Chapter 561 – The Council Reconvenes
The ice cavern where RhanTegoth's corpse had once been sealed was quiet, but it was no longer empty. Hundreds of figures gathered there—the gods of Olympus and Asgard, the dragons, the elves of Alfheim, the angels, the immortal sages, and the Vampire Queen. The glow of the blue circuits etched into the walls hummed faintly, a reminder of the one who had already left.
No one had gone home. Not after Jotunheim.
The images of what they had seen—a world of fire caged inside a ring of a thousand pillars, then frozen into a silent graveyard of lightning—were still burned into their minds. Even as the temperature outside began to normalize, the weight of what they had witnessed hung over them.
At the center of the cavern, Merlin struck the base of his staff against the ice, calling the council to order.
"Fthaggua," he said, his voice echoing in the hollow chamber, "has been erased. Not sealed. Not driven back. Erased. The Void Knight has once again acted before we could even form a plan."
There was no argument to that. They had all seen it: the blue light that swallowed Jotunheim, the battle that raged inside, and the way the land itself had changed. They had also seen how narrowly the barrier had kept the flames from reaching Alfheim and Vanaheim. If it had cracked, two realms would already be ash.
Zeus leaned forward on his throne, his face hard. "We have relied on chance twice now. First with Ghatanothoa, and now with RhanTegoth. Without him, none of us would be here. That cannot happen a third time."
Odin's single eye swept across the gathered gods, his voice like frost. "We all heard what Surtr said. There are more. Yig. Atlach-Nacha. And the one we do not dare name yet." His eye narrowed. "We will find their seals. Before they wake."
At the mention of Atlach-Nacha, all eyes turned toward the group of Mesoamerican gods standing silently at the edge of the hall. Tezcatlipoca gave a slow, humorless grin.
"Even we do not know the exact passage," he said. "We know where the webs begin, but they stretch forever. The Andes hide more tunnels than there are stars."
A low rumble rolled through the cavern.
Surtr's voice.
"You will find them," said the ancient flame. "Atlach-Nacha sleeps deep beneath the Andes. Its bridge was nearly finished when the first war ended. Cipactli gave part of its own body to wrap that bridge in stone. The mountains themselves are a cage. But cages break."
The words settled heavily over the council.
Before anyone could speak, the air rippled.
Blue light bent, and without a sound, the Void Knight appeared in the middle of the chamber.
The sudden presence silenced everything. Even the dragons lowered their heads slightly, the heat of the room seeming to vanish as every gaze fixed on the armored figure.
Merlin exhaled softly. "You returned."
Alex's voice, calm and unhurried, came from behind the smooth, glowing visor.
"Yes. I came for an answer."
He stepped closer to the circle, his movements soundless. The faint light from his armor reflected in the ice underfoot.
"Surtr spoke of Atlach-Nacha," he said, his tone flat but clear. "If it wakes, it will be worse than Jotunheim. It will not burn. It will bind. And there will be no escape."
His visor turned toward the Mesoamerican gods.
"Do any of you know where the sealed passages begin? Even a trace is enough. If there is a place where the threads feel unnatural, tell me now. I intend to find it before it wakes."
For a long moment, the cavern was silent. The gods exchanged glances. Finally, Quetzalcoatl stepped forward, his plumed feathers stirring faintly in the still air.
"There is one place," he said. "A valley high in the Andes, where the wind never blows. No birds, no animals. We call it El Descenso Silencioso. The Silent Descent. Shamans will not even say its name. The locals say that to enter is to walk into honey. The air thickens. The deeper you go, the slower you move, until you can no longer move at all."
Tezcatlipoca's grin faded, his voice low. "Even we do not reach the end. Hunters vanish. It swallows them."
The Void Knight tilted his head slightly. "Good. That's enough."
Odin's voice cut across the chamber. "You mean to go there yourself?"
"Yes," Alex replied. "I don't need armies. I need the location. When I find it, I'll end it before it ever steps into the sunlight."
Freyja's golden eyes narrowed. "You intend to do what you did in Jotunheim."
"Yes," he said again. "If that bridge is finished, there will be no border between the Dreamlands and this world. I won't let it happen."
For a few moments, no one spoke. The only sound was the soft hum of the circuits embedded in the ice. Then Athena, ever controlled, folded her arms.
"You act alone," she said quietly. "You always do."
Alex's voice didn't change. "I act where hesitation kills."
He turned his visor away from the gods, away from the council, and without another word, the blue light of his armor brightened. The energy bent around him, and in an instant, he was gone.
