Zenith Online: Rebirth of the Strongest Player

No matter how much Kieran attempted to call out to Adeia using the connection fostered by the Sacred Inheritor, it was as if his voice couldn't penetrate her mind, impeded by a strange sound barrier.

His first scream had stimulated a faint reaction, but from then on… nothing. Kieran knew why. It was the Flame's doing, who utilized its aura to create a baffling ward around Adeia.

Perhaps that should have stopped Kieran's advance then and there, convincing him not to approach, but it didn't. 

He waded through the thickening aura, which became dense like sludge. 

Taking even another step forward had become incredibly hard. For a moment, it stumped Kieran, completely ruining his forward momentum. Stuck in place, he surveyed this dense energy.

It borrowed upon the energy of the monoliths, which seemed to draw power from the Darkness Below. More than that, Kieran could feel an intensifying rumble traveling through this strange gloaming.

That's when Kieran noticed Deidamia assimilating mass amounts of the carmine light, gaining sigils similar to Heartbanes but not quite. These sigils carried a different purpose.

If Heartsbane's purpose was to pierce… Deidamia's purpose had been to cut. 

Instinctively, Kieran touched his chest after painstaking efforts. Upon giving it deeper consideration, Kieran realized that Deidamia had never pierced him. Adeia always opted for a cut even when the opportunity to stab arose, as if the principle were ingrained in her.

Is there where it had happened?

Kieran trudged forth, only succeeding in taking a single step, his dominant hand stretched in an attempt to touch Adeia's back.

However, the pressure holding him back vanished abruptly, condensed into something frightening and unable to be described, and then slammed into his chest with the force of a dreadful wrecking ball.

Kieran flew through the air like a broken ragdoll, slamming against the coarse pathway about a hundred meters behind the Sacred Inheritor. He groaned painfully, his expression frozen in shock.

When had the Flame grown strong enough to affect reality? And to do so to great effect?

Kieran clawed the ground, scrambling to his feet. 

All of this felt so wrong to him. He had thought the Flame's goal all along was him, but he was using another pawn, which destroyed Kieran's assumption. 

Or maybe he hadn't been wrong but too close-minded. 

The Flame's plan was grander than Kieran had fathomed. That lack of awareness could be attributed to Kieran's limited understanding, but he had other designs.

To Kieran, this was no result of his incompetence. 

It was the product of the Flame's cunning. A cunning that allowed it to kill many Gods before falling. He had to admit he was no match for the Flame regarding machinations and devising plans with innumerable layers and contingencies.

But… did he need all of that?

Kieran ruminated over that question for a few seconds.

He considered everything that had happened during this Trial. He looked at it critically, setting aside all superfluous affairs that could deviate from his current avenue of thought. 

Anything capable of over-complicating the process was immediately dismissed as it had no place. 

Eventually, Kieran concluded something extremely vital.

By virtue of his defiance, the Flame had settled for a lesser pawn. Though it had prepared many contingencies, a replacement hardly ever compared to the original. 

In this case, the replacement poorly reflected the original. He thought about it. Kieran had the power of a Fiend, but Adeia was a human without the Mark of the Maddened… currently.

If he ignored her current limitations, Adeia was an exceptional candidate to become a new Fiend. No, compared to all of the other Fiends… she was far better suited. Her original disposition would allow her to excel as a Fiend because she tended to fixate. 

In a word, Adeia was… hyperbolic.

And Fiends loved to obsess. Meld those two together, and what was created would be a monstrosity!

And that was precisely what was happening. The energies spilling off the monoliths were the same defiled and bloody energies used to create a Fiend inside the Pit of Culling. 

It could transmute a human to turn them into something dreadful.

That was why Kieran overreacted to the dense energies, and the Sacred Inheritor was so frightened. All of the blood spilled in the Ravaged Plain was seeping down here by way of the Flame's manipulation.

Originally, Kieran was meant to stay down here, absorb all of this, and in doing so, lose his mind and become the Flame's utter thrall. It had forged him to be its weapon.

'No… the Flame doesn't want a weapon. It's the type to want to get its hands dirty and relish the thrill of crushing things directly.'

If not a weapon, a vessel then. 

Thinking about its limitations, the Flame could not exist without the Order of War and Flame. They acted as an extension of the Flame, giving it a "body" to control. 

But all of them had died. Every last Fiend was… well, gone. Eradicated and turned back into a well of untapped power. That power was now presented, primed to be condensed and funneled into one person.

Though far from the Flame and Adeia, Kieran could hear the alluring temptations it whispered to her. It spoke to a part of her that desired the strength to end it all — to destroy all that was unjust and against her cause.

Kieran had to admit that the Flame was matchless when it came to manipulation. If not for all the defenses against his efforts, Kieran wouldn't have made it this far.

With each passing moment, Adeia gave in, crumbling against the Flame's temptations. She could not mount a defense against this coercive bundle of dark power.

It seeped into her while Kieran fought against the dense energies. He opened his mouth at some point, inhaling ravenously while grasping the Testament in his Realm.

The resentments found kinship in him, his presence gaining purchase and allure. Kieran tried to gorge himself on the energies, striving to absorb them to soak up Adeia's burden.

But the Flame merely regarded him with an amused chuckle.

"You have no idea how long this plan has been in progress, my defiant child. You have yet to know futility, but I will continue to teach you. First lesson: powerlessness."

A massive cyclone of dense, dire energies tapered to a point right above Adeia's open mouth and drilled into her.

Maniacal laughter echoed throughout the Darkness Below as the Flame regained his sinister presence. Adeia looked at the Flame's new appearance in alarm before shaking with despair.

Somehow, Kieran could hear her thoughts clear in his mind, likely due to the remnants of the Sacred Inheritor's fading power. 

And what he learned was… shocking.

Adeia didn't know how it was possible, but her Patron God had apparently never reached out to her. Her Godsend came from the Flame itself, and because of that gift, it could easily influence her mind.

'That's…'

Kieran blinked in disbelief.

The Flame had perfected its imitation of the Endless of War through her connection to the War Deity Council. Its understanding of the Endless of War's mannerisms didn't come from her knowledge, though. That was simply the equivalent of a refreshing course.

As the energies burrowed into the primed Adeia, the Marked of the Maddened appeared far larger than any other Fiend possessed. It stretched across her entire body, blazing with a crimson radiance that bled from the gaps in her armor.

Like the Flame said, Kieran's attempts to absorb the energies were futile. He could not stop the inevitable.

The Sacred Inheritor tugged on his arm.

"We… we should get out of here. That thing is super dangerous."

Kieran agreed, but as much as he wanted to, he couldn't move. He was held in place by an almighty force. Not even his Aspect could help him break free as he manifested its ruinous threads.

Astonished, Kieran watched as Adeia's skin paled, becoming a grayish-white, crimson veins shot through her extremities and up her neck, similar viscid blood stretching across Deidamia.

Then, she stepped forward and made a biased slash at the Door. A red line appeared seconds later, diagonally bisecting the strange stone material.

When the slabs of inordinate weight fell with a tremor, ghastly wails escaped, carrying the song of salvation.

Suddenly, Kieran's surroundings disappeared, alarm eating away at his mind.