All eyes turned toward the strange entity that had just appeared.
Silent, it swept its gaze over the three silhouettes standing in the room, then inspected the sides as if probing the surrounding shadows.
Ravena:"Do you think this thing... is Azazel?"
Erasa, surprised: "Even with the eyes of Mü Thanatos, I behold this thing and I can't grasp its nature."
She extended her hand in a gesture of warning: "I suggest you don't approach it... or even attack it!"
Bakuzan, defiant: "Did you hear what Azazel said? This thing is a threat!"
Bakuzan leaped to strike, completely ignoring who—or what—he was facing. Before him stood the Absolute Resonance, incarnated for the first time. It had made Azazel its mask for ages, never considering manifesting. But the matter of Sakolomeh had forced it to take on flesh and bone.
The attack shot forth... and nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. The entity didn't even grant him a glance. Simply because it possessed a Pre-Existing Dissolution.
All hostility, all intent, all attack, all concept targeting the Meta world it incarnated couldn't even emerge. It dissolved before its very formulation, because that would imply an "outside." Yet nothing existed outside of it.
Bakuzan recoiled, stunned. It was the first time something so fundamentally incomprehensible had happened to him.
But that was only part of their stupefaction.
The Absolute Resonance scanned the room, but it didn't perceive the world like they did. It didn't "observe"; it existed, and everything around was merely an extension of its own substance.
It was a Fundamental Property—Ontological Absoluteness, an Absolute Self-Primacy.
The Meta world, as Resonance, incarnated the sole existence whose reality:
depended on nothing,
preceded all causality,
preceded all concepts,
preceded even the logic of "existing."
It wasn't "first": it was the absence of second.
It was the all in the all. Occupying simultaneously every position—before, during, after, around, inside, outside—by default.
It wasn't omnipresence like other entities: it was the impossibility of being non-present.
And here's the most crucial detail: everything that existed in the Meta world was, in the eyes of the Absolute Resonance, not distinct elements, but internal properties, variations of itself.
It didn't "see" Bakuzan, Erasa, or Ravena. It simply "noted" fluctuations, extensions of its own essence. These three were not separate individuals: they were a variation, a manifestation of itself.
Erasa froze, petrified by the intensity of this truth. Even Mü Thanatos, with all its power, seemed to want to react, but analyzing the very structure of this entity was beyond any capacity.
No state, no force, no intent could increase it, diminish it, threaten it, or complete it…
For it was already complete, in every sense existence could conceive.
A man suddenly appeared at the heart of the ruined castle.
Ravena recognized him instantly.
Neru.
Erasa slowly turned her head toward him. Instinct urged her to attack—Neru worked for her father, he was part of the problem—but she held back. Since the thing's appearance, every interaction had to be reduced to the strict minimum. A hostile gesture, a misinterpreted intent… all that could be perceived as an affront. Or maybe not.
No one knew how this entity functioned.
Since its arrival, its silence alone crushed the space. It made it more terrifying than all the beings present combined.
Neru took a step forward, his gaze charged with a strange pride.
— Ravena? What's happening here?
Ravena didn't respond. She simply extended her arm and pointed at the creature.
Neru frowned.
— What's… this thing?
— We don't know, whispered Ravena. But do nothing. It's useless. Everything we could attempt is.
Neru then turned his gaze toward the entity.
The Absolute Resonance took a step forward, as if preparing to leave the castle ruins. Then it stopped dead. Something had caught its attention.
It slowly turned its head toward Erasa.
A chilling shiver immediately ran through Erasa's body.
And, without transition, Mü Thanatos appeared before them. There. As if she had always been present.
— Goddess Mü Thanatos…? breathed Erasa.
The creature turned its gaze toward the goddess… then disappeared.
Mü Thanatos remained motionless for an instant, head tilted. When she raised it, something had changed. Her gaze was no longer the same.
And suddenly—she attacked.
Erasa dodged just in time.
— What's happening?!
Bakuzan drew his weapon and attacked without hesitation. But the attack produced nothing. It was denied before even manifesting, dissolved at the root. Mü Thanatos, as pure definition and conceptualization, refused any application of aggression directed against her.
Bakuzan recoiled, teeth clenched.
— In the end… she's not so different from the other creature.
