Chapter 84: The Last Cast

Max broke through the surface, plunging downward from the crushing pressure of the abyssal ocean into a blinding, impossible sky.

Five suns burned from above, glaring down with unmerciful heat. But high among them, one sun hung dim, choked by a bruised, suffocating shadow that coiled around its edges.

Get out, Max spat, his mind violently shoving the creeping darkness of voices back, forcing the intrusion out of his head before it could take root.

With a sharp mental swipe, he flicked open his system prompt.

A blade materialized before him out of thin air—the Saintess blade, the exact weapon Lucas had wielded. He checked its status, his eyes scanning the glowing text of the Astral Burden tied to its steel. A grim, heavy truth settled in his chest.

Lucas isn’t dead. Not really.

A Burden didn’t kill you. It didn’t grant a clean release. It just twisted the mind, warped the soul, and drove a person completely mad, turning them into a walking husk. Looking at the weight of that curse, Max knew the bitter truth: Lucas would be dreaming of death, begging for it, yet denied even that mercy.

The wind shrieked past his ears, a roaring gale as he manipulated his elemental affinity, compressing air beneath his boots to shove himself deeper into the descent. Floating island after floating island rushed past his sides, blurred streaks of green rock and ancient soil swallowed by the dizzying drop.

He stared at the Saintess blade in his hand, feeling the cold, alien hum radiating from the crossguard. With a flick of his wrist, he dismissed it from his status interface, caught it physically, and slid it into his pocket ring. The silver band gleamed against his knuckle, bearing the crest of the Silver Rain Guild.

As he plummeted, the weight of his thoughts dragged heavier than gravity. His team members were gone—every single one of them reduced to mindless, twitching puppets for that monstrosity down in the abyssal sea. How was that fair? They had walked into this together. Were they all just meant to die in the dark?

It had all started as a standard commission from the head family. Rumors of a Saintess-Tier blade had drawn them in. The Silver Rain Guild operated under the Sloane family, though it was technically an offshoot of another main branch run by the family’s daughter. If Max recalled the history correctly, Rain had been part of it once, but after the fall of the Storm Saint, she had broken away to forge her own path. Now, she wasn’t even here to see her people slaughtered.

Her vice-captain, Lucas, was trapped in the Astral Plane, hollowed out by the Saintess blade’s Burden. The rest of his teammates were mindless meat for the Titan’s maw. And Max was the only one left.

He almost laughed. He even prayed—though he had stopped believing in any god a long time ago, tired of a silent sky that just watched people die while they screamed.

Then, he felt it.

A blinding, violent heat slammed into his back, fierce enough to make him feel like he was being cooked alive inside his own skin. Max whipped his head around.

Max was a man who lived without regret. From the moment he chose to enter the brutal trials to form his contract—knowing full well it meant pledging his life over to House Sloane—he had never looked back. Max didn’t care about the politics. Power was the only currency that bought you a tomorrow, and he had been willing to pay the price.

Within his guild, they just called him the element caster. But to Max, they were more than comrades. If anyone asked him about the Silver Rain Guild, his answer was always the same: They’re like family to me.

He cherished family above everything. He had even pushed through the agony of the second trial just to secure his tether, marching forward with open eyes. He didn’t regret a single second of it.

Even now, as a searing light shaped like a falling sun plunged downward to crush him, a rapid reel of memories flashed behind his eyes. He had lived a life entirely without regret.

In the middle of the roaring fire, his fingers brushed against cold metal in his pocket.

His eyes snapped down. He was still falling, the wind tearing at his clothes, the blade still resting in the ring. With frantic, desperate speed, he yanked the ring off his finger, pressed a Silver Guild emergency seal onto the band, and hauled back his arm. He threw the ring with every ounce of remaining strength, launching it far out into the open air away from his trajectory, watching it streak like a silver shooting star toward a distant floating island.

Then he looked up.

The descending sun wasn’t a star. It was a massive, concentrated ball of condensed light, hurtling straight down toward him with apocalyptic speed. There was nowhere to run. The blast radius was too wide, the descent too fast to dodge.

Max’s teeth gritted so hard they nearly cracked.

I’m not dying here.

He poured every last drop of his remaining Astral energy into his lungs, surging his air element to its absolute maximum limit. He forced his body downward, trying to dive faster, trying to outrun the doom screaming at his back.

It was unforgiving. The sheer radiation of the approaching light began to catch his clothes on fire, eating away at his fabric piece by piece. Beside him, massive floating islands caught in the wake of the falling sun simply vaporized into ash, or burned away into glowing slag in a fraction of a second.

Max threw his head back for one final look.

He was completely out of energy. The air in his lungs burned. The five distant suns in the sky felt like mocking spectators, but he knew the sixth sun—the one dragged out from the abyssal ocean by that dawn titan—was the one that would finally turn him to dust.