The world slammed back into existence. One moment, the calming snow of Yog's realm. The next, the biting silence of a mountain peak under a sky of shattered obsidian, sickly light from the moon casting long shadows.
Nulls lay on cold stone, the Yog Codex a dormant star against his chest. He sat up, his movements unnervingly fluid. A single, spiraled horn of polished jet curved from his temple, akin to that of a sheep. He ran a finger along its cold, smooth length.
"Well, this is a new look," he chuckled, his voice a familiar, cheerful baritone that clashed with his demonic silhouette. "A bit dramatic, don't you think? All I wanted was a library card."
The world vanished. Not into white, but into an absolute, lightless, soundless void. A pocket dimension of pure nothing. Nulls felt a moment of weightlessness, the only sensations the cool cover of the Yog Codex in his hand and the faint pressure of his own horn against his temple.
Then the void began to kill him.
There was no warning. No flash of light. The air in his lungs turned to fine, abrasive glass dust. He choked in his own blood, a silent, agonizing spasm as his alveoli were shredded from the inside. At the same instant, the space around his right leg was violently compressed, the bones snapping with a wet, sickening crunch that was the first sound in the void.
He screamed. Then he reacted.
A constellation-sigil flared blue in the darkness. The glass dust in his lungs was redefined back into breathable air. He gasped, his throat raw. But his leg was still a ruin of pain. He had to prioritize.
Figures began to glow in the darkness, their outlines limned in the faint energy of their own power. They were arranged not in a circle, but in a shifting, three-dimensional formation, using the void itself as their medium.
A wave of force hit him from behind, not physical, but conceptual. It was a spell that enforced the law of "one way." It tried to make his blood flow only out of his body. He felt a terrifying pull in his veins, his skin prickling as capillaries threatened to rupture. He spun, sketching a counter-sigil that reinstated the natural, cyclical flow of his circulatory system.
The effort cost him. A blade of solidified shadow, conjured from the nothingness, materialized and slashed across his back. He felt the searing heat of the cut, the warm spill of blood down his spine. He grunted, stumbling forward.
They were too disciplined, too coordinated. They used the featureless void to their advantage, attacking from angles that were impossible in a normal world.
He slammed the cover of the Yog Codex shut. The sound was a thunderclap in the silent void. He then pressed his palm flat against the cover, his fingers splayed. Blue light, the color of ancient constellations, erupted from his palm, etching a complex sigil onto the book's surface.
"Enough of this," he rasped, his voice raw. "Let's introduce some new friends."
He tore his hand away. The sigil remained, burning on the cover. Three distinct screams echoed through the realm, shaking it to its foundations. Hairline cracks spiderwebbed across the void. From the sigil, three beasts erupted.
The first, the Beast of Time, a humanoid of flowing, iridescent sand, appeared just as an operative tried to trap it in a stasis field. The sand-creature gestured, and the operative's personal time accelerated violently. In a heartbeat, the man aged from his prime to an ancient corpse, crumbling into dust.
The second, the Beast of Entropy, materialized as a swirling vortex of grey smoke. It turned its gaze on a woman whose form glowed with a complex, machinery-like atmosphere. The sleek, energy-based rifle she was materializing corroded in her hands, its structured light dissolving into chaotic, harmless static.
The third, the Beast of Dichotomy, was conjured, a thing of jagged, impossible angles, simply walked through a barrier of hard light another operative had thrown up. The barrier didn't break; it became inconsistent, flickering between existence and non-existence. The beast grabbed the operative's head with geometric claws. The man didn't die from physical trauma. His mind broke, overloaded by the visual paradox of the thing holding him. He went limp, brain activity flatlining.
But they were adapting. A trio of figures, their power flaring in sync, cast a combined spell. The void around one of the beast, a being of impossible angles, began to simplify. The complex, paradoxical nature of its existence was being forcibly smoothed out, rendered down into a single, stable, and therefore vulnerable, form. The beast thrashed, its form flickering.
A cluster of men with bird masks surrounded the beast, a blue pentagram glowed beneath the beast, the men each simultaneously began to weave sigils. Nulls shifted his gaze towards them, he carefully observed each of the colors of their sigil, to his shock they were different some crimson, some turquoise but many were white.
He finally snapped out of it, and tried using the time beast to aid the dichotomy beast. As he was going to give the beast a command, a barrage of meteors made out of crystallized space were soaring towards him.
