Chapter 165
Daniel stood in silence, his mind running numb as though it had been hollowed out. The taste of iron clung to his tongue, blood dripping freely from wounds that refused to close. Around him, the mages of the United Guild worked frantically, their hands weaving in desperate arcs of light and sigils. Healing spells rained over him, layers of shimmering wards stacking atop one another, yet the bleeding did not stop. His body trembled, not from fear, but from the sheer weight of battle that clung to him like chains.
The fight against the three Archdemons had gone unseen. The enchanted insects that served as transmission relays had all fallen silent, crushed beneath a spell of such magnitude that it severed every signal to the east. Across the region, enchanted mirrors went dark at once, leaving only a final glimpse, the two-headed troll collapsing with a guttural roar before the vision fractured into nothing. Panic followed instantly.
In the council chamber, Melgil's face had gone pale. She hurled herself at her memory, incanting in a rapid blur, trying to pry open a transfer gate toward Daniel's location. Sparks flared. The rune symbols unraveled. The portal collapsed into smoke. Even with Daniel's permission,his authority over the spell's lattice granting her the right, her efforts failed. Some higher power was choking the ley lines themselves.
Duke Aereth Rothchester wasted no time. He summoned his best knights, his voice sharp as steel ringing from the training yard. "Arm yourselves. We march now!" But before he could give the full order, the Duchess intervened. Her eyes burned with urgency as she called for Custodia, her most trusted aide.
"Send word to the War Forge at once. Use the fastest pixie messger gold can hire at once."
Custodia bowed and obeyed without hesitation. The letter was short, almost savage in its simplicity:
"Bring your army to the west. Protect Daniel."
Even as the message winged its way through ether and wind, across ridges of shattered sky, the War Forge had already stirred. On the far side of the realm, within the cavernous bastions of living stone, Siglorr Bouldergrove stood ready. The dwarf-lord's massive frame towered over his men, his beard braided with iron clasps as his hammer rested upon his shoulder. He too had seen the battle, his own enchanted mirror shattering in a blaze of sparks. He did not wait for commands. Armies moved because Siglorr willed it.
But something was different. The War Forge Daniel remembered, an eternal fortress that once numbered its warriors by the hundreds, a citadel even in void-space, was no longer the same. Their banners flew higher, their weapons gleamed brighter, and their numbers had swelled far beyond what memory allowed. Legions marched now, not mere cohorts. Steel and fire rolled like thunder through the stone arteries of the fortress, a living heart prepared to spill its lifeblood upon the west.
And that was not all. The Crescent Magus Tower, once a silent monument of starlit learning, had shifted as well. Daniel remembered it as cold, indifferent, its Archmage Sylveth Melriel distant and aloof. But now? Their brief conversations had carried a different weight, as though unseen forces had reshaped history itself. What was once forgotten now stood renewed, altered by the hand of something vast and silent.
The changes were not coincidence. Daniel could feel it in his marrow. The battle with the Archdemons was only the spark. Somewhere, beyond the veils of magic and memory, the hand of a forgotten god had moved, and the world itself was no longer the same.
Daniel blinked hard as the pain gnawed at his body, the mages' healing spells weaving across his skin in vain. For a moment, he thought the numbness in his head was only blood loss, but then he noticed the strangeness clawing at the edges of reality itself. His memories wavered—images of the War Forge he once knew, of Crescent Tower's cold halls, of faces he had sheltered in his void space. All of it shifted, like ink smudging across parchment.
The War Forge was not as it had been. In his mind, it had stood as a bastion with barely a hundred true warriors, disciplined but finite. Yet the memory that settled in his chest now pulsed with something else: armies in the tens of thousands, vast battalions whose banners sang in fire and iron. He could see them as clearly as if the forge had been recast in the present moment, entire divisions moving like clockwork beneath Siglorr's command.
So too had Crescent Magus Tower changed. The memory of Archmage Sylveth Melriel had always been distant, her Crescent Tower a hollow place of quiet study, detached from the world's struggles. Now the tower loomed brighter, fuller, its halls alive with magi whose robes shimmered with the glow of astral flame. And Sylveth herself… she had spoken to him differently, as if she had known him longer than their brief contact allowed.
