The silence in Universe 3588 wasn't empty; it was the silence of aftermath. The silence of a void that had just consumed parts of Shinji Kazuhiko, reducing him from transcendent warrior to maimed remnant in the span of heartbeats. Saganbo's finger, a conduit of absolute negation, remained unwaveringly pointed at Shinji's remaining right arm. The pinprick of infinite night at its tip pulsed with hungry, patient anticipation.
"Your right arm," Saganbo reiterated, his voice a chilling monotone that resonated with the finality of a closing tomb, "has served its purpose admirably. Its destruction is... overdue."
Shinji hovered, a broken monument to defiance. The loss of his leg below the knee and three fingers wasn't just physical mutilation; it was an ontological amputation, a surgical removal from the ledger of what-is. The smooth, inert stumps weren't wounds—they were absences, brutal declarations that parts of his fundamental existence had been irrevocably erased from the tapestry of causality itself.
The Voidheart Surge thrummed uselessly within his core, a frantic engine searching for damage to repair and finding only void. His regeneration—legendary, evolutionary, transcendent—spun its wheels against nothing, unable to heal what had never been wounded because the concept of "wound" required something to have been damaged. These weren't injuries. They were conclusions.
The boundless calm of the Innate Self State churned now, no longer a serene ocean but a storm-tossed sea heaving under impossible pressure. Shinji could feel it—the State wasn't collapsing from exhaustion or strain. It was rejecting him.
The realization hit with cold, terrible clarity.
'"The Innate Self State exists outside struggle, outside effort, outside fear," Saganbo had said. '"It is cessation of trying."
But Shinji was trying. Desperately. Every fiber of his being was straining, fighting, resisting the verdict Saganbo had delivered. He was clinging to existence with white-knuckled desperation, and that desperation—that fundamental, human need to persist—was antithetical to the very nature of the State he inhabited.
The Innate Self State wasn't a technique to be maintained through will. It was a perspective that required the absence of will. And Shinji, faced with erasure, had rediscovered his will to survive.
The State couldn't coexist with that.
Like a hand releasing something it can no longer hold, the Innate Self State let him go.
The severance was instant and absolute. The profound calm evaporated like mist under a supernova. The infinite clarity shattered into a thousand jagged fragments of terror and pain. The effortless command over his power dissolved, leaving only the familiar, desperate golden-green glow of his base spiritual energy—raw, unstable, fueled by fear rather than transcendence.
The crimson light blazing around him winked out, replaced by that frantic golden-green pulse. The pressure he'd been existing beside rather than under slammed into him with full, brutal force, crushing his spirit, driving the air from lungs that didn't need to breathe. His vision swam. His remaining limbs trembled.
He felt small. Fragile. Mortal.
The mountain had become a pebble, and the ocean of Saganbo's power was preparing to swallow it whole.
*It discarded me* Shinji realized, the thought carrying a peculiar, hollow devastation. *I reached the State through cessation... and lost it through desperation. I became unworthy of it by trying too hard to keep it.*
The irony would have been almost beautiful if it wasn't so horrifying.
Saganbo observed this transformation with clinical interest, violet eyes tracking every flicker of destabilized energy, every tremor of Shinji's remaining limbs. "Ah," he said, and there was something almost like satisfaction in the single syllable. "There it is. The State has released you. Fascinating. It seems even cessation-transcendence has its limits—not of power, but of context. When survival instinct reasserts itself, the State recognizes the incompatibility and... withdraws. You are mortal again, Fourth Trascender. Fully, completely mortal."
He didn't gloat. Didn't mock. Simply stated it as observable fact.
"And now," Saganbo continued, his finger still aimed with surgical precision, "we conclude what we began."
