NOVEL ONLINE FREE Chapter 7: 7. Omen
The next day's sunlight was unusually fierce. Luna sat on the schoolhouse windowsill practicing her song, children clapping around her. Tiedan mimicked the lyre's melody with his wooden sword.
Suddenly, her singing cut off. The lyre slipped from her hands, and her whole body fell backward like a kite with its string severed.
" Luna!" Lena screamed, lunging forward. Anvil was the first to rush in, carefully gathering Luna into his arms. His rough palm felt her forehead. "No fever! Where's Doctor Kava?"
By the time Doctor Kava arrived, Luna was awake, but her face was deathly pale, her limbs limp.
Kava checked her eyes, felt her pulse, and finally shook his head with a frown. "Pulse is steady. Doesn't seem sick… more like… her strength was drained."
The Chief wrung his hands, turning to see Estelle standing in the doorway. "Mr. Estelle, you know more. Can you check on our little Luna?"
Estelle approached. After a moment's hesitation, he placed his palm gently on Luna's lower abdomen.
A surge of warm energy struck his palm – not the destructive force of the Stellaron, but pure, vibrant Beauty's power, pulsing with life like the soft glow of twin moons. It gently enveloped a tiny presence.
He snapped his head up, meeting Luna's stunned eyes. "You… are pregnant."
"Pregnant?" Karun's wooden sword clattered to the floor.
Granny Moon suddenly clapped her hands. "The Stellar Knight prophecy! Aeon Idrilla said, 'When twin moons shine as one, the future's seed takes root in the Moon Gazer's womb!'"
The villagers erupted. Lena tugged Karun's hand. "Is Sister Luna going to have a little knight?"
Luna looked down at her belly, still flat, yet feeling a strange flutter.
Estelle's fingertips remained on her abdomen. He could clearly feel the energy accelerating its flow, like a bud about to bloom.
The Polaris Mirror Shield on his back grew hot. Within its crack, the outline of Luna's abdomen was visible – radiating a faint, luminous halo like a rising moon.
Meanwhile, in another corner of the cosmos, a bloody battle raged.
Rotstar-7
The air hung thick as congealed blood. Every breath tasted of rust, decaying organics, and a deeper, sickly-sweet tang of Imaginary Decay. Leaden grey clouds churned overhead, pierced only by sickly violet shafts of light illuminating the Antimatter Legion-ravaged earth.
The skeleton of a once-grand starport city remained: twisted steel frames, pipes hanging like dying serpents, building husks scarred by Voidranger claw marks and energy weapon burns. The ground wasn't earth or metal, but a thick, living carpet of deep purple fungal growth – the manifest Destruction rooting itself here.
Silence. Utter silence. Even the wind seemed choked by despair.
Until the footsteps began.
Heavy. Slow. Accompanied by the grating screech of metal on bone. Each step made the fungal carpet recoil, withering in fear. A figure emerged from the shadow of a collapsed starship wreck.
This was Kay, once the Second Seat of the Knights of Beauty. Once a bastion of protection and light.
Now, he was a walking calamity.
His once-gleaming knightly armor was now overgrown, corroded by deep violet void energy that seemed to devour light itself. The plates were jagged, spiked with twisted black bone protrusions at the joints. Where the helmet's visor should be, two seething orbs of crimson fire burned with madness and brutality. The weapon in his grasp was no longer a sacred knightly blade. It was a massive greatsword forged from pure Imaginary energy and some unknown, living metal. Dark purple energy flowed thickly along its length, the air around the blade screaming under pressure, leaving ephemeral spatial fissures in its wake.
He was the Omen Knight.
"High-energy signature detected! Non-Legion unit! Coordina— gahk!"
A shrill alarm blared from a fallen comms tower, instantly silenced by a dark purple energy slash that ripped through the air. The tower top and the Voidranger: Predator perched there disintegrated into shrapnel and foul ichor.
The silence shattered like glass!
From twisted pipes, collapsed buildings, even beneath the writhing fungal mat, a tide of Antimatter Legion units surged forth. Lowest-tier Voidranger: Eliminators shrieked as they charged, claws leaving viridian trails. From the sky, Voidranger: Stalkers dove, unleashing deadly barrages of energy bolts.
Facing this deluge of destruction, Kay merely raised his void greatsword a fraction.
