[Last Episode: Leo: Bring the next one]
Chapter 123, Episode 123
[The Primus World — Jeannette vs Jaxx]
[Jaxx found Jeannette in the wreckage of the outer battlefield, stepping over a dissolving creature corpse with the casual disregard of someone walking through a room she already owned]
Jaxx: You're the first one. Jeannette.
Jeannette: You know my name.
Jaxx: Voriath's files are thorough. First subordinate. Grand Marshal. The one who slapped the Supreme General back to sanity when he was about to do something stupid. Must be exhausting. Being the responsible one for a lord who's not even here anymore.
[Jeannette's grip on her Cosmic Sword tightened, but her expression didn't move.]
Jeannette: Careful.
Jaxx: Or what? He's gone, Jeannette. He is still running around playing soldier for a corpse of a concept... Your Lord no longer exists
[A muscle in Jeannette's jaw ticked.]
Jaxx: Tell me — did he even know your name properly, or were you just the first convenient sword he picked up?
Jeannette: He knew my name before he knew what the Eastern World would become.
Jaxx: Sentimental. Cute. Won't matter once I take you apart.
Jaxx — Destruction Magic. Unleashed.
[The black curl around her hands expanded into a full field, tearing at the ground, the air, the concept of the space Jeannette occupied — Destruction magic that didn't discriminate between matter and meaning, unmaking everything it touched down to the idea of it]
[Jeannette stood in the middle of it and didn't flinch]
Jeannette — Freedom of Will. Passive Resistance.
[The destruction reached her skin and simply failed to unleash, her Freedom of Will's warping of probability and universal law had quietly rewritten, in the space around her, what "being destroyed" meant, and Jaxx's magic found no purchase in the new definition]
Jaxx: —what.
Jeannette: You talk a lot of shit... for someone who hasn't landed a hit.
[She moved — Cosmic Sword rising, cutting clean through the space between them, negating the destruction field entirely as it passed, the blade eating through concept-erasure like it was paper.]
[Jaxx barely got her own blade up in time]
Jaxx: You're a swordswoman too.
Jeannette: I never said I wasn't.
[Their blades met]
[Jaxx's own swordsmanship was real — sharp, trained, dangerous — but Jeannette's Cosmic Sword didn't just cut flesh]
[It cut magic. It negated space. Every parry Jaxx attempted found her own blade's edge quietly stripped of its destructive properties the instant steel met steel.]
Jaxx: That's not fair.
Jeannette: Your stupid Lord erased his existence and called it a Tuesday. Don't talk to me about fair.
[She pressed forward. Hyper Affect running underneath every strike — altering the space Jaxx stood in, the soul-deep confidence Jaxx had walked in with, all of it bending under Jeannette's will the way ether bent under Order Reality.]
Jaxx: Is she bending reality under her sword...
[Jaxx's swings got wilder. Angrier. Less controlled.]
Jeannette: You're better with your magic than your sword
Jaxx: Watch your mouth—
Jeannette: I am watching. That's how I know.
Jeannette — Cosmic Sword — Full Negation.
[The final exchange came fast — Jaxx's Destruction Magic thrown desperately, one last attempt to unmake the woman in front of her — and Jeannette's blade passed straight through the field, straight through Jaxx's guard, and stopped a half-inch from her throat]
[Jaxx froze]
Jeannette: You said he wasn't even here anymore. As the Grand Marshal and Leader of the Eastern World... I sworn to our lord, that we would win this war and eradicate Voriath... I believe our lord is still somewhere
[Her voice was very quiet. Very controlled. The controlled quiet of someone who had spent the entire fight holding something back and was choosing, deliberately, to keep holding it back now.]
Jeannette: He's more here than you'll ever be.
[Jaxx said nothing. There was nothing left to say with a blade at her throat and every ability she had just failed against a woman who'd barely raised her voice.]
Jeannette: Stay down... Let me ask you question..why did you team up with the Voriath's power and his group..
Jaxx: It's to influence this world with Hyper Beings...
[She stepped back. Jaxx didn't move — not out of surrender exactly, more out of the specific paralysis that comes from realizing you badly misjudged something.]
[MeanwhileThe Primus World — Laxcarseel and Jairulioyo vs Galacik]
[Galacik had not expected two of them.
He'd been briefed on Laxcarseel — the Supreme General]
[He had not been briefed thoroughly enough on what happened when Laxcarseel and Jairulioyo fought as a pair]
Jairulioyo: I guess we have to take you on then...
Galacik: Let's see who will overcome..
Jairulioyo: Cool. Laxcarseel, left side's yours.
Laxcarseel: Obviously.
[They didn't discuss strategy beyond that. They didn't need to. Years of fighting alongside each other had compressed their coordination down to single words and shared silences.]