The ice cavern was silent again.
For a long time, no one spoke. Finally, Odin exhaled slowly, his gaze fixed on the place where the Void Knight had stood.
"This world," he murmured, "no longer belongs only to gods."
Merlin rested both hands on his staff, his voice quiet but firm.
"No," he said. "It belongs to those who act."
Blue light folded in on itself, and the cavern where the council sat vanished from Alex's senses. In the blink of an eye, he was standing in a windswept valley high in the Andes. The thin air cut cold against his armor, yet the world here was unnaturally still. There was no rustling of leaves, no cry of birds, no whisper of insects—only silence.
He stood at the edge of El Descenso Silencioso.
Ahead, the valley floor split open into a deep, gaping fissure. The walls of rock were marked with patterns that almost looked like scratches—lines too straight, too purposeful to be made by time and weather. This was the place Quetzalcoatl had described. The Silent Descent.
Without hesitation, Alex walked forward.
The fissure widened into a vast cave. He stepped inside, the blue glow of his armor painting the jagged stone walls. For a time, it was simple: a sloping tunnel, cold air flowing around him. Then he noticed something.
Every step was slower than the one before.
At first, it was faint. A heaviness in the air, as if the cave itself were trying to hold him back. After a hundred meters, it became like wading through water. After two hundred, like moving through thick syrup. Even for him, it was noticeable.
He stopped and crouched, his visor scanning the space around him. His eyes narrowed.
It wasn't the air.
It was threads.
Spider webs.
They were so thin that even divine senses barely brushed against them. They crisscrossed the entire tunnel, layer after layer, forming an invisible barrier that had turned the path ahead into a trap.
Each one carried a faint, pulsing pressure: a fragment of Law. The Law of Web. Even this far from the source, it was enough to slow everything—thought, movement, mana flow. For a normal human, even one thread would have been enough. They would move slower. They would tire. And eventually, they would never move again.
Alex reached out a hand and pinched one between his fingers. It resisted like tempered steel. A faint shiver ran up the strand, and somewhere deep in the tunnels, something stirred. A warning.
The visor dimmed slightly as he tested its strength.
Then he crushed it.
The thread shattered like glass.
Alex exhaled slowly. If this was what slowed gods and hunters to a crawl, he already knew how to deal with it.
With a thought, the blue light of his armor flared—and a second aura rose around him: white fire, silent and impossibly bright, licking up along his gauntlets and down to the tips of his boots.
The Law of Fire.
The first thread that touched the flames turned black, curled in on itself, and disintegrated. Another followed. Then another. The webs did not resist the fire—they shriveled like paper.
Alex stepped forward. Each time his boot came down, the white fire rolled outward in a slow wave, burning the invisible threads until the air felt lighter.
"So," he murmured under his breath, "your Law doesn't like mine."
He moved faster. His fire spread wider, forming a shield of heat that disintegrated every strand before it touched him. What had been a labyrinth that swallowed gods became an open road, cleared by flame.
The deeper he went, the more he saw of the scale of the trap. There were thousands of threads, layered so tightly that no mortal eye could see the stone walls beneath them. Some were stretched taut across the tunnels, others floating loosely like a mist. All of them slowed time for anything that brushed against them.
But the fire consumed them all. The webs curled, blackened, and disappeared without a trace, leaving a faint smell of burnt silk.
Kilometer after kilometer, the descent continued, and the tunnel grew stranger. The rock had begun to twist. Shapes like ribs of bone jutted from the walls, each wrapped in thread. When the fire burned them away, the air trembled as if something far below had noticed.
Alex didn't slow.
He walked as if the pressure didn't exist, as if the ancient trap meant nothing.
And with each step, he thought the same thought:
Atlach-Nacha, this will be easy.
The tunnel twisted one last time, then widened.
Alex stepped into a cavern so vast that even his vision, sharpened to the point of seeing in near-total darkness, could not see the other side. It was as if a world had been hollowed out beneath the Andes.
And everything was web.
The walls, the ceiling, the ground—layer upon layer of threads, thickening until the stone was hidden. These were not the faint, invisible filaments he had burned before. Here, the webs were dense like steel cables, gleaming faintly with the pulse of the Law of Web itself.
And at the center of it all, he felt it.
Something enormous. Sleeping. A weight that pressed on the air like a living mountain.
Atlach-Nacha.
Even asleep, its presence stretched across the cavern, a mind so alien that the air itself warped around it.