No charge. No battle cry. Only bone-chilling… efficiency.
The first wave of Eliminators never reached his armor. His wrist flicked, almost imperceptibly. The greatsword traced a near-invisible arc of dark purple. Space seemed to tear. The Eliminators froze mid-lunge, then dissolved like metal in acid, silently erased from existence along the cut line. No scream escaped; only wisps of smoke remained.
The Stalkers' energy rain fell like a tempest. Kay didn't even look up. He held his shield with his left hand, his right a blur of dark purple as he swung the greatsword. Each stroke bisected an energy bolt mid-air. The bolts didn't explode; they were devoured or erased by the void blade, leaving no ripple. The few bolts that struck his armor merely sparked harmlessly against the corrupted plates, their defensive power grotesquely enhanced by his fall.
He began to move. Not a knightly charge, but the measured tread of Death itself. Each step withered and charred vast swathes of the fungal carpet. His void greatsword became a scythe. Every swing carved a swath of silent annihilation. Eliminators vanished into dust clouds. Stalkers were plucked from the sky by casually flung, space-rending arcs of dark purple energy, crashing down as twisted scrap.
His combat held no beauty, only pure, efficient, soul-crushing power. The air reeked of molten metal, the sickly-sweet corruption of void energy, and the nauseating stench of Legion units being unmade. Dark purple energy, thick as toxic sludge, flowed and spattered around him, dissolving steel and stone where it fell.
Suddenly, a Voidranger: Ravager – like a giant, shadow-lurking scorpion – lunged from the side! Its barbed tail-stinger shot towards his helmet's seam with impossible speed. Kay reacted instantly, spinning the greatsword to block, but the stinger's tip scraped his pauldron.
A hideous screech rang out. A deep gouge marred the shoulder plate. A rivulet of dark red fluid – like blood mixed with stardust, or perhaps pure energy – seeped from the wound. Where it dripped onto the fungal mat, it hissed and scorched, instantly burning a deep pit. At the pit's bottom, faint, twisted starlight seemed to flicker.
This minor injury ignited the Omen Knight's fury. The crimson flames beneath his helmet flared violently!
"ROOOAAARR—!" An inhuman roar, saturated with agony and rage, tore from his throat – the shriek of a wounded beast. It shook the surrounding ruins, dislodging debris.
He whirled. The greatsword wasn't swung; it was hurled like a javelin! It became a dark purple comet, tearing through space, impaling the Ravager and pinning its massive form against a tottering metal tower in the distance!
The void energy contained within the blade detonated, vaporizing the Ravager and blasting the tower's upper half into flaming, purple-fire shrapnel!
In the aftermath, Kay's breath came in ragged gasps. The void energy around him churned violently, unstable. He staggered, dropping to one knee, the greatsword plunged into the ground before him for support. The crimson fire in his visor flickered wildly – rage battling a flicker of unspeakable… exhaustion and struggle.
In that fleeting moment of respite, his peripheral vision caught something.
A fragmented image, like a shard from a distant past, surfaced in his tormented mind:
Within prophetic light, a blurred yet infinitely vibrant figure slowly ascended, symbolizing the birth of a new Aeon of Beauty – Serene.
Pure radiance gently soothed the scarred cosmos. But then, in the next instant, that nascent light was snuffed out by all-consuming darkness… darkness intrinsically linked to Destruction.
The agony this vision inflicted dwarfed any physical wound! Kay clutched his helmeted head, unleashing an even more piercing, soul-rending howl! Void energy exploded from him like a tidal wave, blasting away the remaining Legion units and nearby rubble!
As the storm subsided, the Omen Knight Kay stood once more. The crimson fire in his visor reignited – colder, more ferocious, yet somehow… more hollow.
He wrenched his greatsword from the earth. Dragging his shield, now a maw into the abyss, he took heavy, resolute strides deeper into the ruins, towards the densest concentration of Legion power. Each step made the fungal carpet of death shrink back in terror.
He would fight. He would destroy. He would use these hands, stained with filth and his own tainted blood, to tear open a gap in the encroaching shadow of Destruction before it could fully descend. Even if the cost was eternal damnation. Even if only deeper darkness lay ahead. For the sake of that newborn light, prophesied to fall, he embraced being the deepest, most terrifying… Omen.