A man was tied to a chair in the middle of a dank basement. He was unconscious, hanging limp, his head lolling to one side. The only thing that kept him from falling to the floor was the enchanted rope that curled around him like a snake eager to crush his body.

Alexic Kalcav paced, from one side of the basement to the other, waiting. The unconscious man was covered in blood. For hours, the man had been tortured for information. The wounds that had caused all that blood to flow had all healed by now, but the pain was still written on the man’s face even while he slept. Alexic was proud of that.

He’d always been good at inflicting pain.

The man had given him all the information he could. Alexic had tortured him until he’d signed a truth contract. Then he’d tortured him some more as he’d asked the man questions. Mostly because he enjoyed the sounds people made when they were in agony, and the different ways they reacted, all of which melded together by the end of it.

And because he required answers.

He released a long breath, counting down in his head.

When he reached one, he looked over at the unconscious man slumped in the chair.

The man flickered out of existence. Or, rather, he’d been transported back to the Tower of Champions along with every other Champion on this forsaken planet on the edge of nowhere.

Alexic Kalcav smiled. The Champions were all gone. Which meant Xavier Collins was gone.

The Earth was free of its protection.

He finally stopped pacing, resting a hand on the pommel of his sword. Xavier Collins had sent the sector a message. A powerful one. One that had been heeded, far and wide. But Alexic Kalcav wasn’t from the Silver River sector, and those that he answered to weren’t afraid of the True Progenitor, or what he could become in a mere five years.

In twenty years? A hundred? A thousand?

Perhaps then they would have some cause to worry, but right now… things weren’t so dire.

Alexic had been sent here to teach the boy a lesson. To show him that there were those who were not frightened of him. To show that he could never truly protect Earth, not on his own.

That if he wanted the world to be safe, he would need to make some deals.

Before the man who’d been tied to the chair had disappeared, he had given Alexic everything he’d needed to know. The position of Xavier’s camp within that giant forest. The number of people that were within it. The levels and general dispositions of its six E Grade protectors.

And one more thing—the identities of every family member of Xavier Collins and the others in his party.

He rubbed hands together. Alexic was going to enjoy himself.

~

Emperor Larona floated in the black once more. It had been some time since she’d made it out here. Since she’d drifted into the void between the stars where the answers came to her most readily.

She played with the threads of time and space and possibility, looking at the futures of the person who most interested her. Her lips quirked up at the sides as she saw one possible future—the one she was betting on happening the most.

The one she ­needed to happen, beyond anything.

As she focused on that thread—on that possible future—it tugged at her, pulling her along in a way that she’d never felt before.

Empress Larona received a flood of notifications. Her foresight… it was, ranking up?

Her eyes widened. It shouldn’t have been possible for her to receive more ranks in this spell. She’d hit the peak of C Grade long ago. She would need to break through to B Grade before the spell could move up in ranks.

Or so she’d thought…

But it wasn’t the ranks that stunned her the most. It was what she was seeing in this young man’s future.

If the thread she’d followed, the thread that had tugged at her, went where it showed it did…

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There’s a lot more than this sector at risk…

And the future was changing. Coming closer than she’d ever thought possible.

Soon, it would come time for her to not simply put the pieces she needed in place, but actually began to move them.

~

The creature sailed through the void. It did not need a craft to venture through vacuum, for it had been born in the deep nothing between worlds. At first, all it had been was a spark. An accident. Microbes on the surface of an asteroid caught in the gravitational pull of a nearby solar system.

But when that asteroid entered the solar system, something miraculous happened. A voice spoke to it.

The voice of the System.

It whispered something about being integrated into the Greater Universe, and not only did the spark hear the whispers, it realised it knew itself—realised that it had a mind. It was a being, and the System wished for it to thrive. To advance.

To consume.

And so that’s exactly what the creature did.

At first its thoughts were small, simple things, for it had no words and only an instinct. But as it sailed through the void it picked things up. It learned.

