[Last Episode: Leo: Let's see how far you actually get]
Chapter 128, Episode 128
[Voriath stopped fighting]
[He simply rose — straight up, through the fractured layers of the Primus World's sky, until he hung above the entire battlefield where every combatant, every guild member, every ruler could see him at once]
[He spread his arms]
Leo: What's he doing.
Isaac: I don't know. I don't like it.
Avior: Neither do I. Get ready.
[Voriath closed his eyes.]
Voriath: Brilliant work you three, but the time has come for this to end
[Two threads of light tore free from the deepest layer of the Great Loom — one gold, one silver, both older than the concept of age itself — and struck him in the chest at the same instant.]
[The Primus World shook from the sheer fact of what had just entered it. Every ruler on the field dropped to one knee without meaning to]
[Kai's teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached. Stella's Infinite Aura, which had never once flickered in her life, flickered]
[Ivaraj and Starix]
[The founders of existence. The beings who had built the Primus World and the Invictus World before either had names. Two million years old. Beyond the Fundamental Laws of Cosmos. Beyond reach their power poured into Voriath]
『Embodiment and Ascendant.
Life and Soul.
Death and Sanctuary.
Divine and Chaos.
Light and Darkness.
Emptiness and Annihilation.
Miracles and Creation.
Hope and Despair.』
Issac: Such power... was he really holding back all this time...
[Every one of them settled into him at once, and Voriath's body began to change —but harden, condense, every part of him becoming denser and more absolute with each passing second]
[It was a form that had stopped needing to be worn]
[Satanael's voice came through to Leo, quiet, urgent]
[Satanael]
「Leo. Stop. Don't move closer.」
Leo: What is that, what do you mean??
[Satanael]
「He absorbed them. Both of them. Fully. His parents' power is inside him now, completely, and it's not fighting him for control — which means he found a way to hold it.」
Leo: Meltryllis said that would kill him.
[Satanael]
「It should have. It didn't. Which means whatever he's become right now is worse than anything either of us prepared for. Leo」
Leo: I need a number.
[Satanael]
「There isn't one. I can't read him. I have never once in my existence been unable to read something, and I cannot read him.」
[Leo felt his own hands go cold.]
Leo: Satanael.
[Satanael]
「Don't get near him. I mean that as plainly as I can say it. Don't get near him.」
[Voriath opened his eyes]
[He looked down at the battlefield — at Leo, at Isaac, at Avior, at every guild, every ruler, every subordinate who had fought this entire war to reach this moment — and said nothing]
[He didn't need to]
Voriath — Hyper True Body Wraith.
[He was simply there]
[There — in front of Isaac, close enough to touch, and Isaac barely had time to register the shift in the air before Voriath's hand closed around his throat]
[Isaac's fire didn't ignite. It didn't even try]
[Voriath threw him]
[Isaac went through the ground, through the layer beneath the ground, through seven more layers after that, and didn't stop until he'd crossed half the visible battlefield and slammed into the base of a mountain range hard enough to level it]
Leo: ISAAC—
[He didn't finish the name]
[Voriath was already in front of him]
[Leo swung Shatter Nebula on pure reflex — full commitment, Taiji energy blazing along the edge, every ounce of what he'd earned from Karnak and Tiamat behind the strike]
[It didn't connect]
[Voriath caught the blade between two fingers]
Voriath: Sit down.
[He didn't even swing. He just pushed — one motion, barely more than a flick — and Leo was gone from where he'd been standing, thrown so far and so fast that the shockwave of his own displacement cratered the ground he'd left behind]
Leo: What the—his power is immensely powerful
[Avior was already moving before Leo landed]
Avior: Words of Thought—
[The word never left him]
[Voriath was in front of him before the sentence formed, and Avior's mind-magic — the ability that had erased a void-strike out of existence with a single word ten minutes ago — reached out toward Voriath's presence and found nothing to erase]
Avior: He was able to resist my words of Thought with just his presences alone..
[Just Voriath, standing there, existing, and existing was apparently enough]
[Voriath backhanded him]
[Avior hit the ground so hard the impact tore a crater a kilometer wide, and he didn't get back up right away]
[The entire battlefield had gone completely silent]
[Kai, staring]
Kai: He just—
Stella: Three of the strongest beings in this universe. All three of them. In under four seconds.
Nebula: He didn't even use an ability.
Apollo: He didn't need to.
