Nulls opened his eyes. He was back in the control room of Abyssal Station Zero. The air still smelled of blood, ozone, and the psychic residue of the researcher's fear.
On the floor in front of him, the temporal Codex was scorched. Its once-bruised purple cover was now the color of cold ash, the leather cracked and brittle. The intricate metal pages inside were fused into a single, warped slab. He felt no pull from it, no hum of power. It was a dead thing. He paid it no more mind than a used match.
He stood, brushed imaginary dust from his clothes, and walked over to the researcher's corpse. He grabbed her by the ankle and dragged her out of the control room, her body leaving a smeared trail on the polished floor. He dumped her unceremoniously in the hallway with the other frozen dead.
Returning, he picked up his own Codex, the leather cool and familiar under his touch. He walked back out into the corridor, past the frozen statues of the elite Yagers, and stopped before the open door of the Armageddon-class cell.
The lattice of chains still hummed around the other Codex, the violet keyhole gone. The psychic song was now a low, waiting thrum.
Nulls did not reach for it. He turned to the massive, half-peeled door he had torn from the frame earlier. He placed his hands on the warped metal. A pulse of raw Nexus flowed from him, not to destroy, but to command. The Argus-steel, a substance designed to resist magic, softened like warm clay under the pressure of a will that had once rewritten physics. He molded it. He folded the thick slab in on itself, forging a long, crude box—a sarcophagus for a book.
With another gesture, the humming chains binding the Armageddon-class Codex unwound themselves. They slithered through the air, wrapping the mysterious Codex in a tight, metallic cocoon. He then directed the chains to loop around the waist of his trousers. Next, he took the chains that had once bound his own Codex in the cell and did the same, securing Yog's book to his opposite hip. Both Codexes now hung from his sides, heavy and silent, like weapons on a bandolier.
He turned from the cell. It was time to leave.
"Marky," he said.
A sigils combusted behind him, from it. The Beast of Entropy unfolded, in its true, whale-sized glory. A jumble of void-black angles and silent hunger.
"Up," Nulls commanded, pointing a finger at the ceiling.
Marky complied. It simply do as it was told. A cylinder of matter two meters wide, from the floor Nulls stood on to the theoretical roof of the station and beyond, ceased to exist. There was no explosion, only a sudden, violent inrush.
The ocean, under kilometers of pressure, found the new path of least resistance.
Water did not poured in. A column of liquid force as solid as steel slammed down through the hole, crushing consoles, tearing bulkheads, and filling the corridor with a deafening, crushing roar. The station groaned in protest.
Nulls stood unmoved in the maelstrom, a bubble of calm Nexus holding the crushing pressure and freezing cold at bay. He watched the water rage.
"Again," he said, his voice clear in the aqueous thunder. "In all cardinal directions. Accelerate the process."
Marky became a blur of annihilation. A hole bloomed in the wall to the north. Then the south. East. West. Each new opening was a catastrophic release of pressure. The roar became a chorus. Hallways became torrents. Rooms imploded.
He dismissed Marky. The beast dissolved.
Now, he waited. He stood in the howling, flooding corridor as the station died around him. He could hear, faintly, the sounds the water brought: the shriek of tearing metal, the distant, muffled crump of collapsing decks. And other sounds. Human sounds. Screams, cut short by the inundation. The clang of desperate fists on sealed hatches. A shouted prayer, swallowed by the flood.
He had given them that. A moment. A last breath to curse, to plead, to cling to each other. A final, fleeting connection before the cold and the dark took them. It was more than they would have given him. He considered it a modest kindness.
After six minutes, the station fell silent. The roar of inrushing water faded to a steady, high-pressure hum. The control room, the corridor, everything was submerged in an icy, black sea, lit only by the erratic flash of shorting electronics.
Nulls pushed off from the floor and swam upward, through the clean, cylindrical hole Marky had first made. He moved with effortless, powerful strokes, his Nexus-filled body ignoring the cold and the crushing depth.
He passed through the decks. He saw them. Figures in Rapax armor, pinned against ceilings by debris, mouths open in final, water-filled screams. Researchers floating like pale seaweed in their labs. Containment cells, their doors burst inward, their monstrous inhabitants now still and waterlogged. He saw a species of multi-limbed, gelatinous Morbus that pulsed with a sickly bioluminescence, watching him with clusters of black eyes as he passed. They did not attack. They recoiled, pressing themselves against the walls of their flooded cell. He paid them no mind.
He saw no sign of Skylar's body. That was noted. Filed.
Finally, he emerged from the corpse of the station. He was in the open ocean, a vast, crushing darkness. The only light came from the dying glow of the station far below and the faint, ghostly shimmer of deep-sea organisms.