The realization struck him cold.
The people he had saved, the villagers, the mercenaries, the scattered soldiers, he had hidden them within his void space, a refuge beyond reach. Yet when he sought their presence, he felt only silence. Empty echoes. They were gone. Not slain, not erased, but re woven. Shifted into this… this new narrative that clung to him like a second skin.
Their roles, their identities, and their very lives had been reshaped and rewritten so seamlessly that only he noticed the difference.
Daniel's chest tightened. The forgotten god. He had felt its touch before, but now he saw its intent. This was not random chaos, not a spell gone astray. A hand older than memory was pulling threads through his life, stitching a new tapestry where Daniel was not merely a survivor, nor a leader, but something else entirely.
A Netherborn descendant.
The word burned through him, unbidden. His veins pulsed with the recognition, as though some hidden truth within his blood had been waiting for this moment to awaken.
The mages around him continued their frantic chants, oblivious to the shift. The Duke's knights readied their blades. The duchess's orders raced toward the War Forge. All of them believed the world was unfolding as it always had, anchored in its rightful history.
Only Daniel knew the truth. The old timeline was dissolving. A new one was bleeding into the present, and with each breath he took, he felt less like a man who had fought against fate and more like a figure being carved into it.
And in the shadows of that thought, he realized something else. If he was being recast, if his allies and enemies were being reshaped, then the Archdemons themselves might not be bound by the same limits he once knew.
The battle wasn't just for survival anymore. It was for control of the narrative itself.
Daniel's breath came shallow, each inhale dragging pain through his ribs, but it was not the bleeding that unsettled him most. It was the silence in his mind where certainty should have been. Memories that once anchored him—faces he had saved, the battles he had survived, the sanctuary of his void space—now slipped like water through his grasp. The people he had pulled into safety were gone, not dead, not erased, but changed into something else, something that no longer bore the shape of his memory. Their absence was not absence at all, but replacement. And for the first time, Daniel wondered if even the things he still remembered had ever truly belonged to him.
Was he clinging to a fading dream? Or was the dream clinging to him, remade each time he reached for it?
The doubt gnawed deeper than any wound the Archdemons had struck. His mind swam with contradictions, visions of the War Forge in two states, histories that overlapped yet could not coexist. He felt like a man standing on shifting sand, each grain whispering a different truth. He tried to draw strength from certainty, but what certainty remained when even memory could be rewritten?
And then, beneath the haze of doubt, he felt it: a pulse, distant yet intimate, like the last heartbeat of a dying star. It was not his own.
It belonged to the one who had touched him before the Unseen, the forgotten god.
In that silent recognition, pieces aligned. The truth was cruel in its simplicity: the god had already been weak when it saved Damon Lazarus, burning fragments of its essence to turn the wheel of fate. And now, again, it had reached for Daniel, pouring out what little power remained.
Not to slay Archdemons, not to bend the world into a neat order, but to do something stranger, riskier to rewrite Daniel's story. To bend the timeline around him, to stitch him into survival, to weave him into something greater.
It didn't have to.
That was the truth that cut deeper than all else. The god was born of the void, a being of inevitability, a nameless will meant only to persist in shadows. It had no reason to intervene, no need to care for mortal lives or their fragile threads of fate. And yet, it did. Not for duty. Not for destiny. But because it wanted to.
It wanted to change its nature.
For eons it had existed as a thing without purpose, a whisper in the cracks between worlds, forgotten and unseen because that was all it had ever been. But in saving Damon, in saving Daniel, it chose to become something more. It chose to break its own cycle, to act not as an indifferent void, but as a will that desired, that reached, that cared. It wanted to be remembered—not as an eternal shadow, but as a force that defied what it was.
And so it sacrificed. Its own story unraveled, its essence diminished, its place in creation lost to the very act of giving. To rewrite Daniel was to cut oneself out of the script of existence, to exchange eternity for a fleeting change.
Daniel trembled as the realization dug into him. He was standing in the aftermath of a god's rebellion against its own nature. His survival was not just luck, nor was it destiny. It was the echo of a choice made by a being that had no reason to choose at all.
