88

Of Decay

Rian could tell that Yindra had underestimated just how powerful an infinite Dexterity stat was. When the rift opened and warped both of them into the past, there was almost no time for her to react—even if she could read Rian’s mind.

As they returned to the present, Rian felt it. Another presence, even more ethereal than Ezre. It was hardly more than a feeling. A memory. But it called to him from every direction, and it was most prominent in the sliver of time in which he traversed the rift. It could’ve only been one thing, one person: the last remaining deconstructed god.

Altir, her presence transcending time itself.

The arctic tundra sprawled beneath Rian and Yindra again, the portal still hovering above the black tower, stray creatures from Tsenira’s summonings roaming about with nothing to do, the distant CAF air base smoldering and destroyed.

Rian and Yindra floated in front of each other, Rian watching her with unwavering fortitude, and Yindra watching him with fear settling into her gaze.

Beside them was a black hole—the miniature one that Yindra had generated to thwart Rian’s previous attack. The only thing keeping it from tearing apart their surroundings was Rian’s enhancement of the environment with his Endurance.

And there, seemingly frozen in time within the black hole’s gravity well, were Rian and Yindra’s past selves. It was as if time had stopped around the event horizon.

“How?” Yindra muttered, breathless.

“I made a pact with the Mirage System,” Rian said. Even if Yindra could read his mind, he felt compelled to state it as if to solidify it within the System. “It’s over. You’ve had your revenge. You’ve secured the future you wanted. We can stop this, now. The war between Miriad and Earth ends here.”

When Yindra looked at him again, he could tell that she wasn’t done. His power had frightened her. She was beginning to understand that she was outmatched. That she wasn’t in control any longer.

Rian’s Dexterity was so high that he could even take modest control over Yindra herself. She had resisted the moment Rian had opened the rift—had tried to stay in the future while he dragged both of them back into the present.

And as the realization settled upon her, rage began to swell up within the depths of Yindra’s soul. Rian had impeded upon her will, had begun to rob her of agency.

She wasn’t going to yield. The only thing she could do was to fight, to wrestle for control of the immediate future.

Rian entered Meditation again. If she was still going to resist, then he had no choice either.

One more piece to connect. One more puzzle to solve.

Aside from his secondary alignment, Rian had nothing to latch onto for reconstructing Altir. He didn't know where to begin. All he knew was that Altir was the quintessential priestess. The archetype for all healing classes. The stat of INT itself.

Rian had initially misconstrued what that all meant. And when he opened his eyes, exiting Meditation, his Perception intensified, and the solution was clear.

Healing in Miriad was not what it seemed. Like everything else, it was tied to the concept of time. The repairing of items was accomplished through the reversal of entropy: time travel. It was plain enough for him to see that healing was a reflection of the same principle.

Altir was not a goddess of benevolence, despite all her association with healers.

She was the essence of both life and death.

She was the goddess of Decay.

The restoration of a body was accomplished the same way that items were repaired. And to control such a thing, it meant having authority over the flow of time itself. Forward and backward.

Rian already had a portion of control over it. If he could use his Dexterity to affect its flow, albeit haphazardly, then he’d already found the correct path.

He sensed the pathway to the Altir using his secondary alignment, which he’d received ever since advancing to Monk. And although he’d never had any Godly Fragments of Altir beyond the Superior Lucky Potion that Corvis had stolen, all he needed was at least one to begin the process, and there was exactly one nearby.

It was in Yindra’s inventory.

Rian could feel it resonating with his Perception. Even Yindra had sensed his awareness shifting to the fragment.

“No,” she said, her voice faltering. “Don’t you dare.”

There was something almost heartbreaking about the way she said it. Like he was about to take something precious from her.

He pried it out of her inventory. He didn’t even need to break or force the System into obeying him. His Dexterity made the task trivial.

Altir’s Heart floated in the space between them.

