Sam watched as the first of the allied ships fell. A few lucky shots from the remnants of the Selvan fleet punched through their shields, rupturing the engines in sprays of fire and twisted metal.

  The return fire from his allies wiped out most of the remaining fleet, but more ships were coming from the surface of the planet below. While the Selvans were far weaker individually than anyone in Sam’s army, there were far more of them.

  Sam cursed himself for having fallen into Tantalos’ trap, but he quickly realized that it would have happened anyway. Had he brought Jacob or any of the other core elites, Tantalos would have trapped them as well. This was meant to be a lesson, one showcasing how much power Tantalos had over his subjects.

  “Let go of me!” he shouted, pushing back against the restraints with his Authority. Nothing happened.

  Tantalos let out a dark chuckle, clearly taking great pleasure in the whole thing. “You might think you’re something special, so talented and so powerful for your Rank. None of that matters against me. I represent a core truth of existence. Power is everything. I can do whatever I want to you simply because I am stronger.”

  “Yet you are perfectly willing to sell your more promising slaves off to more powerful factions,” Sam spat. “That’s why you keep skirting the boundaries of how far you can push me. You’re afraid.”

  “I will let that go one time,” Tantalos growled. “Do not insult me again. Another person like you will come along in due time. Prodigies are born every day, and almost as many die.”

  “Yeah?” Sam said. “I’m not any ordinary prodigy. I’ve spoken to the System itself, and I have a feeling it would frown upon what you’re doing here. Aren’t there rules about outside influence on newly initialized universes? You’re waiting a hundred years to devour us because we’ll be stronger, yes, but you also need to wait until the initialization is over, don’t you?”

  “We all speak to the System,” Tantalos retorted with a laugh. "Do you really think you are something special because of something as pedestrian as having a System interface?”

  “That isn’t what I mean,” Sam replied, smiling slightly. He focused on the image that had been burned into his mind at the end of the Tower. The System itself, or at least the powerful version of it that could directly visit Sam without instantly killing him. It had shown interest in him. “You’re always watching me, aren’t you?” Sam called out. “What do you think about what Tantalos is doing?”

  Tantalos laughed after a short, uneasy pause. “That was a good joke. I will let you live for that. Though I suppose I should extract some compensation from you. How do you feel about me torturing you for years on end? Or perhaps, if pain isn’t enough, doing the same thing to everyone you hold dear? In fact-”

  A supernova went off next to Sam, the raw fabric of reality ripping apart as a shining hand forced its way through. It was formed out of a myriad of multicolored rings of energy. For a brief moment, all of existence seemed to fade away. Then it returned as the System’s avatar entered the universe fully, restoring the damage with a wave of its hand. While it didn’t project the sort of transcendent might that the System’s Avatar Sam had been visited by in the Tower, it was nevertheless the same being. The only reason it was limiting its power was to avoid tearing apart the universe, far weaker than the layer of the Tower Sam had first met it.

  The being represented the System as a whole, a living interface between it and the Boundless Expanse. Unlike the System Avatar that Berrigious had allied with during Earth’s Tournament, this being was entirely without emotion or motives save to preserve its own functions. It was why Sam’s summons had worked. While the regular System Avatars hated him, and wanted to destroy every Dao Incarnation they could find, the System itself was incapable of acting contrary to its programming.

  The grip Tantalos had on Sam loosened, the C Ranker clearly preparing to flee. A pulse of light washed over Sam, burning away Tantalos’ invisibility. A portal opened and the C Ranker’s true body was dragged through it, merging with the projection he had used to trap Sam.

  At that moment Sam realized that everything had gone still. The battle in the distance was frozen and the vast loops of flame emerging from the sun had been locked into place.

  “TANTALOS EVRAN VERUVAX,” the System said, the sheer power of its voice sending tremors through Sam's body. “YOU STAND ACCUSED OF A BREACH OF COSMIC LAW. THE EVIDENCE SUPPORTS THIS. HOW DO YOU PLEAD?”

  Tantalos went utterly pale, his grey flesh whitening until he looked like a ghost. “What? How? Since when has the System cared about a random frontier universe?”

