Smoke rose from the city like veins of ink in water, curling into the sky in thick, choking spirals. The City of Cities was under siege. The clang of metal, the crackle of spells, and the screams of citizens formed an unholy chorus that rang through its once-great streets. It was not a battle. It was an unraveling.

  Null had returned.

  No longer the jagged brute of nightmares first unleashed in the northern wastes, Null had evolved—or been refined. Its silhouette was sleeker now, less monstrous and more purposeful. Its body had been reforged into a lattice of biomechanical tissue, each plated segment twitching in rhythm with unseen frequencies. Veins of alchemical fluid pulsed visibly beneath its armor, illuminating its core like a furnace of wet glass. This was a warlock who had fully taken on the role of it's Jennie. Null may have been a humanoid race at one point, but it was impossible to tell what after years of being under Ambition.

  Swarms of abominations followed in its wake. Some were stitched together from battlefield remains, others sculpted from alchemical sludge into mockeries of sentient life. There were eyeless runners with too many joints, armored brutes grafted with buzzsaw arms, and wafting horrors that communicated in scent-trails and chemical pulses. They hissed, screeched, and chanted in unknown tongues—some half-mimicking prayers, others shrieking in code, as if mimicking a language they never fully understood.

  Rent led a charge with the paladins through the Southern District, while Griddle’s platoon held the west with grim determination. The sentries tried to plug the holes, but magic was unraveling too quickly. Spellbooks burned, enchantments fizzled. The paladins’ glowing armor dulled with each passing moment. They were losing ground, not just in space, but in faith.

  And above it all, perched on a drifting platform of his own magical creation, stood Sharrzaman.

  He had just vanished from Krungus’s world—not vanished like a ghost, but withdrawn like a surgeon leaving the room before the anesthesia wore off. His words still echoed in Krungus’s mind:

  "Good luck with all this, you doddering old putz. I’ll be watching."

  His cruel smile lingered like an afterimage burned into the world. And behind the smile—certainty. Not arrogance, not glee. The certainty of someone who believed utterly in the necessity of what came next.

  Krungus was shaking. Not from fear, but from the sharp whiplash of impotence and fury. The confrontation had been no duel. No exchange of spells. It had been worse—a reckoning. He had not been attacked. He had been measured, and dismissed.

  And Sharrzaman had left him with nothing but silence.

  With a whisper to the wind, Sharrzaman's final command echoed into reality. Somewhere deep within the Weave, a ripple passed—gentle, almost loving.

  "Deploy the Needle."

  The abomination Null twitched. From a chitinous pod on its back, a glassy membrane ruptured. A creature emerged—a stingbug. No larger than a common housefly, yet engineered with surgical, almost sacred precision.

  The Needle was Na’atasha’s latest creation. The culmination of a forbidden fusion: the pollen-thick hallucinations of the dreamblossom, a rare, mind-breaking flower that bloomed only during lunar eclipses, and the neurosynaptic targeting instincts of a wasprindle, an extinct insectoid once used to sniff out latent mages in ancient wars.

  Na’atasha had merged them not through alchemy alone, but through gene-music, shaping flesh with resonant frequencies sung in forgotten tongues. The resulting stingbug had no central nervous system. It didn’t think in any known sense. It harmonized with its target, attuning itself to magical potential like a tuning fork to song. Once locked on, it would pierce magical resistance as though reality itself consented to the violation.

  The toxin it carried wasn’t meant to kill. It was a brewed chaos: a psychotropic slurry of liquefied dreamblossom boiled to a slurry with Na’atasha's own modified blood. One sting and the mind of a mage would collapse into a kaleidoscopic meltdown—a visionary implosion designed to overwhelm, disorient, and unmake.

  The stingbug shimmered with refractive scales, pulsing with a sickly green glow just beneath its translucent carapace. Its wings didn’t buzz so much as vibrate the air into obedience. It hovered for a moment—almost reverent, almost sentient—then zipped into the battle like a curse whispered by a god.

  It was a weapon designed not to kill, but to change. To ruin.

  Krungus was everywhere at once, he had lost time and now he was playing catch-up.

  Portals tore through air like silken drapes as he moved across the battlefield. He barked orders, reinforced wards, rescued wounded spellcasters. His white robes were soaked in sweat, his oversized wizard hat lost to the wind. He teleported into the middle of a collapsing bridge and summoned a new one from sheer will, barking at fleeing civilians to keep moving.

  He shouted to Rent through a shimmer-portal. “Hold the south!” he cried to Griddle, who grunted in response while swinging his hammer.

  Elsewhere on the field, dozens of smaller forces had gathered. Sellswords from every banner—mercenaries, drifters, exiles—fought for coin, glory, or old grudges. Wealthy merchants had each assembled their own miniature armies, outfitted with gold-plated armor and exotic contraptions powered by volatile enchantments. Dervish-knights from one of the eastern districts danced through enemies with whirling blades. Even a band of reformed sky-pirates, under a shaky truce, dive-bombed abominations from stolen cloudskiffs. The city had summoned every fragment of loyalty and desperation it could find—and it still wasn’t enough.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Krungus saw Utopianna, hovering above the battlefield, her light almost too bright too look at straight on, even from this far away. The army of monstrosities couldn't even get close to her, and she kept the nearby soldiers in good health. As long as they didn't get swallowed up whole by some of the larger abominations.

