The Ultimate Regressor System

The darkness peeled back from the Sovereign’s face slowly and deliberately, like a veil being drawn aside for effect, and when it finally cleared entirely, Lucas breath caught.

She was beautiful in a way that felt almost wrong to look at directly — silver hair falling in a smooth and weightless past her shoulders, pale and flawless skin that gleamed in the void’s light, a black lace gown draped elegantly across a figure that seemed carved— supple and full in all the right places.

Her eyes, when they finally settled on him, were a deep, violet, sweeping over him with a look akin to amusement.

"..." Lucas tried to speak, but nothing came out from his mouth. He knew from the message about his mark that the Sovereign was female. And he knew for a fact that since she was a goddess, she would be beautiful to a degree.

But this... this was far beyond his expectations.

"Shocked are we?" She asked when she saw his reaction. Her voice, no longer distorted, carried something almost amused, almost warm unlike the cold tone he remembered.

"Everything about you surprises me at this point," Lucas admitted, coming back to his senses as he forced his gaze to steady despite how difficult it was proving to stop it from wandering.

"You have earned my attention properly, Lucas Kane." She rose from the throne in an unhurried motion, closing the distance between them and stopping just inches apart. "I thought it was time we actually spoke."

"Is this a trap," Lucas said warily, taking a step back. "Some way to catch me off guard before you finish what you’ve been trying to do for weeks?"

Something flickered across her expression, then a faint amused chuckled escaped from her lips. "If I wished to end you, little Regressor, I would not need a trap. You should know this by now."

"Fair point."

"My name is Nyra," she said. "I have simply grown interested in you," Something in the way she said it made Lucas uncomfortable. "Interested enough to explain myself for once, rather than simply hunt."

"Then why," Lucas asked, seizing this opportunity. "Why any of this. The Edge, the beasts, all of it. What’s the actual point of all this?"

Nyra studied him a long moment before answering, something almost fond settling into violet eyes.

She gestured, and the void around them shifted. Images forming right before Lucas’ eyes.

Fire against dark caves, the presence of early humanity across open plains, its evolution, the rise and fall of empires blurring in fragments.

"For longer than your kind can comprehend, the gods have watched humanity," Nyra said. "From your earliest fires in the dark, through the ages of stone and bronze. Through every war, every collapse and every civilization built and lost."

She smiled. "You amused us. Your intellect, your strife especially . The endless struggle of creatures carving meaning out of a world that owed you nothing. It was satisfying, it was a thing that held our interest for centuries, and most of all—" her smile widened, "—it was entertaining..."

The images shifted, giving way to agriculture, infrastructure, inventions and innovation s, the movement of centuries compressing into moments.

"But humanity evolved," she continued, something faintly annoyed creeping into her tone now. "And as it evolved, it built comfort. Your kind built machines to labor in your place. Created medicine to cure illnesses and cheat the deaths that once made your struggle entertaining. Created networks that let you speak across continents without ever leaving your own homes. Your struggle, the very thing that made you interesting, began disappearing as time passed."

The images changed further to screens, cities glittering with electricity, people talking to loved ones that lived on the other side of the world, hospitals that became more and more competent in treating people, generally humanity moving through lives that required less and less of the raw and desperate identity that had once defined the species.

"Things only grew worse from there," Nyra said. "Your technology advanced to the point where survival itself became almost trivial for most of you. Comfortable. Predictable. Boring even. And what angered us the most was your kind’s annoyingly persistence to adapt."

The word left her mouth like something distasteful.

"We created disasters, you created means to predict them and reduce casualties. We created pandemics, you countered, creating vaccines that protected your kind. Soon, we grew tired of watching creatures we had shaped for struggle simply... stop struggling."

"So we built The Edge," Nyra said.

"You built an entire dimension of monsters and death just to entertain yourselves." Lucas interjected, his eyes narrowing.

"We built humanity to entertain us in the first place," Nyra said, entirely unbothered by the shock plain on his face. "When you strayed too far from that purpose, we simply.... corrected the deviation."

She said this with an indifferent tone, like she and her kind hadn’t just subjected humanity to and endless cycle of loss and suffering.

Lucas stared at her, as the weight of it settled into his chest like a stone.

Every death. Every horror he’d survived. Every person who he met and died and everything else was engineered, like game built for an audience that had grown bored of their own creation.

"That’s monstrous," he said quietly.

"That is divinity," Nyra corrected. "You would do well not to conflate the two with human morality, Lucas. We do not answer to it."

"Besides," she added, a grin forming on her face, "things have gotten much more interesting."

She continued, walking him through the mechanics of it— the Systems granted to each human upon the Edgewalk’s beginning and the abilities bound directly to the soul.

Lucas listened, then something crossed his mind.

’If the Systems are bound to the soul. If she understands how they actually work—’

"Wait," he said, cutting her off mid explanation. "You understand the Systems, right?."

"Every god has a hand in its creation. Mine included" Nyra said, something like pride flickering across her beautiful features.

Lucas held her gaze.

"Then tell me," he said, his eyes narrowing. "Tell me why mine is broken."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!