[Last Episode: 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.]
Chapter 127, Episode 127
Voriath: Show me what's left.
[He said it]
[The threads of the Great Loom pulled tighter around Leo and Isaac]
Leo: We need a plan.
[He grit out]
Isaac: I'm listening... what's the plan
[He answered]
Leo: His Nexus is infinite. We already know that. But infinite doesn't mean undirected — he still has to choose where to put it, second to second, or he'd just end this instantly instead of talking to us.
Isaac: So he's rationing it.
[He said, understanding]
Leo: Not rationing. Directing. Which means if we split his attention hard enough, in enough directions at once, there's a lag between where he's looking and where he's actually pushing power.
Isaac: A lag we can use.
Leo: A lag we can use.
[Voriath's voice cut through the space between them, carrying from everywhere at once.]
Voriath: I can hear you, you know.
Leo: Good. Then you already know it's not going to work, so you won't be surprised when it does.
[He said, smirking despite the blood on his face]
Voriath — Precognitive Lock.
[His future sight unfurled across every branch of the next several seconds simultaneously]
[He watched Leo's blade rise. Watched Isaac circle wide. Watched forty-one variations of the next exchange play out before either of them had finished their first step]
Voriath: I already know where you're both going to be.
Leo: Cool.
[He said, unbothered]
Leo — Taiji Collapse of Probability.
Leo: Then it's a good thing where I'm going to be just stopped being a fixed answer.
[The declaration reached into the probability threads Voriath was reading and collapsed them into an unstable, actively shifting field of equally weighted possibilities, each one true until observed, each observation changing the next.]
[Voriath's precognition, for the first time since the Living Axis form activated, returned static]
Voriath: What!!!
[He said nothing for a half-second, and a half-second, at this scale, was an eternity.]
Voriath: He rewrote my sight
Leo: My taiji bypasses future sights
[He said, already moving]
Taiji Collapse of Space-Time
[He layered it directly on top of the probability collapse — simply declaring that the space-time coordinate connecting his position to Voriath's was, distance stopped being a fixed quantity between them. It became a live variable, collapsing and reforming with every heartbeat]
[Voriath raised the Chaos Nihilikinesis Sword on pure instinct]
Voriath: Die!!
[Shatter Nebula met void-edge]
[The clash didn't produce silence this time — it produced a genuine, ringing shockwave, the specific sound of two things meeting at a speed neither of them had fully planned for]
Voriath: You're fighting blind on purpose.
Leo: I'm fighting blind on purpose so you have to.
[He said, pressing the blade lock harder]
Voriath: That's — genuinely clever.
[He admitted]
Leo: Thanks. Isaac came up with the framing. I just executed it.
[Isaac's voice came from directly behind Voriath]
Isaac: Wrong. You came up with the framing. I'm just about to execute the other half.
[He said]
Isaac — Twilight-Fed Ignition.
[He'd used the entire blade lock as cover — circling wide the moment Leo's probability field went active, using the same collapsed-and-shifting coordinate instability to make his own position as unreadable as Leo's, and arrived directly at Voriath's exposed back with every fraction of fire he still had left compressed into a single point behind his fist]
[The punch landed clean]
[Voriath staggered forward, directly into the blade lock, directly into Shatter Nebula's edge]
Taiji Collapse Blade — Perfect Harmony Collapse Strike.
[Leo released it the instant the opening arrived — the dual forces of Taiji brought to absolute balance along the sword's edge, unleashed in a single strike that shattered the space around Voriath's chest, erased the reinforcing magic holding his form's structural integrity together, and sent him through six separate collapsing layers of the Primus World's outer atmosphere before he caught himself]
[Isaac's fist was still ringing]
Isaac: That's the plan. Split his attention, hit the seam, don't stop.
[He said, breathing hard]
Leo: Don't stop.
