The abandoned cathedral in the outskirts of Backlund had been reduced to a pulverized crater of shattered stained glass and cratered stone. The hunt for the Aurora Order demigods was supposed to be a precise, overwhelming ambush.
And for the first few minutes, it was.
Cattleya, the Sequence 4 Mysticologist, had successfully severed the spatial coordinates around the cathedral, weaving a starlight domain of twisting fairy tales that trapped the targets. Beside her, Audrey Hall stood with elegant poise, her emerald eyes glowing with a faint, golden hue. As a Sequence 4 Manipulator, she was ruthlessly tearing through the mental defenses of Kasmir, turning the Aurora Order fanatic's mind into a chaotic storm of agonizing dread.
Caught in the crossfire, Xio sliced through the darkness, her Arbiter pathway powers enforcing absolute authority. "Imprison!" she declared, freezing the shadowy tendrils trying to protect Botis. Above them, Fors phased through the collapsing masonry as a Sequence 5 Traveler, dropping deadly occult spells in a relentless barrage.
Botis, battered and bleeding black corrupted blood, was seconds away from death. Kasmir was already clutching his own skull, his mind unraveling into madness.
Then, the air grew utterly still.
The sounds of crumbling stone and explosive magic vanished, swallowed by an unnatural, suffocating silence. A gentle, grandfatherly voice echoed not in their ears, but directly within their Sea of Collective Subconscious.
"To corner a beast is to invite its final, desperate wrath. Why not lay down your arms and seek peace?"
An elderly man with a long, pristine white beard and a simple linen robe materialized from the shadows. He didn't teleport; it felt as if he had always been standing there, watching them as an observer of history.
It was Hermes. The ancient deity-level entity of the Spectator pathway.
Instantly, the battlefield inverted. Audrey gasped, stumbling backward as the sheer, terrifying weight of an Angel-level mind crashed into her own. Her Mind Storm violently rebounded. Cattleya coughed up a mouthful of blood as the starlight domain shattered like fragile glass. Xio and Fors felt an overwhelming, paralyzing desire to simply drop to their knees and give up. Their fighting spirit was thoroughly erased.
Freed from their constraints, Botis let out a sickening, deformed roar, his flesh tearing apart as he prepared to unleash a devastating Black Knight's corruption. Kasmir's eyes rolled perfectly white as he synchronized with the ravings of the True Creator. The Tarot Club members were entirely paralyzed by Hermes' psychological manipulation.
From the depths of the Spirit World, cold, grayish-white fog surged.
The temperature plummeted. A pair of impeccably polished leather boots stepped out from a rift in the air from the Historical Void itself.
Gehrman Sparrow.
Klein had been observing from Sefirah Castle, intending to let his members handle the hunt as a trial, but the presence of an Angel of the Twilight Hermit Order fundamentally severed that plan.
As a Sequence 3 Scholar of Yore, Klein could not directly defeat a high-sequence figure of the Spectator pathway, but he didn't need to. He only needed to be a flawlessly lethal distraction.
Without a single word, Gehrman Sparrow raised his left hand, snapping his fingers. Pa!
The Spirit Body Threads of both Botis and Kasmir seized with violent, absolute rigidity. Klein had summoned a Historical Projection of an Angel-level artifact to violently suppress the surrounding space, severing their connection to the True Creator for a microsecond.
In his right hand, the revolver Death Knell gleamed. It wasn't loaded with ordinary bullets, but condensed compressed sunlight and purification magic pulled from the void.
Bang! Bang!
The shots echoed like thunderclaps. Kasmir's head exploded backward, completely vaporized into a mist of bone and corrupted ash. Botis, attempting to use a spatial jump, was forcibly yanked back by his Spirit Body Threads. Klein didn't hesitate. He forcefully yanked his wrist backward. Botis's corrupted soul was violently ripped from his physical vessel. As the man's physical body convulsed, a crimson sword condensed in Klein's hand, a terrifying manifestation of high-level flame and destruction.
