Chapter 797: Implosion
Arthur sat cross-legged on a gaming chair, eyes fixed on the portable console in his hands as his thumbs danced across its surface, his focus entirely consumed by the boss fight playing out on the screen.
A loud gasp echoed beside him as Celestia floated nearby, evidently distressed that the soap opera she was watching on Arthur’s tablet took yet another tragic turn.
[She’s going to betray him again, isn’t she? After everything he did for her! Humans are such strange creatures.]
Arthur gave a distracted hum in response, too focused on his game to comment. His brows furrowed slightly as his character’s health dropped to a dangerously low level.
’Just one more—!’
**SKRIEEEEEKKK!!
A high-pitched sound reminiscent of a banshee’s scream suddenly rang out directly inside Arthur’s ears, his body jerking as he fell off his chair, crashing onto the ground with a thud and dropping his console.
"What the hell?!"
[Master, this is why I told you to just use a normal alarm clock.] Celestia didn’t even turn away from her screen as she spoke. [But no. You insisted on setting a time-based alarm using the Law of Time itself.]
Still wincing, Arthur groaned and pushed himself back up, rubbing his back with one hand and glaring at nothing in particular.
"How is that even allowed to be that loud..."
His gaze shifted to the Spatial Law Crystal, now half-submerged into the ground. Over the past three days, it had sunk even deeper into the earth, releasing faint pulses of cosmic energy.
"Seems the update’s complete."
Muttering this, he turned towards the Seed Engine nearby, reaching out and wrapping it in his magic power.
He moved it into his subspace and waited in silence.
A minute passed without any strange signs, tremors or distortions in space.
He brought it out, then put it back again, but nothing changed. The Realm seemed as stable as could be.
"...Looks like we’re good," he muttered, turning to face his knocked-over chair. "Time to go."
He picked up his console and tossed it into his subspace, the chair and all his other belongings scattered around following suit.
Then, he headed back to his spaceship, immediately giving it the activation command the moment he entered.
By the time he’d gotten to the cockpit area, it was already rising from the planet’s surface, lifting off into space.
Moments later, the ship was blasting off into the distance, leaving behind the planet that emitted a stable cosmic energy signature.
◇ ◇ ◇
The ship moved on autopilot like usual, folding space as it moved, and Arthur continued playing the game he was unable to finish due to his three-day alarm with the law of time he’d set.
Time passed like this, and soon Arthur had traversed around half the realm, the exit drawing closer with each moment.
Suddenly, the ship jolted mid-jump, and Arthur paused his game, head tilting.
"That was weird..."
[What was weird, Master?] Lostvayne’s voice echoed.
"That jump felt unstable. There wasn’t anything unusual in this region when we passed it last. Something must have happened."
[Give me a moment to check—]
Before Lostvayne could finish that sentence, the entire realm shook violently, a thunderous vibration that made every particle of existence groan under pressure.
The ship jolted in response, the smooth trajectory broken by a sudden fracture in the fabric of space itself.
Arthur dropped his console, instinctively rushing to the viewport, eyes scanning the space around as the shutters retracted.
What he saw made his heart seize.
A jagged crack had torn open in the space behind them, stretching across the realm like a wound in glass, and with a terrible, soundless scream, everything around his ship began to tear apart.
Threads of cosmic energy burst through the rupture, sizzling with radiant violence, and space itself began folding inward as if collapsing into some invisible centre.
Arthur’s voice broke through the silence.
"...fuck."
The same instant that word left his mouth, the ship’s warning systems screamed, and Arthur dashed back to the controls, slamming both hands into the console and deactivating autopilot.
He shifted the engines into full gear, and the entire ship jolted violently as it instantly accelerated to max speed, blasting through the distorting space before it.
Behind him, the apocalypse accelerated.
A star caught in the spatial fracture imploded, detonating in a massive supernova, its core releasing torrents of gamma radiation and raw cosmic energy that scorched everything in their path.
The kaleidoscopic eruption’s shockwave vaporised the atmospheres of every planet around it and reduced entire continents to dust in an instant. In the next instant, the planets, torn from their gravitational anchors, were hurled across space like shrapnel.
Some collided with one another mid-flight, triggering cataclysmic detonations that formed new shockwaves, and others were flung toward the escaping ship at relativistic speeds.
Faster than Arthur could extend a barrier of cosmic energy around the vessel, a giant shard of a broken planet collided with the ship’s energy shields, sparks rising like firestorms as the shields flickered dangerously.
The ship lurched as Arthur dodged a tumbling continent-sized mass, dipping beneath it, only for another fragment to slam against the side, rattling the entire vessel.
The ship’s hull groaned under the pressure, and Arthur moved to adjust course, trying to weave through the storm of stellar wreckage.
