Chapter 1: | Mandate of the Heavenly Will
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The pressure of the lower universes screamed against my form, a crushing weight that felt like raw stone grinding bone to dust.
All of them were less than stage 20 universes, and yet they dared to judge me as if they held dominion.
As if I should kneel.
A symphony of agony echoed within me, my bones crackled, each microscopic fracture a sharp sting, my flesh tore, a searing rip across my hide, my scales buckled, groaning under an impossible strain.
Still, I stood.
Let them tremble in their cowardice.
Let them call me a monster, an abomination, or all the harbinger of myth.
For I am Alister Von Fai, the one who shall devour the Mother of All.
A voice, like light itself woven into sound, shimmered in the void, radiant, judgmental, absolute, and cold as the vacuum of space.
"Sinful being, your existence is a defilement to the mother of all. Prepare to be judged."
The Hero of Light descended, her form bathed in an incandescent aura that hummed with oppressive divinity.
She hovered like a sun reborn, her eyes twin points of burning gold, gleaming with a chilling, divine contempt.
I licked the blood from my lips and pointed a finger at her, smiling.
"Why not judge me more... intimately, Hero of Light? Become mine, and render your verdicts nightly."
Her eyes flared with a dangerous light, a sudden, flickering uncertainty beneath the fire.
A subtle tremor ran through her arm, her grip on the sword tightening almost imperceptibly.
Not just fury… but hesitation.
"You… wretched beast! I am the justice of all creation!"
Light screamed from her blade as she surged forward.
Her strike tore through my shoulder, a searing line of pain followed by the hot, slick gush of my own blood.
But before it could fall, it shifted mid-air, coalescing into a swirling, greenish fog of virulent spores that pulsed with an unholy light.
The lesser beings watching scrambled like insects, their choked gasps and frantic scrabbling echoing faintly as the virulent bloom burned their throats and blurred their vision.
"Pitiful gnats."
I snarled with mocking prejudice.
"Serving the will of the universes for nothing but mere scraps. Then allow me to show you the gloriousness of what real power should you aspire to obtain."
From my back, with a sound like tearing silk and cracking stone, erupted tendrils, slick with nascent power, grotesque in their twisting forms, yet shimmering with a terrible, divine light.
Each bore the shadowy, skeletal visage of devoured dragons, their silent snarls seeming to rip at the very fabric of the void.
The void ruptured.
Screams rang out, thin and reedy, swiftly muffled into meaningless, choked gurgles as the tendrils tightened.
Their resistance was ornamental.
Crash!
A blinding staff struck my skull.
Pain thundered through me.
He had arrived.
The Heavenly Sage, crowned by stars, wielding the Heaven and Earth staff itself.
He leapt again, staff spinning in a storm of divine fury.
"Return my daughter, monster!"
I grinned as his blows struck me, each impact a deafening gong that vibrated through my very core, shaking the fabric of reality itself like a brittle sheet of glass.
I let him rage.
A smile, slow and deliberate, curved my lustrous pale pink lips.
Then, I raised a single finger, the movement almost imperceptible, yet it drew his gaze like a magnet.
His expression froze.
"Ah... the girl with the delicate voice and knows how shake her hips? A shame she was not skilled enough."
With a roar, he charged again.
But a soft voice rang out, calm, yet thunderous in presence.
"Enough."
Time seemed to kneel.
The Zenith of All had arrived.
Samantha.
My ruin.
My goddess.
She walked through the void as though it bowed for her.
Sword made of the void itself was drawn.
Her eyes blazed with an iridescent light, like swirling nebulae trapped within obsidian orbs.
"Long time no see, dear."
I whispered.
"Indeed."
She muttered low in response, her voice barely a whisper, yet it resonated with an undeniable force.
Her eyes, suddenly closing, cut off the iridescent light before she drew her sword with a whisper of displaced air.
As she danced, her movements a deadly dance of a fairy themselves, her sword a blur of void-darkness, slicing through the empty space.
Her every step seemed to crackle with untold power, severing the very fabric of reality itself with a sound like tearing silence.
Even my exoskeleton, crafted from exotic beasts, extinct predators, devoured gods, could not withstand her.
But I did not resist.
Her fury… it was a symphony of destruction, terrible and utterly beautiful to behold.
I welcomed it.
The void cracked again.
Then.
Time stopped.
And from within the stillness stepped Elara, the Witch of Time.
Guardian of what should not be.
Her form glitched, a shimmering distortion in reality as she pressed a hand, cool and ghost-like, to my cheek.
"Why, Alister?"
I smiled, even as my body remained frozen.
"Because I love you. The both of you. And because this… was always the plan."
Her expression softened as her form glitched out of reality itself.
But she vanished, as time resumed, and my body was torn apart.
Limbs, head, flesh, my very essence, shattered into countless fragments, flung across dimensions like cosmic dust.
The heavens rumbled.
A decree unfolded, as the voice of the countless echoed on the still space.
As countless gazed at my mutilated form with contempt.
"You who defied the will of creation… who were never meant to be… born."
"You shall be branded as the sinner of all."
"Your Authority shall be scattered across seven columns, scattered from the vast network of the universes under the heavens, guarded by Stage 100 Incarnates of Disaster."
"You shall not reclaim Wisdom. Nor Desire."
"You shall not Ascend."
"You shall suffer failure upon failure, and seek only your own destruction."
A pause.
A silence as cold as death.
Then the final judgment.
"Let the Mandate of the heaven be fulfilled."
Crash.
Darkness consumed me.
But I smiled, even then.
Because what they didn't understand…
was that I had written the Mandate.