The abyss didn't simply tremble. It split. What had been an endless, silent ocean of dark currents burst into violent motion, its waters roaring without sound and folding into themselves as though gravity had reversed and then collapsed inward all at once. Pressure built from every direction, crushing, twisting, tearing at perception itself, while the darkness thickened until it was absolute, with no light, no depth and no sense of up or down. And then everything vanished.
Youri's eyes snapped open. He was standing — not floating, not suspended, but standing — on a vast, endless desert of dark, heavy sand that shifted beneath a crimson sky pulsing faintly like a living thing. The air was dry and sharp. It carried a heat that felt wrong, as though it came not from a sun but from the world itself.
He turned slowly. "Lea?" No answer. "Altopereh?" Nothing — no presence, no distortion, no sign of the abyss. Only the desert. But something was wrong. He narrowed his eyes and took a step forward. The ground felt real, but not right; the wind moved, but it carried no scent; and the sky loomed closer than it should have, more like a ceiling than an open expanse. "This isn't Tartarus," he muttered. Or rather, not the Tartarus he had come to know.
A sudden shockwave tore through the air as something passed over him at impossible speed. His head snapped up, and he saw it: a colossal figure streaking across the sky, its form blazing like a living weapon. It was a towering humanoid monster forged from jagged crimson crystal and hardened scales, its massive frame cutting through the air like a falling meteor, its body layered in sharp, overlapping plates that jutted out like blades. Its chest was partly exposed, showing dark, stone-like flesh etched with faint runes that glowed and pulsed like a heartbeat; long, upward-curving horns crowned its head, regal and utterly monstrous; its maw stretched wide with rows of serrated teeth; and raw, unstable energy radiated from its limbs. Nuclear — that was the only word for it. Heat warped the air around it, and every movement it made sent ripples through the sky.
But it wasn't alone. To Youri's left, another presence appeared, and this one did not roar. It descended — tall, symmetrical and silent. Its form was sleek and elongated, wrapped in a dark, metallic-black exoskeleton that reflected nothing, smooth in some places and ridged in others, as if it had been engineered rather than born. Its head had no face — no eyes, no mouth — only a smooth, angular shape crowned with two long, curved horns, and behind it hovered a massive ring, a burning halo of molten orange-red energy around which gravity itself bent, so that the sand beneath Youri's feet shifted unnaturally and lifted in small fragments that hung in midair, as if the world had forgotten how to fall.
Youri didn't move. He couldn't. Because the moment the two entities faced each other, the world changed. From the crimson titan surged a domain harsher even than Tartarus — a hyper-arid wasteland where the air ignited and the ground split with internal heat, nuclear fire bleeding from beneath its surface. From the black, godlike being, reality fractured. Its domain was one of absurdity, where stone, fragments and debris floated in defiance of logic and whole sections of space twisted, folding inward and outward while gravity pulled in several directions at once.
Then they collided, and the impact didn't echo — it rewrote the space around them. The titan struck first, its arm igniting with blinding force as it unleashed a burst of nuclear energy that detonated across the warped domain, not contained but spreading outward in layers, each wave hotter and more destructive than the last. The black entity raised a single hand, and the explosion stopped. It was compressed and crushed into a single point of impossible density, then hurled back as a gravitational collapse that the titan tore through with a roar.
And then a third presence entered. The sky darkened — not dimmed, but erased — as a void poured into existence. Altopereh. Not the restrained form Youri had just seen, but its true, monstrous shape: a being of pure anti-matter presence whose form devoured light and whose very existence warped everything around it into a silent, consuming abyss. Its domain flooded the battlefield at once — a pitch-black world with no ground, no sky and no logic, only annihilation. The three domains collided violently, heat, gravity and void tearing at one another in a storm of absolute chaos, until the battlefield became something no mind could hold — a clash not of creatures, but of fundamental forces. And still it escalated.
Then the sky cracked. A sharp, jagged fracture split across the crimson heavens like shattered glass, and something came through it. The tear widened, and a colossal ship forced its way into Tartarus — long and blade-like, with a prow sharp enough to suggest it could pierce reality, its hull layered in jagged green-black plates that overlapped like shards of obsidian armor and, toward its rear, broke into aggressive fins and spiked protrusions that trailed into a tail-like engine burning with a dim, infernal glow. It did not belong there. The battlefield stilled. Even the monsters stopped, and turned.
From the ship they descended — the Sacros. Dozens of knights, then hundreds, poured from the vessel, each wrapped in a domain of its own, their presence bending the world as they fell, and they moved without hesitation. The titan roared and unleashed a catastrophic burst of nuclear fire that swallowed whole sections of the battlefield, but the knights advanced through it, their golden constructs forming barriers that split the explosion apart like water against stone. The black entity struck back, its halo flaring as gravity collapsed inward and crushed entire formations, but the knights adapted at once, anchoring themselves with radiant sigils that held space itself steady. And Altopereh surged forward, and for a moment it dominated, its anti-matter presence erasing everything it touched — knights, light, even fragments of reality itself.
But the Sacros adapted. Golden constructs formed — chains, spears, vast geometric seals of burning light — and they did not fight to destroy. They fought to contain. One by one the monsters were overwhelmed, not by force alone, but by precision. The crimson titan was struck by converging beams of radiant energy until its own nuclear output was forced inward and it collapsed into itself, trapped inside a blazing cage of golden light. The gravity entity resisted longer, warping and bending entire sections of the battlefield, but in the end it too was pinned, its halo locked in place by interlocking rings of radiant force. Altopereh roared, and even it was forced back, as golden constructs closed around it and formed a prison that pulsed against its anti-matter form and held it in place.
Then there was silence. The battlefield froze. The domains steadied, and the ship descended slowly and deliberately onto the desert, its mere presence making the sand shift and part beneath it. The knights formed a perimeter. From the ship three figures emerged, hooded and silent, and walked forward.
Youri stood frozen as they approached. Something in him screamed at him to move, but he didn't, because something deeper told him that none of this was real — and the figures passed straight through him like mist, like memory. A vision.
The central figure raised a hand, and a vast golden circle formed before him, burning, rotating, filled with symbols Youri couldn't comprehend. The ground trembled, and the desert split open. Sand poured inward, revealing something beneath it: a city — ancient and colossal — rising slowly from under the desert as though it had been buried not for years, but for eternity. At its center stood a towering spire, impossibly vast, reaching into the crimson sky like a needle meant to pierce the heavens, its pale surface carved in endless layers of arches, chambers and hollowed structures, whole civilizations etched into its body. Around it spread a dense city of stone — massive buildings, stacked balconies, towering façades — all worn by time beyond measure.
And then light ignited as the Sacros forces descended on the city and their golden constructs spread across its surface. And from within its depths, shapes emerged — familiar, massive, unmistakable. Orbitons. Not one, not two, but many.
This was where they had been born. Where Montern was forged. Where Braken took shape. Where Altopereh itself was made — not as weapons of the Empire, but as something far older, and far more dangerous.
Youri stood frozen as the vision unfolded around him. Because what he was witnessing was not just the past. It was the truth.