The air around him trembled with the weight of this truth. The mages shouted, their healing spells flaring, the Duke's knights moved into formation, and the Duchess's orders rode the wind. The Archdemons loomed, their shadows growing darker. But Daniel stood at the center of it all with a hollow ache in his chest not just from wounds, but from the crushing knowledge that the price of his life had been the last strength of a god who had wanted to be more than void.
And if it had given up its eternity for him, then he could no longer allow himself to be just a man swept along by fate. He had to carry that sacrifice, to prove that a story rewritten was not wasted.
The battlefield was a graveyard of smoke and ruin. From the three hundred who had entered the fight, only one hundred and ninety still drew breath. The rest lay silent forty more clinging to life with broken bodies, their wounds so deep that even the frantic flood of healing magic could not knit them shut without time.
Limbs lost, skin seared, eyes blinded those who could be saved were mended by desperate hands wielding one-use artifacts, treasures that had been hoarded for years. Nearly half of all such relics were spent in a single night, burned away to salvage what could still be called human. As for those vaporized by the Archdemons' sweeping magic, nothing remained but ash and fractured gear. What little could be gathered was wrapped with care, marked for burial, that they might not pass into the void unremembered.
Daniel lay unconscious at the center of it all. His body trembled faintly, but his mind was sealed away in safety. Unlike before, his sanctuary no longer existed in the fragile realm of thought; the void he had forged was now outside him, independent, a true bastion torn free of his mind's confines. That absence was both a relief and a danger for no one could reach him there, and no one could know what he carried within.
Around him, the survivors of the three guilds rallied with grim determination. Charlotte Lazarus, blades still stained with demon ichor, stood at the forefront of the East Lazarus Guild's battered line, her fire dancing along her dagger edges as she barked orders through exhaustion. Beside her moved Jacob, the lava-blooded vice leader, his arms scorched but unyielding, while Oliver loosed poisoned darts into the lingering shades that prowled at the edges of the battlefield. Farrah's vines still coiled across the ground, holding back collapse, while Rainey's swarm of insects hung thick in the air, a buzzing curtain that warned scavengers to keep away. Sabine shifted back from her tiger-form, panting, claws still dripping with gore, and Noah's metallic skin gleamed beneath the pale light, dented yet unbroken.
From the White Devil Guild, Natasha Sokolov,her ice-bound crossbow crackling with frost—stood shoulder to shoulder with her comrades. Borislav's poison seeped into the earth like oil, Mikhaylov's paralyzing spells catching what stragglers dared approach.
Tamara's hands bled mana as she pressed healing light into burned flesh, while Mariya whispered curses at the corpses of fallen demons, ensuring they would not rise again. Radinka hefted her axe, crimson from haft to edge, as Kuzmina, still half-beast, prowled the lines. Nataliya, Aleksandrova,
Irinushka all three kept their weapons drawn, eyes scanning the gloom for the next strike.
And then there was the High Strategy Guild. Mary Kaye Lazarus, shovel in hand, was no longer the scholar but the commander, her voice low and certain as she carved trenches into the blood-soaked soil. Around her, Bonnie bent gravity itself, pinning rubble down to free the trapped, while Cody's shockwaves blasted clear paths through the wreckage.
Maggie's wind blades hissed at shadows, Sophia's arrows burned with fire, and Emma's assessment spells flickered across the wounded, gauging what chance each still had. Brie's voice whispered through their minds, binding the survivors together with thought, while Zalie brewed fresh potions from nothing, hands trembling from the cost. Moyra hardened sand into shields, Liss froze enemies with a touch, Enan's clones rushed to lift debris, Lack's wolves prowled the perimeter, and Romaldo swelled into a juggernaut to move bodies too heavy to drag.
Dozens more labored, spell after spell, every ounce of mana squeezed for survival. Smoke and mist clouded the air, illusions bought moments of peace, and wings lifted the injured to safer ground. Arrows, fire, water, and soil, every element was exhausted, every hand bleeding from overuse. Shields rose, then shattered, then rose again. Healers collapsed only to be lifted by comrades who forced them to keep casting. Buffs, wards, and barriers circled their tattered camp like fading stars.
