Days passed. Then weeks. Then, without any particular announcement, two years had gone by.
The prompt remained.
It flickered at the edge of his vision with the quiet persistence of something that had decided it wasn't going anywhere, regardless of what he did about it. He had approached it from every angle he could construct — including, eventually, the Omnivector Perfecture Eyes.
They couldn't see through it either.
That alone was worth noting. The Omnivector Perfecture Eyes were his own creation, a technique whose ceiling he had never located because he had never stopped pushing it further. At its furthest reach, he had used it to perceive dimensions, to read the fabric of universes, to find and identify any entity regardless of how deeply it concealed itself. He had seen things with these eyes that most forms of existence didn't have language for.
In this body, starved of sufficient energy and materials, they were locked into their weakest functional form.
Even so. Their weakest form allowed him to slow his perception down to levels that made individual moments feel like landscapes. Paired with Cognitive Acceleration, he could read any energy — any kind, any signature, any origin — and sense the emotional states of people within range, limited and imprecise as that last part currently was. Within a certain radius and certain constraints, he was effectively omniscient.
The prompt ignored all of it. Sat in his vision, flickered occasionally, and offered nothing back.
He left it alone. It would resolve when it resolved.
---
The two years hadn't been idle.
He had killed many Nihilborn — the loose ones, the lowest ranked, the ones that drifted without direction across the outskirts of Metneris and the mountain stretches beyond it. Weakest rank, technically. In practice, each one was comparable to a Pulse Rank Resonant in raw strength, which meant most people would have found a single encounter life-ending. Axiros found them useful for keeping the body sharp and for the occasional material they carried.
He had gathered people. Quietly, carefully, through the particular combination of patience and pressure that he had refined across more lifetimes than he bothered counting. His network of influence had grown steadily, each new addition placed where they would be most useful, none of them aware of the full shape of what they were part of.
But the physique remained a mystery.
He had killed enough during those two years to expect some pattern to emerge — absorbed strength, residual memories, something. His physique had demonstrated the capacity for it early on, that strange rapacious quality that consumed everything fed into it. But the Nihilborn kills had yielded nothing of the sort. No accumulated strength. No bleed of memory from the dead into him.
He turned the question over regularly and arrived at no satisfying answer. He left it open.
---
The item had come from sheer chance, which meant it hadn't come from chance at all.
He had long since settled his understanding of luck: it didn't exist. There was only will, and ambition, and the consequences of both moving through the world. Coincidences were just causality that hadn't been fully traced yet.
So when he found the dead Resonant in the mountains — bony hands locked around something they had apparently refused to release even past death — and recognized immediately what it was, he didn't call it fortunate. He noted it, took it, and filed the circumstances away for later examination.
The ticket to the Sword Realm.
A place so mythical and so thoroughly elusive that its existence was still technically disputed among people who should have known better. Even the most powerful figures in Cinderveil had never managed to locate it with any reliability. And here it was, in the grip of a corpse in the mountains outside Metneris, found by a boy on a routine endeavor.
He couldn't use it yet. It required Aeonex to activate, and he had none — his Rite of Revelation was still ahead of him, the prompt still sitting in his vision as a constant reminder.
He kept it regardless. Stored it where it would be safe and inaccessible to anyone else.
'Someone might be arranging these moments,' he thought, turning the possibility over without committing to it. 'Steering me through a sequence.' He sat with that. 'Or the sequence is a consequence of how I move through the world, and I'm pattern-matching things that don't have a pattern.'
Both possibilities were worth keeping open.
Either way, it benefited him.
For now, that was enough.
---
He had been moving quietly through the world for two years, pulling certain people out of harm's way before it reached them.
Not out of kindness. Each one had a role in the original plot — a purpose that would become relevant at some point down the line. He didn't know all the specifics yet, but he knew enough. They were pieces worth keeping on the board.
The vessel's memories still hadn't come through, which was strange enough that he had stopped dismissing it as a minor delay and started treating it as a variable worth watching. A few days, a week at most — that was the normal window for a transfer of this kind, even accounting for unusual circumstances. Two years had passed. Either something was actively preventing it, or the system was involved, or both, or neither.
He left the question open. Forcing it hadn't worked.
