Barbarian's Adventure in a Fantasy World-Chapter 366: Authority (1)

“Go,” Ketal said. “Run, you lot.”

The barbarians who had been holding themselves back for his word laughed with a joy that broke like ice under the boot.

“Hahaha!”

“This time we kill it!”

They surged toward the Empire’s capital in a gray tide. Ketal turned to Helia, who remained at his side with a hard expression and a gathered company at her back.

“You and yours will handle the apostles that escape the line. Those that my people do not catch, you will break. You can do it.”

“I understand,” Helia said. The answer came steady despite the coil of worry within her. Behind her stood several dozen men and women who had answered her summons at a word, hardened fighters and mages whose names meant something wherever maps held writing.

“Ketal,” she added, and the small formality felt like a prayer. “Please return in victory.”

“Do not worry.” He smiled, and the warmth in it sat alongside iron. “I will finish this and come back. I am ready now.”

***

The capital creaked around its own heart. Deep within its stone, the Twisted gathered itself. It smoothed the raggedness from its edges, arranged its limbs and ideas, and became more purely itself with each pulse. It knit, it settled, it shaped the world under its hands into a tighter loop that fed itself.

At that moment, it noticed what moved toward it. It flung its sense outward like a net thrown over the sea and felt what ran across the snow. It understood them the instant their weight touched its notice.

Barbarians of the White Snowfield, it thought, and the notion tasted like a curse. He went back to fetch them.

Disgust colored its dry internal voice.

Vermin, it thought. I did not expect to see them here.

The barbarians of the White Snowfield were beings so fierce that even the Twisted had grown weary of them. Gratitude remained, for it was through their strength that the endless war had finally reached its end. Yet alongside that gratitude came a quiet reluctance—a wish never to be entangled with such creatures again.

The Twisted had no intention of meeting the barbarians itself. Strengths and weaknesses had little to do with that decision. It did not want to touch a thing that refused to stop. It turned instead to the tools that waited for its will.

“Move,” it commanded. “Kill them.”

The ground shook as if it remembered being molten. The apostles that had been sitting in the dark opened their eyes and obeyed. They broke the floors above and poured up and out, sprinting toward the barbarians who had spilled into the streets.

Laughter met them like a door swinging wide.

“Hahahaha!”

“There you are! Die for us!”

Impact followed impact. Hekate strode forward at the tip of a wedge, face lit with fierce delight. She lifted her axe high and brought it down with both hands. The land split under the blow. An apostle who had charged with the weight of a Hero could not endure it and came apart into equal halves.

However, the halves did not die. They writhed toward one another, fused back together into an ugly shape that no hunter would claim for meat, and dragged madness behind them like tattered cloth. That twisting authority reached for Hekate to swallow her in one gulp.

She bared her teeth and punched into the oncoming dark. The shock rolled through the world and made roofs shiver and frost fall in powdered veils. Barbarians met apostles, and the tangle refused to resolve. Neither side got the clean upper hand. It felt like two waves pressing against each other, the place of contact spitting sea into the sky.

A single figure walked through the clash. Each step fell as if he were taking a quiet stroll while a storm broke around him. Nothing that struck sparks elsewhere could touch his sleeve. Ketal passed through the writhing air and stood before the Twisted.

“We meet again,” he said.

“You bought yourself time to fetch the barbarians,” the Twisted answered with a small curl of mockery. “You should not have done that.”

The world warped at once. Space and time kinked and twisted, and Ketal found himself at the hinge of the movement as if every axis wanted to run through his chest. The Twisted laid its authority over everything in reach and turned the city into a knot made of cause and effect.

Ketal did not watch it happen. He already had his axe in hand. He drew up his aAra and threw it into the twisting world as a blade.

Sound cracked open. What lived inside that swing held the Abomination’s authority, the cold truth called death. It answered Ketal without friction; it rode his rank cleanly and struck the twisted world the way a hawk struck a field mouse. The twist died where his blade cut. Ketal planted a heel and drove forward.

The Twisted moved at the same time. Its authority pressed in a different direction, smearing the world the way paint smeared under a hand. Substance and idea bled into one, condensed, and transformed into a projectile that had no name and no place in any decent story. It screamed toward Ketal.

