Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion - Chapter 96 - Balanced On A Knife’s Edge

[Author's Note: I think this is where I'll end the first book. Chapters for the second book will continue as normal tomorrow, however!]

In between the stars at the core of the galaxy, near the supermassive black hole that kept the sector together, the Empress Larona floated in a deep meditation. The vacuum of space had long ago lost its ability to affect her, and there was an appetising silence about the void between the stars that the woman had experienced nowhere else in the Greater Universe.

Though it was completely silent, there were still things to be felt. The Celestial Energy and Void Energy being the main two. They were so densely packed within the vacuum that the first time she’d experienced their presence she’d worried it would overwhelm her.

Now such things were simply the background noise of the universe.

Here, she floated. And thought. And dreamt. And Saw. For this was where she came for insights. Here, where everything was quiet but for the future, where she could delve into her mind for almost as long as she wished. Here, where she could not be disturbed by her subjects.

Images swept into her periphery, caught by her consciousness as though it were a net. She peered at each of them in turn, attempting to discern their impact upon her plan.

Her sector, her galaxy, was under threat. She had Seen this a long time ago. It had been one of her first visions. Before she’d even reached the peak of E Grade, the System had bestowed this insight upon her. And for hundreds of years, it had cursed her mind.

Every waking moment, and many of her dreaming ones, this vision had plagued her. Like a parasite, it ate away at all her thoughts until it consumed each one of them. For so long, avoiding this calamity had been her sole purpose. Still was her sole purpose.

The End was coming.

A B Grade Denizen that destroyed everything it came upon in its search for power. She did not know what The End looked like, all she knew was that it would come. For she had Seen it—Seen the aftermath of what it would cause.

Ten billion planets left dead, devoid of their respective energies. Devoid of their respective lives. The End sucked all life into itself. Consumed everything.

She still Saw flashes of that future every day. Saw her own world succumb to that terrible fate. When the integration had come to her world, she had been a priestess of the Old Religion—a religion that had been old even then, and now was all but lost to time, as she was the only surviving practitioner.

Though her faith in any sort of benevolent higher power had abandoned her, she still found herself praying to the old pantheon. To the Mother. The Father. To the Wind and the Sun. To the Earth and the Sea.

And to the Stars. The celestial bodies that she had spent so much of her time staring at, interpreting, identifying, even before she’d become what she was now. Oh, if she had only known what those stars held in store she would have been terrified staring up at them.

That terror struck her as it always did, gripping her heart like icy fingers, as she Saw into the future. For a nine hundred years she had known this was coming, and for a nine hundred years the vision had remained static.

Death. Destruction. That was all that was in store for her sector when The End came.

And so she made her plans and prayed to dead deities that had never truly lived, following rituals that had been old when she was still young. And she kept looking until she Saw something that she could thread into the futures to change them, for she knew she may never be strong enough to change them on her own.

She had stalled at C Grade half a millennia ago, with no sign of ever being able to push past it. At least, not before The End came.

The future was a difficult thing to predict. One of the most infuriating things about being among the Seer line of classes was that other Denizens tended to think you had it all figured out. It was also one of the biggest advantages. Many a Denizen had called her to fight only to be wary when she arrived.

The thought would enter their mind—She would not be here unless she knew she would win. Sometimes, simply placing that thought in someone’s head was enough to impact their confidence and lead to their defeat. A self-fulfilling prophecy. A term that always made her chuckle.

But the future wasn’t a simple thing to read. It wasn’t fixed. It shifted and changed. New threads emerged as old ones were tied or cut forever. It had taken her a long time to figure out how to not only track those changes back to their source, but also be the cause of them herself.

The one thing that had the largest chance of changing the future she Saw was the System itself. For any planet that was not integrated into the Greater Universe was a void of utter darkness that even Empress Larona could not see into.

When a little blue planet had been integrated into the System, thousands of futures she’d thought solid for hundreds of years had been utterly distorted. An occurrence that could only mean one thing—the birth of a true Progenitor.

The future she saw—The End sweeping over the galaxy and destroying everything in its path—had not been one of those solid futures that changed. Floating in the vacuum, she wished to rectify that. To discover if her long game was possible. She could almost See the man now. Each hour that passed in the normal stream of time had made him become clearer and clearer.

His fate, however, was yet to be determined. It balanced on a knife’s edge.

The Tower of Champions was a difficult realm for a Seer to peer into. The System had blocks in place for eyes such as hers, but she had slowly been unlocking them, one by one, to obtain a unhindered view of the man she hoped would help change the sector’s trajectory.

The man who might stave off The End when it finally came for them.

What she found was interesting. Peering through the void she felt the remnants of a presence left behind. Something powerful had been through here. Something powerful which had gazed upon this particular instance of the Tower of Champions. As someone who dealt in futures, she knew such a thing could not be mere coincidence.

Strange.

The power she sensed… it was like nothing she’d ever felt before. Not even as strong as what she felt from The End.

One of the Old Ones?

She followed the path that had been left behind by an entity far more powerful than herself. Someone at B Grade, or possibly even A Grade. She could not tell. At C Grade and a thousand years old, she was the most powerful Denizen in her sector.

But that was because her sector was young, having been around for less than ten thousand years. And in those years, before it had grown strong enough, or found a protector, it had been purged twice before her planet had been birthed into Greater Universe by the System.

Empress Larona did not know what had caused those purges. Perhaps it had been The End, back then, too. Or one of the Galaxy Eaters she’d heard whispers about. Or someone from her sector had angered one of the Old Ones. When a sector was young, any number of things could cause its demise—its purge or its colonisation. And the strongest Denizens from a new sector often found there way to older sectors, where their paths to power were more assured, and where there were securities against such calamities as purges. Denizens would often spend hundreds of years saving enough to travel away from their sector.

The Seer did not spend her time worrying about the past, or those that had abandoned the sector—those that might have staved off The End alongside her if only they had remained. The only things that concerned her were what was coming to pass in the present, and what would come to pass in the future.

Following the path tread by one more powerful than her, Empress Larona made it into the particular instance of the Tower of Champions that held the one she’d been looking for. The next true Progenitor. When she glimpsed his soul she almost gasped. Perhaps she would have, had she not been floating in vacuum, unable to breath.

Millions of threads to the future were connected to the man’s heart. More than she’d ever seen on a single Denizen. His power at present was insubstantial, though not for his level and floor on the tower, but the potentialhe possessed.

It was clear to her why he might have been visited by one of the Old Ones.

She could see where those threads led. See where they might end. The knife’s edge. There was something in his near future calling him toward his death. Something on the next floor—then later, on his return to his little blue planet.

And a thousand more.

She’d never seen someone with a fate in such a state of flux.

Is this why his arrival has not changed the fate of the sector, and the arrival of The End? Because he is destined to die before his time?

Empress Larona followed the threads. One by one, she examined them, using all the considerable powers of her mind, until she came upon the faintest of them all—a line that led to a future she had never seen.

A line so faint, so unsure, so unlikely that she feared it may never come to pass.

A line that connected Xavier Collins to The End, that threaded his fate with that of the sector itself.