The Primordial Record

1008  Awakening Of Madness (10)

"Naviir!! Keep it tight, tight! You are straying from the path."

"Damn it, Naviir has lost half his head, Urhos, take his place, we cannot…"

"I am sorry, this is my last resurrection, I don't think I can.."

"We have crossed the halfway point, everything from this point gets harder, but we are nearly there, we are Explorers! We move…"

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There was no need to wait for the corruption to kill him. Noah thought he was dying so fast already that dying from the corruption would be a blessing. The Deific Explorer encouraging the rest had been frozen, then diced before he was crushed to pieces, and somehow his voice still lasted long enough to encourage them all to push forward.

Although for a brief moment, every Deific Ranked Explorer here had seen the ocean of Purified Aura, and they had all understood the significance behind such a thing. For all the many reasons to die in this world, dying for something that could lead to the salvation of your entire world was near the top of the list.

They pushed forward even as their numbers began to drop, making sacrifices that would ensure that their Null Charges reached their destination. They blew past countless traps, and none of them hesitated even till the end.

They fell faster and faster, drawn by an implacable force, and even if they wanted to stop, they could not. Noah had been roaring his defiance since the moment he fell, and alongside him, every Explorer did the same, they roared, and they died, but they never stopped jumping back into the Abyss.

Madness? Maybe, but they were Explorers.

Noah had died three times already and for the fifteen hundred Deific Rank Explorers that began the journey of laying down Null Charges, there were barely sixty of them left. The dangers as they fell deeper into the earth did not reduce but increased with every mile that passed.

They had penetrated hundreds of miles into the earth, and the Null Charges they had dropped along the way had nearly reached a million, the effects of so many Null Charges were beginning to spread ahead of them, clearing everything along their path for miles, making the passage safe from any anomaly, either spatial or otherwise.

Behind them blazed with red, the light from the Null Charges made the passage behind them appear like the insides of a throat and they were falling in its gullet.

The Explorers were a few miles away from the bottom, which in their Aura Senses appeared gray.

"We are nearly at the end, I don't see anything, are you sure that the treasure is below?" An Explorer whom Noah did not know his name called out.

He was in the foremost position and had been leading them all for a while, he was the most powerful Deific Explorer Noah had ever seen, but sadly it appears that he was in his last life, although this did not stop him from staying at the front and braving most of the dangers. Noah wished to know his name,

"We should watch out for the Aaarhhh…"

Whatever he was going to say next was cut short as he was grounded into pieces in midair, flinging blood and gore for hundreds of feet. Noah's eyes widened in realization, he was a few hundred feet behind and was directly behind the crushed Explorer, he screamed, "Spatial Collapse!"

The gray Aura below was not where the descent had ended, they were all wrong in their assumptions, instead, it was an entire section of space that had fractured into pieces, Noah had never seen anything like this before, he had always thought that the space in this world was stable enough that there would be no way for space to be fractured at such a scale.

"Release everything you can!" Noah, roared as red beads were launched from his arms at lightning speeds.

In the beginning, Noah could only activate and release ten Null Charges at a time, but after repeated tempering with death as the prime motivator for him to improve, he was now able to push out thirty Null Charges at once.

However, against what they were about to face, he feared even if they were all able to release a thousand at once, it would not be enough. The next second was consumed by screaming and death, as Null Charges were primed and launched toward the fractured space below. Like pouring water into a vat of boiling oil, the spatial fractures expanded and shattered even as they were dispersed into nothingness.

The agitated space flung out an unknown amount of spatial anomalies that vanished in a short while but did not make them any less dangerous.

In that single second, sixteen Explorers died to these roving spatial anomalies, and the physical and mental weight hanging around Noah's shoulders and the rest of the Explorers increased because a while back the Ascendants had modified the spatial treasures for the Null Charges that they would appear around the bodies of the living.

This became necessary when the number of living Deific Explorers had fallen to the point that it was no longer viable to wait for the death of the rest before assigning the Null Charges to them. They were simply dying too fast, and they needed to finish the job properly and in a short time unless the living Piece of Heaven might acquire enough power to decimate everything.

For Noah, the next few moments that followed went by in a blur, he swerved, rotated, accelerated, and decelerated, he lost portions of his body to the spatial tears when he was too late in his maneuvers or he decided to sacrifice less critical parts of his body to keep himself alive long enough for them to be regrown.

At this point he no longer has legs, he did not waste energy trying to regrow them, he just kept his head, torso, and arms, and except for his arms that were kept pristine, the rest of his body was a picture of devastation.

It was one of the most terrifying seconds in his entire life, and Noah had to use the entirety of his senses and more as he delved deep into all that he was capable of, his experiences, losses, and victories, he pulled every scrap of morale he could gather and continued launching Null charges, disregarding the growing weight on his arm as more and more Explorers died around him without any hope for their eventual resurrection.

He had been the one who kept more Core Aura for his eventual resurrection, and yet it appeared he was the one who had managed to preserve his life more than the others. Noah did not find this irony to be funny.

He had discovered that the one thing that pushed him past his limits was the thought that he was the first to see this calamity descend, and in a way, his destiny was now tied to it, and if it was the last thing he had to do in this life, Noah was going to find the root of this mystery.

His hands were moving in a blur, from a distance it was almost as if he had multiple arms, and then as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. Noah was through. But he was alone, all who followed him had perished.

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