*It bypasses everything,* Shinji thought, the realization a cold knife twisting in his gut even as his golden-green energy flared desperately around his core. *Act 6 transcended concepts like pain and death... but it can't transcend absolute unmaking. The Innate Self State made me irrelevant to conventional conflict... but Saganbo's destruction isn't conventional. His erasure isn't an effect I can reverse or endure—it's the deletion of the cause itself. My arm... if that beam hits... it will be like it never existed. Not just gone... never was.*
The sheer, horrifying finality of it paralyzed him for a microsecond.
A microsecond Saganbo didn't grant him.
While his finger remained aimed, his other hand moved. Dark energy—not coalescing but condensing from the surrounding void of the universe itself, drawn from the death of distant stars and the entropy of collapsed matter—gathered in his palm. It wasn't a sphere; it was a swirling vortex of localized annihilation, a miniature event horizon that devoured the faint starlight trying to reach them, casting Saganbo in an even deeper, more terrifying silhouette against the cosmic backdrop.
The pressure radiating from it wasn't just force; it was a sucking emptiness that threatened to unravel Shinji's spiritual cohesion, pulling at the threads of his existence like fingers prying at a tapestry.
Shinji braced, pouring every ounce of his remaining power into his golden-green aura, focusing Act 3's manipulation not on attack, but on reinforcing his very spiritual structure against the encroaching entropy. His core pulsed frantically, the Voidheart Surge responding to proximity to annihilation with desperate, evolutionary fire.
*I have to dodge. I have to move. He's attacking with both hands—the vortex to force movement, the finger to punish the evasion. It's a trap with no exit. But if I don't move—*
Saganbo's hand flicked. The vortex of dark energy didn't fly; it unfolded. Space distorted around it as it surged toward Shinji, a wavefront of pure erasure expanding silently, inevitably, swallowing light and concept in its advance.
Voidstep.
Shinji poured terror and will into the spatial shift, aiming to reappear far to the left, putting the expanding wave between himself and Saganbo's finger. He felt the spatial fold tear open, felt the chilling kiss of the interstitial void, felt his consciousness sliding through the gap in reality—
—and stumbled.
Without the Innate Self State's perfect equilibrium, the Voidstep was rough. He reappeared not smoothly but crashing, his remaining leg buckling, his balance destroyed by the absence of limbs his spatial sense still expected to be there. He slammed against the invisible plane of orientation he maintained in the void, gasping, vision blurring.
The wave of annihilation was closing fast, but he was now off its direct path by mere meters. He twisted desperately, pouring his golden-green energy into evasion, sheer survival instinct overriding thought.
He was almost clear. Almost—
Saganbo's finger moved with imperceptible speed, the motion containing no wasted effort, no excess flourish. The calculation was instant and perfect: intersect the spatial coordinate Shinji's right hand would occupy during his desperate dodge.
Not where it was. Where it would be.
FZZZT!
Shinji screamed.
A raw, agonized sound torn from a throat suddenly, horrifyingly vulnerable. The sound echoed through the void—not physically, but psychically, a broadcast of pure suffering that rippled through nearby dimensional boundaries like a stone thrown into still water.
He looked down, and the horror was fresh, renewed, compounded.
His right hand, from the wrist down, was simply gone. Vanished. Not severed. Not cauterized. Not even torn away. Erased. The smooth, inert stump at the end of his forearm was identical to the others—a testament to permanent, irreversible loss, a declaration that this part of him had been retroactively concluded from the narrative of his existence.
The golden-green energy around him flickered wildly, unstable, shocked by the impossibility. His core pulsed erratically, the Voidheart Surge trying and failing to surge against nothing, confused by an injury that wasn't an injury but an absence.
He tumbled away from the expanding annihilation wave, gasping soundless sobs that wracked his frame. He clutched the new stump against his chest, the phantom pain of an impossible loss warring with the horrifying numbness of the void where flesh should be, where bone should flex, where fingers should curl.
He hovered, panting, golden eyes wide with shock, terror, and the crushing, undeniable weight of defeat.