[He agreed]
[Voriath reformed his position in the open sky above the battlefield, blood — actual, dark, unhealing blood — running freely down his chest where the Perfect Harmony Collapse Strike had landed]
[He looked down at the two of them with an expression that had, for the first time since the Living Axis form activated, genuinely changed]
Voriath: You hurt me.
Leo: That was the goal.
Voriath: Twice, now, in the span of ten seconds. Nobody has managed that against this form. Nobody.
Isaac: First time for everything.
[He said, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand]
[Voriath was quiet for a moment, looking at the wound on his chest, at the wound on his cheek from before, at the two of them standing together, exhausted, bleeding, and refusing to stop.]
Voriath: My strength in this form is meant to be undeniable. Absolute. I told you both that I already won.
Leo: You said that a lot, actually.
[He said]
Voriath: I'm starting to understand why you two keep making me repeat myself.
[He raised the Chaos Nihilikinesis Sword — and this time, for the first time, his stance shifted into something with genuine weight behind it, no longer the casual, omnipresent pressure of a being toying with lesser things, but the focused, deliberate readiness of someone who had just been reminded that his opponents had teeth.]
Voriath: Fine.
[He said]
Voriath: Let's stop pretending this is a formality.
Voriath — Chaos Nihilikinesis Sword.
[He came down at Leo first — full commitment, the void-edge carrying the weight of the Nexus behind it, no longer content to let the Loom do the fighting for him]
Leo: What the... such powerful force
[Leo met it, both hands on Shatter Nebula, the impact driving him back through cracked ground, heels carving trenches into the Primus World's already-ruined surface]
[Isaac came from the flank the instant the blade lock formed]
Isaac — Overcharged Strike.
[His punch landed against Voriath's exposed ribs with a force that shouldn't have existed anymore — every reserve he had left, every ember of the Sutur Ignition Form's dying heat, compressed into one final act of pure, undeniable strength]
[The impact cracked audibly]
Voriath: —... dammit
[He actually grunted, the sound genuine, involuntary]
[He broke the blade lock with Leo to answer Isaac directly, sword swinging in a wide arc meant to end the exchange in a single motion — and Leo used the opening, the half-second Voriath's attention had split toward Isaac, to drive Shatter Nebula forward one more time.]
Taiji Collapse Blade — Netherflame Thrust.
[Black flame found the same wound Perfect Harmony had already opened, driving deeper, siphoning at the Nexus Battery's edge again]
[Voriath's sword-swing — the one meant to end Isaac in a single motion — arrived a fraction slower than it should have, thrown off by the drain, giving Isaac just enough room to get his arms up and take the hit as a graze instead of a killing blow]
[He was thrown regardless. Hard. Through a full kilometer of cracked battlefield before he skidded to a stop]
[But he was still breathing]
[Still moving]
[He pushed himself up, one arm clearly not working right anymore, blood soaking through what remained of his shirt, and looked back toward Voriath and Leo with the specific stubbornness that had defined every single moment of this war for him]
Isaac: That the best you've got?
[He called, voice rough]
Voriath: No.
[He answered, and for the first time, there was no omnipresent evenness to the word — just a single voice, directed, focused entirely on the two of them.]
Voriath: But it's the best you're going to see for a while. Because I am done underestimating either of you.
[He turned his full attention back to Leo, blade raised, the Living Axis form's overwhelming pressure narrowing, concentrating, no longer spread thin across the entire battlefield but pulled entirely into this one exchange.]
Voriath: My limits are on, Leo Sebastián. Let's see if yours actually are too.
Leo: They've been on since the moment you erased me.
[He said, raising Shatter Nebula, Taiji energy coiling bright and black-white along the blade]
Leo: I've just been waiting for you to notice.
[Suddenly an unexpected person arrived on the battlefield, it was Avior, the long waited friend of Leo and Issac has finally arrived]
[Then he landed between Leo and Isaac, both of them mid-recovery, both bleeding, both bracing for Voriath's next strike — a figure dropped from the torn sky with the calm, unhurried precision of someone who had timed his arrival to the exact second it would matter most]
[Avior]
[Leo's head snapped toward him]
Leo: Avior?
