The final week felt like the last deep breath before a plunge into impossibly deep water. The air in the Cradle, and indeed across our entire alliance, was thick with a quiet, purposeful anticipation. The looming threat of the dungeon had been a distant abstraction for a year, a countdown timer in the back of our minds. Now, it was a tangible presence, a final exam for which I had spent every waking moment studying.

I spent those last few days not in frantic, last-minute training, but in moments of quiet connection. The real preparations were already done; the forging of the soul was complete. This was about settling accounts, reaffirming bonds, and saying goodbyes, just in case.

I found Lucas in the armory in Bastion, personally overseeing the sharpening of a new batch of Aegis-steel swords. The city was a well-oiled machine now, its systems running with a smooth efficiency that allowed him these small moments of hands-on leadership.

"Everything ready on your end?" I asked, leaning against a weapon rack.

He didn't look up from the whetstone, his movements rhythmic and steady. "As ready as we'll ever be. The watch rotations are set. Silas has drone patrols running on a continuous, randomized loop. Eliza says the shield's power core is stable at one hundred and twelve percent of its theoretical maximum." He finally looked at me, a serious, steady expression on his face. "We can hold the fort, Eren. We're not the same group of desperate survivors you had to carry in that first dungeon. We built this," he said, gesturing around with his open arms. "You can trust it to stand while you're gone."

"I know," I said, and the simple truth of it was a profound comfort. "I'm not worried about the walls. Just… watch out for Anna. She'll try to take on too much."

A rare, genuine smile touched his lips. "That's what I'm here for. Go. Do what you have to do. We'll be here when you get back."

My goodbye with Eliza was in her workshop, a chaotic wonderland of half-finished projects, sparking conduits, and the clean, sharp smell of ozone and hot metal. She barely registered my presence, her eyes glued to a complex holographic schematic she was manipulating with frantic, elegant gestures.

"The energy decay of the Chronocrystal is still too unpredictable!" she muttered to herself. "If I can't stabilize the temporal field, the entire resonance chamber will just… poof!"

"Going somewhere, Eliza?" I asked with a grin.

She jumped, startled, before a wide, brilliant smile lit up her face. "Eren! I was just working on… well, it's a surprise. Something for your welcome-home party." She wiped a smudge of grease from her cheek with the back of her hand, her eyes shining with fierce intelligence. "Don't you dare go getting yourself unraveled by some cosmic entity. I've got three new theoretical frameworks I need to bounce off you when you're back, and Leoric is, frankly, getting a little too predictable in his responses."

Her own way of saying 'be careful' was to give me homework. I laughed as she proceeded to show me another weapon she was working on.

Anna was, as always, the hardest. I found her in her Grove, sparring with Grover, her Mythic bow, [Final Word], a blur of silver light in her hands. The two of them were a symphony of deadly grace, the massive, silver-barked Ent creating openings with sweeping gestures that seemed to slow time around their enemies, and Anna putting an arrow of pure, conceptual decision through each one. She had grown so strong, so confident.

She stopped when she saw me, dismissing the bow into a shimmer of light. "So," she said, her voice trying for casual but not quite making it. "It's time."

"It's time," I confirmed.

She walked over and wrapped her arms around me in a fierce, tight hug. For a moment, she was just my little sister again. I could feel the thrum of her peak Tier 4 power, a deep and steady river, and beneath it, the unbending iron of her will. "You come back," she said, her voice muffled against my chest. It wasn't a request. It was an order. "Don't make me come in there after you."

"Wouldn't dream of it," I murmured, hugging her back. "Besides, someone needs to keep an eye on Lucas. He gets… broody."

She pulled back, wiping at her eyes with a frustrated hand, a watery smile on her face. "Deal. Now go on. Go be a stupid, overpowered hero. We'll handle things here."

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My final farewell was with my Anima, gathered in the command center of the Cradle. Jeeves, Rexxar, Leoric, and Nyx stood before me, silent and watchful.

"This is my trial," I told them, my voice echoing in the quiet chamber. "Kasian's analysis is clear. I have to walk this path alone. The Cradle must remain sealed until I return. Jeeves, you have command. Protect our home. Protect our people."

"Your orders are my prime directive, Master Eren," Jeeves replied, the darkness around his form steady as a star. "We will await your victorious return." Rexxar just slammed an armored fist into his palm, the sound a crack of thunder. "Break them," he boomed. It was all he needed to say.

