Becoming a Monster

Chapter 682: Chapter 681: The Hollow Chasm

After what happened, the few like Arachne or Ailetta wanted to approach Noah after sensing that something wasn’t right with them.

But the moment they moved, he stopped them from approaching him.

“Stay where you are, and don’t use any mana.”

Even after their attacks disappeared, he could still see mana rushing in from around the forest, and until he understood what they had created, he wasn’t willing to risk adding anything else.

Yet watching the mana disappear wasn’t what bothered him the most. The entire area where their attacks had collided felt wrong in a way Noah couldn’t quite understand.

At least a hundred yards of the forest had been reduced to varying shades of grey. Trees, grass, exposed roots, and even the soil had been stripped of every trace of color, leaving behind a section of forest that looked almost detached from everything around it.

There was no movement among the leaves despite the wind passing through the rest of the battlefield, nor could Noah find so much as an insect moving across the ground. Everything was perfectly still… or dead…

He had seen what his miasma could do to living things, but even the worst damage it caused didn’t compare to what he was looking at now. His miasma could kill a tree or corrupt the earth, preventing life from being created again.

Here, Noah couldn’t shake the feeling that trying to place something living inside that hundred-yard stretch would end with the same result regardless of what it was. Whatever had happened hadn’t just killed everything caught within the area. It had left behind a place where Noah couldn’t imagine life continuing to exist at all.

Looking toward the sky only made that feeling harder to dismiss. Rain continued falling, yet the space above the grey land remained completely clear. Noah watched several drops reach an invisible line before disappearing, with none surviving long enough to breach that invisible barrier.

The mana pouring toward the vacuum suffered the same fate. Streams continued rushing in from every direction as the world tried to correct itself, only to disappear as soon as they crossed into the grey area.

Noah had expected the influx to eventually begin filling the emptiness they created, but nothing he could see suggested that was happening. No matter how much mana entered, the area remained unchanged, leaving him uncertain whether the world could actually repair what their attacks had done.

No one around him seemed to understand it any better. Humans stared at the lifeless stretch of forest without approaching, and Morvyr didn’t dare move as long as Noah didn’t, but the celestial beings’ reaction stood out among everyone else.

The Seraphim and the others watched the grey expanse without panic or uncertainty.

They had seen it before.

For many of their kind, protecting the rest of existence from places like this was one of the duties they had been created to fulfill. Angels had been taught something different. They had been taught to fear what existed within that space, and to fear the space itself.

The voice within Malachi recognized the sight almost immediately.

“Purgatory… The Devil’s ene- No… This is worse than I thought. This is Hell’s energy. Just what did yo-“

The voice suddenly cut off completely. Malachi waited a moment, breathing anxiously, waiting for the voice to accidentally give away what was happening. This time, after waiting for what felt like a lifetime, the voice didn’t say anything.

“What do you mean?” Malachi finally asked when he could no longer stand waiting. “What is happening? What did you mean by Hell’s energy?”

He received no answer, even as his questions became increasingly frantic. “What did they create? What is that place?”

The voice still didn’t answer. Malachi waited before calling for it again, his breathing becoming increasingly uneven when that failed to provoke a response either.

There was something almost ironic about how badly he wanted to hear it now. Not long ago, he would’ve given almost anything for the voice to stop speaking inside his head, yet its sudden absence had left him desperate for an explanation.

The sight it had given him only made that need worse. Malachi could perceive the battlefield around him as clearly as he had since receiving the angel’s gift, but the moment his attention reached the grey expanse, his vision ended.

There was no darkness waiting beyond that boundary. Darkness was still something his gifted sight could perceive. Instead, his vision abruptly stopped wherever the unaffected forest ended, then resumed on the opposite side of the grey expanse.

He could perceive everything around it, but the hundred yards in between gave his sight absolutely nothing to show him, as though that section of the world didn’t exist.

That frightened Malachi far more than knowing Noah and the Seraphim had somehow caused it. His sight came from an angel, and the power allowing that angel to grant it ultimately came from God.

