The journey back from the Verdant Maze was a frantic, desperate flight. Kael pushed his body past every limit he had ever known, his feet barely touching the ground as he moved like a grey phantom across the continent. The world was a blur of colour and motion. The serene patience he had cultivated over a hundred lifetimes was gone, burned away by the image of the Warden, the celestial administrator of his prison. He was no longer the observer. He was the observed. He was being hunted.
He arrived at the hidden sea caves of Freeport like a storm, his sudden, breathless appearance a shock to his lieutenants. They had only ever seen their leader as a being of unshakable, ancient calm. To see him now, his eyes wide with a chilling urgency, filled them with a sense of profound dread.
"Gather the sect. Arm yourselves," Kael commanded, his voice sharp, devoid of any preamble. "We have been discovered."
He did not waste time with the cosmic, mind-shattering truth of his vision. He gave them a truth they could fight. "The enemy is from the Celestial Realm. A being of immense power. It knows we are here, and it is coming."
His commands were a rapid-fire cascade of strategic orders. Borin was to rally their fifty warriors, setting up kill-zones and ambushes within the twisting sea caves. Elara was to use her informant network to create chaos in Freeport as a diversion, and to watch the skies for anything unnatural. Finch was to secure their library, to prepare their collected knowledge for immediate evacuation or destruction. He was a general preparing for a siege he knew he could not win.
The first omen came within the hour. The perpetual wind off the ocean died completely. The sky over Freeport, usually a hazy blue, took on a strange, metallic, colorless sheen. A pressure began to build, a silent, atmospheric weight that made the air feel thick and hard to breathe.
Kael felt it most acutely. His Qi-sight, usually a window into a vibrant world of energy, was now being compressed. A vast, blanketing aura of pure, cold, unfeeling law was descending from the heavens, suppressing the natural Qi of the world like a lead blanket snuffing out a candle.
Then it came.
Not a meteor, not a thunderclap. A single, geometrically perfect beam of white light, no wider than a thread, descended from the heavens. It touched the surface of the ocean a mile from shore. There was no splash, no steam, no sound. The water where the beam made contact simply… ceased to exist, leaving a perfectly circular patch of calm, glassy sea.
From that impossible point of contact, a figure coalesced. It was the Warden from his vision, a being of incandescent white light, its form shifting between a serene, featureless humanoid and a terrifying angel of impossible angles. It did not walk on the water. It glided a foot above it, moving toward the shore with the placid, inexorable grace of a glacier. Its presence seemed to leach the very color from the world around it.
It ignored the city of Freeport entirely. Its senses, operating on a level beyond mortal comprehension, were locked onto Kael's unique spiritual signature. It moved directly for the hidden sea caves.
At the mouth of their largest cave, the fifty members of the Rootless Sect stood waiting, armed with harpoons, weighted nets, and heavy crossbows. They were terrified. The being gliding towards them felt like the personification of death itself. But their brutal training, their absolute loyalty to the boy who had given them a purpose, held them fast.
Kael stood before them. He knew this was not a battle for victory. It was a test. A desperate attempt to gather data on the nature of his jailer.
"Hold it back!" Kael roared, his voice the signal to begin. "For thirty seconds!"
On Borin's command, the sect unleashed hell. Harpoons flew, crossbow bolts a solid volley of steel, and massive, weighted nets were launched. It was a storm of purely physical projectiles.
The Warden did not flinch. It did not raise a shield. It simply continued to glide forward. As the sharpened harpoons and bolts entered its immediate proximity, they slowed, their metallic forms turning brittle, grey, and then dissolving into a fine, inert dust. The nets unraveled, their fibers turning to ash. The being's passive aura was a field of absolute entropy for mortal works. It did not need to defend itself.
The Warden raised a hand, its gesture as simple and unhurried as a man pointing the way. The air in front of the sect members warped. A dozen of them were hurled backward by a wave of pure kinetic force, slamming into the cave walls. Their Adamantine Bodies, tough as they were, groaned under the impact; bones were cracked, but miraculously, not shattered. The Warden tilted its head of light, a silent, almost curious gesture. It seemed surprised by their resilience.
Kael knew he had to intervene. His disciples could not even slow it down. He made a choice.
He activated his Artificial Core.
A chaotic, multi-coloured aura of raw, unstable power erupted around him, a stark, heretical contrast to the Warden's pure white. He shot forward, his feet blurring, and threw himself directly at the celestial being.
His fist, wreathed in the violent energy of his man-made godhood, met the Warden's simple, outstretched palm of light.
The impact was not a thunderous explosion. It was a deafening, soul-crushing silence. A perfect void where all sound and energy died. The chaotic, rebellious power of Kael's core ground against the pure, immutable law of the Warden. It was a battle between a bug in the code and the code itself.
Kael was thrown backward, his Core sputtering violently, an agony unlike any before tearing through him. His attack had failed, but it had done something. It had momentarily halted the Warden's serene advance. He had survived his first direct contact with his jailer.
But in that brief, silent clash, he saw the truth. It was not a fight. The power gap was not a gulf; it was a galaxy. He could not harm it. He could not stop it. He could not win.
The Warden, its featureless face of light seeming to focus on him with a newfound interest, began to gather its power for a true, deliberate attack. A nimbus of white light formed around its hand, an energy that Kael knew would not just kill them, but unmake them from existence.
He looked at his horrified, battered disciples. He had led them here. He had one final, terrible duty to them. He had only one escape hatch.
He turned his focus inward, to the very mechanism of his soul, the one thing the Warden had come to erase. He prepared to pull the trigger himself. He would reset the loop. He would run.