"Son of a—" Without the luxury of time, his fingers hurriedly painted a constellation-sigil, shortly after a dome of pure Nexus energy blinked into existence around him, akin to that of Yog's. The meteors were disintegrated upon collision.
Due to the spell's nature, it required a tremendous amount of Nexus energy to operate, and it started taking a toll on his body. He was being worn out.
He unconsciously unmade the dome, letting the meteors collide with him, but as the first meteor was about to hit him, the beast of time had reduced the meteor velocity to zero, making them hang idly.
But even then. He was bleeding, his leg was useless, one arm hung broken. He was a brilliant strategist in a war of attrition he couldn't win.
An operative blinked into existence above Nulls, dropping down with an aethereal machete aimed for his spine. Nulls tried to dodge, the movement was instantly abandoned as the agony on his broken leg reminded him.
As the operative's blade hit the first cell of Nulls's skin. His beasts reacted in perfect, terrifying sync. As Nulls realized what had happened, the beast of time accelerated his personal time, allowing him to complete the dodge before the attacker's blade could connect.
Simultaneously, the beast of entropy materialized instantly beside operative, it cast a sigil in a slice of time even thinner than an instant, as it flicked the sigil with its claws, the sigils materialized a black cocoon painted with runes around the operative.
"Slaughtered them leave nothing alive!"
An operative blinked behind him, a blade of solidified aetherion forming in his hand. The sand-beast did not turn. Its clawed hand simply shot backwards, and its fingers, moving faster than the operative's nerves could fire, plunged into his chest.
It pulled out his still-beating heart, and as the organ pulsed in its grip, it aged it to dust. The operative looked down at the cavity in his torso, confused, before collapsing.
A trio of vermin coordinated, their movements a blur. One wove a sigil that turned the void around the Beast of Entropy into a perfect vacuum, seeking to suffocate its chaotic form.
The smoky beast thrashed, letting out a deafening roar as it does so, its edges fraying. Another operative materialized, swinging a massive, glowing hammer of pure energy at its core.
The Beast of Time accelerated the entropy beast's personal timeline. For the smoky creature, the vacuum had existed for subjective hours. It had already adapted, its form learning to thrive in the absence of things.
It lunged forward, not as smoke, but as a solid force of decay, and drove itself through the chest of the hammer-wielding operative. The man's powered armor didn't break; it rusted through in an instant, and the flesh beneath putrefied, sloughing off the bone in a wet, stinking heap.
The Beast of Dichotomy punched an operative in the sternum, and the force of the blow was both delivered and not delivered at the same time. Her armor was pristine, but her spine and ribs inside were pulverized into jelly. She vomited a torrent of blood and tissue.
The operatives shifted strategy. They stopped trying to land killing blows and began using binding spells. Glowing nets of hard light shot out, tangling the Beast of Time's limbs. Chains of solidified probability wrapped around the Beast of Entropy, trying to force its form into a single, stable state.
Nulls grunted as a kinetic blast caught him in the side, cracking his ribs. He gasped, blood spraying from his lips. He slammed the Codex shut and then open, the sound a thunderclap that disrupted a forming spell. "Dichotomy!" he roared.
The beast of impossible angles understood. It ignored the operatives harrying it and slammed its claws into the void itself, right where the binding spells were anchored. It didn't break the spells. It introduced a flaw. The net holding the Time beast flickered, its existence now conditional. For one second it was there, the next it wasn't. The sand-creature tore free.
Freed, the three beasts converged on a single point. It was not a planned maneuver, but an instinct.
The Beast of Time froze a cluster of four operatives in a single moment.
The Beast of Entropy flowed over them, and their frozen, timeless bodies underwent millennia of decay in a heartbeat, crumbling into ossified fossils.
The Beast of Dichotomy then swept through the petrified statues, its touch not shattering them, but erasing the logical premise of their cohesion. They dissolved into inert, grey powder.
The fight was a meat grinder. Sigils flared and died in the darkness, illuminating glimpses of nightmare. An operative drew a crimson rune in the air, only for the Beast of Entropy to physically claw through it, the spell dissolving into sputtering sparks against its smoky flesh.
The Beast of Time caught a volley of rounds, held them suspended in time, and then flung them back with interest, each round now aged to a state of radioactive decay that ate through armor and flesh alike.
They saw the beasts were the real threat. They stopped targeting Nulls directly and focused on the summons.
