Alpha chaos awakens, p.1
Alpha: Chaos Awakens, page 1
Alpha:
Chaos Awakens
By
Aleron Kong
Alpha: Chaos Awakens
A work of Tamori Publications
Copyright © 2024 by Aleron Kong
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used factitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
The scanning, uploading and distribution or this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. Thank you for protecting the rights and writing process of the author.
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1: Stolen Joy
Chapter 2: Legendary Summoning
Chapter 3: Silver Fox
Chapter 4: Cheating is Awesome
Chapter 5: The Assessment
Chapter 6: Hollow Fear
Chapter 7: Heroic Suffering
Chapter 8: Dragon Fear
Chapter 9: So Normal
Chapter 10: Collisions
Chapter 11: Better Angels
Chapter 12: Worse Fate
Chapter 13: Just Another Day
Chapter 14: Status Page
Chapter 15: Primordial
Chapter 16: Path of War
Chapter 17: Lotus
Chapter 18: Long Live the Confederation
Chapter 19: Broken
Chapter 20: Remembrance
Chapter 21: Overachiever
Chapter 22: Fledgling
Chapter 23: Capitals
Chapter 24: Threshold
Chapter 25: Cultivator
Chapter 26: Horror
Chapter 27: Glyphs
Chapter 28: Three Promises
Chapter 29: Evil
Chapter 30: Backlash
Chapter 31: Double Dip
Chapter 32: Brent Roth
Chapter 33: Heal Thyself
Chapter 34: Appreciation
Chapter 35: Level Up
Chapter 36: Light
Chapter 37: Many Paths
Chapter 38: Sealed Hate
Chapter 39: Killers
Chapter 40: Trespass
Chapter 41: Wergild
Chapter 42: War Protocol
Chapter 43: New Attribute
Chapter 44: Apologies
Chapter 45: Need
Chapter 46: Run!
Chapter 47: The Drums
Chapter 48: Charlamagnes
Chapter 49: Oh Boy
Chapter 50: Sucker Punch
Chapter 51: Intro: Klaus
Chapter 52: Cold Blood
Chapter 53: Lightbulbs
Chapter 54: Local News
Chapter 55: Hate
Chapter 56: Inappropriate
Chapter 57: Cost of Power
Chapter 58: Fury
Chapter 59: Birth of a World
Chapter 60: Taxes
Chapter 61: We’re “fine”
Chapter 62: The One
Chapter 63: After Darkness
You can make a massive difference!
Dedication
This book is dedicated to a man that helped me early in my literary path. His light was taken from us too early due to a drunk driver. Kamel was a man I never met in person, but he was kind, joyous in our interactions, and helped me bring my words and worlds to so many people around the world. You are not forgotten, and you are still appreciated.
Chapter 1: Stolen Joy
‘I don’t deserve to be this happy.’
Fin kept thinking that as peals of laughter filled the car.
The two lovers looked out at all the beauty laid out before them.
This was their favorite spot on Stone Mountain. It was a little bluff at the top of a palisade, and it gave a great view of the Atlanta skyline and the forested, rolling land leading up to it.
They had gotten there just at the right time. The sun would be setting soon. An hour at most.
The skyline was bathed in a golden glow.
During the day, the dull brown stone that made up the older parts of the city was boring at best, but in the golden hour, that brown became amber, and boring became beauty.
Long shadows stretched across the ground towards the man and woman resting in their car, inky fingers created by the light. The two of them just basked in the sun and the sight. As beautiful as the view was however, they were barely paying attention.
Not with the horror show of a dinner party they’d just left.
“I cannot believe,” Lauren said, laughing so hard she could barely get the words out, “that they acted like they couldn’t smell anything.”
“I know,” Fin gasped out, wiping tears from the corner of his eyes. “What, in the name of Odin’s booty, possessed her to make a, what was it? An Argentinian bean casserole? She’s from Wichita!”
Peals of laughter echoed off the inside of the car.
“Did you see everyone’s faces? They were trying so hard to hold it in and everybody was failing. Oh my god!” Lauren was wheezing now. “Vance even tried to get up and open a window, ‘for some air,’ but Ashley made him sit back down because it was ‘cold outside.’ She just couldn’t admit that her dinner had basically caused an ecological disaster!”
“Geneva, show the vid I took,” Fin called out, a devilish look on his face.
“Don’t drag Geneva into this,” Lauren chastised him, but the smile and rapid nods showed she was talkin’ shit.
“As an AI, I’m always happy to help,” came a disembodied voice. The feminine tones did sound happy to join in the fun. A moment later, a picture showed up on the smartglass in the windshield. It showed a young Asian woman sitting with five other people, crowded around a table that was just a bit too small.