He was down to one leg. One arm ending in a stump. Stripped of his ultimate state. The Fourth Trascender was broken.
Saganbo drifted closer through the void, the annihilation wave dissipating harmlessly behind him like smoke in wind. He observed Shinji's degradation with the cold curiosity of a scientist examining a specimen that had exceeded expectations but ultimately confirmed the hypothesis.
"It's over, then," he stated. Not a question. An observation. The pinprick of darkness at his fingertip winked out. There was no need for threats now. The threat was implicit in Shinji's shattered form, in the stumps, in the wild, desperate flicker of his destabilized aura.
Shinji forced his head up, blue eyes blazing with defiance even now—though it was the defiance of the cornered animal, not the conqueror. Blood trickled from a split lip gained during his stumbling voidstep, freezing instantly in the vacuum into a small ruby crystal that drifted away. "No," he rasped, the word scraping his throat raw, tearing at vocal cords stressed beyond endurance. "It's not!" He pushed against the void with Act 3, forcing himself upright on his single leg, golden-green energy flaring erratically around his core and the stump of his left arm. "It's the only option left!"
Saganbo tilted his head, and for a moment—just a moment—something that might have been respect flickered in those ancient violet eyes. "Admirable," he conceded. "Futile, but admirable. You possess a similar spirit to the one that made the ones before you legendary. But spirit alone..." He raised his hand again, dark energy beginning to coalesce with terrible, patient slowness. "...cannot overcome essence. You know this now. The lesson has been taught. The conclusion is inevitable."
The orb of negation formed in his palm—smaller than the vortex, denser, radiating pure concentrated unmaking. It pulsed with silent hunger, a black sun that devoured hope itself. This was no longer assessment. No longer measurement. This was dismissal. A contemptuous execution of something that had proven interesting but was now merely inconvenient.
Shinji roared, the sound tearing from his core rather than his throat, a primal expression of refusal that transcended words. He poured every last drop of his spirit—the dregs of his Acts, the fading embers of his Voidheart Surge, his rage at Kokuto's blade, his grief for Kiyomi's smile, his love for those who had fought beside him—into the golden-green maelstrom swirling around the stump of his left arm.
It grew, pulling in the sparse cosmic energy of the dead universe, a miniature, unstable sun of desperate defiance against the encroaching dark. It was ugly. Unrefined. A far cry from the elegant, controlled power of the Innate Self State or the precise devastation of Act 6.
But it was his. Human. Imperfect. And absolutely, defiantly real.
"Farewell, Fourth Trascender," Saganbo murmured, and there was a note of finality in the words that went beyond this moment, beyond this universe. It was the closing of a chapter in the cosmic ledger. He flicked his wrist with casual, dismissive ease.
The dark orb shot forward, silent, inevitable.
Shinji thrust his stump forward, unleashing the desperate blast with a wordless scream that contained everything he couldn't say, everything he'd never get to say.
The energies met in the void between them.
For a fraction of a second—a sliver of time so thin it barely registered on any scale—the golden-green light held. Fueled by Shinji's indomitable will, by his refusal to accept the verdict, by the sheer human stubbornness that had carried him from a blood-soaked apartment in Tokyo to the void between universes, it pushed back against annihilation itself.
Then, like paper before a plasma torch, like ice before the sun, like hope before entropy's final word, it simply dissolved.
The dark orb consumed Shinji's attack without pause, without resistance, without acknowledgment. It was a non-interaction. Shinji's defiance was registered, noted, and dismissed by something that operated on a level where defiance was conceptually irrelevant.
The orb struck him square in the chest.
There was no explosion. No dramatic blast wave. No final words or gestures or cinematic slow-motion collapse.
Shinji Kazuhiko simply... unraveled.
From the point of impact, his body dissolved into shimmering motes of golden-green light that winked out of existence one by one like stars dying in accelerated time. His remaining leg, solid one moment, became translucent, then transparent, then gone. His torso, the core he'd fought so hard to protect, flickered through states of increasing unreality before dissipating entirely. His head—those wide golden eyes still blazing with defiant fury even as they ceased to be—dissolved last, the expression frozen in a final, soundless roar.
