The closer the man got, the more I felt frozen. Space itself solidified. I remembered the feeling all too well from my vision, when the Se-Targa Ascendant had visited.

  Visited along with this new monster slowly coming towards us.

  The core features were the same as they had been so long ago. He still had stringy blond hair, a blue cloth hanging around his waist, and those azure tattoos wrapped around his torso.

  It was his height that had changed. That, plus the ruggedness of his face, the presence of new scars, and the general confidence of his bearing which proclaimed this was a vastly different person from my vision. Honestly, it was more surprising that I had still recognized him. Hadn’t it been something like a millennium since I had last seen him?

  “Mageling.” Khagnio’s voice was tight. The pressure was making just breathing difficult. That Khagnio could even squeeze a few words out was a surprise. “This isn’t good.”

  It most likely wasn’t. And the worst part was that we probably couldn’t do anything about it.

  The man finally came to a stop. He looked around a silent world.

  “Is this it?” he asked.

  The pressure lessened. I could breathe again. Properly. I hadn’t even realized my breathing had stopped, like I wasn’t even allowed to die without this tattooed monster’s permission. My body sucked in desperate lungfuls of air in case everything froze again.

  He stepped past Khagnio and me, giving us brief looks from his pale gold eyes, before reaching the statue of the strange elf-tree-thing.

  The bugs had grown agitated at his approach. Now, even while they remained frozen in their spots, they buzzed their wings and growled, the Netherthreads on their bodies writhing with dire threat.

  The man’s lips curled.

  “I came here expecting a proper mess to fix,” he said, derision dripping from every word. “And yet, all I find are pathetic pretenders playing with wasted relics. So is this it? Is this all you have to show me?”

  I didn’t know what in the world he was talking about. Forget that, I hardly knew who in the world he even was, besides that tenuous connection to an Ascendant.

  How had he even known to come here?

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I don’t have the slightest clue who you—”

  He ignored me completely and stepped closer to the Blight Swarm. “Look at you,” he said to the bugs. “Look at how worthless you’ve become.”

  It was like I didn’t even exist. The dismissal stung fiercely. Instead of feeling empowered at achieving our goal, instead of the triumph that should have been enlivening me, all I felt was panicky and hollow. This asshole had appeared out of nowhere, a wildcard seconds away from upending everything.

  “You all used to be something once,” he went on saying, almost glaring at the bugs. “You used to mean something. The Work of an Ascendant. A Monumental Opus.”

  He spoke with zealous reverence, every word landing like the gong of an enormous hammer.

  Slowly, he stared up at the statue’s head. “And now, over the centuries, you’ve been reduced to nothing but a shadow of your former selves. Weak. Pathetic. Ignominious.” He looked back at the gathered Swarm. “You don’t deserve to disgrace their memory.”

  A tattoo of a tendril on his shoulder writhed, leaped off his skin, then slammed into the statue.

  The creatures of the Swarm screamed in unison as the statue simply toppled. It crashed to the metal floor of the Nether Vein, shattering into glinting pieces that scattered everywhere.

  I was a little too shocked to react, other than instinctively stepping back enough so that I wasn’t rained on by a spray of debris.

  The roar that followed from the Swarm turned me deaf, leaving behind a painful ringing. Moments later, a mountain of the bugs, all slashing, crashing, and frothing together, raged through the Nether Vein, every single one of them determined to tear the tattooed man apart.

  Who just curled the corners of his lips even higher.

  I stared at the veritable wall of monsters about to slam in. Even though I’d fought a lot of those, several of them at once too, what I faced now would have eviscerated me. I knew my limits, and this—what looked like the full might of the Blight Swarm—was way beyond me.

  But I didn’t quail, wasn’t afraid for even a second, because of the man before me. A monster far worse than anything the Swarm could ever be.

  His tattoos writhed on his skin some more. Before the storm of bugs could even get close, whips of blue rushed off his body, darkening to a shade resembling the night.

  When they reached the Blight Swarm, they ate through the monsters.

  I was right. Totally right. To this man, the entirety of the Blight Swarm meant nothing. Dozens of deep blue tendrils, threads that were thicker than a train carriage, crashed into the Blight Swarm. Each one just gobbled up a bug within its thickness. Not a single monster got away. Not a single one came out.

  Not even the strong ones, like the powerful, humanoid insect I had fought, could escape.

  He didn’t destroy all the monsters. Or consume them. I got the impression of consumption because his strange, thick threads bulged whenever they “ate” another Swarm monster, before dragging the bulge towards him, condensing it into a glowing pulse of energy. Like snakes swallowing their prey whole.

  The man was apparently toying with some of his prey too. Instead of letting one of his threads swallow up a bug—the armoured one that had nearly jumped on me and Khagnio way back on Ring Four—he just dragged it closer, keeping it immobilized with the deep blue energy.

  “Tell me,” he said. His voice was so placid, it was impossible to think he was also eradicating the entirety of the Blight Swarm with no effort. “What did you truly hope to accomplish here? What were you going for? What did you want?”

