Banished to the Abyss After Defying the Author-Chapter 30: Starlit Rot

Claus’s trembling finally slowed.

Noah stood beneath the tall glass windows of Xenovia’s church, silver light pouring across the marble floor.

He looked at Claus.

"After the sky turned into permanent night, did anything change in Solaris? Anything that felt different from normal?"

Claus lowered his gaze.

"Great One... I know you can already see it. Something is wrong. The sky doesn’t feel like our sky anymore."

"Tell me what you felt," Noah said. "Specifically."

Claus swallowed.

"One night, I was returning home. I was thinking about small things, daily things. And then—"

His words slowed unnaturally.

His lips moved, but the sound lagged behind them.

Noah’s expression hardened.

Temporal interference.

"Continue," he said, sharper now.

Claus blinked rapidly, shaking his head as if trying to clear it.

"I felt something pass through me. Cold. Not wind, not magic. Something else entirely. And when I looked up, I saw shapes. Many of them. Flying across the sky, heading toward the southern district."

"What did they look like?"

Claus hesitated.

"Ghost-like. But not entirely transparent. Like something wearing the shape of a memory."

Noah nodded once.

Real Sky bleed-through.

He turned immediately.

"Good. That’s enough."

He stepped out of the church without another word.

Solaris’ white streets shimmered under the false blue sky.

But beneath it, Noah could feel the wrongness. The faint distortion pressing down from above like weight accumulating on a surface that wasn’t built to carry it.

"That man in the garden," Noah muttered to himself. "Not human. A puppet. A signal."

He moved toward the southern quarter.

Halfway down the main street, the world stopped.

Wind froze mid-motion. Dust hung suspended in the air. Birds locked mid-flight.

Noah did not stop.

He exhaled slowly and looked around at the frozen street.

"There it is."

The bright Solaris streets dimmed into a muted red haze as the illusion peeled back.

Footsteps echoed behind him.

"YOU. ENEMY. DIE."

Noah turned.

The same hollow-eyed man from the garden stood there, but now his skin was splitting open, light leaking through the cracks like broken porcelain from the inside.

Noah looked at him steadily.

"So you followed me here."

The man didn’t respond.

Magic circles burst open all around him in rapid succession, dozens becoming hundreds within seconds. The ground cracked as summoning sigils ignited one after another in concentric rings.

And they emerged from the circles.

Dragons made of smoke with hollow ribcages that still somehow roared. Fenrir-shaped beasts stitched from shadow and bone. Griffins assembled from darkness.

They roared together.

The frozen citizens of Solaris remained suspended around them, completely unaware.

The first dragon lunged.

Noah sidestepped. Its jaws passed through his shoulder.

And tore open his flesh anyway.

He didn’t flinch.

He looked at the wound.

"Not physical."

The cut burned like absence rather than fire. Real Sky energy eating into him from the inside of the wound outward.

The Fenrir leapt next. Its claws connected cleanly.

The force redirected.

Noah flew backward and crashed through a stone fountain. Water hung frozen around him as he stood back up from the rubble.

He looked at his hands.

"Redirection layer. Reality mirror. So every attack I land gets sent back at me."

He summoned the Void Spear.

His eyes began bleeding immediately.

He looked at the swarm of beasts and hurled the spear at the nearest dragon.

It pierced clean through the creature.

The dragon dissolved into red mist.

Then reassembled.

Noah smiled faintly.

"Not summons. Manifested fragments. Destroying the body does nothing."

A griffin tore downward from above. Its talons scraped across his ribs before he could move. He waited for regeneration to trigger.

Nothing.

He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth.

"Right. Still sealed."

He looked at the battlefield properly for the first time, not reacting to individual attacks but watching everything at once.

The attacks weren’t random.

They were synchronized.

Every beast moved in coordination, filling gaps when another one lunged, never overlapping their angles of attack.

Linked.

His eyes tracked the summoning circles still glowing faintly across the ground in overlapping patterns.

The hollow-eyed man stood completely still in the center of all of them.

Still chanting.

"Anchor," Noah said quietly.

He stopped dodging.

He let the beasts hit him.

Claws across his arms. Fangs at his shoulder. Wing impacts that threw him sideways. Burning sigils that seared through his coat.

Each strike tore flesh.

He used the impacts to move, letting each blow carry him closer to the center while the beasts repositioned for the next attack.

He appeared beside the summoner.

He grabbed the man’s face.

The skin cracked further under his grip, fractures spreading outward from where his fingers pressed.

Noah looked inside.

There was nothing there.

Only swirling red sky where a person should have been.

"So you’re not the killer either," Noah said. "Just a vessel."

He crushed it.

The body shattered into mist.

Out in the circle, the beasts flickered.

Their movements became irregular, losing synchronization.

Noah stepped back to the center of the summoning circles.

He looked at the ground where all the circles connected.

He reformed the Void Spear in his hand.

Instead of throwing it at a beast, he drove it straight into the ground at the convergence point of the circles.

"Collapse."

The spear erupted upward like a pillar of darkness, expanding through the ground in every direction along the engraved lines of the sigils.

All summoning circles cracked simultaneously.

The phantasmal beasts shrieked as the anchor holding them was severed, and they imploded one after another until nothing remained but fading red mist dissolving in frozen air.

Silence.

Time still frozen.

Blood dripped from Noah’s chin onto the still-wet marble.

He stood alone in the red haze and looked toward the palace.

"The murders weren’t random," he said to himself. "And those ghosts weren’t actually avenging Kurugshetra."

He walked to where the royal corpses had been earlier and crouched down, looking at the ground carefully.

The red mist thickened around him.

"They were testing manifestation. Seeing how much Real Sky energy they could push through and maintain in a fixed location."

He stood.

"And someone is directing them toward that goal."

The air shifted.

Far south.

The Real Sky distortion intensified noticeably, pulling at the edges of his perception like a sound becoming louder.

Noah began walking toward it.

The further he went, the more the frozen Solaris scenery deteriorated around him. White marble turned gray. Gray turned red. Red turned the deep black of scorched stone. The false sky above cracked open in long jagged lines and stars bled through the gaps.

The Real Sky loomed beyond those cracks.

Time did not resume.

He reached the southern boundary of Solaris.

A massive circular fracture hovered in the air ahead of him, reality peeled back like paper around its edges. Beyond it stretched an endless starlit void.

Cold.

Silent.

Watching.

Noah stopped at the edge.

His wounds were still open. His eyes still bleeding faintly.

He stared into the void beyond the fracture.

Something moved inside it.

Not Chaos.

Not a ghost.

Something that had been waiting with patience.

Something that knew he would come here eventually.

Noah looked at it without moving.

"So," he said quietly, "this is where you’ve been gathering."

The fracture pulsed once in response.