"Separate them!" a commander roared, his voice cutting through the chaos. "The smoke one decays matter! Hit it with pure energy! The sand one manipulates time! Overload its perception with divergent temporal streams! The broken one breaks logic! Don't look at it! Predict its position and saturate the area!"
A group of operatives surrounded the Beast of Entropy, not with blades, but with focused beams of raw creation energy, trying to overwhelm its decay with a surplus of order. The beast thrashed yet again, its smoky form brightening and thinning under the assault.
Another group targeted the Beast of Time, firing pulses of warped time that created a storm of conflicting temporal zones around it. The sand-creature faltered, its movements becoming erratic as it tried to process a hundred different time flows at once.
The Beast of Dichotomy found its prey ignoring it, the operatives instead laying down a grid of spatial mines that detonated in a pattern based on predictive algorithms, forcing the paradox-being to constantly flicker to avoid blasts that were waiting for it.
Nulls saw his advantage crumbling. He bellowed a command, not with words, but with a surge of will. The beasts disengaged from their individual battles and converged on him.
The Beast of Time accelerated Nulls's own perceptions, letting him see the world in slow motion. He saw a spatial blade creeping towards his neck. He pointed, and the Beast of Dichotomy reached out and twisted the space the blade occupied into a knot, snapping it.
An operative teleported behind him with a force pike. Nulls didn't turn. The Beast of Entropy flowed over the man, and the pike rusted to dust in his hands an instant before the operative's body followed suit.
As Nulls regained his advantage, to his shocked the operatives has adapted to his perception speed, stripping him of his advantage once more.
Air turned to acid in Nulls's lungs. He was choking, clawing at his throat, when a figure in black tactical armor phased from the darkness and drove a knee into his ribs. He felt the bone crack. He tried to sketch a sigil, but a second operative materialized, grabbing his wrist and twisting it back with a dry snap.
Then his beasts were among them.
The Beast of Time moved in a blur, not teleporting, but simply existing where it needed to be a moment before.
It ducked under a swing from a power-gloved fist, and as it moved, its flowing hand carved a temporal sigil in the air. The operative who had thrown the punch aged fifty years in the space of a breath. His skin shriveled, his muscles atrophied, and he collapsed into a pile of dust and brittle bone.
The beast did not pause. It lunged at the man holding Nulls, its clawed fingers moving so fast they seemed to tear the air, ripping the operative's throat out in a spray of hot blood.
The Beast of Entropy embraced them. An operative slammed a hammer of solidified force into its smoky chest. The moment the weapon connected, it began to rust, its structured energy unraveling into brown flakes and useless heat.
The beast grabbed the operative's arm, and the flesh beneath its touch withered, the skin blackening and peeling back from suddenly brittle bone. With its other hand, it traced a sigil of dissolution on the man's chest plate. The armor didn't break; it crumbled like ancient parchment, and the entropy seeped through to the screaming man beneath.
An operative tried to pin it in a cage of intersecting laser light. The Dichotomy Abomintaion simply stepped through a point where the angles should have been impossible, its jagged, non-Euclidean arm spearing through the operative's eye socket and out the back of his skull.
As the man convulsed, the beast used its free hand to scratch a paradox into the air. Two other operatives, charging in unison, suddenly found their perceptions inverted. One saw the other as Nulls and opened fire. The other, seeing his partner as a monster, did the same. They shredded each other with plasma fire before they realized their mistake.
Nulls, freed from the grip of the dead man, spat a mouthful of blood. His broken wrist was a white-hot agony. He saw a pattern. They were focusing on the Beast of Time, recognizing its speed as the greatest threat. Three operatives had it surrounded, their movements synchronized, creating an overlapping field of slowed time.
"Eros, disengage!" Nulls yelled, his voice raw. He sketched a hasty sigil with his good hand, not at the operatives, but at the void floor beneath them. He defined a ten-foot circle as "slick with blood." The operatives' boots lost all traction. They slipped, their coordinated formation breaking for a crucial second.
The Beast of Time, Eros, used that second. It accelerated its own personal time to a dizzying degree, becoming a sandstorm of motion. It moved between the flailing operatives, not with spells, but with brutal, physical efficiency.
One man had his neck snapped by a whip-fast kick. Another took a palm strike to the chest that didn't break ribs, but delivered a century of decay to his heart, which turned to dust in his chest.
The operatives adapted once more. One of their leader, a woman with a scar across her jaw, barked a command. They stopped trying to fight the beasts directly. They began targeting the space around Nulls, trying to isolate him. A wall of solidified space-time fabric erupted to his left.