Alex did not speak. He did not need to.
The blue glow of his armor deepened, and from his body white fire erupted—not like a torch, but like a second sun igniting underground. It wasn't mere magic. This was the Law of Fire, burning so hot it warped the stone walls and turned the faint webs closest to him into ash before the flames even touched them.
The energy did not come from mana alone.
It came from two Laws combined:
The Law of Fire, absolute and pure, consuming everything.The Law of Mana, driving the spell to perfection, so efficient that not a single flicker of power was wasted.
Alex raised his right hand and released it.
A column of white-gold flame burst outward, expanding in every direction, a tide of annihilation that devoured everything within a radius of a thousand kilometers.
The cavern, once still and silent, screamed.
The webs lit up like oil-soaked paper. They did not resist. They shrieked as they curled and blackened, their intricate structures collapsing to dust. For all their strength, they were incompatible with the Law of Fire. They disintegrated instantly, no matter how deeply they were embedded into the rock.
The flames moved like a storm.
Every layer of the trap—threads laid for tens of thousands of years—vanished.
Atlach-Nacha stirred.
Its immense body, like a living mountain of black chitin and endless legs, twitched as the firestorm reached it. Eyes, cold and ancient, snapped open in the center of the cavern. For an instant, the air turned solid, the Law of Web trying desperately to trap the flames—
And failed.
The fire clung to its body, racing across its legs and abdomen. The smell of burning chitin filled the cavern. The enormous form writhed, its screeches shaking the walls, but the flames never dimmed.
White fire consumed it.
The sound of the burning filled the endless hollow space, a roar like a thousand furnaces.
When the flames finally dimmed, the webs were gone.
The walls of the cavern were scorched smooth.
And in the center, the colossal spider that had once been Atlach-Nacha lay motionless, its body charred to perfection, blackened and cracked, smoke rising from its twisted limbs.
Nothing else moved.
Alex lowered his hand, the glow of the flames fading, leaving behind only silence.
He looked once at the massive corpse, his black eyes calm behind the visor, then turned his head slightly, scanning the cavern with his senses.
Not a single thread remained.
Atlach-Nacha, the bridge-maker of the Dreamlands, had been roasted where it slept.
Chapter 562 – The Spider That Wouldn't Stay Dead
The vast cavern was silent except for the faint crackling of flames cooling against scorched stone. The air was heavy with the smell of burned chitin, thick enough that it clung to the inside of his armor.
Alex stood at the center, his black eyes locked on the enormous, charred form of Atlach-Nacha.
Its limbs were curled inward, its glossy black carapace now a mosaic of cracks and burns. Smoke rose from the gaps like steam from a roasted chestnut.
It looked dead.
But Alex didn't move.
His visor displayed nothing.
No system notification.
No "Level Up."
No message saying Law Acquired: Law of Web.
Not even a faint flicker of confirmation.
His eyebrow twitched, just barely.
"Still alive, huh?" he murmured to himself.
And without another word, he lifted his hand again.
White fire roared back into existence.
The entire cavern lit up a second time, as if a new sun had bloomed underground. Flames washed over the massive corpse, clinging to it, burning it all over again.
Atlach-Nacha twitched.
Alex did not even blink.
The flames surged higher, hotter, crawling over every limb, every joint. The air turned into an oven.
After five minutes of constant fire, he paused.
The spider was still.
His eyes narrowed behind the visor. "You're faking it."
Another wave of white fire.
WHOOSH!
This time, he didn't stop at five minutes. He kept going. Ten. Fifteen. The heat was so intense that the stone floor began to turn glassy beneath his feet, forming pools of black obsidian.
The corpse convulsed. Its legs jerked once, a pitiful, burned motion.
Alex tilted his head slightly. "Ah. There you are."
And he didn't stop.
White fire rolled endlessly from his palm, the spell so enhanced by the Law of Fire and the Law of Mana that it was effortless. He didn't even need to raise his other hand. The flames burned like they had their own will, erasing everything they touched.
Half an hour passed.
The only thing left of Atlach-Nacha was a mound of cracked, brittle pieces. It looked like someone had roasted an insect until it was hollow inside.
Still, no notification.
He waited a long moment.
Then, finally, deep in the remains, something shifted—a faint twitch, so small no human would have seen it.
His hand came up again.
"Persistent," he said flatly. "Fine."
Another explosion of white flame.
This time, he poured everything into it, condensing the heat into a wave that flooded every corner of the cavern, bouncing off the scorched walls until the air itself became fire.
