Chapter 276: The Unraveling

From the tip of Finn’s finger, a point of pure black silence opened.

Nothingness in its purest and most true form. A singularity of absolute absence that expanded outward from that single point and shot forward toward the Radiant One with a speed that belied how quiet it was, how utterly unremarkable it looked against the devastated terrain around them.

The Radiant One roared madly in response, smashing the Errant Sword aside with a sudden burst of divine force that sent it spinning for miles, then turned His entire body into a beam of golden light and shot upward, directly away from the expanding invalidation, heading straight for the gap in the fog and the open sky beyond it with everything He had.

Althea watched from where she stood below, her eyes tracking the beam of light streaking upward and the trail of nothing expanding behind it — a widening triangle of pure absence that grew larger the further it traveled, the world simply ceasing to exist inside it. No sound. No air. No matter. Everything in its path, down to the last molecule, was simply deleted from existence like they had never been there in the first place.

And even worse, this time, reality wasn’t healing anything at all.

Althea had watched Finn’s Error magic tear the world open in glitching fractures multiple times now, and every single time reality had stitched itself back together behind him, filling in the gaps with new matter, the world correcting itself…

But this… This was entirely different.

The void of nothingness left behind wasn’t a wound the world was trying to heal. It was an absence the world couldn’t register, couldn’t respond to, couldn’t even acknowledge as something that needed addressing. It simply was. A triangle of nothing, expanding outward from Finn’s position and widening as it rose, nearly fifty miles across at its broadest point by the time it began to slow.

This was wrongness in real life. A wrongness that was so uncanny, one couldn’t even begin to describe it.

It was especially wrong for Althea, who was Order personified. The deepest expression of her authority was the imposition of structure onto chaos, and chaos had always been her counterpart, the thing her nature defined itself against.

But this… this was before chaos. Before order. Before any concept that either of them represented. Looking at it felt like looking directly at the state of existence before existence had decided to exist, and every part of what she was recoiled from it without her permission.

Above her, the Radiant One was slowing.

She could see it happening even from the ground, the beam of golden light that was His body losing the frantic urgency of its initial escape as the null void’s expansion chased Him upward, and for a moment it seemed like He would clear it, the distance between the edge of the invalidation and the beam of light stretching just enough that she thought He had made it.

Then the invalidation reached its final speed, one last burst before it stopped entirely, and closed the distance.

It ate into the trailing edge of the beam… and a soul-wrenching scream tore through the air above them, the sky itself seeming to shudder with it.

Immediately, the beam of golden light collapsed and became the Radiant One again. His golden body became corporeal, descending slightly in a stagger as if He would fall, but He caught Himself in the air.

Very quickly, Althea spotted the source of his guttural scream. Right from his knees down, his legs were gone. The stumps glowed gold at the edges as His divine authority immediately tried to regrow them. But at the base of each stump, where new flesh and light should have pushed forward, the black nothingness clung, and nothing could form inside it, nothing could push through it, and the regrowth stopped at its boundary and simply held there, unable to advance.

He stared at His legs with utter disbelief, and something that looked like genuine fear in His eyes. He was a true God… a Rank I God for that matter, descended in the flesh. And He’d been wounded to a point where he couldn’t even regrow His limbs.

Immediately, as if coming to a realization, he launched Himself upwards, continuing to float towards the sky as if heading for the sun. And just as He did, the sky also lit up.

Multiple streams of golden light descended from the sun above, falling like liquid sunlight weeping from the surface of the sun itself, heading straight towards him to meet halfway.

Far below on the ground, Althea’s brows shot up in surprise as she watched those strange streams of light morph into human figures as they neared the Radiant One, and immediately, her first thought was that they were other forms of the Him, extensions of the same being. But then she remembered something:

Lucine had used the term “Sun Gods” more than once — plurally and deliberately. That distinction she had noted at the time and filed away came back to her now as she watched them converge around the Radiant One in the air above the null void.

These were not bodies of the Radiant One… They were separate beings. Each one an authority unto themselves, aspects of the sun divided among them. Heat. Fury. Vengeance. The burning and the blinding and the consuming. The Radiant One was the first among them but not the only one, and they had come now because one of their own had been wounded in the mortal plane with wounds that would not heal.

The sky is even darkening too…

She registered it slowly at first, the quality of the light changing overhead, the warmth of the open sky above the ruined fog canopy losing its intensity, and then all at once she understood that it was darkening because so many of them had left their domain simultaneously that the sun itself was dimming from the departure.

Below them, nearly a hundred miles down, Finn stood on the cracked and devastated earth and watched placidly, his hands still, the Errant Sword returned to his side, his green eyes tracking the gathering of Sun Gods above calmly, like everything was unfolding exactly as expected.

He watched as the ones among the Sun Gods, whose authorities were hot and furious, began to descend towards him as if it exact vengeance…

But before they could even move at all, a sudden change occurred within the null void, and it showed what it truly was.

The absence it had carved into the world — fifty miles wide, stretching from the ground where Finn had cast it to the point near space where it had stopped — had been sitting there since the moment the invalidation ended, silent and unmoving and easy to forget in the chaos of what followed.

But the world had not forgotten it. The world had been responding to it the entire time in the only way it could, pulling the matter at its edges inward, space bending around the absence, and the scale of it had been building and building until a threshold was crossed…

Without warning, space collapsed inward toward the null void from every direction simultaneously, swallowing everything closest to it. The air, the earth, the fog of no return itself.

The seas that had surrounded the island stretched and bent as they were pulled across miles of distance toward the singularity, the geometry of the world elongating and warping around the event horizon as matter rushed inward to fill an absence it could not fill, and the attempt to fill it only accelerated the collapse further.

The Sun Gods were pulled with it. Every one of them, regardless of how much authority they burned against it, found themselves drawn toward the collapsing void, the spatial distortion overriding their ability to simply hold their position, and the furious ones who had been descending toward Finn were now fighting against a pull that had nothing to do with gravity and everything to do with the structure of space having changed fundamentally in the region around them.

The earth beneath Althea’s feet lurched. The ground cracked and tilted and she drove her sword in and called on everything her Transcendent body had… and yet it wasn’t enough.

Her feet left the earth and she felt herself beginning to angle toward the void, the pull finding her despite the distance she had put between herself and the fight, and for one clear cold moment she understood that there was nothing in her that could resist this, that the order she could impose on space was nothing against a collapse of this scale…

But right when she thought it was over, a field snapped into place around her — An anomalous field that simply refused to participate in what the space outside it was doing. She landed back on solid ground inside it and felt the pull stop completely, then she looked to her side and Finn was standing there, his eyes still on the sky, his expression unchanged.

The chunk of earth they stood on was roughly a mile across, isolated now in every direction by the collapse, the seas having long since been pulled away and stretched into the void, the fog of no return gone, and what surrounded them on all sides was the warped and elongated remnants of a world being slowly consumed by the absence Finn had put into it.

She looked at him, then looked up again.

The null void was filling. Slowly, agonizingly, the collapsed space was filling the opening the way a cloth pulled taut into a small point eventually stoppered a hole. The Sun Gods had freed themselves from the worst of the pull by rising high enough that the event horizon’s grip weakened, and they hung in the space above now, wounded and furious and burning their authorities against the distortion around them to hold their positions.

“I want you to trust me, Althea.” Finn suddenly said out of the blue, making Althea look down and straight at him in blank surprise.

The chaos was still raging outside the field, Gods still floating far above them, the world still bending and twisting at the edges of the void, chaos raging all around… Yet Finn was asking her for what…?

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