Northern's rest was soothing, deep—a solace that pulled at his very soul. It was a rest he craved, needed, from everything. Chaos had drained his body to the core, and using Omniform with his two clones had only deepened his exhaustion.
The deep sleep seized control over him, not something he could fight, but something he savored deeply.
And he was beginning to savor it too much.
Northern felt a subtle crawl of something slipping past his mental boundary. Yet he remained powerless, trapped. If anything, all of it felt like a dream, a tempting escape from the burden of living, the weight of being human.
It continued, lulling him deeper and deeper into the abyss of rest.
Until a terrifying pressure crashed down on him and his name crawled out in a familiar voice.
It was as though the world itself had summoned him. Northern, lost in the depths of his dream, couldn't grasp what was happening, but he recognized the voice. The weight of it pressed against him, making his heart ache in a strange manner.
Clinging to that ache, he began to retrace his steps back to consciousness.
What was he supposed to be doing now?
Right—there was a war brewing with Lieutenant Dante, and he was supposed to help.
But the fatigue clung to him like an iron shroud, unlike anything he had ever experienced before. He wouldn't mind more sleep.
At the same time, an undeniable taste of agony wrenched his heart, sprouting worry. He was worried about his self-proclaimed mentor.
Northern continued to tear upwards through the haze of his mind, fighting against the sweet siren call of rest. It was the most grueling battle he had faced in a long while.
Like wrestling with his own shadow, he had to deprive himself of solace, to struggle against the very peace his body screamed for. Every step upward brought a pang of regret, each one offering a tempting whisper to surrender, to sink back into oblivion.
But he couldn't yield. So he fought relentlessly, waging war against himself to wake up.
And when he finally breached the surface—that critical point where he fully recognized the dread and agony soaked in the voice—his eyes flared open like twin azure stars igniting in darkness.
The charred body of Paragon Raizel trudged forward in a macabre march, his voice scraping through the air like metal dragged across stone.
"R-i-a-n"
Dante and the Prophet observed from behind, their faces telling different stories. Dante's expression crumbled, a monument of sorrow breaking apart piece by piece. The Prophet, meanwhile, remained unmoved by the grotesque spectacle, his face a mask of cold indifference.
He only frowned because the name struck a chord of familiarity in his mind. But the weight of other schemes burdened him too heavily to dwell on it.
Things had unfolded according to plan for so long, until he had inserted that damned boy into the equation. Koll had believed he could orchestrate it all.
He had crafted his schemes with surgical precision—gifting Rughsbourgh the final hack to force open rifts, while planting a seed in his mind.
A hunger for Central Plains to grow stronger, a drive that had pushed Rughsbourgh to launch his monstrous Dark Continent initiative. Sending students to a crucible where they would be hammered into weapons of brutality.
Of course, Koll merely sought to use the smoke screen of violence and the intoxication of war to weaken the conceptual boundary imprisoning his master.
He had seized the perfect chance to bait the child of prophecy—a being unfettered by the concepts of Ul'Tra-El, a wildcard in a deck of fixed outcomes.
Yet the boy he thought he could manipulate like a puppet on strings had transformed into a dagger between his ribs, twisting deeper with each passing moment.
Koll's teeth ground together as his mind churned through it all. Frustration boiled through his veins as he replayed their encounter from mere hours ago.
He had expected to see terror etched across that face. Instead, he'd found stillness—a calm as deep as ancient waters. There was no denying it—the bastard had evolved.
He had metamorphosed from the impulsive, reckless Northern into something calculated, measured... Rian.
The name reverberated through the chambers of Koll's mind like a death knell.
'Ri...an.'
In an instant, Koll's eyes snapped wide open, realization striking like lightning.
"STOP HIM!!"
The words tore from his throat.
He lunged forward, but Lieutenant Dante's expression hardened. The lieutenant dropped low and pivoted—a blur of motion—driving his fist into the Prophet's abdomen with bone-crushing force. The impact catapulted Koll backward, his body carving a trench through the rubble as he tumbled across the ground.
In that precise moment, the space before Raizel began to shimmer and distort, reality itself fraying at the edges.
Koll sprang to his feet, unblemished as though the devastating blow had never landed. His voice erupted, laced with desperation.
"What in death's name are you DOING?!! I SAID STOP HIM!!"
He didn't fully comprehend what was unfolding, but primal instinct clawed at his insides, screaming danger.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Dante hesitated, torn between duty and friendship. Confusion etched across his features as the fabric of space tore open before Raizel's charred form.
The once-proud metropolis lay in ruins around them—a concrete jungle reduced to a wasteland of rubble and dust. What had been a skyline of towering structures now resembled barren earth awaiting the first foundations.
The devastation had cleared all obstructions, making it possible for anyone to witness what was unfolding, regardless of distance. Even Bairan, approaching from the opposite direction, suddenly froze mid-stride as he sensed his master's presence rippling through the air. A whisper of a smile crept across his lips as the Limitless Void began to tear open, a wound in reality itself.
First emerged pristine white hair—luminous as freshly fallen snow—cascading just above the brow, parted elegantly in the center, each strand dancing like silver threads in the whisper of wind.
Those resplendent blue eyes—deep as mountain lakes, clear as winter sky—gazed somberly at the charred figure before him.
Northern's heart constricted, a vise of agony and grief twisting something fundamental within him as he beheld the remains of what once was Burning Storm.
Those remains continued to call to him with a will so powerful it seemed to bend reality itself to its purpose. How else could it reach across worlds, across realities so vastly different from their own?
Northern's lips quivered, words trapped in his throat. His first attempt yielded only silence. On the second try, his voice emerged fragile as spun glass.
"Burning... Storm?"
"R-i-a-n."
The scorched apparition finally halted before him and sank to one knee in supplication.
Northern felt something more profound than mere presence—a gravitational pull of will. Burning Storm was drawing him forward with an inexorable force beyond comprehension. Where this pull would lead, Northern couldn't fathom.
But he would follow.
Yet beyond all else, what pierced his heart most deeply was the spectral notification hovering before his eyes like a ghostly herald.
[You can absorb name…]