The remnants of Atlach-Nacha, already blackened, split apart with a dry, brittle sound.
This time, the twitching stopped completely.
And at last, the familiar system voice echoed in his mind:
Level Up!
Gained Levels: 52,372
Unused Stat Points Acquired: 261,860
New Law Acquired: Law of Web
Alex let the flames fade, watching the last bits of smoke drift up from the brittle corpse.
"Should've stayed asleep," he muttered.
For a moment he just stood there in silence, making absolutely sure there was no more movement. Only when he was completely satisfied did he open a rift behind him.
As he stepped through the gate, the entire cavern was nothing but a sphere of scorched glass and empty silence.
He paused just beyond the rift, hovering in the silent air high above the Andes. The scorched valley far below was still cooling, steam curling up in long white strands, but he was no longer paying attention to it.
In the quiet of the sky, he pulled up his own status screen. The glowing lines of text hovered in front of him, reflecting faintly in the visor.
Name: Alex Elwood
Level: 279,060
HP: 2,203,400
MP: 1,101,880
STR: 220,350
END: 220,340
AGI: 220,330
INT: 220,376
WILL: 220,224
Unused Stat Points: 261,860
Law of Mana (3%)
Law of Ice
Law of Fire
Law of Web
He studied it for a moment, then silently began distributing the points. Everything was allocated evenly, each stat receiving exactly 52,372 points.
As the final point settled into place, the air around him rippled. Power surged through his body, heavier and more stable than before. His armor adjusted to the change, the energy field brightening briefly before settling back to normal.
New Stats:
HP: 2,727,120
MP: 1,363,740
STR: 272,722
END: 272,712
AGI: 272,702
INT: 272,748
WILL: 272,596
Unused Stat Points: 0
The difference was immediate. His perception of the world sharpened again; movement, mana, even the faintest vibration in the air felt slower.
He closed the screen and looked down at the Andes once more. There was nothing left to do here. The bridge-maker was dead, the threads were burned, and the tunnels that had once trapped even gods were silent.
With a simple thought, the rift behind him widened.
He stepped through without looking back.
Chapter 563 – The Next Question
The air inside the ice cavern shimmered again.
The council, still in heated discussion about the Silent Descent and the reports of the ground shaking in the Andes, froze as blue light folded in on itself at the center of the room.
A familiar armored figure stepped out, silent as always.
The Void Knight had returned.
Zeus, Odin, Freyja, and even Merlin fell silent. Every faction present—the elves, the angels, the dragons—turned to him instinctively.
Alex's visor swept across the room once. He didn't waste words.
"Atlach-Nacha," he said, his voice calm, almost conversational. "It won't wake again."
The statement was so casual that for a moment no one reacted. Then the meaning sank in.
Shock rippled across the room. Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca exchanged glances, eyes wide.
"You already—" Merlin began, but stopped when Alex raised a hand.
"I came back for another question," Alex said, as if they hadn't just learned that one of the Great Old Ones had been destroyed a few minutes earlier.
His visor turned toward the council.
"Where is Yig?"
The simple question hung in the air like a blade.
Everyone present understood what it meant.
One by one, the voices that had been arguing fell silent again.
For a moment, the chamber was silent.
Then, from the depths of the ice cavern, Surtr's rumbling voice rolled through the air, heavy and deep as magma shifting beneath the earth.
"So," Surtr said, "was it truly that easy?"
All eyes turned back to Alex.
The Void Knight's visor tilted slightly, as if considering how to answer.
When he spoke, his tone was the same calm certainty as before.
"It was slightly weak against me. I burned the entire cave. When it pretended to be dead, I just burned it continuously until it stopped moving."
The simplicity of the statement made several gods stare at him as if they had misheard.
"You mean…" one of the angels muttered, "…you just… roasted it?"
Alex didn't reply to that. He didn't need to. The answer was obvious.
Merlin rubbed his forehead slowly, muttering under his breath, "All the webs, all the centuries of fear over that bridge… and he treated it like a nest of spiders."
Tezcatlipoca's grin returned, sharp and amused, though his eyes remained wary. "You have no idea how many hunters disappeared into those tunnels. Even gods would be stuck until they starved. And you… you just burned it?"
Alex glanced in his direction.
"The Law of Web doesn't do well against Powerful Fire. Once the threads burned, it was only a matter of time."
Zeus opened his mouth, closed it again, and simply leaned back in his throne. There was nothing to say.