  “IT IS NOT YOUR PLACE TO QUESTION MY MOTIVES. WHAT WOULD AN ANT KNOW OF A GOD’S DESIRES? I AM OMNISCIENCE AND OMNIPOTENCE INCARNATE. MY JUDGEMENT IS THAT OF EXISTENCE ITSELF.”

  The words seemed to cause Tantalos physical pain, each syllable blasting chunks off his flesh. It wasn’t the result of a Dao or element. In fact, Sam couldn’t detect any sort of energy usage on the behalf of the System’s avatar. It was as if its will was strong enough to alter reality all on its own.

  Tantalos opened his mouth to say something, but with a simple wave of the System’s hand, his mouth disappeared. His eyes bulged, but nothing could be done. While a cultivator of his caliber had no need for a mouth to speak, the System had still rendered him completely mute.

  “FOR THIS TRANSGRESSION, YOU MUST BE PUNISHED COMMENSURATE WITH THE DAMAGE YOU HAVE CAUSED.”

  Tantalos’ mouth appeared once more, only for a bloodcurdling scream to erupt from it as countless crimson spirits emerged from the firmament, slamming into his body.

  “EVERY LIFE YOU HAVE CLAIMED IN THE PURSUIT OF POWER NOW RAMPAGES THROUGH YOUR ENTIRE BEING. YOUR DAO IS THAT OF SLAUGHTER. PERHAPS IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO BE ON THE RECEIVING END.”

  Tantalos continued to scream, each of the specters erasing parts of his flesh. His body was eaten away over a matter of seconds, crumbling into ash and then into nothingness. A tiny spark of brilliant energy was all that remained. The System snapped its fingers and a rift opened next to the wisp. It fled through the hole in reality before the rift closed. Tantalos was gone, as if he had never been there.

  The System turned towards Sam, its face completely blank. “MY EYES MIGHT BE ON YOU, BUT DO NOT THINK THAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO CALL UPON ME AS IF I AM A MERE LACKEY. THE ONLY REASON YOU ARE NOT DEAD RIGHT NOW IS BECAUSE TANTALOS COMMITTED A CRIME THAT WARRANTED MY INTERVENTION. MY SERVANTS WOULD NEVER DO ANYTHING THAT MIGHT INADVERTENDLY HELP YOU, SO I WAS FORCED TO ACT DIRECTLY.”

  For a brief moment, Sam felt a titanic weight press down on him like a mountain. It was both physical and spiritual, inducing such existential dread that Sam nearly lost his mind. Then the System vanished as if it had never been there, leaving Sam floating in space, his mind in turmoil.

  With Sam back in the fight, the rest of the battle against the Selvans went about as well as could be expected. The rest of the fleet was wiped out in an instant, and Sam descended to the planet itself. As the ships continued to bombard the Selvan world, Sam let loose.

  Initially, he tried to keep his attacks limited to only the Selvan combatants, but he quickly learned that there were no civilians. Every one of the aliens had turned rabid after the death of their leader, suffused in a crimson light that gave them greater strength, but almost no intelligence. They were little more than monsters at this point, and Sam treated them as such.

  He vaporized entire cities made out of woven silk, visiting destruction on the now mindless beasts that had once lived there. As an experiment, he had tried to purge the crimson light from one of his foes with his Authority, but upon doing so, it had simply collapsed, dead. There was no saving the Selvans at this point.

  Hordes of the aliens boiled up from the depths of the planets, coming in all shapes and sizes. The only common factor was their aggression. Something about the waves of nightmarish hybrids of human and spider evoked a sense of disgust in Sam, lending a bit more weight to his blows. Not that it really mattered, given that he eclipsed them in every regard.

  Instead, his mind was set on a different problem. What had happened to Tantalos. Sam hoped that the warlord was dead, but he knew that was very unlikely. Had his home universe been freed from Tantalos’ ownership, the System would have sent a message. Besides, the tiny spark of energy leaving the universe indicated that something had remained of the C Ranker. Sam wasn’t sure what the wisp had signified, but it was no stretch to assume that Tantalos had ways to survive death. Besides, the System had only said that it would punish him commensurate with the damage he had dealt. That didn’t sound like a death sentence. That sounded like a warning.

