[Last Episode: [They moved together — the boy who'd built the Eastern World out of grief and the boy who'd spent this entire war refusing to stop getting back up, both of them carrying everything they'd earned, everything they'd lost, and everything they still had left to prove to each other, into the fight against the thing Voriath Luminael had finally, truly become]
Chapter 126, Episode 126
[The first strike from the voriath didn't look like an attack]
[Leo felt it before he saw it: a wrongness in the space between himself and Voriath, a sense that the coordinates he was standing at had been quietly, casually redefined]
[Then he was somewhere else]
[The distinction mattered — his body hadn't traveled through the intervening space, because for Voriath in this form, intervening space was no longer a meaningful concept]
[He simply existed at a point in the Great Loom, and he had decided, with the same effort it takes to blink, that Leo's thread belonged somewhere else]
[Leo hit the ground three hundred kilometers from where he'd been standing, hard enough to crater the Primus World's surface on impact]
[Isaac fared no better]
[With a single word, voriath erased the incoming attack from issac]
Isaac: —what—
Voriath: I told you. I'm not fighting to win anymore. I already won. This is what happens after.
[His voice carried from everywhere, every dimension simultaneously, the Great Loom's threads all speaking with the same certainty at once.]
[Leo pulled himself up out of the crater, blood on his face again, and looked toward the source of the voice with the specific stubbornness of someone who had learned, across sixteen years, exactly how to keep standing]
Leo: This is painful
Voriath: Now die
Leo: .... he ha become extremely overpowered
Voriath: This time, I shall end this
[The sky tore further. Not dramatically — just steadily, the specific slow unraveling of a ceiling that had stopped being asked to hold and had started, instead, being told to stop existing.]
Voriath: You want to understand what you're looking at.
[Isaac, climbing to his feet, fire barely holding:]
Issac: Not particularly.
Voriath: You're going to anyway.
[He said it the way you state a fact about weather.]
Voriath: As for right now, my heartbeat is the rhythm of every heartbeat in every timeline, simultaneously. I have merged what I am with the Infinite Nexus, and in doing.
[Leo felt the truth of it in the way the ground beneath him no longer felt entirely stable — not from damage, but from the specific uncertainty of standing on something whose author was actively rewriting the terms of its own existence.]
Voriath: And I am done being generous.
Voriath — Absolute Command
[Leo felt his own body's connection to its abilities flicker]
Leo: I better use Taiji Collapse of Authority to rewrite it
[Taiji Collapse of Authority reached out toward Voriath's guard and found, for the first time since he'd earned it, that the declaration didn't land at all]
[It was simply rewritten before it could complete, Voriath's will already present at the point where the ability would have taken effect, having decided the outcome before Leo had finished deciding to try]
Leo: That's—, did he just appear before my eyes could react
Voriath: The Nexus at full power doesn't eradicate existence, it kills concepts. I have told you that the version of me you were fighting before was choosing to hold back. This is what happens when I stop.
[He struck again — and this time it wasn't a fist or a blade, it was simply presence, the specific weight of a being who was now the source code of everything pressing directly against two people who existed, structurally, several layers beneath him.]
[Both Leo and Isaac were driven to their knees] pressed — the way gravity presses, absolute and without malice, simply because the thing generating the pressure existed at a scale that made resistance a category error]
[Isaac, through gritted teeth]
Issac: He's not even trying.
Leo: I know.
Isaac: This is what he looks like not trying.
Leo: I know.
[They stayed on their knees for one full second — the longest second either of them had experienced in this entire war — and then, together, without discussing it, without needing to, they got back up.]
[The Battlefield — Understanding What Was Coming]
[Voriath looked down at the two of them still standing, and something in his expression — carried across every dimension his voice reached — shifted into something colder]
Voriath: You're still standing.
Leo: Yeah.
Voriath: That is either the most impressive or the most foolish thing I have witnessed in this entire war, and I genuinely cannot decide which.
Leo: My Taiji Collapses is hard to overcome
Voriath: My power is getting stronger
[He was quiet for a moment — the specific quiet of a being deciding how much truth to give an opponent before ending them.]
Voriath: I want you to understand something before this continues. Because I think you've earned the understanding, even if you haven't earned the outcome.
Isaac: Huh, what do you mean.
Voriath: My parents. Ivaraj and Starix. You know they created the Primus World. You know they created the Invictus World. What you don't fully understand is what they are beneath those titles.
[The Manipulator, watching from the sidelines with Siriusniyo and Beatrice, went very still.]
The Manipulator: He's not—
Voriath: I am on the verge of bringing them back.
[The words landed across the entire battlefield at once — every combatant, every guild member, every ruler hearing it simultaneously through the omnipresent reach of the Living Axis form.]
