Chapter 463: Chapter 463- Other World’s Situation

Another World,

"ARRRRGHHHHH!!!"

The scream wasn’t a battle cry. It wasn’t the kind of sound a warrior makes when they’re charging into the fray.

It was the sound a mind makes when the last wall finally gives way—raw, formless, the jagged edge of someone who had been holding up the sky for too long and simply couldn’t do it for one more second.

The four sorcerers instinctively stumbled back. The silver-armored knights exchanged looks, their discipline flickering. Nobody had been briefed for ’this’. The paperwork had been dry, clinical—’Hero of the Bahamut Titan Bloodline. Expected Classification: Titan Vanguard. High Threat Threshold.’ The capital had been sealed weeks ago, a standard cage for a standard hero. They expected confusion, maybe some disorientation.

Nobody had mentioned "broken."

Gareth was still curled over the fading summoning circle, his hands clawed into his hair, his knuckles white as bone. His shoulders hitched with every ragged, desperate breath. And the energy—that strange, humming thing that had ignited back in the hot spring basement, the thing that had popped his restraints like twine—was back.

It didn’t explode. It curdled.

The air in the chamber thickened, turning heavy and stagnant. Torches flared, then bent away from him, the flames licking at the air as if trying to flee. Hairline fractures crawled across the stone floor, tracing a slow, deliberate web of ruin that radiated from his knees.

A young sorcerer, his grip on his wand white-knuckled, backed into a knight’s breastplate.

"What is he—"

"Hold your positions," the lead sorcerer barked, though his voice lacked conviction.

Then, the pressure snapped.

It wasn’t an explosion; it was an eviction. The bloodline forced the air to bow to his presence, reality bending to accommodate something it wasn’t built to contain. The remaining runes of the summoning circle shrieked, then shattered, spraying jagged stone like shrapnel.

Two sorcerers collapsed. Three knights slammed their shields forward.

Gareth stood.

He didn’t rise so much as he simply ’became’ vertical. There was no grace in it, no tactical awareness. He was just a body that had stopped managing its own gravity.

His eyes were wrong. There was no glow, no dramatic spark—just a terrifying, hollow vacancy. He wasn’t in the room. He was still three thousand miles away, back in that basement, watching the light go out of his mother’s eyes. He was seeing the bracelet on Yuna’s wrist, the way Raven had looked at him—with that infuriating, detached amusement.

"’BASTARD—’"

The word ripped out of him, a jagged piece of shrapnel from a life he’d just lost.

He moved.

The nearest knight, a man encased in two hundred pounds of military-grade steel, didn’t fly backward. He went ’through’ the wall. The stone groaned, cracked, and gave way, the knight vanishing into the corridor beyond before the thud of the impact even registered.

The other knights surged, but it was already too late.

The fight didn’t start with a bang; it started like a dam failing. A crack, then the rush of water, then the sudden realization that the structure was gone.

Twelve knights went down in ten seconds. Gareth wasn’t fighting them; he was just moving, and they were in his way. They were nothing more than debris in a flash flood. He moved through their formations like a current, and they bent, broke, or were simply tossed aside.

The sorcerers threw everything they had. Binding sigils, containment webs, heavy-grade sleep hexes that would have put a dragon into a coma.

He walked through them. The magic frayed the moment it touched his skin. It wasn’t that he countered it; his blood simply didn’t recognize the spells as real.

"What is he?" The lead sorcerer’s hands were shaking as he scanned the energy output. "Titan bloodline... Bahamut-class expression... how is it this full on day one?"

"The hero is attacking us—"

"This is impossible—"

"Is he corrupted? Is it demonic?"

The lead sorcerer stared at his flickering instruments, his face going pale. "No. No demonic presence. No outside influence. This is... this is his natural state."

A heavy, suffocating silence filled the room.

"A hero has gone mad," someone whispered.

"Heroes don’t go mad."

"This one has."

High above, the dome over Veranath shimmered, invisible to the city below. It was a masterpiece of arcane engineering, designed to hold gods, managed by the best in the realm.

It had never been tested against a Bahamut Titan.

It held, but just barely.

Gareth hit the barrier twice in the first hour. He wasn’t aiming for it—he was just moving, and the dome happened to be where he was headed. Each impact sent seismic tremors through the city, rattling teacups in the lower districts and sending the panicked guard into a frenzy.

By hour four, the military had retreated, their pride and their armor shattered.

By hour eight, the War Council met in a room that felt suddenly, terribly small. They had a problem, and they finally realized that the weapon they had summoned wasn’t under their control. It wasn’t even aware they were there.

They needed a different response. Something final.

She arrived on the second day.

Not because it had taken her that long to prepare.

Because she had spent the first day watching.

Astasia moved through what remained of the inner district’s eastern quarter with the specific quality of someone who had seen destruction before and was reading it the way a physician read symptoms — not with alarm, with information. The craters in the cobblestone. The load-bearing walls that had been pushed through rather than blown out. The consistent directionality of the damage, always forward, always the shortest path between where he was and where whatever he was seeing in his head existed.

She was tall.

The silver armor she wore was full-plate, articulated at every joint, bearing the insignia of the Angel Archetype bloodline at the pauldrons — white wings, stylized, the specific symbol that the world associated with the class of hero born for a different function than combat. Healers. Mediators. The heroes who came to ’end’ things rather than win them.

Her helmet was on.

Her sword was sheathed.

Her hands were empty.

She found him in the market district’s ruins — what had been the market district, before two days of a Bahamut Titan expressing his grief in architectural terms had converted it to a largely open-air landscape of displaced stone and shattered stalls.

He was standing in the middle of it.

Breathing.

Just breathing.

The energy had not depleted — that was the thing about Titan bloodlines, the thing that made them the most feared of the hero classifications, they did not deplete through expression. They accumulated. Every impact, every containment barrier, every military unit that had engaged and been set aside had fed back into him rather than drawing from him.

He was ’more’ than he had been two days ago.

His eyes were still wrong.

He turned at the sound of her approach.

"Stay back," he said.

His voice was a wreck. Two days of screaming had done what two days of screaming did to a voice, leaving it scraped raw, the words emerging from something that had been used too hard for too long.

"I’m not here to fight you," Astasia said.

"Stay ’back.’"

"Gareth—"

The name.

She used his name and the effect was immediate — not softening, the opposite, a sharpening, the specific reaction of a person for whom their own name had become attached to something unbearable.

"’Don’t—’"