[Voriath drifted down toward the ground, slow, unhurried, and looked around at the battlefield — at everyone still fighting his creatures, at the Astronomical Guardians still holding their line, at Xuantian and Mercurius still bleeding from Meltryllis's blade, at every single person who had come here to stop him]
[He raised one hand]
[Every creature still on the battlefield stopped moving and dissolved]
[Then he turned his attention to the guild lines]
Quinn: He's looking at us.
Christo: Move—
[Voriath tapped two fingers together]
[A section of the battlefield the size of a small city simply ceased the ground and everything standing on it removed from existence in the space between one heartbeat and the next, leaving a smooth, perfect gap where a portion of the Primus World's surface had been]
The Manipulator: His sheer energy alone removed the space-time itself...
[Guild members scattered]
Quinn: He's not even trying to kill specific people. He's just clearing space.
Klaus: That's worse..... it's as if he wants to erase our entire existence into nothingness
[Meltryllis, who had not moved from her position at the edge of the field this entire fight, finally uncrossed her arms]
Meltryllis: More like totality...
[Xuantian, on the ground beside Mercurius, both of them still recovering from her earlier assault, looked up at the sky]
Xuantian: That's the form... Voriath never loses... no matter how yall try, he will always win
Mercurius: The one we were built to serve, ultimately. The reason any of this started.
[Meltryllis studied Voriath for a long moment, her expression unreadable.]
Meltryllis: He actually did it. He actually held both of them.. but not for long though
Xuantian: Is that bad.
Meltryllis: That depends entirely on whether Leo can find a way to matter against something that doesn't need to try.
[Meanwhile, Leo pulled himself out of the crater his own body had carved, every part of him screaming, blood running freely from somewhere he couldn't identify anymore]
Leo: Am coming for you Voriath!!!
[He looked toward Voriath]
[Voriath was simply standing in the air above the battlefield, unmoving, watching, the way a person watches weather they've already decided isn't worth reacting to]
Leo: Satanael.
[Satanael]
「I heard what he said to you. Sit down. I don't like it.」
Leo: Neither do I.
[Satanael]
「Leo. Listen to me. What he's holding right now isn't power in the way we've been fighting power this entire war. It's not a form with a technique behind it that you can read, adapt to, find a gap in. It's the literal foundation of existence, wearing a body because he needed a body to stand on.There is nothing underneath it to exploit, because it is the underneath.」
Leo: So what do I do.
[Satanael]
「I don't know.」
[Leo went still.]
Leo: You always know.
[Satanael]
「Not this time. I've existed for two million years, Leo. I have never encountered this. Nobody has. His parents built the framework everything else operates inside of. What he's wearing right now is that framework's source code, standing in front of you.」
Leo: Then we're done.
[Satanael]
「I didn't say that.」
Leo: You said you don't know what to do.
[Satanael]
「I don't. That's different from saying it's over. It means we're past the point where I can guide you through this the way I've guided you through everything else. Whatever happens from here, it has to come from you. Not from a strategy I hand you. From you.」
[Leo looked up at Voriath again. At the stillness of him. At the complete absence of urgency in a being who had just thrown three of the strongest people in the cosmology aside without breaking stride.]
Leo: Okay.
[He stood up]
[Isaac dragged himself out from under the collapsed mountain range, one arm still broken, blood soaking the entire left side of his body now, and looked toward the sky with the specific stubbornness that had never once, in this entire war, allowed him to stay down]
Isaac: Voriath is the real deal
[He got up anyway]
[Avior climbed out of his own crater more slowly, one hand pressed to his ribs, mind-magic flickering weak and uncertain around his fingers for the first time since he'd arrived]
Avior: I couldn't erase it. I couldn't even read it coming.
[He got up anyway]
[The three of them found each other again near the center of the battlefield, all three bleeding, all three barely standing, all three looking up at the same impossible thing]
Isaac: Plan.
Leo: I don't have one.
Avior: I don't either.
[A pause.]
Isaac: Cool. Great. Love this.
Leo: That's my line.
Isaac: I'm allowed to borrow it. You're not using it right now.
[Voriath finally spoke]
Voriath: You're still standing.
Leo: We are not giving up, we will fighting till the end even if we go beyond our limits.. we would take you down!!
Voriath: Such play
Leo: Your power won't last long....
Voriath: My power is limitless
Issac: Will will keep fighting...
Voriath: I threw you into the ground hard enough to level a mountain range.
Isaac: I noticed.
Voriath: Am impressed
Isaac: We won't give up!!
[Voriath looked at the three of them for a long moment — not with anger anymore, not with the fury from before, but with something closer to genuine, distant curiosity, the way you'd look at an insect that kept walking after you'd already stepped on it.]