[Silence. The specific silence of an entire cosmology understanding, all at once, exactly how much worse this could get.]
Jeannette: He's going to—
Kai: Resurrect the Hyper Gods.
Stella: The actual founders.
Voriath: Not their bodies. Their bodies are gone, sealed away in a place even I cannot fully reach. But their souls — the essence of what they were, the two most overpowered beings this cosmology has ever produced — that, I can touch. That, I can bring back into myself.
[He looked at Leo. At Isaac. At the entire battlefield beneath him.]
Voriath: If I consume that power, there will be no version of this war that ends any way but the way I choose.
[The Manipulator's expression had gone genuinely pale.]
The Manipulator: If he does that—
Siriusniyo: There's no coming back from it. Not for any of us.
[Meltryllis, still standing apart from the fighting, arms folded, finally spoke — and for the first time since she'd arrived, her tone carried something sharp underneath the usual amused calm]
Meltryllis: That's the single stupidest thing I have heard, and I have heard a lot of stupid things.
[Voriath's attention shifted toward her.]
Voriath: Huh and who are you to judge
Meltryllis: I have several. Would you like them in order of severity, or should I just start with the one that matters most?
Voriath: Humor me.
Meltryllis: You are talking about pulling the souls of two beings whose combined output built the framework you currently exist inside of, and putting that power into a body that — however transcendent you currently think you are — is still, structurally, a single point of failure. You're not asking to borrow their strength. You're asking to hold a sun in your hands and hoping your hands don't matter.
[She uncrossed her arms.]
Voriath: Do you have a grudge against me, what history background do you have throughout the years
Meltryllis: Ivaraj and Starix didn't just create existence. They are the load-bearing walls of what existence currently means. You put that inside yourself, even briefly, and one of two things happens. Either you can't hold it, and it unmakes you on the way through — taking a significant chunk of the surrounding cosmology with you out of pure structural sympathy. Or you can hold it, briefly, and it changes what you are so completely that the thing standing here afterward won't be Voriath anymore. It'll be something wearing what's left of him.
[A pause. The battlefield held its breath.]
Meltryllis: You're not reaching for power, Voriath Luminael. You're reaching for your own extinction and calling it a solution.
[Voriath looked at her for a long moment — the specific look of a being encountering, for the first time in the entire war, someone who genuinely wasn't afraid of what he was and was telling him so without flinching.]
Voriath: Noted.
Meltryllis: That's it? Noted?
Voriath: I said I'm on the verge of it. I didn't say I've decided.
[He turned his attention back to Leo and Isaac.]
Voriath: For now. This is enough... Such Insolence!!
[The Fight — Leo and Isaac, Beyond Their Limits]
[He struck again, simply the weight of his presence, applied directly, a downward pressure that would have flattened a lesser battlefield into nonexistence]
Issac: what kind of devastating power is this... more like abyss power
[Leo and Isaac moved at the exact same instant]
[Leo went low, Shatter Nebula angled to redirect rather than block, while Isaac came in high, fire wrapping his fists in whatever fraction of the Sutur Ignition Form he could still hold together]
[Voriath's pressure met both of them at once — and for the first time since the Living Axis form had activated, it didn't simply flatten them]
[It slowed]
Voriath: —, such power..
[His voice, for one instant, lost its omnipresent evenness.]
Voriath: You're resisting the Loom itself.
Isaac: We're used to resisting things that shouldn't be resistible.
Leo: It's kind of our whole thing.
[They pressed forward together — Isaac's fire finding the seam in Voriath's presence that Leo's redirected pressure had opened, Leo's blade finding the exact half-second Isaac's fire had bought]
[Voriath looked at the two of them — bruised, bleeding, exhausted past any reasonable definition of exhaustion, still standing, still moving in perfect sync, still pushing — and something in his expression, buried under the cold fury, flickered with something that was, despite everything, close to respect]
Voriath: You two
.
Leo: Yeah?
Voriath: I understand now why Satanael chose you. And I understand, more than I did an hour ago, why your rival chose to stay beside you instead of simply watching you win or lose alone.
Isaac: Careful. Almost sounds like a compliment
Voriath: Don't get used to it.
[He raised his presence again — the Loom tightening, every thread of the local multiverse pulling taut around the two of them — and the true weight of what remained, even without his parents' power, bore down on Leo and Isaac with the specific intent of a being who had decided that respect and mercy were, in this moment, two entirely separate things.]
Voriath: Because this is only the beginning of what I'm capable of showing you.
[The battlefield watched, breath held, as Leo and Isaac braced against the tightening Loom together — two rivals, two friends, two boys who had built themselves into something the cosmology had never produced before, standing against the thing Voriath Luminael had chosen, at last, to truly become.]
To be continued...