After Hela's submission, Morgan Manor returned to its surface calm.
But surface calm was never true calm.
Loren stood before the study window, his black hair gleaming softly in the afternoon sunlight. His gray eyes watched the lawn stirring in the breeze, but he seemed distracted.
There was a reason for his distraction.
After Hela submitted, he had thought Asgard's crisis had been resolved. Perhaps the prophecy of Ragnarok could be rewritten because of his intervention.
But what was happening in the universe left him unable to rest easy.
Over the past few days, his Silver Superman senses had picked up some unusual fluctuations. They were not fluctuations of energy, but fluctuations of existence.
One powerful life after another was vanishing.
Not ordinary death, but complete disappearance.
As though someone were using an eraser to wipe those names from the universe's canvas, stroke by stroke.
He closed his eyes and extended his senses into the depths of the universe.
At the far end of the Milky Way, on a planet shrouded in darkness, he sensed a void.
There had once been a powerful being there, a god called Sovereign's Peak, worshipped for tens of thousands of years by the primitive civilization of a certain star system.
But now, that being was gone.
It had not fallen, nor had it migrated. Some force had erased it entirely from the level of existence, even erasing all traces that it had ever existed.
Loren opened his eyes and lightly tapped the windowsill twice with his fingers.
"Master, what are you thinking about?" Tifa's gentle, calm voice came from behind him.
"Something is wrong in the universe. Some powerful beings are disappearing," Loren said.
Tifa walked to his side and followed his gaze out the window.
On the lawn, Nymph was talking to a