---
Present —
He sat on the ledge with his legs hanging freely over the drop, the mountain range spread out below him in the last light of the evening. The setting sun threw long, fading strands of orange across everything, and his eyes caught it in the particular way they caught everything now — the Omnivector Perfecture registering the light at levels that went well past what the moment called for.
His hair moved in the wind. White, striped through with violet, the same as it had always been in this body. His face had settled into something that didn't match the age it sat on — too composed, too still, carrying a weight that thirteen year olds had no business carrying. His physique was the same story. Too developed, too deliberate, built by two years of nightly practice into something that had quietly exceeded what a mortal, unawakened body was supposed to be capable of.
His red eyes — violet beads threaded through them, legacy of the Omnivector Perfecture's construction — tracked the last of the light without blinking.
The Teraphira beeped.
Kael. The only contact saved in it.
[Uncle is calling you. Says he wants to discuss something important.]
Axiros read it, felt a faint flicker of attention move through him, and let it settle back down. He already knew as much as Stark knew about most things. Probably more.
He pocketed the device and looked at the horizon for another moment.
The sun was down. Time for the nightly practice.
---
The Five Arts of Hell was his own creation — a physique art built with a single purpose, to push a mortal body as close to its absolute ceiling as possible before awakening changed the equation entirely. He had been running it every night for two years without missing once.
Within the hour he was back, moving at speeds that had become quietly unreasonable for something still unawakened. His body had found its mortal limit and settled there, right at the edge of what the flesh could sustain without crossing into something that required Aeonex to maintain.
He stepped through the door.
Celestia, Kael, and Stark were all in the same room. The arrangement of it told him what the conversation was going to be before anyone opened their mouth.
'Rite of Revelation,' he thought, settling into the nearest seat. 'Right on schedule. Completely predictable.'
"Sit down, Axiros," Stark said. "We need to discuss something."
"What is it, uncle?" Open expression. Mild curiosity. The face of a boy with no particular foreknowledge of anything.
"Your Rite of Revelation," Celestia said. "It falls within two days."
"I've heard of it." He tilted his head slightly. "But what exactly is it, aunt?"
She explained it patiently — the connection to Aeonex, the mechanics of the process, the low but real possibility of failure, the fact that it fell precisely on his tenth birthday without exception.
"I'll prepare myself mentally," Axiros said, with the careful nod of someone taking new information seriously.
Stark nodded. So did Kael — though his nod carried a slightly different weight, the nod of someone who knew exactly how much of this was performance and had decided, once again, to say nothing about it.
---
Two days disappeared quickly.
He had been feeling the spatial disturbances building for a week — pressure accumulating around him, the dimension housing the Rite of Revelation pressing closer to the surface with each passing day. By the morning of the second day it had reached its peak, the air around him carrying a faint tension that anyone sufficiently sensitive would have noticed and been unable to explain.
Axiros had been ready for this for considerably longer than two days.
"Good luck," Stark said, and meant it in the uncomplicated way that people mean things when they don't know the full picture. Celestia echoed it. Kael added his wish with the particular expression of someone wishing luck to a person they suspected didn't need it.
Axiros smiled at all three of them.
He had a contingency regardless. Beyondix — an energy so rare and so potent that it made Aeonex look like a starting point. A hundred known users across the entirety of existence. Its awakening was a matter of will, nothing more, nothing else.
Axiros had more will than most things had ever possessed.
Failure wasn't a real concern.
---
Then —
The spatial distortion hit without warning.
It wasn't subtle — it was enormous, wild, the kind that threw his senses sideways before he'd finished registering it was happening. Stark and Celestia both reacted, their heads snapping toward him simultaneously, something alert and alarmed moving across both their faces.
The tear opened beneath him.
No time to respond, no room to step aside. It swallowed him completely — pulled him through and deposited him somewhere else entirely, all of it happening in less than a second.
White.
Boundless, total white — a void that was nothing like the void he knew, because this one wasn't empty. Something occupied it. He couldn't locate it, couldn't point to it, couldn't find its edges or its source. But it was there, present in a way that pressed against his perception from every direction at once.
His Omnivector Perfecture swept the space immediately, reading everything within range.
It found the white. It found the boundlessness.
It couldn't find what was filling it.
He stood very still and waited, his expression giving nothing away to an audience that might or might not exist.