  I wanted to call him crazy. He was talking with a bug, after all. A monster who only responded to base impulses. But somehow, the creature I had dismissed to be nothing more than a mindless being bent on destruction was actually speaking.

  It was saying something to the man. I understood nothing. All I heard were indecipherable clicks of its mandibles.

  The man stared at it. Then laughed softly. Derisively. “How pathetic. You really have lost it all.”

  His engorged blue threads crushed the monster—the one I had run away from and believed only a Councillor could defeat—to nothing.

  I swallowed. The sheer insanity of power on display kept me rooted to my spot. In the end, though, even my numbness had limits. If it was just the Blight Swarm being destroyed, I’d have been fine with it. But that wasn’t the case.

  As the monsters that had been plaguing Zairgon were all dealt with in short order, the other monstrous obstacle we had faced within the Nether Vein finally made an appearance.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  The tall, gangly creature was loping across the now-open space, rushing straight for the man who had killed its favoured tree. I swallowed. Right. That thing had been guarding the statue, which meant it wasn’t just nesting here, if monsters within the Nether Vein even did that, and instead considered the strange statue of an Ascendant as something valuable.

  Something worth killing for.

  It was almost fascinating how the man repeated the exact same thing he had done moments ago with the armoured Swarmlord or whatever it was. I still didn’t get to see just what the creature was capable of. The man’s threads immobilized it with no trouble. Then he drew it in and asked it the exact same thing.

  “What do you want?” he said. “O, Malformed Guardian of the Nether Vein, what do you really want here?”

  And just as with the insect monster, this one responded too. Once again, Universal Language Approximator failed to translate it. Looked like it wasn’t as universal as it liked to proclaim. Was it because these were monsters and they weren’t really speaking a language that could be understood? Well, it was communicating somehow, since the man comprehended it.

  Because just as with the bug earlier, he was disappointed. He sighed, then let his threads consume the monster.

  It hadn’t even gotten the chance to struggle.

  I didn’t care about it. I didn’t even care about the fact that the man’s enormous blue threads swallowed the monster just as easily as they had gobbled up every bit of the Blight Swarm they had come in contact with.

  What bothered me was that the Councillor wasn’t far behind. What alarmed me was that she had rushed in, following hot on the trail of her enemy to strike it down, only to get caught by the blue threads instead. And just as with the Blight Swarm and the Nether Vein monster, she was swallowed up by the threads too.

  Oh, she tried to resist. Her prismatic aura flared, glowing feathers emerging to form a protective cocoon. And for just a second, it even forced the huge tendrils to halt.

  The man’s eyebrows shot up by a fraction.

  And then the threads slammed in from all directions, crushing the spot where Se-Vigilance was standing, consuming her completely just as they had done with literally everything else they had come in contact with.

  I felt like screaming. Why hadn’t he tried talking with the one victim capable of it?

  “Stop!” I yelled, finally discovering the impetus to do something other than just stare agog.

  Except, of course, far too late to do anything about the Councillor. When the dust cleared, she was gone. Just like everything else.

  But my shout had managed to drag the man’s attention onto me.

  Fuck.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten you.”

  I swallowed. My brain was still panicking. Even a wrong syllable could be fatal, but every single thing I felt like saying could—no, would—be the wrong thing against a man like this. Talking to a volcanic eruption wasn’t going to prevent a burial underneath burning, molten lava.

  “You’re the last mess, aren’t you?” he said.

  “I… I don’t know who you are or what you want,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “Really?” He raised his eyebrows. “You say you don’t understand me, yet you speak a language that hasn’t been taught for almost six hundred years now?”

  “Fuck,” I muttered.

  I had been so shellshocked by everything going on since the man had arrived that I hadn’t even noticed we were talking in his tongue. In a language that decidedly wasn’t New Zair. I cursed myself. How had I missed that? Especially when I had been thinking about the Universal Language Approximator just a minute ago?

  The man laughed. “You intrigued me the moment I heard you.” His eyes still glimmered like liquid gold. “Because that was when I knew you were the other mess I had to deal with here. Maybe even the main one. But I had to take care of the appetizers before the main course, you understand.”

  I was right. The Blight Swarm had been the appetizers… he was consuming everything that his threads were swallowing up. How in the world was he doing that? What kind of Aspect allowed him that sort of power?

  “My, my,” he said. His smile widened, eyes almost knowing. “Even while you’re so terrified that you’re frozen in place, you’re hungry. I was right. You really are the main reason I was called here, aren’t you?”

  I tried not to get distracted by my impending death. By how one wrong move would have me swallowed up by one of the deep blue threads. The bulge of the swallowed Councillor was growing brighter and more condensed, moving closer and closer to the monster that had maybe already killed her.

  Unless there was a minute chance that she was still alive, still surviving up until the moment her current state touched his body.

  I wracked my mind for what in the world I could do to stop a living atom bomb from destroying everything within its vicinity. A dangerous gamble. That was all I had.

  “This is far beneath you,” I said.

  The writhing, twisting deep blue threads froze. I wanted to breathe out a sigh of relief at seeing the thread carrying the Councillor’s remains stop as well. But he was glaring at me now, those golden eyes burning holes through my very soul like twin suns scouring my being with an infernal gaze.

