The 26th floor was also a Duchy like the previous floor. But the vastness of the floor never mattered to them as Varian and Maria were able to locate the gates in the planet they landed so far.
But that notion was broken in this floor.
"What do you mean you can't find the gate?" Varian and Maria stood in the dark space.
"Literally. If you can't notice, we're stranded in the middle of nowhere." Maria grumbled as she put away her locating treasure and lay down…not really laying down since they're in space. She waved her hands and began to swim funny.
"Irresponsible," Varian muttered and expanded his sight.
From their position, they could see the flickering lights of stars in the far distance. But other than those twinkles, there was only darkness.
Varian's space sense expanded like a violent wave of an ocean and reached a million miles in distance. Then it expanded further and further until it covered a distance equivalent to ten times that of between sun and earth.
Still nothing.
Varian exhaled in frustration.
Sometimes, he forgot how small he really was in the face of the universe. He could single-handedly demolish a planet and had long lost awe of them. In a sense, he felt as big as a planet.
But universe? It's a different story.
Even if he reached the peak of Celestial ranks, Varian had a feeling that he'd still be the same. At most, he'd be a bigger ant in front of this vastness.
'Divine rankers…' Perhaps only they could not feel helpless in front of the boundless cosmos.
"We'll teleport to the nearest star," Varian said.
Maria nodded and took out her space treasure, an orb enclosed in a six-pointed metallic structure.
"No. Not that, it takes too much time." Varian rejected her and swiped the space ring that Julius used to own.
The space around them distorted and they appeared ten million miles away. The distance was nothing in the vastness of space but Varian wasn't really trying to travel. It was just a trial teleport.
"Hey, did you notice anything off?" Maria looked around and tightened her grip on the spear she took out at some point.
"Yeah," Varian wasn't too pleased with the finding.
The space around them began to twist and fold like a carpet. Being inside the affected region, Varian and Maria felt as if a hydraulic machine was pressing them and trying to 'print' them onto a sheet of paper.
"This is one of the almost certain death traps for the 26th floor. Even if someone goes through this floor a million times, it's unlikely they'll encounter this. Only a handful of members ever did. But why…" Maria was just a second short of crying. "Why the hell am I so unlucky?"
'It's not you, it's me.' Varian thankfully didn't say it out loud else he had a feeling that even if Maria deemed it extremely risky, she'd try to kill him here and move on.
Despite her trove of treasures, the tower posed a fatal threat to Maria. She certainly wouldn't want a disaster star with her when she's on an important mission.
"I guess you're plain unlucky," Varian said with a straight face. "This type of thing never happens to me."
"Right?" Maria's shoulders drooped. "I guess karma is catching up. If I knew it, I would've tortured those bastards for bringing me this bad luck."
Varian distanced himself from her and activated his space sense. The folding of space grew much more forceful and Varian felt himself shrinking with each passing moment.
Varian and Maria quickly teleported before things could get worse.
But things did get worse.
The stable space where they teleported began to fold again and this time, it was far faster and much more forceful.
This time, they tried running away without teleportation, but the space collapse followed like a vengeful beast.
So, they started teleporting with all their might to save their fragile lives. What started as a 'threat to run away from' soon turned into a 'threat that'd kill us in seconds.'
When they finally reached the edges of a star system, Varian and Maria were already bleeding all over their bodies.
With every passing second, the space pressured them from all sides and practically crushed them.
"You said this is a rare danger, but what is this about?" Varian asked as he raised his hand and noticed it had shrunk to half its size in thickness.
"N-No one knows." Maria rummaged through her memory and information records, but none helped. "The information of this danger is found only in the records of the dead. That includes rank 6s. As far as the records go, no one survived this."
"This isn't just normal space collapse." Varian cursed.
The three-dimensional space was collapsing into two dimensions!
It's as if this space was trying to turn him from 3D to 2D, which would of course result in their certain death.
Varian thought getting into the star system would've helped them solve the danger but it clearly didn't.