The asteroid was pulled toward a planet. The world of Groneku. The world was inhabited by a species of snake people that had only been integrated in the system for a few decades when the creature arrived.

The Groneku were fortunate, for they had lived in a quiet sector in their universe. When their planet was restricted, there had been no interference from other Denizens allowed. When the five years ended, the people had made alliances through the Tower of Champions.

Their planet was safe.

Until the asteroid hit.

It was not in the nature of the Serpen of Groneku to look up, and so they did not see their destruction coming. The impact was an extinction level event. At least, to any normal world it would have been.

It wiped out all those below D Grade.

The creature finally had more than space scraps to consume. The world was abound with corpses, and by the time the Groneku knew it was among them, it was too powerful, and it was too late.

The end came for them.

When the creature had consumed the entire planet, bringing every ounce of energy into itself that it had to offer, and every single Mastery Point from those beings that had been left alive, it fashioned a new asteroid for it to ride upon from the planet itself. It had become strong enough to pull the planet out of its orbit from the solar system’s star.

And it moved on, from one solar system to another, one planet to another, consuming all that came before it.

Something whispered to it as it moved through space. Words that it knew came from the very System itself.

Its ruler.

Its saviour.

Its God.

The one that had brought it out from nothing.

The one that had turned it into what it was today.

The System had a quest for the creature to perform. There was a sector, far off on the edge of the Greater Universe. The creature had received similar quests like this in the past, gaining many rewards for completing them. But the creature did not care about rewards, it simply wished to consume. And wherever the System sent it, there was always more to be devoured.

The quest was one of purging.

And so the creature accepted the System’s quest and began its long journey toward the Silver River sector. The creature did not think in terms of time. It did not worry about how long it would take to get to where it needed to go. Time was not a concept it worried about. It did not know if it would take minutes, hours, decades, or millennia, but it knew it was on its way.

For the Silver River sector, the end was inevitable.

~

The oldest and most powerful Denizen of the Greater Universe once more stood at the top of the tower he had long ago created in honour of the Tower of Champions. He walked through his garden until he reached the edge of the roof, then he leant against the rail and released a long and pained sign.

He was one of very few people in the Greater Universe who was aware of the System’s origins. One of very few people who knew what its ultimate goal was. He was the first to receive a notification from it stating that he was being watched by the System, and he was the first to be spoken to by the very System itself.

And by the one who had created it.

He blinked. Looked up into the sky. The sky was blue and clear of clouds. It was noon on his planet. The day bright. But his vision was powerful enough that he could see straight through the atmosphere and out into the clouds.

He had often done this since sending one of his favourite descendants to the other side of the Greater Universe, all the way to the edge, to watch over the man called Xavier Collins. He knew that he couldn’t see the star that small blue planet orbited. The distance was so vast, the light years between them so many, that the light coming from that part of the universe visible to his eye had been formed billions of years before the planet itself had even come into existence.

“I have dedicated my long life to you,” the man said.

There was no one on the roof with him. Nor was he speaking through any sort of communication device. Indeed, there was no one around for miles who would be able to hear him as the roof blocked sound from escaping it.

No one would hear him but the System itself.

“I have done all that you have tasked me with. If this child is the one, I will accept that.” He dipped his head, shut his eyes. “I just want this all to finally be over.”

There was a threat to the Greater Universe. A threat that had been around since the dawn of time, and one that would meet them at the end of it.

This was not the first Greater Universe. Though the man often thought of himself as the oldest person to have ever existed, he knew that he was wrong, for the Tower of Champions had already been created when he had been born, and all its tower floors had been formed. Other universes—other realities—existed apart from his own, ones where the end had already been played out.

Ones where a saviour had never been found.

And so a new universe was created with every decision. With every change. With everything the System learned. And every single one of these universes was created with a single purpose—

To find a way to stop the end of everything.

To find a way to stop entropy itself.