The Void Knight had turned what they feared most into something that sounded like clearing a basement.
Then Alex turned back toward Surtr.
"That leaves Yig," he said simply, as if the conversation about Atlach-Nacha was already finished.
Surtr's presence filled the cavern, molten heat radiating from the very sound of his words. His deep voice echoed from every frozen wall.
"Yig…" Surtr rumbled. "The Father of Serpents. It sleeps deep beneath the deserts of the Southwest. Its coils reach into every cavern and hollow beneath those sands. When it stirs, even the smallest motion poisons everything around it."
Odin's single eye narrowed. "Its Law?"
"The Law of Poison," Surtr answered. "Not a venom of flesh. Not something you can cure. This poison spreads across bloodlines. It seeps into children not yet born. Those who carry it may never know, until their descendants sicken and die."
The gods and immortals shifted uneasily at the description. Even angels frowned. It was a curse that could span generations, a slow and quiet apocalypse.
Surtr continued, his tone like rolling thunder.
"When Yig wakes, it will not burn the world, nor freeze it. It will strangle it. Quietly. Century by century."
The chamber went quiet.
All eyes turned to Alex again.
Through the smooth visor of the Void Knight, his voice came calm and certain, with not even a hint of hesitation:
"Then I have to kill it before it releases that poison all over the world."
His gaze swept across the council.
"There won't be a second chance. Once that venom spreads, you can't pull it back."
He said it simply, like a man stating the time, but every god and immortal in that chamber felt the weight of it.
Freyja's lips pressed into a thin line. "You intend to go directly into its nest."
Alex didn't deny it.
"I've seen what happens when you wait for these things to wake. That won't happen again."
The blue light of Alex's armor pulsed once.
Without a farewell or another word, he disappeared from the council chamber.
The sudden absence left the room silent. Even Odin did not speak. They all knew where he was going.
Southwestern desert, North America
The world reassembled around him in a dry, lifeless heat. The sky stretched wide and cloudless, and beneath his boots, the sand crunched like powdered bone.
But the desert was no longer whole.
Before him, a vast chasm split the earth apart—miles across, a wound in the land that had swallowed dunes, canyons, and every sign of life.
The edges of the cliffs were jagged, crumbling slowly into the void below.
Alex stepped forward, looking down.
What lay beneath was not rock.
Amber.
The entire hollow below the collapsed desert was lined with a smooth, golden resin, as if the world itself had crystallized. It shone faintly in the sunlight, translucent and strangely warm.
And within that amber…
a body.
Yig.
The coils of the Father of Serpents stretched out for miles, frozen in place, each scale gleaming like polished stone. Its massive head was turned slightly to the side, fangs longer than towers, mouth closed but not at rest. Even in stasis, its presence was suffocating.
The amber was a prison.
But Alex could feel it:
The Law of Poison leaked from inside, slow but constant.
The wind above the desert was empty, but the air down in the chasm was thick, carrying a faint scent of decay that didn't belong in a dry place.
Alex crouched at the edge of the chasm, gazing at the serpent's enormous form sealed inside.
"…So that's you," he said quietly.
Chapter 564 – The Frozen Serpent
Alex's boots touched the sloping wall of the chasm, his steps silent as he descended toward the amber floor. The light from above dimmed with each step, swallowed by the golden resin until the entire hollow glowed faintly like a lantern buried deep underground.
From here, he could see it clearly:
A crack.
Running across the surface of the amber like a jagged scar, stretching from the center of Yig's massive coils all the way to the wall. Thin, but wide enough that he could feel the breath of something ancient pressing against it from within.
The prison was failing.
The coils inside twitched faintly.
Not a full movement—just a tremor.
Enough to send a ripple of poisonous intent through the amber.
Alex didn't hesitate.
Time slowed around him, then stopped.
The world itself fell silent.
Time Magic.
Blue-white glyphs flared around him as he poured mana into the spell, pushing his perception into a state where even the trembling of the amber was frozen.
The serpent's head, caught mid-shiver, hung in the amber like a painting.
But Alex wasn't done.
The Law of Ice surged next, erupting from his armor like a winter storm.
Frost spread out over the amber, crawling across every coil, every scale, sinking deep into the cracks until the golden resin was covered in white crystal.
Even the faint poisonous mist in the air was forced to stillness, each particle freezing in place like glitter.
The Law of Mana tightened everything.
Every second of time-stop, every layer of ice was reinforced with impossible efficiency.
Not a single movement was wasted.
And finally—
The Law of Web.