[He said, disbelief cracking through the exhaustion in his voice]
Isaac: No way.
[He said, already grinning despite everything]
Avior: Long time no see.
[He said, rolling his shoulders, mind-magic already coiling faint and violet around his fingertips]
Leo: It's been years. You disappeared from the guild without a word.
Avior: I was training.
Isaac: For years.
Avior: For years.
[He said, entirely unbothered, eyes already flicking up toward Voriath with the specific calm of someone doing quiet calculations]
Leo: You could've sent a letter.
Avior: You were busy building an entire subordinate army and an Eastern World. I didn't want to interrupt.
[Leo let out a short laugh, despite the blood on his face, despite everything.]
Leo: Fair.
[The Manipulator, watching from the sidelines with Siriusniyo and Beatrice, narrowed his eyes at the new arrival]
The Manipulator: Who is this.
Siriusniyo: I don't recognize the signature.
Beatrice: Neither do I, and I make a habit of recognizing things.
[Aries Felixiana — captain of the Solar Dragons, who'd fought her way close enough to the front lines to hear the exchange — called over, breathless but grinning.]
Aries: That's Avior! General of the Solar Dragons Guild — well, unofficially, he's rarely around enough for the title to mean much on paper. Leo and Isaac's oldest friend from the Chaos Universe, way before either of them became what they are now.
The Manipulator: Their oldest friend.
Aries: The three of them came up together. Leo's the one everyone talks about, Isaac's the rival everyone knows, but Avior—Avior's the one who kept both of them from doing something reckless enough to get themselves killed before they were strong enough to survive it more like Luna...
Siriusniyo: And now.
Aries: Now he's apparently strong enough that recklessness isn't really a concern anymore.
[Avior looked up at Voriath —the torn sky, the sheer scale of what stood above the battlefield — and exhaled slowly through his nose.]
Avior: Okay.
[He said, mostly to himself]
Avior: That's a lot.
Isaac: You're just now noticing?
Avior: I noticed the second I crossed into this dimension. I'm processing it out loud. Give me a moment.
[Leo pushed himself fully upright, wiping blood from his jaw, looking at Avior with the specific relief of someone who hadn't realized how much he'd needed backup until it arrived.]
Leo: You didn't have to come.
Avior: I know.
Leo: You came anyway.
Avior: You're my friends. Also, and I say this with love, you two were about to lose.
Isaac: We were not about to lose.
Avior: Isaac. Your arm is bent in a direction arms don't bend.
[Isaac glanced down at his own arm, considered this, and shrugged with the one shoulder still working properly.]
Isaac: Cosmetic.
Avior: Sure.
[He raised both hands, violet light gathering thick around them, and looked between the two of them with the specific focus that had, apparently, replaced whatever looseness he'd carried as a younger guild member.]
Avior: Alright. Catch me up. Fast version.
Leo: He's the son of the creators of everything, he wants to rebuild the cosmology by force, we talked him into a temporary ceasefire, he erased me, I died, I came back with two ancient dragons and the entirety of Taiji Collapse, and now he's threatening to resurrect his parents' souls if we don't stop hurting his feelings.
Avior: ...That's a lot to have happened since I left.
Isaac: Welcome back.
Avior: Right.
[He cracked his neck once, violet light sharpening into something closer to focus than mere gathering, and looked up at Voriath with an expression that had gone entirely, coldly professional.]
Avior: Let's not let him resurrect anyone, then.
[Voriath looked down at the new arrival with mild, genuine curiosity]
Voriath: A third.
Avior: Hi.
Voriath: You arrived at a strange moment to introduce yourself.
Avior: I have good timing. Ask anyone who's known me long enough.
[He didn't wait for a response. He moved — not fast in the way Leo or Isaac moved, but precise, every step calculated three steps ahead of itself, and the moment he crossed into range, violet threads of thought-magic lashed out toward Voriath's guard.]