  All Sam really knew was that if Tantalos was still alive, the alien would do everything he could to make Sam’s life a living hell. While the System might be watching to make sure he didn’t directly interfere with the affairs of his subjects until the end of the initialization, there wasn’t any provision for afterwards. Sam would need the protection of the Adventurers’ Guild as soon as possible after the protections fell.

  Sam blinked, finding himself standing in a crater dozens of miles wide. He had lost track of the greater battle, sinking into a rhythm against the mindless creatures that the Selvans had become. Not even blood remained from the slaughter, every one of the monsters atomized.

  He flew up into the sky, gazing down like a god upon the remnants of the planet. Most of the population centers were gone, but some still remained, hordes of Selvans’ rampaging across the mountainous landscape of the planet. Explosions rocked the world as the allied ships fired devastating salvos against the now undefended planet. None of the Selvans had retained the wherewithal to man their artillery, if indeed that would have even done anything. They had poured most of their resources into a fleet that had melted away like ice before the supernova that was Sam.

  Sam turned away, ready to leave the rest of the battle to his soldiers. They seemed to have it mostly under control. While some had died during Tantalos’ little game, far more had survived than not. The survivors would grow strong from the levels they gained, ensuring that something like this never happened again.

  A sharp crash sounded through not the physical world, but the reality of the Dao. A spike of pure power lanced into Sam’s mind, causing him to turn back towards the planet beneath him.

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  A crack had opened up around the equator, racing across the planet like an opening maw. Mountains tumbled down into the rift, affixing themselves like teeth. Sam quickly realized that they were teeth as the rift opened and closed.

  “What the hell?”

  Vast pits opened up in the northern hemisphere, forming eyes filled with pools of molten lava. They blinked once, before locking onto Sam. Twin beams of pure energy erupted from them, hundreds of miles wide. Sam teleported out of the way, but he still felt the intense heat.

  He scanned the planet, extremely confused as to what was going on.

  Civilization Gestalt

  Level 450

  Sam had no idea what a Civilization Gestalt was, but judging by the name, it had something to do with the fall of the Selvans. The System and the Dao affixed great meaning to things like last stands and endings, and it seemed like it had stepped in here.

  Regardless of what the creature that had taken over the planet actually was, it still needed to be dealt with. He could research it later.

  “You all need to get out of here!” Sam shouted into the void, his Dao carrying his words into the allied ships. This was not a fight that any of them could contribute to. “Get back to the portal! Tell Jacob to come through!”

  The Civilization Gestalt opened its maw wide, roaring in rage. A wave of pure force washed out from the planet sized monster, slamming into the ships. They shot backwards as if from a cannon, metal warping and energy shields buckling from the strain. As far as Sam could tell, it hadn’t even been an attack.

  The ships’ propulsion systems came online, some of them severely damaged. They limped towards the portal at a fraction of their normal speed, barely making it there in time before the monster fired another set of energy beams.

  Sam realized that one of the beams was going to hit the stragglers, and the portal itself. He wasn’t sure if that sort of energy would pass through the portal or simply overload it, but he couldn’t let either happen. The former would destroy Sanctum and probably a large chunk of Earth, whereas the latter would leave him stranded light years away from home. Such distances were nearly insurmountable even for someone like him, or at least in the time frames he had to return to his planet.

  He arrived just before the beam struck, channeling half of his available Dao resources into his hammer. Worldbreaker grew until it eclipsed the entire portal, a shimmering hemisphere of red and blue light forming around it. The beam struck home just as the shield snapped into place. Cracks immediately started to spread, a titanic force bending the shield backwards.

  Sam pushed back, but against the might of a being the size of a planet, he could do very little. Until the last ship passed through and the portal was safe, Sam had to hold strong.

  The force wasn’t insurmountable, but it was incredibly difficult to hold back. Sam was forced to expend more of his Dao to stabilize himself, and when that wasn’t enough, he used his element to further anchor himself in place.

