At the dawn of the Era of Gods, when the deities emerged to claim their thrones as the pillars holding up all of creation, they sought to consolidate the authorities outside the twenty two authorities they each possessed. Unable to accommodate the remaining fifty six. Out of this, they took twelve of the most volatile and most destructive abstract forces and forcibly compressed, forged, and sealed them into a single, terrifying locus:
The Oblivion Cube.
Its real function remained unknown to all except the divine and for an era it remained whole. That was until the Divine Beast—the Ancient Kitsune, the Maker of Discord—struck the artifact, shattering its crystalline lattice back into twelve distinct fragments. Each fragment was not merely a a power stone or a reservoir of energy; it held an authority equal to an Abstract—a fundamental, unyielding truth of creation.
She hid them across existence, laughing as she watched the deities scramble to reclaim what they had lost.
Fast forward a few thousand years and now one of these fragments was in the hands of a sociopath, the worst kind of person to hold ultimate power.
The piece Cynn Nastrod held in his hands was the Fragment of Dissonance.
Dissonance was the abstract truth of the non existence of cohesion , harmony, or consistency between things, such as contradictory laws, conflicting ideas, or mismatched actions.
It was not disorder.
It was the fundamental truth that things could be unmade.
That harmony could be shattered.
That everything could be broken from within.
And it was tearing Nastrod apart.
Immediately after his grand declaration about saving millions, the fragments power roared through him as if the floodgates of a dam were opened within him.
"GAAAHHH!"
Nastrod's manic laughter turned into an agonizing, blood-curdling shriek as a wave of the fragments awesome presence tore through the entire area and caused the world to shake.
The Abstract of Dissonance flared outward, violently rejecting Nastrod's physical vessel. The air around him distorted, twisting into sickening, unnatural angles. The stone beneath his boots dissolved not into dust, but into conflicting, impossible states of matter—simultaneously melting and freezing, solidifying and vaporizing.
Nastrod's body was literally being torn apart from the inside out. Dissonance was forcing his Flow channels to fight his own nervous system, his blood to reject his veins, his soul to pull away from his flesh, his mind to contradict his own belief.
"It... it refuses to conform to my vision!" Nastrod gasped, his eyes bulging as veins of energy cracked from his body and snaked their way across his form. As a Votary, Nastrod could actively manipulate the Concept Layer, the first and most superficial layer of existence, manifested truths, the 'skin' of the world.
His baseline soul was fundamentally too weak to anchor an Abstract. To wield a Fragment without being absolutely destroyed, one needed to exist on the same hierarchical tier:
A Primordial being, the very apex of Ascension.
"No... no, no, no!" He strained still trying and failing to impose a Concept on an Abstract. But his attempt
triggered a violent backlash.
BOOM!
The Fragment's presence flared out in a massive, conceptual shockwave. The spatial fabric of the ossuary ruptured. The sheer pressure of the Abstract slammed into everyone in the chamber.
What Nastrod was attempting was like trying to hold an exploding star in a glass cup.
Emma and Pihla burst through the rubble.
"He has some sort of weapon." Ema said straining in the Presence of the fragment.
"We need to separate it from him and take him out!"
Pihla didn't answer. She simply moved.
Her naginata swept toward Nastrod's throat, but a Thanatologist intercepted—his cleaver catching the blade with a shower of sparks. Emma lunged for the Fragment, but another Thanatologist blocked him, his black robes billowing as he swung.
"Tch. The church is in on this too." Pihla said but easily swatted them aside with her power. They were fakes after all and not on the same level as true Saints. That didn't stop them from running interception.
Ignoring the collapsing ossuary, Thanatologists fought with renewed ferocity, their movements precise, coordinated. They had one goal: to retrieve the Fragment and return it to the Church.
A chaotic, brutal free-for-all detonated between the three parties: The Enforcers, The Thanatologists and The Revolutionary, each group fighting the others while trying to take the Fragment. They weren't able to overpower and just take the fragment because of the Presence of the Fragment.
Nastrod himself for some reason was managing to evade the attacks coming his way, albeit barely.
"How is he still able to dogde?" Pihla wondered.
"Its the arcane eye, he's using it to send the damage somewhere." Emma responded through telepathic link.
"He must be a madman. Even in this state he can still make such calculations? Where is he trying to funnel all that energy?"
"Your guess is as good as mine. But given the intensity of this Presence and the slowing of his movements. His body will give out before long, keep pushing!"
