Earth's Greatest Magus

Chapter 3066: Arrival

Tartarus Realm,

Four months of arduous travel came to an end when the armada’s advance ship finally dropped out of the void, and the familiar signature of Parasite X immediately lit up across every sensor.

As much as Emery wanted to push forward and investigate, they didn’t have that luxury. They were the advance unit, sent ahead for one purpose: mark the destination, establish a stable anchor, and hold the position until the rest of the fleet could safely follow.

"Keep the target locked. Updates every ten minutes." Supreme Karat’s voice carried no room for argument.

With the ship settled into position and the crew locked into their watch rotations, Emery withdrew into his inner domain.

It had been three and a half months since they crossed into the Eternal Void, and during that time, his connection to everything outside had been completely severed. His inner domain itself remained untouched, but the Khaos hub at its center stayed silent.

He had left all three Khaos Guardians behind with his avatars, which meant all three Khaos Gates remained sealed along with them.

He could still enter the Khaos domain itself. He could still stand before the stone table and observe its ever-shifting star chart. But what he could no longer do was reach any of the seeds he left behind.

Except for two that cross the realm with him.

Soltz and Veyarel.

With a simple thought, both of them appeared within his Khaos domain.

Soltz arrived visibly restless, his eyes immediately sweeping across the familiar domain before he finally asked, "How is it? Have we actually arrived? Tartarus, truly?"

"That’s exactly why I called you here." Emery gestured toward the stone table. "Take a look."

At his thought, the surface rippled. Dust-fine points of light scattered across it before slowly drawing together, forming clusters of stars that expanded into a vast nebula. Moments later, the shifting lights settled into a detailed star chart.

It wasn’t the familiar layout of the Magus Realm that either of them had spent decades studying.

This was Tartarus.

"See if any of this looks familiar to you."

When Emery had first joined the mission four months earlier, he had been genuinely surprised to learn that the Magus Alliance possessed maps of Tartarus at all. They were fragmentary records, pieced together from centuries-old information left behind by ancient travelers and incomplete in almost every direction.

Still, enough of the recorded star data matched what they could observe from the surrounding space to confirm that the fleet had reached the correct realm.

Exactly where they had arrived, however, remained an open question.

Karat had handed that problem directly to Emery.

Fortunately, the Khaos star chart made short work of it.

The true scale of Tartarus had caught even Emery off guard the first time he saw the realm properly mapped out. It was nowhere near as small as they had initially assumed, spanning roughly a quarter the size of the entire Magus alliance.

But without an established portal network, traveling from one edge of the realm to the other would take years, even aboard the fastest ships they had.

That estimate didn’t even account for the chaotic void itself—the dense, dangerous clouds that covered much of Tartarus’s open space and made direct travel nearly impossible.

It finally explained why the native peoples of Tartarus relied so heavily on the spatial anomalies they called rainbow rivers simply to travel between distant regions.

Soltz needed a full minute just to orient himself with the chart. Another minute passed before he managed to find anything useful.

Even beneath layers of drifting void-smoke, the crimson sun wasn’t difficult to locate. It was the fixed point around which all seven of Tartarus’s inhabited planets supposedly orbited.

By cross-referencing the likely paths of the rainbow rivers with the information already displayed on the star chart, Soltz gradually worked out the approximate location of each planet. They were scattered across seven completely separate sectors of the realm.

He read the names aloud one by one as he found them.

"Pardera... the Fey World... the Giant World... and others."

All seven were located deep within Tartarus’s inner core.

Even reaching the nearest one would take a few months of travel.

For anyone else aboard the ship, at least.

Emery began chanting softly under his breath, the ancient words falling into a steady rhythm. As he continued, the runes carved along the edge of the stone table began to glow, and the star chart rippled outward.

One dark point appeared.

Then another.

Then dozens more, spreading across the vast map and illuminating locations throughout the realm.

Khaos Waypoints.

Emery’s eyes moved across the newly revealed network, calculating distances and connections. With a functioning waypoint network laid out before him, distance suddenly stopped meaning quite what it had a moment ago.

The nearest waypoint to Pardera was barely a day’s journey away. The one closest to the Fey World was roughly twice that.

Emery looked at Soltz.

With this network, he finally had exactly the proposal he needed.

Back in the command room, Emery laid out his proposal to Karat plainly: he would scout ahead to the Pardera Kingdom and gather whatever current intelligence he could before the rest of the armada caught up.

Karat agreed without much hesitation.

"Alright." She waved a hand dismissively. "There’s no need to wait for the main fleet. Go ahead and leave now."

Emery had barely turned to leave when one of the bridge officers suddenly spoke, his voice tight with alarm.

"Sir—the Parasite X is moving."

The readout confirmed it a heartbeat later.

The massive, worm-shaped signature had begun moving directly toward their position.

Then more signals appeared.

Hundreds of smaller life signs suddenly lit up across the surrounding asteroid field, emerging from behind the rocks and drifting void-smoke. One after another, they began converging on the same target.

Their ship.

Rosin Karat was already on his feet, his expression hardening as his voice cut through the bridge.

"All hands, prepare for battle."