The evening deepened, painting the world in surreal hues as the sun began setting behind Nihilim, reflecting as orange disks across the clouds.

  The black hole's corona created an otherworldly twilight, casting everything in deep oranges and purples. The crystalline body of Miss Possible caught these colors, refracting them in mesmerizing, eerie patterns across the wheat field.

  "Speaking of biting," I said, watching the cloud ring thicken above Shandria, "can Leviathan Nightingale's shadow flock chew through Miss Possible? Or follow us into the Chasm Sea?"

  "The Shadow-beasts are surface to air predators," Vespera clicked. "They can't follow us deep underwater into what's basically a glowing watery environment. Also they're not smart enough to cut through Miss Possible. Unlike that Scrutimancer. That could have gone badly, considering that Shandria does have dimensional-sword artifacts that could cut through Miss Possible. Good job on bamboozling him and directing his attention towards Vassily.”

  "So they could have destroyed our tank?" Cinder asked.

  "If given enough time to understand her," Vespera nodded. "Absolutely. She might be thicc, but she's not invincible to dimensional magic.”

  "I still can't believe they bought that whole Rainbow-Thunder Order thing," Cinder sighed.

  "People want to believe in something bigger than themselves," I shrugged. "Especially bureaucrats. They love complicated explanations that make them feel like they're part of some grand narrative. They wanted a big, visible enemy to fight, so I gave them Vassily."

  Cinder rolled her eyes. "You manipulated an entire city's law enforcement with a fairy tale."

  "Not a fairy tale," I corrected. "A strategically constructed narrative designed to redirect investigative resources and protect our immediate interests."

  "Strategically constructed narrative," Cinder mimicked, rolling her eyes. "You mean a lie."

  "A carefully curated truth," I grinned. "Technically everything I said was true. We ARE fighting entropy. Miss Possible IS an ancient engine. Vassily IS working with Zalimar to sell Topaz."

  "The fine art of truth-bending! Our human husbando will make a great Omnid politician one day!" Vespera laughed as we walked back to Miss Possible.

  "Why did Vassily even answer the questions of a mixed-blood student so eagerly?" Cinder asked. "Isn't he a Skyfall Academy authority figure?"

  "Nah. He's a simple Russian peasant from 15th century Moscow," I said. "He's got no actual Academy authority, on paperwork he's basically a contractor Zalimar hired to protect his gate. Vassily's job is to answer Omnid student questions about Arx and to retrieve them via Corpse Seekers if they're in trouble. Zalimar rescued Vassily and his brothers when Moscow was set on fire by the retreating Russian army and installed them all over his illicit businesses across dimensional gates. Domovoys are long-lived Omnids who are bound to particular locations. They generally don't get smarter as they age - their strength lies in manipulation of a small pocket of reality they inhabit, not intelligence. Basically, they're perfect as immortal minions who don't rebel and don't think too hard about the ethics of Topaz trade."

  "Ye, Domovoys are opposite of us Thunderbirds," Vespera nodded. "They don't produce artifacts, nor change the outside world. They're keepers and protectors of particular domains, their Fractal Engine hearts are focused inward not outward."

  The Thunderbird tapped her beak.

  "To add on, the ideology of Omnid eugenics gained worldwide prominence in the late 1800s," Vespera clicked. "It was Sir Francis Galton, an Omnid who coined the term "Ood-Eugenics" in 1883 and began to promote it as a way to improve Clan strength by encouraging the reproduction of Omnids with "desirable" traits and discouraging those with "undesirable" ones. It was then that many powerful 'Firstborn Clan' families like mine began to snub mixed-blood nullborns, constructed Probability Engines and began to rely on them to breed stronger children like myself with ritual magic and arranged marriage. A Domovoy from the 1500's who has been staying on Arx for seventeen thousand years is pretty much disconnected from all of that 19th century ideology."

  "I see," Cinder said.

  I stared at the landscape past her. The gargantuan shadow of the black hole cast itself across the vast, endlessly stretching inverted world. It was mesmerizing, beautiful and mindbogglingly alien, a sunset on a Birch-World style megastructure.

  "Excited for our underwater adventure?" I elbowed Ci.

  "Concerned mostly," she commented, "but when has that ever stopped you?"

  "Never." I smiled.

  Vespera tapped her token and a part of Miss Possible liquefied, producing a crystalline stairwell.

  I stopped at the end of the stairwell, at the edge of the door, watching as the night’s sharp edge rushed across the landscape, reaching Shandria.

  A hundred bells sounded across the city in the distance, wailing like a doomsday siren.

  "Martin," Cinder began. "That's the night bells. Nightingale is coming. We have to go.”

