Rebirth: Necromancer's Ascenscion-Chapter 132: Living Prophet

Caelen couldn’t breathe.

His back was pressed hard against the jagged stone of the crumbling ruin wall, each breath a panicked gasp that rattled in his throat.

Dust clogged his lungs.

Blood pounded in his ears.

His fingers—cut and raw—dug into the stone like claws, as if gripping it might anchor him to a reality rapidly slipping from his grasp.

Beside him, Lyra clutched at her temples, her body wracked with tremors.

Her knuckles had turned ghost white, locked in a grip so tight it looked like her bones might snap through skin.

And then—they both screamed.

It was not the scream of fear.

Not even pain.

It was something deeper, more primal—a scream stolen from the mouths of things that lived before men had names.

The sound twisted into the air like the cry of creation unraveling.

Tears streamed down their cheeks, thick and crimson, more blood than water.

It spilled freely from their eyes, painting their faces in streaks of agony.

Their ears rang—not with sound, but with an absence of it.

A silence so absolute, so crushing, it rang louder than any roar of battle or death.

They could not move.

Could not run.

Could not even think clearly.

Because something was here.

Something vast.

Something old.

And it did not belong.

Their bones and joints refused any attempts, seized in place beneath an ancient pressure that defied logic, defied sense.

It wasn’t mana. It wasn’t magic.

It was something malicious—something elemental and absolute.

Caelen felt it in every cell of his being, in the marrow of his bones, screaming at him to run, to flee, to hide.

But even the concept of movement had been stolen from him.

"What... what is this...?" he rasped, though his throat was raw and his voice came out more breath than word.

Lyra sobbed beside him, a low, strangled sound. Blood dripped from her chin. "We need to run," she whimpered, "but my body... it won’t move..."

This terror—it wasn’t human.

It wasn’t even animal.

It was the kind of dread etched into the genetics of all living things.

They weren’t even participants in the battle anymore.

They were insects. Shivering on the edge of annihilation. Spectators to the end of something they didn’t understand.

And then, as if to add to their terror—Caelen saw it.

Cardinal Fang was crying.

Not tears, but blood.

The Crimson Executioner. The High Inquisitor. The Butcher of Westvale.

The man who’d walked through fire and left cities burning behind him... was bleeding from his eyes.

He touched a gloved hand to his cheek, staring at the crimson smear on his fingers as though seeing blood for the first time.

A long, stunned silence hung in the air.

Then, impossibly, he laughed.

A raw, broken sound. Half-choked, half-reverent.

"So this," Fang said hoarsely, "this is the true extent of your power... I thought the rumors were exaggerated, Demonbl—" He caught himself mid-word. His gaze flickered, voice shifting into something darker.

Not mockery. Not anger.

Reverence. Awe.

"No... Prophet of Death." he corrected himself.

Ian didn’t smile.

Didn’t blink.

Didn’t even breathe.

He just... was.

A black shape amidst a battlefield of ruin and dead things.

And he spoke.

His voice was calm. Clear.

Like still water hiding an undertow deep enough to drown the world.

"This isn’t power," Ian said. "This is calamity. A taste of the coming silence. The whisper of the Fourth Convergence."

Fang staggered back, eyes wide, mouth twitching with disbelief.

And still—he roared defiance.

"WELL STILL—!" he bellowed, voice breaking against the sky like a war horn. "I WILL NOT BE DEFEATED!"

The sky answered him.

A terrible sound ripped through the heavens—metal and scripture and blood colliding in a storm of ritual and rage.

Crimson rods appeared in the air, hundreds of them.

Jagged spears forged from cursed rites, glowing with damned light and whispering the names of forgotten gods.

They floated above Fang in a perfect circle, a halo of death.

Spinning. Screaming.

Radiating heat so intense the very air trembled.

And every single one of them pointed at Ian.

The air buckled.

The stone cracked beneath their feet.

Even space itself seemed to retreat.

And then—

Ian exhaled a single word.

"Cease."

No chant. No gesture. No magic circle drawn in blood.

Only a word.

A declaration.

And the rods obeyed.

Not one of them moved.

They didn’t fall. Didn’t explode.

They simply ceased.

Unmade in an instant, as if the universe retracted them from its memory. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ

The air that had once held them no longer remembered that they’d been there.

Fang stared.

Stared like a man watching a god write new laws of reality.

Ian stepped forward.

His blade scraped behind him—long, black, trailing darkness across the stone like ink across parchment.

"I told you," he said, voice like judgment passed down through generations. "It didn’t matter how strong you were. Not against this. Against me... you will surely die."

Fang collapsed to his knees.

"What is this? What are you?" he gasped.

But Ian no longer looked at him.

His gaze had shifted—to Caelen, to Lyra, to the battlefield littered with important relics. Hundreds dead. Artifacts gleaming in the blood-red light.

He raised a hand.

And Caelen, Lyra along with the relics vanished.

No flash.

No theft.

No spell.

They were simply... gone.

Taken.

Reality offered no resistance.

Then, at last, Ian looked back to Fang.

There was no fury in his eyes.

No cruelty.

Only verdict.

"Cardinal Fang," Ian said, and his voice now echoed with a depth that scraped against the veil of worlds, "for your sins of ignorance... here is my Judgment."

He raised the blade that shared its name.

Judgment.

It was less a sword as much as it were proclamation.

A cut in the fabric of reality, rimmed in black flame. Its edge pulsed with soul-light, covered in glyphs that whispered in dead tongues.

Then—

He brought it down.

The world went quiet.

But not the quiet of peace.

The quiet of ending.

A single black line tore through the air—from heaven to earth, from realm to realm. It was too perfect, too precise—like creation had been split by a divine scalpel.

Time didn’t slow.

It collapsed.

The Hollow Spine Ruins trembled once.

Then vanished.

No explosion.

No crater.

Just absence.

The memory of the place was gone.

It had been unwritten.

And across the world, others felt it.

Sanctum loyalist screamed. Beasts howled. Priests fell to their knees.

The dead stirred. The blind saw visions they weren’t meant to. And something old, something watching from beyond... smiled.

Back on the battlefield, Ian lowered the blade.

The black scar he carved into reality lingered a heartbeat longer.

Then—faded.

What was once Hollow Spine was now a perfect, gaping absence.

A silence more complete than death.

A message carved into the world:

The Prophet of Death was still living.