With a single, teleporting dash, Gehrman Sparrow appeared behind the demigod and drove the blazing blade straight through Botis's chest, twisting it upward and slicing the demigod entirely in half. Black blood and charred organs rained upon the rubble.
Dead. Both of them, in the span of three seconds.
Hermes' eyes narrowed. The ancient old man looked at the blood-soaked, cold-eyed adventurer, fully recognizing the terrifying aura of the gray fog clinging to him. The ancient Spectator weighed the situation. Engaging in a death match with the favored Blessed of a reviving Great Old entity over two dead zealots was utterly pointless.
Hermes gave a polite, archaic bow. "A swift execution. The Hunter's gaze is truly sharp tonight."
His body dissolved into a psychological cue, erasing his physical presence and fading into the collective subconscious, fleeing the battlefield as smoothly as he had arrived.
Before anyone could catch their breath, a shrill, piercing whistle echoed from the physical world outside the cathedral's remnants. A blood-red flare shot up into the dark Backlund sky, bathing the clouds in crimson.
Leonard's signal. The Red Gloves had arrived and were locking down the perimeter with an official Nighthawk demigod.
"Leave," Klein ordered, his voice an icy rasp. His hand snapped out, catching the shimmering, starry Beyonder characteristics of Botis before they could fully condense. He tossed them to Fors.
"Now!" Cattleya gritted out, wiping the blood from her chin.
Fors snapped out of her stupor. She grabbed Xio's shoulder, throwing her other hand out to encompass Audrey, Cattleya, and Mr. World. The Sequence 5 Traveler visualized their pre-arranged safehouse. A door of illusory, brilliant starlight rotated into existence in front of them.
With the heavy footsteps of Nighthawks echoing on the stone steps outside, the five of them plunged into the starry door, the spatial rift sealing shut just as the cathedral doors were blown inward.
Normally, Traveling felt like swimming rapidly through a tunnel of bizarre, overlapping colors, flanked by the incomprehensible, chaotic entities of the Spirit World. However, the moment they crossed the threshold, something went catastrophically wrong.
The Spirit World here wasn't just chaotic; it felt... dead.
A horrifying, sterile vacuum of spiritual energy violently grabbed them. It was as if the very laws of mysticism were being aggressively burned away by an invisible, anti-magic engine.
Fors screamed as the starlight around them shattered into jagged, burning fragments. The spatial coordinate she held onto dissolved into nothingness. They were violently expelled from the dimension like a bodily organ being rejected by an immune system.
CRASH!
They hit the ground with bone-rattling force, slamming into a pile of damp, foul-smelling black bags.
"Cough...!" Xio rolled instinctively, popping up into a defensive crouch, a blade instantly drawn.
Fors groaned, clutching her head as she struggled to her feet. "What... what was that? The Spirit World... it forcibly closed on me..."
"Stay alert," Cattleya whispered. She tapped her glasses, attempting to activate her Sequence 4 Mysticologist spiritual vision to analyze the laws of their new surroundings.
Hiss!
Cattleya let out a sharp cry, clamping a hand over her eyes as twin trails of blood leaked through her fingers. "The laws... they are entirely gone! No, they are being suppressed. My connection... it's fading!"
Audrey, brushing a smudge of dark, foul grease from her usually immaculate dress, quickly attempted to soothe them with Placate. She reached into her Sea of Subconscious, expecting the vast, oceanic power of a Manipulator. Instead, she only pulled out a thin, thread-like stream of soothing energy.
Her breath hitched. The immense, god-like mental domain she possessed was gone. Locked away. "I... I can only use my powers up to Sequence 7," Audrey whispered, her voice laced with growing horror. "I am... just a Psychiatrist again."
"Me too," Fors panicked, her fingers frantically swiping the air. "I can't open a door! The highest spell I have is from the Trickmaster sequence!" Xio gripped her sword tightly, realizing her authoritative physical commands were entirely unresponsive. She was reduced back to an Interrogator.
