven’t you learned by now not to look down on anything that naturally carries the modifier of ’Chaos’ or ’Order’?"
Ranus’ words just now revealed something crucial.
The Eternals weren’t the ones who had named this creature the Crawling Chaos. Sure, the name suited its actions of constantly trying to crawl into the Cosmos, but it wasn’t a title given by them.
That was a name and title it naturally possessed.
It came with the default modifier of ’Chaos’.
"Did you forget what happened in your last encounter with an existence who naturally possessed such a title?"
Ranus’ question made Akasha’s brows twitch in annoyance.
He hated being reminded of that particular incident—the one where a portion of his Conceptual Authority was stolen by an unwilling ’Envoy of Chaos’.
Yes, the woman who created an Immortal Anomaly that even the Eternals couldn’t kill—the Witch of Chaos.
The same one who created the Immortal Hybrid, whose soul fragment Arthur encountered in the Valmone universe—Jamie Westley.
That encounter was quite the...eye opener for Akasha, reminding him that there were things even he didn’t understand, even with his Authority over the Concepts that underpinned the ability to know and understand things.
Ignoring the clearly irritated Akasha, Ranus turned his attention back to the tear in reality and spoke.
"I think it’s reached the threshold. If we act now, we should be able to keep it from returning for another million years or so."
His words revealed the reason they’d just been floating in space, watching the Crawling Chaos crawl its way into the Cosmos.
They wanted it to manifest more of its existence, so they could destroy more of it.
"Remember when we thought we could just let it fully enter the Cosmos and have Julio imbue it with ’Death’ so we could permanently kill it?" Ranus asked, a tinge of amusement in his voice.
At that, the Eternal of Creation raised an eyebrow.
"You mean the days when we were young, stupid, and still underestimated Chaos’ power? Yeah, I unfortunately remember them very vividly."
"Haha, those were good times. Came with plenty of lessons, though.
We found out the hard way that the ’Chaotic Concept of Death’ cannot imbue an existence born directly from Chaos itself with ’Death’."
"It’s not that it can’t," she replied. "It just takes an astronomical amount of Cosmic Energy that would leave even us drained and without the power to actually kill it afterwards."
"That’s not much different from calling it ’impossible’," Ranus responded, his gaze shifting away from the Cosmic Horror to a seemingly random direction in space.
"If you two aren’t going to handle that thing, I will," Akasha cut in, his eyes glowing as he began to rouse his cosmic energy.
But before he could unleash it, Ranus raised a hand and grabbed his shoulder.
"Dude, chill."
Though he was holding Akasha’s power down, Ranus still wasn’t looking at him. His eyes were fixed on an empty spot in the dark stretch of space.
Suddenly, a thin white line of energy traced itself across the darkness, tearing open a second rift.
Unlike the first, this one didn’t explode, but slowly, neatly, and symmetrically unfolded the space around it, creating a passageway for more entities to emerge.
Then, a low hum began to echo across the vacuum, the sound made possible by forces subtly rewriting the laws of physics.
From within the rift emerged the source of the sound, a group of pure white, perfect crystalline prisms.
Following them were floating spheres composed of millions of interlocked, endlessly spiralling rings, their mere presence causing the fabric of space around them to twist into spirals.
At the sight of them, Akasha’s expression changed once more. Clicking his tongue, he withdrew his cosmic energy, understanding why Ranus had stopped him.
It was, of course, because of these newly arriving Cosmic Horrors.
Yes.
These geometric-looking entities, which had emerged from the rift and even sealed the space behind them with surgical precision, were Cosmic Horrors, just like the grotesque, tentacled abomination trying to spread chaos in the Cosmos.
But unlike the Crawling Chaos and its fellow spawn of the Void god that possessed amorphous, viscerally repulsive forms that shattered minds and evoked a sense of wrongness that could not be comprehended unless one possessed cosmic-level power, these newcomers evoked horror through overwhelming, oppressive perfection.
Looking at them didn’t drive beings to madness like the sight of the Crawling Chaos did. Instead, it forced them to recognise their own smallness, disorder, and fundamental wrongness in comparison.
