Chapter 672: What If?
The tall wolfish woman stood at the edge of the sky above the carnage of the battle below, a fondness filling her merciless eyes. She blinked once and directed her cold gaze to the demons circling toward the humans in the distance.
In an instant, her shadow stretched, and things rose from it, and the sight of it made the chamber go quiet in a different way than Andreiโs transformation had.
Where Andrei had produced awe through the sheer physical fact of what he became, what Syrian produced was, for lack of a better word, scary, spine-chilling.
Wolves, or shadows shaped like wolves, emerged from beneath her.
Massive, towering, and pitch black in their entirety, their forms drank the available light, giving nothing back.
But they were not conjurations in any sense that the word was usually applied. Their multiple eyes carried life in them, cruel and patient, the eyes of things that had powerful will and killing intent bleeding out from them in dark increments.
They looked at the demon forces and, without a word, they all, in their growing numbers, pounced on the demons below like hungry savages.
Within seconds, the organized mass of thousands was breaking apart, as with each passing moment, dozens were swallowed into the nightmarish, shadowy maws, their screams silenced, their lives cut short.
The Lady soon followed her wolves, a force of equal terror as the entire horde combined. Syrian and Andrei were simply crushing and tearing without mercy, moving through the demon army the way a storm moved through a wheat field, without much of any resistance.
One thing everyone noticed quickly was how neither of them opened their domain, and the demons who tried to were dragged out, their domain shattered in a matter of moments.
A similar spectacle was unfolding on two other battlefronts, just a little less savage but equally dominant.
Avelor had conjured a tree.
The word was inadequate for what the feed showed. A gnarled, vast structure had grown from the frozen ground of the northwest road, its trunk wider than a small mountain, its branches reaching outward and upward until they touched the icy sky above, the whole of it spreading across the landscape with the calm, absolute authority of something that had decided this was where it lived now.
It did not attack in any conventional sense. It did not need to. Any demon or cultist that came within range of it simply stopped, the tree drinking their life force through contact with the same unhurried patience it might have drawn water from soil, adding what it took to its own continuous, expanding presence.
Avelor sat atop one of the higher branches and watched the road below her with the detached expression of someone whose work was largely complete.
Calvanyr was not visible at all.
His presence on the front was known only by what it left behind, sliced bodies arranged with the clean, precise geometry of cuts made by something that had chosen its angles carefully and never needed to make the same cut twice.
No visible movement, and no projected force. Just the continuous, methodical evidence of something working through the demon forces with such efficiency, one would mistake it for a dozen invisible swordsmen.
On the feed from the northern road, a familiar face moved through a different kind of chaos.
Pyrael, dressed in a robe of white flames that appeared to be uninterested in burning her, a sea of seething white fire that spread outward from her position with the patient, absolute completeness of something filling a container.
Any demon that failed to clear the boundary of it in time dissolved, quietly and completely, the white flames taking them apart at the level where things were made rather than at the level where they simply existed.
Beside her, her companion Ikern had pulled two Elemental Rulers of early Eighth Rank into a closed domain of his own, the three of them vanishing from the visible feed entirely, the battle between them happening somewhere the cameras could not reach.
Grace watched all of it with the particular expression of someone who had been a broadcaster for long enough to know that silence was sometimes the right choice, and was choosing it now.
"The only person taking any meaningful hits is Ruinov," she said finally, her voice carrying the slightly distant quality of someone thinking aloud rather than performing commentary. "And even then, I have yet to see a single armor plate shatter completely. I have yet to see him bleed."
"Pyrael. She is not fighting them, she is just executing them, just with fire and not a blade." She paused, watching the feed. "And then again, a quick death by blade would be a mercy that these soulless demons donโt deserve."
A beat of silence.
"The most frightening one among them is that woman," came a voice from the panel, measured and deliberate.
It was Lady Rosalba who had spoken, her calm eyes resting on the feed showing Avelor seated in the high branches of her tree, watching the demon forces below diminish with the unhurried patience of someone simply enjoying her work.
"Avelor," Rosalba said, as though the name itself carried the explanation.
Odin felt his throat go dry.
He was not accustomed to his throat going dry. He was not accustomed to watching something and finding that none of his existing frameworks were sufficient to contain what he was seeing.
The power being displayed by the Shadow Oblivion Organization was not merely extraordinary. Astounding was the word that formed first, and he rejected it immediately as insufficient. Impossible was more accurate, because impossible was what it actually was.