Galacik — True Darkness Flame. Ignited.
Galacik: GO TO HELL!!!
[The black fire came off his blade in waves, swordsmanship married to conceptual darkness, each swing carrying the promise of erasing whatever it touched into something that had never cast a shadow to begin with]
Galacik: Let see how you dodge this bunch of fools!!
[He struck at Laxcarseel first]
Laxcarseel — Wonder Nullification.
[The strike arrived and found nothing to erase, because Laxcarseel had already, quietly, destroyed the conceptual framework that let "being struck" apply to him in this specific exchange]
[Galacik's blade passed through empty definition]
Galacik: —
Jairulioyo: Let's end this...
Jairulioyo — Aethon Blitz.
[The lightning came from an angle Galacik hadn't been watching, moving fast enough that his Darkness Flame's own reactive defenses barely registered it before it connected — a glancing hit, but enough to stagger him, enough to open the half-second Laxcarseel needed]
Galacik: How powerful are these guys, his lightning travel faster than concepts...
Laxcarseel: Struggling already.
Galacik: Don't underestimate me...
Laxcarseel: Not against a duo who fights like one mind in two bodies, you haven't.
[Galacik gathered himself — swordsmanship reasserting, the Darkness Flame deepening — and pressed a real offensive, forcing Laxcarseel back a step, forcing Jairulioyo to reposition.]
[It worked, briefly. Galacik was genuinely skilled, genuinely dangerous, and for a few exchanges the fight looked close.]
[Then Laxcarseel and Jairulioyo synced.]
Laxcarseel — Liberal Infinity. Jairulioyo — Judgment Volt. Simultaneous.
[Laxcarseel erased the incoming Darkness Flame from Galacik's blade mid-swing — casually, and in the exact same instant Jairulioyo's anti-magic bolt slammed into Galacik's now-unarmed strike, dissolving whatever construct he'd tried to reform in its place]
[Galacik stumbled, weaponless for a critical half-second]
Laxcarseel: This is where it ends.
[He didn't say it with cruelty. He said it with the flat, absolute certainty of someone whose power was built entirely around removing things from existence and who had already decided this was happening.]
Laxcarseel — Final Absolute Transcendence.
[His presence expanded —Galacik felt the concept of his own continued existence become, briefly, a question rather than a fact]
Galacik: Wait—
Laxcarseel: You came for our lord's throne. You don't get to ask for mercy on the way out.
Erasure Destruction.
[Galacik didn't scream.He simply stopped being present in the framework, not violently removed, just no longer there, the sentence continuing on without it]
[Above the battlefield, Voriath felt it happen his jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly]
Voriath: I already knew that outcome from my timelines... they are already useless anyway
[He said it to no one in particular, mid-exchange with Isaac's blazing fist. His Infinite Glass — the fragmented timeline-sight he'd always carried — had shown him this specific defeat days ago, in one of a thousand branching possibilities he'd catalogued and dismissed as unlikely.]
Voriath: Unlikely was apparently generous.
[He didn't dwell on it. There wasn't room to dwell, not with four of the most dangerous beings in the current cosmology bearing down on him at once.]
[The Primus World — Isaac, The Manipulator, Siriusniyo, and Beatrice vs Voriath]
Voriath: Four of you. At once.
The Manipulator: You erased his rival's best friend. Did you think we'd come one at a time out of politeness?
Voriath: I hoped.
Siriusniyo: You hoped wrong.
[The four of them moved as separate, deliberate points of pressure — Isaac's Sutur Ignition Form burning close-range, The Manipulator's One Wonder Sword carving lies into reality from the flank, Siriusniyo's origin-fire pressing from above, Beatrice's blade finding angles nobody else could see, her presence still deceptively relaxed even now.]
[Voriath moved to answer all four simultaneously]
Voriath — Wrathful Blitz.
[He was in four places, briefly —simply present at every point of contact at once, the specific speed that broke the ordering of cause and effect entirely]
[Every strike aimed at him met resistance that had already anticipated the strike's outcome]
Issac: What.... his resistance is immensely strong
[Isaac's fist connected with something that felt, for half a second, solid — then wasn't]
Isaac: He's matching all four of us.
The Manipulator: I noticed.
Beatrice: His power keeps growing infinitely, he has infinte stamina. I'd be more worried if he wasn't.
Siriusniyo: Worry later. Fight now.
[They pressed harder — a coordinated assault that would have ended almost anything else in the cosmology in seconds, and Voriath took it, absorbed it, answered it, blood still leaking from wounds that refused, now, to fully close.]
Voriath: You're the four strongest things standing against me.
The Manipulator: Flattering.
Voriath: I'm not flattering you. I'm telling you that even this — the four of you, together, everything you have — is not enough.
Isaac: Then we'll find more.
Voriath: There isn't more to find.
