Forbidden Constellation's Blade-Chapter 162: A Hero Is Required

Contrary to what Ryn expected, chaos hadn’t descended immediately.

Everyone wasted no time, boarding on Braum’s airship. It tore through the darkened sky and descended toward the nearest harbor, which coincidentally was Pearlreach.

They had briefly considered approaching the fracture directly, circling above the ocean where the beam had struck.

Braum shut that down immediately.

"We don’t chase something we don’t understand," the Dwarven Hero spoke. "Something of this caliber rarely meant good news."

So Pearlreach it was.

As the airship lowered through the clouds and the docks came into view, the reaction below was not what Ryn expected.

The port was full.

Ships sat idle in the water and dockworkers stood frozen where they had been working.

Every face was turned upward.

Dwarves were not a skittish race. They did not flinch easily or fear storms.

But this...

Ryn, along with his party, descended from the gangplank quickly as they surveyed upward.

From here, the crack was clearer, Khaz Vordun’s skyline had obscured much of it before with its stone towers and rising smoke.

A murmur moved through the docks, a mix of panic and doubt.

"What in tarnation..."

"Is that the result of someone’s Blessing?"

"Are the gods going to strike us down?!"

Ryn didn’t pay attention to the rest of their comments, instead looking closely with [Limited Foresight].

From here, he could see it properly.

The fracture lines were shrinking, but not evenly.

Some segments had been sealed cleanly, fading into the blue as though nothing had ever been there. Others lingered stubbornly, trembling slightly as if resisting the correction.

It’s...disappearing. Ryn thought. So something is actively closing it.

Though in the center, a thin, vertical seam remained.

He felt his Blessing stir once more, not violently like before, or the blinding pain that had driven him to his knees.

Amelia came to stand beside him.

"It’s closing," she said.

"Yeah," Ryn murmured.

But his eyes didn’t leave the sky.

"It’s not collapsing on its own," he added quietly.

Amelia glanced at him. "Then what is it?"

Ryn didn’t answer immediately, his gaze drifting somewhere else.

Fritz stood near the edge of the dock, shoulders squared, head tilted upward like the rest of them. The wind tugged faintly at his cloak, but he did not seem to notice. There was no fear on his face.

Only uncertainty.

That’s right...

In his previous life, there had been no debate. Fritz stood beneath the cathedral light that the Gods had chosen, and he had stepped forward as though the path had always existed beneath his feet.

Though, the Hero’s Path was only created through unrest by the Churches.

"But, was that really all there is to it?" Ryn muttered.

The Churches scrambled to maintain legitimacy. It had been easy to assume the Hero’s Path was born from political necessity, another consequence of his interference, a ripple from Ryn’s decisions that spread outward.

But as he replayed it in his mind, the sequence no longer aligned.

"No..." he murmured under his breath. "That wasn’t it..."

Then the words hit him like a storm, the Pope’s exact words that become the final piece of the puzzle.

"For the past six months, no new Blessing Tomes have manifested. Each of our churches received the same message with identical wording:"

"A Hero is required."

Gears slowly turned inside Ryn’d mind as he looked up to the thin vertical seam in the sky as it tightened ever-so-slightly.

At first he accepted the explanation, after all, the Gods don’t owe humanity anything. If Blessings ceased, then perhaps it was simply their will.

However, it was a preparation.

And now, seeing the fracture in the sky mend slowly, Ryn started to think that this could only be the presence of the divine.

Then the gods were never absent...they were occupied.

His jaw tightened slightly.

In his first life, he had believed the Evernight to be corruption. A rot spreading through the world. A sickness born from within that consumed everything in its path.

However, rot began at the core, something that changed from the inside.

But no, it was clear as day to everyone looking at the current scene:

The world was not being consumed from within...it was being pressed from without.

The realization settled into place with a quiet certainty, and just as quickly, Ryn forced himself to set it aside.

Speculation didn’t change the current issue.

"Ryn."

Amelia’s voice was steady, but her eyes were sharp.

"This was the Cult, wasn’t it?"

He nodded once.

"Yes."

There was no point pretending otherwise. A device capable of piercing the heavens did not emerge by accident.

"But what were they trying to—?"

She stopped mid-sentence.

Something had shifted along the horizon.

