Tim scanned back over the papers surrounding his small workspace for the thousandth time that hour. It was practically pointless. He’d looked at them so many times that their contents may as well have been engraved into his brain.

To anyone else, the papers were nothing more than scattered waves to seemingly no pattern or sense. They resembled the scribblings of a madman, drawn with a piece of spatial magic-imbued charcoal. Perhaps that was what they were. That thought brought a flicker of a smile to Tim’s lips.

It had been so long since he’d felt this alive.

There was a great difference between drawing breath and living. To exist was entirely independent to purpose. To passion. To having something to work toward. The chitin of his own failures had wrapped him like a tight cocoon. Only in recent times, after he’d gotten his hands on Space Runes, had the cracks appeared.

And now they were all but gone. Reaching Rank 5 was incredible. An entire new world sprawled before Tim. There was so much that he’d looked right past. Discoveries that waited to be found within this very tower, much less a short distance away from it.

The world was large. Larger than he’d ever thought. And, to him, the drawings on the papers around him were no scribbles. They were the world itself. The pattern of spatial magic that interwove through the Arbalest Empire, put to pen and diagrammed to the absolute best of his ability.

It had been a project he’d started after reaching Rank 3 but Rank 5 had trivialized much of what had once been nearly impossible. That was why — hours after his prior conversation with Noah — Tim continued to look deeper. There was too much waiting for him to find it.

This was the perfect opportunity to try and dig it free.

Tim wiped his forehead, a slight furrow knitting his brow. Shadows covered much of his work. He shifted to the side to try and get better lighting, but it did nothing. Tim glanced over his shoulder.

The sun had somehow already set.

Has it really been that long since I started today? I suppose it must have. Time is starting to slip away from me, eh?

Letting out a slow breath, Tim shook his head. He looked back to the papers around him, squinting to make out the details. His eyes were drawn to several smudged pages where he’d erased and redrawn over sections several times over.

It wasn’t because he’d made a mistake.

That had been what he’d thought at first — but Tim had triple checked the area before making the second round of changes, and it had been different when he’d checked the location several hours later.

A small frown touched his lips. Despite his delight in the work, there was a growing sense of unease in his stomach. The smudged up area wasn’t an isolated issue.

Changes were appearing all over the kingdom. Patches of the world, aligned into perfectly clean and emotionless boxes. And that wasn’t all. The damaged portion of the barrier…

It was growing worse.

That should have been a good thing. Tim was certain there would have been no way for their group to cross out of the Arbalest Empire without that damage. But the rate at which it was appearing was just too high.

Is someone trying to chip away at the barrier on purpose? Or is it an after effect of the Night’s Shadow? That beast did quite the number on the empire. The full extent of that damage isn’t even yet evident. It’s still unfolding like some sort of plague.

At least, that was his best theory. Tim didn’t know what else could have caused the patches of emotionless, dead Order to be popping up all over the Empire. There didn’t seem to be any particular pattern to their appearance. The patches simply came into being.

Tim let out a slow sigh. He pinched the bridge of his nose. It felt odd that the Night’s Shadow was still affecting the world to such an extent. Any remnants of its magic should have dissipated by now.

But there was no way the enormous creature was still here. Its presence was too immense. Tim refused to believe he would be able to miss it. If the Night’s Shadow — or even just a small portion of the monster — returned to the empire, then the pressure difference would have been impossible to miss.

Stolen novel; please report.

It would be like dropping a steel ball on a spider’s web. Even if the web held together, it would bend so heavily around the ball that even a fly at the farthest strands of the web would feel its sway.

As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been anything of the sort. The distribution of magical energy in the empire is roughly the same as how it was when I started researching it more closely. The patches of order that are appearing don’t have increased weight to them.

That means they have to be after effects… right?

Tim didn’t have an answer to his own question. All he could do was keep watching. Trying to jump to conclusions or come up with wild theories wasn’t going to help him until he had something to build off.

There’s an answer here somewhere. I just have to find it.

