Whatever else happened, Vex was definitely coming through on her end of the deal. Not only had her people offered to help us find the other Forerunners, but now as we stood facing the biggest threat in this place, other than perhaps the Huntsman, she was there with full support, and not just the moral kind. I felt bad for ever underestimating the Lepun.

  I pulled the life crystal from my spatial storage and fed Life Mana into it. The power flowed out of me in great torrents, far beyond anything that I could have managed on my own.

  I took another step forward, each movement a monumental effort. The weight of Veil's collective will pressed down on me, empowering yet overwhelming. The howls of the approaching hounds echoed across the devastated landscape, each baleful cry terrorizing my mind. It was a primal sound, one that spoke to the deepest, most ancient parts of my being, urging me to flee.

  But I couldn't run. Not now. Not with everything at stake.

  Jiang and Asta were stirring. Urg was trying to help them up. Somewhere behind me, I was certain that Anika had survived the waves of energy as well. That was what cockroaches did best.

  The life crystal in my hand pulsed with energy, growing brighter with each passing second. Life Mana flowed into it, not just from me, but from the essence of Veil itself. It was as if the artificial world recognized the threat Morvarg posed and was pouring everything it had into this last, desperate gambit.

  As I neared Morvarg, the crystal's glow intensified, rivaling the sun itself. Its radiance was painful to look at, but I couldn’t fully close my eyes. It was a stark contrast to the swirling darkness that engulfed my foe. Morvarg had managed to regain his footing, his misshapen form swaying unsteadily. The hole I'd punched through his skull was slowly knitting itself back together, dark energy weaving new flesh and bone.

  With a final burst of speed, I closed the distance between us. Morvarg's remaining eye widened in surprise as I slammed the life crystal against his chest, right at the epicenter of the swirling vortex of Oblivion.

  The moment the crystal made contact, the world exploded again.

  Reality shattered. Fragments of existence scattered around me like broken glass. Colors I had no name for flashed across my vision, accompanied by sounds that shouldn't exist. In an instant, Morvarg and I were no longer on Veil. We were everywhere.

  And nowhere.

  We floated in a chaotic nightmare realm, a place where the laws of physics and sanity held no sway. Entire worlds sprang into existence around us, only to crumble and fade away in the blink of an eye. Stars burst to life and died in rapid succession, their brief lives playing out in seconds.

  I saw glimpses of other realities, other possibilities. In one, Earth had never been chosen for induction. In another, I saw myself leading an army of Forerunners against some unseen threat. These visions flashed by too quickly to fully comprehend, leaving me dizzy and disoriented.

  Through it all, I clung to one singular purpose—to keep forcing Life Mana into Morvarg's core. It was the only real anchor keeping me from being swept away by the tide of madness.

  Morvarg writhed before me, his form constantly shifting and changing. One moment he was the hulking alien I’d grown to loathe. The next, a swirling mass of darkness. Then a being of pure energy. But always, always, there was that core of Oblivion at his center, fighting against the influx of life.

  I pushed harder, drawing on reserves of strength I didn't know I possessed. The life crystal burned in my hand, its heat that of a thousand supernovae, yet somehow not painful. I could feel it resonating with something deep inside me—the unyielding essence of a Forerunner’s core.

  "You... cannot... win," Morvarg's voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere, distorted and fractured. "Oblivion... is... inevitable."

  "No," I growled through gritted teeth. "Life will persevere. It always has, and it always will."

  I poured more energy into the crystal, willing it to fill the void at Morvarg's core. The clash of energies created a storm of power around us, reality itself buckling under the strain. I caught fleeting glimpses of familiar faces—Asta, Jiang, even Cece back on Earth—before they were swept away in the chaos.

  Time lost all meaning in this place between places. It could have been seconds or centuries that we struggled there, locked in our cosmic battle. But slowly, as slow as the formation of galaxies, I began to sense a change. The maelstrom around us started to calm. The rapid flashes of alternate realities becoming less frequent. It felt as if the washing machine of creation had just finished its spin cycle.

  And still there was an emptiness within him. A billion souls, he had said. The emptiness of an entire world. Veil helped, but it wasn’t enough to bridge the gap.

  It isn’t power you lack, but structure. Creation is about more than life. It is about bringing order out of chaos.

  It was a system notification as clear as day, but it was also like someone having a conversation with me.

  Title Activated: Heaven’s Ambassador.

  Error… restrictions are in place.

  Recalculating… chaotic space will bear a lifting of the restrictions.

  Try to survive.

  Power rushed into me. It was orderly, structured, in a way that I’d never experienced before. People like to think that they are logical, but so much emotion clouds our thoughts. We are no more creatures of pure order than we are of pure chaos.

  My stats shot up, and I felt like I touched upon the face of God. I couldn’t describe what was happening exactly, but my body was being upgraded. Where I’d had a hundred levels, now I had thousands.

  Ascendant tier reached.

  Use Order Mana.

  I hated the system with a burning passion, but I needed it now. I tapped into the power it held out to me, and pushed.

  Order Mana began to fill the void of Oblivion inside Morvarg as quickly as the system pushed it into me. My role had been reduced to conduit, a pipe for raw power that was beyond my ability to control.