Voriath: I want you to understand what you're looking at, because I don't think you do yet.
Leo: In what sense should we understand you or listen to you..
Voriath: I am not stronger than I was five minutes ago. I am complete. Every gap in what I was, every place where you three found a seam to exploit — the probability collapse, the space-time instability, the split-attention tactic, all of it — those gaps existed because I was, until this moment, incomplete. My parents' power didn't add to what I had. It finished it.
[He raised one hand, and the air around it didn't shimmer, didn't glow, didn't do anything at all — it simply stopped being air in the normal sense, becoming instead a small, silent patch of something that had no name.]
Voriath: There is nothing left to find. No angle, no timing, no combination of three tired children throwing everything they have left at once. I am not fighting you anymore. I am simply here, and you are simply in the way.
Leo: That's a lot of talking for someone who just said there's nothing left to say.
Voriath: I'm explaining it because I respect what the three of you built to get this far. I told you that before, and it's still true. But respect doesn't change the outcome.
[He lowered his hand.]
Voriath: This is where it ends.
[He moved]
[Leo barely saw it — a blur that wasn't fast so much as simply inevitable]
[Voriath's presence relocating from the sky to directly in front of him without any visible transition between the two states — and Shatter Nebula came up on pure muscle memory, Taiji Collapse of Authority already flaring along the blade]
Leo: Your strike here answers to—
[Voriath's fist closed around his throat before he finished the sentence]
[The declaration simply didn't land]
Leo: What...
Voriath: That ability worked on me when I was still building toward this. It doesn't work on what I've finished becoming.
[He lifted Leo off the ground]
[Isaac was already moving, fire gathering around his one good fist, and Avior beside him, mind-magic sharpening into something aimed and desperate]
[Voriath didn't look at either of them]
[He simply extended his free hand, palm open, and both Isaac and Avior found themselves stopped mid-stride —unable to continue moving forward]
Isaac: What—
Voriath: You're not part of this exchange right now.
[He turned his attention back to Leo, still held aloft by the throat, still conscious, still fighting to breathe.]
Voriath: I told you, in open space, above the stars, that I respected you. That I believed the framework could change from within. I meant it. I still mean it.
[Leo, choking out the words]
Leo: Then let go.
Voriath: I can't. Not anymore. My parents are inside me now, Leo, and they don't share your patience for slow change. They built existence once already. They're not interested in watching it be rebuilt by committee.
[His grip tightened.]
Voriath: I'm sorry it has to be this way... but this time you die!
[Leo's vision was starting to blur at the edges]
[He could feel Shatter Nebula still in his hand, could feel Taiji Collapse of Authority straining uselessly against a will that no longer acknowledged it existed, could feel every single ability he'd earned across this entire war reaching for purchase and finding none]
[Satanael]
「Leo—」
[Leo, barely able to force the thought]
Leo: I know.
[Satanael]
「I don't have an answer.」
Leo: I know that too.
[Satanael]
「Then what are you going to do.」
[Leo looked at Voriath — really looked at him, past the void-armor, past the absorbed power of two beings older than time, at the face underneath all of it, the face of someone who had said, in open space, that he'd wanted a world worth building.]
[Leo, voice barely more than breath]
Leo: I'm going to remind him what he actually wanted.
[Satanael]
「Leo, he can't hear reason right now. He said so himself.」
Leo: Everyone can hear reason. Sometimes you just have to say it loud enough.
[He didn't have the strength to shout. He didn't have the air. But he said it anyway, quiet, direct, looking Voriath in the eyes the entire time.]
Leo: You wanted a world where your parents didn't have to seal their own son. Where the governance worked correctly. Where nobody had to choose between the people they love and the thing they built.
[Voriath's grip didn't loosen. But something in his expression flickered.]
Leo: This isn't that world, Voriath. This is you becoming exactly the thing you said you hated. Overwhelming force instead of correct governance. You're not fixing what broke your family. You're becoming the reason it broke.
[Voriath was silent for a long moment.]
Voriath: You think words are going to stop this.
Leo: I think you're still in there. Somewhere underneath your parents. I think Voriath Luminael is still the one holding this hand around my throat, not just the power inside him.
[A longer silence.]
Voriath: You're very good at this.
Leo: I've had practice.
[Voriath's fingers loosened but enough that breathing became possible again, enough that Leo's vision cleared, enough that whatever conflict had just crossed through Voriath's expression was, for the moment, genuinely real]
Voriath: I don't know if I can stop this.
Leo: Then let me help you stop it.
