Chapter 81: The Edge of the Abyss

High above the submerged ruins, Sen was plunged deep into the abyssal ocean. The cold water pressed hard against his senses, but far beneath him, a strange, ethereal light flickered in the dark depths—a glowing beacon calling out from the abyss.

He kicked, descending further into the light-dappled sea. Then, without warning, something slammed around his ankle.

Thick, crimson silk tendrils wrapped tightly around his legs, their blood-red fibers glowing with a sickening heat under the water. The vines snapped taut and yanked him down with terrifying speed, dragging him further into the watery abyss.

Meanwhile, on the outer ledge of the expanding dome, the element-caster from Lucas’s squad scrambled for footing. Lucas had given his life so he could escape, using the Saintess blade and hurling him clear of the second island’s destruction. But the element-caster knew he was far from safe. If he didn’t find a way out of this corrupted realm immediately, he was as good as dead.

After using a water blast to redirect his plummet toward the dome’s structural edge, he intended to slide down along the wall.

Then, a flurry of light-fire wings sliced through the mist above him.

A dozen light-winged humanoids descended like vultures, their single eyes locked onto his location. Their maws split open, gathering white-hot solar energy.

"Get away from me!" the element-caster screamed.

He thrust both hands outward, summoning a swirling torrent of high-pressure ocean water. The water burst forward in heavy, pressurized arcs, slamming into the first three beasts and blasting their charred forms against the dome’s translucent shell. But as more swarmed down, the water proved too slow to keep up with their agile, aerial strikes.

He gritted his teeth, making a split-second decision. As an elemental caster, all natural forces were technically his to command—fire, water, earth, and air. But shifting affinity wasn’t without cost.

He severed the flow of water and snapped his hands into a cross formation, forcing his Astral energy to alter its frequency.

WHOOSH!

Gales of razor-sharp wind erupted around his body. Using wind demanded exponentially more energy than water, burning through his remaining reserves at an alarming rate, but he had no choice left. He needed speed and lethal cutting power.

He leaped off the structural lip into a glide, channeling the wind currents to propel himself downward along the inner curved wall of the dome. As three winged abominations lunged at his back, he flicked his wrist, sending spinning blades of compressed wind flying behind him.

SLICE! SHRED!

The wind blades tore cleanly through light-fire wings and molten flesh, exploding the beasts into bursts of fading light. A sharp, rhythmic chime echoed in his mind as the system logged the kills, but the caster didn’t even pause to look at the interface.

He didn’t know where he was going. He only knew he had to keep moving down, diving deeper into the lower floor of the dome array toward whatever sanctuary might exist at the bottom.

BOOM!

A massive beam of pure light-fire shot past his shoulder, scorching the skin on his arm and melting the metallic dome lining beside him. The alpha light-winged beasts were locking on, raining heavy artillery down his flight path.

The caster gritted his teeth, riding the wind currents like a gale surfer. He tilted his body into a sharp dive, dodging and weaving through the crisscrossing pillars of light, the searing heat singing his uniform as he hurtled toward the edge of the abyssal floor.

The moment his boots scraped against the solid stone foundation of the dome’s lowest tier, the element-caster didn’t pause for a single breath. His lungs burned, his limbs trembled from pure exhaustion, and his Astral reserves were hovering at a critical low, but survival instinct drowned out the agony. Gathering every remaining scrap of wind energy left in his soul, he thrust his palms downward against the structural floor.

BOOM!

A hyper-compressed blast of gale-force wind detonated beneath him, shattering the weakened lower barrier shell of the dome.

High above the remnants of the battleground, the chained Titan suddenly stiffened.

For the entire duration of the Breach’s descent into madness, the Indigo-Class calamity had remained eerily still—hovering before the stepped landmasses, its burning glare fixed on the central temple as if trying to piece together a long-shattered memory. But as the caster breached the lower boundary, the Titan’s gigantic head snapped downward. Its twin, miniature-sun eyes flared with a sudden, violent intelligence.

It sensed an anomaly—a sliver of raw Astral energy slipping outside its locked orbit, breaking the boundary of its absolute domain. And the Titan did not like it.

Locking its cosmic gaze directly onto the fleeing caster’s signature, the leviathan opened its terrifying jaws. For a creature of such titanic, unfathomable proportions, the speed of its movement was sickeningly fast, defying all natural laws of physics.

