Chapter 407: Pyris against Fate?
Fate had made its decree. A cold, unfeeling judgment. A sentence written in the bones of the cosmos long before Pyris ever existed.
And yet—he moved.
The moment his foot left the ground, the air itself shattered.
A storm of force erupted around him, a howling vortex that sent shockwaves through the hall.
The gathered leaders, ancient and indomitable in their own right, felt the weight of it—the buried power, the presence that had long slumbered within Pyris, now unfurling like a beast awakening from the depths. This was not borrowed strength, not a fragment stolen from another. This was his—his alone.
And yet… it was never meant to be his.
A power without origin. A force that should not exist within him, but did.
Where had it come from? Had he taken it? Had he earned it? Or was he merely a mistake in the script of reality, an aberration that the cosmos had failed to contain?
The answers did not matter. Not now.
Because if there were consequences for wielding such power—he would suffer them later.
Now, there was only movement.
His body blurred beyond comprehension, light and shadow twisting violently in his wake. To the others, it was as if existence itself refused to define him. He was neither here nor there, neither bound nor free.
Just gone.
Somewhere beyond the maelstrom of his own acceleration, Pyris felt it—that creeping, unnatural wrongness.
It had begun the moment he emerged from the Labyrinth. The moment he faced Darkness Infernum. From then on, everything had felt forced, as though reality itself had become an unsteady hand rushing to correct its own mistakes. The events around him no longer followed a natural course; they felt written, hastily and without care, as if some great, unseen hand was desperate to drag him back into its script.
It was like a writer scrambling to repair a shattered plotline—frantically closing gaps, forcing threads to align where they no longer fit.
But Pyris had jumped beyond those threads.
He had broken something.
And now, the cosmos was trying to pull him back in.
Zaryana's words echoed in his mind. The warning. The truth.
"You have shattered the chains of Fate. You have broken through Destiny's weave. But now, Pyris… you will face things beyond your level."
At the time, he had taken it as a challenge. An obstacle to overcome.
But never—never had he imagined that Fate itself would turn against him.
Yet how could it not?
He had defied it. Again and again, he was meant to rewrite what was meant to be, his mere existence a wound in the fabric of predestination. And so was his woman who'd changed the strings to fate.
And now, Alexa was about to pay the price.
No.
He would not allow it.
It was no longer about right or wrong. No longer about morality, or consequence, or even survival. This was something greater.
This was Pyris against Fate itself.
Could he win? Could he change what the cosmic force had already decreed?
Perhaps it was madness to even try.
But madness was all he had left.
He was watched. He could feel it.
Zaryana—watching, waiting.
Goddess Lilith—silent, but just as observant.
And beside her, an Endless—one of them. The ones who stood beyond even gods.
Only Duality was absent.
But Fate—Fate was watching too.
Not as a spectator. Not as an observer.
As a force beyond comprehension.
An Endless too. An ancient, immovable certainty, stronger than gods, stronger than creation itself.
And Pyris had dared to challenge it.
Let it watch.
Because tonight, he would carve his own path through its design and if Fate wished to stop him—
It would have to try.
It had only been been barely half a year or less. Half a year since Alexandra entered his life. A human—an extraordinary one—but a human nonetheless. Yet time had meant nothing. Not to him. Not to her.
She had become something greater, something irreplaceable, something that even the cosmos would bow in shame trying to explain how quickly it had happened.
Pyris hadn't seen it coming. No one had. Not the mortals who lived blind to the currents of fate, not the gods who read the strings of existence. She had become family, not just in name, but in the way that mattered—woven into him in a way that made the thought of life without her unacceptable. She, like the rest of his women, was a piece of his very existence, a presence so ingrained in his being that to lose her would mean something more than grief. It would mean war.
And Pyris had already decided. If fate had set itself against them, if destiny had written their tragedy into the fabric of reality itself, then he would be the one to carve through it.
The cosmos had made a mistake thinking it could take from him without consequence!
If that was what it meant to have her forever, to hold onto the ones he cherished without fear of them being ripped away—
Then so be it!
He would burn through whatever shackles bound them. He would tear apart whatever laws dictated their endings. He had already done enough to make himself the bane of fate and destiny itself. What was one more act of defiance?
And so, he had moved.
The world did not allow him entry. It did not permit his arrival. It was forced to acknowledge his presence, bent to the sheer inevitability of his will. Space would not open for him—it would crack, a violent shift in reality as Pyris appears, the storm of speed that carried him leaving the very air trembling in his wake.
Power surged, barely contained, an unspoken pressure pressing down on everything around him as if the world itself had yet to decide whether it would shatter or submit beneath the force of his existence. He did not need to announce himself. His presence alone was a declaration, an undeniable shift in the balance of the moment.
Anastasia had been desperate, teetering on the edge of something reckless, something dangerous—something she could not take back. It no longer mattered. Pyris was here. And with his arrival, everything else became irrelevant.
The weight of the room changed, the air thick with something beyond mortal comprehension, something that did not belong to the logic of this world. His power did not scream. It did not rage. It did not need to. It merely was. A force that existed beyond explanation, coiled within him, restrained yet unshaken, a power that had no right being his yet was—a power that had no known origins yet flowed through him as though it had always belonged to him.
His eyes glowed, not with golden light, not with divine radiance, but with something far more absolute. The secrets of the world lay bare before him.
The flow of existence itself felt exposed, as if every thread of fate, every unseen hand that sought to dictate what should be, was now laid out before his gaze. And he saw her—Alexa, her body shrinking away, the supply of life essence draining, fading, slipping toward something irreversible.
"Step aside."
The words were not shouted. They did not need to be. Anastasia moved before her mind even registered the command. Not by fear. Not by choice.
But because it was inevitable. There were voices that demanded obedience through sheer force, voices that cowed lesser beings into submission through power alone. Pyris' voice was not one of them. His voice dictated reality. To ignore was to deny his existence itself.
To resist was like to stand against the very laws that governed the universe. Anastasia did not resist. She could not.
The golden sword came forth. It did not shimmer like an artifact forged by gods, nor did it blaze with holy fire. It simply was. A weapon that had no need for ornamentation, no need for grandeur, because it existed in a state of absolute authority. The hilt wrapped in dragon scales, the blade gleaming with an aura that did not belong to mortal hands.
Pyris stepped forward, and power rippled with him, not as a shield, not as a manifestation of might, but as something far greater. He did not wear power.
He was power. And despite the weight of the moment, despite the undeniable force he exuded, there was something else—something that made the air catch in their throats.
He looked sovereign.
Not beautiful. Not divine. But sovereign. Not a king. Not a ruler. But something even they—the ones who would stand at the pinnacle of existence—would later come to acknowledge. The kind of presence that would make gods falter. The kind of existence that woul make fate itself hesitate.
And then the blade touched her heart.
No one spoke. No one dared to. The room was thick with tension, not because they feared what he might do, but because they did not know what he was doing. Was he saving her? Or was he ending her?
And then the blade pierced.
A single motion. No hesitation. No doubt.
And at that moment, Emberly arrived.
But it was already too late.
Fate had changed.
And it couldn't be changed!