The universe is a machine, vast and perfect. I have turned its gears, rewritten its laws, broken its symmetry a thousand times over. But now—now, something has reached into the mechanism and torn out a piece. And I do not know who. I do not know how. I do not know why. But I will.
Unknown:
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Somewhere and Nowhere:
High above the world, adrift in an endless sea of clouds, looms a castle of impossible grandeur. Its towering spires twist like the fangs of some celestial beast, their tips wreathed in ribbons of silver mist.
The walls, carved from gleaming obsidian and veins of crystal, pulse faintly with a light not entirely of this world. Bridges of marble and gold suspend themselves between its many turrets, defying logic, shifting and rearranging as though the castle itself breathes.
A waterfall of liquid light spills from its highest peak, cascading into the void below, vanishing into eternity.
But the sky is not empty. It writhes with things. Some drift like broken dolls, their bodies bloated and glistening with iridescent mucus, their hollow eyes leaking streams of shimmering violet fluid.
Others spiral with grotesque grace, their forms folding in on themselves like petals of rotting flesh, weeping tears of molten gold.
There are things with wings—vast and majestic, spun from strands of translucent silk, their movements like the whispers of gods—until they turn, revealing their underbellies: pulsating, writhing masses of veined, chitinous tendrils, hungry for something unseen.
The sky is a contradiction, a canvas of wonder and horror, where beauty and revulsion embrace in a dance of eternal, terrifying elegance.
Inside the floating castle, the air hums with an eerie stillness, disturbed only by the faint, rhythmic ticking of unseen mechanisms buried within the walls.
The grand hall, where a lone man sits at a massive, crescent-shaped table, stretches endlessly into dim-lit infinity.
The ceiling is lost in shifting shadows, where chandeliers of frozen lightning pulse with intermittent flashes, casting ghostly patterns across the polished obsidian floor.
The walls are alive—veins of molten silver slither through the stone, forming shifting constellations and arcane equations that vanish the moment they are understood.
Bookshelves carved from petrified bone loom high above, their tomes bound in glistening skin, whispering in tongues too ancient for mortal ears.
A great stained-glass window dominates one side of the chamber, revealing the churning sky beyond, where grotesque and magnificent things drift by like forgotten gods.
At the center of it all, the man works, hunched over pages filled with numbers and symbols that twist and rearrange themselves the moment he looks away.
His pen moves on its own, scratching out calculations that should not exist, should not be known. A set of crystal spheres levitate before him, spinning, shifting, aligning in patterns that dictate the movements of the world outside.
Beyond the table, the door pulsed. No hinges. No handle. No seams. Just a shifting, writhing surface of something almost organic, something that breathed in the silence, something that watched.
No one had ever opened it. No one ever should.
But sometimes—just sometimes—it whispered his name.
He ignored it.
"When will it work?" His voice fractured reality itself, the sound vibrating through dimensions beyond the material.
Frustration laced his tone as he pressed the needle of his pen into the parchment with enough force to erase the very concept of matter from existence. The entire castle should have collapsed, shattered into dust, imploded under the weight of the force he exerted.
It didn't.
Not because of luck. Not because of restraint. But because this wasn't the first time he had done this.
The castle, every stone, every inch, every atom down to the very ink in his pen—enchanted, reinforced, layered with contingencies upon contingencies.
And yet, that wasn't enough.
It never was.
Calling him a man was absurd. It was a lie, a convenient term for something that shouldn't exist.
His kind—if such a thing could even be classified—was an impossibility, a paradox wrapped in flesh and divinity, logic and madness.
He was contradiction.
"How many days will I have to wait?"
His celestial half gleamed with cold perfection, his marble-smooth skin reflecting an inner radiance that defied entropy itself.
But his other side pulsed, seethed—a living horror of chitinous bone and liquid shadow, where countless eyes blinked in and out of existence, shedding molten ichor with every unnatural movement.
Above, a broken halo flickered erratically, no longer a perfect ring, but a jagged scar of shattered divinity.
The door whispered again.
He did not answer.
The air in the chamber vibrated with the endless ticking of unseen gears, a rhythm that had become indistinguishable from his own thoughts.
He exhaled, the sound distorted, layered—a voice both synthetic and organic, celestial and hellish.
"How many hours have I done this again and again?"
His wings shifted, their structure a grotesque juxtaposition of biological impossibilities.
The left, a lattice of photonic filaments, refracted light into shifting spectrums, each feather a crystalline array of energy manipulation.
The right, a membranous horror, composed of something denser than flesh but more flexible than chitin, its veins pulsing with a viscous, black substance that defied known states of matter.
They moved together, but not through muscle or tendon—quantum entanglement held them in synchrony, the paradox of his existence forcing cohesion where none should be possible.
His arms, too, were a testament to the violation of biological symmetry.
The left radiated in wavelengths beyond human perception, a lattice of self-repairing cells that adjusted and realigned in real time, accelerating entropy reversal within any organic structure it touched.
