So long as she could probe the depths of Acheron, even if she ultimately had to retreat, she could still bring back information of immense value—instead of a meaningless rout.
At that thought, a glint flashed in Phantylia's eyes.
Though she had decided to take a reckless gamble, she felt little worry about perishing here.
As the most cunning and hard-to-deal-with Lord Ravager, a master of survival, she had long paved countless escape routes for herself—"a crafty rabbit with three burrows" was far from enough to describe her contingencies.
Even if this golden-tree body—painstakingly forged—were to collapse here, her core consciousness would not be completely annihilated. She would always have a chance to make a comeback.
For Phantylia, a temporary, severe loss of vitality was far preferable to losing face on the spot.
Having prepared for the worst, her enchanting, peerless smile resurfaced on her pale cheeks, now tinged with a quiet, cold hint of killing intent and provocation.
"Emanator of Nihility… heh, what an awe-inspiring title."
She lightly shook her eerie folding fan, and the emerald radiance of life and the pitch-black aura of destruction around her erupted once more.
More torrential than ever before, the two utterly opposed forces—naturally repulsive to each other—were forcibly blended by her will into writhing, twisting torrents of obscure energy, enough to corrode stars and obliterate laws.
"But to think a single sentence could make an Lord Ravager halt? That is… underestimating the greatness of Destruction."
Before her words had fallen, the flood that fused life and death, creation and end did not rush straight toward Acheron. Instead, it suddenly changed course and slammed brutally into the star's inner sea itself—the surging, resplendent stream of life.
Her intent could not have been clearer.
She would threaten the planet's core to force Acheron to intervene, then closely observe the form and magnitude of the opponent's power in their response.
At the same time, she would create large-scale energetic chaos and visual cover to open the best window for her next move—or her retreat.
Yet before an assault fierce enough to put a first-rank deity on full alert, perhaps even injure them, Acheron's response was so calm it was suffocating.
She still stood as immovable as an ancient monolith. Only her pale fingers, resting lightly on the violet-black hilt, tightened ever so slightly—almost imperceptibly.
No earth-shaking clash of energies, no dazzling bursts of light.
The annihilating torrent that could erase stars, the instant it entered a certain range around Acheron, seemed to have its meaning and foundation of existence stripped away and rejected by some absolute rule.
The raging energy composing the torrent lost all internal logic and external definition, and vanished—utterly and silently.
It was not canceled or neutralized, but erased directly from the ledger of existence, returning to absolute, eternal nothing.
The entire process was so silent and smooth it was hair-raising, as if it had always been meant to be.
Phantylia's pupils contracted sharply again, but her offensive did not cease at this unfathomable scene; instead it grew even more violent and devious.
More supremely condensed, dusky beams of destruction lanced in from every direction at bizarre angles, with several insidiously fast rays stabbing straight toward the shivering halo of planar will in the distance—striking where the foe must defend.
This time, the long-silent Acheron finally made a more overt move.
She gripped the hilt.
Not the lightning-fast draw of a common swordswoman, but a slow, ceremonial opening motion, as if bearing boundless weight.
With that movement, an indescribable domain that froze the mind spread from her, swiftly expanding.
Colors bled away at a speed visible to the naked eye, turning into dead gray and white. All things lost their luster and vitality. Every sound was devoured. Even the surging energy flow seemed to become an absurd, silent pantomime.
All existence moved irreversibly toward the end of meaning and the terminus of being.
"I weep for the departed…"
A hollow, ethereal voice—like one carried from the void—sounded softly. It contained no joy, anger, sorrow, or delight, yet bore the compassion and stillness of one who sends off all things.
The world lost all color in that instant, reduced to absolute gray and white.
Acheron's once-smooth purple hair turned lifeless gray-white. Two thick streams of blood-tears slid from her empty eye sockets—ghastly and strange.
Weird blood-red markings crawled like living things up from her pale neck, and in a blink covered half her face and body, as if she had just bathed in a pool of blood, drenched in shocking crimson.
In this absolutely desaturated world of death, only Acheron remained the sole—and final—stain of blood across heaven and earth.
In that moment, Acheron displayed without reservation the true visage and terror of a Nihility Emanator.
"Dusk's rain... it too shall fall."
In this gray and white world, she seemed infinitely tall—like a deity presiding over the end—yet also as small as dust, as if she herself were part of the void.
The ōdachi in her hand did not come fully out of its sheath; only a sliver of a dark-red edge showed, as if it could devour all light and hope.