If that power couldn’t reach whatever now occupied the space in front of him, then Malachi knew of only one place described in the Church’s oldest records where the same should’ve been true.

The Hollow Chasm.

Malachi stared at the grey forest, wishing more than ever that the voice would explain what was going on.

—

Meanwhile, the angel was already moving through Heaven.

Her connection with Malachi remained intact, but she had withdrawn most of her attention from it while searching for another angel who had also involved themselves with this part of the mortal world.

Under different circumstances, she would’ve preferred bringing what she witnessed directly to one of the Archangels, but her status didn’t grant her the right to approach them, and a message sent through others offered little certainty of ever reaching one.

It wasn’t because what happened was unimportant. The beings above her watched over matters spanning entire realms, not to mention they were continuously at war against the Devils’ own archdevils, making even a Devil capable of wielding Hell’s energy relatively insignificant compared to the threats demanding their attention.

That left her with the closest alternative: another angel whose chosen could provide the help she currently needed.

A shiver passed through her as she remembered the grey expanse. Angels were supposed to be absolved of the fears that plagued mortals, but Heaven had made certain its inhabitants understood why the Hollow Chasm was something even they should never enter.

The Chasm existed along the boundary separating Heaven and Hell, forming wherever Heaven’s and Hell’s infernal energies met in enough balance that neither could overpower the other. Instead, they continuously destroyed one another, preventing either from persisting within the space between them.

Normal mana and even life energy itself suffered the same fate, leaving an emptiness where the energies and laws supporting the rest of Creation could no longer function.

Anything entering that emptiness disappeared from every means Heaven possessed to perceive it. Its mana, presence, soul, and even the connections leading back to it could no longer be detected, leaving no way to determine whether it had been erased or continued existing somewhere beyond that boundary.

Power offered no protection from something that gave it nothing to act on, which is why even the greatest beings crossed between Heaven and Hell by overwhelming the equilibrium and temporarily forcing the Hollow away rather than trying to survive inside it.

What made the Chasm truly terrifying was the knowledge that something somehow lived within that nothingness.

Neither Heaven nor Hell understood how anything could live within a place where existence itself couldn’t survive. What little they did know came from the rare occasions when the beings inside found a way out, and every encounter had taught both sides to fear them.

They hunted angels and Devils without distinction, possessing enough strength that even the most powerful among either side couldn’t afford to treat their appearance lightly.

There was no way to know why they were so hostile. Some believed the emptiness they were born within had left an equally impossible void inside them, driving them to destroy the two forces responsible for creating their home in the first place.

Anything killed by one of those beings suffered a fate far worse than death. Their body and soul didn’t just disappear. Every trace of their existence was erased along with them, including the memories of anyone who had ever known them.

Angels could fight beside someone for centuries, only for that history to vanish the moment they were killed by a creature from the Hollow. No one would question where they had gone or realize someone was missing. As far as everyone left behind was concerned, that angel had never existed in the first place.

If not for the Archangels, Heaven might never have realized it was happening. Their power allowed them to recognize the gaps left behind even when the memories themselves were gone, giving Heaven its only warning that something was removing its inhabitants so completely that Creation itself seemed to forget them.

That knowledge was one of the reasons the Hollow was guarded so heavily. Keeping its inhabitants inside wasn’t only a matter of protecting Heaven from another enemy. Every one that escaped carried the possibility of erasing others so thoroughly that eventually no one would even remember there had been something to fear.

Until now, those warnings had little to do with her responsibilities within the mortal realms. She had certainly never considered that a Devil there could possess infernal energy pure enough to reproduce the conditions necessary for the Hollow to form when it collided with the Seraphim’s heavenly power.

Whether that grey expanse was only a localized imitation or something far worse was beyond what she could determine through Malachi. What mattered more was finding the other angel whose personal servant was close enough to prevent the devil from killing everyone there and growing stronger.