  He saw Bahumbus on some glider contraption he must have made recently. He was soaring over the battlefield dropping two different kinds of bombs. The first one was a magical magnet of sorts, which pulled the enemies into a central location. The monstrosities clawed the ground in protest as they were pulled into the bomb's magnet. The second one was more of a regular bomb. The main difference being green fire.

  Krungus was trying to save the city. Trying with all of his being to find a way to save the most people he could. Even if the newspapers lambasted him at every turn, if he gave every ounce of sweat and magic he could, maybe he could live with himself. But only if he truly exhausted all options, tried everything. This time could be different.

  And then—

  Something pierced him.

  He didn't see it. Didn’t hear it. Just felt the sudden sting, like a needle threading through every layer of protection. It didn’t disrupt his shields. It didn’t bypass them. It ignored them, as though they’d never existed.

  A cold burn spread across his chest.

  He stumbled.

  The world shifted.

  Colors bled. Sounds twisted. The sky inverted.

  From Krungus’s point of view, time was no longer linear. He saw Utopianna die—once, twice, twenty times—crushed beneath rubble, consumed by flame, fading into dust. He screamed her name, but it was swallowed by the warping of reality.

  He saw her face—her joy, her sorrow—glitching like a broken mirror, appearing in every reflection, behind every eye.

  Streets looped into themselves. The City folded like origami into a box of pain and fire. Sharrzaman laughed from every window. His voice was the rain. His voice was inside.

  Krungus’s thoughts shattered into fragments. One saw himself as a young apprentice, another as a god, another as a corpse. They argued. They wept. They merged.

  In the deepest corner of his unraveling mind, a new clarity emerged. The Weave was broken. Rigged. It had always been a trap. A net pretending to be a sky.

  It didn’t need to be fixed.

  It needed to be removed.

  Floating in midair, eyes dilated, he began to shape a spell not meant to be cast.

  Constructive glyphs spiraled around him, entwining with dream-logic sigils and teleportation runes. Nightmare runes followed—raw, unsanctioned symbols pulled from dreams and hallucinations, bound only by the will of their caster. Krungus was no longer casting a spell. He was composing a reality failure, an undoing written in pure intent. Old laws didn’t matter anymore. There was no one to punish him if he broke everything.

  Power gathered visibly around him. Air shimmered like a heat mirage. Dust rose in concentric circles. Birds dropped from the sky. The wind refused to blow.

  Anyone within a few hundred yards felt it in their bones—a nauseating, humming pressure behind the eyes, a static charge in their molars. Sellswords paused mid-swing. Mages forgot their incantations. Even abominations hesitated.

  High above it all, Sharrzaman—who had been watching with smug detachment—tensed. His eyes narrowed, his lips parted.

  "Oh no," he muttered.

  Below, Krungus floated like a corpse in a storm. His voice was wind. His heartbeat pulsed like a drum of war. A vision—Utopianna, smiling and alive—touched his mind. She reached for him. He reached back.

  “Let there be no thread,” he whispered.

  And the world complied.

  The shockwave exploded outward.

  A silent, invisible dome of nullification surged from Krungus. Every magical construct, every charm, every enchantment flickered and died.

  In the North Ward, Threadwalker nodes sparked and shattered, their network collapsing like a spiderweb on fire. Bahumbus’s sentries, still mid-formation, convulsed and fell in unison. Paladins dropped their swords, now dull iron. Their glowing eyes dimmed.

  Eugene instinctively clutched Cozimia’s lantern, bracing for the worst. But unlike the arcane constructs around them, her light did not dim. The lantern pulsed steadily, unaffected by the unraveling of the Weave.

  Jennie magic—deeper, older, unbound by the lattice of mortal spellwork—remained untouched. Cozimia's voice rang clear through the storm of nullification, fierce and furious.

  “Krungus, what did you DO?!”

  Eugene staggered back in shock, relief flooding through him as he realized she was still with him. Not all magic was gone. Not yet.

  Utopianna turned, eyes wide with terror and recognition, and ran toward the hovering figure of Krungus. “NO!” she screamed, voice breaking.

  But it was done.

  Krungus fell.

  A soundless explosion of matter accompanied him. His bag of holding, once a stable pocket realm nested safely within the folds of the Weave, ruptured like a starved balloon.

  Thousands of objects erupted into the air—scrolls fluttering like panicked birds, flasks of volatile ingredients hissing as they hit stone, wands spinning like spears, enchanted lenses clinking across cobblestones. A crown of teeth, a bound quill writing furiously on nothing, a soul jar still whispering names. Spices, bones, dusts, relics, small dimensional cages—each one a fragment of a lifetime’s obsession with possibility.

  The air filled with paper, ash, and glittering debris. As if the sky itself had wept magic.

  And then he hit the ground with a dull thud. Smoke coiled upward in absolute silence. His arms splayed, robes scorched. The mark of the stingbug still glowed faintly on his chest.

  The battle paused. Not in time—but in awe. And fear.

  Sentries flickered. Spells died in throats. The Weave was gone.

  For the first time in over 9,000 years, since Krungus rediscovered the Weave, the City of Cities was quiet.

  And for the first time in even longer, no one—not even Sharrzaman—knew what came next.