The presence turned slightly toward her.
Not a sharp movement.
Rather an inflection, as if something had just noticed a dissonance.
Salomeh understood it immediately:
where all the others lost their contour,
she remained whole.
She did not dissolve.
She did not unify.
She was… foreign.
A violent shiver ran through her.
Her instinct screamed.
She tried to materialize her Son Goku no Buki.
Nothing.
Not even an echo.
Not even a clear refusal.
The very idea of fighting diluted itself, as if the concept of combat had just been swallowed, leveled, rendered useless.
There was no longer any "against."
No "face to."
Only… a silent totality.
— Morlük…! she cried.
No response.
It wasn't a normal silence.
It wasn't absence.
It was worse.
Morlük hadn't disappeared.
He had ceased to be distinct.
Gods.
Demons.
Dragons.
Humans.
Everything that still existed… existed without being someone.
Salomeh felt her legs tremble.
Panic rose.
She turned to flee—
And the presence was already there.
In front of her.
Immense.
Crushing.
There was no distance crossed.
No displacement.
She was there because she could not not be there.
Salomeh then understood something horrible.
One did not flee from Absolute Resonance.
Not by changing universes.
Not by breaking dimensions.
Not by taking refuge in a pocket of reality.
Because it wasn't a thing located somewhere.
It was where the "somewheres" existed.
There was no outside to reach.
No elsewhere.
To flee presupposed a place where it would not be.
But that place did not exist.
Absolute Resonance did not attack.
It did not strike.
Did not aim.
Did not traverse anything.
It declared itself.
Everywhere existence could take place.
Everywhere it could not.
And even where that distinction no longer made sense.
Salomeh took a step back, then another.
The presence observed her.
Not with hostility.
But with incomprehension.
As if it were trying to grasp a mathematical anomaly.
Why…
why did this thing refuse to be the All?
The other worlds were not refuges.
They never had been.
Changing universes was changing rooms.
Changing floors.
Changing angles.
But always inside the same building.
And that building…
was it.
Salomeh felt a crushing pressure, not on her body, but on what she was.
On her very right to be different.
For the first time, she understood.
It wasn't destruction that was coming.
It was something far more definitive.
The end of all singularity.
Salomeh thought for a fraction of a second about fleeing.
The idea was born…
and died immediately.
It wasn't a prohibition.
Nor a force that prevented her.
It was more insidious.
She understood, without anyone needing to tell her, that there existed no place to go.
A pocket dimension?
She had already traversed them.
Unstable refuges, folds outside the world.
But faced with this…
they were only internal folds.
Secret rooms in a house that had no outside.
Everything that was "pocket," "bubble," "elsewhere," was only an arrangement permitted by the very laws that supported this presence.
They existed through it.
Thanks to it.
Like an application lives in a device it does not control.
If the support disappears, the illusion disappears with it.
Hiding in a pocket dimension was hiding in one's own shadow.
A shadow cast by the thing one was fleeing.
Salomeh felt a dull pressure, not on her body, but on the very principle of action.
To flee was not to run.
It was to create a difference.
And every difference was already condemned.
For to flee, one needed:
an outside,
a boundary,
a separate state,
a non-included movement.
But none of that was authorized.
Absolute Resonance had no need to pursue.
All hostility toward it dissolved before even being thought.
Every attempt at separation normalized before existing.
Entities were not its enemies.
They were its internal properties.
How to attack that of which one is a function?
How to oppose that which defines even the possibility of opposition?
Salomeh backed away further.
The presence looked at her.
And in that gaze, there was neither anger nor judgment.
Only a silent interrogation.
Why…
why did this thing persist in not merging?
Then she felt it.
Something in her.
Not a force.
Not a power.
An absence.
Infinitesimal.
Incomplete.
But real.
A void that did not seek to escape,
that did not seek to survive,
that did not even seek to exist.
She understood.
What escaped the Métaworld…
was not what fled.
It was what never entered the game.
Sakolomeh.
Her 0.
It did not move.
It did not resist.
It did not even think to escape.
It was not a survivor.
It was a hole.
A non-state.
An absence without position.
And what Absolute Resonance perceived in Salomeh,
was not her.
It was the imprint of that absence.
A fragment impossible to normalize.
As if, without knowing it,
all those who had been close to Sakolomeh
had become something else.
Not extensions.
Not copies.
Masks.
Zones where the All could not fully close itself.
Absolute Resonance imperceptibly tilted its attention.
It did not yet understand.
But it had just spotted an anomaly.
The creature extended its hand.
Salomeh no longer moved.
Fear had frozen her to the depths of her being.
She was indeed a mask… but she ignored it.
And that mask had to be removed.
Like all the others.
The immense hand approached, heavy, inexorable, ready to seize her and erase her into perfect unity.
Salomeh closed her eyes.
She had no more thoughts.
No more strength.
Not even the idea of resisting.
— Nooooon!
The cry tore through the air.
Hinata.
The creature slightly diverted its attention.
It saw her immediately.
Her too.
Another mask.
One more.
And that irritated it.
Sakolomeh was already causing too many problems for the Métaworld it incarnated — and now its anomalies were multiplying, transmitting, propagating like a living incoherence.
Hinata, for her part, felt no fear.
Only one burning, simple, primitive thing.
To protect.
She ran.
— Hinata, no! cried Salomeh, abruptly opening her eyes.
— Don't approach that thing!!
But Hinata did not stop.
Then, as she advanced, something changed.
Her desire…
frayed.
The closer she got, the more the very idea of protecting Salomeh lost its sharpness, like a word repeated too many times until it no longer had meaning.
She understood, without understanding.
This creature was not an opposition.
Not an enemy.
It was…
coherent with what it did.
Not against Salomeh.
But toward her.
Like a part seeking to reclaim what belonged to it.
And Hinata felt the same thing happening in her.
A gentle and terrible attraction at once.
A silent normalization.
Her legs gave way.
She fell to her knees.
— …What is this… she murmured, lost.
— Hinata!!
Salomeh ran, grabbed her before she fully collapsed, knelt down in turn.
— Hinata, look at me… are you okay? Say something!
But already, the creature was no longer looking at them.
Its attention had just been seized by something infinitely more serious.
Something it recognized.
Something it could not absorb.
Its gaze tightened.
Sakolomeh.
He was there.
And he was not alone.
At his side stood the Exentity, the primordial gods, Lucifer, the father god.
The Ineffables of the Dream were also present — all of them, without exception.
All become, consciously or not, masks of Sakolomeh.
They had come.
Not to attack.
But to exist together before Absolute Resonance.
Salomeh raised her eyes, incredulous.
— …Sakolomeh…
He turned his head toward her.
And gave her a calm smile.
Soothing.
As if telling her that everything would be fine, even if it wasn't true.
Then he disappeared.
And reappeared right in front of the creature.
It looked at him.
In its attention vibrated two things it did not usually know:
anger,
and incomprehension.
Before it stood the bug.
The 0.
The one that could not be normalized.
Sakolomeh slightly raised his head and spoke in a slow, measured, almost polite voice:
— Can I know your true name?