The water was a monotonous, crushing rhythm against his senses. For an entity that had once calculated the collapse of a multiverse, the act of swimming was a profound indignity. Each stroke was a reminder of the meat-sack he now inhabited, its limitations a constant, grating hum in the background of his thoughts.
Thirty minutes. The countdown ticked in his mind, a thermodynamic clock woven into the fabric of his soul. He'd been swimming for ten. The spell that erased him from the Archons' perception was a fire consuming his own existence as fuel.
"Yog," he thought, projecting the name into the silent, psychic space they shared. "This is… degrading."
There was a shift in the void behind his eyes, a sensation of ancient, dusty pages turning. "You formulated the effects. The spell functions as intended."
"It functions for thirty minutes," Nulls corrected, his mental tone annoyed. "Then I become a metaphysical ghost. Permanently. Surely one of your past… partners… ran into this problem?"
A long, considering silence. "The consequences of my spell can't be changed, to conjured a spell you must give reality an equivalent tribute. Althought the need for an alternative never really crossed my mind."
Nulls's mind, an engine of Theos intellect, seized the admission. "Then let's be inventive. The spell is tied to my body. But a body can wear things. I need a… container. Something else to hold the paradox."
He broke the surface, the sun a blinding flare after the abyssal dark. On the horizon, a smudge of green resolved into an island. He swam with renewed vigor, the countdown now at twenty-two minutes.
He emerged onto a beach of white sand, his naked form dripping onto the pristine shore. The concealment spell still active, he was a ghost, a non-event to the world. But he could feel the strain, a subtle fraying at the edges of his being.
Twenty minutes. He strode inland. The jungle was a riot of alien scents and sounds. His goal was the faint, structured hum of Aetherion he could sense further inland. A city.
"If I drop the spell, they'll find me in a heartbeat," he mused to Yog. "So I can't stop. But maybe I can… move the problem."
"Clarify?"
"Clothes," Nulls thought, the idea crystallizing. "I'll stitch the spell into the fabric. A walking, talking concealment charm that isn't me. It would take the strain off my own soul."
There was a pulse of what might have been amusement. "Clever. But the limitation is in the magic itself, not the anchor. The cloth would still burn out in thirty minutes."
"Then I'll become a very fast tailor," Nulls replied, his mental voice changed to cheerful. He found a clearing and began to work. With a thought, he pulled carbon from the air, hydrogen from the moisture, weaving them into a simple, dark tunic and trousers.
He etched the sigil of non-existence into the very atomic structure of the fabric and let the ones in his soul to die. It was done in seconds. He pulled it on. The existential strain lifted from his soul, transferring to the clothes. The countdown reset. Thirty minutes.
"Better," Nulls said, flexing his arms. The cloth was stiff. "I could make it invisible, I suppose. But then I'd have dirt and bugs all over me. A nuisance."
He felt an idea forming. "Yog," he began, his tone deceptively casual. "What are your feelings on… roommates?"
The psychic space went still. "Explain."
"A second Codex. Something for time. I could slow it down for the clothes. Make thirty minutes feel like thirty years."
Yog's response was swift, almost dismissive. "Why bother? Summon your creature. It can warp local time as easily as it unmakes matter."
"The beast is a sledgehammer," Nulls countered. "It drinks my power, it's loud, and the effect vanishes the moment I send it away. And it draws attention. I'd rather not have every eye on me."
"I'll think about it," Yog said, its tone suggesting the matter was closed.
The countdown on the clothes ticked to thirty seconds. The fabric began to feel thin, spectral. He was out of time.
With a mental sigh, he let the spell die in the tunic. It became just cloth again. He dropped, burrowing into the soft sand until he was completely submerged. Then, he wove the spell again, pouring it into the millions of sand grains surrounding his body. The countdown reset. Thirty minutes. He was now a hidden variable in the island's geology.
"Yog. The Temporal Codex. It's the only convinient solution," he thought from his sandy tomb.
