Godslayer's Legacy: THE PATH TO SUPREMACY

The chasm was silent. The aftermath of Rui's strike lingered in fractured echoes, fading into a trembling stillness. The God of Grief's form bled into the darkness, fragments of shadow peeling away like dying embers.

But Rui… Rui remained.

His body was barely holding together, suspended in the trembling air by sheer will and the flickering remnants of his shattered aura. The faint silver light around him sputtered, breaking apart like glass under immense pressure.

In the airship above, Kovar's glass dome flared violently with crimson warnings. Energy signatures flooded the crystalline control panels, cascading in erratic patterns.

"Output at… 317%—this is impossible!" Kovar's voice cracked, his normally steady tone breaking into frantic urgency. "Rui! Can you hear me?! Your core is collapsing—you need to—"

Static.

The connection was severed.

Kovar slammed his fist against the panel. "Rui! Answer me!"

But Rui was no longer listening.

His silver eyes, glowing faintly amidst the fractured air, were wide open but… vacant. Blood seeped from beneath them, thin crimson trails carving sharp lines down his pale cheeks and dripping from his chin. His expression was frozen in something between agony and serenity—a razor-thin edge of stillness amidst chaos.

And then, Rui… let go.

His trembling aura expanded outward in a single, breathless pulse. His mind, his senses, his very essence unraveled as if he were being pulled apart, thread by fragile thread.

The world around him dimmed.

The chasm, the flickering shadows, even the faint crackle of mana—all of it bled away into nothingness.

---

Rui floated. Or perhaps he stood. Or perhaps he simply was.

The concept of time—of seconds ticking forward, of moments slipping past—ceased to exist. The air was thick, heavy with a luminous glow that bled through the infinite expanse in shifting patterns of runes and symbols. They stretched out forever, wrapping around him like threads in a great tapestry.

The runes pulsed softly with faint light, each one carrying a weight Rui could feel but not fully comprehend. It was ancient, impossibly vast—like staring into the bones of the universe itself.

His breath, if he was still breathing, came slow and calm. The wounds that racked his body seemed distant now, the pain a faint echo at the edges of his awareness.

He could see everything.

The threads of mana, countless and endless, interwoven across the vast tapestry of existence. They shifted and danced, flowing through the cracks of reality like veins of molten light. Some threads were frayed, others severed, bleeding energy into the void.

Rui floated. Or perhaps he was still falling. Or standing. Or perhaps he simply was.

The chasm, the ruins, the jagged sky—they were all still there. But his vision had shifted.

The world unraveled before his silver eyes, its layers peeled back to reveal something deeper, something ancient. The threads of mana, endless and interwoven, stretched in every direction. They formed bridges of light, spiraling towers of glyphs, and endless rivers of glowing symbols that pulsed with an unseen heartbeat.

This was the true world. The world beneath the world.

Time held no power here. Moments did not pass—they simply existed, stretched infinitely across an invisible horizon. Each flicker of a rune, each delicate shift of a thread, felt like an eternity and a single breath all at once.

The threads of mana bled through the fractured air, tangled and severed where his final strike had landed. Jagged, broken glyphs hung suspended in space, spilling faint trails of energy into the void. It was like seeing the aftermath of a wound cut into the fabric of reality itself.

But amidst the infinite weave, the fracture still remained—a black knot, a wound within the threads themselves. The shadows crawled there, writhing, twitching as if they were aware of his gaze.

The God of Grief wasn't gone. Not yet.

Rui's body hung limp in the air, his shoulders trembling as blood dripped freely from beneath his eyes. The crimson trails traced sharp lines down his cheeks, cutting through the faint silver glow clinging desperately to his skin. His fingers twitched faintly, barely holding form, as arcs of unstable mana sputtered between them.

In the Rune World, the flow of energy was clear, undeniable. Mana spilled out from the fractured knot in sickly black tendrils, spreading like ink through water, poisoning the threads around it.

It was rebuilding itself.

Slowly. Painfully. But it was happening.

"No."

The thought cut through Rui's fragile awareness, sharp and absolute. His chest burned, his core cracking under the immense strain of the mana flooding through him, he didn't care, kill or be killed. His aura flared, threads of light snapping outward before sputtering into faint embers.