Something moved in the dark above him.
It uncoiled from the greater blackness. A serpent. Its scales were the blue of a deep glacier, and along its flank, iridescent fins as sharp as tectonic plates cut the water with silent, terrible grace. Its head was of a behemoth, a cathedral of bone. Its open maw was a cavern lined with obsidian fangs, each one the size of a sky-scraper, the gaps between them as wide as city avenues.
The leviathan's eyes, turquoise pools larger than lakes, found him. The pupils shrank, focusing on the insignificant speck, until they were points of absolute black no larger than sports balls.
It lunged. The water was displaced, a continent of muscle and intent driving toward him. To Nulls, compared to the horrors of the Theos war, it was a statue. A very large, very slow statue.
He raised his right hand. With his left, he tore a single, short link from the chain holding the Armageddon-class Codex to his hip. As the colossal maw descended, about to engulf him and a few million gallons of sea, he sketched a sigil in the water before him. It glowed a fierce, actinic blue, the rune for Gravitational Mass.
He touched the sigil to the small steel link.
The variable M in the local mass equation for that specific piece of metal increased by ten to the power of twenty. The link became instantaneously heavier than a neutron star.
The leviathan's jaws were a meter from closing around him. Nulls opened his hand.
He dropped the link.
It should have fallen like a meteor through the beast's lower jaw, through its body, through the planet's crust. But Nulls was already conjuring a second, opposing sigil beneath it, a Kinetic Nullifier. The unfathomably dense link simply... stopped. It rested on the plane of force, an invisible anvil, just inside the leviathan's mouth.
The effect was immediate and absolute.
The creature's head snapped downward as if hooked to a falling moon. The immense momentum of its lunge was instantly reversed. Nulls, was yanked down with it. They plummeted toward the seabed.
They struck not with a crash, but with a deep, seismic thud that sent a cloud of silt blooming into the abyss. The leviathan lay pinned, its monstrous head pressed into the ocean floor by a weight it could not comprehend. It thrashed, a world-ending convulsion that stirred currents powerful enough to scour mountains, but it could not lift its jaw from the anvil.
Nulls swam calmly to the creature's flank, near a major artery. With a claw of entropy, he opened a gash. Blood, darker than the surrounding blackness and hot as a volcano, poured out in a thick, constant stream.
Using the blood as ink and his finger as a brush, Nulls began to trace a pentagram on the seabed. It was colossal, each line a trench carved into the rock. When it was complete, a stark, bloody star on the ocean floor, he placed his own Codex gently at its center.
He looked at the struggling continent. With a flick of his hand, he inverted the gravitational constant on the chain link. The anvil became a bullet.
The metal link dropped. It punched through the leviathan's lower jaw, tore down through its throat, ricocheted off the dense bone of its spine, and shredded its internal organs in a storm of supermassive shrapnel. It exited through the creature's tail in a burst of viscera, then buried itself in the planetary mantle, leaving a tunnel of absolute devastation through the beast.
The leviathan's thrashing ceased. It was dead.
Nulls stood in the center of his pentagram, the death of a sea-titan around him. He raised his hands, his voice a clear vibration in the eternal dark.
"The Lurker beyond the Threshold."
"The Tome and the Knowledge of the gate."
"The All-in-One."
"The One-in-All."
The vast, ancient life force of the leviathan, the essence of a creature that had existed since the continents were young was ripped from its colossal corpse. It flowed into Nulls as a tsunami of raw Nexus. The dark lake within him, already vast, overflowed. It expanded its own banks. It reached a placid, terrifying, absolute fullness.
For the first time since his rebirth in this petty universe, his reserves were full. Not a drop more could be held.
He dismissed the pentagram and the sigils attached to the chain. He recalled his Codex to his hip. He left the withered, desiccated husk of the leviathan where it lay, a new mountain range on the ocean floor.
He looked up, toward the distant, unseen surface. Toward the world that had made him a prisoner. He began to swim upward. He had an appointment with a man named Yama.
He swam upward through the endless dark. The pressure lessened, the water warmed by fractions of a degree. Life began to appear.
He passed forests of bioluminescent kelp that swayed in slow, deep currents, their light casting long, ghostly shadows. Schools of fish with bodies like polished iron darted away from his presence. He saw the shell of a creature so vast its curved back formed an underwater plateau, covered in centuries of coral growth and slow-moving, filter-feeding behemoths. It was alive, a continent adrift.
It did not notice him. He extended a single tendril of Entropy, to sever the neural cluster that governed its autonomous functions. The great creature simply stopped. Its heart ceased. Its gentle, world-shaping currents fell still. It began its millennia-long descent to become a new part of the ocean floor. He swam past its dying edge without a glance.