From three proud guilds, this was what remained. Scarred, bloodied, diminished—but alive.
And yet, beneath the scraping and the shouting, the digging of trenches and the binding of wounds, there was silence too. The silence of absence. A hundred souls lost to darkness, and the lingering dread that the Archdemons had not been defeated, only driven back into shadow.
All eyes turned at intervals to Daniel, lying motionless among them. He was the reason they had fought. The reason they had survived at all. And though unconscious, though pale and still, the weight of his presence was undeniable.
They could not know that within him stirred the echo of a god's sacrifice, that even as they clung to survival, the threads of fate themselves were being rewritten.
And somewhere in that silence, the survivors understood without words: this was not an ending. This was the pause before the next storm.
Night pressed heavily over the battlefield, the stars muted by smoke that still hung in slow, curling sheets. The survivors of the three guilds worked through exhaustion, their bodies long past breaking yet unwilling to stop.
Fires were lit not for warmth, but for light, to keep shadows at bay. The wounded were laid in rows, tended by trembling hands, and the dead were gathered with reverence, each body marked with a sigil of passage before being wrapped in cloaks and banners. Some wept openly, others worked in silence, their grief buried beneath duty, but none were untouched. From three hundred, one hundred and ninety remained. That number clung to every breath, a reminder carved into the night air.
Watch rotations were set in place. Wolves summoned by Lack prowled the outer edges, insects by Rainey hovered in clouds thick enough to choke the dark, while Oliver's poisoned darts and Natasha's ice bolts shimmered in the shadows as warnings to anything that dared draw close. The healers worked in shifts, hands glowing faintly as they poured what little mana remained into keeping hearts beating. Shields flickered now and then, collapsing with fatigue, only to be raised again by another.
Yet for all their efforts, a weight hung heavier than fatigue, the weight of knowing they had faced three Archdemons and survived by chance, not by victory. Every whisper of the wind, every crack of stone sounded like the prelude to another attack. Some tried to find solace in laughter, brief and broken, but most sat in silence, heads bowed, blades resting on their knees as if praying that steel alone could keep the night from swallowing them whole.
In the center of their broken camp lay Daniel. His chest rose and fell in shallow rhythm, his wounds bound by spell and cloth, but his mind was elsewhere, adrift, unreachable. The mages who checked him whispered that his spirit was stable, that he lingered in some sanctuary beyond their reach. Few truly understood what that meant.
Inside, Daniel drifted.
The void around him was not the familiar one he had once carved into existence. It was colder, emptier, a blank horizon where not even echoes dared to stir. He stood in nothingness, weightless, yet burdened with the heaviness of memory unraveling. And in that nothingness, visions began to bleed through like cracks in glass.
He saw fragments, Damon Lazarus, a life that had been purged, scrubbed clean from the pages of time. Yet the erasure had left scars, holes in history where something new had been forced to grow. Into those blank spaces, stories twisted and bled, rewriting themselves into shapes that should not exist. One such shape was a digital construct, a memory of Earth, of a game called Arcane Crusade. He remembered its pixels, its code, and the tower hidden in its virtual sprawl, a tower he had co-created in another life. That false reality now bled into this one, filling the gaps Damon had left behind.
Daniel's heart pounded as he watched the erratic chaos of his existence play out before him—fragments of two histories colliding, shattering, and reforming. He was both player and piece, creator and creation. The weight of it pressed down until he thought the void itself would consume him.
He tried to call out, but no sound came. His breath fogged against nothing. He stood face to face with absence itself, the sheer enormity of being rewritten, and for a moment he feared there would be nothing left of him at all.
Then
A voice.
It cut through the blankness like a spark through oil. Distant, warmer, andrp enough to pierce the silence.
"Wake up."
The words echoed, not from the void, but from somewhere closer, warmer, and insistent. They tugged at him, pulling against the weight of erasure. His pulse quickened. His body, far away, trembled faintly against the earth.
The survivors mourned, rebuilt, and watched. But within the heart of the void, Daniel Lazarus stood on the edge of two stories colliding, and someone, something was calling him back.
