Chapter 367: Authority (2)

Since ancient times, people believed that beautiful gems held a mysterious power. In this fantasy world, that belief proved true. The purer and finer the stone, the stronger the Myst within it.

“In my world, nothing like that existed,” Ketal said.

A flawless jewel on Earth was only a pretty stone to anyone who did not agree on its worth. If no one assigned it value, a gem amounted to nothing at all.

It was not only gems. When the Mortal Realm was formed, ancient lakes took root alongside the land and, over time, began to hold their own depth of wonder. The Fairy’s Lake was the most famous of such places.

“In my world, a lake like that is simply old water. If it dries up and rots, the world does not change even a breath.”

Even a great tree like the World Tree would be nothing more than a big tree. People might marvel and call it rare, yet inside it no special force slept. On Earth, nature existed as simple phenomenon. No spirits nested there. Tornadoes, tsunamis, and wildfires yielded to physical explanation. Magic amounted to tricks of the hand and the eye.

Endless training only wore a body out, and meditation meant nothing more than observing one’s own mind.

Demon King, Heroes, spirits, Aura, sorcery—every one of them was a fiction. Miracles did not happen, and Myst did not exist. Things rotted, turned to dust, broke to atoms, and became part of the world again.

Everything had lost meaning, stripped of purpose and substance until only emptiness remained. That was the nature of Ketal’s authority—pure and absolute in its simplicity. He imposed the laws of the world he had once lived in upon this one, forcing them to take hold where they did not belong.

“You called my authority the Authority of Erasure,” he said. “You were not wrong.”

In his world, what this place calls magic, Myst, miracles, and wonder could not exist and would not be permitted. They had to vanish. The Twisted mistook that for the authority to erase.

“So this is...,” the Twisted said, and its voice rasped like a blade. “This is the world you came from?”

It did not feel cold. Cold was still a quality that belonged to something. This felt like the absence of qualities. Everything approached a state without meaning, even the Twisted itself, which had stood since the universe’s first dawn.

“I have never seen such a thing,” it murmured.

It had seen Ketal’s authority more than once. It was why it had failed to kill him even though, by rank, it stood above him. Ketal answered by removing things. He refused to lose and yet never broke through to win.

Back then, Ketal’s use of that power had stayed confined to small circles. He had never bent the world itself like this.

“You stepped Outside and reached a higher plane,” the Twisted One said.

“No.” Ketal shook his head. “My authority has not changed. Not at all.”

“What...?” the Twisted replied.

Ketal had carried within him a force that reduced even the Twisted to insignificance. Yet he had never chosen to wield it. The reason was simple—such power existed to end everything, not to preserve. To use it would have meant erasing not only the enemy but the world itself, leaving nothing behind to remember that either had ever been.

“Because I did not want to,” Ketal said, and his tone darkened.

His authority laid the order of his home over this place. Each time he pulled on it, he felt as if the power whispered to him that this fantasy world amounted to a daydream, that nothing here held meaning, that one day he would wake and watch it crumble without weight.

It dragged him back through the reality he had abandoned and forced him to taste a hell he had sworn to forget. He had never used that authority in the White Snowfield, not properly, not even once, even when death put its hands on his shoulders.

“This time is different,” he said. “This place is the miracle I begged for.”

The Twisted meant to break that miracle. He had decided, then. He would protect a miracle with the power that erased miracles.

“Besides, I do not control it easily. I am fortunate that the worst did not happen. Mishandled, I could have thrown the whole world under it,” Ketal explained.

The Twisted One felt that its strength, its authority, its very shape as a being began to unravel. Meaning fell away like flakes of old paint. Even the idea that it existed here peeled back as if the world had finally said, You do not belong.

This is dangerous,

the Twisted thought. Panic seized it as it tried to flee outside the reach of Ketal’s authority. However, it discovered that it could not move at all.

Its body of spines remained fixed as if a nail driven through the universe had pinned it there. Not even a tremor answered its will.

“You can act only through the strength of this world,” Ketal said. “In my world, a mass of spines like you has no ability to move by its own will.”

Therefore, the Twisted moved nowhere. It kept its silence because the silence was all that remained to it.

“But not everything is blocked,” Ketal said. “I cannot claim to use this perfectly.”

The Twisted flung a bundle of spines with desperate speed. The force inside them had rotted down to almost nothing, but iron still carried weight even when stripped of magic. Ketal lifted his axe.

The impact hurled him across the stone, slamming him into the ground with crushing force. The shock rippled through his body like a breaking wave; bones groaned under the strain, and flesh split open before closing again in trembling spasms. A breath escaped him—half exhale, half stifled groan—before silence settled over the wreck of his fall.

“So, it seems this isn’t an all-powerful answer after all,” he murmured, recognizing that his authority, for all its might, carried its own limits and flaws.

When Ketal replaced the world with his own order, his own great strength went with everything else. In that state, he was nothing more than a human being honed to a fine edge. The Twisted, by contrast, still managed to swing a piece of its authority in cramped, fraying motions.