At first it was only a disturbance in the water, a dark line cutting across the surface where there should have been none. Then the sound reached them, a distant scream.

A ship burst into view from the horizon.

Ryn squinted his eyes, barely able to catch the figure on deck.

Hadrik.

The dwarven captain who had first guided them through these waters.

He was standing at the bow now, one hand gripping the railing, the other waving frantically toward the harbor.

"MOVE!" Hadrik’s voice carried faintly across the water. "GET CLEAR—!"

The sea behind him rose, a gigantic wall of water that climbed unnaturally high, folding over itself as something massive displaced it from beneath.

Foam churned black near its base, spiraling outward in violent currents.

It was definitively chasing the ship.

The wave did not slow.

Hadrik’s ship veered hard toward the docks, sails straining, hull groaning as it cut through the harbor at reckless speed. He was still shouting, still waving, when the sea behind him rose higher.

The wave swallowed the ship whole.

For a split second, the vessel disappeared behind a wall of churning black water. Then the mass surged forward and hurled the ship like a child’s toy, smashing it across the outer piers.

Hadrik tumbled from the sky just before Fritz barely managed to catch him with a gust of wind.

"What...what’s going on Hadrik!" Ryn shouted. "What did you see!"

"It’s...coming..." Hadrik said slowly before his eyelids closed, falling unconscious.

Ryn didn’t even have time to process everything, as a sound cut through the panic instantly.

"Down!" someone shouted.

The first wave crashed into Pearlreach with a force that shattered wood and tore docks from their foundations. Water surged across the port in a single overwhelming sweep, swallowing crates, bodies, and entire sections of the city.

Ryn moved before the second impact struck.

He seized Amelia by the arm and pulled her close, frost already spreading beneath his boots.

The temperature plummeted in an instant.

Ice erupted outward in a sharp, rising wall, jagged and thick, climbing between them and the oncoming flood. It formed just as the sea slammed into it.

The impact was deafening.

Water burst against the barrier in a violent explosion of spray and debris, splintered wood and broken stone battering against the frozen surface.

The whole harbor vanished.

One moment it had been there, the next it was absolutely gone, replaced with black water.

The surge rolled over the docks, swallowing everything in its path, spilling into the lower streets beyond. Ships snapped their dockigns and were carried inland like stray wood.

The ice wall groaned under the pressure.

For an instant, Ryn thought it might fracture.

Then the water began to recede, slowly, draggin wreckage back toward the sea.

Ryn lowered the ice wall only when the pressure finally eased. Frost cracked and fell away as the barrier dissolved into mist.

For a moment, there was no movement.

Only the sound of water rushing through ruined streets.

Pearlreach was gone.

Everything was destroyed and bodies lay motionless on the ground. Ryn’s jaw tightened, but he forced himself to scan.

Fritz.

He found him first.

Fritz and his group stood several dozen meters away, surrounded by a faint, geometric shimmer that flickered as it dissipated. Metallic plates lay half-buried in the stone around them, glowing runes fading along their edges.

A defensive deployment.

Undoubtedly Jay’s work.

The barrier must have triggered on impact.

They were soaked, and shaken, but alive.

Nearby, Braum stood planted in the wreckage, one knee bent against the stone. In front of him, a massive shield of condensed metal Essence still shimmered, its surface dented and warped from the force it had absorbed.

Braum looked at the situation grimly. Their Hero had held, but Pearlreach hadn’t.

Ryn stepped forward, boots splashing through ankle-deep water as it continued to drain toward the sea.

But he noticed it then.

Dark currents spiraled where the wave had risen, the surface refusing to calm even as the tide pulled back.

They didn’t have time to do much, as something else caught their eye.

Something broke through the water’s surface. A massive serpentine form tore through the water in a violent convulsion. It did not rise smoothly, it thrashed and tore.

Writhing as it roared out in pain.

Dark matter, one Ryn recognized instantly, clung to its body, seeping between its scales like ink forced into cracks.

It tightened around the beast as the serpent smashed back and forth before finally falling back into the water.

Then...it rose once more, but this time...it was wrong.

Ryn felt his breath catch.

The substance flowed upward like oil defying gravity, gather around the creature’s head before funneling to its eyes.

For a split second, the world held still.

Then the blackness sank in, and its iris turned a complete and abyssal—

Night.