"You're not listening," Yog's voice held a rare edge of frustration. "My connection to you is a singular thing. Other Codexes are… different. They have voices, forms. They're not just knowledge. They're presences. And their power, Aetherion, it can't mix with what you are. With what I've given you."
"Why not?" Nulls asked, genuinely curious.
"I had a wielder long before you. Laufey. A good soul, in her way. She tried to cast a simple blessing for her village, using their local magic. I begged her not to."
"Why would she?"
"Faith. She was making an offering to a god I knew for a fact did not exist. She thought I was a demon sent to test her. She called me a liar."
"What happened?"
"She cast the spell." Yog's voice grew distant, heavy with a memory that was not a memory. "Her body… it twisted. It became something that should not be. It was a horror I had not foreseen. I didn't know… I didn't understand the consequences then."
"Then why didn't she just use the our power?"
"She was afraid. She said it felt… profane. That it would defile her holy places. She chose her comforting lies over the truth I offered her."
Nulls let the silence hang for a moment. "We'll fix it. We'll wipe the slate clean. I have a plan, and you have to promise not to get angry. I guarantee it will work. If it doesn't, you can punish me however you see fit."
A flicker of wary interest. "What is this plan? I'm listening."
"We join Valerius's little club. We play along. Then, we find the most important maggot in the jar, and we remove it. The whole structure will collapse from the inside. It's more efficient than a direct assault."
There was a long, heavy pause. "I will… consider it," Yog said. And then, the presence was simply gone. Nulls called out into the mental silence, but there was no reply. He was alone.
The sand-spell had twelve minutes left. He deactivated it, wiggled through the earth to a new location, and reactivated it. Another thirty minutes. Tedious.
He needed a better fix. An idea sparked. He conjured a microscopic barrier just above his skin, trapping a fine layer of sand against his body. He deactivated the larger field and emerged. He now carried his own concealment field with him. One hour of total concealment. More efficient.
He walked until the trees thinned. He stood at the edge of a wide, public beach. Hundreds of humans dotted the sand. They were data points, their only value: a potential resource.
He needed better clothes. Taking a pair from one of them was a trivial action. He focused on a man in the modest clothing. He began to weave a spell to disintegrate the man. But his control was still new, clumsy. The spell flared.
There was no sound. One moment, a sunny beach. The next, a hundred-meter circle of sand flash-melted into a bubbling pane of obsidian glass. Everything and everyone within it was gone. In the nanoseconds before the heat reached him, Nulls shielded the clothes he wanted. They floated, pristine, in the heart of the devastation.
He stepped forward, his feet sizzling in the molten glass, the damage healing instantly. He picked up the clothes. They were too small. Annoyed, he cast another spell to adjust the atomic structure of the fabric. He overdid it, then scaled it back, the cloth shimmering until it fit. He pulled them on.
Then, he wove the concealment spell into the new clothes. The countdown began again. Thirty minutes. The humans at the edge of the glass saw nothing of him. They only saw the sudden, silent horror where their world had been. They screamed, but Nulls was already gone, a ghost in the manor.
The stolen trousers were a coarse, scratchy wool, a far cry from the conceptual armor of his past. They were modest, simple, and utterly mundane, the perfect disguise. With the concealment spell woven into their fibers, Nulls was less than a ghost as he walked from the glass-scorched beach towards the city's skyline. He was a negative space, a walking erasure.
The beach path gave way to a paved road, which widened into a grand causeway leading towards a colossal bridge that arced over a churning river estuary. The bridge was a marvel of crude engineering.
A twenty-kilometer span of stone and steel that connected the island's wild heart to its civilized core. People and vehicles streamed across it, a river of oblivious life. Nulls had just set foot on the bridge's wide pedestrian walkway when the air changed.
It began as a wet, tearing sound from beneath the bridge, followed by the shriek of twisting metal. A section of the guardrail bulged inward, then burst apart in a shower of shrapnel. What hauled itself onto the roadway was a blasphemy of flesh.
