Zay sat slumped against the cave wall, his chest rising and falling in jagged bursts. The stone behind him was cool, damp with age, and pressed firm against his back. Droplets echoed in the dark, falling at irregular intervals, yet their rhythm was calming compared to the flame he'd fled from.
His breath steamed in the cold air, and the edges of his vision blurred with exhaustion. For the first time in what felt like hours, he closed his eyes and let the silence settle over him.
But then—
—The ground throbbed. A slow, deliberate pulse that hummed through the stone and sank into his bones like a warning from the world itself.
Zay's eyes snapped open. He didn't move at first—only listened. A low vibration stirred in the distance, then intensified. Pebbles near his boots began to tremble.
Then came the sound—a hollow boom, like a bell tolling from the sky itself. It didn't echo inside the cave. It pressed into it.
Zay stumbled to his feet, his palm braced against the stone wall as the pulse grew stronger. He turned toward the entrance and staggered forward, before existing the cave, his eyes narrowed against the faint flickering light outside.
When he reached the opening, his breath caught.
Far in the distance, high above the peaks that carved the horizon, a massive column of flame shot skyward. It wasn't just fire—it was colored fire, a strange twilight hue of pale lavender and smoldering silver. The sky itself seemed to bend around it, dark clouds being pushed outward like a dome was being forced open.
Then another beam, on the opposite side—this one darker, dusky red with veins of black rippling through it. It roared to life with no warning, carving through the sky from a distant mountain in the west.
Zay took a step back.
"What... the hell is that?" he muttered, heart hammering again. His aura flickered around his skin like a second pulse, reacting to something unseen.
Two more followed—one to the south, glowing with that same eerie twilight hue, and one to the east, a mirror of the dusk-colored flame. The beams didn't burn like normal fire—they twisted, flowed, and bled color into the atmosphere as though repainting the heavens.
And then, like something had been waiting for that precise moment, each of the four beams bent. They didn't aim toward the sky anymore.
They turned inward—toward the center of the world.
The moment they converged at a central point on the horizon, the earth beneath Zay cracked—not violently, but subtly, like a groan from something ancient waking up. The wind outside his cave died. The clouds above began to swirl, slowly, a spiral of blood-red light gathering like a cyclone of shadow and flame.
A strange voice echoed across the land—not through the air, but inside his head. Foreign, low, ritualistic. He didn't understand the words. He didn't need to.
He felt the intention.
Zay gritted his teeth and stepped back into the cave's shadow.
"…It's a summoning."
Above the sky, the four beams fused into one. The colossal pillar of energy surged downward, crashing into the center of the landmass. There was no explosion—only silence. Then the blood moon began to rotate. Slowly. Unnaturally.
—
At the epicenter of the world, where no nation claimed dominion and no road dared lead, a vast black stone plateau jutted out of the earth—its surface scorched, cracked, and etched with ancient runes long buried beneath time.
There, a man stood.
Naked beneath the stars, skin pale as bone, body thin but firm with unnatural tension. No shame in his posture, no hesitation in his breath. His chest bore a single, jagged inscription carved deep into the flesh: False Threads
The letters looked fresh—still bleeding, yet not a drop of blood fell. They pulsed instead, matching the rhythm of the four beams converging above.
He stared upward with hollow, sunken eyes. Unblinking. Unmoving. The wind parted around him. The flames above howled.
Before him, hovering in the air as if suspended by fate itself, was a blade.
The weapon looked forged from dreams and madness—its surface black as a starless void, veins of red energy swimming beneath its metal skin. Its handle, jagged and crude, bore the shape of a screaming mouth.
He reached for it with both hands, as his fingers gripped the cursed metal, the sky answered.
Each flame at the cardinal points—North, South, East, West—flared violently. Their colors inverted. The Twilight Flames now burned with dusk's color; the Dusk Flames shimmered with twilight's eerie glow. The beams shifted hue in tandem, and the very sky twisted under the weight of the arcane exchange.
He raised the blade over his head, his grip on the handle tightened as he opened his mouth, his voice was broken, cracking with age and power, but the words echoed like they had been carved into reality long before he spoke them. The flames responded, writhing above like serpents in agony. The world seemed to lean in, listening.
