King Sulbian drew upon the full might of his soul core, his gaze locked on the abomination before him. This was no ordinary beast—it was the same calamity that had been devouring their galaxy piece by piece, a predator so vast that star systems vanished into its maw like crumbs.
"I hope, its not an mistake" he closed his eyes mumbling and then opened them fully focused.
His expression turned cold as his soul core spun faster, threads of condensed essence weaving into a weapon of pure will—a soul spear. In his hand, it looked almost insignificant against the leviathan’s endless bulk, but Sulbian knew better. This wasn’t meant to wound flesh—it was meant to pierce the spirit.
With a sharp thrust, he hurled the spear. In the endless dark, it was no more than a glimmering needle racing toward a continent-sized shadow. Yet the instant it struck, the effect was devastating.
The beast’s roar ripped through the void, not in triumph but in agony. Starfields quaked under the sound. It stopped feeding, its titanic head twisting toward him, eyes like dying suns burning with rage.
Sulbian met that gaze without flinching. "Good," he said, voice low but steady. "Come after me."
Then, without hesitation, he turned and fled—not deeper into Sulbian territory, but across the void toward the Volarisa Galaxy. It was a gamble—a reckless, dangerous gamble—to lure the calamity away from his own domain by driving it into another.
If it worked, the Sulbian Empire might survive. If it failed... two galaxies would burn.
The void bent and screamed as the chase unfolded across entire star sectors.
King Sulbian’s cloak snapped like a banner of defiance as his body blurred into streaks of light, every step propelled by the raw force of his soul core. Behind him, the calamity beast surged, its titanic body crushing star systems under its weight. Its form was an abomination—whale-like bulk stretched with crooked legs that clawed at the fabric of space, wings that blotted constellations, and a mouth that seemed to be a wound in reality itself. Each beat of its wings tore nebulae apart. Each footfall ruptured time itself.
The King’s gambit was brutal and desperate—dragging the beast from his own bleeding galaxy toward another frontier. Every strike he threw, every spear of soul-light he cast, only enraged it further. It howled, a sound that cracked worlds in distant systems into drifting rubble, but it followed him. That was enough.
Across the endless gulf of the void, Volarisa stirred.
Asher sat cross-legged in the deep silence, suspended mid-cosmos as though the universe itself bent around his stillness. His eyes were half-closed, but the moment Sulbian’s desperate escape lit up the star sea, his lids lifted. He felt it before he saw it—the tremor of something old, something that carried the weight of extinction in its breath.
His gaze turned eastward, piercing through millions of light years in a single thought. And there it was: the King of Sulbian, a lone spark dragging behind him a nightmare made flesh. The calamity beast—a devourer of galaxies, its size mocking comprehension, its power gnawing at the foundations of creation.
Asher’s lips curved, not in amusement, not in fear—but in recognition.
"So... a calamity beast."
He did not rise. He did not brace. He simply remained as he was, legs folded, arms loose across his knees, soul power flowing in quiet tides around him. Against such a thing, others would have fled, prayed, or broken. Asher did nothing but wait.
And behind him, as if time itself conspired, King Sulbian tore across the gulf, the beast’s bellow still echoing from the galaxy he had abandoned. Every heartbeat closed the distance between the fleeing monarch, the pursuing leviathan, and the man who sat unmoving at the threshold of Volarisa.
The question was no longer whether the beast could be stopped.
It was whether Asher would move.
King Sulbian’s soul flared as he reached the very threshold of the Volarisa galaxy, his figure battered from the chase, cloak torn by the constant waves of pressure the calamity beast radiated. Ahead, floating at the boundary, sat Asher—cross-legged in the void, eyes half-closed, as if the chaos of galaxies meant nothing to him. The sight forced Sulbian to halt abruptly, his breath sharp, voice hoarse.
"...I had no choice."
Asher slowly opened his eyes, calm and cold, the faint glimmer of soul-light rippling within them. "You could have asked for my help." His tone carried no judgment, only quiet certainty, a reminder that the path Sulbian had chosen was one of desperation, not strategy.
The king’s jaw tightened. Behind them, the colossal monstrosity loomed—its wings folding and unfurling like continent-sized sails, its body stretching endlessly through the dark. The maw opened, and even silence bent around the soundless pressure of its hunger.
"It was either your galaxy or mine," Sulbian said, his voice breaking through the trembling void. His body twisted, retreating further into Volarisa, abandoning both the beast and responsibility with grim resolve. He didn’t wait for Asher’s answer—because he already knew it.
Asher didn’t move to stop him. To him, Sulbian was no more than an ant who had chosen survival over honor. His eyes remained fixed on the creature that bore down, and there was no disdain in them, only a dangerous calm.
For Asher, calamity beasts were no strangers. He himself has one for pet so he knew more about them. They were not mere monsters born of chaos, but children of higher dimensions—exiled predators cast into lower realms, where the fabric of reality was thinner, weaker, easier to gnaw upon. Here, they could gestate, grow fat and powerful, free from the suppression of their native planes.
In truth, the beings of higher dimensions thought little of these lower worlds—viewing them as insignificant wombs, breeding grounds where their discarded terrors could feed and ripen.
The calamity beast’s wings darkened half a starfield, its bulk so immense that entire planetary belts trembled as it moved. Its hunger was primal, its intent simple—consume the one who dared sit unmoved before it.
Asher did not rise. He remained cross-legged, the silence of his form almost mocking compared to the storm of void-breaking force that surged from the beast’s body. The creature opened its jagged, mountain-sized jaws, a roar of hunger tearing across lightyears as it lunged. Its mind carried only one thought—eat.
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But just as its abyssal maw closed in, Asher’s eyes slid open. A dull red glow flickered within them, the kind that saw not flesh but soul. His hand drifted lazily to his side, and from nothingness, a long, curved scythe manifested—its edge humming with a law not of this dimension, a cut that belonged to truth itself.
Without flourish, without even the need for stance, Asher lifted the weapon and waved it once.