The new power flowed out of him like invisible threads. But unlike Atlach-Nacha's, these were his to command. He wove them through the frozen cracks, over the serpent's body, forming a net of temporal bindings that held it exactly where it was.
Time, frost, and silk.
Even if Yig awoke, it would be unable to move.
Unable to strike.
Unable to release its poison.
Alex looked up at the massive head locked in front of him.
"You're not going anywhere," he said quietly.
The power of four Laws radiated outward, and the desert fell into an unnatural stillness.
Alex stood at the base of the amber chamber, the air still and unmoving around him, the coils of Yig locked in layers of frost and temporal threads.
But he knew this wasn't enough.
The prison had already cracked once.
If he left it like this, it would only crack again.
He extended both hands, palms open.
Mana surged.
The air around him warped, space bending as he began to gather and weave multiple schools of magic at once.
Fire and Ice, opposite forces, began to circle each other, merging into a blinding spiral of heat and frost.
Space folded inward, creating a pocket so that the destructive forces wouldn't leak beyond the amber chamber.
Time magic wrapped around it, slowing every vibration, making the growing sphere of power more stable.
And in the center, lightning arcs danced, snapping like serpents inside a storm.
Each layer was reinforced by the Laws he now carried:
Law of Mana made every strand precise, perfect, without waste.Law of Fire ignited the core into a sun-bright inferno.Law of Ice sharpened the freezing shell, turning every edge into something absolute.
The cavern trembled.
Amber walls, already cracked, began to fracture further just from the pressure of the spell he was forming. The serpent's frozen body twitched faintly inside, as though sensing what was coming.
Alex's visor narrowed.
"Don't bother."
The heat from the spinning core of fire and lightning roared like a furnace, while the outer layers of ice and temporal control crushed down to bind it all together. Opposites that should have annihilated each other were forced into harmony under his control.
He had used this method before, but never at this scale.
The air hummed as the finished sphere floated above his palms, the size of a house.
A silent storm of flame, ice, lightning, and warped space, all locked inside a prison of time.
"This is where it ends."
With a flick of his hand, Alex hurled the sphere directly into the heart of Yig's frozen coils.
The sphere sank deep into the coils of the frozen serpent, burrowing into the cracks of amber as if the world itself was drawing it in.
For a heartbeat, there was only silence.
Then—
Detonation.
The explosion didn't roar outward like a normal blast. It collapsed inward first.
Space folded in on itself, crushing Yig's enormous body against the sphere's core. The serpent's scales groaned and split like glass under a hydraulic press.
And then, the pressure reversed.
Fire erupted, a column of white and gold, so bright that the amber walls turned molten just from the light.
The heat burned straight through the coils, cutting clean paths through flesh and scale as if they were parchment.
At the same time, ice bloomed in perfect opposition.
The flames didn't destroy it; instead, the two forces moved together like a predator with two jaws, crushing Yig's flesh from both directions.
Every time fire burned a wound open, ice raced in behind it, freezing the exposed flesh solid, only for more heat to shatter the brittle pieces into shards.
Lightning struck next.
It didn't arc randomly. Each bolt was guided by time magic, stabbing through the frozen serpent like a surgeon's scalpel.
The lightning shattered the serpent's bones, ripped through its fangs, and destroyed the venom sacs before they could release even a single drop of poison.
Time magic locked everything in place.
Even as the serpent's body tried to convulse, it moved as though caught in amber all over again, frozen in the moment of destruction.
Space magic crushed each wound further, folding each piece of Yig's immense body into itself. Scales and flesh collapsed, pulled apart into fragments of nothingness.
For a full minute, the explosion wasn't a sound but a phenomenon.
Amber turned to vapor.
The hollow desert floor became an artificial sun.
When the light began to fade, what had been an endless coil of poison and scales was now a shattered ruin.
Chunks of charred serpent flesh floated weightlessly inside the unstable pocket of folded space, each piece frozen in a block of ice before fire reduced it to ash.
Venom that had been forming in its body was burned to smoke, purged before a single drop touched the air.
The last spark of lightning struck its head, splitting its massive skull in two.
The serpent's mind, its Law, and its presence—
gone.
The silence after was absolute.
Alex stood alone in the molten, collapsing hollow, the heat rising around him like mist, but none of it touched him.
Only when the last echoes of its existence faded from his senses did he lower his hand.
As the last sparks of lightning faded, the world seemed to hold its breath.
In that silence, a familiar chime echoed in Alex's mind—calm, mechanical, absolute.