"Threadless, formless, yet bound by oath,
I name myself the gate, and I unmake my soul.
Let flame dream, let void weep,
Let time unravel in fires too deep.
In my blood, the lie complete—In my flesh, the promise repeats.
May Riluc feed, may the Threads be torn.May the true world, long buried, be reborn."
Then, with no hesitation at all, the man stabbed the blade through his own chest. He did not scream, he did not even flinch and before he knew it, The blade began to drink.
Blood first. Then flesh. Then bone. It fed on him like a starving beast, devouring his body from the inside out. But he never once fell. His body floated, suspended midair, arms limp at his side as the blade rose from him like it had claimed its master.
The ground where he had stood ignited in ghostly blue fire—Dream Flames—a sacred and forbidden kind of flame not seen since before the first empires fell.
The Dream Flames surged upward, catching the now-floating blade of Riluc and absorbing it whole. The flame shot skyward in a fifth and final beam, meeting the same altitude as the others.
For a breathless moment, the beams formed a broken shape.
A four-pointed star.
Then the fifth completed it. It was now a pentagram.
Crimson, orange, yellow, black, and violet light blazed from each of its corners, twisting in a slow, terrible spin. Each beam seared into the sky like it was branding the heavens.
Far from the center, atop their respective peaks, four cloaked figures stood—each one having spoken the incantation that summoned the initial flames.
One in the North, draped in snow.
One in the South, surrounded by cracked glass and scorched soil.
One in the East, where storms never ceased.
One in the West, where winds dared not blow.
In unison, they raised their blades—each forged from a different truth, a different cost.
Val-Ruk of the South, obsidian and jagged.
Ty-El of the North, silver and twisted.
Zero of the West, hollow and humming.
Tu-Val of the East, curved and smoking.
In unison, without wasting a moment they all spoke as one voice, but in completely different areas of the world.
"We are the keys. We are the nails.
In fire, we speak. In silence, we fail.
May Val-Ruk howl. May Ty-El weep.
Let Zero vanish. Let Tu-Val sleep.
Burn our names. Burn our sins.
Begin the end where the world begins."
The four of them chanted this four times in a row before each exhaling and tightened their grip on blades. Then each stabbed themselves in the heart without hesitation.
Their bodies began to dissolve into particles of light and dark—absorbed not by the sky, but into the very flames they had conjured.
The beams brightened—no longer just light, but souls.
And above, the pentagram pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
Then it began to spin, slowly at first, then faster, painting the sky in a blur of impossible color.
At its center, the world cracked.
A loud, shattering sound tore across the land, and the very sky itself split open. A massive fracture, a jagged wound in the heavens.
And from that wound—a hand.
Black as midnight, with fingers long and clawed, each wrapped in chains that shimmered like starlight. It pierced through reality itself, fingers curling as if reaching for the world beneath it.
Zay saw the hand tear through the sky, and his body froze instantly.
"So that's why…" he muttered, voice low. "That's why Midnight: Danger went off."
The hand continued to descend, its massive fingers bound by ethereal chains shattered and vanished as it moved. It curled around the tear in the sky, forcing it open. A second hand followed, its fingers also chained—until those chains, too, broke apart like fragile glass.
That second hand gripped the opposite side of the wound in the sky and ripped it wider.
And then it came.
An entity descended slowly through the tear. Its form was completely engulfed in roiling black and midnight-blue mist. Where its eyes should have been, two deep pools of crimson-blue light stared out, pulsing like dying stars.
Zay's breath hitched. He clenched his blade with trembling hands as the Resonance Lens appeared before his vision.
[WARNING: A Forgotten Deity has descended. Core Rank | Unmeasurable. Do not attempt to fight. Stay hidden.]
Zay's jaw tightened as a chill ran down his spine.
"This… This is a god," he whispered. "Why... is a god here?"
He took a slow step backward, standing at the threshold of the cave.
"There's not a damn chance in hell I can win against this... What kind of bullshit is this Sequence?" he muttered to himself, forcing his aura to fade as he reactivated [Shadow Hide].
'I hope this can hide me from gods as well…' he thought, swallowing hard before slowly backing deeper into the cave.