Chapter 501 - 501: an Awakened Abyss monster

Silva listened to everything that Zion said. He folded his arm and responded.

"It seems the abyss is deeper than I thought it would be," Silva stated.

"There is a whole lot beyond what you know," Zion commented.

"We have to find our way back home. Ragna has done something, and if we do not move fast, they might be in trouble," Silva expressed.

"That would mean that you are giving up on your plans?" Zion asked.

"No plan compares to saving my family."

As he said that, he headed back towards the planet, knowing that he needed to get Drake and the others to head back. He was not going to allow whatever Ragna was doing to destroy his home.

[…]

Aris and the guardians stood scattered across the battlefield, abyss monsters closing in on every side of them, their numbers still climbing as the rifts overhead kept tearing wider by the second.

"Hell," Aris said, watching another crack split open above them, the light behind it a deep and wrong purple. "This is turning into something else."

The rifts kept growing. Nothing about that was changing, no matter how many of the things pouring out of them the guardians cut down. For every one that fell, two more seemed to claw their way through.

She glanced at the guardians around her, that same cheeky smile finding its way onto her face despite everything falling apart in front of them.

"Well," she said, "you guys should just give it your all."

The guardians surged forward as one, throwing themselves into the mass of abyss monsters with everything they had. Aris moved with them, barely touching the ground as she went, red chaos energy coiling and snapping around her like it had a will of its own.

She tore through the abyss monsters as she moved, each one destroyed completely the instant she reached it. She didn't slow down for any of them. A pair leapt at her from above, claws first, and she twisted under the first one, put her hand straight through the chest of the second, and kept moving before either had even finished falling to the ground. Blood splattered across the churned earth behind her with every kill. More abyss monsters kept coming, more chaos followed her wherever she went, and the numbers barely seemed to drop no matter how many she took out.

Then the crack came, cutting through everything else at once.

It was loud enough that an ordinary person's eardrums would have burst on the spot. It rolled out across the battlefield, across the region, across what felt like the entire planet, because by now the rift above them had grown so large that it could be seen from other worlds entirely, a wound torn straight through the sky itself.

The rift was a long jagged tear, its edges shimmering a deep purple shot through with other colors that had no business being there. Inside it was nothing but a dark, endlessly churning swirl of darkness, and beyond that swirl was the abyss itself, waiting.

A hand came out of it.

It wasn't massive compared to the size of the rift, but it was still enormous for a hand, completely black, its fingernails a glowing, sickly purple that matched the veins of light crawling across its skin. It gripped the torn edges of the rift and pulled, ripping the tear wider as it dragged itself free inch by inch.

A second hand followed the first, gripping the other side.

With every inch it tore open, more abyss monsters spilled out behind it, first twice the usual number, and then four times that, an endless stream pouring down out of the dark and into the world below. The thing kept extruding itself through the widening gap, its arms alone looking almost humanoid, and yet nothing like anything human at all.

Then its head broke through.

It was massive, easily large enough to blot out a stretch of sky on its own, and it carried more than six eyes, all of them opening at once and turning slowly toward the world beneath it, taking in everything below with a kind of patience that felt worse than hunger would have.

Aris felt something cold settle into her chest. Whatever this thing was, it was beyond anything they had faced before. Beyond anything they could control, and she knew it the moment she looked at it, knew it the way you know a fall is going to hurt before you've even landed.

Across the planet, people stopped wherever they stood and looked up. Every race, every kind of being, all of them stunned into stillness by what was tearing itself free of the sky above them.

The being finished emerging fully, a hulking, four-armed shape wrapped in armor unlike anything Aris had seen before, dragon-like wings unfurling from its back, wide enough to cast shadow over the horizon in both directions. It hung there for a moment, massive and impossible against the darkening sky, before it finally brought one leg down out of the rift and planted it on the ground below.

The leg alone was the size of a small town.

The impact sent a wave of purplish energy rolling outward in every direction at once, tearing through forests, flattening everything in its path as it went, trees and stone and earth alike disappearing under it. Aris threw up a dome of red energy around herself and the guardians just in time, the wave slamming into it and rolling around them on every side.

The dome held for a moment. Barely. The red light of it strained and cracked along its surface before it finally shattered outright.

Aris dropped to one knee, coughing blood onto the broken ground beneath her. She looked up along with everyone else around her, fear finally catching up to all of them at once as the full size of the thing standing over the world finally sank in.

The only thing she could get out was barely more than a whisper.

"Where are you, Silva?"