She seemed to swing casually, gently, toward Phantylia.
No brilliant arc of blade-light. No violent shock tearing space. Not even a ripple of energy.
Phantylia only felt that her very existence had been struck by an absolute, incomprehensible negation.
Her protective energy, her indestructible golden-tree body brimming with life force, even fragments of her soul's origin and consciousness—all became transparent, unreal in that instant, and then, like a sandcastle scattered by wind, began to collapse, crumble, and dissipate from the most fundamental level.
It was not physical or energetic destruction, but something more fundamental, more despairing—a fall from existence into nonexistence.
"Pff—!"
Phantylia spewed a mouthful not of blood, but of dark golden fluid composed of pure destructive energy mingled with the source of life. Her body trembled violently, and her aura withered at a terrifying speed, like an avalanche.
Horror filled her eyes as never before. She could clearly sense that a portion of her existence had been permanently and utterly erased from the cosmos.
Had she not pre-separated and hidden a part of her core origin as a fallback, and had the golden-tree body not provided terrifying life force as a buffer, that casual strike would have been enough to cast this Lord Ravager into eternal slumber—or utter nihility.
"Cannot… be opposed!"
The thought tolled like a death knell in the depths of her soul, shattering all luck and hesitation in an instant.
Without a shred of delay, face and dignity be damned, Phantylia let out a sharp, pained shriek and detonated, at any cost, the emergency escape she had planted deep within the golden-tree body, along with those parts already tainted by nihility and beyond salvation.
Boom!!!
A storm of extremely chaotic, twisted energy exploded, bizarre in nature, forcibly disrupting the mercilessly expanding domain of nihility for the briefest instant.
Seizing that minuscule yet priceless opening, a dark, deep rift of space—linked to a far, unknown coordinate—was suddenly torn open. Phantylia's now translucent, dim, and battered figure bolted into it like a startled bird, vanishing from sight.
"The Herta, Acheron—I will remember you both. Destruction will come."
Even in such a wretched, near-death flight, her resentful shriek came through the closing rift, striving to salvage the last shred of pride.
The rift sealed quickly. The star's inner sea gradually returned to calm, leaving only the chaotic zone of energy left by Phantylia's self-detonation and the lingering scent of destruction—proof of the savage, humiliating defeat an Lord Ravager had just suffered here.
Acheron slowly sheathed her blade and the nihility domain that returned all things to stillness dissipated silently.
Colors and subtle sounds returned to the space, but her eyes—still so hollow they seemed able to swallow all—remained fixed on the void where Phantylia had vanished.
"One more… blood debt."
She spoke softly, her voice still ethereal and calm, yet containing a soul-crushing heaviness and indifference.
On the throne, The Herta finally came back to herself from spectating. A rare stiffness lingered on her flawless face, and her all-seeing eyes flashed with a strange light as she stared intently at Acheron, who had returned to normal.
She had long learned from Lu Jingming that Acheron's strength was terrifying, and she was sure Acheron could suppress or even drive off the incomplete memory-body of Phantylia.
After all, Lu Jingming had spent a vast amount of precious Power of Truth to summon this special existence. Even if not at full strength, dealing with the memory-body of an Lord Ravager rebuilt upon a golden tree should be no problem.
But The Herta had not expected Acheron to win so… cleanly. It was outright a rout.
From start to finish, Acheron had essentially unleashed only a single, seemingly casual strike. Yet that blade—bearing the ultimate principle of nihility—made a notorious Lord Ravager truly experience defeat and fear, nearly leading to complete annihilation.
Especially that power which bleached the world and denied the very basis of existence—the priority was terrifyingly high, as if it stood above many conventional cosmic rules.
This undoubtedly provided several critical, even paradigm-shifting extreme parameters for The Herta's Simulated Universe project.
The Herta instinctively glanced at the nearby halo of planar will, still quivering and exuding a thick aura of fear.
From that nascent shard of consciousness, she clearly sensed that its fear toward Acheron surpassed even its fear of Phantylia.
Curious indeed.
Phantylia's malice toward it was naked—devour and replace—whereas Acheron had never shown it any malice; she had even protected it.
Yet the world's will instinctively feared Acheron more.
For no reason other than this: Phantylia's destruction remained a violent transformation within existence, while the nihility Acheron wielded was a total negation of existence itself.
Once tainted by that power of nihility, even a world's will might irreversibly fall into utter nothingness, with even the traces of its existence erased—a fate more despairing than being destroyed by an Lord Ravager.