My gaze fell on Kaelen, who sat at my feet, whining softly, his starlit eyes fixed on my face. He knew. "Sorry, buddy," I said, scratching him behind the ears. "Not this time. You're on guard duty." He leaned his head against my leg, a gesture of profound, unhappy understanding.

Kasian's calculations had given me a route, a six-day journey on foot from the known edge of our maps to the Cradle's hidden location. It would theoretically be possible to set up a portal once I arrive, but the journey must first be made. A week of walking the earth, of feeling the world under my feet, of consolidating my spirit before the final trial. It almost felt like a pilgrimage.

I set out at dawn, a lone, black-clad figure moving west. The journey began in familiar territory, the whispering grasslands and dense jungles of the eastern continent. With my Tier 6 body, the trip was effortless. I did not need to sleep, eat, or even pause for breath. I moved at a constant, ground-eating pace that was faster than a fighter jet, my footsteps silent on the earth.

The first two days were a blur of vibrant, teeming life. Herds of horned, six-legged grazers thundered across the plains, their movements a river of muscle and dust. Great, iridescent-winged predators wheeled in the sky above, their cries sharp and clear. I moved through it all like a ghost, my [Prime Axiom's Nullifying Veil] keeping me hidden, an observer in a world bursting with vitality.

On the third day, the landscape began to change. The lush jungles thinned, giving way to a vast, petrified forest. Immense, ancient trees, turned to solid, grey stone, clawed at the sky like the hands of dying giants. There was no birdsong here, no rustle of leaves. The only sound was the whisper of the wind through the stone branches. Even the monsters were different. Creatures made not of flesh, but of living rock and tormented shadow, rose from the earth to challenge my passage. They were strong, mid-Tier 4 entities, but I dispatched them with a contemptuous ease, a single [Ashen Edict] unraveling them back into the silent stone and darkness from which they were born.

By the fifth day, I had crossed the petrified forest and entered a new, even stranger region: the Salt Pans of a forgotten, ancient sea. A perfectly flat, white expanse of crystallized salt stretched to the horizon in every direction, glittering under the sun like a field of diamonds. The air was unnaturally still, the silence so profound it felt like a weight on my eardrums.

There was no life here. At all. Not a single blade of grass, not an insect, not a microbe that my Gaze could detect. This was a place of absolute sterility. But as I walked, I began to see things half-buried in the salt. The immense, fossilized skeletons of creatures that dwarfed anything I had ever seen, sea-leviathans whose ribs were the size of buildings, their skulls larger than houses. This had once been a place of colossal life. Now, it was a graveyard.

I felt a growing sense of unease. The path to the dungeon was not a road through a dangerous wilderness; it was a journey through descending rings of death and silence. The closer I got to my destination, the less life there was, as if the dungeon's very presence was a blight upon the world, a slow-acting poison that had sterilized everything for miles around.

On the sixth day, the endless salt flats finally gave way to a range of stark, black mountains that jutted from the white plain like jagged teeth. Their peaks were sharp, their slopes covered in a fine, black scree that crunched under my boots. Kasian had told me the entrance lay in a hidden valley within these mountains.

After hours of climbing through the oppressive, silent peaks, I found it. It wasn't a cave or a fissure. It was a perfect, circular valley, a kilometer in diameter, nestled in the heart of the highest mountain. And in the exact center of the valley floor stood a single, immense structure.

It was an archway.

It was easily a hundred meters high, carved from a single, seamless piece of opalescent, pearly-white material that seemed to drink the light of the sun and glow with a soft internal luminescence. It wasn't built; it looked as though it had been grown. The arch was not ornate or covered in runes. It was utterly simple, its elegant, perfect curve a statement of profound and ancient power. The ground before it was a pavement of smooth, grey stones, arranged in a vast, circular mosaic.

As I approached, a low, resonant hum began to fill the air. It wasn't an audible sound, but a feeling, a vibration in my very soul. It was a feeling of welcome, of homecoming. And yet, beneath it, there was a profound and eerie sense of age, of a loneliness that stretched back across millennia. The air here was not dead like the salt flats; it was thick with a power so old and so alien that it felt like breathing pure, liquid time.

This was it. The entrance to the Cradle's dungeon. The dungeon where I was to meet the Old Gods. I stood before the magnificent, silent archway, the sun casting my long shadow across the ancient stones, a lone, mortal figure facing the doorway to divinity and madness. I had one day to rest, to center myself, to consolidate my spirit.

The trial was about to begin.

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