Level Up!
Gained Levels: 41,880
Unused Stat Points Acquired: 209,400
New Law Acquired: Law of Poison
The words appeared across his vision, hanging there in luminous lines of light.
Alex glanced at them for a brief moment, scanning each notification with calm precision.
Another increase. Another Law.
The presence of Yig was completely gone. Not suppressed, not dormant—gone.
Below his boots, the molten floor of the hollow began to solidify, waves of cooling amber and glassy rock freezing under the effect of residual time magic.
Where a moment ago an ancient poison had slept, there was now only silence, light, and the faint smell of burned scales.
Alex let out a slow, controlled breath and closed the notification window with a thought.
Alex opened his status screen, the transparent window appearing before his eyes. Streams of numbers and letters hovered silently, reflecting in the visor of his armor.
Name: Alex Elwood
Level: 320,940
HP: 2,727,120
MP: 1,363,740
STR: 272,722
END: 272,712
AGI: 272,702
INT: 272,748
WILL: 272,596
Unused Stat Points: 209,400
Laws:
Law of Mana (3%)
Law of Ice
Law of Fire
Law of Web
Law of Poison
His eyes moved down to the unused stat points.
209,400 points.
Without hesitation, he selected distribute evenly. Mana flared as the points flowed into his body like liquid light. The frozen air around him rippled as each stat increased.
The hollow desert chamber shook faintly from the force, amber and rock cracking from the sudden expansion of energy.
New Stats:
HP: 3,145,920
MP: 1,572,640
STR: 314,602
END: 314,592
AGI: 314,582
INT: 314,628
WILL: 314,476
Unused Stat Points: 0
Power surged through his limbs, clean and controlled, every sensation sharpening. Even standing still, the sheer density of his presence pressed against the walls of the amber chamber like a physical force.
Alex closed the screen, his expression calm.
With Yig gone, this place no longer had a purpose.
Alex did not leave immediately.
Instead, he raised his right hand one last time.
White-gold fire erupted from his palm, sweeping across the hollow like a tide. The flames licked over every broken scale, every piece of shattered flesh, every trace of amber that had once held Yig.
Nothing was spared.
The heat was so intense that even the blackened fragments of bone turned to vapor, erased from existence. There would be no corpse left behind, no fragments for anyone—or anything—to find.
Only when the hollow was nothing more than a smooth, glassy basin of cooled, fused stone did he finally lower his hand.
He turned without a word, opened a rift, and stepped through.
Ice Cavern – The Council Chamber
Blue light folded in on itself once again, and the Void Knight appeared in the same place he had stood before.
The gods and immortals turned toward him instantly, their expressions a mixture of awe and dread.
Alex's calm voice cut through the silence:
"Yig won't be waking. Now," he said, his visor sweeping across the room, "what's the next address?"
The council chamber froze once again, every being present suddenly aware that he was going to handle the next one just as quickly.
The council remained silent for a moment after Alex's question, unsure who would speak.
Finally, it was Surtr's heavy, molten voice that broke the silence.
"The next threat," Surtr said, "is Cthulhu."
The very name changed the air in the room. Conversations stopped, and the faint magical glow of the chamber dimmed as if the world itself disliked hearing it spoken aloud.
"Where?" Alex asked, his voice steady.
"Beneath the deepest trench in the Pacific," Surtr replied. "Even in slumber, its presence twists the sea around it. It is stronger than the others you have faced."
Odin added grimly, "Cthulhu wields two Laws: the Law of Space and the Law of Dream."
Alex stood still for a long moment, silent behind his visor.
Law of Space.
That one was troublesome.
His thoughts moved quickly.
Teleportation magic bends space, but it is never as perfect as the Law itself.
The Law of Space doesn't just open a door; it rewrites the concept of distance.
Against a being that controls it, the battlefield becomes infinite and unpredictable.
The Law of Dream didn't bother him.
Dreams couldn't touch his Will.
But Space was different.
Through the visor, his voice came calm, thoughtful.
"If it's Space, that one will be difficult. That Law is better at teleportation than any teleportation magic I know."
His words were simple, but the weight behind them made every immortal present pay closer attention.
"I'll need to kill the other Great Old Ones before I go to it," he continued. "Cthulhu should be very strong, and its flexibility with space-time will be dangerous. The Law of Dreams won't affect me—but the Law of Space will be a problem."
He turned slightly, almost to himself.
"I'll overcome it."
The tone wasn't arrogant. It was just a decision.