Her expression was slightly strained, but it was nothing compared to the massive amounts of sweat on everyone else’s forehead. Small toots blared out periodically that absolutely no one admitted to hearing or creating. After a few seconds, one of the women started coughing, a cough that quickly became a gag.
“Look at Ashley’s face! She was trying so hard to pretend it didn’t reek in there, but the room was so small,” Fin’s breath came out in short gasps, “I’m surprised no one actually vomited. And the best part… The best part! Was when Matt came late and was like, ‘Does your dog have the runs? What is that smell?’”
“Stop it. Stop it,” Lauren begged, slapping his thigh.
The two of them sat there laughing. The video stopped, and the two of them held hands, enjoying the setting sun.
For obvious reasons and love, all four windows of their SUV were discreetly cracked. They lay in their reclined chairs, fingers interlaced, and loving each other like there was no tomorrow.
Sadly, for one of them, that was true.
As the first stars appeared above them in the darkening eastern sky, that was when it happened.
That was when the sky fractured.
That was when the world ended in Chaos.
When the world was reborn in a tsunami of grey fire.
“Kamel, are you seeing this?”
Lauren sat up abruptly, pointing through the windshield.
In the days to come, Fin would remember many things. He would remember not wanting to look at what she was pointing at, because it meant he could no longer gaze at his wife’s beautiful face. Her soft brown hair, smooth skin, and his favorite feature, her gentle, crooked smile, curved lips that always seemed to be half delight and a half reassurance.
Fin had turned away though, and instead of that smile, the end of the world was forever etched into his memory.
The first sign of the change was the clouds. Rather than just white and faded gold, they were multihued. Reds warred with yellows, and blacks lay next to green. It was as beautiful as it was bizarre.
He tried counting and came up with eight different colors, if you counted normal white. For seven seconds, the world was united in delight, gazing upon a heavenly kaleidoscope.
That joy ended. What replaced it nearly broke Fin’s mind.
He remembered it as a strange, nearly physical sensation.
It was akin to an epiphany; a fundamental world view being shattered.
His brain just couldn’t process that the sky itself was breaking.
Far to the west, the clouds peeled back leaving an island of blue. Cracks began to spread across the sky, as if the roof of the world was just a fractured pane of glass. For six seconds, those cracks grew. At the end of this second seven, the “pane” shattered upwards, tearing a hole in the world.
On the other side of the pit that had been gouged in reality, for a fraction of a moment, Fin saw sights he quite literally could not conceive. A sea of stars, planets, horrors and miracles and more things that he would never put a name to flooded his mind, body and soul.
That view of infinity was replaced by what looked like a second grey sun. It began as a pinpoint, but grew in a second until it had washed out any sight of what was on the other side of the broken sky. A fraction of a second after that, a pillar of dirty silver fire, countless miles across, slammed down into the Earth.
For seven seconds, the beam poured raw Higher Energy into the Core of the Earth. A swirling pillar of grey fire, surrounded by three smaller helices of energy, one blood red, the other
All who gazed upon the pillar, felt every emotion they had never dreamed of experiencing. They feared what they saw for it was the end of all things. They yearned for what they saw, for it was the forgotten home they had never known.
For twenty-one seconds, by the Law of Three and the Power of Seven, the world came to an end in true majesty and horror. And Fin was witness to it all, Lauren’s hand digging into his arm, both mesmerized by sights that even gods would not be so fortunate to gaze upon.
He would never forget.
He would never be the same.
In twenty-one seconds, Fin’s understanding of the Universe changed, and yet that was not the strongest memory from that fateful day.
More than any of that, more than the skin of the planet being broken, more than his view of reality shattering along with it, he would remember, that at the end of the world, the woman he loved had not called him Fin.
Instead, she’d used a name that had begun as a joke, but had grown into an eternal pledge of love. A promise that he would always do his best to be her “perfect one.”
She’d called him Kamel.
The beam finally disappeared.
The grey energy had impacted somewhere in the Pacific Ocean and was fully consumed by the planet’s Core. During those twenty-one seconds, thousands died due to tremors, plane crashes and any number of other ways.
Callous as always, history would not even note the passing of these poor unfortunates. Nothing would be remembered about the moments before the Wave. But they would remember seconds to come. After the disappearance of the pillar of Chaos, for exactly six seconds, the world went back to normal.
In those seconds, the hole in the world repaired itself, disappearing without a trace. The colors in the clouds had already faded as well. On the surface, nothing looked different. Everything was so benign in fact, that Fin and Lauren looked at each other with an unspoken question.
Did that really just happen?
With the arrival of the seventh second, the world was reborn in grey fire. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a globe of graphite hued energy rose from the depths. It began small, no larger than a fist but rapidly grew in size and intensity, until only three seconds later it was the brightest star to ever be seen in the night sky.
