Chapter 374: The Story After (6) [Side Story, Part 6]

The world roared as the storm raged.

Winds tore across the ruined land, grinding earth and air together and sweeping everything away. The Tower Master was no exception. The barrier he had barely managed to raise shattered like glass. The storm chewed through his robes and gnawed at his bones; several fingers splintered outright, white fragments tearing free and spinning away into the gale.

He groaned, voice rough with strain. “

Kh...

”

“Oh,” the White Serpent observed, its eyes gleaming with faint surprise. “You endured my attack.”

It tilted its colossal head, amusement glinting in the cold white of its scales.

“You are reasonably useful,” it said. “Consider this. Even now, you can enter my service. Become my slave. You will hold the glory of being my first.”

“Utter nonsense,” the Tower Master replied, every word a rasp.

Inwardly, he cursed. Ketal had told him that if they ever faced monsters from legend, he would manage well enough. All of that had been empty comfort. The gap between him and this monster was overwhelming.

The White Serpent chuckled, a sound like boulders rolling together.

“Then that is a pity,” it said. “You will be my meal instead.”

Its body undulated. The storm howled with renewed fury. Shattered stone rose like a cloud of knives. The Tower Master pulled one artifact after another from within his robe. These were items he had hoarded in secret since the war, tools he had never reported to anyone. Counting their combined value, he could have purchased a third of the entire Mage Tower.

However, they disintegrated almost instantly. One blast of the storm, and half of them shredded in an instant, metal and crystal ground into dust.

“Damn it,” he spat.

This was not a simple storm. Every phenomenon that arose from the White Serpent’s movements carried an alien authority, the distorted power of the Demon Realm.

The Serpent’s head drifted toward him. It opened its jaws, eager to swallow him whole. The Tower Master forced a spell through the chaos and skipped sideways through space.

“Quick little thing,” the Serpent remarked. “Spatial leaps. What an annoying power.”

If he had still possessed skin, it would have been slick with cold sweat. He was a lich, an undying being. As long as his life vessel remained intact, he could not truly die.

Yet the White Serpent was an existence born of the Demon Realm’s strangeness. If it devoured him, there was no certainty that his immortality would hold. Even now, the storm was gnawing at his core, scraping at the essence that remained of his life.

I wonder if Ketal can even come here to help me,

the Tower Master thought.

The Tower Master doubted it. Ketal was on the far side of the continent. Even if someone noticed the anomaly at once and relayed word at the fastest possible speed, a full day would pass before Ketal arrived.

So this is my grave,

he thought.

He had survived the war that should have ended the world, only to die here under a monster’s shadow. The idea made something in him rage. The flames in his eye sockets flared brighter.

“I will not go quietly,” he said.

The land shook again. The storm surged toward him. His bony fingers moved in a complex pattern, sketching symbols in empty air. Before him, a plane of black lines appeared and unfolded, forming a two-dimensional coordinate grid that hung in space. A shrill sound cut through the roar of the wind as the storm collided with the grid.

“Oh,” the Serpent said.

For the first time, it sounded genuinely intrigued. Its storm, the destructive force born of its movement and authority, crashed into the Tower Master’s grid and stopped.

“A strange power,” the Serpent observed.

The Tower Master shook his hand out as if his joints ached. “Barely succeeded. I truly thought I would die this time.”

He and Ketal had conducted countless experiments together, yet what held the Tower Master’s fascination was not Ketal himself but the laws that shaped the world Ketal had come from. Gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force created a universe governed by four fundamental interactions that combined to form a system that, in their own way, felt flawless.

In that world, outcomes were fixed. Under the same conditions, the same experiment always produced the same result. It was the opposite of this Myst-soaked world, where Myst’s volatility turned every calculation into guesswork.

To the Tower Master, fixed values had been beautiful. They had awakened a hunger he had not felt in ages, the old desire to know and to understand. After that, he had devoted himself to one goal. He wanted to take those fixed values and recreate them as magic.

Now, the fruits of that effort finally revealed themselves.

“This is my own magic,” he said. “My own world.”

This was a third realm, born between his Myst-ridden universe and Ketal’s ordered one.

“Let us begin in earnest,” he said.

“That sounds delightful,” the Serpent replied. “Struggle as much as you like.”