Then Rian reached out and grasped the spatial-temporal existence of the portal itself, wrestling with it to restore its original coordinates. The portal had partially destabilized, but that didn’t mean it was impossible to find Miriad again. It just meant it was harder than before. And if he couldn’t realign it, he would need a stronger signal between the Fragments, a louder resonance.

At the same time, Yindra moved to thwart him and reclaim the piece of Altir that she’d kept for so long. Rian only managed to get a glimpse of the various Altir Fragments and nullshards on the other side of the portal when something else registered in his Perception.

Yindra seemed to’ve noticed it too, and she halted her attack. She wrapped herself in darkness, forming a thick cocoon of ice dense enough to block light itself.

The warhead was coming. The ballistic missile that the United States had sent in desperation. Rian could hear its approach dozens of miles above, an arcing path reaching into the stratosphere, now descending toward their location. They had mere seconds until it would detonate upon them.

As the missile became visible in the sky, Rian brought all his attention to it. He used Mirage: Flux to redistribute his finite stats into Perception until he could see through matter itself.

The missile wasn’t carrying a fusion payload, one of the modern thermonuclear warhead designs. It was an older one: a fission bomb. The United States wasn’t just planning on vaporizing the area. They wanted to completely irradiate it as well.

He was in luck. He had needed just one more aspect of Decay to narrow in on the rest of Altir’s Fragments. But he’d certainly never imagined that the final key would be a nuclear warhead—a bomb containing the most powerful form of decay in the universe.

Fission.

And as Yindra saw what he intended to do, even she was aghast at the thought of it; Rian’s Perception was high enough to glimpse her thoughts in return.

He couldn’t draw temporal energy through the portal anymore without misaligning it. And he needed a wealth of it to form stable temporal channels to each Altir Fragment and nullshard.

So he wasn’t going to draw it from Miriad’s future. Using his infinite Dexterity, he was going to redistribute what was already here.

This one’s for you, Decha.

The ballistic missile detonated five hundred feet above the tower—above the portal—and Rian threaded his control around every uranium atom undergoing nuclear fission above them. The explosion lasted an instant before it was snuffed out. Most of the light, the ionizing gamma radiation from the blast, didn’t even make it to where Rian and Yindra were.

Rian had contained it all, redistributing the energy into the space between his hands. It felt like he was holding a snapshot of the sun. He’d brought the detonation to a standstill as if he’d stopped time.

Performing the Goam crafting method, he substituted the requisite temporal energy with the power of a nuclear bomb. He fed that energy into the System, then used it to open a temporal channel to every Altir Fragment and nullshard on the other side of the portal, combining them and bringing them to one location.

LEVEL UP x40! (Lv. 148→188)

It was like the nuclear blast, on pause, had suddenly resumed. Energy exploded from Rian’s body, but the landscape remained intact, and even Yindra had insulated herself well enough for the transformation’s energy to hardly faze her.

Rian’s attention went inward. Altir’s soul was vastly different from the other two. She felt slightly mismatched with him, but he didn’t mind taking up the soul of a woman in addition to the other three souls already within him, not including his own.

And then he turned his attention outward, and his Perception skyrocketed higher than it ever had.

Cobalt

Level 188 Monk

Species: Human-Novai-Demigod of Strength, Lightning, and Decay

HP: 9999/9999

—

Strength: ∞

[Power: ∞]

[Endurance: ∞]

—

Dexterity: ∞

[Agility: ∞]

[Accuracy: ∞]

—

Intelligence: ∞

[Perception: ∞]

[Cooldown Reduction: ∞]

…

He saw the future.

His Perception had climbed to an immeasurable level. The past, present, and future had become indistinguishable. They were now one.

Yindra was fleeing. Would flee. Always would have fled.

Rian saw the path forward. But he knew he couldn’t bring himself to kill her.

