Sign In To The Body Of Chaos At The Start

The world was holding its breath.

The Skyreach Fault, a graveyard of forgotten Sovereigns' sins, now became the crucible where fate, ambition, and betrayal would clash.

Damon stood alone on the jagged obsidian precipice, with thirty-six Abyssal Worshippers encircling him in a tightening noose of malice. Above, the fractured moon gleamed with a muted cruelty, as though mocking the notion of balance.

And from the Rift, the Dominion Beast emerged. It wasn't a monster in the traditional sense. It was a paradox made flesh.

Its form was an amalgam of impossibilities, an endless spiral of wings that folded and unfolded in rhythms that defied linear time.

Its "body" was a mosaic of inverted stars, each fragment a window into the Abyss. Eyes, hundreds, maybe thousands, flickered across its shifting mass, some blinking into existence, others fading out, always watching, never in unison.

Its roars were literal fractures in reality itself, each pulse warping the dimensions around it. The creature was a form of absolute power, the Abyss had formed it as a statement of its power, and this statement was certainly successful.

Antares stood before it, arms outstretched, like a maestro conducting a grand symphony of destruction.

"Behold, Damon!" Antares' voice reverberated with twisted triumph, "The Nyx'tar Dominion Beast! Born from the fractures of the Wellspring's echoes and the Abyss's insatiable hunger. It knows no fear. No limit. It exists to erase all that thinks itself real."

The Dominion Beast's arrival would have shattered the resolve of armies. But Damon was no army. He was a predator.

He inhaled, slow and deliberate.

The Seed of Aether pulsed within his core, its rhythm syncing with the erratic heartbeat of the Fault. Every leyline fracture, every distorted pulse of space, all converged into his awareness.

His eyes of Oblivion narrowed. He saw it, beneath the abyssal sigils and corrupted anchors, threads. Weaknesses.

"They brought a beast that can't be born," Damon murmured, his voice carrying an edge of cold amusement, "How poetic. Neither can I."

The first strike came not from Damon, but from the Dominion Beast. A lash of void-threaded tendrils, bladed and serrated, surged forward at impossible speeds, warping space as they lunged.

The impact zone around Damon distorted, folding inward like a collapsing star. But Damon was no longer bound by conventional space. He stepped sideways. not a dodge, but a deliberate fold of reality.

The tendrils slashed into an empty moment, never reaching him, his control over space was far too exquisite at this point to be caught by an attack like that.

His form blurred, reappearing mid-air with BloodReaper drawn, the blade now pulsating in tandem with the Seed's resonance. It no longer absorbed light. It refracted existence.

Damon swung once and his attack was simply a show of force. His Spatial Cleave severed the dominion tendrils' tether to the present, erasing their existence as though they had never been summoned.

The Worshippers recoiled, several faltering in their chants. A crack ran through the primary Rift Anchor.

Astralene's handiwork had begun.

Hidden amidst the rib-like spires above, Astralene's fingers traced through the air, golden lines of Fate unfurling from her Book of Destiny. She wasn't just rewriting runes, she was severing cause-and-effect chains linked to the Nexus.

Every twist of her fingers sent subtle ripples through the summoning structure, weakening it strand by strand. But the Dominion Beast was vast. The Rift's foundation was layered.

She needed time and Damon was buying her just the amount of time that was necessary for her.

The Dominion Beast roared again, its soundless fury tearing a section of the Fault's ridge apart. Worshippers scrambled to stabilize the collapse, invoking Void Barriers that shimmered with corruption.

Antares remained at the epicenter, his aura swelling, hands weaving Abyssal Mantras.

"Damon!" Antares snarled, stepping forward as the beast readjusted, "You can dance all you like, but every moment you breathe here feeds the Rift! The Nexus isn't a spell. It's a birth canal! You're too late to stop it!"

But Damon's smirk only deepened. His response was surgical.

"You still think I came here to stop the summoning?"

He raised his hand, and in that moment, a secondary spatial pulse rippled through the battlefield. Antares' expression shifted, his mouth opening in sharp realization.

The leyline beneath his feet buckled.

A figure emerged from thin air, Artemis.

Wreathed in Spirit Veil, she was a ghost of grace and lethality. Her twin daggers, forged from crystallized spirit aether, shimmered with lethal precision.

Before Antares could even summon a defensive chant, Artemis struck.

Her first dagger pierced the Void Shroud Antares had subconsciously maintained. The barrier cracked, a spiderweb of fractures spreading from the impact point.

Her second blade followed with a twisting arc, slicing through the stabilizing anchors around Antares' immediate perimeter.

Antares snarled, summoning a backlash of abyssal force, but Artemis was already gone, vanishing back into the Spirit Veil.