Whatever this realm was, its ambient spiritual laws were so utterly hostile to Beyonders that the universe itself had forcefully suppressed their Beyonder characteristics to Sequence 7, shielding their souls from total collapse by locking down their divinity.
"Mr. World!" Audrey turned, seeking the calm, terrifying presence of their most powerful member. If anyone knew what was happening, it was the Blessed of the Fool.
Klein was slowly picking himself up from the wet, asphalt ground. He had felt the horrifying suppression the moment they landed. Sefirah Castle's connection hadn't completely vanished, but it felt incredibly muffled, like trying to hear a whisper entirely underwater. His scholar's coat was stained with something smelling aggressively like exhaust fumes and rotting food.
Worse, he had instantly lost his Faceless powers. The skeletal structure of his face, the muscle tension, the pigment of his hair, all of it forcibly snapped back to its default state. The cold, sharp, predatory features of Gehrman Sparrow melted away.
When Audrey, Fors, Xio, and Cattleya looked at him, their hearts skipped a beat in pure, unadulterated shock.
Instead of the terrifying, mad adventurer of the seas, standing before them was a young man in his twenties. He had soft, dark hair, deep brown eyes, and the somewhat pale, unassuming face of a university scholar. He looked... normal. Utterly, disarmingly normal. Even his terrifying aura was entirely gone, replaced by the faint, hidden danger of a Magician.
But Klein wasn't paying attention to the girls' shocked stares.
His dark eyes were wide, staring in absolute disbelief at the environment around them. It wasn't Backlund. There was no gas-lamp smog.
They were standing in an alleyway constructed of massive, uniformly baked red bricks and harsh, grey concrete. Rusted fire escapes climbed up towering buildings that pierced the early dawn sky with millions of electric lights. The distinct, overwhelming smell of gasoline, exhaust fumes, and stale urine hit his nose. In the distance, the wail of a police siren, a modern police siren, echoed through the canyon of concrete.
Klein's breath caught in his throat. Modern lights. Concrete. Dumpsters. The asphalt.
A wave of overwhelming, blinding nostalgia hit him. Earth? Did I actually return? Did the teleportation anomaly throw us through the door of time and space?!
His heart pounded wildly in his chest. For a fleeting, euphoric second, Zhou Mingrui thought he was finally home.
Then, he stepped out past the edge of the alleyway, looking up toward the dawning sky. Perched against the side of a massive, gleaming glass skyscraper was a colossal, high-definition digital billboard, vividly glowing in the morning light.
It depicted a handsome man with a goatee wearing an incredibly sleek, high-tech suit of red and gold armor, shaking hands with a woman in a red, blue, and gold military-style uniform. The glowing English text beneath them read:
STARK RESILIENT & ALPHA FLIGHT: REBUILDING THE FUTURE, TOGETHER. SUPPORT THE REGISTRATION.
Klein froze. The euphoric nostalgia in his chest shattered, instantly replaced by a deep, hollow abyss of absolute dread.
He didn't read American comics avidly back in his old life, but pop culture was pop culture and he was a keyboard warrior. He recognized that armor. He recognized that name.
He hadn't returned to Earth. He had been thrown into a universe where gods, aliens, and reality-warping mutants treated the planet like a weekly chew toy and right now, he was stuck in the middle of it as a Sequence 7 Magician, serving as the sole bodyguard for four terrified, confused Victorian-era noblewomen and pirates who didn't speak a single word of English.
"Mr... World?" Audrey asked tentatively in Loenese, her green eyes full of intense curiosity and caution as she took in his unfamiliar, scholarly face. "Where are we?"
Klein slowly closed his eyes, inhaling the smell of New York City exhaust.
"We," he said, using his actual, unfiltered voice for the first time in an eternity, "are in a very, very big problem."