But he could still see it—the knot, the fracture, the sickness spilling outward into the web of existence. It was an infection, he needed to get rid of it.

And he could see how to stop it.

A single thread caught his attention—a line of glowing silver cutting through the blackened tangle. It vibrated faintly, stretched thin, but unbroken. It was connected to him, running through his chest and deep into the infinite weave of the Rune World.

It was his thread. His tether to everything.

With trembling effort, Rui reached—not with his hand, but with his will.

His vision sharpened as he gripped the thread with his mind, with his spirit, with the last fragile remnants of his strength and willpower. It trembled in response, glowing faintly brighter, as if answering his call.

And then Rui pulled.

The world trembled.

Threads of mana flared violently outward, spiraling and snapping taut as energy rushed toward him in cascading waves. His aura ignited once more—violent, unstable, roaring outward in a corona of molten silver light.

The knot of darkness below reacted. The shadows recoiled, twitching violently as the fractured glyphs surrounding it trembled, shivering under the sheer force of Rui's will.

The universe itself felt like it was holding its breath.

Far above, on the edge of the shattered sky, Kovar's airship shuddered as warning lights flared violently across the crystalline panels.

"Energy spike detected! Output levels—in the thousands!—impossible!—how...?" Kovar's glass dome crackled with cascading data streams, the intensity reflecting across his face. His fingers gripped the control panel with white-knuckled force.

"Rui…" he whispered.

But Rui couldn't hear him.

His thread, his single fragile connection to the tapestry of reality, pulsed with blinding light as the energy surged through him.

The fracture in the Rune World screamed.

Rui's outstretched arm locked into place, his blood-streaked fingers trembling as his core—cracked, unstable, screaming in protest—poured every last shred of energy into this single moment.

The threads surrounding him—countless rivers of light and ancient runes—rippled outward like a tidal wave, all converging on the knot of darkness below, the infection he thought.

The whole area glowed. The air hummed.

Rui's voice, ragged and trembling, barely above a whisper, cut through the endless hum of mana.

"Collapse."

The word left Rui's lips, a fragile whisper carried on threads of light and raw willpower, through the rune world and real world.

And the worlds obeyed.

For an instant—an infinite, breathless instant—there was silence.

Every thread of mana, every trembling rune, every shattered fragment of light and shadow froze in perfect stillness. The chasm below, the fractured sky above, the air itself—all of it seemed to hold its breath.

And then—

Reality ruptured.

A soundless explosion tore outward from the knot of shadow—an eruption of light and force so absolute that it defied the senses. Threads of mana snapped like overdrawn wires, cascading outward in blinding arcs. The air rippled violently, shimmering as if caught between layers of glass.

The abyss screamed.

Remaining stone pillars shattered into powder. Cracks spiderwebbed across the ground and stretched outward like bleeding veins throughout the whole abyss. The very air was pushed back in concentric rings, a shockwave expanding outward with unyielding force. Everything was flattened as far as the eye could see.

High above, Kovar's airship bucked violently, its stabilizers screaming as they fought to keep the vessel upright. Crystalline panels erupted in bursts of sparks as overload warnings flared crimson across every surface.

"Structural destabilization at catastrophic levels!" one of the ship's systems blared. Kovar's hands flew across the controls, his voice a sharp bark amidst the chaos.

"Compensate! Keep her steady!"

But the airship could only hold position, trembling in the aftershocks of Rui's final command.

Below, or what was below, the knot of darkness—the remnants of the God of Grief—was gone. Not dispersed, not scattered, not fading into shadow. Simply… erased.

In its place was nothing.

A perfect sphere of absence hovered in the space where the god had been—a void so deep, so utterly empty, that even light refused to touch it. The edges of this void shimmered faintly with fractured threads of mana, twitching like severed nerves trying desperately to reconnect.

The area itself buckled inward around the wound. Stone and debris were pulled ever so slightly toward the void, as if reality itself was trying—and failing—to stitch itself back together.

For a moment, all was still again. The dust settled slowly in the ruined air, the last echoes of the backlash fading into a dull hum.

But the scar remained.

A wound in the world.

A place where mana no longer flowed, where the threads of reality were severed and left to drift, untethered.

The Abyssal Scar.