VRRRRRRRRRRR—!

The core within its chest roared like a dying star. At the back of its throat, a sphere of pure, condensed light-fire began to materialize, pulling the surrounding thermal energy into a single, blinding singularity.

Below, the surviving contractors who were still desperately fighting off swarms of aberrant beasts suddenly collapsed. The psychic weight of the sun-core hit their minds like a physical strike. Dozens of Awakened lost control of their tethers instantly as the insidious voices inside their skulls turned into a deafening, unified scream.

Worse still, several contractors instinctively made the mistake of looking up.

The moment their eyes met the Titan’s open maw, the light was so immensely bright, so sickeningly blinding, it was like staring directly into the heart of a solar flare. Flesh cooked instantly. Those who looked up didn’t even get the chance to transform—they simply erupted into pillars of ash and white-hot fire, consumed entirely by the sheer thermal radiation before the attack had even been fired.

Unlike the smaller, localized light-fire beams generated by its mini-creations, the Titan condensed its entire solar payload into a colossal, absolute sphere of destruction.

With a sound that shattered the underwater atmospheric fabric, the Titan unleashed the cannon-like blast. The towering sphere of sun-fire plunged straight down through the center of the dome, incinerating everything in its path as it tracked toward the bottom boundary.

Far below the direct line of fire, the element-caster had already forced his way through the ruptured floor.

The moment his wind blast tore through the lower dome’s shell, a staggering rush of frigid sea water and the suffocating pressure of the abyssal ocean slammed into his body. He gasped, his vision swimming with dark spots as the immense atmospheric weight threatened to crush his chest cavity.

But as he tumbled through the tear, expecting to be instantly flattened by the ocean depths, the world shattered around him once more.

He didn’t drown. Instead, he passed through a strange, secondary dome-like structure—an intricate, forgotten layer of spatial architecture underlying the entire Breach array. The transition was violent, wrenching his senses inside out as the water pressure vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

Suddenly, he was falling.

Not through the pitch-black ocean, and not inside the claustrophobic confines of the temple barrier. The caster tumbled through open, crystal-clear sky, thousands of meters above an entirely different landscape. The wind rushed past his ears as he plummeted through the clouds, squinting against a blinding, golden glare.

He looked up into the vast expanse above.

Hanging in the sky were five distinct suns—shining with brilliant, ancient radiance, though one of them flickered with a dim, dying light.

He had broken through the barrier and started falling headfirst back into the expanse of the Golden Sun Realm.

The Titan’s colossal light-fire cannonball plummeted through the upper atmosphere of the dome array. Even with its sickening, unnatural speed, the dome’s vast height meant the terrifying sphere of solar destruction took time to tear through the sky, incinerating the air and lighting up the dark ocean floor in a blinding white glare.

High above, the chained leviathan paused, its twin miniature-sun eyes turning toward a new anomaly. Its cold, primordial gaze locked onto a sudden surge of spatial energy near the upper boundary of the dome shell.

Responding to their master’s silent command, the swarms of aberrant beasts shifted direction. Abandoning the surviving contractors on the ground, hundreds of light-winged abominations—led by the remaining silk-winged leaders—soared upward like a flock of burning vultures, their eyes fixed on the incoming threat.

Right at the upper barrier, Sen finally arrived.

With a single, brutal flick of the Starless Edge, the spatial blade severed the crimson silk vines that had locked onto his ankles. The severed tendrils dissolved into sparks of blood-fire, releasing him from their grip.

Before he could even catch his breath, a light-winged aberration tore through the mist, its single glowing eye crinkling into a sickening grin as it lunged for his throat with razor-sharp talons.

The Starless Edge hummed with cold, terrifying authority as Sen delivered a clean slash. Sending multiple pieces to slice his body all around.

The creature didn’t even have time to scream; its body split into multiple halves before disintegrating into black dust.

Sen lowered the hilt, his jaw set tight. But there was no time to celebrate the instant kill.

From the ruptured edge of the upper dome, the true swarm burst into view. Hundreds of light-winged humanoids and silk-winged monstrosities poured out from the sky like an avalanche of molten stone and blinding solar fire. Their maws split open in unison, gathering white-hot beams of light-fire as they descended upon Sen from every angle, completely blotting out the sky.

Sen gripped the hilt tighter, his eyes turning cold as he prepared to cut his way through the horde.