Twenty kilometers below the shimmering, unreachable surface, he encountered something made.
It was a submarine, a sleek vessel of black alloy, its hull etched with the angular, predatory sigils of the Rapax Morsatra. Lights glowed from its viewports. Through the thick glass, he saw figures moving in the illuminated interior. Researchers in grey uniforms, their faces drawn and anxious.
One of them, a man with a close-cropped beard, was screaming into a device, a glowing rectangle he held with both hands. His mouth was wide, his eyes bulging. Nulls focused his hearing, pushing through the water and metal.
"—any station command, this is Research Vessel Charybdis on deep patrol! Abyssal Station Zero is gone! Repeat, the station signature has vanished! We are reading catastrophic hydrostatic collapse and a massive biological signature that just... stopped! We need immediate—"
Nulls laughed. A soft, genuine sound that formed a stream of bubbles that spiraled toward the distant surface. He shook his head, a human mannerism he'd adopted for its communicative simplicity, and continued his ascent. The submarine, its crew screaming into the void, shrank beneath him and was swallowed by the dark.
.
.
.
He broke the surface, it was midnight. The ocean was a calm, endless plain under a sky so thick with stars it looked like spilled salt on black velvet. A fat, yellow moon hung low, painting a wavering road of light across the water. There was no land in sight. The silence was absolute, broken only by the soft lap of water against his chest.
He tread water, turning a slow circle. His senses, expanded to their limit, found nothing. No continental shelf. No tell-tale magnetic pull of land. The nearest significant landmass was millions of kilometers away. He could wait. Tectonic plates shifted at a leisurely pace. Given a few hundred million years, a continent might drift to this spot.
But by then, humanity would be long extinct. The thought was neither comforting nor disappointing. It was a fact, like the water's temperature or gravity.
He began to swim east. The motion was automatic, his powerful strokes creating almost no wake. As his body worked, his mind turned inward.
The Codex and the Morbus. The promised catalysts. Yog's contract was specific: power in exchange for becoming a beacon for both Morbus and Arcanist. The tools for the job were to be provided. Yet here I am, swimming in an empty ocean. Did he lie?
Yog was a being of knowledge, not deceit. Deceit was inefficient. A lie would only breed distrust, and Yog needed my will, my physicality. But an omission? A miscalculation? Perhaps the internal terms of the contract were flawed. Or perhaps the external conditions had changed. The presence of the other Codex, Asset Θ, was a variable not in the original equation. Had its presence altered the distribution of the tools? Had the Rapax, in their desperate containment, somehow locked them away beyond even Yog's immediate sight?
He swam for hours, the moon tracing its arc. Eventually, a smudge darkened the horizon. Not a continent. An island. A speck of volcanic rock and white sand, no more than a kilometer across.
He swam to it and emerged from the surf. He walked up the beach, his bare feet sinking into the cool sand, and lay down on his back just above the tide line. He let the tension leave his muscles. He folded his hands neatly over his chest, a parody of a corpse in a coffin. The sand shifted minutely each time a wave spent its last energy at his feet. He let the water wash over his legs. What harm could it do?
He looked at the moon. It was a pitted rock, reflecting sunlight. He had once moved such rocks to calibrate gravitational instruments. He had vaporized them for fun. Now, it hung in the sky, a lonely, beautiful thing. A strange, quiet feeling unfolded in his chest, not more an emotion than a raindrop is an ocean; it's just a hollow shell where one might be, slowly awakening in his hyper-rational mind, and infecting it with something he never felt. It was odd.
He slowly closed his eyes. Sleep was not a biological requirement. His body would not fail without it. But the conscious mind, even his, benefited from periods of defragmentation. To sleep because he wanted to, not because he had to, was a luxury his endless existence had rarely afforded. Here, on a silent rock under a stranger's moon, he could afford it.
He let the sound of the waves become the only thing.
.
.
.
He woke up because the sound of waves was gone.
He was no longer on the island. He was in a white, cube-shaped room. The walls, floor, and ceiling were made of a seamless, luminous material that emitted a sterile, shadowless light. Around him, etched into the floor in precise lines of silver, was a series of concentric circles filled with complex geometric sigils and symbols of containment. The air smelled of ozone and recycled, sterile air.
He sat up. He got to his feet, brushing non-existent sand from his clothes. He observed the room. No door. No visible seams. He walked calmly to the edge of the innermost circle and reached out a hand.
His fingers met an invisible barrier. It did not shock or burn. It was simply there, unyielding as a law of nature. He pushed. It held. He could feel its structure. A lattice of hyper-concentrated Aetherion, woven with concepts of imprisonment and nullification. Sophisticated. A grade above the Argus-steel cell.