Isaac: You'd be surprised.
[He struck again, and again, the Sutur Ignition Form's heat pressing at Voriath's edges the same way it had pressed at the Absolute Transcendent God form earlier — not breaking through, but costing, every exchange another small debt added to a ledger Voriath was quietly, secretly, trying to pay down with stolen moments of regeneration.]
[Voriath was not going down but he was not winning cleanly either and for the King of the Multiverse, son of the creators of everything, that in itself was the strangest sensation he'd felt since the seal broke]
[The Primus World — Xuantian and Mercurius vs Meltryllis]
[Xuantian and Mercurius had barely finished reforming from their revival when Voriath pointed them toward the new arrival]
Voriath: Handle her.
Mercurius: The swordswoman.
Voriath: Yes.... don't underestimate her... there is something off about her...
Xuantian: You want us to fight her.
Voriath: I want you to try.
[They approached her together — two of the most feared servants in the cosmology, converging on a woman standing with her arms still loosely folded, watching the wider battle with mild interest.]
Meltryllis: Oh, hello.
Mercurius: Alter Meltryllis Xibala.
Meltryllis: You've heard of me.
Mercurius: Everyone within a hundred light-years heard what you did to those creatures.
Meltryllis: That was barely a warm-up.
[Xuantian's scythe was already rising.]
Xuantian: Then let's see the real thing.
Xuantian — Scythe Cleave: The First and Last Breath.
[The slash aimed to hit her across past, present, and future simultaneously — a wound that shouldn't have been dodgeable, that existed outside the normal rules of avoiding an attack]
Meltryllis: Intresting, an attack that exists outside the logic of rules
[Meltryllis's blade met it without visibly moving fast enough to have met it at all]
[The scythe stopped]
Xuantian: What the—
Meltryllis: That's a good technique. Cutting across timeline states at once. I've seen worse from beings twice your age. But my blade exists at every point in my own timeline simultaneously too. When two things both claim every moment, it comes down to who actually understands what that means, not who says it first.
[She pushed, gently, and the scythe swing that shouldn't have been dodgeable simply lost its footing in time and slid away from its target.]
Mercurius: Full Absorbed Space Time. Let see how you handle this
[He engaged the form — Logic Lines spreading out from him, reaching for the causal thread connecting Meltryllis's every action to its result, intending to snip the connection before her strikes could land.]
[Meltryllis looked at the Logic Lines reaching for her]
Meltryllis: Oh, that's clever. Genuinely Doesn't work on me, though... let me show you something intriguing
Meltryllis — Causality Light.
[She simply informed the causality underneath them, gently, that her outcomes were already decided and had been decided before Mercurius had been born — and the Logic Lines, finding nothing left to snip, quietly deactivated on their own]
Mercurius: That's not possible.
Meltryllis: I've been doing what's not possible for about thirty-nine billion years now. You get used to hearing that.
[She moved the space between her last position and her next simply ceasing to be relevant — and both Xuantian and Mercurius found themselves fighting someone who was already past whatever defense they'd raised, every time, without exception.]
Xuantian: She's not even trying.
Meltryllis: I'm trying a little.
Meltryllis — Lux Slash.
[The wave of light didn't erase them outright — she'd pulled it, deliberately, holding back from the full erasure her ability was capable of]
[It hit hard enough that both Xuantian and Mercurius were sent skidding, blood actually visible on Mercurius's lip for the first time since the war began]
[Xuantian caught himself and looked at her, genuinely startled]
Xuantian: You held back.
Meltryllis: Of course I did. If I hadn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now. I like conversations.
Mercurius: You could end us.
Meltryllis: Probably in about a tenth of a second, yes.
Xuantian: Then why haven't you.
Meltryllis: Because it's more interesting watching what you do when you know you're losing and keep going anyway. That tells me more about a person than the ending does.
[She struck again — faster this time, no longer holding the pace back even if she was still holding the lethality back]
Mercurius: How.
Meltryllis: Nine hundred years of a sword and forty billion years of being what light is. You're both very good, by the way. Genuinely. I mean that.
[Xuantian, on one knee, looked up at her with the specific expression of someone recalibrating everything he thought he understood about the cosmological hierarchy.]
Xuantian: You're stronger than our lord.
Meltryllis: Close to it. We haven't actually compared notes properly. Semantics, really, at that level.
[On the other side of the Primus World — Jeannette's Order]
[Jeannette, having left Jaxx on the ground, turned to survey the wider battlefield — the creatures still swarming, the guild members and rulers holding the line, Isaac and the others locked with Voriath, Xuantian and Mercurius bleeding under Meltryllis's blade]
[She raised her voice]
Jeannette: Astronomical Guardians. To me.