The night pressed heavily on Vaenyx, the fused familiar, its form still intact but weighed down by an ache it could not name. It lingered at the edge of the survivors' camp, away from the firelight, where shadows stretched long and thin, mirroring the unease within. Their master's silence, Daniel's unconscious stillness, throbbed like a wound through their bond, and for the first time, Vaenyx realized how fragile the thread tethering them truly was.
They had reveled once in their newfound autonomy no longer bound as mere echoes of Daniel's will, but alive, with choices, with thoughts of their own. Yet now, standing in the cold quiet, they felt the cost of that freedom pressing back against them. They remembered, with startling clarity, that their very existence had been shaped out of Daniel's childhood recollections, fragments of dreams and half-remembered companions pulled into form. But tonight, that foundation trembled.
Something had shifted. Damon Lazarus had been erased from the ledger of Earth's history, and in his place, the story was rewritten Edward Lazarus as the architect of Arcane Crusade, the one who laid down the laws and skeleton of the digital realm where the Tower had been born. Vaenyx could not explain it, but the truth of this rewriting rippled into their being like an aftershock.
They felt it in the hollow of their chest, in the way their very essence dimmed. It was as if some vital part of them had been cut away and discarded, leaving only a phantom ache where once there was clarity. They could not say what had been removed no memory would surface, no image would take form, but the absence itself was undeniable, gnawing at them, cold and merciless.
Confusion tangled with grief. Vaenyx could not understand why the erasure of a man's history should bleed into their veins, and yet it did. They were born of Daniel's memories, woven from the boy he was and the man he was becoming, and now those same memories were shifting under the weight of rewritten time. If Damon Lazarus no longer existed, then perhaps something of their own essence, something once tied to him, had been extinguished as well. It was a quiet, shattering heartbreak grief without an object, mourning without a body.
Vaenyx curled in on themselves, whispering nothing into the night, knowing only that the master they loved had carried burdens beyond their comprehension, and they had been too distracted by the thrill of their freedom to truly see it. Now, with the world's stories being torn apart and remade, they feared the cost of blindness might be the unraveling of who they were.
They moved like ghosts stitched together from guilt and habit, the remaining guild members carrying a weight that no armor could shoulder: sixty names that would never answer when called, sixty hollow places at the table, and sixty faces that visited them in nightmare and waking alike. The world had given them power, a glittering promise of escape and small triumphs; instead, it had handed them a verdict.
Those gifts, once toys for idle evenings and crowded taverns, felt obscene now talents learned to charm and amuse, to trade jokes and craft clever illusions, skills sharpened for connection and boredom, not for the thing that now pressed against their throats: death. They went on guild quests not for glory but for the thin, ugly necessities coin for medicine, coin for coffins, coin to keep the living from starving while their hands trembled over bandages.
Each mission became a ledger entry in a grim accounting of loss: another supply run, another body recovered, another promise to a mother who would never again hear her child laugh. The wounded huddled in quiet rooms, their breaths ragged, nails digging into sheets until the pain of waking was the only proof they still existed; some lay feverish, eyes unmoored and seeing the battlefield replayed in colors that would not fade.
Around the camp there was no boasting, only the small, ritualized silences boots removed without sound, a lantern snuffed with ceremony, a single candle left at the edge of the road for the ones who had died with their names on their lips. Conversation had narrowed to practicalities and apologies: apologies whispered to empty beds, to armor that no longer fit, to the hollow echo of a laugh now gone. And beneath it all, a question bowed their shoulders more than any pack: what meaning did life hold when power only taught you how to hurt better?
What use were awakenings that only made the world more efficient at taking you? Sometimes, in the rare stillness between patrols, one of them would articulate the thought that had grown like a rot in their hearts, perhaps surviving was betrayal; perhaps living on, carrying the memory of so many bright lives, meant prolonging a cruelty by which the dead were only ghosts in waiting. Other times they tried to answer with vows to be better, to avenge, to live for the fallen but the promises tasted like ash, and the question returned, heavier each time: if every dawn is measured in funerals and every skill is a sharper instrument of loss, is there anything left worth waking for?