Its head swept from side to side while its tail lashed through the air, and the storm roared back to life around it. Shattered landmass rose like meteors before hurtling toward the Tower Master, each piece transformed from mere stone into a cursed projectile by the Serpent’s alien authority.

The Tower Master had not been able to fully block such attacks before. He drew a breath that rattled through his ribs and snapped his fingers. More coordinate grids unfolded around him, sheets of black line-work intersecting and overlapping.

The Serpent’s authority slammed into them, and the world thundered around the impact, yet the grids endured without the slightest tremor or sway. They held their place as if fixed into the very fabric of reality, absolute and unmoving.

“Oh,” the Serpent said again, its eyes brightening.

It did not understand the mechanism, but it could see the effect. Those grids were seizing the world by its foundations. They fixed the value of Myst, locked it so that no outside force could shift or warp it.

“Your power resembles mine,” it said. “It smells like my authority.”

“To hear that from something that has existed since the dawn of creation is an honor,” the Tower Master answered. “In that case, accept this as well.”

He lifted a finger and pointed toward the Serpent, aware that fixing coordinates and shutting out all other interference served purposes far beyond defense.

“Coordinate Interference,” he murmured.

The grid snapped into place over the Serpent. Lines of fixed reality overlaid its flesh, and for a heartbeat, the world seemed to hold its breath.

Then the sky exploded. Light tore upward in a column so immense that it could have been seen from the outer edge of the atmosphere. The blast rattled the Tower Master to his bones.

Artifacts shattered one after another around him, even though they existed only to shield him from such feedback. Within seconds, they were gone. He flung more grids around himself in a desperate shell.

The thunder rolled on and on. When the shockwave finally faded, he lowered his hands and exhaled slowly.

“This is beyond what I expected,” he admitted.

Where the mountain range had once stood, a massive hole now yawned. It was perfectly round, like a scoop carved from ice cream, a clean-edged circle that sank deep into the earth. It was too large to call a lakebed, more like the dry course of a river broad enough to swallow cities.

“The collapse came from the clash between fixed and unfixed values,” he murmured.

He considered what occurred when a world shaped by mutable Myst collided with an imposed set of immutable coordinates, and the answer lay before his eyes. He let his hand fall, certain that no matter how powerful the Serpent was, taking that blast head-on could not have left it unscathed. At the very least, it had to have suffered a serious injury.

In that gap, he had to call Ketal. He had to move quickly, before the Serpent recovered. That thought pushed him into motion.

Just then, a sharp hiss cut through the air. From the depths of the hollow, the Serpent’s head lunged upward. The Tower Master threw up a new grid on reflex.

Impact rippled through the world, and he stared in disbelief as the coordinate grid, once marked by absolute stability and fixed values, began to show cracks. Thin fractures spread along its lines like delicate spiderwebs.

The Serpent laughed, wild and delighted. Clouds above them tore apart under the force of its voice.

“A pathetic mortal dares to meddle with the immutable,” it said. “That much I praise. Yet you remain a mortal. Did you truly think you could wound me?”

“This is absurd,” the Tower Master said, the words scraping out of him.

The Serpent showed no injury at all. Even where the grid had overlaid and interfered directly, its scales were smooth, unmarred by so much as a scratch.

Bayern said he injured the Ugly Rat,

the Tower Master thought.

Bayern, the King of the North, had fought another of the legendary beasts, the Rat that fouled the seas, and managed to wound it.

The Tower Master stood at least three steps beyond Bayern in raw power, and the magic he had just unleashed was a breakthrough he had achieved only after grasping a far higher principle. Yet the Serpent remained flawless, and it regarded his dismay with what seemed like quiet amusement.

“I am the Serpent that has existed since the beginning,” it declared. “I am promised invariance.”

The Ugly Rat embodied defilement. The White Bear embodied endless strength. The White Serpent embodied eternal, unchanging invariance. That was its authority. Its slit pupils pinned the Tower Master in place.

“That a paltry mortal has learned to touch the immutable earns a measure of praise,” it said. “That is all. The gulf between you and me will never be bridged. So die!”

Its jaws opened wide, and it surged toward him. The Tower Master tried to move, but his responses lagged. Fleshless hands felt suddenly heavy.

