Chapter 273: Absolute Calm

The God of Secrets looked at those green eyes and was quiet for a moment.

Then he straightened, what remained of his composed manner returning in pieces, and when he spoke again, he wasn’t speaking to Finn.

“Arros.” His voice carried across the hall clearly. “I had placed considerable faith in you… Considerable. And yet here we stand, and it is still him looking at me through those eyes. After everything. After all of it.”

Finn said nothing.

“You couldn’t even manage the final step.” The God of Secrets tilted his head slightly, studying the green eyes in the rubble, as if he was looking at Arros directly. “All that preparation. All those iterations. And in the end, the soul you built so carefully turned out to be a problem you couldn’t solve.”

Still nothing from Finn.

“Well.” The God of Secrets glanced at the stump where his hand had been, then back up. “Our arrangement is concluded. You guaranteed me access to Eternity in exchange for my assistance. You cannot deliver on that guarantee — frankly, at this point, I question whether he could ever have reached Eternity at all… So we are done.”

As he concluded his statement, Finn finally stepped out of the rubble and into their expectant view… Most especially Althea.

She had been expecting anger. She had braced for it from the moment she’d watched him walk into that corridor, knowing what was in that chamber, knowing what he would see. The rage she had anticipated — the rage that came from finding out the full extent of all that had been done to him, from seeing every stage of a manipulation he had been inside without knowing — that rage would have been justified.

Enormous.

She had been preparing herself for what it would look like coming out of someone with Finn’s current level of power…

Yet it wasn’t there.

The person that came out of the rubble and into the hall was calm. Cold and completely still, the air around him was dense with a weight that hadn’t been there before he entered the corridor, a prominence that pressed against her senses even from across the hall.

His eyes hadn’t left the God of Secrets the entire time, and immediately he stepped out fully, he raised one hand and the Errant sword that sliced the God of Secrets’ hand whipped across the hall and met his palm.

And as if that was a signal, the God of Secrets moved the same instant.

What followed was a fight of a scale that shook Althea, who was watching. Despite being well versed in battle herself, she was still shocked by just how domineering Finn was. He totally and thoroughly trounced the God of Secrets, establishing his current level of power doubly in her mind.

This wasn’t even a fight. A fight involved two people clashing. The God of Secrets wasn’t clashing with Finn in any way. All he was doing was evading. His vessel burning through divine essence at a rate Althea could feel even without being able to directly perceive divine power — she felt it in the quality of the air around him, the way the space he occupied kept shifting, the speed at which he changed positions each time Finn moved toward him.

And Finn was moving constantly.

He wasn’t using the soul masses. She could tell. He wasn’t casting any magic in particular either. No edict words, no formed expression of authority. He was simply attacking with the Errant Sword in his hand purely by his own might. What happened to the space around each strike was a consequence of what he was rather than anything he was deliberately doing.

Reality glitched where he moved. Tore open in pixelated fractures that spread from the point of each swing and then dragged themselves back together behind him. The hall was coming apart faster now from the combined force of the temple’s collapse and what Finn was doing to the air inside it.

The God of Secrets hadn’t landed a single offensive action.

Before things could get worse, Althea snapped out of her daze and moved. She got Ailin onto her back, securing her carefully, and ran for the nearest gap in the hall wall where the collapse had opened the temple to the outside. She cleared the threshold and kept moving, into the forest, the white fog of no return thick between the trees above her, shrouding the outside world entirely.

Behind her, the hall came crumbling down with a loud crash, giving away entirely as Finn continued to wreak havoc.

But Althea didn’t bother to look back at all. All she did was keep on running, putting distance between herself and the fight, and her mind was already working while she ran — processing what she had just seen, turning it over, pulling at the details.

Finn’s current state. The full picture of what he had walked out of that chamber carrying. Not just the soul masses, not just the Errant Sword. Something had settled in him in there, something in the way he moved and the way the air responded to him and the way he had received the God of Secrets’ words without reaction — all of it pointed to a Finn who had come out of that chamber knowing exactly what he was.

She didn’t know if that was good. She wasn’t sure yet.

What she could assess clearly was the fight itself. The God of Secrets hadn’t been touched since that first strike that had taken his hand. He was fast, genuinely fast, burning divine essence to maintain a speed that let him stay ahead of Finn’s attacks.

He won’t last long burning his divine essence like that…

Her thoughts trailed off and she suddenly stopped cold in her tracks for half a step.

He’s using divine essence…

How’s he using divine essence?!

They were outside the temple now. Out in the open, inside the Fog of No Return, and the fog’s divine limiting effect was real — she had heard Finn describe it early in their time here and she knew it was one of the fundamental conditions of this place. Except for inside the temple where the laws had seemed to be different, divine power could not be used inside the Fog…

So how was the God of Secrets using his freely?

She was still turning this over in her mind when a loud shout snapped her to attention.

“Finally!”

The roar came from somewhere behind her and above, and she turned in time to see the fog part.

A beam of gold tore through the gap from above, driving straight down through the fog’s canopy and into the forest below with a sound that hit her in the chest before she heard it with her ears. Pure sunlight weaponized.

The fog of no return had been breached. She processed this in the same second she registered what the beam meant…

The Sun God.

Finn reacted before she had finished processing that realization.

She saw it happen — the attack he had been driving toward the God of Secrets redirected smoothly upward, the Errant Sword swinging to meet the descending beam mid-air with everything he had channelled into it. The sword groaned audibly even from her distance.

The collision above the treeline was a sight she couldn’t even put into words.

The shockwave spread outward in every direction simultaneously. Visible in the open air without needing anything to carry it, a ripple that moved through the world itself, parting the fog in a widening circle from the epicenter and opening a hole in the canopy that let the actual sky through. Blue sky. Real sunlight spilling down into the fog of no return for what may have been the first time since the fog had formed.

The trees directly below the impact point snapped. Moving outward from there, the rest bent hard, earth scattering from the roots, leaves stripped clean. She was far enough that it reached her as a rolling pressure rather than a direct force, but even at her distance, with her Transcendent body braced for it, the shockwave hit her hard enough that her feet left the ground for a moment and she had to call on everything she had to land without stumbling, her arm locked around Ailin on her back.

A fleeting thought crosses her mind that instant: the gap between divine power and mana, the sheer overwhelming scale of what she had just watched, how different things would be if she could wield that as a source…

But she cut the thought immediately.

What she could do now was more than it had ever been. She had been holding back since the Sprawl, moving through this entire journey with her power and knowledge deliberately suppressed, acting within the limits of what Thalia would have known and been able to do. That was done. Finn already knew.

Everything she had kept sealed away — the accumulated experience of her many lives, the full depth of her Order authority and her insight into it, the refined knowledge that had let her survive the combined assault of Arros and two other peak Transcendents in the last war — none of it needed to stay hidden anymore.

She stopped running.

She lowered herself to one knee, one hand steadying Ailin on her back, and drove her sword into the earth with her other hand.

Order magic expanded outward from the point of contact in every direction, a dome that spread fast and wide, extending past a mile from where she knelt before she sealed its edge.

Inside the dome, everything she declared orderly became orderly. The shockwaves from the impact above — nullified.

The displaced air, the scattered earth, the vibrations still rolling through the ground from the fight — smoothed inside the boundary into nothing.

“Order Declaration: Absolute Calm.”

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