[Last Episode: Leo: All of us]
Chapter 129, Episode 129
[The Primus World — The Trick]
[Voriath's eyes cleared, calm, warm, the same look he'd had above the stars]
[Leo lowered his guard half an inch]
[That was enough]
[Voriath's blade went straight through him]
Leo: —... he tricked us!!
[The Chaos Nihilikinesis Sword punched clean through his chest, and Voriath's face, the second the blade landed, twisted into something that had nothing warm left in it at all]
Voriath: You actually believed me.
Isaac: LEO—
[Voriath yanked the blade free and turned in the same motion, backhanding Isaac across the field before he'd taken a single step, and Avior barely got a shield of thought-energy up before Voriath's foot came down on it and shattered it along with three of his ribs]
Voriath: The Nexus doesn't like being talked down. It doesn't like being reasoned with. And it really doesn't like sharing a body with someone weak enough to fall for a boy's speech about hope
[His voice had changed. Lower. Wrong. The specific wrongness of something wearing a familiar shape from the inside.]
Voriath: I let it in fully for one second. That was the mistake. Now it's not asking anymore.
[He came down on all three of them at once, blade and fist and raw presence, and this time there was no restraint in it at all, no measured force, no game]
[Leo caught himself mid-air, blood pouring from the hole in his chest, and threw everything he had left into Shatter Nebula's edge]
[It didn't slow Voriath down at all]
[Isaac tried to land a hit and got thrown through a mountain range for the second time that day]
[Avior tried sealing magic — a desperate, last-resort binding meant to lock Voriath's body in place long enough for the other two to recover]
Avior — God of Gemini. Sealing Array.
[The chains of light wrapped around Voriath's arms, his legs, his throat]
[They held for exactly one second]
[Then the Nexus simply erased them, and Voriath didn't even look at Avior as he did it]
Voriath: Nice try!
Avior: He–...
[He didn't get a chance to say anything else before Voriath's hand closed around his throat and threw him bodily into Leo, both of them tangling and crashing across the cracked battlefield together]
[Satanael]
「Leo. I found something.」
[Leo, pushing himself up, coughing blood]
Leo: Talk fast.
[Satanael]
「The power he absorbed isn't just his parents' essence. There's a structure holding it together — a core, separate from him, separate from them. If I'm reading this correctly, the Nexus itself is the thing keeping all of it stable inside him. Damage the core, and the whole structure destabilizes.」
Leo: Where is it.
[Satanael]
「Center of his chest. But Leo — the moment you get close to it, it's going to know. It's not passive. It reacts. If it senses a direct threat to itself, it will pull itself out of him entirely and retreat back to wherever it came from before you can land the hit.」
Leo: So I get one shot.
[Satanael]
「You get one shot, and it has to be precise, and it has to be fast enough that the Nexus doesn't have time to flee.」
Leo: Great. No pressure.... so the Nexus was the cause of all this war..
[The fight carried them somewhere new — an abandoned castle standing alone at the edge of the Primus World's ruined outer district, empty halls and broken towers, and none of them fully registered how they'd ended up there]
[The moment the three of them regrouped inside its collapsing walls, Voriath was already there waiting]
Isaac: Sealing didn't work.
Avior: I noticed.
Leo: Satanael found something. There's a core. We hit the core, we hit the Nexus itself, not him.
Isaac: How do we hit something that runs the second it's threatened.
Leo: We don't give it time to run.
[He looked at both of them, blood still leaking from the wound in his chest, and something in his exhaustion cracked, unexpectedly, into a grin.]
Leo: You guys ready to actually go fast.
Isaac: Define actually.
Leo: Faster than we've ever gone. Faster than training. We would push past our limits!!
[Isaac grinned back, matching him exactly.]
Isaac: HellYeah. I'm ready.
Avior: I'll cover you both as long as I can.
Voriath: What a fool, What can you possibly do to take me down... I am the King of the Hyper God itself nothing can stop me now...