The Beast of Dichotomy, Barbatos, reacted. It threw itself in front of Nulls, its body a living shield. The wall of sound hit it and fractured, the coherent waves becoming dissonant, harmless noise.
The absolute cold pit tried to swallow it, but the beast's paradoxical nature refused to be defined by a single temperature. It shuddered, ice forming on its jagged plates, but held firm.
"Marky, the wall!" Nulls commanded.
The Beast of Entropy, Marky, slammed its fists into the wall. The structured vibrations decayed into a faint, warm hum. Then it turned its gaze on the operatives maintaining the spells. It didn't attack them. It attacked their connection to the void.
The very air around them began to rot, the nothingness itself putrefying. One operative screamed as the void he was drawing power from curdled, the feedback lashing back and bursting his eyes in their sockets.
Nulls was bleeding from a dozen cuts, his body a map of pain, but his mind was cold and clear. He saw a group of four operatives preparing a combined spell, a sphere of annihilating gravity.
"All three, on the sphere!" he screamed.
Eros, the Time beast, reached it first, touching the sphere and accelerating its formation to its logical conclusion, causing it to collapse in on itself a microsecond early.
Marky, the Entropy beast, hit it next, causing the collapsed energy to decay into a harmless shower of sparks.
Barbatos, the Dichotomy beast, arrived last, introducing a flaw in the spell's foundational matrix, ensuring it could never be cast again.
The backlash vaporized the four operatives. But the effort spent the beasts. Their forms flickered, becoming translucent. Nulls felt the last of his Nexus energy gutter. They were spent.
The remaining operatives, less than half their original number, saw it. The scarred woman grinned, raising her hand for a final, killing strike. Nulls met her gaze, gave a bloody, exhausted smile, and with his last bit of strength, whispered a command to Eros.
The Beast of Time did not attack. It focused on the single, still-smoldering spark from the decayed gravity sphere. It accelerated that spark. It fed it time. It gave it a billion years of existence in a single moment.
The spark bloomed into a miniature supernova.
The void, the operatives, the entire pocket dimension, were consumed in a light that was also a sound that was also the end of everything. When it faded, Nulls was back on the mountain, broken but alive, the taste of victory and blood identical in his mouth.
A phalanx of attackers was closing in. It was in that desperate moment, his eyes catching on a Codex chained to a hip glowed everytime one of the operatives moved in the void, that the idea struck him. A desperate, all-or-nothing play. He poured the last dregs of his Nexus energy into a single, colossal sigil, not to attack any one enemy, but to attack the void itself.
"Marky. Barbatos. Eros. To me!"
The three beasts galloped towards him, slashing anything that stood on their trajectory. They surrounded him in a triangle formation. The beast of dichotomy, in the same moment, stepped in front of Nulls, it splayed its bony geometric hand and started weaving sacred geometric symbols around them, forming a protective barrier.
The Time Beast accelerated the concept of the pocket dimension's existence. It force every reconfiguration of nothingness to bloom simultaneously throughout the realm, chipping away at the realm's quality of nonexistence.
The Beast of Entropy introduced decay into the spells, causing each reconfiguration of nothingness to wither as fast as it could bloom.
The Beast of Dichotomy infected the void's foundational logic with a fatal paradox, making it so that the reconfiguration never happened in the first place.
The reaction was instantaneous and catastrophic.
The perfect, featureless nothingness developed a flaw. A single, hairline crack in reality appeared, and through it poured… something. Not light, not energy, but the violent, chaotic potential for existence.
The void screamed. The glowing figures of the Codex users flared in panic as their control shattered. The pocket dimension, a perfect prison, began to die, its own laws turning against it.
In the resulting maelstrom of unraveling physics, Nulls saw his chance. His beasts were disintegrating, their energy spent. But in the chaos, he managed one last, precise strike. He located the lead operative, the man who was frantically trying to stabilize the collapsing dimension.
Nulls didn't fire a bolt of energy. He simply pointed his broken arm, and with the last of his will, swapped the operative's spatial coordinates with a point deep inside the raging spatial storm at the heart of the collapse.
The man vanished with a short, cut-off scream.
The void dissolved, spitting him out. He hit the mountain rock with a wet, final thud. The impact jarred through his broken body, a fresh wave of agony eclipsing the constant, screaming chorus of his wounds. He was a ruin. A thing of shredded meat and splintered bone. The coppery taste of blood filled his mouth, and each ragged breath was a knife in his punctured lung.