Not all threats could be avoided or blocked, however.
Lostvayne vanished from Arthur’s side, reappearing outside the ship a second later. With a single swing, the Ego Weapon carved through a massive rotating mountain of planetary rock, splitting it down the centre and sending the halves spiralling harmlessly away.
Celestia followed, her blade a streak of silver light as she pierced through cluster after cluster of flying debris, shattering them into smaller fragments. Both swords moved with breakneck speed, dashing across space, destroying the largest and most dangerous projectiles before they could hit.
More and more stars and planets shattered behind them, some disintegrating under the force of the spatial collapse, while others were affected by the debris of the initially destroyed star system.
Space bent and warped under the intensity of the energy, and a moment later, the cosmic radiation from the nearest collapsed star reached them.
A golden-red wall of force crashed into the ship’s barrier, and even through his layered defences, Arthur felt the heat. His cosmic energy barrier cracked violently, spiderweb fractures racing across its surface.
As the space around them continued to collapse, the ship’s primary space-folding system failed, unable to lock onto stable coordinates in a realm that was breaking apart in every direction.
Arthur unhesitatingly activated the Cosmic Teleporter, creating a portal in front of him and firing the ship straight through it without hesitation.
Upon emergence at the other end, the ship was closer to the realm gate, but even here, space was beginning to distort violently, as if the collapse had followed him through.
Time wobbled like melting glass as the space it was connected to crumbled. Even the direction Arthur was flying towards was not safe from the sudden collapse.
Holes appeared through space as though someone had struck it with a hammer, expanding rapidly like tumours, and warping everything around them and generating their own gravity wells that threatened to pull the ship off course.
Arthur clenched his right fist, using his Gravity Authority to anchor the ship to his desired path, continuing towards the massive realm gate ahead.
The portal was already damaged, fractures spreading across its border like spiderwebs. Segments of it were breaking off, peeling away like shards of glass and patches of its surface glitched, threatening to vanish.
Arthur’s Aspect of Time activated, and he dumped every ounce of time law energy he could spare into the ship’s core, accelerating its velocity again.
The ship zoomed forward like a comet, and the moment it passed through the broken gateway, the entire realm behind it imploded.
It was like a big bang in reverse.
All the matter and energy of the realm was forced into an infinitesimally small point.
But this concentrated energy could not be contained forever.
The pressure at the point of collapse became so immense that it triggered a violent, outward explosion, consuming almost everything around the dying realm.
The gods who were stationed nearby and their spaceships were all vaporised in the burst of cosmic energy.
Nearby planets were also affected, disintegrating under the pressure. The gravitational waves released from the final collapse destabilised their host star, which collapsed in on itself and then exploded, further feeding the cycle of devastation.
Time warped in a disturbingly unnatural way at the moment one of the nearby planets was destroyed, and as space distorted violently, everything in that region—the collapsing star, the matter spilling from its imploding core, the shattered remnants of nearby planets—was drawn into a single, immense singularity that bloomed in absolute silence, swallowing them whole.
Then, they vanished.
The entire singularity and everything nearby suddenly vanished, completely erased from time itself, as though they had never existed to begin with.
From that point of erasure, cracks began to spread outward across the weave of permanence, like a virus affecting the galaxy.
But Arthur didn’t see any of this, as he was too busy trying not to die!
He created layers upon layers of cosmic energy to shield his body against the aftermath of the realm’s obliteration that had long since vaporised his ship and sent him hurling through space at a speed so extreme that his body could barely endure the strain.
The Stellar Guard? Yeah, all five charges had already been used up. That explosion had packed more than enough force to kill Arthur five times over.
His body continued hurtling uncontrollably through space until, eventually, he slammed into the magnetic field of a nearby star and crashed down onto a planet situated at the outer edge of that star’s gravitational field.
The impact knocked the wind from his lungs, and silver blood poured from his lips as he hit the ground.
His vision dimmed, his head falling back against the dusty surface beneath him.
But just then, Celestia and Lostvayne simultaneously released surges of cosmic energy straight into his heart. The twin bursts collided in a sparking flash that forcibly restarted his slowing heart and yanked his consciousness back online.
Though conscious, Arthur was momentarily disoriented, his mind flooded with too many streams of information and stimuli to process at once.
However, Celestia’s piercing voice that echoed in his head brought to mind the first priority.
[Master!!! Your wounds!!!!]
That word—’wounds’—combined with the intense pain wracking his entire body snapped his instincts into action.
Without hesitation, Arthur tore open his subspace, reached in, grabbed one of Creusery’s life crystals, and crushed it in his hand.
Healing flames immediately spread over his body, burning away the extensive damage. His skin sizzled, steam rising from his healing flesh as he coughed and sputtered up another mouthful of blood, the regeneration process taking its toll in full.