Within a heartbeat, only a faint afterimage remained in the void, a ghost-memory of yellow-green light shaped like a warrior.
Then that, too, faded.
Then silence. Utter, complete, absolute silence.
The Fourth Trascender, Shinji Kazuhiko, who had awakened the Innate Self State through pure cessation, who had fought gods and survived the impossible, who had transcended mortality only to be reduced beneath it, was gone.
Saganbo lowered his hand. The dark orb dissipated like smoke. He surveyed the empty void of Universe 3588, his expression unreadable—neither satisfied nor disappointed, simply... complete. A task finished. A variable eliminated. An equation balanced.
"The Fourth Trascender," he stated to the empty cosmos, the words flat and final as a tombstone's epitaph, "is no more."
He turned, purple-black energy rippling around him in preparation for departure. A spatial distortion began to form, reality folding to accommodate his transit back to his sanctum.
He paused.
Violet eyes narrowed, scanning the void one final time with the meticulousness of someone who had learned, over eons, that assumptions were how empires fell.
Nothing. Only emptiness and the faint, fading echoes of erased existence.
Satisfied, Saganbo stepped through the fold in space, leaving Universe 3588 to its grave-silence.
Universe 3523 - Saganbo's Sanctum (Ruined Throne Room)
Saganbo materialized amidst the ruins of his throne room, the spatial fold sealing behind him with a soft whisper of displaced air. The shattered obsidian, the weeping neutron star fragments embedded in walls, the massive trench carved by Shinji's throw, the vaporized sections of god-stone—it was a mess, an affront to the ordered aesthetic he preferred.
He frowned, a flicker of genuine irritation crossing his face as he surveyed the damage. "Tchk," he clicked his tongue, the sound echoing in the oppressive silence. "This needs repairing. Annoying." He raised a hand, purple-black energy beginning to swirl around his fingers with focused intent, preparing to reassemble the god-stone through sheer application of divine will and spatial manipulation.
KRA-BOOOOOOOOOM!
The massive, reinforced doors sealing his sanctum—each weighing as much as a small moon, forged from divine materials designed to withstand cosmic-scale assaults—didn't just blow open.
They vaporized in a cataclysm of overlapping energies: Emerald spiritual force, violet lightning, superheated molten rock, and searing white light that burned afterimages into the air itself. The detonation was so violent that the shockwave cracked the remaining walls, sent cascading debris from the ceiling, and momentarily destabilized the pocket dimension's ambient pressure.
Dust and pulverized god-stone billowed inward, momentarily obscuring the entrance in a choking cloud.
When it cleared—slowly, dramatically, like a curtain being drawn back to reveal actors on a stage—five figures stood silhouetted against the corridor's dim light.
They were ruined.
Merus, cerulean skin marred by deep, weeping gashes that leaked luminous blood, one arm hanging limp and useless at his side, the shoulder visibly dislocated. His pristine suit was torn to shreds, exposing burns and bruises across his torso. But his eyes—those ancient, divine eyes—blazed with wrath so profound it seemed to warp the air around his head.
Kagaya, towering but hunched, his massive frame listing to one side. His tribal markings pulsed erratically over a chest covered in dark bruises the size of dinner plates and burns that still smoked faintly. His Boulder-Breaker was gripped in a trembling hand, the weapon itself cracked along its length. Blood—emerald-tinted and thick—dripped steadily from a gash across his forehead.
Shirou, leaning heavily on his rifle as if it were a cane, using it to keep himself upright. His armor was cracked in a dozen places, one pauldron completely missing. His face was a mask of bruises, one eye swollen nearly shut, the other—that strange crimson eye—narrowed with lethal, calculating focus despite the obvious pain.