He did not summon Marky. He did not weave a counter-sigil. He could have. At half its normal power, the Beast of Entropy could have gnawed a hole in this pretty cage in minutes.
But he did not.
He took two slow steps back and sat down in the exact center of the circle, crossing his legs. He rested his hands on his knees. He needed to find Yama. Information was required. And who had the best database on powerful, problematic arcanists? The Rapax Morsatra. This was an assumption, of course. This pristine, silent box could belong to Solomon University or Methuselah Genesis. But the feel of the magic had a certain brutal, efficient finality to it. It felt like the people who built cells around Armageddon-class assets.
So he waited. He was patient. He had waited in a straitjacket for insects. He could wait in a white cube for a face.
On one wall, a large, rectangular section remained dark while the rest glowed. A screen.
He watched it. He waited.
It flared to life with a soft hum.
The face that filled it was one he knew. One of the first human faces he had imprinted in this new life. Her hair, once styled severely, was now disheveled, strands stuck to a damp forehead. The intelligence in her eyes was still there, but it was buried under layers of raw exhaustion and a simmering, frantic desperation. She looked like she had not slept in a week.
She stared at him from the screen. He stared back, his expression perfectly pleasant, blank, and curious.
"Hello, Val'" he said, his voice cheerful in the sterile silence. "You look tired. Have you been worrying about me?"
The screen flickered slightly with static, the only imperfection in the sterile room. Valerius's face tightened at his greeting. She ignored the name. She leaned forward, her hands gripping something below the camera's view, knuckles white.
"You're awake," she said, her voice scratchy from disuse. It was a statement, not a greeting. There was no trace of the composed, superior agent left.
"Observant," Nulls replied, his head tilting. "I suppose congratulations are in order. You captured me. Second time's the charm, as my people say."
She ignored the comment, leaning forward. The dark circles under her eyes looked like bruises. "The station is gone. The Charybdis logged a Leviathan-class bio-signature termination event before it went dark. You did that. You're at full capacity. I am looking at power readings that are... they're theoretical. They shouldn't exist."
"I'm full, yes," Nulls agreed pleasantly. "It's a lovely feeling. Thank you for asking."
"We can't contain you," she stated, the admission seeming to physically pain her. "Not in any conventional sense. The cost in lives, in resources... it would be cataclysmic. And there's no guarantee it would work."
"How refreshingly honest," Nulls said. "Self-preservation is such a compelling motivator."
"We didn't capture you." She bit the words off. "You let us. This passive Aetherion field we projected wouldn't have held an Archon-class Morbus, let alone you."
"And here I thought I was being discreet," Nulls said, his smile never wavering. "My mistake. So, if you're not here to gloat about your superior containment protocols, why the call? Checking on my room service?"
Valerius took a deep, shaky breath. She was steeling herself. The frantic energy in her eyes focused into a brittle, desperate resolve.
"I want to make a deal."
Nulls didn't move. His pleasant expression didn't change. But the air in the white room seemed to grow colder. "A deal," he repeated, the word tasting flat. "You have my attention. Proceed."
"We know what you're doing," she said quickly, as if the words were burning her mouth. "The patterns. You're not just killing and then moved to a different herd. You're… harvesting and building towards something. Something that requires specific types of energy, specific deaths. We've analyzed the residuals from the bridge, from the station, from the leviathan carcass our deep patrol found."
"Fascinating forensics," Nulls nodded, encouraging. "And?"
"And we can give it to you."
She blurted it out. Her eyes were wide, a mix of terror and a salesman's zeal.
"We are the Rapax Morsatra. We have access to the global Morbus containment registry. We know where they are, when they manifest, their spawn cycles. We have archives on every major Codex wielder above Echelon Three, their capabilities, their schedules, their weak points. We have black sites filled with experimental Aetherion reactors, batteries charged with Aetherions quantity you can't just find lying around. We can feed your process. We can make you more efficient."
She was leaning into the screen now, her face a pale moon in the dark. "In exchange, you leave our infrastructure alone. Our bases. Our command structure. You target what we tell you to target. You become… a scalpel. Our scalpel. Directed. Contained. Useful."
She stopped, breathless, waiting.
Nulls was silent for a long moment. He looked down at his own hands, folded in his lap, as if considering. Then he looked back up at her.
"Valerius," he said, and his voice had lost all its false warmth. It was the calm, dry tone of a lecturer stating an obvious truth. "Let me explain the fundamental flaw in your proposal."
He held up one finger. "This world has no power I cannot take." He gestured vaguely around the white room, at the invisible barrier. "Your strongest containment is a habbits, I would break the bad ones and potentially kept the good one as a slumbering place. Your Aetherion reactors are cookies in a jar. I love cookies."