Through a haze of pain, he saw the moon swimming in his vision. He tried to push himself up, but his arms, one broken, the other slashed to the bone, buckled beneath him. He looked down. Where his legs should have been, from the knees down, there was only a void of mangled tissue and shattered femur, the ends glistening under the moonlight. The disintegration effect had taken them completely.
A weak, gurgling laugh bubbled up from his throat, mixing with the blood. "Y-Yog," he rasped, the name a prayer and a curse. "I-I think your deal is not too bad after all."
He had to move. He had to get away. With a trembling, barely functional hand, he began to trace a sigil in the air. The lines were shaky, the constellation-light flickering and weak. He was drawing on the very dregs, the fumes of his power.
Just one more line. One more—
A hand clamped down on his wrist. The grip was like iron, utterly immovable.
Nulls's head rotated to the side. A man stood over him, silhouetted against the moons. He was tall, his frame lean under a simple, dark coat. The faint glow of a cigarette ember bobbed near his lips, casting a tiny, orange halo in the night. He wasn't one of the suited operatives. This man was something else.
They stared at each other. The man's face was in shadow, but Nulls could feel the weight of his gaze, not furious, not hateful, but utterly, profoundly tired. A full minute passed in silence, broken only by the whistle of wind over the peak and Nulls's wet, struggling breaths.
The man's eyes, glinting in the moonlight, shifted from Nulls's broken form to the Yog Codex, still clutched in a death-grip against his chest. In response, Nulls's grip tightened. His knuckles, already white, went bone-pale. He secured the book tighter, a final, defiant act of possession.
The man took a long, final drag from his cigarette. He dropped it to the stone, grinding it out with the toe of his boot. He never broke eye contact. Then, without a word, he placed his free hand on Nulls's forehead. The world did not scream this time. It simply ceased. One moment, the cold mountain air, the taste of blood, the searing pain.
The next, the deafening, hydraulic shriek of thirty chains punching through his flesh, spine, and muscle. The paralyzing weight of the straitjacket. The immense, soul-crushing pressure of this new place.
The transition was so brutal, so absolute, that the memory of the man with the cigarette was nearly erased, replaced by the sterile, blinding light of his new and final reality.
He looked around his new prison and finds a cluster of black spheres embedded deep into the walls of the cube. He looked beside him and there it was, Yog's Codex sitting idly beside him like a curse that won't leave its martyr.
The room was a cube, its walls were metallic and shiny. A single large screen eclipsed the entire wall behind him, and a lone lightbulb dangled above.
He tried to move but the chains were welded to the wall, he tried wiggling his fingers beneath the straitjacket, attempting to cast a tiny sigil to corrode the chains.
He managed to wiggle his fingers into creating a tiny sigils, the spell was successfully cast. All he had to do now is to wait, he tried to sit but a chain punctured deep into his cranium restrained him from ever doing so, he tried to bruteforce his way into breaking the chain.
A sound of rustling and clashing chains were heard as Nulls wrestled with the chains. The chains didn't so much as crack, additionally the sounds of the chains was deeply unpleasant to his ears. Finally he gave up and back into his original standing position, it was uncomfortable and agonizing but there isn't much of a choice.
He lets out a deep sigh letting his shoulder relax and his mind to wander off, after all, he had managed to cast a spell. It was only a matter of time before the chains snapped. Having that in mind his only problem are how could he entertained himself during the spare time?
He began moving his eyes rapidly, scanning every inch of the room for a possible flaw. There was none. The cube was somehow perfectly engineered to imprisoned him, as if they know everything about him in the first place. But how?
The thought rang out in his mind, akin to that of a church bell, he still remember each of them they seemingly have a dominion over a certain aspect of reality, he has seen one of them controlled space, matter, energy and many things. Just then he remember of an old Theos proverb.
"Time and place are always a pair, you can't have one without the other. They are a pair, two faces of the same entity."
It was meant to be an unserious epigram, something that Theos playwright removed from their script because of the lack of meaning it had. But Nulls finally saw a link between his situation and the epigraph he finds mediocre and inferior at best.
The corner of his mouth curled up, he could feel the chains tightening inside his spine. He shifted his gaze to Yog's codex and whispered with a little power that he had.
"Humans are interesting aren't they Yog?"