The creature shrieked, an awful, broken sound, and hurled itself down the slope with unnatural speed, limbs flailing in crooked motions as if it had too many joints and none of them in the right place.
Asrel narrowed his eyes and planted his feet.If this had happened back when he still had mana, the fight would've been over before it began.
He clenched his fist. The veins in his arm lit up with a dull crimson glow as the Chaos surged through him like molten fire. It resisted control, thrashing against the channels he carved for it, but he forced it down, anchored it in his strike.
The creature lunged, claws outstretched.
Asrel met it head-on.
His fist slammed into the monster's chest with a sound like cracking stone. For a moment, everything held still, until the Chaos surged forward, pouring through his knuckles like a floodgate bursting open.
The impact was devastating.
The creature was blasted backward mid-leap, crashing through the air like a ragdoll caught in a cyclone. The punch knocked it away as the Chaos energy entered it, worming through its broken flesh, tearing through muscle, bone, and essence from the inside out.
It hit the ground in a heap.
And then it convulsed.
Its body twisted violently, spasming as though something inside was trying to claw its way out. The skin bulged. Cracks split open. With a final, wretched sound, the creature detonated in a burst of dark red mist and flesh turned to vapor, bones scattered like ash in the wind.
Asrel stood frozen, arm still raised, the aftershock humming in his bones.
He blinked.
"...That was my first real hit with Chaos," he murmured.
Smoke and silence drifted where the monster had fallen. There was nothing left. Just a faint crater and scorched earth veined with cracks, like the ground itself recoiled from the contact.
He approached cautiously, Chaos still simmering beneath his skin.
"No trace left, huh..." He eyed the crater. "That's some nasty work."
For the first time, Asrel felt the potential of what lay within him.
The Chaos was destructive, yes. Brutal. But if he could learn to guide it, refine it...
"I need to explore this more," he muttered. "There's power here. Real power."
Asrel pressed forward, the windless desolation stretching endlessly before him.
Every now and then, a ridge or shattered rise hinted at what may have once been hills or cliffs, but now they were just broken silhouette, monuments to a world undone.
He journeyed in silence, his senses ever alert.
It didn't take long before the creatures returned.
Twisted things.
Like the one before, grotesque, malformed, stitched by madness. Some crawled. Some limped. Others moved with insect-like sharpness, their bodies jerking as if puppeteered by something unseen.
Asrel watched one of them from a distance, half-buried in the ground, its spine arched backward, twitching. The way they existed… it was wrong.
"What's going on?" he muttered, his brow furrowed in thought.
These weren't beasts born of nature, nor failed experiments of man. They were warped, broken by something far more fundamental.
"Is this still the effect of the explosion?"
He remembered the Chaos that had ravaged his body, remembered the pulse that destroyed everything around him. But these creatures… they shouldn't exist. Not after that blast.
Not here.
Asrel's eyes narrowed. "I need answers."
'I should restrain the next one I encounter and see what they really are.'
But a new problem surfaced.
He had no restraining magic.
The Chaos within him is still hard to control. Precision was difficult, restraint even more so.
Still, he had to try.
It wasn't long before the next opportunity presented itself.
From beyond a cracked ridge, four of them emerged, crawling out from the dust as if they had been waiting. Their bodies moved with jerky, uneven motions, eyes glowing with dull, unfocused hunger. They smelled the energy in him. They came for it.
Asrel exhaled.
He charged.
The first creature leapt, maw gaping wide with rows of broken, stone-like teeth. Asrel pivoted, stepped under its arc, and drove his palm into its chest. A pulse of Chaos discharged, too much. The creature burst midair, raining gore across the cracked stone.
One down.
The second came in from the side, limbs spinning like blades. Asrel ducked and swept his leg across the ground, tripping it mid-motion. Before it could recover, he slammed his hand against its head and forced a compressed burst of Chaos energy into its skull.
It convulsed and then collapsed.
Two.
The third creature showed no hesitation, no instinct for survival, no fear in the face of death. It charged blindly, limbs flailing, jaw unhinged in a silent shriek.
Asrel moved first.
He focused and tightened the Chaos within him, drawing it down like coals pressed under iron. He met the monster head-on, stepped inside its lunge, and drove his fist into its gut, just off-center. The force wasn't meant to kill, but to cripple. The impact sank deep, and Chaos spread like smoke through flesh.
The creature spasmed violently as a bloom of red-black mist burst from its torso. It dropped, twitching, body too broken to rise.
Three.
The last one didn't hesitate.
It threw itself at him, snarling and snapping, limbs jerking without rhythm.
Asrel held his ground. Then, at the final moment, he shifted left and struck low, a sharp blow to its leg, focused and precise.
A crack echoed. The leg bent in the wrong direction, and the creature collapsed in a heap, shrieking as it clawed at the earth, still trying to drag itself forward.
Asrel darted in before it could regain footing. He grabbed its remaining limb, clenched his fingers, and channeled a thin filament of Chaos energy, like a wire of burning glass, into the joint.
Muscle tore. Tendons snapped. The limb went limp.
The creature writhed, flailing helplessly.
Asrel stepped back, breathing steady, Chaos still simmering in his arms.
Asrel stood over the crippled creature, its broken body twitching in the dust. It hissed through what might have been a throat, its voice wet and ragged.
Kneeling beside it, Asrel placed a hand over its chest, careful not to provoke it further.