Peter Williamson sat apart from the others, his shield hand trembling beneath its bandages, the faint pulse of lingering magic still throbbing inside the ruined flesh. He had been spared, though he would never call it mercy. The memory was carved too deep into him: the clash when his barrier had faltered, the flash of steel severing through muscle and bone, the hot sting of his lifeblood spilling out in a rush. He should have died, would have died if not for the girl at his side.
She was a mage, barely more than a child in his eyes, her hands steady as she poured every last drop of her gift into him. Healing light burned against his wounds, knitting, sealing, dragging him back from the abyss. But the price was hers. He could not forget how her lips paled, how her shoulders sagged, how her breath hitched one final time as her magic consumed what her body could no longer give. He could not unsee the way she fell, lifeless, not older than his own daughter, who was waiting for him back on Earth, blissfully unaware of the nightmare her father had stumbled into.
He lived, yes, but every breath carried the weight of her death. Gratitude felt like a betrayal when guilt was the louder truth. He could not face her parents, could not imagine meeting their eyes, telling them their child had died so that an old man, a man who should have been expendable, could limp forward another day.
The thought clawed at him in the silence between battles, where every flicker of campfire flame seemed to cast her face into the smoke. Around him, others bore similar scars: a thief who had lost her sight yet clung to the guild out of loyalty; a bard whose voice had been ruined, who hummed broken notes for comfort but wept when the sound betrayed what was gone. Each survivor carried not only wounds of flesh but also shackles of the soul, griefs that no healer could stitch back together.
And in the stillness of that haunted night, Daniel stirred awake. His chest rose with effort, his breath dragging against the weight of exhaustion, and the first thing he saw was Emma leaning over him, eyes sharp but softened with worry, her hands assessing his condition with quiet precision. He listened to the whispers of grief around him, to the heavy silence that pressed thicker than armor, and he understood. He did not need to ask what they felt, because he knew it too.
Their pain was the currency of the weak, the price of those too powerless to shield themselves from despair. Powerlessness was a wound deeper than any blade, a reason that even the living moved as though they were already half-buried. Daniel's gaze hardened. He could not take away their suffering, but he could answer it with his own conviction. If weakness was the path to ruin, then strength his strength had to become the answer.
Daniel's eyes opened slowly, the weight of exhaustion dragging at his body, but the heaviness in his chest was not from wounds alone; it was from the sorrow that clung to the guild like a second skin. Emma's hands moved gently over him, checking his injuries, her voice a steady anchor in the storm of grief that hung in the air. Around him, the silence of the survivors was louder than any battlefield, a silence made of muffled sobs, of breaths held too long, of memories too raw to speak aloud. And in that moment, Daniel recalled his father's words, spoken long ago with a weary wisdom carved from battles both literal and unseen:
"Not all fights, even the honorable ones fought with the strongest companions at your side, will guarantee victory. There will always be a cost."
Those words struck him now with the force of prophecy. Looking at the broken remnants of the three guilds, he understood death itself was not what destroyed them; it was not the final breath or the fall of a comrade that weighed upon their hearts. Death was only the outcome, the shadow cast by something far more insidious: the twisted cruelty of circumstance, the vile reasoning of a world that demanded suffering as the price of survival.
Daniel's conviction tightened like steel in his chest. If others faltered beneath the burden of grief, if Peter Williamson wept silently over the life of the girl who had died to save him, if the bard's ruined voice and the thief's sightless eyes dragged them toward despair, then Daniel would not allow himself the same collapse. He would bear it—every loss, every scar, every ounce of their collective pain.
He would shoulder the grief they could not speak and carry the memories they could not endure. For he now saw life with new clarity: not as something simple or guaranteed, but as a labyrinth of choices, each branching toward outcomes shaped by reasons unseen, by motives twisted or pure. Life was complication itself, and it was in those complications that meaning was forged. What mattered was not whether death came that was inevitable but how they answered it, how they carried its weight without shattering.
Daniel felt the truth settle inside him like a fire slowly catching: if their suffering was unavoidable, then he would make it his, and in doing so, free them to keep walking. Victory without cost was an illusion, but hope, fragile though it was, could still be kept alive if someone was willing to bleed for it.