“Ordinarily, you would have vanished at once. Because I expanded the radius to its limit, you can hold on a little longer.” Ketal tightened his grip on the axe. “Right now, you have a chance. Kill me before you fade, and you win.”

The Twisted screamed and fired volleys. Spines came in sheets. Ketal lowered his stance and moved the axe.

Steel rang like teeth biting a shield. He knocked shots aside, wove around others, and threw his body where the path opened. The Twisted was a supreme creature; it learned in an instant that it could still wield raw force and shifted to attacking with spines alone. The authority inside them had been erased, but a balista-length barb flying point-first still maimed.

Ketal kept his feet light and turned where the air told him to turn, yet cuts began to appear. He bled, and he yielded ground, and the Twisted pressed without pause. To any watching eye, one side attacked relentlessly, and the other broke by degrees.

Yet the one who ran out of time was the Twisted. In the end, it was the one that had swallowed poison. A doomed animal could thrash, but the nature of the end did not change.

Spines fell like a storm through a cedar forest. An ordinary fighter could not avoid them all. One tore a long gash in Ketal’s thigh and stole strength from the leg. Another shattered a finger as he caught a bad angle on the haft. Shards and splinters peppered his skin. A deflection sent him stumbling into a wall hard enough to cut his scalp.

Yet, he did not fall. He stood up through the pain and kept answering. The Twisted scattered the last of what it could gather and tried to force a resolution, but Ketal did not die.

At last, the volleys ceased. The Twisted could no longer launch a single spine. In Ketal’s order, something made of spines did not qualify as life. It could not think. The consciousness behind it thinned and began to wisp away like breath on cold air.

“You endured longer than I expected,” Ketal said. “You truly were the victor among the Primarchs.”

He walked, swaying. He looked like ruin and still lived. The Twisted thrashed toward escape with what tatters it had left, and nothing answered.

It ended there. The Twisted grasped the truth at last, and a ragged howl tore from its depths—a sound born not of pain, but of the bitter understanding that followed defeat.

“Why!” it cried, and despair and rage pulled at the sound from both ends. “Why did something like you descend into this world? If not for you, this universe would have become mine! You’re an Anomaly!”

Its gaze wavered and fixed on him again.

“No matter how I defile this universe, it has nothing to do with you. Why do you interfere? For what purpose?”

“Your anger makes sense,” Ketal said, and he did not pretend otherwise.

The Twisted polluted the cosmos, bent it, and made it its own. That would be ruin for life. Even so, it had been born here. Perhaps, by one reading, its victory and rule would have been a kind of natural conclusion.

However, Ketal stood apart. He had not been born of this fantasy world, and his existence lay beyond its design. For an outsider to halt a being native to this universe was an aberration—something that could never appear natural, no matter how complete the victory.

“I did not want to use my authority to the end,” he said. “But you were too strong.”

He had never once used his authority after stepping Outside, not even against the Demon King. When the fate of the Mortal Realm had hung in the balance, he had considered it; if it had been his life alone, he would have refused and died rather than lay this order down.

However, the Twisted gave him no room for that kind of vow. He broke his own rule and chose to use it.

“I am sorry,” he said softly. “I will make the world I want.”

He would give this place the kind of fantasy he desired. Before the hopes of others and before the peace of the world, it was his stubbornness and his fixation.

“If you had stayed quiet in there, perhaps I would have left you alone. But I will not stand still while you shatter my world.”

He would erase a miracle born at the dawn of the universe with his own hands. He reached the Twisted and raised the axe. The creature tried to rage again and found nothing. It clung to the last threads of itself and waited.

In the end, it accepted its fate. Its voice fell flat and even.

“So you will make the world you desire by your own obsession,” it said. “Then mortals had better pray that your obsession continues to favor them.”

It gave a thin, weary laugh.

“Enough talk. The loser is the loser. You are the winner. End me.”

“Farewell.”

The axe fell, and that single motion was enough. A swing simple enough for any human arm brought the Twisted to its end. Ketal lowered himself to the ground where he stood, the weight of the moment settling around him like dust after a storm. He began to draw back the authority that had consumed the world, reclaiming it bit by bit, each motion deliberate and restrained, as though he feared the act itself might unmake what remained.

The order that devoured Myst and erased miracles thinned and went out. As it lifted, the Twisted’s body began to fade. It turned to dust and drifted apart. An existence that had persisted since the universe’s first light vanished, leaving only the marks of its destruction behind. Ketal watched and spoke under his breath.

“I am sorry. I will keep my world.”

As the overlaid order receded, his body returned to its strength. Wounds closed at speed. The Abomination that had hidden quietly inside him peeked out.

“Is it over?” it asked him.

“It is over.”

“Even a second glance at your authority makes me despise it,” the Abomination said. “It is a power that erases our kind from the root itself. I never wish to see it again.”

“You will not,” Ketal said. “I will have no reason to call it up.”

There was a certainty in his voice. As if to seal it, a System window appeared.

[Quest #791 Complete]

The prompt was expected. He had dealt with the Twisted that had stepped Outside, and the system recorded the end. The window that followed did not match the usual pattern.

[Select the reward you desire.]