He closed his eyes.
'Let me see.'
He extended his senses, threads of perception wove through the creature's body, brushing against the strange currents within.
What he found unsettled him.
"…This energy," he whispered.
It was the same foreign energy he had sensed in the air since waking in this ruined land. The same presence that kept him alive in place of food. Now, it saturated the creature's flesh, woven into its muscle, threaded through bone, like parasitic veins.
"So this is what made you…" he murmured.
He stood and took a step back, eyes narrowing.
"If this energy was already in the air… then it's not just residue from the explosion."
It didn't make sense.
The mana core explosion had destroyed everything, burned the world to ash, reduced the landscape to ruin. Nothing should've survived in its blast radius. Certainly not these things.
And yet…
He turned and looked back at the trail he had followed. He'd already walked for days. The terrain had changed little, but the number of creatures had steadily grown.
Asrel let out a long breath, his thoughts racing.
There were no answers. No one left to ask.
Even the stars overhead, dim and veiled, offered no comfort.
"I need to find where this started."
His gaze drifted toward the horizon, where jagged silhouettes hinted at structures or ruins in the far distance. It was hard to tell, vision warped at range, the air thick with distortion.
"I've traveled far," he muttered, "but this place hasn't changed."
The land remained dead. Gray and cracked.
And yet the monsters kept coming.
Asrel looked down at the creature, its body twitching weakly. With a sharp burst of Chaos, he ended it quickly.
The body dissolved into dark mist, leaving nothing behind.
Without another word, Asrel turned and moved on.
~ ~ ~
In the distance, a jagged silhouette cut through the gray haze of the horizon, collapsed towers, broken stone arches, and fragmented walls half-buried in ash. Asrel approached cautiously, boots crunching over fractured stone and long-settled dust.
At first, he thought it was another site ravaged by the blast.
But the closer he got, the more he noticed the details, weathered carvings, decayed structures, and ruined halls draped in silence. Time had eroded these structures.
It felt ancient.
Whatever had happened here, it wasn't recent.
Dust covered everything like a burial shroud. No signs of life, no signs of conflict. Just long-forgotten silence.
"What is going on?" Asrel muttered. "What actually happened to me?"
He tried to piece it together, how long he had been inside Void World, how far he had been thrown, what forces could've shaped the land this way.
Too many questions. Too few answers.
"I need to find someone," he said aloud, more to himself than anyone else. "Anyone."
He wasn't sure if anyone still existed out here, but he had to believe someone did.
Though he didn't feel tired, Asrel decided to rest. Not because his body demanded it, but because his mind did. He lowered himself onto the cold stone floor, crossing his legs and closing his eyes.
For the first time since waking in this strange land, he turned his full attention inward.
The Chaos stirred beneath his skin, warm, volatile and alive.
He followed it deeper, searching for the core of it all.
At the center of his being, nestled where his mana core once was, he saw it: a dense sphere of black and crimson, slowly spinning like a silent storm. The Chaos Core.
It pulsed with power far beyond anything he had ever felt.
"It's completely taken over," he thought. "There's no trace of my old mana left."
The energy wasn't just different, it was heavier, sharper and more concentrated.
If he were to measure it, Asrel estimated that one unit of Chaos energy held the force of ten units of mana.
"Ten times stronger… but far more difficult to control," he whispered. "It doesn't follow the same rules."
"For now, it's only useful in combat."
Shifting his focus, Asrel began to scan his physical form.
He could feel it in every fiber of his being, his cells had changed. Whatever process had saved him from disintegration also reshaped him, altering his body to withstand the Chaos surging within.
His bones were denser. His muscles stronger. Even his skin felt more resistant, more reactive to threats.
He experimented cautiously.
He tried shaping the Chaos, willing it into different forms.
A blade of energy in his hand. A ball of energy from his palm. A barrier to deflect incoming strikes.
Each attempt demanded intense concentration, and more often than not, the Chaos simply recoiled, refusing to obey.
But after enough repetition, he began to see results.
Thin streaks of crimson light followed his gestures. He could hurl compressed bolts of Chaos in a straight line. He even managed to form a partial shield that held for a few seconds before destabilizing.
"It's harder than casting spells… but not impossible," he muttered, breath steady. "And the force behind it… is undeniable."
He opened his eyes. Satisfied for now.
Rising from his seated position, Asrel extended his senses again, and this time outward.
The energy in the air, the same one he had been subconsciously feeding on during his journey, was strange. He focused on it carefully.
It was a blend of energies, dense like Chaos, but murky, unfocused, and inconsistent.
He touched it with his awareness, testing its nature.
It was unclean. Tainted in a way that felt toxic, like spiritual pollution. Not enough to poison him outright, but clearly harmful to anything unaltered. It explained why the monsters were so grotesque, they were feeding off of it, evolving into what they'd become.
But to Asrel, it was something else entirely.
Fuel.
He inhaled deeply, pulling it in, guiding it toward his Chaos Core.
The Chaos responded immediately, swirling with anticipation.
Then the refining began.
The Chaos didn't absorb the energy as-is. Instead, it broke it down, dissolved it like acid washing impurities from stone. It discarded most of the substance,what remained became part of him.
"So… five parts of this corrupted energy make one part Chaos," he noted.
A small grin tugged at the edge of his mouth.
"Well… that's convenient."