[Voriath came through the castle wall without slowing down, and the three of them scattered — not in fear, in formation]
[Leo hit Voriath's flank]
[Isaac hit the opposite side half a heartbeat later]
[Avior stayed back, thought-magic wrapping tight around both of them, redirecting Voriath's counters just enough to keep either of them from taking a fatal hit]
[They tore through the castle and through its outer walls, its collapsing towers, out into the open ground beyond it, and the fight kept accelerating — every exchange faster than the last, every strike landing and answered and countered before the sound of the previous one had finished traveling]
[A city three kilometers out ceased to exist in the space of a single exchange, caught in the backlash of a blade clash none of the four of them had meant to aim at it]
[A mountain range folded in on itself when Isaac's fist, wrapped in whatever remained of the Sutur Ignition Form, missed Voriath and hit the ground instead]
[Somewhere in the middle of all of it — bleeding, exhausted, fighting something that had just tried to kill them all — Leo started laughing]
Isaac: What's funny.
Leo: Nothing. Everything. I don't know.
Isaac: You're insane.
Leo: Don't act like you're the sane one.
[Isaac was, in fact, smiling — the same reckless, delighted grin he'd worn through half of this war.]
Isaac: Yeah, okay. Fair.
[Avior, breathless, half a step behind]
Avior: You two are actually enjoying this.
Leo: A little.
Isaac: A lot.
[Avior shook his head, but there was no real argument in it — just the specific fondness of someone who had known both of them long enough to understand that this was, somehow, exactly who they'd always been.]
[Meltryllis had been watching the escalation with growing intensity, and now she went suddenly, completely still]
Meltryllis: Hmm, something is off about Voriath's power... that's not just power he is using
The Manipulator: What isn't.
Meltryllis: What Voriath absorbed. The thing bonded to him right now, sitting inside his chest, wearing his parents like a costume.
[She narrowed her eyes at the fight tearing across the horizon]
Siriusniyo: what do you mean??
Meltryllis: That's an entity.
Siriusniyo: You're saying the Nexus is alive.
Meltryllis: I'm saying the Nexus was made. Someone built it — I don't know who, and honestly, that's the part that concerns me most, because I've been alive forty billion years and I can usually place the origin of anything at this scale. I can't place this one.
Beatrice: Explain what it does.
Meltryllis: It doesn't just grant power. It co-exists. It forms a contract with whoever it binds to, and once that contract is signed, the two of you are no longer entirely separate. The Nexus lets its host manipulate the flow of energy and matter across the multiverse — reshape reality, bend physics and time, whatever the host wants.
The Manipulator: That's what we've been fighting.
Meltryllis: That's what we've been fighting. But there's a cost, and it's a nasty one. If the host overuses it — pushes it past what even the Nexus considers sustainable — it starts pulling itself back out. Automatically. The host feels it happening. And in the time it takes to fully withdraw, it doesn't leave quietly.
Siriusniyo: It makes them worse on the way out.
Meltryllis: It makes them evil. There's something in the bonding process that corrupts the host the longer the Nexus stays active past its limit — and the only way to stop that corruption completely is to destroy the core of the entity itself. Not the host. The Nexus's core, specifically.
[The battlefield had gone very quiet, listening.]
Kai: So the Voriath fighting Leo right now—
Meltryllis: Isn't entirely Voriath anymore. Hasn't been, probably, since he absorbed his parents fully. What's left of him is buried under something that wants to keep existing more than it wants him to win.
Jairulioyo: Can they even reach the core??
Meltryllis: If Satanael found it — and from the way Leo just changed his fighting pattern, I'd guess he has — then yes. But it has one chance. The Nexus will feel the threat coming and try to flee back to wherever it came from before the hit lands. Whoever's trying to destroy it needs to be faster than its own self-preservation.
Laxcarseel: Lord Leo needs to end this before it takes control of another user and grants it another power..
[A pause. Everyone on the field looking back toward the fight — toward Leo and Isaac, tearing across a collapsing landscape at a speed that had already outpaced sight, both of them laughing.]