Miryoku, her white hair singed at the ends and matted with soot, her rose-gold jacket torn nearly to ribbons. Luminous blood—the blood of Luminarans, which glowed faintly even when spilled—trickled from her nose and a deep gash across her forehead. Her hands trembled as light flickered unsteadily around her clenched fists, the harmonics unstable. Even if she wasn't as torn as the others.
Netsudo, trembling so violently it was visible even at a distance, partially hidden behind Kagaya's massive form. His orange hair was matted with soot and sweat, his eyes wide with barely-controlled terror. Wisps of smoke still curled from his intact hand, evidence of the fire that had helped breach the doors.
They looked like soldiers who had fought through hell itself. And they had—the Labyrinth's remaining chambers, whatever had delayed Kokuto, and the final desperate sprint through Saganbo's domain to reach this place.
Saganbo lowered his repair-focused hand, purple-black energy dissipating. His expression shifted from irritation to mild surprise, then quickly settled into cold, analytical amusement. He scanned them with the detached interest of an entomologist examining interesting but ultimately insignificant insects, his gaze lingering on their injuries, their defiance, the desperate fury radiating from their spiritual signatures.
"What happened to Kokuto?" he mused aloud, his voice perfectly calm amidst the settling debris and the crackling of residual energies. "I know for a fact he didn't lose... not to you. That is just perfectly impossible by every metric I can calculate." His tone carried absolute certainty. "I wonder how you managed to arrive here, then."
The implication hung in the air, heavy and ominous: Kokuto had been delayed, not defeated. And whatever they'd done to delay him was temporary at best.
"WHERE IS SHINJI?!" Merus roared, his voice cracking the air itself, thick with anguish and barely-restrained fury. Divine energy sputtered around his good hand, unstable and wild, no longer the controlled precision of a God of Creation but the desperate lashing of grief made manifest. He took a staggering step forward, cerulean blood dripping steadily onto the shattered floor. "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HIM?!"
Saganbo met his gaze, violet eyes utterly devoid of empathy, sympathy, or even acknowledgment of Merus's pain as meaningful. He simply stated facts, delivered with the casual indifference of someone reporting yesterday's weather:
"He's dead."
The word hung in the air like a guillotine blade suspended at the apex of its fall.
"Reduced to nothing. Erased from the ledger of existence. The Fourth Trascender is no more." He paused, surveying their reactions with clinical interest. "And you pieces of half-dead meat will follow suit soon enough. Consider it mercy—a swift conclusion rather than the slow degradation I inflicted upon him."
A collective flinch ran through the group like an electric shock.
Miryoku gasped, the sound raw and broken, her hand flying to her mouth as if to physically hold back the denial trying to escape. Her violet eyes flooded with luminous tears that spilled over immediately, tracing glowing paths down her cheeks. "No... no way!" she choked out, her voice strangled, denial warring with the horrifying certainty in Saganbo's tone and the absolute finality of his posture. "You're lying! Shinji... He wouldn't lose to you! You can't just—he can't be—"
"I DON'T WANNA DIE!!" Netsudo shrieked, the words high-pitched and breaking, his control finally shattering entirely. He shrank back further behind Kagaya, his whole body shaking so hard his teeth chattered audibly even in the aftermath of the explosion. "P-Please, I just wanna go home! I don't wanna—"
"BASTARD!!" Kagaya bellowed, and the sound was like thunder made flesh, shaking the remaining pillars, sending fresh cracks spiderwebbing through weakened structures. He hefted Boulder-Breaker despite the visible agony it cost him—bones grinding in his fractured arms, muscles tearing under the strain—and emerald energy flared wildly around the weapon despite his massive injuries. It was a miracle he was still standing, much less able to channel power. "YOU'LL PAY FOR WHAT YOU'VE DONE! I'LL CRUSH YOUR SKULL WITH MY BARE HANDS IF I HAVE TO!"