Voriath:"You can't fight what's inside me. Nobody can. I told you—
Leo: I'm not asking to fight it. I'm asking you to remember why you didn't want to be it in the first place.
[The battlefield held its breath]
[Isaac and Avior, still frozen in place by whatever unspoken force Voriath had put on them, watched the exchange with wide eyes, neither of them daring to move, neither of them daring to speak]
[Jeannette, watching from the Astronomical Guardians' position, had gone completely still]
Jeannette: He's talking him down. Again.
Laxcarseel: Or he's about to die trying.
Antoinette: His fate-line is doing something I've never seen it do. It's not fixed on either outcome. It's genuinely open.
[Meltryllis, watching from the edge of the field, finally spoke, quiet, mostly to herself]
Meltryllis: Interesting.... The Nexus is still affecting him.
[Xuantian, still on the ground beside her]
Xuantian: What is...
Meltryllis: He's not fighting the strongest thing in this universe right now. He's negotiating with it. Those are very different skills, and most people who have one don't have the other.
[Voriath looked down at Leo, still held aloft, still bleeding, still refusing to look away]
Voriath: If I let this power settle. If I let my parents fully take hold instead of fighting them for control the way I'm doing right now—
Leo: Don't.
Voriath: It might be the only way to stop what's happening to me.
Leo: It's not stopping anything. It's finishing it. You said so yourself — you're not stronger, you're complete. If you let go, there's no you left to come back from it.
[Voriath was quiet.]
Voriath: Then what do you suggest.
Leo: Fight it. The way you fought everything else in this war. Not with power — you don't have room to out-power your own parents. Fight it with the thing you've had this whole time that they don't.
Voriath: Which is.
Leo: A reason that isn't about winning.
[A long, long silence.]
Voriath: You're asking a great deal from someone currently holding you by the throat.
Leo: I know.
Voriath: And if I can't do it.
Leo: Then I suppose we find out together what happens next.
[Voriath closed his eyes]
[For a moment, nothing happened]
[The battlefield stayed frozen — Isaac and Avior still held motionless, Leo still dangling, the entire cosmology watching a single, silent internal struggle happening inside the being who had just absorbed the two most powerful entities to ever exist]
[Then his grip loosened further]
[Leo dropped, catching himself clumsily, coughing, one hand still wrapped around Shatter Nebula's hilt out of pure reflex]
[Voriath opened his eyes]
[They were different. Not the void-black they'd been a moment ago. Something closer to what they'd been in the seam between universes, above the stars, when he and Leo had sat on declared ground and talked like two people who might actually understand each other]
Voriath: It's not gone.
[Leo, still catching his breath]
LeoI know.
Voriath: It's just — quieter. For now.
Leo: That's enough.
Voriath: Is it.
[He looked at his own hands — at the Hyper True Body Wraith's form still wrapped around him, dense and absolute and terrible, still holding the power of two beings who had built existence itself.]
Voriath: I don't know how long I can hold this line.
Leo: Then we don't waste it.
[He pushed himself fully upright, Shatter Nebula raised, exhausted, bleeding, but standing, and looked at Voriath with something that wasn't quite hope and wasn't quite fear but sat somewhere honestly between the two.]
Leo: We're not done yet. Not the fight. The other thing. The thing we started talking about above the stars.
Voriath: The world worth building.
Leo: Yeah.
[Voriath was silent for a long moment, and then, slowly, the crushing pressure that had been bearing down on the entire battlefield since his parents' power settled into him began, gradually, to ease.]
Voriath: Then help me hold it.
[Isaac and Avior found themselves able to move again, both of them stumbling forward, both of them staring at Leo and Voriath with matching expressions of complete disbelief.]
Isaac: Did you just talk down a being wearing the power of the actual creators of existence.
Leo: ...Yeah.
Isaac: That's insane.
Leo: I know.
Avior: That's the single most Leo thing I have ever watched happen.
Leo: I'm taking that as a compliment.
Avior: "It was meant as one.
[Voriath looked at the three of them — bruised, bleeding, barely standing, and yet somehow still here, still together, still trying — and something in his expression, buried deep beneath two million years of inherited weight, settled into something that looked, for the first time since the war began, genuinely tired rather than furious.]
Voriath: This isn't over.
Leo: I know.
Voriath: The power inside me isn't gone. It's not controlled. I'm holding a line, not winning a fight.
Leo: Then we hold it with you.
[He looked at Isaac. At Avior. At the battlefield beyond them — at Jeannette and the Astronomical Guardians, at Meltryllis watching with new interest, at every guild and every ruler who had come this far to see this through.]
Leo: All of us.
To be continued....