It started as a weight, a heavy, velvet pressure pressing me into a floor that wasn't there.
My thoughts were thick, like cooling wax, slow-drifting through a dark that felt too vast to be a room. There was no sound, only the rhythmic, internal thrum of my own pulse—a dull thud-thud echoing in the hollow of my skull.
Then came the static.
A microscopic prickle of electricity began at the base of my spine, moving upwards, the mana lattice twitching back to life.
It was a cold, sharp silver against the warmth of sleep. My fingers couldn't move yet, but I felt the grit of the sheets against my knuckles, a texture so sharp it felt like a shout.
The air in my lungs was stale, tasting of dust and the faint, lingering ozone of a subspace that was already in some other dimension.
I tried to force air into my lungs, and the world finally began to solidify. The darkness wasn't absolute anymore; it was grainy, shifting into a deep, bruised purple that still stripped me of any chance of sight.
Clink.
My eyelids felt fused, weighted with a leaden lethargy that defied the sudden, frantic screaming of my instincts.
Something was wrong. The air in the room was too still. The natural "noise" of the house—the settling wood, the distant hum of the kitchen—had been vacuumed away.
I forced them open.
It wasn't a smooth motion. It was a jagged, mechanical snap.
Light hit my retinas like a physical blow—a searing, white-hot needle that sent a jolt of liquid fire straight to my visual cortex.
For a heartbeat, the world was a chaotic smear of overexposed silver and grey. My pupils contracted with an almost audible click of focus. The blur resolved into the familiar ceiling, but the shadows were wrong.
They weren't drifting with the sun; they were anchored.
My gaze shifted, heavy and slow, trying to probe for the origin of this.
Eventually, my eyes moved upwards.
A silhouette.
Blacker than the room, a void in the shape of a man, carved out of the morning light.
He wasn't moving. He wasn't breathing. He was just... there. Standing in the space where the air had died.
Before I had enough time to register what exactly I was looking at, my mana lattice, not bound to my conscious nervous system, took over.
My fist flung upwards, trying to strike the man but hitting nothing but the after-image of where he had just been.
The sleep vanished instantly, replaced by the cold, crystalline bite of the lattice. My heart hammered once—a single, violent boom—and the world turned into a static photograph.
I jumped backwards, still not fully aware of what was happening, but my consciousness was only now starting to catch up to the lattice's instantaneous response.
Nothing moved, not even the leaves falling outside, not the knights who were in their training.
My brain had turned up to the max perception speed in a desperate flight or fight response.
Suddenly, and all at once, it felt as if time had stopped.
Except for him.
My brain was working overtime, slowing down my view of the world around me, and regardless, he didn't look slowed at all.
"Cool technique." His voice was strangely... human. As if it was a monster masquerading in human flesh.
"Won't help here." His voice dropped further.
"Who are you," I asked, already aware that this guy was out of my league.
I blinked once.
The next time I opened my eyes, I was looking towards the ceiling, weightless.
The ceiling blurred past my face, an obvious sign that I was moving. And fast.
KRA-SHHH.
The sound of what could only be the window shattering left me stunned.
I was no longer looking towards the ceiling, but towards the sky.
Had I just been flung out of the window?
My body spun in the air, a frantic attempt at re-aligning myself before I fell.
I was a few stories up, and although this wouldn't kill me, it wouldn't be optimal for fighting, especially with my defenseless family still in the house.
I had to get this guy away, and fast.
I flipped a few times, landing on my feet, and although I seemed to have sprained my foot on the landing, it was better than breaking it.
I turned towards the shattered window, the man stood up there, still absorbing almost 100% of the light, staring.
His pure white pupils were a stark contrast to the void that was the rest of his body.
I blinked.
He was suddenly in front of me, hands gripping my neck.
He lifted me off the floor, slowly, as I clawed and grasped to get him off.
He had travelled dozens of meters in what was probably no more than a millisecond.
I kicked him in the stomach, but instead of him flying back like I would've liked, he instead felt more like kicking into a wall.
His grip didn't falter. If anything, it tightened.
He looked into my eyes, and a sadistic grin spread across his face.
And then...
He dropped me.
Willingly.
I was both scared, and happy that he had dropped me.