  "Shhh," I said. "I want to see the local Leviathan."

  As the shadow engulfed Shandria, something began to move within the dark cloud ring. At first, it was just a subtle rippling, like a massive creature stretching beneath a dark blanket. Then, impossibly slowly, a titanic form began to unfurl, a hundred legs emerging as if stepping out of the cloud across the air.

  A hundred shadows seemed to reach out to it from the city below. The entire shadowy ring circling the city suddenly twisted and wobbled, unfolding into a monster of titanic proportions, a head covered in silver-blue eyes blooming into existence, thousands of red dots forming on its chest.

  One by one, smaller Shadowbeasts disconnected from it, spreading out like a hive of angry, dark bees.

  "Sheet," Vespera uttered beside me. "That's a 13/10 spookiness level."

  "Never seen it come down?" I asked.

  "Not from this angle," Vee replied. "By now, the Inn window shutters close."

  Cinder wrapped her hands around me, pulling me into the tank.

  As the Leviathan Nightingale unfurled itself above Shandria, its massive form seemed to consume the entire sky. Hundreds of silver-blue eyes blinked and scanned the landscape, while shadowy appendages stretched out like tentacles, probing the city below. It released a wail that sent a chill down across my spine, causing my heart to thunder madly.

  Fear magic of the highest order, same as the Wendigo wards, perhaps more potent.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  The Leviathan’s flock spread out into all directions, a few black dots of flying Shadowbeasts heading towards us.

  The crystalline wall of Miss Possible cut the view off as I was pulled inside. The Corpse Seeker accelerated instantly and in a flash, glowing water detonated around us as the wall-screen lit up.

  In another second or two, the view of Shandria was gone far behind us. As the crystalline legs of Miss Possible thundered across the sea floor, I watched the silt bloom behind us like a massive, underwater explosion. The sea around us glimmered with an alien jade-green luminescence, casting ethereal light across the tank's interior.

  Vespera's talons were buried deep within Miss Possible's crystalline controls, electrical currents dancing between her fingers and the tank's internal systems. Her eyes were focused, half closed and calculating.

  "Depth?" I asked.

  "Cozy," Vespera clicked.

  [Depth: 447.63 meters]

  [Aetheric Density: 995.49]

  [Pressure: 41 atmospheres]

  Lines flickered into existence on the round wall that displayed the view of the magic-irradiated sea.

  [Core Temperature: 42%]

  [Energy Level: 96%]

  [Structural Integrity: 61%]

  [Dimensional Stability: 78%]

  [Storage Capacity: 68%]

  [Internal Life Support: active]

  Cinder peered out at the glowing underwater view. "How deep can Miss Possible go?"

  "Way deep," Vee clicked. "Could probably dig halfway into the center of the Earth with this baby. She was made for plowing through dungeons. Gonna keep an eye on structural integrity and adjust the dimensional wards cast by the dragonheart accordingly, don't worry."

  Strange crystalline structures grew from the seafloor - not coral, something more alien. Some looked like massive fractals, others like frozen explosions of light.

  "Pretty," I commented.

  "Coral formations twisted by magrad," Vee commented.

  Luminescent fish-flocks danced around the alien corals, looking like a mix between jellyfish and dragonflies, their translucent bodies rippling with waves of brilliant jade-green light that matched the sea's ethereal glow.

  "Bioluminescent adaptive creatures," Vespera clicked, pausing a frame of a shot of the underwater flock. "Rapidly evolved to survive in high magrad environments. Notice how their bodies constantly shift and change? They're absorbing and redistributing magrad constantly."

  [Depth: 1447.63 meters]

  [Aetheric Density: 1211.53]

  "How high is the magical radiation here?" I asked as the fish and corals vanished behind us and the sea bed started to glow even brighter.

  "High enough that normal organisms or a human would melt into an incoherent puddle within minutes," Vespera replied.

  "What about an Omnid?" I asked.

  "Omnids could probably survive here," Vespera clicked. "Maybe suffer minor mutations. You, however..." She glanced at me. "Would literally disintegrate. Poof."

  Cinder wrapped her wings around me protectively, making the 'not on my watch' expression. I leaned into her embrace, smiling. "Awww. My knight in shimmering feathers."

  She let out a small growl.

  [Depth: 2447.63 meters]

  [Aetheric Density: 1887.22]

  Something pulsed ahead of us like dancing lightning wrapped in a corona of colors that made my head hurt. As Possy rushed towards it, moving at ludicrous speed, the brilliant thing became shaped like a gargantuan hollow diatom. Violet lightning danced across it, leaving streaks across reality that made my head hurt.

  "Daymn," Vee commented. "Now that's something you don't see everyday."