Shirou remained silent, but his grip tightened on his rifle until his knuckles went white, tendons standing out like cords. His crimson eyes—those strange, awakened eyes—scanned Saganbo with the detached, professional calculation of a sniper assessing an impossible target, cataloguing weak points that probably didn't exist, running probability calculations that all returned the same result: Zero.
*So that's the God of Destruction,* he thought, the internal monologue cold and analytical even through the grief trying to claw its way up his throat. *The source of all this suffering, all this chaos. Looks like a pissed-off aristocrat who just had his favorite rug ruined. But that aura... it's not just power. It's absence. It's like staring into the event horizon of every black hole that ever consumed a star, all compressed into one being. Shinji fought this? Shinji... actually managed to wound this?*
The realization of what Shinji had accomplished—and what it had cost—settled over him like a lead weight.
"YOU DAMNED MONSTER!!! SAGANBO!!!" Merus's scream was raw, primal, stripped of divine composure entirely—a sound of pure, unadulterated grief and rage that transcended language. His aura exploded outward, cerulean energy lashing the air like whips, unstable and wild. He launched himself forward in a streak of desperate fury, creation energy manifesting not as elegant constructs but as crude, violent lashes aimed at Saganbo's face, his chest, anywhere vulnerable.
Kagaya roared and charged, each thundering step cracking the floor, swinging Boulder-Breaker in a massive overhead arc that would have pulverized mountains. Emerald energy trailed the weapon like a comet's tail.
Miryoku, tears still streaming, wove strands of desperate, brilliant light with trembling hands, aiming to bind, to constrain, to do anything that might give them an opening. The light was beautiful even in its desperation—ribbons of pure luminance that sang with harmonic frequencies.
Shirou dropped to one knee, rifle snapping up with professional precision despite his injuries, the barrel already glowing with concentrated emerald energy as he lined up a shot at Saganbo's head, calculating lead time, spatial distortion, every variable his enhanced perception could process.
Only Netsudo remained frozen, paralyzed entirely by fear, unable to move or fight or do anything but watch in helpless terror.
They attacked as one, a desperate, coordinated assault born not of strategy but of pure, grief-fueled fury.
Saganbo didn't move from his position.
Didn't shift his stance.
Didn't raise a hand in defense.
He simply sighed, the sound heavy with profound, almost disappointed boredom, like a teacher watching students fail a test they'd been told the answers to.
"Pests," he stated flatly.
Then he raised a single hand, palm outward, fingers slightly spread.
"The Initial Stage," he said dismissively, his tone carrying the same energy as someone swatting flies, "will be more than sufficient for cleaning up this refuse."
A wave of pure, overwhelming spiritual pressure erupted from him.
It wasn't the focused unmaking he'd used on Shinji—the surgical erasure of concept and history. It wasn't even the Intermediate Stage's reality-decaying field. This was the crushing, sterilizing force he used on galaxies, the pressure that turned planets to dust and stars to ash, the weight of a God of Destruction's mere presence made manifest.
It slammed into the charging allies like an invisible wall forged from the deaths of a billion suns.
THUD-CRACK-SHATTER!
The sounds came simultaneously, overlapping into a single catastrophic chord of destruction.
Merus's creation energy attacks dissolved mid-flight, unraveling like thread pulled from cloth. He was caught mid-leap, the pressure hitting him with the force of a collapsing dimension. His trajectory reversed instantly. He was hurled backwards, spinning uncontrolled, and crashed into the far wall with enough force to crater the god-stone. Fresh cerulean blood sprayed in an arc. His eyes rolled back. He slumped, consciousness fled entirely, body going limp.
Kagaya's charge stopped dead as if he'd hit an invisible mountain. Boulder-Breaker flew from his grasp as bones audibly cracked in his arms and chest—not the small pops of minor fractures but the wet, grinding snaps of major structural failures. His ribs caved inward. He opened his mouth to roar defiance and only blood came out. He collapsed forward like a felled tree, hitting the floor face-first with a sickening thud, his massive frame utterly still.