The sphere grew stronger and exerted a strange pull. Clouds across the world lengthened and moved west. As if they were being sucked down a drain, the clouds stretched as they moved, making distinct lines in the sky. The sphere of Chaos energy bloated, no longer looking like a distant star, but a brother to their own sun. The seconds ticked by, and it swelled larger, a behemoth, more massive than anything ever seen. On the fifth second, it blocked almost all of the sky. A planet crashing into their own.
“Kamel?” Lauren’s voice quavered.
Fin grabbed her fingers with one hand. With the other, he blocked her view and turned her head so he could look into her eyes. He answered her in the only way he could. His words were lies, but the message behind them held the greatest truth. With fear gripping his own heart, he chose to focus on love, and tell her that even if this was the end of all things, she was loved and not alone.
“We’re together.”
The world exploded.
With a sound so loud that it moved beyond human hearing, silent yet deafening, the planet of stone fire expanded at a rate of thousands of miles per second. Chaos energy, the raw building block of the Universe, washed over and through the Earth in exactly seven seconds.
A wall of slate energy devoured the world, hundreds of miles high. An impenetrable, opaque wave of grey rushed over the globe. Any who stared upon it were struck dumb with terror. Deep within themselves however, they all thought this wave of oblivion was the most beautiful sight they had ever beheld.
Impossibly intricate swirls in the flame spoke to every man, woman and child on Earth.
Fin and Lauren did not see it. Instead, in that iota of time before they were consumed, they stared into one another’s eyes. Like that, the world disappeared in a wash of roiling gunmetal light.
Time and Fate themselves became untethered from the Earth.
Doors long closed creaked open and new passageways were made to both heavens and hells.
Creatures long relegated to the forgotten corners of the world found dormant powers awakening.
The primordial essence of the Universe, Chaos itself, swept through everything and everyone on Earth, laying the seeds of Awakening or doing so outright.
By the Law of Three and the Power of Seven, the world was reborn.
The wave washed over Fin and Lauren both and…
Chapter 2: Legendary Summoning
A new world will now be inducted into the Labyrinth!
Common, Low-rank Mortal Tier, World Energy being allotted…
Assessing world Grade…
Error! World is a Pseudo-Mortal Realm! Common-rank World Energy may damage the World Spirit…
Changing assessment format…
Assessing World Spirit level…
Error! World has Nascent Spirit!
World does not meet requirements for induction into the Labyrinth!
Rejecting assimilation into the Labyrinth…
Error!
Aberrant energy forcing connection. Assimilation cannot be stopped.
Allocating further energy…
Mid-rank Mortal Tier World Energy being allotted…
ERROR!
Aberrant Energy forcing connection. Assimilation cannot be stopped.
Allocating further Energy…
High-rank Mortal Tier World Energy being allotted…
ERROR!
Aberrant energy forcing connection. Assimilation cannot be stopped.
Danger! Labyrinth Assimilation may be flawed. Newly inducted world may be crippled.
Automated protocols insufficient…
Mortal Tier energy allocation insufficient to stop assimilation!
Special condition triggered!
Mortal Tier Labyrinth Administrator assigned…
Collecting further data to assess need for Common, Uncommon or Limited rank Administrator…
Assessing aberrant energy which is forcing connection…
Higher Energy detected in the Energy forcing world connection!
Danger!! Newly inducted world may be destroyed!
Mortal Tier Labyrinth Administrator insufficient!
Scarce rank Heroic Tier Administrator assigned…
Assessing type of Higher Energy…
Chaos Energy detected in the energy forcing world connection!
DANGER! Neighboring world seeds in danger of corruption!
Low-rank Heroic Tier Labyrinth Administrator Insufficient!
High-rank Heroic Tier World Energy being allotted…
Epic rank Heroic Tier Administrator assigned…
Widening scan…
Widening scan…
Widening scan…
Sympathetic resonance detected on assimilating world…
Chaos Energy detected on assimilating world as well!
ERROR! Chaos Energy cannot exist on the material plane!
DANGER! Existing World Cluster in Danger of Corruption and Degradation…
Searching…
Searching…
No precedence found!
Low-rank Saga Tier World Energy allocated!
Fabled rank Saga Tier Administrator assigned…
Temporal freeze enacted. Assimilation paused.
ERROR! Temporal freeze failed!
Assimilation recommencing…
DANGER! Chaos Energy concentration allows resistance to Time!
DANGER! Chaos Energy concentration bleeding through material plane!
DANGER! Chaos Energy could potentially threaten entire Labyrinth Sector!
Increasing Energy allocation to mid-rank Saga Tier, Mythic!
Mid-rank Saga Tier World Energy being allotted…
Temporal freeze enacted.
Assimilation pau- paus- pau-
ERROR! Temporal freeze failed.
Assimilation recommencing…