A second finger. "This world has no knowledge I cannot extract." He tapped his own temple. "Your archives are buildings. Buildings have doors. Doors have locks. Locks are picked. Your minds are soft, wet things that scream their secrets with the right pressure."
A third finger. "This world, and you in particular, have no leverage."
He dropped his hand. "You offer me a key to a room I am already inside. You promise me treats from a pantry I already own. You propose an alliance where you provide the targets, as if I cannot see every living thing on this planet as a potential resource. Your 'deal' is not a transaction. It is you, begging me to pretend you are a partner instead of inventory."
He leaned forward slightly, his eyes locked on hers through the screen. The cheerful mask was gone, replaced by an emptiness so absolute it was more terrifying than any rage.
"You have nothing to bargain with. You are a frightened animal offering to guide the hunter to other animals, in the desperate hope he will eat them last. This is a prayer masquerading as a bargain. And I don't answer prayers."
Valerius's face collapsed. The desperate hope bled out of her, leaving behind a raw, hollow exhaustion. She had played her last card, and he had shown her it was blank.
He leaned forward slightly, his pleasant eyes locking onto hers through the screen. "There is, however, one piece of data I currently desire. Its acquisition by alternative means would be… tedious."
Valerius's breath hitched. A spark of hope. "Name it."
"The location of Wolfgang Yama Morta."
The name sucked the remaining color from her face. "Yama? Why? He's a problem, but he's not your problem."
"He interests me. I wish to examine him."
"He'll kill you," she whispered, but it sounded like a plea.
"Unlikely. But that is not your concern. Your concern is the transaction. You give me his precise, verifiable location. In return, I will not obliterate the next three Rapax vessels that enter my sensory range. A temporary ceasefire, born of my momentary… lethargy."
He let the word hang in the air. Lethargy. It was the ultimate insult. He wasn't offering peace. He was offering a delay because brute force was, for him, a boring chore.
"You could find him yourself," she said, her voice hollow. "You have the power."
He settled back, his posture relaxed. "The alternative is I grow bored of this white room, leave, and begin the tedious process of finding him myself. The collateral damage would be… extensive. Multiple continent might shattered. An ocean could forget how to be wet. Small things, really. But messy."
Valerius stared at him. She saw no bluff. No rage. Only a calm, infinite capacity for violence, currently inconvenienced by a minor search function. The deal was not a bargain. It was a predator pausing its hunt because it had momentarily lost the scent, and offering a nearby rabbit the chance to point the way.
Her shoulders slumped. The fight left her. She was not saving the world. She was choosing which part of it would burn first.
"Consider my request for you to simply tell me not a negotiation. You give me a name and a place. In return, I would delay turning your entire civilization into a screaming, bloody slug for my convenience. It is the most generous offer you will ever receive."
He spread his hands, a gesture of magnanimity.
"So. The location of Yama Morta. For the sake of your world's continued structural integrity. Tell me."
The spark died. Her face went ashen. She leaned back in her chair as if struck. "Yama..." She repeated, the words was bitter in her tongue. "You can't be serious. That's... that's a suicide request." She stated, still in disbelief.
"For you, perhaps. For me, it's an errand. A tedious one. I could brute-force my way to him. It would be Cataclysmic Many of your people would die in the process, which I don't mind, but it would be... inconvinient. Consider this my mercy. Give me a location, and I will walk out of this room and go directly there. The collateral damage will be minimal. For now."
Valerius's mind was visibly racing, trying to find an angle, a hook. "Yama... his Codex. It's dual-episteme. Demonology and Angelology. The Holos Rayos pantheon. He can summon—"
"I know," Nulls interrupted, his smile turning thin. "I am aware of his Codex's episteme and his martial proficiencies. Ars Siwang. Letum Jiva. Dauthr Pali. Brutally efficient. In one timeline, he severed both my arms. It was quite instructive."
The blood drained completely from Valerius's face. Her lips parted soundlessly. "How... how could you possibly know that? Those are our deepest threat-assessments. Classified beyond Top Secret."
Nulls gestured vaguely toward the empty space beside him. "The temporal Codex told me. We had a lovely chat. Very informative."
"The Hermes Engine?" Valerius whispered, her horror complete. "You... have an audience with it? That's impossible. Its security protocols..."
"Are now irrelevant. It was a fascinating little thing. Lived through countless iterations of me. Grew quite resentful, actually. It told me many things. About you. About the agencies. About Yama." His tone was conversational, as if discussing the weather.
"Where is it?" she demanded, a flicker of her old authority breaking through the panic. "The Hermes Engine is a vital strategic asset. What have you done with it?"
