The abyss convulsed.
Every fracture Vemy had carved into the Ring God's prison now widened, no longer bleeding light or shadow—but something deeper. Something that made the void itself recoil.
The crystalline hand tore through first, followed by an arm of shifting shards, veins of black radiance pulsing beneath fractured skin. Each movement splintered space around it, as though reality had no right to contain it.
Akiar's lightning sputtered. He staggered backward, not from attack, but from presence. His storm aura faltered under the sheer impossibility before them.
"By the stormfather…" His voice cracked. "That's not divine. That's not anything."
The rest of it followed.
A body half-formed, jagged and incomplete, yet alive in its own chaos. Its face shifted every heartbeat—sometimes a mask of obsidian, sometimes a lattice of crystal, sometimes nothing at all. No symmetry, no balance. Only fragments that refused to agree on a shape.
The whispers that bled from its form weren't sound. They drilled into the mind directly, overlapping, wrong, as if a thousand broken voices were trying to speak through one mouth.
[System Alert: Aberrant Entity Emergence.]
[Designation—Refused.]
[Classification—Error.]
[Warning: Core integrity compromised.]
Vemy's spear wavered in his hand. His body still screamed from Prismarine Break, bones splintering with every twitch, but he forced himself upright.
"What are you?" His voice cut the void, ragged but unshaken.
The thing tilted its fractured head, pieces shifting into place, then away again. When it spoke, it was not words but an avalanche of broken truths:
"…Forgotten.
…Forsaken.
…Freed."
The abyss itself seemed to bend toward its voice.
It raised its hand—the jagged crystalline one—and the shards orbiting Vemy's body responded. For an instant, his Prismarine fragments froze mid-orbit, trembling as though dragged by a higher resonance.
Vemy's chest seized. His grip tightened until his palms bled. "No. You don't get to touch this. Not my power."
The shards around him shattered back into motion, spinning violently, resisting the pull. The entity's fractured head cocked to the side. A jagged approximation of laughter rippled out, like glass grinding into itself.
"Defiant one… you fracture, but do not fall. That is why the god feared you."
Akiar stepped forward, lightning snapping alive again, though his hands trembled. "Vemy… that's not a god. That's something outside the system. Something the cycle wasn't made to hold."
The entity raised both arms now, its shards glimmering with colors that shouldn't exist. Space cracked open wider around it, spilling horrors like ink into water.
"Then tell me," Vemy snarled, spear lifting despite the blood dripping down his chin. His wings flared jagged and broken, but still burning. "If it's outside the system—
—then why the hell does it sound like it's here for me?"
The entity's fractured body convulsed once more, shards rearranging into a form too sharp, too wrong, yet unmistakably focused on him.
"…Because you broke the door.
And now, breaker—
you are mine."
The void screamed as it lunged.