Avior — Words of Thought
Avior: Erase.
[The word left him quiet, almost bored, and the incoming counter-strike Voriath had already launched toward him — a blade of void-energy meant to end the introduction before it finished — simply stopped existing between one instant and the next.]
Voriath: —
[He blinked, genuinely startled for the first time since the fight began.]
Voriath: You erased my strike with a word.
Avior: That's the ability. Words of Thought. I see it coming, I say something, it's gone. Works on conceptual attacks too, for the record, so don't bother trying that angle.
[Leo, already moving to flank left, called back with something close to a laugh in his voice.]
Leo: He's always been like this.
[Isaac, flanking right]
Issac: Annoyingly efficient.
Avior: I prefer 'competent.
[The three of them fell into rhythm without needing to discuss it]
[Leo pressed from the front, Shatter Nebula weaving Taiji Collapse abilities into every strike and Isaac circled, fire guttering but present, using his one working arm and the last embers of the Sutur Ignition Form to force openings]
[Avior stayed just behind and between them both, reading the fight three moves ahead, erasing what needed erasing, redirecting what needed redirecting]
[Voriath swung the Chaos Nihilikinesis Sword in a wide arc meant to catch all three at once]
Avior — Chrono Displacement.
Avior: Not today.
[He said, and the loop closed around all three of them at once — a fraction of a second folded back on itself, the sword's arc arriving into a space that had already, technically, been vacated a heartbeat before it existed]
[Voriath's blade cut empty air]
[Leo used the opening]
Taiji Collapse Blade — Infernal Flame Arc.
[The white primordial flame caught Voriath across the forearm, sticking, burning, refusing every attempt at extinguishing — and in the same breath, Isaac closed the distance and drove his one good fist into the same wound, deepening it, the fire and the strength working together the way they'd always worked together, two halves of the same relentless pressure]
[Voriath staggered]
Avior — Death Fist of Power
[Avior arrived last, timing his own strike to the exact half-second Voriath's guard was still reeling from the first two, and drove a punch forward that carried a weight entirely disproportionate to his frame — a strike built to penetrate any defense, any span of time or space, engulfed in enough force to erase a planet if he'd let it]
[He hadn't let it]
[He'd scaled it down, deliberately, precisely, to exactly what this exchange required]
[It still landed like the end of the world]
[Voriath went through four collapsing layers of the Primus World's cracked atmosphere before he caught himself, blood — real, dark, unhealing blood — running freely now from three separate wounds.
The battlefield had gone almost entirely silent, watching]
[Kai, from where he stood with the other rulers:]
Kai: Who is that.
Stella: The third one.
Kai: He erased Voriath's attack with a word.
Nebula: And just hit him harder than either of the other two have managed all fight.
Cyra: Cosmic Awareness confirms it. His combat signature wasn't even on record an hour ago. He came from nowhere.
[Jeannette, watching with the rest of the Astronomical Guardians, tightened her grip on her sword]
Jeannette: Our Lord has friends we've never met.
Laxcarseel: Apparently.
Antoinette: His fate-line just connected to two others I hadn't tracked before. They've been linked for a very long time.
Martha: Whoever he is — he's fighting like he's known them his whole life.
Pandorami: Because he has
[Karnak and Tiamat, both still in their true forms, watched from where they'd settled at the edge of the battlefield, patient, waiting for their new lord to call on them]
Tiamat: Your Leo has good people around him.
Karnak: Better than most of what we saw in our own era.
Tiamat:"That's not saying much. Our era ended with the Hypers erasing us.
Karnak: Fair point.
[They watched the three of them press forward together, and something in both ancient dragons' expressions settled into quiet, patient approval.]
[Ereshkigal's voice carried faintly, from wherever she watched]
Ereshkigal: So that's the third one Isaac used to talk about.
[A pause.]