Nulls looked briefly upward, as if trying to recall. "It's... dead. I overclocked its perception by a few trillion eons. It couldn't handle the introspection. Scorched itself to ash. The remains are at the bottom of the ocean, near the interesting new geological feature that used to be your station." He looked back at her, his expression one of mild apology. "A pity. It had a certain personality."
On the screen, Valerius simply stared. The last vestige of her bargaining position, the belief that she controlled any piece of the board, crumbled to dust. The being in the white cube knew secrets he shouldn't, had destroyed assets she considered untouchable, and viewed her entire civilization as a temporary convenience.
"You..." she breathed, but no words followed.
"So," Nulls said, clapping his hands together softly. The sound was obscenely cheerful in the silent room. "The deal, Valerius. Yama's location. In exchange for a marginally less catastrophic exit from your lovely little box. The clock is ticking. I can feel my patience, a finite resource you have already overdrawn, beginning to expire."
Valerius swallowed, the sound a dry click picked up by the microphone. The desperation on her face hardened into a grim, hopeless resolve.
"His location," she said, her voice flat. "We don't have it. Not precisely. Not even Solomon University's divination arrays can pinpoint him. He has… a guardian. A boon from his Codex."
Nulls raised an eyebrow, his smile not fading but becoming more fixed. "Go on."
"He commands the demon, Ordos," she said, spitting the name as if it were poison. "From the Holos Rayos pantheon. Its domain is Secret. Not merely silence. Not just stealth. The active, metaphysical principle of secrecy. As long as Ordos is bound to him, Yama's location, his immediate intentions, his next move… they are classified on a fundamental level. They are un-knowable. Not even other Codexes with scrying episteme can crack it."
Nulls listened, his head tilted. "Ordos," he repeated. "A demon of Secret. What is its weakness in the mythology?"
Valerius let out a short, bitter laugh that held no humor. "We don't know. Nobody does. The Holos Rayos myths are fragments. Inscriptions on cave walls that predate language as we define it. We have names, domains, and artistic interpretations that came ten thousand years later. The story of Ordos's weakness, if it was ever written, is lost to time. Eaten by the very secret it was meant to protect. Our best theologians and mytho-historians have spent decades on it. They have nothing."
The sterile white room felt even quieter. Nulls's pleasant expression finally settled into something neutral, analytical. He looked at Valerius's exhausted, defiant face on the screen.
"I see," he said, his tone losing its playful edge. It was calm, cold, and final. "So the sum total of your leverage, your side of this proposed 'bargain,' is to tell me the name of the entity that prevents you from giving me what I want. You offer me a problem and call it a partnership."
He took a step closer to the screen, his image filling her view. "Valerius, if all you can give me is 'I don't know,' then I feel no obligation to uphold my end of any hypothetical deal. A transaction requires an exchange of value. You have offered me nothing of value."
Valerius's composure broke. 'We can help you find another way!" she insisted, her voice rising. "We have resources, manpower! We can research, we can—"
"Die. All of you," Nulls interrupted, his voice still quiet but now carrying the weight of absolute verdict. "You can die slowly, in the dark, after watching everything you've built turn to ash. Or you can die quickly, now, and spare yourself the tedious epilogue."
He placed a hand on the invisible barrier of his cell. It shimmered silver where his fingers touched. "You built this box on a fundamental misunderstanding. You thought it was to contain me. It was to contain your fear instead. To give you a sense of control while you decided what to do with the calamity in your custody. It is a placebo."
He closed his eyes for a second, as if listening to a distant sound. "The demon of Secret. Ordos. Thank you for the data point. It is more useful than your 'bargain'."
His eyes opened. They held no anger, no malice. Only a profound, terrifying readiness. "Our conversation is over. Tell your people to pray. To their gods, meet their families, or perhaps killing themselve. It won't help, but it will give them something to do in their final moments."
On the screen, Valerius's face was a mask of pure dread. "Nulls, wait—"
He didn't. He turned his back on her image, facing the center of the white room. He raised his hands, with the casual precision of a conductor readying his orchestra. The sigils on the floor began to glow with a deep, ravenous, bloody crimson.
"Marky," Nulls said, his voice a gentle command. "The room. Unmake it."
The bloody crimson light from the sigils swirled, converging on Nulls. From the center of that vortex. The Beast detonated with a Gaia shattering shriek, causing even Nulls to cupped his ears.
The seamless walls, the floor, the ozone-scented air, the intricate silver containment sigils. All of it, to a radius of one kilometer, simply winked out of existence. As they were consumed by the blast of maximized disorder.
The complex it was housed in, the forests of Aetherion-conductive cabling, the secondary containment vaults, the barracks, the landing pads, all of it was replaced by a perfect, smooth, hemispherical bowl of glassed earth, one kilometer across and five hundred meters deep at the center, where Nulls stood.
