“Hey. I haven’t given you permission to die, have I?”

Hrok had already let go of hope; her heart was a dim, cold cave. Then a teasing laugh brushed her ear, light as wind over reeds. The familiar voice snapped her eyes open, and she blurted without thinking:

“Brynhildr!”

“Wrong. It’s Lady Sigdrifa.”

A familiar silhouette tore the void like cloth, yet it wasn’t Aphelia’s black waterfall of hair. It was a silver-white ponytail, bright as frozen moonlight. Azure and silver armor flashed like waves on steel. Her eyes were wild as stormfire. The face matched Aphelia’s, yet the aura screamed otherwise. Before them stood Sigdrifa, returned from the hollow between worlds.

Silver Aether poured and shaped itself into a colossal blade. The hulking monsters looked like brittle ants under its edge. From Sigdrifa’s slender frame, a pressure swelled, like thunder coiled beneath a mountain’s skin.

“Night spans the ages; only life endures!”

The giant sword pried open the black sludge like a ship’s prow cutting tar. Her chant rose like a sacred hymn in a quiet cathedral. In a blink, the blade fragmented into countless fine Aether swords. The great spine of the weapon thickened into a towering trunk, and the drifting swords stretched into branches, veiling sky and earth like a silver canopy.

When the Aether swords rooted as a giant tree, it anchored deep and drank stone like rain. A surge of life burst from the trunk, turned into dew, and fell in glimmering sheets onto the wounded Valkyries. The stronger the Valkyrie, the sweeter the boon. Hrok’s Aether-twisted wounds eased, seven parts in ten, like frost thawing under spring sun.

“Sigdrifa… how can this be! What are you doing? Wasn’t all this your fault?” Violet didn’t drop her guard; her gaze stayed sharp as a knife’s back. Yet her wounds knit before the eye. The life pouring through her was pure, purer than any she could steal by blood.

“I did this?” Sigdrifa let out a self-mocking breath. Her silver-gray eyes lifted to the black ring smoldering in the sky. “I’m not that capable.”

Aether blades kept flying out like starlings. Each monster they met was nailed where it writhed. If the Valkyries of this world held a drop of Aether, Sigdrifa held the sea. She could carpet the planet in blades, and her Aether would refill faster than it burned.

“These black sludges weren’t you, and those Eldritch Gods in space…” Hrok was stunned, salt-cold. She hadn’t imagined Sigdrifa would help. They were supposed to be fire and water. Now they stood side by side against a common storm.

“Of course not. How many times do I have to say it?” Sigdrifa’s tone bit like frost on glass. “Do I need to stage all this just so you’ll call me a savior? I’m not Brynhildr. I don’t need pointless comrades. Instead of your gratitude followed by suspicion, it’s faster to remove you.”

She wasn’t Aphelia; patience wasn’t her virtue. She waved them off, a flick like a hawk’s wing, and stepped onto the crown of the Aether tree. Her gaze speared the black ring.

The Aether tree blanketed half the Earth, a silver forest stitched from blades. Branches reached past the atmosphere, fingertips on the edge of space. From orbit, a vast silver-white barrier spread over Earth like an ice sheet, endlessly dissolving the dumping black sludge.

“Brazen, aren’t you? Think this planet’s empty?” In Sigdrifa’s eyes, countless pale-cyan streams of light were flowing up, feeding the ring like rivers into a maelstrom. She gave a cold smile. A silver blade flashed into her hand, and she chopped at the black like lightning over night seas.

The ring realized the problem too late. It was mid-feast, swallowing that pale-cyan energy, and couldn’t guard in time. It took the blow head-on. Aether tore a blazing arc across the starfield, clean and merciless, and cut the black ring in two.

The ring’s shadow trembled so hard it warped the view. The quake wasn’t just image; it ran to the universe’s four corners like shock through iron. Countless worlds powdered in silence, shattered from the inside out, erased to dust without warning.

“Playing that trick again? Don’t start thinking you’re something.” Sigdrifa’s eyes sharpened like drawn steel. Aether roared out of the great tree and split into titanic roots. They speared into Earth’s depths, waking near-abandoned Earth Veins like drums. Her Aether rushed through them and lit them alive.

Earth’s Aether had thinned because those Earth Veins fell quiet, like wells gone dry. The buried power hadn’t changed; it only lacked a spark to wake. Today Sigdrifa’s Aether came like a storm. The deep veins surged, like volcanoes jolted awake. With Earth’s feedback of primal force, she seized eight-tenths of the Earth Veins in a heartbeat. The reforming power slammed into her mind like a tide through a narrow gate.

Within those short breaths, Sigdrifa did what a single soul shouldn’t. She took hold of a planet. The information load could crush any mind like glass under a boot. Only someone at her rung could stand, and even then the risk swelled with strength, not shrank.

That’s the law in this cosmos. The stronger you are, the heavier the risk and the deeper the causality. An ordinary person bears ordinary cause and effect, maybe a streak of bad luck and it’s over. At Sigdrifa’s and Aphelia’s height, every act tugs the universe by the roots.

“Hah… hah…” Her breath came hot as forge air. “As expected of one of the Origin motherstars. The force inside outruns mortal imagination. Origin’s backlash? Against a motherstar, it’s limited.”

She shook her head, fog clearing like mist off a lake. She wiped the blood at her lip. A feral grin returned, bright as a blade. The tremor from Earth’s heart beat like a war drum. She knew Origin’s counterattack had begun.

She had to hold.

Origin’s riposte would be wild and brutal, a maul swinging from the dark. That “casual” slash at Origin had been long planned, a knife kept under the cloak, timed for when Origin looked away. The sneak attack landed, and the wound to Origin rippled across far-flung stars.

Now that “retribution” was falling toward Earth like a hammer. Sigdrifa had to take it all, or Origin would crush this world flat. Life here would be scooped into its maw, turned to fresh meat, and civilization would vanish like smoke.

To Sigdrifa, Earth wasn’t her motherworld. She could abandon it and sleep well. But Aphelia? That fool would never hand Earth over. Better to eat Origin’s strike now than brawl with Aphelia later.

The crust bucked; the deep groaned like a leviathan turning. The Valkyries felt the wrongness immediately. The sensitive ones bled from seven orifices and crumpled, like strings snapping in a storm. Origin was redistributing the pain of that wound across many worlds. Earth, under Sigdrifa’s hand, was the first target.

“What is this? Is the whole continental shelf about to collapse?” Violet slapped both hands to the ground, heart tight as a clenched fist. Crimson Aether threaded into fissures like roots, probing down. It was as she feared: a terrible force was tearing at the shelves, not just in the Americas. Nearly every shelf on the globe shook, on the edge of breaking.

Hrok jammed her weapon into the soil. The feedback matched Violet’s, ugly as a storm map. Something monstrous was wrecking Earth’s bones. Sigdrifa met it head-on, a clash that made their hearts lurch. Thankfully, she still remembered to shield the planet, kept that force from running rabid.

Even so, the whole world changed.

A once-balanced ecosystem cracked like glass. Countless species winked out forever, leaves gone from the tree of life. Environments that were links in the living chain lay in ruins, their functions lost for good. Human cities? Already ghosts, swallowed by dust and water.

The loss couldn’t be measured in numbers. It was a planet-scale catastrophe, a movie’s apocalypse made real, just late to the Mayan calendar. Feeling the weight of it settle like ash, Violet and Hrok’s faces went dark as stormclouds. How were they ever going to answer to Aphelia?