  The density of the mana ripping through my system was so far beyond anything I could have handled otherwise, that I knew but for the system actively protecting me, my mind would have been scoured away.

  But as I hung there in limbo, feeling my body and mind being stretched to my limits and beyond, I felt a new doubt. This was taking too long. This was the raw power of the system coursing through me. Ascendant tier mana. How was Morvarg not dealt with yet? He was Rare tier. He should be a memory, if that.

  Then it hit me. This was a battle of proxies. I wasn’t sure if Morvarg represented another system, or what he called Oblivion. He seemed to hate all systems equally, cursing Anika for her connection to yet another. He claimed he wanted freedom. He was obviously a nihilist, but this wasn’t the time for philosophy. I was simply trying to survive.

  Life Mana was filling part of the emptiness within him, within a billion extinguished souls. Order Mana from the system was completing another part of it, but it was like looking at a tapestry which had all the red and yellow threads pulled out of it, leaving only green and blue. I could see the shape that it was supposed to take, but didn’t know how to fill in the missing bits.

  Then I heard it. My mind was so empty as power rushed through me, there was barely room for the stray thought. Then that other voice whispered to me, just as brash as before.

  I can give you more. Open up the door a little and I can make you more than you ever thought to be.

  I flung defiance in the face of this other system. I recognized it as the voice of Hell. “I’ll never be like those devils.”

  Laughter followed.

  You’re already one step closer, but just as your master is more than one type of power, so, too am I. You don’t need Hell Mana for this. You need Chaos Mana. Creation is a messy business.

  It was the most reasonable the voice had ever sounded. That alone wouldn’t have convinced me. I’d always held to the maxim that the devil that you know is better than the devil you don’t. I knew that the system inducting the Earth had many crimes to answer for, but my soul told me the Hell system was much worse.

  Yet, what it said resonated with me. Creation is about life and certainly about making order, but it is also about raw chaos.

  I didn’t have to speak. The Hell system must have latched on the instant I assented. The power hit me like an ice bath, an absolute contrast with the power of the system I knew.

  Error… Chaos Mana detected.

  No error, you buffoon.

  Whatever else passed between the two systems was lost to me, as it was all that I could to do hang onto the ragged edge of my sanity. Life Mana I could handle, but this Order and Chaos that was surging between me made me feel like I was being unmade and reformed a million times per second.

  The black void in Morvarg finally start to shrivel. The combined power of the two systems was too much. Morvarg’s body was blasted to so much cosmic dust, and all my hands clung to was the raw swirling emptiness of Oblivion. I struggled to keep my soul from being flushed away with it.

  Like poor, poor Roddy.

  Chapter 37- It’s Getting Crowded In Here

  I groaned. It felt like an eternity stuck in this spot. The emptiness was being filled and the tapestry taking shape. Yet Order and Chaos fought each other as much as they tried to fill the emptiness.

  I was beginning to realize just how personally conscious the systems were, especially the Hell system, but hearing them bicker was just odd.

  I groaned again. The yellow was still missing from the tapestry. Chaos had filled in most of what was missing, and the image of completeness was growing near.

  The fear of being swept away was still very much alive, and I could only try to hang on. My reserves of willpower were nearly drained.

  Then I felt another presence. It was one so reassuring, so a part of me, that I instantly felt peace.

  Urg was here. I didn’t know how, but he was.

  “Where Image goes, Urg can go too.”

  I felt the strength of our bond, and the walls of my soul were shored up. I continued to ride the waves of energy, aiming to hold on. I don’t know how long that continued for but that was when I heard another voice. Certainly something as powerful as a multiverse spanning system could make itself sound different, but somehow this felt distinct, different from either the heavens or the hells.

  Connection. That is what is missing. See the connections. Even in a divided realm there are still connections. Life and Death. Order and Chaos. Creation and Oblivion. Man and eidolon.

  It wasn’t forceful. It didn’t try to convince me to do anything. It simply invited me to see a deeper level to the pattern being set out for me. Even chaos could be beautiful if seen from far enough back.

  My connection to Urg pulsed, and I felt stronger. I drew power from Order and Chaos, and possibly from something else. My mind wanted to run down the rabbit trail. Were there three systems active here? Or was this something else?

  I pushed my mind away from the question and focused on understanding the pattern before me. But before I could completely disengage another notification filled my mind.

  There is more to reality than two extremes.

  I ignored it, tucking those words away for the future. For now, I just needed to see what I was missing. As I came to understand the connection, Spirit Sense showed me more of those golden threads between Urg and me. We were woven tighter together than I ever imagined. But both order and chaos were wrapped around those threads. I could be an agent for either, or perhaps both.

  Then I felt the moment of completion. The final thread. It was that point at which the emptiness was filled and a billion souls cut short were balanced. The chaotic space around me shattered like a heavy pane of glass and I found myself sucking air on my back, looking up at the blue sky above Veil.

  I scrambled to my feet, unsure where I was, but the level of devastation around me indicated that I was probably back where we’d been fighting Morvarg. But there was no one else. Even Urg was missing, although, that made sense. He would have probably had to return to the astral plane in order to be able to communicate directly with me.