The edges of the bowl were still glowing a faint cherry red. A light evening rain had begun to fall, hissing into steam where it struck the hot glass.
Nulls stood at the bottom of the crater, in the sudden, ringing silence. The air smelled of ozone, scorched silicon, and clean, damp earth from the exposed forest beyond the crater's rim. He looked up. It was twilight. He was in the middle of a vast, old-growth forest. Giant trees, their trunks wider than houses, stood sentinel at the edge of the devastation, their leaves rustling in a wind that carried the scent of pine and distant rain.
He had been underground. In a bunker complex cleverly hidden beneath a mountain forest. A sensible location. Now, it was a skylight.
He dismissed Marky. The lingering sense of absolute negation faded.
He took a step, his feets crunching on the vitrified ground. He remembered Yog's words, the parameters of his bond with the Codex. To ascend from the degrading, brute-force stage to tenth Echelon, required a tribute. A key to unlock deeper integration.
A billion souls. Any kind of soul. Killed with bloodlust.
The arithmetic was simple. The method needed to be efficient.
He began to walk deeper into the untouched woods, away from his own crater. His senses expanded, filtering the world. He ignored the chattering consciousness of squirrels, the dim glow of a fox's cunning, the myriad insects. Too large. Too individual. Too slow.
He listened for the choir of the truly minute.
After an hour of silent walking, he heard it: the gentle rush of water. He followed the sound to a wide, slow-moving river, its surface like black glass under the darkening sky. Along its banks, especially on the submerged stones near a gentle bend, were thick, luxuriant patches of moss. Velvety green carpets, thriving in the cool, clean water.
He looked at the moss. A mat of countless, simple, photosynthetic lives. Each thread a soul. Tiny, yes. Dim, certainly. But a soul nonetheless. And there were… trillions here.
Perfect.
He stepped into the river, the cold water soaking his trousers to the knee. He reached down and grabbed a massive, dripping handful of the thickest moss. It came up easily, a soggy, dense clump teeming with microscopic life.
He held it in his cupped hands before his face. He closed his eyes in theatrical relish. He focused the vast, dark lake of Nexus within him, drawing a thread of pure, annihilating power into the palms of his hands.
The air around his fists began to warp and shimmer. The water dripping from the moss instantly vaporized. The temperature within the cage of his fingers spiked, not to merely mimicked the heat of a fire, but the heart of a star, a contained, miniature fusion reaction of raw, hostile reality.
A truly manic smile spread across Nulls's face. It was not his usual pleasant mask. This time it was wide, unhinged, and full of a genuine, gleeful malice. He would performed a ritual sacrifice on a scale so vast it became absurd. He was committing deicide against a universe of algae.
He opened his hands.
"Die."
There was no explosion. No flash of light. Every cell, every chloroplast, every strand of DNA and droplet of protoplasm was flash-converted into its constituent atoms, and then into energy, in a nanosecond. A tiny, perfect conversion of mass to light and heat that vanished almost as soon as it was born.
One trillion individual, microscopic souls, extinguished with a thought, and with a feeling of pure, joyful contempt.
The tribute was paid.
The world did not shake. The forest did not tremble. But within Nulls, a lock clicked open.
An intangible force pulled him backwards, through the layers of his own mind. The river, the forest, the twilight. All dissolved into the familiar, infinite gloom of Yog's library.
He stood again before the fireplace of black flame. Yog was in his armchair, the same shifting, starry form. But his posture was different. He was leaning forward, his featureless face tilted. The usual ambient of detached, ancient knowledge was gone, replaced by a palpable, swirling mix of emotions that even Nulls could read.
Frustration, that the ritual had been fulfilled by such a… loophole.
Shock, at the sheer, audacious pettiness of it.
Disbelief, that it had actually worked.
Proud, that his partner had so perfectly understood and weaponized the literal terms of their covenant.
And beneath it all, trembling at the edges of his form, the brink of uncontrollable laughter.
Yog stared at Nulls. The silence in the library was heavier than usual, thick with unsaid commentary. Finally, Yog spoke, his voice strained with the effort of maintaining gravitas.
"You… incinerated a handful of river moss."
Nulls nodded, his manic smile still etched on his face. "A billion souls. You specified any kind of soul. You did not specify minimum luminosity or cognitive function. Biological life qualifies. I calculated the colony density. I met the quota. Was my bloodlust insufficient?" He asked the last question with genuine curiosity.
Yog was silent for a long moment. One of his starry hands came up and made a vague, complex gesture in the air, as if checking an unseen ledger. He let out a long, slow sigh that smelled of cold nebula and old parchment.
