Chương 420: Start of a True Adventure

Vale murmured to himself as he walked through the forest. It was peaceful now. Only the songs of small birds broke the silence, drifting between the trees while the leaves moved softly in the wind. There were no predators in sight. Not even prey. After everything that had happened, the lack of danger felt slightly unnatural. Still, Vale welcomed it. He needed some peace after meeting a Fragment of a god. The whole meeting had been... far too normal. He had expected something grand.

Maybe a godlike figure coming down from the sky, a heavy force filling the air, or some clear sign that he was standing before something far beyond a mortal. A Fragment of a god should have felt like a god. Instead, the Tyrant had simply been sleeping in a cave. It ate, talked, asked questions, and acted almost like any other living creature. It was clearly powerful, but it was still a creature. Vale found that strangely comforting. Maybe gods were not as different from mortals as he had thought.

Perhaps even beings that powerful could sit in a cave, enjoy a meal, and complain when someone woke them up. Then again, he had barely seen the Tyrant use any of its powers. It had spoken, understood human speech, and somehow vanished without leaving a trace, but that was about all Vale had seen. He frowned as the thought stayed in his mind. What exactly was its power? The Tyrant was supposedly the fifth Fragment of the Original Arcana, a Tarot card that had once been known as the Emperor.

If the High Priestess stood for knowledge and sight, perhaps the Tyrant's power was tied to its own nature: authority, control, and rule. Could it force others to obey? Could it control them? Maybe it could command anything weaker than itself or even create servants of its own. Vale had no idea what that would look like, but the thought made him uneasy. Whatever its power was, he doubted the Tyrant was weak. It had even claimed that it was below the High Priestess, and that bothered Vale.

If all the Fragments came from the same source, shouldn't they have been close in strength? They were pieces of the same greater being, so it seemed natural that their power would have been split evenly. Unless it hadn't been. Maybe some concepts were simply stronger than others. Vale's thoughts wandered further. If that was true, then the Strength card had to be terrifying. The name alone suggested as much. What would something like that even look like?

Could the Strength Fragment crush mountains with its bare hands? Could it tear through the Tower of Ruin itself? Maybe it could even destroy whole realms. By now, Vale couldn't say that any of those things were impossible. The gods were already capable of holding back beings far beyond anything he could understand. Spawn could keep growing through higher stages, and if they reached their final form and became Goliaths, their very existence could begin to tear a realm apart.

Reality itself could break simply because something too powerful had entered it. Vale had seen enough to know that power could reach levels that made normal rules almost meaningless. The Tower of Ruin seemed to be the one exception. Nothing worked normally there. The Tower could survive forces that should have destroyed everything inside it, and Vale still didn't understand why. He did, however, have a theory. It was only a guess, but the more he thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make.

Chaotic Atum was the natural state of existence, while Harmonic Atum was the state placed upon it by the Creator. Perhaps someone inside the Tower had tried to harmonize the Atum but had failed to finish the process. At the same time, the Chroma had somehow become stagnant. And Chroma was what allowed change to happen. Without change, the process could never be completed. The Atum would remain trapped between two states, neither chaotic nor harmonic. It would simply be stuck.

Vale had never seen anything like that while studying Atum within Kealix's domain, but it could explain why the Tower behaved so strangely. It could explain why the land could survive such great power without being destroyed. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. At least, Vale wanted to believe it did. His thoughts slowly returned to the being behind most of those questions. Kealix. Who was Kealix, really? Vale knew that Kealix was his Enigma.

He knew that much. He was also said to be the first master of the Tarot Fragments, perhaps even their creator. But none of that answered the question that truly mattered. What did that make Kealix? He wasn't simply another god. Kealix himself had given Vale the answer at the end of his first Trial.

"A mistake." Vale's expression shifted as he remembered those words. What did they mean? How could something as powerful as Kealix be a mistake? Why had he sealed himself away? Why had he abandoned everything he once had and become a mystery even to those who had followed him? None of it made sense. And the more Vale thought about it, the more questions appeared. He had spent so long trying to understand Kealix that he sometimes wondered if there was even an answer he could find.

Perhaps the truth was buried so deep that even the gods who had known him could no longer reach it. Vale sighed. Then stopped. Something was wrong. He slowly lifted his head. The forest looked the same. The trees were still there, the wind still moved through the leaves, and birds still called somewhere in the distance. Yet something was watching him. Something was hunting him. A cold feeling ran down his spine as his hand moved toward his blade.

His wounds had not fully healed yet, and his body still ached from the fight with Korin. Most of his internal injuries were only now starting to recover. He could probably handle a Category Three without much trouble, and a weak Category Four might still be possible. Anything stronger was another matter. A Category Five was out of the question. And whatever this was, Vale could not let it follow him back to camp. Eskar was gone, Nym was still recovering, and Nova was a healer rather than a fighter. As for Korin...

Vale's expression darkened. He didn't even know if Korin would fight anymore. The man had nearly killed all of them, and worse, he had been forced to watch his own body do it. Vale couldn't imagine what that had done to his mind. Korin had always been strong, but strength didn't mean much when the person behind it was breaking apart. Vale clenched his teeth.

'Screw it.'

"Show yourself, bastard!" His voice echoed through the trees, but nothing answered. The forest remained quiet, almost as if whatever was watching him had decided to wait. Then a cold gust slammed into him. Vale didn't turn right away. Instead, he closed his eyes. Sight could be fooled, but his other senses were harder to deceive. He listened to the air, the ground, and the leaves around him. He felt the pressure shifting nearby and waited for the smallest sign of movement. There. Something was moving.

It was large, heavy, and it was close. Vale's eyes snapped open. He moved at once, throwing himself to the side. The ground exploded behind him. A huge beast burst from beneath the earth, its jaws snapping shut around stone and dirt. The rock shattered between its teeth with a loud crunch as chunks of earth flew in every direction. Vale felt the force of the attack rush past him before he rolled across the ground and caught himself on one hand. He looked back.

"A power type, huh?" The beast looked like a huge alligator, but its body was built very differently. Its legs were long and thick, made for digging rather than swimming, while its body was heavy and tough, almost as if it had been built to survive deep underground. Thick plates covered parts of its hide, and its claws were large enough to tear through packed earth with ease. Every movement carried great weight. This thing wasn't built for speed. It was built to attack from below.

Vale slowly stood and drew both blades. He studied the beast from head to tail, looking for any weak point. Its hide was thick, and the muscles beneath it were even thicker. He doubted his daggers would do much if he struck its body directly. The real question was whether he could pierce its hide at all. The beast turned toward him. Its reptilian eyes locked onto his, and a deep hiss escaped between its teeth. Vale lowered his stance.

The creature was more than twice his height even while standing on all fours, but size alone didn't decide a fight. Skill mattered. Speed mattered. Experience mattered even more. Vale had survived things far worse than a beast that relied on surprise attacks. He shifted his feet and tightened his grip on the blades. The creature dug one claw into the earth, ready to strike again. Vale gave it a faint smile.

"Let's see how strong you are." The beast lunged. Vale moved at the same time, rushing straight toward it. The fight had begun.