Chapter 88: An Absolute Anomaly
Ayla suddenly lost connection with Kenji.
The sudden severance of the connection was not a gradual fading, but a violent, instantaneous snap.
One millisecond, the intricate, invisible threads of the Death Looper trait hummed periodically against Ayla’s internal core, vibrating with the comforting, familiar resonance of Kenji’s physical presence at the southern gatehouse.
The next millisecond, there was nothing.
An absolute, terrifying void opened up within her sensory matrix.
Ayla froze on the thick branch of the ancient tree outside the city walls. Her sleek, black-furred cat form stiffened, her long tail dropping completely flat as her golden eyes widened in panic.
She closed her eyes, expanding her advanced soul power to its absolute maximum limit, desperately scanning every single coordinate within the Supreme Forest and the grand stone structures of the academy.
Nothing.
It was as if Kenji had been completely and cleanly erased from the very fabric of existence.
There was no lingering trace of his soul energy, no ripple of his biological heat, and no echo of his conscious thoughts.
To her primitive, processing mind, this specific outcome should have been fundamentally impossible. Kenji had Death Looper.
He could not truly die or vanish permanently because the mechanics of the trait always bound them together across the shifting loops of time.
But standing alone in the cold morning air, Ayla was suddenly, absolutely sure of one horrifying truth: Kenji was genuinely about to die for real.
It was like his existence was going to be erased from the world, and there would be no reset to save him.
The timeline would not fold backward. He would simply cease to exist, leaving her entirely alone in a hollow world of Crusade.
A heavy, crushing wave of terror, an emotion completely foreign to her original, self-centered mimic nature, hit her core with the force of a physical blow.
She did not waste a single fraction of a second thinking about her solidified light blue soul core or her unfinished hunting plans.
Her black cat form instantly dissolved into a mass of translucent blue fluid, shifting rapidly into the large, aerodynamic structure of the Wind-Rider Falcon she had devoured earlier.
With a fierce, desperate screech that echoed across the outer rings, she launched herself off the branch, her wings beating the air with such violent, desperate force that a localized sonic boom rippled through the dense foliage behind her.
She activated Gale Acceleration at its absolute limit, turning her avian vessel into a blurry streak of gray and silver as she rushed straight toward the distant silhouette of the southern city gates.
As she crossed the high stone walls and looked down, the grand plaza of the gatehouse was a scene of unmitigated, horrific massacre.
The stone tiles were completely submerged under a lake of dark crimson, covered from edge to edge with the mangled bodies of thousands of low-tier students and the deflated hides of their contracted pets.
Armored city guards lay dead in neat, sequential lines along the battlements, thick gray smoke still drifting out from beneath their shattered iron visors.
To Ayla’s eyes, this massive display of carnage was absolutely nothing. She did not care about the thousands of dissolved human souls, nor did she care about the strategic plot of the Enders.
Her golden pupils darted frantically across the blood-soaked plaza, scanning the mounds of flesh until her focus finally locked onto a single, tattered uniform leaning against the far masonry.
It was Kenji.
His physical body was completely intact, a shallow graze marking his shoulder where a stray bolt had passed by.
He was standing perfectly upright, his standard-issue iron sword and light wooden shield still clutched loosely in his hands.
Ayla did not even wait to land properly. Mid-air, her falcon form violently tore apart, shifting back into her perfect human slate form within a single heartbeat.
Her silver hair trailed wildly behind her as her bare feet slammed against the slippery, blood-stained stone tiles.
She lunged forward, throwing her slender arms firmly around Kenji’s torso from behind, burying her face deeply into the crook of his tattered collarbone.
"Kenji! Kenji, are you fine?" she cried out, her voice dropping into a frantic, breathless purr as she hugged him with every ounce of physical strength her Bronze body could muster.
She expected him to immediately shift his weight, to offer a dry, stoic comment about her sudden public appearance, or to gently stroke her hair to calm her racing core.
But there was no reply from him.
His muscular frame felt entirely rigid under her touch, cold and unresponsive like a stone statue carved into the wall.
Ayla’s heart skipped a violent beat. She quickly uncoiled her arms and spun around to his front, her small, pale hands grabbing his cheeks to force his head downward so she could gaze directly into his face.
His hazel eyes were completely vacant. The sharp, clinical luster that always defined his expression was entirely gone, replaced by a hollow film.
It was like his actual, living soul had completely dissipated into thin air, leaving nothing behind but an empty, breathing shell of meat.
"No..." Ayla whispered, her voice cracking as a strange, hot sensation welled up behind her eyelids.
For the first time since her birth as a primitive slime, real, genuine human tears streamed down her porcelain cheeks, cutting clean lines through the dried blood splattered on her face.
"No, Kenji... don’t leave me. You promised. You said we would be together next time..."
She pressed her forehead against his chest, her soul desperately screaming into the void, trying to find a single thread to pull him back.
While Ayla was weeping over his empty chest in the material world, Kenji’s core consciousness was still trapped deep within the vast, absolute black expanse of the void.
He stood suspended in the empty space, completely isolated from his physical nervous system.
Directly in front of him, the colossal, molten orange pupils continued to stare straight into his soul, their fiery surfaces contracting in and out with an intensity that felt like the heavy breathing of a cosmic furnace.
The sheer mental pressure radiating from those eyes was suffocating, but Kenji refused to look away.
The silence stretched on for what felt like entire centuries within the timeless void.
Finally, the colossal pupils flared with a surge of heat, and the deep, echoing voice vibrated through Kenji’s mind once more, uttering two heavy, definitive words:
"Leave her."
Kenji was completely stunned. The demand was so entirely unexpected that for a fraction of a second, his clinical thought process stalled.
He knew exactly who the entity meant by "her." There was only one single person in this world that could cause a cosmic anomaly of this scale to stall its world-clearing script.
It was Ayla.
Kenji’s hazel gaze turned completely cold inside the mental space, his posture straightening as he looked directly into the burning center of the orange eyes.
Why would this entity care about whom she should be with?
Did it launch a massive, city-wide massacre just to isolate him in the void and make a personal demand?
"Both of you aren’t supposed to be together..." the voice boomed again, the tone shifting from aggressive malice to a strange weight of ancient exhaustion and profound sorrow.
The words rippled through the black expanse, causing the darkness to warp and twist like ink in water.
"Your very convergence is an absolute anomaly. It distorts the primary architecture. It breaks the boundaries of the loops. If you remain by her side, the final sequence will never trigger, and her core will be permanently corrupted by your foreign existence."
Kenji let out a low, cold breath, his voice cutting through the entity’s echoing pressure with absolute defiance.
"Who are you to decide that?" Kenji asked, his tone dripping with unyielding steel.
The colossal molten pupils contracted sharply at his words, the orange flames turning into a deep, blinding white heat that threatened to tear the black expanse apart.
The entity looked at the tiny bone fragment beside Kenji’s soul line once more, a long, rumbling sigh shaking the void.
"Who am I?" the voice whispered, the sheer volume of the sound dropping into a terrifyingly clear, human cadence that carried an authority older than the academy itself.
"I am her father..."
