The sky was not burning. It was worse. It was peeling.
Silas stood on the fractured balcony of what had once been the Imperial Spire, the wind whipping his tattered uniform against his scarred body. The only sound was a low, gut wrenching hum that seemed to emanate from the very fabric of spacetime, a discordant note at the heart of reality. The air was thin and sharp, tasting of ozone and nothingness. Two hundred years of brutal survival, clawing his way to the absolute pinnacle of mortal power, had led to this. To the end of a world that had died so slowly it hadn't even noticed.
He was an Apex, a title earned not through brute force, but through a terrifying, profound understanding of his Thread, The Thread of Integrity. He couldn't turn a mountain to dust with a glance, but he knew the precise, single point to touch that would make it crumble under its own weight. He was a master of cosmic leverage but against the gods, it meant nothing.
Below him, the Imperial City was a graveyard of impossible geometries. Buildings twisted into crystalline spirals, streets flowed like frozen rivers, and entire districts were simply… gone, replaced by patches of shimmering, silent void. The laws of physics were no longer suggestions; they were echoes of a broken reality.
This was not the result of a battle. This was the result of a presence.
In the torn sky, they hung like twin, silent gods. One was a being of perfect, blinding structure, a fractal of infinite, crystalline order that drew the eye and the soul into its cold, mathematical beauty The Forgemaster. The other was a vortex of pure, untamed life, a storm of endless, vibrant change that promised a billion new possibilities in every heartbeat The Soulspire.
They were not fighting. Not yet. They were simply observing their new arena. Their arrival alone had been enough to unmake reality.
"They don't even see us, do they?"
The voice was quiet, strained. Silas didn't turn. He knew who stood beside him, the only other soul left on this broken spire. Cassia. Her face, usually a mask of calm analysis, was pale and drawn. The air around her shimmered, not with power, but with the lack of it. Her own Apex-level Thread, the profound concept of Causality, was fraying, unable to find a place in a world where cause and effect had become a meaningless prayer.
"We are the dust on the floorboards of their new home," Silas replied, his voice a low rasp. "They will sweep us away without a thought."
He had tried to fight. For weeks, he and Cassia had led the last remnants of humanity, the most powerful Resonants on the planet, in a futile war against the encroaching gods. He had reinforced the very concept of "existence" in a pocket of the city, only to watch it dissolve when the Soulspire's gaze passed over it. Cassia had tried to weave a causal loop to trap the Forgemaster's influence, only for the loop to shatter against a being for whom logic was a tool, not a rule.
They had failed. Every gamble, every sacrifice, had been utterly and completely pointless.
"There is one last contingency," Cassia said, her voice gaining a sliver of its old strength. "One I prepared long ago."
Silas finally turned to look at her weaving threads of causality. He saw the truth in her eyes, the terrifying cost of her plan. She was not weaving an attack. She was weaving an escape. For one of them.
"You can't," he said. It wasn't a plea. It was a statement of fact. "The energy required to punch through two hundred years of causality… it would unravel you. Not kill you. Unravel you."
"My Thread is Causality," she countered, a faint, sad smile touching her lips. "What better way to spend its final moment than with one, perfect, impossible effect? I can send your consciousness back, Silas. Your mind, your memories, your mastery. Back to the past, to the boy you once were."
He stared at her, the cold calculus that had guided his entire life running the numbers. The probability of success. The potential gain. The absolute certainty of her sacrifice. His mind flashed back to the choice at the Onyx Gate—sacrificing three hundred of his own soldiers to delay the Forgemaster's advance by a mere seven seconds. It had been the correct tactical decision. He felt nothing then, and he felt nothing now.
"Why me?" he asked. His voice was flat, devoid of the emotion the question should have held.
A sad, knowing look entered her eyes. "Because I tried to be a hero, Silas. I tried to save them." She gestured to the unraveling city. "Look where it got us. This world doesn't need another hero to die for it. It needs a monster who will live for himself. You are a predator, Silas. You have the will to do what must be done. To be cruel. To be pragmatic. To win even against them." She gazed towards the entities above.
She raised her hands, and the air around them began to distort. Threads of golden light, the very concept of cause and effect, began to coalesce around her. The air grew heavy with the smell of ozone and paradox.
"Don't waste it," she said, her form beginning to flicker. "Don't let my echo be for nothing."
Silas didn't thank her. He didn't promise to save the world. He simply watched, his grey eyes memorizing every detail of the process, every nuance of the power she was unleashing. He was already planning, already running through the first hundred steps he would take. The mistakes he would correct. The assets he would acquire. The sister he would cultivate.
The sky above them finally broke. The Forgemaster and the Soulspire moved, and a wave of pure, conceptual negation washed over the city. Their battle has started in this broken universe.
In that final instant, Cassia's power flared into a blinding sun.
If our reality is to be erased, she Decreed, her voice echoing not in the air, but in the soul of reality itself, then send the consciousness and accumulated knowledge of Silas Valerius back 200 years to the body of his younger self.
Silas felt a wrenching, tearing sensation, as if his very soul were being ripped from the fabric of spacetime. The world of peeling skies and impossible gods dissolved into a tunnel of searing, golden light.
His last thought was not of gratitude, nor of sorrow. It was of the Onyx Gate. Of those seven seconds he had bought with three hundred souls.
Of the bitter, undeniable truth that even his most ruthless calculation had been a rounding error to the gods.
He would not miscalculate again.