Kael’s blade carved through the first of the shadow born echoes, its body dissolving into streams of dark vapor that bled back into the obsidian ground. The strike should have given him satisfaction, but instead the remnants of the monster slithered into the cracks of the glassy plain, reforming behind him as if mocking his effort.The Void didn’t deal in victories. It recycled every failure into another obstacle, forcing him to fight the same battles until despair set in.Kael pivoted, teeth clenched, meeting the charge of another echo this one the Bloodfang Alpha, larger than the last time he faced it, its fangs dripping with spectral venom. His body reacted on instinct, muscles coiled with familiarity, but his mind betrayed him with flashes of memory: the night he killed the beast, the villagers it had slaughtered, the fear he had felt then.This was the trap. Not their power, but the memories they dragged out of him.“Come back to me,” Aria’s voice echoed in his mind.Kael roared

Kael woke to the sound of breathing. Not his own ragged gasps, not the suffocating silence of the Void, but something steady, alive, close. He opened his eyes slowly, blinking against the golden haze that filled the air.The world had changed.He lay on a bed of stone, smooth and warm as if carved from living sunlight. Above him arched a sky of fractured light, pieces shifting like shards of glass suspended in motion. Streams of color blue, crimson, gold wove together, cascading down to form rivers of energy that flowed across the ground.And there, standing at the edge of the light, was Aria.Her eyes were tired, her body battered, her clothes torn by battles he hadn’t seen. Yet she stood, unbroken, her hand pressed to a pillar of shifting energy as though holding it steady. When she saw him stir, she let out a sound half sob, half laugh and rushed forward.“You stubborn, reckless fool,” she whispered, dropping to her knees beside him.Kael tried to sit up but pain wracked through hi

The fortress shook again, harder this time. Chunks of stone rained down from the battlements as the Hunters slammed into the gates. Their claws scraped grooves into the enchanted iron, shrieking like nails on bone.Kael stood before the wall, his blade pointed skyward, fractures glowing in rhythm with the rift overhead. Every soldier had turned to look at him now. Some stared in awe, some in fear. But in all of them flickered the same question could this broken man with voidlight in his veins truly be their salvationAria moved to his side, voice steady. “If the system gave you a directive, it means there’s a path. But Kael severing the rift’s anchor isn’t like slaying Hunters. Anchors are pieces of the Sovereign itself. You’ll be cutting into its flesh.”“Then it will bleed,” Kael said, his voice calm but hard.Ryn frowned. “Anchors Where”Kael’s system flickered, filling his vision.[Quest Directive: Sever the Rift’s Anchors][Status: Three anchors detected in this region][Anchor O

The fortress shook as if the earth itself were rebelling. Cracks split the courtyard, bleeding voidlight into the stone. Soldiers stumbled, clutching weapons, eyes darting skyward as the rift blazed above them like a second sun.Kael emerged from the undercrypt with Aria at his side. Both were bloodied, their armor scorched, their faces carved with exhaustion. Yet the moment they stepped into the open air, the soldiers froze. The hum beneath their feet faded. The tremors slowed. And hope, fragile as glass, flickered in their eyes.Ryn rushed forward, helmet under one arm, his face streaked with ash. “The ground stopped buckling. What did you do”Kael raised his blade, still glowing faintly with voidfire. “We severed the anchor below. The fortress will hold for now. But the last one is up there.” He pointed to the sky where the rift pulsed, its tendrils unfurling across the heavens like a net.The air itself bent around it. Whole swaths of stars blinked out, swallowed by its expanding

The guardians were gone.Their bodies dissolved into storms of violet light, their screams swallowed by the black. What lingered was silence but not peace. The silence pressed like stone, a suffocating stillness that wrapped around Kael and Aria as they hovered before the anchor.The sphere loomed vast before them, a wound in the heavens. Its surface writhed with veins of fire, rivers of void pulsing in time with some alien heartbeat. And at its center, the Eye opened.It was not an eye in shape, yet every part of Kael’s soul knew it as such. A circle of abyss, a spiral of hunger, a gaze that reached past his flesh and into the marrow of his being. To look at it was to feel yourself stripped layer by layer until nothing remained but the hollow truth.The system bled warnings.[Critical Entity Detected: Rift Anchor Core][Threat Level: Absolute][Survival Probability: Negligible]Kael shut the prompts out. He had no need for probabilities. He had chosen.The Eye pulsed, and the world