The land was quiet. Not with peace—but with the eerie hush that follows a calamity no one remembers.
Students lay sprawled across the broken earth, disheveled, dazed. What little remained of the ritual site now resembled a scar scorched into the land. And amidst the bodies, groans, and murmurs, one thing was certain:
No one knew what had just happened.
Reynard groaned as he sat up, brushing dirt from his coat with shaky fingers. "The hell was that…" he muttered, rubbing his temple. A piercing ring echoed in his mind like a distant bell refusing to be silenced.
Around him, other students began to stir. Their conversations stumbled forth in fragments:
"Was it some kind of devil?"
"Did we get attacked?"
"Did anyone see what happened after the light?"
They remembered the strange distortion in the sky. They remembered fear—raw, bone-deep fear—but nothing after that. Just… blankness. A cut in their memory, as though time itself had skipped.
"I don't think we all passed out at the same time," a girl muttered, hugging her knees. "It doesn't feel right."
"But we're alive, aren't we?" another replied, forcing a chuckle. "Maybe the ancient guardian took care of it. Whatever it was."
That seemed enough for most. They grasped at the notion like a raft in deep water. Anything to stay afloat.
Reynard remained silent. He didn't believe it. Not fully. There was a wrongness in the air, an absence where something monumental had clearly happened. And yet… his memory refused to fill in the gap.
A little further away, Dawn lay on his back, staring at the sky.
He too had been thrown down when the Radiance flared, the slash that ended the anomaly reverberating through his soul. His breathing was shallow, his limbs trembling—not with fear, but something more abstract.
Uncertainty.
His mind was fogged, but unlike the others, there was a memory. Not a clear one. But something raw and etched into his being.
He remembered refusing something.
Something vast.
Something wrong.
His jaw clenched. The words he had spoken still echoed inside him—not as language, but as essence:
"I refuse."
It hadn't been a declaration. It had been defiance, pure and unyielding. But what had he refused?
And why did it feel like he'd been seen by something far beyond the mortal coil?
He sat up slowly, clutching his side, surveying the others.
None of them knew.
None of them remembered.
He was alone in that certainty.
---
Up on the Wall, three figures had watched the collapse of the event. They had not been part of it—but they had witnessed.
The Grand Duke, cloaked in golden silence, exhaled through his nose. "It happened," he murmured. "The Cultists have grown much bolder. To think they will infiltrate in the Wilderness just to summon a fragment of their so called deity!"
The Grand Instructor nodded slowly beside him. "Indeed. Such a being that is beyond mortal understanding can cause terrifying harm to the students. But someone denied the intrusion. Rejected it… completely."
Their eyes were narrowed, not in suspicion, but recollection. Both had stood once on the Celestial Battlefield, where stars wept and behemoths bled light. They knew the scent of war beyond worlds.
"That slash," the Grand Instructor continued. "It didn't merely banish a fragment. It cut the event itself from the world. A mortal cannot do such a thing."
"And yet one did," the Grand Duke replied, his tone grim with awe. "Or something did it through a mortal."
Luna stood apart from them, silent, her eyes scanning the ritual site with an expression that did not match the others. She had not seen the battle. Not in full. But her perception, strange and layered, had caught flashes—slivers of something radiant, something terrifying, and one figure… refusing.
She frowned. Concerned about someone above all for some reason she couldn't put her fingers onto.
Dawn.
The boy who called himself unremarkable. The boy who stood like a Pillar in front of the training students.
She turned away from the Wall and began walking down the slope, ignoring the Duke's raised brow.
"Where are you going?" the Grand Instructor asked.
She didn't look back. "To find someone interesting."
---
Gary stood, brushing off dust, eyes distant. Beside him, Ingrid held her spear tightly, looking toward the sky.
"You felt it too, didn't you?" she asked softly.
Gary didn't answer immediately. "I did. But I can't put it into words."
Ingrid nodded. "Like waking up from a nightmare but not remembering the true terror."
"Yes," Gary said. " It seems someone took care of the nightmare we all shared for us, doesn't it?"
They didn't discuss it further. Because whatever had changed was beyond the words of mortals—and yet, it was not lost on them. There was a disturbance in the world itself. A denial. A shift.
And it had centered around someone.
Their eyes, almost at the same time, drifted to where Dawn slowly rose to his feet.
---
The events of that day was bound to be recorded in the history as an unsolved mystery. The Wilderness exploration turned into a disaster with intrusion of Cultists, worshippers of Celestial entities! But the students inexplicably survived the disaster without knowing how.
Some consider this event as a Nightmare, filled with terror about fortunately forgot it quickly. Some consider it as a scheme, but their memories fail them too. Some saw it as mortal trifle, not bothering to pay much attention to it. But the truth had already faded into Myth.
For all except those who still remembers the Defiance, both in the sky and land.
And even he who jad unknowingly landed a blow on something unimaginably vast for a mortal.
Just like the First Prime!
---
To be continued