"The terms," Yog said, the words precise, "are satisfied. The tribute of one billion souls, extinguished with malicious intent, has been accepted. The Tenth Echelon of the Codex Yog-Sothoth is now accessible to you."
Another pause. The black fire crackled silently.
"The method," Yog continued, his voice now laced with a dry, awe-filled resignation, "was technically flawless. It was also the single most petty act of vandalism I have witnessed since the birth of irrational numbers. You have unlocked Echelon ten. MY Echelon ten. Through an act of transcendent pedantry."
Yog's starry form seemed to ripple, the constellations that made up his essence swirling with chaotic, unreadable energy. The dry resignation in his voice broke, replaced by something else, a kind of horrified, transcendent amusement.
"My past wielders," Yog said, the words trembling on the edge of something uncontrollable. "The scholars. The kings. The mad prophets. They spent lifetimes, millennia, clawing their way toward the precipice you just… stepped over. They wrought calamities to fuel their ascent. They painted history in blood and genocides."
He paused, and a sound escaped him. It wasn't a chuckle. It was the low, tectonic rumble of cosmic plates shifting in mirth. "Only two has ever touched the Tenth Echelon. Most died ancient and powerful and utterly, hilariously distant from true understanding. The few who came close… their unlocking was a millennium-defining event. It sparked planet-wide terror. It was seen as the end of days. Entire religions were founded in the aftermath of their failures."
Nulls stood listening, his own earlier manic smile returning as a faint, curious quirk on his lips.
"Take Julian," Yog continued, the names rolling out like indictments. "My first true wielder after the Fall. He spent two thousand years conquering a continent, ritualizing each massacre. He drowned the inland seas in blood until they were crimson. He slew eighty-nine million souls. He built pyramids of skulls to the sky. He died thinking he had pleased me."
The black fire in the hearth flared, casting long, dancing shadows up the infinite shelves.
"Then Hans," Yog's voice was now laced with a gleeful, awful nostalgia. "He engineered a sentient pestilence, pathogens tied to his own life force. It spread for twelve centuries. It twisted ecosystems, birthed horrors, and killed one hundred and ninety million humans. He died when a rival poisoned his favorite vineyard. The irony was exquisite."
Yog's form shook. The sound coming from him was unmistakable now, laughter. It was the laughter of a god who has seen the punchline of a joke ten thousand years in the making.
"And those are just two! There were others! Who thought genocide was necessary! And you… you walked into a forest. You picked up a clump of moss."
Yog's voice rose, filled with a shocked, admiring horror. "You charged your hands with the power to ignite stars. You looked at one trillion infinitesimal lives and, with genuine, focused bloodlust, you said, 'Die, bacteria.' And you fulfilled the covenant."
The laughter finally broke free. It wasn't human laughter. It was the sound of ancient, silent chaos finally finding something funny, a deep, resonant, and utterly terrifying sound that vibrated in the marrow of reality.
Nulls listened to the history of epic, tragic, futile striving. He heard the grand tales of continents drowned and centuries-long plagues. He measured them against his own efficient, brutal, trivial act.
And he started laughing too.
It was a quieter sound than Yog's, but just as genuine. A soft, breathless chuckle that grew into clear, ringing laughter. Laughing at the sheer, sublime pointlessness of their effort. The grandiose suffering, the millennia of struggle, all rendered absurd by a single, pedantic interpretation of a rule.
"They… they really did all that?" Nulls managed between breaths, wiping a non-existent tear from his eye. "Two thousand years? For eighty-nine million?"
Yog's laughter boomed in agreement. "They believed! They truly believed the scale of the suffering was what mattered! The poetry of it! The statement! They never understood that the universe doesn't care about statements! It cares about quotas! You met the quota with lawn trimmings!"
The two of them, the ancient tome of alien knowledge and the reincarnated architect of cosmic suicide, laughed together in the timeless library. They laughed at the misplaced grandeur of mortals. They laughed at the horrific simplicity of true power. For a moment, the vast gulf between them, creator and weapon, master and slave was bridged by a shared, terrible joke.
Finally, the laughter subsided into shaky, echoing silence. Yog's form settled, the stars within him spinning with a new, calm light. He looked at Nulls, and for the first time, there was something akin to respect in his void-like gaze.
"The First Echelon is yours," Yog said, his voice still warm with fading amusement. "Let us see what you build with it. I suggest you avoid moss. It lacks… dramatic weight."
Nulls nodded, his own smile settling back into its usual pleasant mask, now edged with a new, razor-sharp certainty. "Understood. No more horticulture." He gave a slight, mocking bow. "I believe I have an appointment with a man who keeps secrets."