  The shield shattered, and the beam washed over Worldbreaker. Sam strained against the pressure, using Dao Juggernaut now that it was a matter of physical strength. He barely managed to hold Worldbreaker in place, but his flesh started to tear, tens of thousands of health points vanishing every second from the simple effort of holding the beam back.

  He was slowly pushed back, his arms bending backwards. Just before the beam overwhelmed him, a shining star of brilliant scarlet light exploded out from the portal, hammering into the back of his hammer. Jacob had arrived. With the strength of both men pushing back, they finally overwhelmed the beam.

  “You arrived just in time,” Sam said gratefully.

  “Of course,” Jacob said simply. “Saving your ass is my job.”

  Sam scoffed, but couldn’t muster a response. Instead he directed his annoyance towards fighting back against the Gestalt. The energy beam ruptured, folding in on itself in a conflagration of radiance. The leering face of the planet was revealed behind it, every ounce of its focus on Sam and Jacob.

  “Ugly bastard,” Jacob said derisively. “Nothing a good few punches can’t fix.”

  “I think it might take a bit more than a few,” Sam deadpanned, panning his gaze over the titanic monster beneath them. “Though I have to say, I am interested if my hammer can live up to its name.”

  The Civilization Gestalt opened its mouth and a swarm of black dots rushed out, growing larger and larger as they crossed the gap. They were revealed to be vast, misshapen Selvans made out of obsidian. Within them was a fair amount of conceptual energy, representing the civilization that the Gestalt had arisen from.

  Each of the constructs were almost ten miles long, though they were dwarfed by their progenitor. Each of them had strength near the high end of E Rank. Sam was glad that he had sent his fleet back to Earth. These monsters would have torn through the shields and metal of the vessels like they were made of paper.

  Getting a quick count of the swarm, Sam found that there were about ten thousand of the creatures, organized in a loose formation.

  “You take the right and I’ll take the left,” Sam said to Jacob. “We need to draw the Civilization Gestalt’s fire away from the portal. If it breaks, we’re screwed.”

  “That’s an odd name for a monster,” Jacob observed as he geared up for battle. A suit of glowing red light formed around him, shining like a beacon in the darkness. “What happened here? Did the Selvans summon it?”

  “I’ll explain later,” Sam said. “It’s a bit complicated. We can get into the details when it’s dead.”

  Jacob gave him a snarky salute. “Aye aye, captain.” Then he was off, teleporting towards the enemy formation.

  Sam swung Worldbreaker a few times to gather momentum before opening a series of portals, sending the hammer darting in and out. The gargantuan weapon blasted apart each of the monsters it touched, traveling all around the battlefield in a matter of seconds. Sam opened another portal and traveled through it personally, emerging in the middle of the pack.

  The constructs swarmed him, bolts of energy streaking off their mouths as if from a cannon. Sam, under the influence of Dao Juggernaut, was more than fast enough to make a mockery of the creatures’ speed. He didn’t bother moving, instead contorting around the beams, letting them travel past to slam into the other monsters.

  Craters were blasted into the golems as their projectiles tore each other apart. Sam finished the job, his hammer shrinking down to a more manageable size. He tensed his legs and leaped off a floating chunk of rock.

  Had a mortal been watching, they would have seen a web of light suddenly form amongst the monsters as Sam used them as stepping stones. Worldbreaker landed thousands of times in the span of a second, each blow a killing strike.

  Jacob was having similar success on the other side of the battlefield, vast energy fists pummeling his foes into powder.

  The Civilization Gestalt opened its mouth, letting out an echoing rumble of disapproval. An orange glow built in its maw, an upwelling of lava blasting out and into space. Sam teleported out of the way, but his enemies weren’t so lucky. They were enveloped in molten stone and returned to their original state, melting back into lava.

  Sam frowned at the seemingly self-sabotaging move on the part of the Gestalt. Even the most mindless of monsters had a sense of self preservation. They would never do anything to hamper themselves.

  As the roiling sea of lava started to collapse in on itself, compressing down into a humanoid form, Sam realized what the Gestalt was doing. In reclaiming its servants, it was now able to use their energy for something else. That initial fight had been more of a probing maneuver than anything else, meant to draw out Sam and Jacob’s strengths.