  “You,” he said. “I knew there was something eerily familiar about you. You’re the one.”

  I feigned ignorance. Another gamble. “I don’t understand what you mean. I don’t even know who you are.”

  Honestly, I wasn’t even lying. Thinking about the complications of time just messed with my head. He had seen me a thousand years ago, even though I had only been present before him just a few days back.

  “Don’t lie,” he said. “You’re the spy. The sneakthief peeping at his betters, a worm glancing at gods. You were there all that time ago, I’m certain of it now.” He didn’t approach me, nor did his threads resume moving with the intent to consume me. And yet, I felt him loom a lot more threateningly. “The question is how.”

  “I’ll happily tell you, so long as you stop destroying everything you touch.”

  That was an absolutely reasonable thing to say, and yet, I got a first-hand lesson that reason couldn’t exist without context. Case in point, anything sounding even mildly demanding was going to piss off someone whose power was seemingly boundless.

  “You will happily tell me,” he said, threads now burgeoning around him again. “And that is it, scum of time.”

  I cursed myself. Gamble failed. I had at least, for just a bit, stopped the man from consuming Se-Vigilance as well. But now, I myself was facing death. I couldn’t even think about mustering any sort of tangible defiance, no matter how much my mind rebelled at my impending fatality. What was the point? If a Jade-ranked Councillor was as insignificant as a fly, a Gold-ranked like me was nothing.

  The threads stormed—

  And Kostis landed with a funnel of smoke just a bit in front of me, kneeling with his head bowed. Every single one of his gem-scales was glowing a vivid, deadly scarlet.

  “Great Paragon,” he said. It shocked me a little. Not just his sudden appearance. Now that I could recognize it, I could only stare as Kostis almost fluently spoke the supposedly ancient language the man and I was conversing in. “I beg of thee, have some mercy. The boy is young, naive, and a Summoned to boot.”

  “Summoned?”

  Don’t lie, he had said. Did this man—this Paragon, one of the strongest beings in existence beneath the ancient Ascendants, which did a lot to explain the man’s ridiculous might—have some kind of lie-detecting power? Because he wasn’t doubting Kostis at all.

  “Yes, Great Paragon,” Kostis said. His scaly head bowed lower. I supposed I should have taken the hint and shown subservience instead of defiance, but at this point, it was too late for me to pretend to be anything other than who I was. “By… one such as yourself, in fact. Paragon Shubratha.”

  The deadly intent disappeared as suddenly as it had resurfaced.

  I wished I could have relaxed, could have felt relieved, but every nerve was jolting with electricity. Every muscle was strung tighter than a bowstring.

  “Interesting,” the Paragon said. “So Shubratha has a hand in all this… it’s all starting to make more and more sense…”

  If that made some sort of twisted sense to the Paragon, I couldn’t even begin to understand it. All I remembered was the bastard who had summoned me, this Paragon whose name Kostis had neglected to mention the one time we had actually talked about it, hadn’t cared a whit that I had been summoned only to be immediately sacrificed.

  Admittedly, he had also said that the Sacrifice would fail. Which it had, and now I was here. But the gangster wizard had been dismissive from the get-go. He hadn’t contacted me since, probably didn’t even know I was alive. I couldn’t be a part of any stupid plan of his.

  Right?

  “And you’re associated with him too, aren’t you?” the Paragon asked, for once turning his burning eyes off me to look down upon Kostis.

  “I have been fortunate to make his acquaintance,” Kostis said.

  “I see. What is your name?”

  “Kostis Daksilsaz, Great Paragon.”

  “Kostis Daksilsaz.” The Paragon’s voice took an evaluating, challenging, and menacing tone. I once again felt like an ant caught under a magnifying glass. “Tell me this—what is it that you want here? What is it that you seek?”

  My heart pounded a little as I waited for Master Kostis to answer. He was taking his time, his head still bowed. I didn’t blame him one bit. The question was, quite literally, life-or-death.

  “I came here, Great Paragon,” Kostis said. “To help my comrades and my fellow Zairgon citizens defend themselves against the Blight Swarm. Or, what remained of it, rather. But my other intention was to explore the mysteries that the Nether Vein itself presented.”

  “For what reason?”

  “For…” Kostis sighed resignedly. “For I lack the power I deserve.”

  “Ah.”

  My heart started sinking immediately at that response. I didn’t even get the chance to protest what happened next. The Paragon, who had walked closer, slashed his hand ahead of him with blinding speed. I cried out as he struck Master Kostis.

  Who thankfully dissolved into smoke instead of being smashed into a pulped, bloody smear.

  “Ah, how wily,” the Paragon said. Despite Kostis’s trick, blood still covered half his hand. Blood that wasn’t his at all. “I see now why you were unafraid of being honest. I suppose I shouldn’t have underestimated a Paragon’s associate to such a degree.”

  Kostis, of course, wasn’t coming back. His smoke was gone, all traces of him absent from the vicinity like he had never come here in the first place.

  “So.” The Paragon’s burning eyes turned to me again, freezing me where I stood. Shit. “Your turn, interloper. What is it that you seek?”