Fortunately, the Transport Cannon was the perfect way to do that. In conjunction with his new Rank 5 Rune, using the cannon to cast his spatial magic out was almost embarrassingly easy. All he had to do was modify a few of the parameters and utilize the Key held within the tower as a channel rather than a full energy source.

Such a method couldn’t generate enough magic to send anyone somewhere and call them back in one piece, but it was more than enough to let his mind brush over a portion of the empire leagues away without him having to move an inch.

There must be some manner of hint. If there’s anything I’ve picked up from spending time around Noah and these smart kids, it’s that there’s a pattern. There’s always a pattern. So what is it?

Tim’s forehead furrowed further still. At this point, he probably could have kneaded bread between his knit brows.

His attention was momentarily pulled away as the Transport Cannon’s lift rattled to a stop. He hadn’t been the one to operate it. But that was commonplace in recent days. Sticky had taken a fancy to the mechanism and begged him to show her how to use it. Tim had been more than happy to oblige. As such, she’d been ordained the new lift operator.

Tim’s eyes flicked involuntarily to see who the newcomers were. It was a pair of women, neither of whom immediately struck a chord in his memory. That said, he was pretty sure this wasn’t the first time he’d seen them. Vague recognition prickled against his scalp. His focus faltered.

Contessa and Karina, isn’t it? I think someone described them to me at some point. What are they doing—

And then Tim froze.

He’d pulled his focus away from the world outside the transport cannon in his distraction. Not entirely, but just enough to take a look back at the Transport Cannon. His senses had done the equivalent of taking a step back.

In doing so, for the first time, he saw the forest for the trees. He saw the Arbalest Empire. Not from a close, focused viewpoint that would allow him to inspect the intricacies of the spatial magic that infused the world, but from a distance.

All the blood rushed out of Tim’s face.

And finally, he saw the pattern that he’d been searching for. He saw the reason why he hadn’t been able to find any changes to the spatial pressure throughout the Arbalest Empire.

It wasn’t because there hadn’t been a change. It was because he’d been measuring the difference by comparing one point to another. That stopped working when there was a pressure source so enormous that the entire empire was completely engulfed by it.

Measuring averages was pointless when every average changed an equal amount. There was no one point that had changed because the entirety of the empire was completely and utterly engulfed by a single, enormous presence that bore down on everything with equal intensity. Patches of order multiplied across the Arbalest Empire. One became five. Five became fifty. The world was turning stiff and immutable, the magic floating freely within it being forced into a frozen state.

The Arbalest Empire was evaporating before his very eyes.

But even as the new information processed within Tim’s head, something changed. There was a pop, a sigh, in the back of his mind.

And then another.

And another.

Like dominos falling, the soft sounds of something giving way echoed through Tim’s mind. It was almost gentle — but he knew it to be anything but. The pattern screamed a warning in his head.

A final, exhausted whisper brushed across Tim’s thoughts.

His blood went cold.

“Brace!” Tim screamed, grabbing the controls of the Transport Cannon. “Domains up!”

And that was all he had time to say.

The ground bucked beneath their feet. The Transport Cannon groaned as it swayed, cracks racing up its walls in an instant as the foundations were practically torn out beneath it. Thunderous crashes split the silence outside as buildings crumbled, sent crashing to the ground by the most violent earthquake Tim had ever felt.

People flew through the Transport Cannon around him. They tumbled across the ground and slammed into the walls, which mercifully managed to hold strong. He barely managed to keep his own footing by clutching onto the cannon’s controls for dear life.

A deafening scream tore through Arbitage’s sky. It was a thousand voices laid over each other at once, the victory cry of a being more ancient than anything else within the Arbalest Empire.

And then the presence arrived.

It came in the silence after the scream, appearing like a whispered promise in the night.

The sky went black.

Tim’s hands flew across the controls of the Transport Cannon. He didn’t have an instant to waste. There was no point looking out the window. Even as haunting song filled the air and the tremor tearing through the ground intensified, threatening to tear the tower apart at the seams, Tim already knew what was outside. It was a thousand times stronger than the previous time he had felt it, but the pressure was terrifyingly unmistakable.

The Night’s Shadow had returned.

And this time, it was awake.