— But why is she attacking us?! cried Erasa.
Explosions tore through the castle. Entire sections collapsed while Erasa, Bakuzan, Ravena, and Neru dodged frantically, never counterattacking.
— It's clear, launched Erasa. She's controlled by something!
— Control an entity like her?! growled Bakuzan. It's unimaginable!
Then Mü Thanatos stopped dead.
She screamed.
A distorted cry, charged with pain. She fell to her knees, convulsing, as something tore through her back. Wings burst forth in an explosion of dark energy.
Four pairs of wings.
— Shit… murmured Erasa.
— She's transforming into Shad Ruhvaël…!
Bakuzan's eyes widened. Mü Thanatos had just shifted: from Absolute Conceptualization to Absolute Deconceptualization.
A dome deployed brutally around the castle. Space sealed shut. All escape became impossible.
Everything the dome touched disappeared instantly.
Not destroyed.
Deconceptualized.
Erasa lowered her eyes to her hands, intact.
— It seems… that only the ineffables can survive a dome of Total Deconceptualization so far.
Silence fell again.
And this time, it was even heavier than that left by the Absolute Resonance.
The dome closed completely.
There was no sound.
No vibration.
Not even the feeling of enclosure.
Everything inside… simply ceased to have ever been conceptualized.
The castle no longer existed.
The air neither.
Even the void left by their disappearance was denied. It wasn't nothingness: it was the absence of the very possibility of nothingness.
And at the center of this absolute impossibility, Shad Ruhvaël grew.
Her body expanded, not in space—for space no longer existed—but in the very order of the dream. She became gigantic, overwhelming, her four pairs of wings deployed like strata of dead truths, each beating not to fly, but to refuse that what they covered be thought.
The veil now covered even her eyes.
It wasn't protection.
It was an ontological prohibition.
Erasa felt Mü Thanatos scream within her.
Not rage.
Pain.
— Don't… look… she murmured, voice trembling. Even I… must not see myself like this.
Shad Ruhvaël's presence crushed every attempt at action. Bakuzan tried a step to the side—the movement itself disintegrated before completion. He reappeared a little farther, as if the dream had corrected an error.
— Damn it… he growled.
He gripped his weapon by reflex, then stopped dead.
The blade no longer existed.
Not broken.
Not annulled.
Never defined.
— What's the point… breathed Bakuzan, voice hoarse, horribly lucid.
— What's the use of facing an entity that can't be destroyed… because its nature denies even destruction?
Shad Ruhvaël slowly raised an arm.
The gesture alone made an entire "zone" of the dome disappear—not destroyed, but removed from all thinkable structure. Ravena felt something brush her existence. She had the impression that a memory had just died before even existing.
— Listen to me! cried Erasa.
Her voice trembled, but she held on.
— I don't know… I don't know at all, she replied to Bakuzan.
— But as an apostle, there's only one thing I can tell you.
A lance of light formed in Shad Ruhvaël's hand.
It emitted no energy.
It illuminated nothing.
It was drawn from an erased concept, something forgotten before even the Word.
— Don't let that lance touch you, continued Erasa, voice broken by urgency.
— Otherwise… it's over. Even ineffables like us won't survive it.
The lance vibrated.
The dream itself seemed to hesitate.
— Actually… she resumed, almost suppliant.
— Don't let any of her attacks touch you. None. I mean none.
Shad Ruhvaël advanced.
She didn't walk.
She preceded.
Distance folded, not reduced, but rendered irrelevant. Neru felt his legs tremble. He felt neither fear nor panic. Those emotions no longer applied here.
— Ravena… he murmured.
— I… I feel nothing anymore.
— That's normal, replied Ravena in a flat voice.
— She precedes even that.
A wing passed near Bakuzan.
The mere contact erased a possibility: the one he had once had to become something other than what he was. He growled in pain, not physical, but existential.
— She's not killing us… he spat.
— She's taking us away.
Shad Ruhvaël raised the lance.
Time no longer existed, yet the instant stretched like an eternal condemnation.
Erasa clenched her teeth.
— Hold on…
— As long as we still exist, even as errors… the dream holds.
Above them, Shad Ruhvaël's gigantic silhouette immobilized.
The battle was about to begin.