Maybe it was the newly formed Altir side of him, despite his soul being exceptionally crowded now. Or maybe it was Corvis’s loyalty still affecting him, or the fact that Rian still had a conscience and didn’t actually want to murder anyone. Or maybe it was the cumulative pacifistic side of him that had grown with each godly merger—with Goam, then Ezre, and now Altir. It was the foundation of them, their intention since they’d come to Miriad: to stop the Hundred-Year War.

The only reason that Yindra had become so hostile was that she had survived the Undoing. Anger had corrupted her. She had shed the ideals of pacifism that had defined the Four.

And for all that had happened to Yindra, Rian couldn’t blame her for lashing out against Earth, even if he felt obligated to stop her.

Maybe on some level, to some degree, he really did want the world to end—out of spite, out of childish hate—and to let Yindra destroy everything. But he knew something else was holding him back.

Because he knew there was another way.

His Perception was infinite, and time itself was no longer linear to him. An instant was endless; eternity was an instant. He saw and understood the entirety of the situation on a fundamental level.

He should’ve realized it sooner. The System was just a conduit for harnessing temporal energy. And that energy originated from one place.

It had taken some reframing of what he already knew, but now it made sense. Miriad was an alternate version of Earth. They were neighbors existing in parallel universes directly adjacent to each other, making access between them relatively simple. Miriad was Earth-like, and Earth was like Miriad. That meant he could assume they were dependent on the same physical principles.

If so, then the Four weren’t just gods.

They were the four fundamental forces of the universe.

The answer to everything had been staring him in the face all along. All he needed to do was muster enough energy, contain it upon a single point, and he could recombine the Four completely. Not just within himself like the three god-souls his Vessel now contained, but into a singular being. Unified.

And all the temporal energy that the Mirage System had ever utilized, all the power that had ever been drawn from the future—at last it would be released, sent down temporal channels into the past, distributed to wherever it had been drawn to.

He saw it, understood it. The picture was complete. The temporal energy that everyone had been drawing from the future—it was him.

It all stemmed from his future self.

Because he was going to become Ulm.

Rian began to hover toward Yindra. She was cowering now, knowing that the end had come. When she tried to flee, Rian summoned walls of impassible space, demarcating the battlefield from the rest of the planet.

That’s right, Rian thought, and his internal monologue was joined by the three other voices. Goam, Ezre, Altir. He knew Yindra could hear him, hear all of them. It’s time to end this. You’re no longer a threat, Yindra.

When he spoke, his three-fold voice thundered across the sky.

“Now you’re just another crafting material.”

Yindra summoned more black holes to stop him, to deflect the path of his approach. But he dispersed them with a mere gesture, accelerating the black holes’ locality forward in time until they evaporated into nothing. Even black holes were subject to decay. They didn’t last forever.

Yindra was out of options. There was nothing she could do to stop him.

Her rage was boundless. She swore revenge, cursed the world at her feet, even prayed to the future Ulm that they would turn against this world when they were whole again, for she was Deception, the goddess of all that hid away in the depths of vengeful creatures to exact their will unseen, to control all that which they could not. Through deceit, through lies. She was elemental, gravity itself, a driving force beneath the veneer of existence that would never go away. Not so long as the intrinsic greed within all creatures remained, their collective actions rebounding through time, twisting the fate of life itself down vicious self-consuming paths in an eternal struggle for survival. Yindra cursed the universe for bringing everything to this.

And as Rian reached out, summoning all his power to erase the boundaries between the souls within him and that of Yindra, he understood her.

He understood her because she was not a goddess of vengeance. She was a reflection. An embodiment of the flaws of humankind. It was desire, that insatiable longing for more at the expense of everyone and everything else, that had corrupted her.

And all her anger and bitterness, her vitriol for humanity and their unending perseverance, her disgust for their ability to always hope for something better—it dissolved against Rian’s embrace. Her rage withered to nothingness, unable to escape. And when there was nothing left, all that remained was regret and shame for what she had done.

It all faded beneath the light, and Yindra found the soul she had been longing for, the other half that had been separated from her.

A reversal of decay. Of healing.

“I forgive you.”