But the damage was done. The Dominion Beast's stabilization wavered, its limbs glitching in and out of phase. The Rift anchors sputtered, their resonance faltering.

The Beast had after all been weakened to be summoned in this world, and Artemis' attack had done even more damage to that summoning altar.

Antares staggered, a snarl of frustration cutting through his composed veneer. His eyes darted skyward.

Astralene's silhouette gleamed atop the spires, illuminated by lines of rewritten destiny.

"Checkmate," she whispered.

But Antares wasn't finished.

"NOW!" Antares bellowed, his voice infused with a command-layered spell. The remaining thirty-six worshippers shifted formation, abandoning the Nexus rituals and invoking Abyssal Convergence.

They formed an encirclement around Damon, collapsing the battlefield into a singularity zone. Chains of reality-stasis lashed out, attempting to immobilize Damon within a pocket dimension of controlled entropy.

It was a massive gambit. If Damon couldn't move, they could stabilize the Dominion Beast through sheer forced convergence and still win the fight. They hadn't expected the need to use this, but they prepared for a-lot of possible scenarios.

But Damon had long since prepared for this. His left hand, already splayed open, closed into a fist. The Seed of Aether responded.

Space bent, but this time not as a defensive fold. It bent offensively.

The collapsing singularity the worshippers had conjured recoiled, as if struck by a counterweight. Damon wasn't merely manipulating space now, he was dictating which "versions" of space were allowed to exist.

The battlefield shimmered.

Half of the Worshippers suddenly found themselves sliced into misaligned dimensional echoes. They weren't dead.

They simply ceased to align with this version of reality, their forms dragged into fragment timelines where Damon was no longer their opponent.

Antares' eyes widened at the sight, seeing just how powerful Damon was, it sent shivers down his spine, all the while Damon's figure blurred, closing the distance between them within a heartbeat.

The first clash was raw.

BloodReaper met Antares' twin voidblades in a burst of refracted shadows. Their collision sent shockwaves through the Fault, fissures spiderwebbing outward from their point of impact.

"You're not supposed to be this strong yet!" Antares hissed, pressing forward with a flurry of precise thrusts, each one laced with Abyssal infection meant to corrode Damon's spatial control.

But Damon wasn't defending. He welcomed the assault, allowing Antares to overcommit and then he countered.

With a subtle pivot, Damon invoked Spatial Twist, redirecting Antares' own voidblade into a recursive loop. The weapon phased, slashing toward its wielder with the same momentum Antares had launched.

Antares barely parried, stumbling backward, his defenses fractured.

Damon didn't relent, keeping up the pressure. Shadow manifestations, forged from Ashborn, erupted around him.

Each shadow bore weapons forged from his will, their strikes coordinated with a precision that boxed Antares into a shrinking battlefield.

But the Dominion Beast wasn't idle either. Sensing its Rift Nexus destabilizing, it roared, unleashing a nova of Abyssal Gravity.

The world compressed. Damon's shadows strained, space itself trembling under the sheer gravitational dominance.

Yet, Damon stood unmoved. He raised BloodReaper vertically, its edge gleaming with crystallized Aether.

With a decisive slash, he invoked Void Lockout, a Forbidden Spell that severed mana channels within a localized dimension.

The Dominion Beast's gravitational pulse faltered, its core compression halting as its connection to this realm weakened. Abyssal energy around it frayed, as if the world was actively rejecting its presence.

Antares snarled, summoning the last reserves of his power, attempting to re-anchor the Dominion Beast by sheer force of will.

But Astralene was already ahead. From her vantage point, she unleashed the final directive of her rewritten Fate Weave.

The Rift Anchors, deprived of their stabilizing chains, imploded.

A silent wave of conceptual collapse surged across the battlefield. The Dominion Beast, still mid-birth, roared in fragmented defiance as it began to unravel, not by Damon's hand, but by the Fault itself rejecting its existence.

Reality was expelling the intruder. Antares roared in denial, surging forward in a reckless final strike, aiming to impale Damon through the heart.

But Damon didn't need to block at all. Artemis emerged from the veil once more, her daggers lancing out, severing the Abyssal sigils along Antares' arms, crippling his casting channels.

Antares' strike lost all force, and Damon caught his wrist with bone-crushing precision.

"You've lost," Damon said quietly.

And then, for the first time, Antares looked afraid.

But the battle was not yet won.

As the Dominion Beast's form disintegrated, an emergency Rift Beacon activated, a failsafe planted by Varus himself.

A portal began to open behind the collapsing Nexus, larger, more forceful.

From it, reinforcements would emerge.

Damon's expression hardened.

"This isn't over."

He turned to Astralene, whose eyes reflected the incoming danger.

"No. But it will be."