I didn't have the time to waste trying to talk, or even to catch my breath.
I turned around immediately, and channelled all the mana in my body into my legs.
I used the last remaining mana to coat my body, and the area around me, in a circle of mana. aiming to prevent the incident that had occurred last time.
I pushed my feet into the ground, turning back only to see the man was sat there, smiling, with his hands in what was likely his pockets.
I needed to get whatever would happen in this fight away from my family, and the home I had grown up in over the last eight years.
The world didn't just blur; it shattered. As I hit what was the fastest speed I had experienced in the real world since returning, the garden warped into a violent, chromatic tunnel.
The manor house groaned and bent like a reflection in a disturbed pond, its edges bleeding into the bruised purple of the morning sky.
I wasn't running through air anymore. I was punching through a wall of liquid lead.
My mana-covered-skin hissed, ionizing the atmosphere into a screaming halo of white plasma that blinded my peripheral vision. Every step was a silent explosion—I saw the stone tiles beneath my feet liquefy and spray outward in slow-motion fountains of grit, but the sound was a ghost, trapped somewhere far behind my wake.
I was a meteor skipping across the surface of the earth, and the only thing that remained clear was him—the void-man, standing perfectly still in the center of my self-made hurricane, watching me with those dead, white eyes.
In no more than 10 seconds, I was probably over 30 kilometers away, The mana I had concentrated in my legs was running out, and fast, and if I ran out of mana while doing this and the mana bubble collapsed? I would die.
Undeniably, I would more than likely run myself into a red mist.
I checked my mental clock and made a note of my mana.
I had probably 5 seconds left of mana.
That was enough for maybe 20 km if I really tried.
5.
The man was still was still nowhere to be seen, I had crossed through cities, careful to avoid anywhere populated as to not get blood on my hands by dragging people into the explosions behind me.
4.
I looked behind me, trying to find the man.
Nothing.
The view behind me was nothing but destruction, my movement left a vacuum wherever I went, tearing up ground, and turning dirt to glass.
3.
The air turned a purple white, the friction between my mana shield and air ionised the air into plasma. There would more than likely be a trail of purplish-white over the roughly 38 kilometers I had passed so far.
2.
Beneath my feet, and behind me, every single step I took left a crater in the floor, about 4 meters wide. Uninhabited huts I passed had their roofs dragged off, the effects not unlike a tornado of flesh. Stone pillars were turned to dust as I blew past them. The explosions behind me were blue, a clear sign of the explosive friction-based vacuums I left behind me.
I wasn't leaving a trail; I was erasing the path behind me. Every time my heel struck the earth, a thunderclap loud enough to shake the foundations of the distant capital erupted underfoot. Behind me, the dirt didn't just fly—it vitrified, turned into jagged glass by the heat and pressure.
A farmer's cart I bypassed didn't just tip over. The shockwave hit it like a physical hammer, reduced the wood to toothpicks, and then the following vacuum sucked the debris into the air, spinning it into a 100-meter-high cyclone of splinters and dust. I was a 42-kilometer-long explosion that hadn't finished happening yet.
1.
I hard stopped, reserving my mana.
I slammed the mana bubble into the floor, ending my momentum but temporarily submerging me in the ground.
My eyes flickered around frantically, as I disabled all of my mana-based structures, even the lattice.
I had maybe one burst of anything left over, and I didn't want to waste it until I was sure there was a threat.
46 kilometers.
I had cross provinces of kingdoms, and I wasn't even sure where I was anymore.
0.
Nothing happened.
The man was gone? Hopefully left in the wind or blew up the moment I started moving.
Either way, he posed no risk to me.
Had he given up on chasing me.
I was looking behind me, the sonic explosions I made starting to catch up.
9 seconds later, the sonic booms were close enough that I could almost taste them.
I fortified my ears for one brief moment, and I heard a sound so loud it would melt the brain of any normal person.
Alright.
Nothing behind me. i had made it.
I turned back around in front of me.
"AGHH"
I swung a punch immediately. A punch which was caught out of the air.
"Don't do that, its rude to swing at people." His voice was dripped with venom.
I had lost.
Nearly 50 kilometers in 15 seconds, and he was still in front of me.