So this is death,

he thought.

He would die here, swallowed by the Serpent. Death swept toward him. Sensation rose in him like needles. His awareness of Myst sharpened. His awareness of the world’s structure and his own identity all focused into a single, piercing point.

Time seemed to slow as his mind expanded, and on the edge of death, he caught a fleeting glimpse of the law and pattern that bound everything together. The Tower Master slowly lifted his hand, and a sharp crack rang out, bright as a struck bell.

The Serpent’s head snapped back as if hammered from the front. For the first time, a sound of pain slipped from its maw.

“What?” it said.

It stared at him without a trace of amusement. Before the Tower Master, space had split, and the rupture was no simple separation of distance but something far deeper, something that touched the underlying structure itself.

The Serpent whispered a word that did not suit its enormous frame. “Fragmentation...?”

“Ah...,” the Tower Master said. His voice trembled between a groan and a laugh. He had brushed against a great forbidden aspiration and reached the far edge of its path. He extended his hand and articulated the insight aloud, giving it shape. “World Fragmentation.”

The world itself shattered. Reality broke into shards that closed around the Serpent like the plates of some cosmic trap. It thrashed and tried to escape. The fragments rang as if they were made of tempered glass.

Escape was impossible. The broken pieces of reality themselves held the Serpent in place. It glared, eyes burning.

“You, little...!” it growled.

“Exile,” the Tower Master said.

The fragmented world folded inward as its shattered pieces crumpled and vanished, leaving behind an empty realm, a hollow space stripped of all substance. No air, no earth, no light remained, and even radiance itself would have been consumed there, leaving nothing but complete absence.

The Tower Master sagged to his knees and sucked in a breath that did not exist. His bones rattled in his body. His magic reserves were gone; it felt as if one more spell would stop his heart. Even so, he could not keep the laughter from bubbling out.

“

Ha... ha... ha,

” he said.

He had just cut out a piece of the world and sealed it away. He had designated spatial coordinates. He had fixed temporal coordinates. He had set dimensional coordinates.

Then he had locked the result, fixing its value so completely that nothing could interfere. It was a form of magic that required mastery over space, time, dimension, and result, a spell that could only exist at the level of one who ruled the world itself.

It was a spell that had existed only in theory at the Eleventh-Class tier. He had stepped into that realm, if only for a moment.

“To think I would reach understanding under the fear of death at this age,” he said.

However, it would not last. He had not truly ascended to the Eleventh Class. This was a temporary attainment, a door opened by desperation. To stand there in a stable, permanent way lay far in the future. Perhaps he would never reach it again.

Yet he had witnessed it, and knowing that it was possible became enough.

He exhaled. After resting for a short while, he pushed himself to his feet. The incident was over. He could return and organize what he had learned.

Then a faint tearing sound reached his ears as a crack formed within the black void where he had severed the world. At first, he thought his vision had blurred, but the fracture deepened and spread like a break across glass, and the flames in his eyes flickered.

“No,” he whispered.

The sealed space shattered with a roar. The exiled world forced itself back into contact with reality. A shattered, mangled landscape unfolded, like something that had been crushed in a fist and then dropped at his feet. In the midst of it lay the White Serpent.

“How dare you!” it roared. Its voice boiled with rage. “How dare a mortal wound me? How dare you scratch the skin of my invariance?”

On its brow, a mark marred the perfect smoothness. It was very small, no more than a shallow scrape by human standards, hardly enough to break the skin.

The Tower Master felt hollow. His enlightenment had become nothing more than that thin, shallow wound. The Serpent’s fury burst forth. Its head reared high and then slammed downward.

“I will crush you!” it roared.

He could not move, having drawn his magic up from the bottom of the well until not a single drop remained, and even lifting a finger would have been difficult. He closed his eyes without a trace of regret, for in the end, he had pierced a new realm, and that achievement alone carried a quiet sweetness.

The world shook. A titanic impact rolled through the mountains. The Tower Master, who had been silently waiting for the end, opened his eyes a fraction. The flame in his sockets flickered in disbelief.

“Ketal...?” he breathed.

“Quite the ordeal you’ve endured, Tower Master,” Ketal said.

He stood before him, one hand planted atop the Serpent’s skull, forcing its massive head down into the shattered earth.