She used her power to catch two house sized debris that were falling on them. A clench of her fist and they broke don to sharp shards she shaped with her mind and sent them towards the Thanatologists. Three out of the five Thanatologists were killed by the shower, their flow-negating robes tearing like parchment. The remaining two who barely managed to escape were severely wounded.
Emma's Grosse Messer sliced through a Thanatologist's shoulder, while Pihla's Naginata spun in a deadly arc, deflecting two broad cleavers before thrusting toward Nastrod's heart. Instead t struck one of the veins of energy on his body and was flung some meters backward.
Nastrod staggered, his body wracked with spasms.
"I... I can control it!" he gasped, his hands clamping around the Craving."
'Why am I not dead yet?' Nastrod thought frantically, his mind racing through the agonizing static.
'A mortal vessel should have collapsed in milliseconds... Why am I still holding shape despite this strain?'
He dodge an attack from the wounded church agents and managed to send two tendrils to impale them and then fling their bodies at the attacking enforcers. Pihla flung them away and controlled the objects around, bone and stone and forced them to converge on the revolutionary while Emma slowed down time around him to prolong his agony. Their goal had switched from a direct confrontation to a strategy of exhaustion
They would wear him out till he collapsed under the weight of the power he was trying to contain.
"Shouldn't we bring him in alive?" Pihla asked as she added more weight to the ball, influencing notions to make it an agonizing burden.
"Our orders were to crush the revolution. The men we've captured will help us with investigations into the Black Dandy and serve as scapegoats to appease our citizens. Besides..."
He slowed down time even more and added, his face solemn,
"Cynn Nastrod is already dead."
Meanwhile, under the weight of the Saints compound attack, Nastrod finally realized why he wasn't instantly killed as he should have been, and his blood ran cold.
'Craving...'
The living artifact wasn't protecting him—it was actively draining his life-force to stabilize the Fragment, while simultaneously attempting to rupture his heart!
'Igor...'
The Corpse Chaplain had rigged the living weapon from the very beginning. The man catcher was alive and surgically wired in such a way that it would act as a parasitical cradle—it would let Nastrod locate and claim the Fragment, kill Nastrod in the process to stabilize the cosmic power, and then automatically return to Igor with the prize in it's jaws.
He was never meant to survive this.
He was merely a courier.
As his consciousness flickered on the edge of oblivion, suppressed memories rushed back into his mind like a torrential flood—
He remembered dark, sterile halls. Men shrouded in silver robes and metallic masks standing over his dissected, lifeless corpse. He remembered the cold, rhythmic hum of ancient machinery rebuilding his shattered flesh after the Aerthos-Kemet War.
"Lord Xylos has granted you a second breath, Cynn Nastrod," a cold, echoing voice had told him in the dark.
"Go forth. Ignite your kingdom. Save millions. For their collective agony and salvation shall pave the way for the descent of the true Messiah."
Nastrod's hands trembled as he dropped to his knees. He was at his limit and the weight was about to crush him. His muscles shrank, clinging tightly to his bones. Gray, crystalline shards of Flowstone began to erupt from his shoulders, chest, and arms—his body was becoming Hollow, turning into a petrified, drained husk.
"Xylos rebuilt me! I am not Igor's puppet! I am the savior of this rotting world!" His soul screamed in defiance.
"I WILL NOT DIE HERE!"
He had made up his mind. He was going to gamble his life with one final move. First he focused his Arcane eye on the life that was withing Craving. After a few seconds he found it—a pulsing, malevolent intelligence that was trying to kill him. Using Abatement he threw the strain his body was going through at it. Because the strain on him was great, little pressure and the core died.
Next, he made a Pact. —a sacred, inescapable Vow written with Flow onto his very soul.
Nastrod gritted his teeth, his crazed, bloodshot eyes locking onto the void.
"In exchange for sacrificing my Arcane Eye of Abatement... and in exchange for my guaranteed death at the end of this noble mandate... I pledge my life and soul to wield the Fragment of Dissonance for three days! Let its full power be mine, so that I may save millions!"
The soul-binding vow took hold. The cosmic scales tipped.
The Fragment flared and a shockwave knocked the two saints back once more.
Silver light erupted from his Arcane Eye, the Celtic Five-Fold Knot burning brighter than the sun. His life force poured into the Fragment, feeding it, empowering it, binding it to his will. The Fragment of Dissonance in turn clicked into alignment with his spirit.
THUMP-THUMP.
Emma and Pihla burst back through the rubble, wiping blood from their faces, only to freeze dead in their tracks.
