Chapter 398

Chapter 398

Everyone watched as balls of fire flew into the sky, almost like fireworks, only to signal the coming deaths of untold thousands.

Ten minutes to go.

One of his minds switched to doing a countdown while the rest just focused on the world around them as he pulled out the bar of food he was given, taking off the paper to give it a look.

If he didn’t know better he would have thought it was chocolate, with its dark colour and glossy appearance, only to see how wrong he was as he took his first bite, and despite the situation they were in felt his eyes light up.

It was rich, but not sweet, with flavours coating his mouth and constantly shifting as a feeling of power came over him, the buffs from it permeating his body to fill it with strength. He couldn’t even begin to guess how it had been made but desperately wanted to know if he ever got the chance. Even if he couldn’t fill his food with power, he at least wanted to recreate the flavour as every feast or holiday meal he’d ever gotten to enjoy in the past flashed through his mind, all while parts of him watched those in the surrounding area go through the same thing as the reason they must have been distributed in the first wave became clear. It wasn’t just for the extra power each person would receive, It was a way to break the tension.

He didn’t think he was wrong to say that some good food could make any situation a little easier, and what he was experiencing wasn’t just good, it was incredible. He’d been letting himself feel smug occasionally with how good his own cooking had been ever since he’d awoken his crafting, but between seeing what his teacher could forge and now trying the food of a tier three cook when it was clearly a mass-produced ration, be couldn’t help but feel humbled in how far he could still grow if given the chance.

He continued to nibble on it, savouring each bite as minutes passed while everyone around did the same, happy to indulge in that brief respite from their thoughts as much as they could before they all finished, going back to focusing on the point with weapons in hand, even if the general atmosphere felt just a little calmer than it had.

Four minutes left.

One minute.

The balls of fire shooting up into the sky told him that his counting had remained true as the tension that had fallen came back in full force while he felt his heart pound. The entire reason he was even in that universe was before his eyes as untold gods were watching down and an entire other world looked on from across the primordial chaos that separated realities, just as invested in their success.

Every grey was watching what was about to take place, letting them temporarily forget their own troubles as most of them were locked on to the representatives of their own kind who’d been brought to the world, the only members of their race who had a chance of surviving their world’s eventual cold end, though a few looked elsewhere. There were many interesting individuals after all, and as a universe that had received more attention than any other for how it had reached out across the gap into so many others, people couldn’t help but get invested in what they saw.

As each second passed, Ben could feel his pulse rising, getting to the point where he thought his heart might just burst altogether as he took one last look at Thera beside him before putting his eyes squarely on the light beaming into the sky, acting as a call signal for what was to come.

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six.

“Five, four, three, two, one.”

By the end, the countdown slipped out of him, and with the final word came a change to what they were seeing, the invasion point no longer being a beam of light, nor a tear in space like he’d usually see with that branch of magic. Instead, it looked like a fractal tube stretching into the sky, still as large as it had been only moments before but now showing snippets of a thousand different worlds as it finally began.

The gate opened up and pandemonium poured out.