[Meltryllis, quietly, almost to herself]
Meltryllis: Faster than the Nexus itself. That's a very tall order. The Nexus itself preserves the future surpassing it is likely impossible that's like trying to survive the end of space-time
[Something in Leo shifted]
[It didn't come with a form name. It didn't come with a system notification or a declared ability. It simply arrived — the specific sensation of a ceiling he hadn't known was still there finally, quietly, giving way]
[Satanael]
「Leo—」
[The voice cut off]
[Isaac felt the same thing happen to him at almost the exact same instant, and Cinder, perched at his shoulder, opened her beak to say something and found she couldn't finish the sentence before Isaac had already moved three exchanges ahead of where she'd started speaking]
[Satanael, from somewhere behind, distant, stunned]
[Satanael]
「I can't— I can't track him anymore. He's moving faster than I can process.」
[Cinder, equally stunned]
[Cinder]
「Neither can I. Isaac's outpacing his own fire's ignition speed. That's not possible. That's not—」
[Avior tried to keep pace and fell behind within seconds, thought-magic straining to read movements that had stopped being readable at all]
Avior: I can't read read their—
[He didn't finish either. He simply stopped trying, dropping back, watching instead of participating, because there was nothing left for him to contribute to a fight that had left the register he operated in]
[Leo and Isaac didn't speak]
[They didn't need to]
[Every strike one of them threw, the other answered in the same breath, the two of them moving around Voriath in a rhythm that had stopped being coordination and become something closer to competition — each of them pushing harder specifically because the other one was pushing harder, neither willing to be the one who slowed down first]
[Voriath swung the Chaos Nihilikinesis Sword at Leo]
[Leo wasn't there anymore]
[He swung at Isaac]
[Isaac wasn't there either]
Voriath: —what, they are both surpassing my prophecies
[His voice had genuine confusion in it now, the Nexus's borrowed fury faltering under something it hadn't accounted for.]
Voriath: You're not fighting me....
[Leo, from somewhere Voriath couldn't quite track:]
Leo: No.
[Isaac, from somewhere else entirely]
Issac; We're fighting each other. You're just in the way
Voriath: What... are you saying am not worthy of your presence..
Issac: something like that...
Voriath: What!!!
[The battlefield had stopped being able to follow the fight visually at all. What remained visible was only the aftermath — mountains folding, rivers boiling, the sky itself developing tears that hadn't been there a moment before, each one marking a point where Leo or Isaac had simply been, then wasn't]
[Meltryllis's expression had shifted from calm interest into something genuinely, rarely alarmed]
Meltryllis: That's—
The Manipulator: What.
Meltryllis: I need to recalculate something.
Siriusniyo: Recalculate what.
Meltryllis: Where the ceiling actually is.
[She was staring at the tears spreading across the sky, at the specific quality of destruction that no longer looked like it belonged to the same battle that had started this war.]
Meltryllis: There's a level above Voriath and above the Nexus entirely. The Fundamental Laws of Cosmos sit there — Lyra, Draco, Liam, the three who govern the actual structure of creation itself, above even the Hyper Gods' authority. I don't think what I'm looking at right now is at that level. But I think it might be approaching the door.
[The battlefield went dead silent at that.]
Kai: Hold on what....You're saying they might be surpassing the Fundamental Laws.
Meltryllis: I'm saying I genuinely don't know anymore, and that has not happened to me in forty billion years.
[Voriath was falling behind]
[He was falling behind in real time, the gap between his own speed and theirs widening with every exchange, the Nexus's borrowed power straining to keep pace with two beings who had, somewhere in the last several seconds, stopped needing permission from anything to keep accelerating]
Voriath: Stop—
[Genuine panic entered his voice now, the first true fear either Leo or Isaac had heard from him in the entire war.]
Voriath: This isn't — you shouldn't be able to—
[Leo and Isaac still didn't answer]
[They didn't need to]
[Leo found the opening first — a fraction of a gap in Voriath's guard that existed for less time than either of them could have measured before this moment — and drove Shatter Nebula directly toward the core Satanael had identified]
[Isaac was already there, half a heartbeat ahead, fist wrapped in everything he had left, striking the exact same point from the opposite direction]
[The Nexus felt the threat and tried to flee]
[It wasn't fast enough]
[The strike landed]
[Both of them, together, at the exact same instant — Leo's blade and Isaac's fist meeting at the center of Voriath's chest, and the Nexus's core, caught in the half-second it needed and didn't have, shattered]
[The light that came off Voriath in that instant had no color at all]
[He simply stopped — mid-motion, mid-word, the borrowed fury and the absorbed weight of two million years both draining out of him at once — and fell]
[Leo and Isaac fell with him, all three of them dropping out of whatever register they'd been fighting in, gravity reasserting itself, the sky's tears beginning, slowly, to knit shut]
[The war was over]
[Leo hit the ground first. Isaac landed beside him a half-second later, both of them skidding, both of them finally, completely spent]
[For a long moment, neither of them moved]
[Then Leo started laughing]
Isaac: What.
Leo: We did it.
Isaac: We did it.
Leo: I went faster than you at the end. Just so you know. For the record.
Isaac: You did not. I hit first.