  The lava stopped shrinking a few seconds later. A hulking brute of an elemental, about thirty feet tall, stood in its place. Obsidian armor covered its body and it held a shield in one hand and a sword in the other. The armaments were crude and ugly, still covered in imperfections left behind by the cooling lava. The sword was covered in jagged spines of irregular obsidian, while the shield was misshapen, also covered in spikes of night-black rock.

  Sam scanned the elemental as soon as it finished forming.

  Gestalt Guardian

  Level 425

  While the monster was lower level than its creator, Sam had a sneaking suspicion that it would be a much more difficult foe to face. The Civilization Gestalt was near the peak of D Rank, but its power was spread out across an entire planet. It was almost impossible to defend a body that large with mere D Rank power. This avatar had no such limitations.

  When the elemental surged into motion, it was with blinding speed. It raced towards Sam, deeming him to be the more dangerous foe.

  Its movements were so fast that Sam had to concentrate in order to dodge them. Most of his battles were against enemies slower than himself, but in cases like this, he had to rely on his martial skills to even the odds.

  The monster swung its sword, the stone heating up until it was a blinding white color. Sam met the blow with Worldbreaker, parrying with all the force he could muster. The monster’s guard was forced wide open and Sam teleported in to capitalize on the opening. His fist slammed into the center of the Guardian’s chest, driving it back towards Jacob.

  The other cultivator was already waiting, twin gauntlets of energy affixed to his hands. They were covered in long spikes, barbed to ensure maximum damage upon their removal.

  He cocked back both fists and punched at the same time, driving them into the Gestalt Guardian’s back. The monster folded nearly in half, returning to a semi-liquid state to blunt the force of the blow. Jacob responded by sending a shockwave of pure force through his gauntlets, blasting the creature apart into a shower of molten droplets.

  The droplets almost instantly snapped back together, reforming into the behemoth of an elemental that it had been moments before. Its hand swept out and quicker than a bullet, snatched up Jacob. A shimmer ran up and down its arm as it warded against teleportation, preventing Jacob from escaping.

  Sam came hurtling out of a portal, hammer twinkling briefly in the sunlight before crashing down upon the center of the Gestalt Guardian’s back. Thunder rumbled through the metaphysical plane as Sam brought the full force of his Dao to bear.

  A wave of destruction rippled through the semi-liquid body of the Guardian, once more splitting it apart into a myriad of molten droplets. This time, Sam followed up with his attack, blasting a hemisphere of pure Dao energy into the cloud of roiling mist.

  This achieved the desired effect, successfully atomizing a good chunk of the monster’s body. When it reformed a few dozen feet away from Sam, it was substantially smaller. The elemental let out a subsonic grumble, the noise as deep and gravelly as the clashing of tectonic plates.

  “You who dare to challenge my creator should know that I am but the least of his servants,” the Gestalt Guardian spoke, surprising Sam and Jacob. Its voice was surprisingly smooth, but still imbued with the monolithic gravitas of a mountain.

  “Really?” Sam asked. “Can that thing down there even form a single sentence? I’m surprised you can.”

  The Guardian glared at Sam, eyes burning hotter than live coals. “My intelligence is but a fraction of my master’s. His knowledge is that of an entire species. Everything that once was the domain of the Selvans is now his.”

  “So, being bloodthirsty, immature and intensely xenophobic? You know, that just doesn’t really strike fear into my heart.”

  The Guardian smiled thinly. “Words are the weapons of those who doubt their own strength. One may only utilize them effectively when they have established their power as matching the sharpness of their tongues. I am confident in myself, but can you say the same?”

  Sam answered not with words, but with a flare of Dao energy that exploded out of his left palm, rocketing towards the Gestalt Guardian. Showing off speed previously hidden, the monster raised a hand, snatching the projectile with a deft flick of its wrist.

  With a clench of its fist, the Guardian crushed Sam’s technique with ease. “You are lacking in strength. Let me teach you the truth about the world. I hope you survive the lesson.”