Ereshkigal: Good. They'll need him.
[Voriath rose from the crater his own momentum had carved, and the fury on his face — genuine, unguarded, no longer the cold amusement of a god toying with insects — silenced the last of the battlefield's murmuring entirely]
Voriath: Three of you.
Leo: Yep.
Voriath: I have bled four times in the last two minutes.
Isaac: We noticed.
Voriath: I am the Foundation of Everything. I am the Loom your existence is woven from. And three children with a sword, a set of fists, and a vocabulary problem have made me bleed four times.
[His voice was rising now — not omnipresent and even anymore, but concentrated, furious, directed entirely at the three of them with the specific heat of a being who had never, not once, been made to feel this particular kind of insult before.]
Avior: In our defense, you did threaten to resurrect your parents. That's a lot of pressure to put on three people trying to have a nice afternoon.
Voriath: You think this is funny.
Avior: A little.
[Voriath's presence surged — the Loom's threads pulling taut across the entire battlefield at once, the ground cracking further, the sky's tear widening, every guild member and ruler across the Primus World feeling the pressure spike hard enough to drive several of them to their knees.]
Voriath: I have shown you restraint. I have shown you conversation. I have explained myself to you, Leo, in open space between stars, because I respected what you were building. That respect is currently costing me blood.
Leo: Respect usually does, when it's real.
[He said, steady despite everything]
Voriath: Then I'll set it aside.
[The Loom didn't tighten this time]
[It screamed — every dimension it touched registering the sudden, total absence of restraint, the sky above the Primus World fracturing further into lines of colorless light, the ground for a hundred kilometers in every direction beginning to genuinely, structurally fail]
Voriath: I am going to kill all three of you, and then I am going to kill everyone who came here to watch me do it, and then I am going to bring my parents back into myself with nothing left standing to object.
[The battlefield trembled — not metaphorically, physically, every combatant across every front feeling the specific, bone-deep tremor of a being no longer interested in restraint of any kind.]
[The Octavian Vanquishers' Kars, watching from the Empire States lines, staggered]
Kars: That's not the same fight anymore.
[Wu Zetian, beside him]
Wu Zetian: No. It isn't.
[Nighurath, further down the line]
Nighurath: He's stopped calculating.
[Dahilia, beside him, Future Sight straining]
Dahilia: I can't read past the next ten seconds. Every branch keeps ending the same way.
[Isaac, despite the tremor in the ground beneath him, despite the arm still hanging wrong at his side, kept smirking]
Isaac: There it is.
Leo: There what is.
Isaac: The real him. Not the cold one. Not the one giving speeches. I've been waiting for him to actually be angry instead of disappointed. Angry, I can work with.
[Avior's expression had gone entirely, coldly focused — the last traces of his earlier looseness burned away, replaced by the specific stillness of someone running calculations too fast for words to keep up with.]
Avior: His rage is making him predictable in exactly one way and unpredictable in every other. Leo — he's going to come at you first. You hurt him worse than either of us.
Leo: I noticed.
Avior: I'll cover the angle he doesn't expect. Isaac—
Isaac: I know. I hit what's left open.
[Avior nodded once, violet light gathering fully now around both hands.]
Avior: Then let's not waste this.
[Leo looked up at Voriath — at the fractured sky, at the trembling ground, at the fury radiating off Voriath in waves that had stopped pretending to be anything other than what they were — and felt, underneath the exhaustion, underneath the blood, something settle into place]
Leo: You want to skip straight to the end.
Voriath: Yes.
Leo: Then come on.
[He raised Shatter Nebula, Taiji energy coiling black and white and bright along its edge, and beside him Isaac raised his one good fist, and beside him Avior's violet light sharpened into something with genuine teeth, and the three of them — friends before any of this had a name, before guilds or ranks or wars, before any of them understood what they were going to become — stood together against the thing Voriath Luminael had let himself finally, fully be.]
Leo: Let's see how far you actually get.
To be continued..