Leo: You hit at the same time. That's a tie, which functionally means I win because I called it first.
Isaac: That is not how ties work.
Leo: It's exactly how ties work.
[They were both laughing now, flat on their backs, bleeding, bruised, utterly wrecked, arguing about nothing while an entire cosmology stood frozen around them in stunned silence.]
[Ereshkigal's voice arrived a moment later, dry as ever]
Ereshkigal: Are you two seriously arguing about who won a race in the middle of your own recovery.
Leo: yes mam..
Isaac:Yes mam, we just were competing against each other
Ereshkigal: Do either of you care about your injuries at all.
Leo: Later.
Isaac: Definitely later.
[Ereshkigal, after a long pause]
Ereshkigal: ...Five weeks. I trained you for five weeks and this is what I get.
[Luna reached them before anyone else did, sprinting across the ruined battlefield and the moment she reached Leo she dropped to her knees beside him, hands shaking, and kissed him on his mouth]
[Right there. In front of everyone]
[The entire battlefield went completely silent for the second time in one hour]
[Leo, when she finally pulled back, looked genuinely stunned]
Leo: —
Luna: Don't. Don't say anything. I've been holding that in since the barrier and I am not doing it quietly a second time.
Leo: I wasn't going to say anything.
Luna: You looked like you were going to say something.
Leo: I was going to say I'm glad you did that.
[Luna went bright red and buried her face against his shoulder instead of responding, and Leo, despite every injury covering his body, wrapped his arm around her without hesitation.]
[Martha, watching from a short distance away, felt something complicated tighten in her chest — not anger exactly, just the quiet, private ache of someone who had spent years standing near something she'd never quite let herself reach for]
Antoinette: Looks like someone is jealous...
[She said nothing]
[She turned it into a smile instead, small and genuine, because whatever she felt privately, Leo being alive mattered more than any of it]
[Quinn reached Isaac a moment later, dropping down beside him, checking his broken arm with hands that were shaking despite her best efforts to keep them steady]
Quinn: You absolute idiot.
Isaac: Hi.
Quinn: You went and fought a being wearing the power of two literal creators of existence.
Isaac: In my defense, so did Leo.
Quinn: I'm not talking to Leo right now.
Isaac: Fair.
[She helped him sit up, careful of the arm, and for a moment just held onto him, not saying anything else at all.]
[The Manipulator, Siriusniyo, and Beatrice arrived together, standing over both of them with matching expressions of genuine, hard-earned respect]
The Manipulator: That was, without exaggeration, the single most reckless display of power I have witnessed in this entire war.
Siriusniyo: And I fought Voriath directly for over an hour.
Beatrice: You two might actually be insane.
Leo: We prefer 'committed.'
Isaac: Very committed.
Beatrice: Insane.
[She was smiling as she said it, though — the specific smile of someone who had watched something genuinely extraordinary happen and was choosing, generously, not to make too much fuss over how impossible it should have been.]
[The Astronomical Guardians arrived as one unit, Jeannette at the front, and for the first time since Leo's return, she didn't hold back the tears at all]
Jeannette: My Lord.
Leo: Jeannette. Hey.
Jeannette: You're alive.
Leo: Barely.
Jeannette: You went beyond anything any of us thought was possible.
Leo: I had good motivation.
[He looked at Isaac, still being fussed over by Quinn, and grinned.]
Leo: Someone kept pushing me.
[Across the battlefield, the Empire States, the rulers, every guild that had fought through this entire war began, slowly, to understand what had just happened. The realization spread outward in waves — first disbelief, then relief, then something closer to joy, guild members embracing each other, rulers exchanging looks of genuine, exhausted wonder]
Kai: It's over.
Stella: It's actually over.
Cyra: Two boys and a hidden third friend just ended a war the entire multiverse couldn't win alone.
Nebula: I don't think either of them realizes what they just became.
[And somewhere in the collapsing ruins where Xuantian and Mercurius had made their final stand against Meltryllis, the two of them felt something shift]
Xuantian: The Nexus—
Mercurius: It's gone.... I must say congratulations to the two kids... I had fun..
Xuantian: It gave us power too. When it goes—
[He didn't finish]
[Both of them faded, quietly, without struggle, sealed away in the same instant the Nexus withdrew from the battlefield entirely, drawn back across the multiverse toward wherever — toward whoever — had made it in the first place]
[The war, in every sense that mattered, was finished]
To be continued...