Chương 178: The Plains of Severed Fate

The air on the Plains of Severed Fate tasted of ozone and static, a sharp, metallic zest that pricked the back of the throat with every inhalation. Compared to the suffocating, heavy dead-air of Va'lour, this world felt dangerously alive. It was a chaotic storm of raw, ungrounded mana, erratic and wild.

"Watch your step," I called out, my voice distorted by the ambient electromagnetic field, sounding as if I were speaking through a spinning fan.

"The gravity shear on this boundary is steep." We stood on the lip of a massive, floating archipelago. Ahead of us, hundreds of landmasses, ranging from the size of a cottage to the size of a continent, drifted lazily through a sky that couldn't decide on a color, pulsing from bruised purple to neon teal. Beneath us, miles down, was a rolling sea of iridescent fog that flashed with silent, heatless lightning. The ground itself was jagged and untamed, covered in grass that shimmered with ghostly translucence.

But the most disturbing feature was the movement. I watched a boulder ten feet away. It was sitting there, solid, moss-covered, and heavy. Then, without a sound, without a flash, it simply wasn't there. It had teleported three feet to the left. No transition. No blur of motion. As if reality itself had just glitched.

"It's nauseating," Anna murmured. She wasn't rubbing her temples or complaining. Her voice was low, tight, and focused. Her eyes, usually so bright, were narrowed, scanning the impossible terrain with a grim intensity. The casual ease she used to carry was gone, replaced by a rigid vigilance that spoke of a deep, lingering distrust of her own senses.

"It's a world of probability flux," Arthur's clone observed quietly, his eyes closed as he sensed the environment.

"Objects here do not possess a fixed location until they are observed or acted upon. To hunt here, one must not aim at the target. One must aim at the intent of the target."

"Intent," Anna repeated, the word tasting strange on her tongue. She gripped her bow, her knuckles white. Kaelen's warning bark cut through the noise. We froze. The tall, violet grass ahead parted. Or seemed to. A creature stepped out. It looked like a wolf, drawn in static electricity and dragged through a magnet. Its form was jagged, lines of blue and white energy barely holding a cohesive shape. It flickered in and out of the visible spectrum.

My Gaze identified it as a Phase-Stalker, high Tier 4 with essence that resonated with displacement.

"Only one?" Rexxar rumbled, stepping forward, his massive claymore humming.

"No," I said, my [Predator's Gaze] flaring further. The deception unraveled before my eyes.

"Six. Flanking pattern. They're phasing through the light spectrum."

"My fight," Anna stated. She didn't wait for my approval. She stepped past Rexxar, putting herself at the tip of the spear. Her movements were stiff, lacking her usual fluid grace. She was forcing herself. Pushing past the recent memory of paralysis. The lead Stalker growled, a sound like tearing paper, and lunged. Her shot was technically perfect. A straight line to the center of mass. But the beast wasn't there anymore.

The arrow passed harmlessly through its chest as the creature glitched, its form blinking out of existence for a microsecond and reappearing three feet forward. The miss clearly shook her. I saw her shoulders hunch slightly, a flinch. The trauma of the tower — the feeling of helplessness — was a specter hovering over her. Two more Stalkers materialized on her flanks, their jaws gaping wide to reveal maws of crackling void energy. My hand twitched, ready to summon a weapon from my Armory.

My instincts screamed at me to intervene, to Leap in and burn them to ash before they could touch her. No, I told myself, clamping down on the urge with an iron will. If I step in now, she stays broken. She needs to remember that she is dangerous.

"Stop looking at them!" I shouted, my voice cutting through the static wind.

"They react to observation! Don't shoot the body, Anna! Shoot the moment!" A third wolf was on her. Its claws raked for her throat. She scrambled backward, a clumsy roll that barely cleared the attack, leaving scorched lines on her armor where the static claws had grazed her. She came up on one knee, breathing hard, her eyes wide. She looked at me for a split second. I held her gaze, offering no help, only expectation. She turned back to the wolves. She closed her eyes. Shutting out the visual chaos.

Shutting out the glitches. Relying on the deep, intrinsic sense of causality that came with her Soul, s he waited. A pulse of her grey-silver aura expanded from her body. It felt heavy. Grounded. The wolf on her left leaped. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. She didn't track it. She twisted her torso and fired at the empty air two feet behind it. The wolf glitched, blinking backward to dodge a presumed attack, and materialized directly around the arrow shaft.

The projectile, wreathed in her heavy mana, didn't just pierce; it anchored. The static form of the beast screamed and solidified into blood and bone, crashing to the ground, dead. Her eyes snapped open. There was no triumphant grin. Just a cold, calculating assessment. She fired again, anticipating the glitch of the second wolf. The arrow caught it mid-blink, pinning its head to the ghostly soil. The remaining pack hesitated. They were apex predators here, used to prey that couldn't understand their movement.

But this prey was shooting their futures, not their bodies. The pack leader snarled and blurred, its movement an unpredictable zigzag of teleportation, closing the distance in impossible leaps. Anna didn't back down. She stood her ground, feet planted. She drew [Final Word] to its limit. The wolf vanished ten feet away. She turned ninety degrees to her right and fired point-blank into the nothingness.