I dropped to my knees, effectively drained of mana, physical strength, and mental fortitude.
And then I thought.
The engine.
I didn't reach for the lattice for fortitude. I reached for the engine for an explosive finish.
The forbidden rhythm kicked in, a violent, grinding thrum that ignited my blood, turning it into liquid fire. I didn't balance the flow for safety—I broke it.
I cancelled the movement of the mana in my body.
I had two cores, enough to almost kill me but I let the pressure build regardless, until I felt the sickening, wet crack of my primary core beginning to splinter.
His eyes widened. He didn't see a 'cool technique' anymore; he saw a tragedy.
I was a ticking bomb.
3 seconds.
I felt the mana in the area get sucked into my body, I had effectively no idea how this happened, but knowledge is of no use to a dead man.
2 seconds.
He couldn't kill me, it would simply cause the explosion to happen immediately, blowing him up at point blank range.
1 second.
I couldn't figure out why he hadn't run, so I assume he had drained his mana in the same way I had. That was the best case scenario.
My primary core was shattering, I could hear cracks forming by the millisecond, I wasn't sure if it could even recover, but it didn't matter to me.
0.
He didn't dodge—he couldn't. He dropped like an anchor, his aura turning into a wall of solid light, bracing for the megaton shockwave.
Now.
I didn't detonate. I killed the engine.
The silence was deafening. The massive pressure I'd built up didn't explode outward; it imploded. The vacuum left by the suddenly disappeared sucked the man forward, his perfect balance shattered by the sudden absence of the threat he was bracing against.
I rode the backlash. My body jolted upwards, my right arm whipped forward, fueled by the receding tide of my own failing mana.
THUD.
My knuckles met his jaw. The sound of my hand breaking was like dry wood snapping in a forest, but I saw his head whip the slightest angle to the side.
I saw a bead of blood bloom on his lip.
I had sacrificed my core, my mana, and most of my bones for a single inch of movement. And as I collapsed, the vacuum left by the now non-engine turning my insides to ice, I saw him smile.
It wasn't the smile of a man who had won. It was the smile of a collector who had just found something priceless in a pile of junk.
My knees hit the scorched earth, the impact rattling my already fractured ribs. The absolute zero of the Engine's shutdown was worse than the fire; it felt like my veins were being threaded with liquid nitrogen. I tried to gasp, but my lungs were locked in a cryogenic stutter.
The man didn't move to strike back. He didn't even wipe the blood from his lip. He simply stood there as the 46-kilometer trail of destruction I'd left behind finally caught up to us.
BOOM.
The sonic boom arrived like the hand of God, a wall of compressed air that flattened the trees for miles and sent a tectonic shudder through the very plate I was kneeling on. The dust from the vitrified path I'd carved rose up like a funeral shroud, swallowing the forest in a haze of pulverized stone and ionized ozone.
Through the grit and the haze, he stepped closer. His boots didn't make a sound on the glassed earth.
He crouched down, deeply. He grabbed my chin and lifted my head forcefully, forcing me to really look at his eyes for the first time.
"You broke your own body for a drop of blood," he said, his voice slicing through the ringing in my ears. The sadistic edge was gone, replaced by a terrifying, clinical curiosity. "Most would call that a failure of character. A lack of restraint."
He reached his arm further down, his hand a shadow against the bruised purple of the morning sky. He grabbed the front of my shirt and hoisted me up as if I weighed nothing more than a handful of ash.
"But Sevran doesn't look for restraint, Aren."
He leaned in, the white voids of his eyes reflecting nothing but my own broken, shivering reflection.
"We look for monsters who are willing to burn the world down just to move the sun an inch."
I tried to summon a spark—a flicker of the engine, a shard of the lattice, even a hint of mana—but there was nothing left but a cold, hollow ache where my power used to be. My consciousness began to fray at the edges, the darkness of the "meat-space" sleep returning to claim me.
"Rest," he whispered, and for the first time, the monster sounded almost proud. "The carriage will be here shortly. You have a long way to go before you're ready to hit me again."
My head lolled back, watching the purplish-white scar in the sky begin to fade. I had saved my family. I had drawn blood from a god.
And all it had cost me was everything.