The right was a biomechanical horror, its surface a shifting fractal of necrotic decay and self-replicating tendrils, leeching life on a fundamental level, rewriting cellular blueprints into nothingness.
The two worked in tandem—one hand constructing, the other dismantling.
When he wrote, the paradox continued. The golden sigils formed by his left hand carried equations beyond Einsteinian physics, forging predictive models that rewrote causality itself.
His right hand, however, scribed violations of logic, numbers that twisted in their own dimensions, warping the parchment beneath them as if it were a living organism in agony.
His voice, when it broke the silence, carried the weight of harmonic resonance and destructive interference—a choir and a scream, a waveform beyond simple comprehension.
He could collapse matter with frequency alone, or realign molecular cohesion with a whisper. And yet, despite the vastness of his intellect, his power, his design…
The fucking Giant still existed.
"I should have killed him when I had the chance."
His wings shuddered at the thought, quantum filaments oscillating, dark matter veins constricting.
But there was still the virus. A work of true ingenuity, a quantum pathogen designed not to destroy, but to redefine.
It operated beyond mere biology, embedding itself within the very information layer of a being, rewriting existence at a structural level.
Ymir had been the intended host. His DNA, his physical framework—perfect for iterative restructuring.
But no. That bastard's wife had taken the infection instead.
Unexpected. Messy.
It didn't matter. The virus was beyond the comprehension of anything that primitive giant could conjure. Neutralization? Impossible.
The very act of attempting to remove it would rewrite the infected deeper into its lattice, an ever-tightening recursive loop. That idiot had already destroyed the only clone that could provide him insight.
He smirked, an expression that was both human and monstrous, a contradiction etched across his divided face.
"Fuck him. Let's see how long he lasts."
Then it happened.
The first anomaly came from Graham Forest. A disruption in the energy field, subtle at first, then undeniable. One of the fucking batteries was dead.
His fingers twitched, the clawed one tightening as if it could crush the realization itself.
Using Evil Gods as batteries had been the most efficient solution—converting entities of pure construct and thought into inexhaustible energy sources.
Their very existence, bound by conceptual permanence, made them an unending supply of power. But one of them had been destroyed. Not drained. Not disconnected. Destroyed.
His mind raced through probabilities, calculations unfolding at speeds beyond comprehension. The implications spiraled into absurdity.
Killing a god was damn near impossible.
They weren't biological.
They weren't physical.
They were constructs of will, manifestations of cosmic law. Even obliterating their form wouldn't erase their existence. And yet—one was gone. Not displaced. Not dispersed. Fucking gone.
This was a setback. A serious one. A miscalculation.
It angered him.
"Fucking piece of shit." His voice fractured the air, a resonance of layered frequencies, enough to send the castle's walls humming. "Whoever did this is a fucking piece of shit."
His fist slammed onto the table. The impact rippled through the structure, shaking its very foundation, sending cracks racing along the obsidian floor. The chandeliers of frozen lightning flickered erratically, recalibrating from the force.
Then the second anomaly hit.
The quantum tracker embedded in the virus—the absolute failsafe, the perfect tether—was gone.
Not jammed. Not corrupted. Removed. His connection had been severed, forcibly torn away, and he hadn't even noticed until now. Worse, he had no way to replace it.
His body tensed, energy surging through his veins like molten circuits.
What the fuck is happening?
He could have dismissed the god's destruction as an anomaly. A freak occurrence. A cosmic error.
But this?
This was precision. This was intelligence. This was a direct challenge.
Killing the god hadn't put him on guard.
But this? This put him on edge.
Someone was here.
Someone who either understood what they were doing… or someone so fucking stupid they didn't care about the consequences.
Either way—
They were dangerous.
He took a long breath through his nose, the air tasting of burning metal and something far older, something woven into the castle itself.
His mind, a perfect fusion of celestial calculation and infernal instinct, processed the situation with cold precision.
This was unusual. Too unusual. The death of an Evil God, the severing of the quantum tracker—both in isolation were concerning. Together? They were a deliberate move. And deliberate moves required answers.
Perhaps a direct confrontation wasn't necessary. Not yet.
Maybe I should investigate first.
His fingers drummed against the table, the sound reverberating unnaturally, warping space with each tap.
His options narrowed, eliminating paths too costly, too inefficient. Then, the answer presented itself.
The Hero.
An expendable pawn. Easy to manipulate. Easy to command. Just the right amount of strength to stir the waters without sinking the whole ship.
A smirk crept across his divided face, the celestial half exuding a serene, almost benevolent glow while the abyssal side twitched with something more primal, more malicious.
Yes. That was it.
He would send the Hero forward first, dangle just enough information to guide him toward the source of the anomaly.
Let the fool fight, let him struggle, let him bleed if necessary. The Hero wouldn't question it—he never did. That was what made him useful.
Yes. It was decided.
The Hero would go first.
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