The arrow struck with a wet crunch as the wolf appeared directly in its path, carried by its own momentum onto the waiting tip. It fell at her feet, dissolving into a puddle of unstable blue goo. Silence returned to the hill. Anna remained standing, her chest heaving. She didn't cheer. She didn't smile. She stared down at the dissolving corpses, her expression unreadable. She walked over to the first kill, yanked a dropped core, and wiped the blue gore on the grass.

"We move," she said hoarsely. We journeyed deeper into the archipelago for what felt like hours. The world fought us every step of the way. Gravity would suddenly shift sideways for ten yards, threatening to fling us into the abyss. Trees lashed out with branches that teleported inside our armor. It was grueling. It was stressful. And it was exactly what she needed. I watched her from the back of the formation. With every encounter, she became less frantic. The wasted movement disappeared.

She stopped trying to visually track every threat and began to trust her gut, her specialized perception. She was becoming quieter, more efficient. But the silence worried me. The banter was gone. The sister who used to make jokes about "kicking monster ass" was replaced by a soldier who methodically disassembled threats. The shadow of Va'lour lay heavy on her. She wasn't fighting for the thrill of adventure anymore. She was fighting to prove to herself that she existed.

We reached a wide chasm spanned by floating rocks.

"Ambush ahead," Arthur whispered, sensing disturbances in the ether.

"Fracture-Bats. Swarm density." They descended from the clouds above, a screeching black cloud of leather wings and razor claws. Hundreds of them. Each one blinking in and out of reality, creating a confusing, nauseating strobe effect against the sky.

"Rexxar, defensive screen!" I ordered. The lion-man roared, his claymore becoming a windmill of golden death. Kaelen darted through the shadows, biting and blinking in tandem with the enemies. I stayed back, arms crossed, watching Anna. She stood in the center of the chaos. A bat dived for her face. She tilted her head mere inches, the creature passing through the space she had just occupied. She swatted it out of the air with the limb of her bow, impaling it with an arrow in the same motion.

She was dancing with the chaos now. She wasn't overpowering it; she was reading it. She fired into the swarm. Not single shots, but a massive [Barrage]. Her hands were a blur. Arrows flew in fan patterns, calculated to intercept the bats' probable blinking locations. Silver light traced webs of death in the air. Bodies rained down around her. She didn't say a word. Her face was a mask of intense concentration, sweat plastering her hair to her forehead.

She was in a trance state, forcing her mind to process probability calculations at a speed that would burn out a normal human brain. When the last bat fell, she didn't collapse. She immediately scanned the perimeter, notched a fresh arrow, and held it.

"Clear," she said, her voice flat.

"Good work," I said softly.

"You're adapting." She didn't look at me.

"It's not enough. They're just animals. Dumb beasts." She turned and looked toward the center of the island chain, her eyes hungry for something more substantial. We crossed the chasm and ascended a steep ridge of floating basalt. At the summit, we stopped. Before us lay the heart of the archipelago. It was a massive, central island, dominated not by nature, but by ruin. In the center of a scorched crater stood a colossal structure.

It looked like a temple dedicated to storms, but built by giants who hated straight lines. Massive, jagged pillars of grey stone jutted into the sky like broken ribs. Arcs of raw, blue lightning leaped between the stones, forming a crackling, chaotic barrier around the perimeter. The air above it swirled with a perpetual storm cloud that rained upwards. My [Predator's Gaze] flared, the data flooding my mind instantly. Multiple mid Tier 5 signatures — Construct Guardians.

"Mid-Tier 5," I murmured, reading the signatures.

"Guardians. Constructs. And… something else. Something dense." Anna stepped up beside me. She stared at the ruin. The lightning reflected in her eyes, stark and harsh.

"There are things in there stronger than me," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes," I confirmed.

"Guardians. Made of stone and phase-mana. They won't bleed or panic and they'll hit like meteors." I turned to face her.

"We can skirt it. We can farm the outskirts for a while longer. Build up your base. It's safer." She finally looked at me. The vulnerability I expected to see wasn't there. The fear was still there, deep down. But it was being crushed under the weight of a cold resolve.

"I spent what felt like months standing still in the dark, Eren," she said quietly.

"I felt my soul being siphoned away because I wasn't strong enough to tell reality 'No'. I am never going to feel that way again." She tightened her grip on [Final Word].

"I don't want safer. I want the thing that scares me." She looked back at the temple.

"Is there a catalyst in there? Something for the evolution?" I nodded.

"My Gaze detects a concentrated pool of Chrono-Essence. Highly potent. It's exactly what could help your soul break the threshold." She took a deep breath, letting it out slowly.

"Then we're going in." She started walking down the ridge, toward the lightning and the ruin, her step heavy and determined. She didn't look back to see if I was following. She assumed I would cover her, but she walked like she was ready to die to claim that ground. I watched her go, a mix of fierce pride and heartache warring in my chest. My little sister was gone. The tomb had taken a part of her. But in its place, a warrior was being forged. I drew my sword, signaling Rexxar and Kaelen.

"Let's go," I said.

"We have a temple to breach."