He lifted his axe to guard, meeting the strike head-on. The impact hurled him backward, the force surging through his frame until he caught himself at the brink of the horizon. Myst poured from him in steady waves as he forced his weight downward, his boots digging deep into the ground to hold his stance. A grimace tightened his face as he rolled his shoulder, his forearms trembling—not from pain alone, but from the raw power of the blow that had driven through him.

To compress the world and turn it into horror was no act of the Twisted. That particular strike carried a different will.

“That’s the authority of the Horrid,” Ketal said.

“I defeated the other two and took their strength,” the Twisted replied.

The Primarchs had not been one but three—the Horrid, the Twisted, and the Hideous. Their endless struggle had finally reached its conclusion, and in the aftermath, the Twisted had emerged as the one to claim the victor’s prize.

“When I first stepped outside, I lost too much and could not bear those powers along with my own,” it said. “That is no longer true. They answer to me as if they had always belonged in my hand.”

Fog rolled from it like a sea breaking its banks and rushed at Ketal. Where it touched, the world itself corroded and dripped into absence.

The authority resembled the Ugly Rat’s poison that stained the northlands long ago, the way the stain lay heavier than any weight, but the resemblance ended there. The Ugly Rat had crushed and defiled the world, but this fog dissolved. It erased the floor of meaning and then twisted whatever clean line remained into nothing with a lazy cruelty. It ate the world and grinned to show its teeth. This was the Hideous’s authority, the firstborn of the Mire of Filth.

“You have tricks,” Ketal said, and the click of his tongue was almost fond. He gripped the axe harder, filled his arms with strength, and hewed. The wind that rose from the swing scoured the mist until nothing remained but a faint memory of rot.

The Twisted did not pause. Spines fell in a volley as if launched by a siege engine. Ketal twisted at the last breath and avoided the worst of them, but a horrid orb came on the heels of the volley and hammered against his axe.

The attack threw him again. Without hesitation, a single spine screamed past, a heartbeat late. The fingers that held the axe lost some strength from the jolt, and Ketal dropped under the line of the next spine by instinct more than intention. The barb left a kiss on his shoulder as it passed. That light touch tried to make his muscles turn on themselves in slow knots.

“You are freakishly strong,” Ketal said through his teeth.

He had not misjudged the Primarchs. Their authorities were not intricate or poetic. Each one was the sharpest edge of a single strangeness. Each had climbed to the crest of its own hill and declared itself a mountain. They were raw violence. Each stood above his strength in that narrow lane, and here the Twisted threw three lanes into one road. The combination made answering them difficult.

“You should not have just left,” the Twisted said with real pleasure in its tone.

“When you first found me, I had paid too much for stepping into the Outside. I had shed most of my strength to make apostles and had spent what remained to hold myself together. If you had pressed then, you might have won. Instead, you left me the time. You wasted your chance to fetch barbarians.

Barbarians of the White Snowfield were strong. They would stop apostles along the streets and on the walls. They would make the Twisted earn each broken step. However, that was all. Against the one who held three Primarchs’ authorities in one design, they were an irritation, not a threat.

“Regret your choice and die here, creature from elsewhere,” the Twisted said.

“You are right,” Ketal said. The Twisted had grown stronger, and he did not deny it. Allowing it time to evolve had been a mistake by any simple measure. Yet the truth remained unchanged. Power alone held no meaning.

“If you do not wish to be erased, hide,” he said softly. “Stay quiet.”

The Abomination inside him flinched like a hand from a flame and fled downward into the deepest place it knew. The Aura that wrapped his axe and the Myst that reinforced his limbs went out like lamps in the wind. He gathered what remained of himself and tucked it behind his ribs.

The Twisted blinked—if a thing like that could blink.

“Wait,” it began. Its confusion lasted less than a thought. Understanding struck, and for the first time, the Twisted showed honest shock. “You—”

A spine flashed toward Ketal, born from a world twisted to serve velocity and surprise. It carried an authority that had sent even him scrambling before. However, it vanished the instant it crossed a certain line. No ash, no steam, no scrap of torn concept remained where it had been. It simply ceased.

“It took time to master the radius,” Ketal said. “If fortune had turned poorly, it could have spread across the entire world, and that would have been troublesome. One does not burn down the house simply to strike at a single flea.”

The world began to change around him. Air, wood, stone, carved patterns, painted signs, and every authority that had been laid over the place—their definitions thinned and came undone.

The Twisted gave a small sound and bit it off. “That’s... your Authority!”