For a moment, the entire council chamber was silent, the echoes of his words hanging in the frost-covered air. They could tell he wasn't underestimating Cthulhu—but that he was already planning how to deal with it.
Chapter 565 – The Ones Who Remember
Surtr's molten voice filled the chamber, heavy with finality.
"Those are all the ones I know," he said. "The others… I do not know where they are sealed. Many of their prisons were made in places that have long since changed. Time swallows everything, even memory."
Alex stood silent for a moment, considering that answer. His visor shifted slightly as he looked around the council.
"Then is there anyone here," Alex asked, "who knows of a god older than all of you? Someone who might remember more. Someone who was alive when these things were first sealed."
His voice was calm, but it cut through the room like a blade. The question was simple, but none of them answered immediately.
Finally, it was Zeus who spoke, his voice low.
"Olympus knows of one," he said. "Gaia."
Alex tilted his head slightly. "Gaia?"
"She was there when the Primordials first fought," Zeus explained. "She was older than all of us. She remembers the earth before there were names for it."
Odin added, "We have asked her before. She is… asleep. She has been asleep for a very long time. There are times when she stirs, when we can ask a single question, but now she has gone silent. We have tried to wake her. She does not answer."
"Where?" Alex asked.
"The deepest parts of the earth," Athena answered quietly. "A place no mortal can reach. Even we do not go there unless the world itself calls us."
Merlin stepped forward, his staff scraping softly against the frozen floor. "If Gaia does not wish to wake, there is no way to force her. Her dreams are the crust of the earth. The world is her body."
Alex stood still for a long moment.
Then, in a voice as steady as before, he said:
"When she wakes, tell her I want to speak with her."
He paused, then added:
"If there's anyone who knows the places of the rest, it's her."
A murmur rose from the gathered immortals and envoys, and someone from the side of the hall finally voiced the question that many were thinking:
"What about Nyx?"
An elder elf stepped forward. "You said she has been missing for ages, but even if she is missing, do you truly have no clues? No whispers? Nothing?"
Zeus's expression darkened. Athena answered in his place, her tone level but serious.
"None. Nyx did not just hide. She vanished. Not even the Fates, nor the threads of prophecy, can see her. Her absence is like a hole in existence."
Hera added quietly, "When she chose to disappear, even we could no longer feel her presence. If anyone still walks unseen through the shadows of creation, it is her. But we have no way to reach her."
The elf frowned. "So she might still be alive."
"Alive," Hermes said, "but hidden so deeply that even gods cannot find her."
The hall quieted again after Hermes' words, but the question was not done.
One of the Vanir elders glanced toward the far end of the chamber, toward the molten glow that radiated from nowhere and everywhere.
"Surtr," the elder asked, "you were there in the first age. Do you know where Nyx went?"
The heat in the room shifted, like the slow stirring of a deep volcano.
When Surtr spoke, his voice was low, slow, like stone cracking.
"I do not."
The single answer was heavy.
Surtr's ember-like eyes flickered once, then he added:
"In the first war, I saw her. And after the war, I felt her. Then one day, there was nothing. She did not die. She… left.
The night itself folded around her and she was gone. Not even fire can see through that absence."
He paused, and the heat in his voice dimmed.
"If Nyx does not want to be found, you will not find her. Not me. Not any god."
The chamber was silent after Merlin's explanation.
Even gods who were rarely shaken wore tense expressions.
A Great Old One holding the Law of Darkness… and Nyx fleeing from it—this was not something they liked to hear.
Before anyone could respond, another voice slipped into the room.
Calm. Feminine. Close.
"You don't need to look so far."
Every immortal in the hall turned sharply.
The space just beyond the center of the council table folded in on itself like rippling ink, and a woman stepped forward from the dark as though she had been there all along.
She was tall, slender, with straight black hair cascading past her shoulders. Her skin was pale, and her eyes glowed a deep violet, so vivid they seemed to pull the light out of the room.
There was no sound of footsteps, no mana signature, no ripple of divine power—she was simply there.
The gods immediately recognized that presence. It didn't belong to any pantheon.
Odin's one eye narrowed, lightning crackling faintly in his palm. "Who are you?"
She smiled faintly, not looking at him. Her gaze drifted to Alex instead, as if none of the other beings mattered.
"You wanted someone who remembers," she said softly. "So I came."
Alex's visor focused on her, but he didn't move.
The woman's smile deepened, and for a moment, the purple in her eyes seemed to swirl like an abyss.