  "What is that?"

  "A lotta magrad. It's dimensionally skewering reality, interposing a piece of the Astral Ocean into the physical," Vespera explained. "Normally a dungeon core would gradually sink into the megastructure shell, but this thing is dimensionally anchored in place. Probably 'cus a bunch of Space mages were anchoring their camp, preventing the enemy from teleporting into their midst."

  "Is that safe?" Cinder asked.

  "I dunno," Vee shrugged. "Probably?"

  "Probably?" Cinder raised an eyebrow.

  "We've got the most badass tank in existence," Vee commented. "Okay, slow down a bit now, just in case."

  We reached the gargantuan diatom and I swallowed. It was made from people. Hollow people intertwined with each other in phantasmagorical patterns.

  "Going in!" Vespera declared.

  Miss Possible's drill ignited, it began to plow through the first crystalline human form. The violet lightning dancing across the diatom suddenly focused, striking at our tank.

  The stats went haywire for a second, the view flickering.

  "Shit!" Vespera yelled. Electrical sparks erupted around her, creating a corona of crackling energy.

  "What?" I asked.

  "Thought there would be more chaos between the cores," Vespera replied. "But... This thing is self-organized. It's an engine of hate, of uncreation. A singularity of despair."

  "That doesn't sound good," Cinder commented. "Should we... turn back?"

  "No," Vee said as another impossible underwater lightning bolt struck us. "We can take it. We won't get another chance. It's adjusting, trying to understand us! We have to move forward, rip that core made from cores out from the center."

  "Why?" Cinder demanded.

  "’Cus," Vee fired back. "If we don't deal with it today, the magrad Sea will expand and eat our lovely farm in a few decades or a century. I like our farm. This thing is expanding its domain like a dungeon, growing outward."

  The drill obliterated the outer shell, revealing the innards of the gargantuan diatom. It stretched above us like a dome. Hollow bone-things made from what appeared to be thousands of people fused to each other disconnected from the walls, heading towards us.

  "Sentinels?" Cinder paled.

  "Yep," Vee nodded. "Big ones."

  "Vee," I called out. "What's our exit strategy?"

  "Exit?" Vespera laughed. "We're going straight to the core, baby! These boney boys look like they can pack a punch, but we're faster than them underwater!"

  Miss Possible shot forward, sending ripples behind herself, leaving the titans behind, obliterating more occasional human-shaped mesh walls in her way.

  I looked behind us and finally understood what the diatom was. It was an explosion. An explosion that sent bodies flying, imprinted them in time upon their deaths.

  More hollow shells were obliterated by our drill head. An entire army of men, a hollow camp imprinted into the world. Faces askew in horror as their own magic rained down upon them, some cowering, thousands of warriors and mages suspended in their final moments, like three-dimensional snapshots.

  "Holy shit," I breathed out.

  The core at the center pulsed with an impossible violet light. It wasn't just a core - it was a massive crystalline structure made of fused human heart-cores, each one still flickering with remnants of skills.

  Not the thousands of soldiers, but mages who must have inhabited the central tent. There must have been an implosion that drew everything into itself, folded the cores together into one massive sphere sized about a meter by a meter.

  [Core Temperature: 38%]

  [Energy Level: 84%]

  [Structural Integrity: 52%]

  [Dimensional Stability: 61%]

  "We're losing structural integrity," Vespera clicked. "But we're close to the core. What's it gonna be, Lexxy?"

  "Forward," I said. "Let's destroy this abomination before it eats our lovely farm!"

  "Agreed," she nodded.

  Miss Possible's drill ignited with an intense crystalline light, spinning faster and faster as we approached the pulsing violet core made of fused human heart-cores. The drill began to vibrate, creating a resonance that made the entire tank tremble, the walls of the dimensional bulkheads cracking.

  "Brace yourselves," Vespera clicked, her talons sending electrical currents through Miss Possible's crystalline structure.

  Cinder wrapped her wings around me protectively, her feathers shifting through shades of defensive grays and blues.

  The core seemed to sense our approach. The violet lightning intensified, creating a barrier of pure magic energy that threatened to tear reality apart.

  "Not today!" Vee growled as Cinder dug into me with her claws.

  The drill hit the barrier.

  A sound beyond sound erupted - a scream that wasn't a scream, a light that wasn't light, a moment that stretched between moments...

  A forty two thousand year old tank versus an army of ten thousand mages murdered in a blink of an eye and then left to rot for a century.

  Time versus death.

  Omnid magitek versus Arx wild magic that gradually turned the dead into dungeons.

  The body of the Corpse Seeker groaned, widening cracks running along her crystalline edges, hexamesh ligaments tearing like snapping cables.