[Antoinette, Martha, Infinite, Lilura, and Pandorami converged instantly — the specific instant obedience of subordinates who had trained under a chain of command that worked.]
Jeannette: Take the creatures. Clear the field for the ones fighting Voriath directly. Nobody gets flanked while they're carrying this.
Antoinette: Understood.
Martha: On it.
[They moved out as one unit, weapons rising, and the guild members and rulers nearby watched with open surprise.]
[Kai, watching from a distance]
Kai: He built an actual army, He really has grown in the past 5 years...
Stella: A well-trained one.
Kai: I mean it as a compliment. That level of coordination doesn't happen by accident. He really has overcome the expectations
[The Eastern World subordinates carved into the remaining creatures with the specific, practiced efficiency of a unit that had fought together for years — and the guild members of the Chaos Universe, watching them work, didn't hesitate to fall in alongside them.]
[Quinn stepped forward first]
Quinn: Ice Knights! With me!
[Christo, Becrux, Shannon, Athena, and Staril moved without question.]
Christo: Who are you to command us... I am in charge of the guild not you..
Quinn: This is not the time for that, We are on a brink of life and death and your thinking about your the commander here.... Everyone still standing — charge!
[Her voice carried across the field with a specific fire in it, and it wasn't lost on the ones fighting closest to Voriath.]
[Isaac, mid-strike, heard it and grinned despite the blood on his face]
Isaac: That's the spirit.
The Manipulator: She's leading a charge.
Siriusniyo: Good. We need every hand we can get.
Beatrice: I like her already.
[The guild members surged forward with the creatures, Dark Lords and Solar Dragons and Black Phoenix all falling in beside the Eastern World subordinates, and the sheer volume of coordinated force gave Isaac's group a critical margin they hadn't had a moment before]
[Voriath, for the first time, having to split attention toward a battlefield that was rapidly stopping being a battlefield he could ignore.]
Voriath: Their numbers are growing and able to capitalize on the counter to erase my creatures who are beyond abstract so how are they defeating my creatures with ease... that's impossible!
[The Primus World — Luna's Return]
[She came through the dimensional path at a dead run, Time Magic flaring around her at a speed that outpaced her own footsteps, and the guild members closest to the arrival point turned as one]
[Isaac, catching sight of her mid-fight, froze for half a second]
Isaac: Luna?
Luna: I am finally here..
[Two weeks. She'd been gone two weeks — first at the Terra Celestial World, reunited with her mother, held back from the war by the God of Lunar's careful hand — and now she was here, in the middle of it, sword-light already flaring around her wrists.]
Kai: She's the Time Magic one.
Stella: Leo's—
Kai: Yes.
[Luna didn't wait for introductions. She moved straight into the fighting, falling in beside Quinn without missing a step.]
Quinn: You're back.
Luna: I heard what happened to Leo. I couldn't stay away another second.
Quinn: We've got this side. Go help wherever you're needed most.
Luna: This is where I'm needed most.
[She raised her hands, Time Magic curling gold around her fingers.]
[Luna, quietly, to herself, mid-fight]
Luna: Come back to me, Leo. Please.
Luna — Chronos Shatterpoint.
[She struck the pivot point of the nearest creature's existence, unmaking it back into raw energy in a single motion, and moved to the next without slowing]
[Luna, still fighting, still thinking]
Luna: He promised we'd talk properly. When this was over.
[She cut down another creature.]
Luna: This had better be almost over.
Voriath: Her time magic is slowing and draining my creatures existence and energy
[Meanwhile Issac keeps struggling]
[The margin the guild's charge had bought didn't last forever]
[Voriath adjusted and with Xuantian and Mercurius bleeding but still standing, with the creature swarm thinning but not gone, with four of the strongest beings in the current cosmology still bearing down on him directly]
[Isaac took a hit he shouldn't have taken]
[It sent him skidding across cracked ground, the Sutur Ignition Form flickering — not out, but flickering]
[He didn't get up immediately]
Isaac: —.... what the
[Blood in his mouth. Bruises everywhere. Every part of him screaming that he'd given more than he had to give, twice now, in the same day.]
[The Manipulator called over, mid-exchange]
The Manipulator: Isaac—
Isaac: I'm fine.
Siriusniyo: You're not.
Isaac: I said I'm fine.
[He pushed himself up anyway. Slower this time. Every motion costing more than the last.]
[And somewhere in his chest, past the exhaustion, past the pain, the same thought that had gotten him up the first time surfaced again — quieter now, worn thin by repetition, but still there.]
[Isaac, under his breath]
Isaac: Not yet, Leo.
[He raised his fists.]
Isaac: I'm still waiting for you. So I'm not done yet either.
[He charged back in — bruised, bleeding, running on fumes and stubbornness — and the fight against Voriath Luminael continued, four against one, with no end yet in sight.]
To be continued...