The scene before them was straight out of a nightmare. Thick, black-and-crimson veins had erupted from Craving's haft, burrowing directly into Nastrod's emaciated chest. Fresh, mutated flesh rapidly grew around the stone dagger, held in place by the artifact's iron teeth, fusing together into a beating dark purple heart embedded with several eyes.
Nastrod let out a long, shuddering breath of utter exhaustion, his hollow, gray face lifting toward the collapsing ceiling.
"The city above must have felt my struggle," he said, his voice hoarse.
"And now... now, like a butterfly out of it's cocoon, they shall bear witness."
Emma's eyes narrowed into razor slits. "Not while I'm breathing!"
Pushing his temporal Resonant to its absolute absolute limit, Emma vanished, stepping through stolen time to appear directly in front of Nastrod. His Grosse Messer flashed in a thrust aimed straight for the beating heart on Nastrod's chest.
SCHLICK!
Before the blade could make contact, a thick, muscular vein shot out from the exposed heart like a strike-viper, impaling Emma clean through his left shoulder.
"Gah!" Emma gasped, blood spraying from his mouth.
Nastrod didn't even look at him. He simply flared the conceptual presence of the newly bound Fragment. A wave of Dissonance slammed into Emma, blasting the Saint backward like a cannonball, sending him crashing through seven consecutive stone walls, out of the exclusion and deep into the dark ruins.
"Emma!" Pihla roared.
Abandoning all restraint, Pihla elevated her Flow to its absolute peak. Her Naginata turned into a solid beam of blinding, crystalized light as she dropped from above, bringing the weapon down with every ounce of her Saintly force.
BOOM!!!
The resulting kinetic and transcendental shockwave was catastrophic. The sheer force traveled kilometers straight upward through stone and bedrock, blasting a massive, gaping hole—a dozen meters across—clean through the ceiling all the way to the surface aboveground.
The ancient ossuary began its final, total collapse. Thousands of tons of stone and bone rained down like an avalanche.
Pihla didn't wait to see if her strike had connected. Sensing a black tendril creeping toward her ankle from the dust cloud, she flexed her telekinetic Resonant, leaping backward and disappearing up into the rising dust cloud.
Nastrod watched her go, a faint smile on his lips.
"Smart girl." He murmured, coughing up a small fleck of black blood.
"Running away is the only sensible choice."
Pop!
His dark, single eye flicked sideways, catching a faint spatial ripple near the base of the ruined Sephirot mural. He saw Raileigh, bruised, battered, and bleeding, desperately gathering an unconscious, pale Jamie into his arms before vanishing in a pop of spatial displacement.
Nastrod's smile widened.
"Go, little prince... We shall meet again when the stage is set."
His raspy, manic laughter echoed one last time through the falling ruins before his form was completely swallowed by the cascading rubble and rising dust.
*
Jamie woke to pain.
Her chest ached, her leg screamed, her head throbbed.
She felt something warm pressed against her body. Looking down through blurry, unfocused vision, she realized she was lying on a broad, surfboard-like construct forged from a shimmering, pressurized bubble. Holding her tightly against his chest, steering the floating construct was Raileigh.
He was in terrible shape.
His pristine silk coat was shredded, his face was covered in cuts and dark bruises, and his left arm hung at an awkward, painful angle. Blood dripped steadily from his chin, staining his collar. Yet, his golden eyes were fixed fiercely upward, his jaw set in absolute determination.
"R-Rai...?" Jamie choked out, her voice barely a rasp. She tried to push herself up, but a sharp, excruciating pain shot through her chest and left calf, making her gasp.
Raileigh immediately looked down at her, his expression softening, though his eyes were filled with fierce, protective worry.
"Hey... don't move. Don't force yourself, Jamie. It's okay. I've got you."
"The Fragment..." Jamie whispered.
Raileigh's jaw tightened.
"Nastrod has it."
Jamie closed her eyes.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I couldn't... I couldn't reach it."
"It's not your fault."
"I should have been faster."
"Jamie."
She opened her eyes. Raileigh was looking at her, his expression serious.
"We survived. That's what matters."
She stared at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, she nodded.
He shifted his weight, expertly steering the bubble-surfboard upward through the massive, gaping crater Pihla's strike had blasted through the subterranean bedrock. They rocketed upward, rising through about a dozen kilometers of shattered stone and rising dust.
Jamie could see the light above—pale, grey, the light of the city.
"Almost there," Raileigh said.
The moment they entered his two hundred meter range , Raileigh focused his remaining Anti-Flow.
Pop!
A sharp spatial displacement rippled through the air as they both vanished just as they broke the surface, leaving the collapsing subterranean church behind in the dark.