  I shook my head. I truly felt like I was waking from a dream, just to enter another. There was a stack of notifications waiting for me, but the first thing I did was check my map. That was my second clue that something was definitely up.

  Mapping of Veil completed.

  Identification Map +24%

  Those two notifications came unbidden, but they seemed to be true, as I now had a full map of Veil. It was essentially am oval, but with jagged edges. Just like in Kimbora, the borders seemed to fade into an energy field.

  Veil measured 1,872 miles on the short axis, and 9,324 miles on the long axis. So Veil was pretty big, given that it was all land and rivers, with no lakes or seas to be found. The level of detail on the map was astounding, and I found it easy to zoom in and out.

  I quickly found Asta and Jiang, nearly on the other side of the map. They were close together, and there were a number of other friendlies around Asta. The map identified them as her pets. Three specifically, but there was no sign of the swarm of volcanic hornets.

  Next, I looked for Anika. She now showed up as a hostile, a red blip, but I was able to find her. She was more than a thousand miles from Asta and Jiang, but closer to me, which again threw things into question. My teammates were more than three thousand miles from me. How long had I been in that other place?

  The shocks kept coming. According to the party interface, Asta was now level 125. She’d passed me up. How could that have happened?

  I broke down and checked the other notifications. There was some system chicanery at work here, I was certain of it. The first few notifications didn’t seem to explain much at all.

  Mana Affinities Created: Order +2%, Chaos +1%

  You have established affinities with two of the primal forces. Current affinities altered to: Life: 54%, Lightning: 31%, Space: 12%, Order 2%, Chaos 1%.

  These affinities will affect future racial evolutions and class core formations.

  Your title Balance in All Things, has been upgraded.

  Balance in All Things II: +10 free stats/level. +20% all stat effectiveness. whenever using competing forces you will find it easier to find a balance between them.

  Huh. That was a bit underwhelming for an upgrade to a Legendary title, but I choose to believe it would be significant in the future and moved onto the next notification.

  You have served as an intermediary for the Heavens in communication with not just one but two different systems. Your title: Heaven’s Ambassador has been modified.

  System Intermediary—You are but a speck, yet you stand between the peaks. Your loyalties are uncertain, but you have been touched by multiple systems. You are becoming the linchpin in a contested portion of the multiverse. Take care lest you be crushed between forces beyond your understanding. Your choices will impact far more than your own life.

  Potentiality: +1.1% (Estimated Total: 1.9%)

  This title is both part of the Heavens, and not. It is influenced by the other systems you have had contact with.

  System Intermediary (Ascendant)—You receive +50 to Vitality, Will, Charisma, and Perception. All bonds you establish will be 50% stronger. Resistance to coercion at System Tier is increased by 75%. Balance is established as the Heavens counter the Hells. Note: this does not provide any additional resistance to Divine Tier or lower coercion.

  This title will affect your eidolon bond, your team bond, your home team bond, and any other connected titles or traits.

  As the full weight of the title settled onto me, I felt like I was once again in that swirling mess of energy. Except, now I sat at the eye of the storm. I could see it happening around me, but I wasn’t in direct contact. Many eyes were on me though, of that I was certain.

  What this meant for the future, for Earth, I didn’t know. I had hopes of freedom and charting a path for Earth that would save as many lives as possible, but that was for the future. I still had to rejoin my team and figure out what had happened.

  Fortunately, the next notification filled me in on some of it.

  You have returned to Veil. Admission to the Wild Hunt is granted. Parole extended for prematurely leaving the Wild Hunt. Congratulations on surviving your first encounter with chaotic space. Time elapsed: 59 days and 3 hours.

  I almost choked on that last part. Wait, I’d been in that place for nearly two months. That felt insane. Yet, I suppose the system didn’t have any reason to lie to me now. Hopefully, my friends could fill me in on what had happened.

  You have gained 524 Free Stat Points for assisting in killing a Forerunner in the Wild Hunt. The award has been split four ways with the other Forerunners from Earth.

  Earth has gained 50,000 world points.

  I laughed. That was one third of 5% of his stats, plus the extra 1% of his stats, which my other title got me. That meant he had to have been well beyond 20,000 total stats, but I didn’t bother doing the math. Either way, it was a massive haul for all of us.

  Bar’jek has been eliminated from the induction competition as there are no living Bar’jeki to serve as Forerunners. Bar’jek will be harvested for resources.

  After that, there were a series of notifications about Earth gaining more world points. It appeared that both Asta and Jiang had been busy crafting, but they had also won a number of smaller competitions, each one resulting in tens of thousands of points for Earth. We were still more than a million points behind Nargossa, but since they had no active Forerunners, I liked our chances.

  The notifications kept coming.

  You have experienced exposure to chaotic space. +100 Durability, +100 Vitality.

  You have experienced exposure to Ascendant tier mana. +100 Durability, +100 Will.

  You have experienced exposure to non-system energy sources. Vitae capacity is increased by 50% of original base line.

  You have served as a conduit for System tier entities to interact. +150 Endurance, +100 Will.

 

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