Not hyperbole. Not the loose use of a word to convey emphasis. In the most literal sense available to him, given everything he knew about the Ancient World, the Ancestral Realm, the time difference, and the ceiling of what could reasonably be achieved within the timeframes they had all been operating inside, what he was watching should not have been possible.
If it had been NPCs demonstrating this level of power, he could have lived with it. The Malefis Domain was one of the mightiest forces in existence, one of the only powers capable of standing against both the demon armies and the Eldravian Empire simultaneously.
Extraordinary strength from its native inhabitants was something his understanding could accommodate.
But players. The same category of beings as himself, operating under the same fundamental constraints of rank and progression, and the hard ceiling of what the world allowed, showing this.
That was different.
Odin was not naive about the advantages available to those who knew where to look. He was among the few who had received gifts at the beginning, selected early, and set apart from the common player base in ways that most people would never know enough to resent specifically.
He knew the truth of the Ancient World. He knew about the Ancestral Realm and the time differential it offered to those who could access and survive it. He knew all of it, or believed he did, which until approximately an hour ago had amounted to the same thing.
But even among the chosen, even among the individuals who had been given every advantage the system and their own intelligence could construct, the ceiling was visible and known.
He himself was an Elemental Ruler, early Seventh Rank, and that had required everything he had to achieve. The best among them, the ones known as the inheritors of the future, the players destined to shape what came ahead of the Ancient World in the decades ahead, the strongest of that group had reached early Eighth Rank.
With every skill available to them, with borrowed strength and optimal conditions, peak Eighth Rank was the outer limit of what they could reach.
That was all.
And Ruinov alone seemed to be on the same stage of power, if not higher, moving through a battlefield that should have required his full attention with the unhurried ease of something that had not yet decided to be serious about the engagement.
Odin knew that man-beast, or had believed he knew him, which was apparently not the same thing at all.
Then there was Hidden One.
The Domain Ruler.
Odin still remembered the first time he had heard that name spoken. It had been the man beside him who had said it, his voice carrying the particular tone it carried when it was delivering information it considered relevant without being certain yet of exactly how relevant.
At that time, the name had belonged to someone large enough to be known but not large enough to demand genuine attention, a player who had appeared years after the Ancient World had already been shaped and claimed and divided, who had somehow inherited a domain that was dying by any reasonable measure.
Less than three years.
In less than three years, that same player had grown into something Odin could not see the silhouette of. Something that stood face to face with a Sin General, and a city that was still standing when it should not have been.
The anger that moved through Odin at this recognition was not the simple, hot anger of someone who had been beaten in a competition. It was colder and more structural than that, the anger of someone watching the architecture of everything they had spent years building develop cracks.
Everything he had planned and constructed and maneuvered toward was dependent on a specific shape of the world going forward, and that shape was shifting under him in real time, and he was expected to hold it together by people he could not afford to disappoint.
He did not know how much longer he could manage that. He could not even begin to calculate the consequences of failing to.
โOdin.โ The voice arrived directly in his mind, cold and precise, carrying with it a sensation of freezing intent that cut through the heat of everything churning inside him and forced his attention back to the immediate.
โCalm down.โ Loki. The voice was as recognizable as his own, the tone carrying the particular quality it carried when it was not making a suggestion but issuing an instruction wrapped in the phrasing of one.
โYou know how this goes,โ Odin replied, keeping his voice at the threshold of audibility, the words moving at a level that only the superhuman hearing they both possessed could have caught from the distance between them.
โIf the Ruler dies, it accomplishes nothing for us. We gain no ground. And if he survives the battle against the Sin General, if he forces Leviathan to retreat...โ He let the implication complete itself before he continued.
โWe are pushed to the edge of a choice we have spent a year avoiding. Standing with the victims or standing with the tyrants, and every arrangement we have made, every promise extended, and every door kept open on both sides, collapses into a single forced decision.โ His head dropped slightly, the physical weight of the thought pressing down in a way he was not entirely succeeding at concealing. โAnd we both know where they want us.โ
A brief silence passed between them, the sounds of the chamber filling the space around them.
โWhat if the Ruler kills him?โ Loki said. The question arrived with what sounded, on its surface, like a dry chuckle, the lightness of tone that was Lokiโs oldest and most reliable habit, the deflection of apparent amusement that had caused more people than Odin could count to underestimate what lived behind it.
But beneath the lightness, carried in the hushed weight of the words themselves rather than in the way they were delivered, was the full gravity of what the question actually contained.
What if the Ruler kills the Sin General? What if the Ruler kills Leviathan?
Odin looked at him. Just looked, then he shook his head, the gesture small and carrying the weight of something that had no clean answer and knew it.