It was the size of a ground vehicle, but any resemblance ended there. Its body was a glistening, semi-translucent sack of pink-grey tissue, pulsing with a nauseating rhythm. Dozens of humanoid limbs, stripped of skin and slick with a clear, viscous fluid, sprouted from its core, scrabbling and clawing for purchase on the asphalt.
It had no head. Instead, the top of its mass was a single, gaping maw lined not with teeth, but with spinning, bony drills that whirred with a sound like a dentist's nightmare. A single, blood-red organ the size of a dinner plate throbbed where a face should be, and it was pointed directly at Nulls.
This was a Morbus, but a lesser cousin to the Calamity-class behemoths of the deep. An Asfalis-Class. And it could feel him.
A psychic shriek, thin and piercing, erupted from the red organ. It wasn't a sound heard with ears, but felt in the teeth and the mind. The creature's many limbs propelled it forward in a lurching, horrifically fast gallop, its drills aimed at the empty space where Nulls stood.
Nulls didn't flinch. A genuine, pleasant smile touched his lips. This was an opportunity. The Morbus lunged, its maw screaming. Nulls took a single, casual step to the left.
The creature slammed into the spot he had just vacated. Its maw chewed through the bridge's concrete deck, sending chunks of rubble and reinforcing steel flying. A car swerved, tires screeching, and slammed into the mangled guardrail. The Asfalis, enraged, flailed its limb-cluster.
One of the flailing, skinless arms, moving with whip-crack speed, smacked a civilian who was frozen in terror. The man didn't scream; he simply disassembled. His body unraveled into a cloud of blood mist and disjointed segments, painting the bridge in a wide, red arc.
Chaos erupted. Screams finally pierced the air, louder than the maw. People ran, trampling each other. The Morbus ignored them. Its entire world had narrowed to the irritating, intangible signal that was Nulls. It charged again.
Nulls pivoted on his heel, his movements fast and precise. The creature barreled past him, this time plowing directly into the supports of a towering light post. The metal groaned, bent, and sheared. The hundred-foot post teetered and fell across the bridge in a cataclysm of shattering glass and shrieking metal, crushing two public transports and cutting the roadway in half.
"Any seconds now," Nulls murmured, his voice lost in the din. He was a dancer in a ballet of destruction, and the Morbus was his clumsy, powerful partner.
The creature was a whirlwind of gore. A flailing limb caught a woman trying to shield her child, and both were reduced to a paste of bone and viscera. Its maw, seeking Nulls, gouged cavernous holes in the bridge deck, through which cars plummeted into the river far below. With every missed lunge, it dismantled another piece of the city's infrastructure.
It was working perfectly. The Morbus was his unwitting weapon, and the city was the anvil.
The creature, growing frantic, unleashed a new horror. The red organ on its back pulsed, and the skinless limbs began to shiver violently. With wet, popping sounds, the hands at the ends of the limbs detached and launched through the air like fleshy missiles, trailing ropes of tendon.
Nulls weaved through the barrage. A flying hand smacked into a crowded observation platform behind him. The people there didn't just die; their bodies swelled and burst, as if their internal pressure had been violently reversed, showering the area in a red mist and offal.
Another hand-missile shot past his shoulder and struck the base of a suspension cable tower. There was a deep, resonant twang that vibrated through the entire bridge, followed by the groan of overstressed steel. A web of cracks spread up the tower.
The Morbus, now limbless and oozing a thick, yellow pus from its stumps, gathered itself for a final, desperate charge. It was a bleeding, abomination of hate.
Nulls stood his ground until the last possible microsecond, then sidestepped. The Asfalis-Class Morbus shot past him, through the gap it had created, and slammed head-on into the central pylon of the bridge.
The impact was apocalyptic. The pylon, already weakened, shattered. The great suspension cables, losing their anchor, whipped back with supersonic force, slicing through everything in their path, stone, steel, and flesh. A entire section of the bridge, nearly a kilometer long, sagged with a deafening roar of failing architecture and then collapsed into the estuary, taking hundreds of lives with it.