Even as they teleported onto the planet, the space collapse around them continued. In fact, it grew much worse than they expected.
BOOM! BOOM!
Two deep sounds echoed throughout the planet, as if something somewhere deep exploded and then cracks began to spread throughout the planet.
The creatures on the planet, all the way from rank 1 to rank 5, began to panic and flee.
Some rushed to other continents, the powerful ones flew to other planets altogether.
The ruling civilization of the planet—feral humans or Cat humans as earthlings would've liked to call them—rushed out in spaceships and teleportation gates.
The whole planet went into a sudden evacuation, with chaos and violence prevailing everywhere.
Even though he didn't hold any positive sentiments for the natives, Varian felt a bit guilty about the situation.
Clearly, he's a challenger and they're the natives. Yet, he felt like an intruder who sneaked into someone's home and set it on fire, causing the original owners to flee.
"An honest mistake," Varian apologized and increased his speed of teleportations. Yet, the space collapse followed them and it grew faster and faster.
Maria was already under heavy pressure while Varian wasn't sure if he could survive another 10 minutes of this calamity.
"We need a solution." He said.
Maria wanted to slap him for his obvious words but her arms were now only an inch thin and she feared they'd snap.
"The space fluctuation needs to be countered." Varian's spirit sense intruded into the planet's cat people's knowledge centers and searched for the information that could save their lives.
Interstellar Map, celestial bodies, black holes.
The nearest black hole—
"Got it!"
Varian clapped his hand and they compressed a few centimeters. "This is gonna be long, so hang on."
"Wait, W-Wha—"
Maria couldn't finish her words as the world blinked in and out in her vision. And it did more than a dozen times before she felt an extremely strong suction force.
A huge black region with circles of bright light on its perimeter. Once the incoming light crossed a line, the light was just sucked in, creating an extremely dark spherical region in contrast with the extremely bright peripherical circles.
"This…" Maria felt a tug on her whole body, an invisible force pulling her towards the thing. "Fuck! You brought me to a black hole!"
Varian didn't even bother responding and jumped at the black hole. The pull on him grew at an alarming rate and the space-time around Varian began to twist violently.
The space collapse that accompanied them so far now began to weaken as it encountered the natural space-time distorter—A black hole.
These two forces clashed with each other, and as Varian went closer and closer to the black hole, at some point, the two forces began to cancel each other out.
But it wasn't very safe. The space collapse force, whatever it was, seemed to be agitated and increased its power on him.
To balance it out, Varian had no choice but to approach the black hole, even further, putting him into greater danger. "F-Fuck!"
At some point, however, the collapse force reached its limit and could no longer increase.
But by then, it did push Varian into an extremely risky distance from the black hole.
Now, just by standing there, Varian felt his entire body slowly squeezed out of existence. If he took a few steps towards the black hole, he'd be torn into pieces. If he took a few steps away, the space would instantly collapse and kill him.
"H-Hey, I think I found something u-useful!" Maria's voice was weak and on the verge of fainting. But amidst this dangerous chase, she chose to risk it and broke the seal on her power, reaching rank 4. So, she would be fine, for just some more time.
"What? Quick." Varian couldn't even hold a proper conversation.
"T-The space collapse is by a b-beast…" Maria's voice was abruptly cut off as the space-time around Varian began to close off.
"Son of a…" Varian's eyes widened at this deliberate action and he swore without thinking.
He figured it out just now.
In their first teleportation, they accidentally triggered a sleeping beast. The beast began to toy with them and took great joy in slowly hunting them down.
The creature could've used its powers to push Varian towards the black hole instead of fighting against its suction force. But it chose to do so because if it did push him away, he'd end up in the black hole. The creature, however, wanted him in its stomach.
'I'm treated as a prey, huh.' Varian was pissed off.
"Fuck you!" Varian's space-time powers resonated and the space ring on his finger also helped.
An invisible but deadly force faced off against the two forces acting on Varian.
