The icy winds of the Alaskan wilderness whipped against Ajak's face, carrying the scent of ancient snow and frozen pine. She stood at the edge of the excavation site, her gaze heavy with a weary, timeless sorrow as she looked at the carnage below.
"Poor souls," Ajak murmured, her voice trembling with a weight that spanned millennia. "We truly believed the Deviants had been purged from this world, wiped into extinction. We never expected survivors to be lurking in the dark corners of the earth. It is our burden to bear... our failure that it has come to this."
Noah stood beside her, his eyes narrowed into cold slits as he surveyed the jagged ice and the panicked oil workers below. A flash of grim realization crossed his mind; the resurgence of these monsters was, in a twisted way, partly his fault. Yet, he knew the march of time was relentless. Even without his interference, the steady rise of global temperatures would have eventually surrendered these beasts from their glacial tombs. In a few years, these very men would have met the same grisly end, their screams swallowed by the thawing permafrost.
"The creatures have vanished into the tree line," Ajak whispered, her brow furrowed in concentration. "Perhaps our first step should be to locate Phastos."
She turned to Noah, noting his silent, inscrutable expression. Realizing he might not recognize the name, she offered a quick explanation. "Phastos is the brilliant mind of our people—the maker, the engineer. We have always relied on the advanced tracking equipment he forged to hunt the Deviants across the centuries. However, we shuttered those tools and hid them away several hundred years ago, believing the hunt was over."
She took a determined step forward, the furs of her cloak rustling. "The Deviants are a plague; they will not stop until they have consumed every human in their path. We must find Phastos immediately."
"There's no need for such haste," Noah interjected, raising a dismissive hand. A small, confident smirk played on his lips. When he had been thoroughly thrashing Ikaris moments ago, his keen eyes hadn't missed the direction in which the cowardly monsters had bolted. "I can track these vermin myself."
Without waiting for a response, Noah bent his knees and coiled his strength. With a sudden, explosive burst, he leaped into the frigid air, shimmering veils of Eldritch magic catching his weight and propelling him forward like a silver arrow.
Ajak watched him go, her mouth slightly agape. A moment later, a series of booming sonic cracks rolled across the tundra, echoing through the mountains. She stood frozen for a beat, a realization dawning on her that sent a chill deeper than the Arctic air: Noah's raw power and flight were unnervingly similar to those of Ikaris.
Noah soared low, skimming less than a hundred meters above the jagged canopy of the forest. The wind roared past his ears, but his focus was absolute. He channeled his mana, activating a wide-range magical scan that rippled outward like an invisible radar, peeling back the secrets of the earth below.
He followed the lingering trail of malice, and it didn't take long.
Deep within a cluster of ancient, snow-laden pines, a pack of Deviants—beasts resembling starved wolves but mutated with an extra pair of powerful forelimbs—were locked in a gruesome feast. They were tearing into the carcass of a massive brown bear. The poor beast had spent its autumn gorging itself to survive the coming winter, only to become a mountain of fat and fur for these intergalactic parasites.
Noah hovered silently in the air, a dark silhouette against the pale sky. He watched the frenzied movements below. These creatures were the embodiment of bottomless gluttony, trapped in a cycle of perpetual consumption. It was no wonder the Celestials had found them uncontrollable; left unchecked, the Deviants would strip a planet of all life, leaving nothing behind to fuel the birth of a new Celestial.
"You enjoy the hunt so much?" Noah's voice dropped to a cold, melodic whisper that didn't carry to the forest floor. "Let's see how you fare as the prey."
He slowly spread his arms wide, and the air around him began to hum with a terrifying, discordant frequency. Between his palms, wisps of violet Void Energy began to leak out, swirling like sentient smoke. As he brought his hands together, the energy coalesced, bending and warping to the dark mandates of his will.
Below, the Deviants were snarling at one another, snapping at their pack-mates to secure a larger share of the bear's entrails. Suddenly, the shadows beneath them deepened.
Violet sparks, sharp and unnatural, ignited in the snow. Six points of light formed a perfect, ominous circle around the feeding ground.
The lead Deviant paused, its snout dripping with blood. It sniffed the air, sensing a shift in the atmosphere that its primitive instincts couldn't quite categorize. It let out a low, guttural growl, its hackles rising.
The sparks erupted. Within heartbeats, they expanded into swirling, jagged portals of purple fire. From the depths of these rifts, monsters lunged out—creatures so horrific they made the Deviants look like common curs.
"RRRRRRRGH!"
The newcomers let out a deafening, earth-shaking roar. A visible shockwave of sound blasted from their cavernous maws, slamming into the Deviants and sending the wolf-monsters stumbling back, despite being larger than polar bears.
Had anyone from Noah's former life been there—someone familiar with the digital battlefields of League of Legends—they would have recoiled in terror, screaming: "Holy hell, those are Cho'Gaths!"
Indeed, the beings Noah had summoned were the spitting image of the Terror of the Void, though these were "smaller," standing only about five meters tall. Of course, "small" was a relative term for a creature modeled after a beast known for its ability to grow infinitely by devouring everything in its path.
These weren't the "true" Cho'Gath, but rather constructs birthed from the essence of Malzahar's ability to summon the Void Swarm.
In the original universe of the League, the swarm consisted of mindless, skittering voidlings. But Noah, as the Sovereign of his own Void dimension, had discovered he could do more than just summon pests. He could mold that raw, chaotic energy into whatever nightmare he desired.
Today, he had woven the swarm into the shape of the "Great Bug" to teach the Deviants a lesson in the food chain.
The five Cho'Gaths tightened the circle, their chitinous plates clicking as they moved. The Deviants, sensing their impending doom, retreated until they were back-to-back, their eyes darting wildly between the towering purple horrors.
The silence of the woods was broken only by the heavy breathing of the beasts. The Deviants, driven by a desperate survival instinct, decided they would not go quietly. They lunged toward a gap in the circle, trying to use their superior speed to vanish into the brush.
But speed meant little against the Sovereign's chosen.
The five Cho'Gaths moved in perfect, terrifying unison. They reared back on their insectoid hind legs and slammed their massive, scythe-like claws into the frozen earth.
CRACK!
The ground buckled and split. Massive, jagged stone spikes, infused with violet energy, erupted from the soil in a linear path toward the fleeing Deviants.
The wolf-creatures didn't even have time to howl. The spikes tore through the snow and impaled them from beneath, lifting them high into the air. They writhed and clawed at the indestructible pillars of stone, their dark blood staining the grey rock, but there was no escape.
The Cho'Gaths watched their struggling prey, their mandibles clicking in anticipation as strings of glowing saliva dripped to the snow. The hunt was over. The feast had begun.
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