***

Helia stood at a remove from the capital with her choir of strength and watched with a face that held together only by practice. The Empire’s heart shook again and again under blows that could not have been seen anywhere else. Dozens of Hero-ranked collisions stacked on top of each other until even the simplest fighter among those she had gathered had to admit awe and fear.

She knew better than any of them that such displays did not matter.

“Ketal, please win,” she said under her breath.

She had fled before she could properly look at the Twisted. She had not let anyone see what that retreat had cost her pride. Even so, the memory of that glance had set her hands shaking in the night more than once. She had not slept cleanly since she felt its gaze pass over her and continue as if she were too small to notice.

Could Ketal truly defeat a thing like that? she thought. Even she, who thought she understood his strength, could not say. Her breath trembled, and then all at once she lifted her head.

Everyone beyond the walls felt it too. Their gazes turned as one, drawn toward the same distant point, clinging to it as though it were the only solid thing left in a shifting world. Something was rising from the heart of the city. It was not a burst of power, nor the birth of a new Anomaly. It was not a wave, nor a surge, nor even a gathering of weight. It was something quieter and deeper, a movement that seemed to alter the very meaning of stillness itself.

It was absence.

The sensation had no comparison. The mind reached for words like abyss and ran out of adjectives at the first step. The idea of bottomless fell short. The idea of emptiness proved too full. Everything ceased to exist, clean as a page rubbed smooth.

“Ah,” Helia managed. The rest of the thought refused to shape itself. Her pupils widened and swam with confusion.

***

One could wonder how the three Primarchs had fought from the time of the beginning until now without arriving at an end.

Their authorities countered one another, but that alone did not explain the balance. The deeper truth rested in instinct. Each of them understood, with perfect clarity, the line that must never be crossed. They avoided the places where the chance of true loss hid its face. They took what gain they could and then stepped back, and the habit had stretched one battle beyond counting.

That alarm rang in the Twisted now.

Danger, it thought, and retreated in a single clean motion. Its senses told it that even a delay of a heartbeat would cost too much.

Ketal watched it and nodded to himself.

“Your sense is quick,” he said. “I have never shown you this, but you recognized it at once. That is remarkable.”

“You have taken out your authority,” the Twisted said.

It had fought him before, more than once. It had weighed his strength and found it less than its own, yet it had not won. The reason stood before it now with empty hands.

“The Authority of Erasure,” it said.

Erase all things. Make them as if they had never been. That was the shape the Twisted gave Ketal’s Authority in its mind.

“It is strange,” it said. “It sits above our authorities and can even remove them. That was true once, but it is not true now.”

The Twisted had conquered the other Primarchs and stolen their gifts. With those in hand, it believed itself able to bore through even this.

“This time you die!”

It gathered its authorities into one, weaving its own essence with the Hideous’s rot and the Horrid’s compression. The world twisted beneath that fusion, reshaping itself into patterns no reality had ever held before. Structures bent, cracked, and collapsed, breaking along new lines only to continue fracturing further. Then, with deliberate intent, it released everything it had gathered—it fired.

This will pierce your authority, the Twisted thought, full of conviction, and saw Ketal’s face remain as still as a lake at dawn.

The attack crossed the same line and winked out of existence, as if a child had pinched a candle flame between two fingers. It left nothing that could be named a remainder.

“What...?” the Twisted said flatly.

“Rank and tier do not solve this,” Ketal said. “That is not the problem. You are a child of this universe. My words earlier were not flattery. In this world, your authority stands at the top. Here, you break laws and write your own across the scars.”

He stepped forward and the city erased beneath his shoes. Concepts and orders and rules folded themselves away like polite guests leaving a room. On top of the absence, a different order set itself down.

Stone existed as a simple solid. Water existed as a simple liquid. Air existed as a simple gas. Each thing possessed only what belonged to it in essence. Nothing carried a borrowed trick. Nothing held an extra privilege stolen from a clever argument about the shape of reality.

“Your authority is powerful,” he said. “It can tear and tangle the world and blaspheme its laws. In this universe, it sits at the top and speaks over the others. That throne is real. But it only matters on this side.”

The Twisted had been born after the universe began. It belonged to this place even if it stood at the edge and sulked. That was the fact the Twisted kept stepping around.

“You called me a creature from elsewhere,” Ketal said and smiled. “I will answer now. This is the shape of the world I came from.”

He stood on a world without meanings borrowed from argument and spread his arms wide.