Chapter 669: It Was Orphos

Her legs shook. Her spine bent.

A ragged, agonizing scream of sheer, hopeless torment tore from her throat... a sound that seemed so unlike the proud, untouchable image of the Warchief into pieces.

She was losing.

Against an enemy of flesh, Veylara would fight until her last drop of blood.

But how could mortal marrow hold off the cold, unfeeling weight of an entire world’s laws pressing down on a single point? Her core was on the verge of shattering inward, and her skin began to crack, tiny fissures of light bleeding from her shoulders as the descending doom prepared to flatten her into a hollow smear of ash beneath the indifferent wrath of cosmic rule.

Seeing her break, something raw, feral, and utterly vicious snapped inside Sol’s chest.

A red-hot fury surged through his veins, hotter than the fires, hotter than the essence burning in his sun core.

Failing? Erased by a rule?

Fuck that. Fuck the realm, and fuck the sky.

He didn’t care about ancestral mandates. He didn’t give a damn about regional limits, heavenly rules, or whatever grand, cosmic design governed this primitive dirt.

She was Veylara. She was the woman who had stood tall against three armies. He had pulled Veylara from the brink of death in the mountain passes. He had held her against the rough bark of the willow tree, felt her absolute surrender, and traded seed and breath with her until the small hours of the night.

It didn’t matter if it had only been their first night together... in his mind, the line had been drawn. She had yielded to him. She had taken his seed into her marrow.

She was his woman.

He didn’t care that they had only just crossed that threshold tonight. He didn’t care that their bond was messy, crude, and forged in the heat of a victory feast.

In his mind, the moment she took his seed and surrendered herself to him, she became his woman.

And there was no force in this universe, mortal or divine, that was going to tear his woman apart while he was still drawing breath.

Sol was not the kind of man who sat by with his hands tucked between his thighs while someone... or some cosmic, arrogant concept... tried to take what was his.

Even if the enemy was the sky itself, he would tear its throat out before he let it crush her.

"You want to crush her?" Sol snarled, the muscles in his neck bulging like iron cables as he fought the gravity, stepping directly toward the descending storm. "You’ll have to break me first, you arrogant sky-bastard!"

As the pure defiance roared in his blood, a distant, ancient memory suddenly flared behind his eyelids.

"Hold on, Veylara!" Sol roared, taking a violent, tearing step forward against the crushing gravity, the ground shattering beneath his bare feet.

He reached desperately into himself, looking for anything... any scrap of his Free Use authority, any drop of his physical mass, any weapon he could muster to punch a hole through the descending wrath.

But as his senses touched the suffocating, immutable weight of the crimson-black sky, a cold realization slammed into his gut: his Layer 3 Peak core, as monstrous as it was, was still bound by the mortal physics of this world. He was throwing rocks at an avalanche.

In that split second of utter, suffocating desperation, a stray memory flashed across his consciousness.

He remembered a voice. Clear, distant, and steeped in ancient sorrow.

Isylia.

He remembered the fragmented lore she had once whispered in the dark, explaining the impossible miracle of Oprhos.

"It is a divine artifact," her voice echoed in the recesses of his mind. "A relic of the First Dawn, law itself, forged by the very universe when the cosmos was still raw and screaming. Long ago, when the strongest gods still walked openly among the world and hadn’t created their own divine realms, the artifact was revealed. It was no mere relic, but a shard of the primordial weave itself... a thing older than suns, older than law, older than even the gods who coveted it. It was said to hold the power of passage and exchange: the ability to cross the infinite world in a single step, and more importantly... to bypass every restriction, every binding, every decree. Even gods have bled for it, clawed at it, shattered themselves against its silence."

Orphos.

The thought was not a conscious command. It was merely a spark of raw, desperate memory.

Yet, the moment the true name resonated within his soul, the deepest, darkest abyss of his spiritual sea... a place completely separate from his sun core... violently convulsed!

HUMMMMMMM.

A low, primordial vibration resonated through Sol’s skull, so profound that it silenced the roaring of the angry sky in his mind in an instant.

In the center of his spiritual consciousness, something ancient stirred from its long, comatose slumber.

The four-pointed celestial compass hovered in his mental sea, its ancient, weathered surface still split by the jagged, hairline fracture running straight down its center. But it was no longer dull or dormant.

Sol saw it with crystal clarity... and in that instant, everything made sudden, absolute sense.

For days, Sol had felt his mind greedily swallowing the soul-wisps of every beast, warrior, and warlord he had butchered... from Prince Gorr, to the four coalition chieftains, to the Armored Blood-Bore, to the dozens of jungle beasts he had slaughtered just moments ago.

He had thought that bottomless hunger belonged to his own bizarre physical mutations.

Now, looking into his mind, the truth hit him like a thunderclap.

It was Orphos.

The divine artifact had turned his slaughter into sustenance, using the harvested soul-force to mend its shattered matrix and replenish the void left by its dimensional jump.

And right now, the four-pointed compass was glowing with a terrifying, absolute clarity.

The hairline fractures along its edges were sealed; the deep central fissure was humming with concentrated, restored origin force. It was practically brimming with stolen vitality, recovered enough to finally stir... and perhaps, recovered enough to tear open the gate back to his original tribe.

But Sol didn’t even have a fraction of a second to process the revelation as...