Silence descended, broken only by the creak of dying metal and the distant, terrified wails from the city. The Morbus was gone, pulverized in the collapse.
Nulls, still clad in his modest, unscathed clothes, stood at the new precipice. He looked out over the colossal scar of destruction, the shattered bridge, the burning wrecks, the blood-slicked road. It was a masterpiece of misdirection.
He adjusted his simple shirt, a picture of calm amidst the carnage. The city was now wounded, terrified, and looking for a monster to blame. They would find the corpse of the Morbus. They would never find him.
Nulls stood at the edge of the shattered bridge, the modest wool of his trousers whispering in the wind. Below, the churning estuary swallowed the last remnants of the collapse. The Morbus was pulp. The city was in trauma. It was, by all accounts, a successful diversion.
Yet, a single, pragmatic thought cut through the pleasant afterglow of destruction.
Where is Valerius's Institute?
The question wasn't born of concern, but of tactical assessment. An Asfalis-Class Morbus, while lesser, was still a significant threat. Its psychic shriek alone should have been a clarion call to any nearby mages of caliber. The city's defense should have been swift and brutal.
The silence from the city's power centers was deafening.
He monologued to himself, the words a quiet murmur lost in the wind. "Two possibilities present themselves," he mused, his tone that of a scientist reviewing data. "One: Valerius and his prized mages are fully occupied. The Leviathans are applying pressure elsewhere, demanding their absolute attention."
A faint, translucent shimmer passed over the fabric of his trousers. The spell was dying. Twenty seconds.
"Or two," he continued, the corner of his mouth twitching upward. "They are already wiped from the board."
He found he didn't care which it was. Both outcomes were merely different states of the same advantageous variable: chaos. The Institute was a tool. A preoccupied one was a blind spot. Either way, it worked for him.
The countdown in his mind reached zero. The existential strain vanished. He deactivated the spell, not with a bang, but a sigh. The concealment field fell away. The clothes remained, but they were now… less. They held a slight, almost imperceptible translucency, a ghost of the power they had once contained. He was visible, a lone figure on a broken bridge, but he felt no urgency.
He knew what came next. The death of the Morbus, the collapse of the bridge, it was a beacon. Every Morbus in the region would be drawn to the lingering psychic scar. Every Codex-wielder with a hint of perception would feel the disturbance. They were all coming here.
With nothing better to do, his grand plan momentarily stalled by a lack of viable clothing and an overabundance of incoming attention, Nulls sat down. He dangled his legs over the abyss, the picture of casual repose amidst the wreckage. The screams from the city were a distant symphony.
He didn't have to wait long.
The air thickened, pressing down with a physical weight. The water in the estuary below didn't just part; it fled, pulling away from the bridge in a terrified, sucking retreat, exposing the muddy bottom. The sky didn't darken; it was blotted out.
It was the largest of the three Archons. Its scale was incomprehensible. The bridge was a twig beneath it. Nulls didn't look up. He simply closed his eyes and smiled.
The leviathan's descent was not an attack; it was an act of geography. There was no bite, no impact. The space around Nulls, the entire central section of the twenty-kilometer bridge, was simply… gone. Enclosed.
One moment, he was sitting in the open air, the wind on his face.
The next, he was in absolute, suffocating blackness. The sound of the world was replaced by a low, resonant hum that vibrated through his bones, the sound of the Archon's biology. The air was hot, thick with the smell of digested planets and primordial brine. A gentle, acidic rain began to fall, sizzling softly against his translucent clothes and his skin, which healed the minor damage almost instantly.
Nulls opened his eyes to the perfect dark. He was seated on a piece of bridge debris, adrift in a sea of stomach acid the size of an inland sea. He was stranded in the belly of the beast. He brought a finger to his chin, thoughtful.
"Well," he said aloud, his voice echoed throughout the immense, living cavern. "This is more degrading."