Overlord Tamer: All My Pet Monsters Have God Potential

Chapter 220: Ancient One Ythera

The tremor didn’t fade. It built, layer after layer of stone groaning under something ancient stretching awake for the first time in longer than history bothered to remember. The mist at the crater’s distant center stopped churning and simply parted.

The world folded around them without warning, not violently, but the way a hand closes gently around something it has already decided to keep. One moment they stood in the scorched clearing among caged soldiers and a wary, freed wolf. The next, the clearing was gone.

They stood instead on a plane of dark glass stretching in every direction, reflecting a sky full of stars that belonged to no night John had ever seen, motionless and far too close. No wind moved. No sound existed beyond their own heartbeats, hammering loud enough to feel like a violation of the silence.

"John," Yuna whispered, her voice barely audible even to herself, "what did we just walk into?"

Something vast began to rise from beneath the glass, or perhaps it had always been there and only now allowed itself to be seen. Coils wider than mountains unspooled out of the dark in slow, deliberate arcs, each scale the size of a city block and dull as old bronze except where cracks of starlight bled through from somewhere deeper inside.

A head finally lifted above the horizon of its own body, easily large enough to eclipse the sun this domain had replaced. Six eyes opened one after another, each the pale, patient color of a dying star.

Terravax, who had never once flinched at anything they’d faced together, folded flat against the glass floor and stayed there.

Fear hit John first as pressure, then as something closer to memory. It was an echo of every terrible story Chuthulos had ever told him about the being whose slow death was erasing an entire cosmoverse.

’This isn’t that,’ Chuthulos said, quieter and more careful than John had ever heard him. ’But it rhymes with it closely enough that I understand why your instincts just tried to convince you to stop existing quietly rather than be noticed.’

’Is it going to kill us.’

’I don’t know yet, brother John. And I have never once said that to you before.’

None of them could move, not from any visible restraint, but from the simple, crushing certainty that whatever stood before them could unmake all of them without noticing the effort it cost.

Then the vast eyes narrowed, not in threat, but in something closer to focus.

’Interesting,’ a voice said, not projected into their minds so much as simply present in the space around them, layered and ancient and edged with something that might once have been amusement. ’You are still standing. Most who reach this place forget how, somewhere around the second heartbeat.’

John forced his voice to work, though it came out smaller than he wanted.

"What do you want from us?"

’Very little, and a great deal, depending on how this conversation goes.’ The enormous head lowered slowly, taking several long seconds to close half the distance, until one vast eye hovered close enough that John could see storms churning inside it. ’I have watched this crater longer than your kind has existed as a kind. I watch every chain-bearer who enters it and every desperate creature who flees through it, and I had already decided, before this morning, that nothing left here could surprise me.’

’Then you freed something without breaking it first, and a creature bound to you by choice looked at you afterward the way nothing here has looked at anything in longer than I care to measure.’

Azelis’s hand found Vhastra’s flank without thinking, a reflex rather than a decision.

’Yes,’ the voice said, and something in it might have been satisfaction. ’That. That is precisely the thing I wished to see closer.’

...

"Who are you?" John asked, steadier now, though his knees hadn’t stopped shaking.

The great head tilted, considering the question far longer than seemed necessary for something that had apparently lived a million years.

’I have been called many things by many frightened mouths. Most were insults. A few were prayers. None were accurate.’ The pause that followed felt deliberate. ’My name, before the world decided I needed to be contained rather than known, was Ythera.’

"Ythera," John repeated, testing the shape of it.

’Yes. Say it again in a hundred years and see if you’re still able to.’ Something that might have been dry humor colored the words. ’I don’t expect I’ll require you to.’

"You said you wanted to see something closer," John said. "What, exactly?"

’You treat what you tame as kin rather than tools,’ Ythera said. ’I have watched a thousand Tamers pass through the layers below this crater across the centuries. Every one of them called their Monsters companions in front of witnesses and cages in private. You are the first I have seen mean the word both times.’

’I want to know why. I have a great deal of time left, and very little that still interests me enough to spend it on.’

So John told her, plainly, about Alfred and the years before any of this, about a family built from people who’d chosen each other rather than been assigned to one another, about Vaelirash and the wolf and every creature since who’d been given the simple, radical choice to walk away and hadn’t taken it.

Ythera listened without interrupting, six eyes unmoving, until he finished.

’That is either the most naive philosophy I have heard in a million years,’ she said finally, ’or the only one still worth calling philosophy at all. I have not yet decided which.’

...

"For what it’s worth," John said, "the offer’s open. Same one I give everyone. No chains. Equal, not owned."

Something like genuine surprise moved behind all six eyes at once.

’You would offer that to me. Knowing what I am, and knowing what I could do to you and everyone you love faster than you could finish that sentence.’

"I offer it because of what you haven’t done," John said. "You could have killed us the second we walked in here. You didn’t. That tells me more about you than your size does."

Ythera was quiet for a long moment, and when she spoke again, something in her voice had shifted, older and heavier than before.

’I cannot accept, even if some small, foolish part of me wishes to, for the first time in longer than I can accurately recall. I comprehended a Law, John Wicked, and the world does not permit a Law-bearer to move freely once that happens.’

’This crater is not merely dangerous. It is a cage built specifically around me, layer by layer, over centuries, because the alternative was letting something my size decide what it wanted to do with the rest of this cosmoverse. I will die on this ground, whenever dying finally becomes something even I can no longer avoid.’

Something turned over in John’s mind, quiet and quick, the same instinct that had once made him reach for an arm sealed in ancient stone instead of walking away from it.

"What if you didn’t have to stay on this ground," he said slowly. "What if there was somewhere else. Somewhere that isn’t technically anywhere at all."

Ythera’s massive head tilted, curiosity sharpening into something closer to attention.

’Explain.’

"I have a place," John said. "Monster Paradise. It isn’t part of this world, not really. It’s mine, folded somewhere the world’s laws don’t quite reach the same way. Everyone I’ve ever tamed lives there when they’re not walking beside me."

’You are suggesting a contract.’

"I’m suggesting you don’t have to fight your way out of a cage the world built around you," John said. "You’d only have to let go of the part of you that’s spent centuries holding on by instinct. I’d reach for you, and instead of resisting the pull the way everything in you has been trained to, you’d just accept it. That’s all a contract like that has ever needed from anyone."

The silence that followed was the longest yet, six ancient eyes fixed on him with an intensity that made the glass beneath his feet feel like it might crack under the weight of it alone.

Far above, in a fortress built into the crater’s northern rim, alarms that had stayed silent for three hundred years finally began to scream.

...

In the Forbidden Zone Command Center, technicians scrambled between consoles lit end to end with cascading red.

"Containment readings just spiked past every historical baseline," one shouted, hands flying across his station. "Sector Nine’s boundary wards are failing. She’s awake."

The garrison commander, a severe woman named Thessaly Korvain, was already on her feet. "Confirm target. Tell me it isn’t Ythera."

"It’s Ythera, Commander." The technician’s voice cracked. "Full manifestation. Domain active. She hasn’t done that in over two hundred years."

Korvain’s face drained of color as she turned toward the war-map dominating the far wall, where a single red marker pulsed at the crater’s dead center, exactly where their last War-Envoy’s signal had gone dark that same morning.

"Get me a line to the capital," she said. "Now. If she’s testing the boundary, we may have days, maybe only hours, before Godsgrave stops being a prison and starts being an extinction event."

Nobody in the room said what all of them were thinking, that whatever had woken her in the first place might already be standing inside her domain.