Miryoku's light-bindings snapped like cobwebs touched by flame, dispersing into harmless sparkles. The backlash hit her like a physical blow. She was flung sideways, her scream cut off as she hit a pillar, the impact driving the air from her lungs. She slid down, leaving a smear of luminous blood, and crumpled at its base. Her light guttered out entirely. Unconscious.
Shirou's rifle shot vanished inches from the muzzle, the energy simply ceasing to exist under the pressure. The weapon itself—his faithful companion through countless battles—crushed flat in his hands as if gripped by an invisible fist. He had a single moment to register shock before the pressure drove him down, slamming him onto the shattered floor with bone-breaking force. He coughed once, blood spraying from his mouth, and went still.
Netsudo, untouched by the direct wave but crushed by the sheer psychic weight of Saganbo's presence—the existential dread radiating from a being who had ended countless worlds—simply folded at the knees like a puppet with cut strings and collapsed forward, unconscious before he hit the ground.
Silence descended again, heavier and more oppressive than before.
Five bodies lay scattered across the ruined throne room floor, broken and bleeding and utterly still. The only sounds were the faint crackle of dissipating energy, the soft drip of blood on stone, and the shallow, labored breathing of the barely-alive.
Saganbo stood amidst them, unmoved, his hand still raised. He looked down at the groaning, broken forms of Shinji's allies with an expression of profound disappointment, like a gardener surveying trampled weeds that weren't even worth the effort of properly clearing.
"Not even adequate for a proper warm-up," he muttered, lowering his hand. The pressure vanished as instantly as it had appeared, but its effects remained written in broken bones and spilled blood. He turned his back on them—the ultimate dismissal—and gestured toward the ruined throne with irritation. Purple-black energy began flowing from his fingertips again.
"How utterly disappointing," he continued, more to himself than to the unconscious figures. He shook his head. "Merely annoying interruptions."
He focused on reassembling the obsidian, piece by meticulous piece, muttering about proper symmetry and aesthetic balance, treating the bleeding heroes at his feet like mere rubble to be ignored until cleanup became convenient.
The sanctum settled into an awful, tomb-like quiet, broken only by the sound of god-stone being reconstructed and the faint, desperate breathing of those who'd come to save a friend who was already gone.
Universe 3588 - The Silent Grave
The void was absolute. Silent. Empty.
Or so it seemed.
Amidst the cosmic dust and the faint echoes of erased planets—the ghost-memories of matter that had once been—something pulsed.
It was faint. Almost imperceptible. A resonance rather than a presence, a vibration in the fabric of reality so subtle it barely registered above the background hum of the universe itself.
But it was there.
A fragment. Less than a body. Less than a face. Less than a ghost.
A single eye—blue, wide with agony and impossible, defiant will—hovered in the void. The lid was torn, the surrounding flesh ragged and incomplete, but the eye itself was intact, staring with manic intensity into the infinite dark.
Strands of hair drifted around it like seaweed in a dead sea—vibrant yellow, some tipped with green, still carrying the colors of life even in this place of absolute death. They moved with no wind, no current, propelled only by the faint spiritual energy that held them loosely together.
And beneath the eye, anchored to it by threads of golden-green power so thin they were almost invisible, pulsed a core.
Shinji's Trascender Core.
It was cracked. Deep fissures ran through its crystalline structure, dark lightning flickering in the fractures. It pulsed erratically, its rhythm the panicked stutter of a dying star rather than the steady throb of healthy power. Light leaked from the cracks like blood from wounds, dissipating into the void in wisps of wasted potential.
But it was intact.
Saganbo's erasure had unmade Shinji's flesh, dissolved his bones, scattered his essence—but the core, that fundamental anchor of his being, that seed of infinite potential that defined a Trascender, had endured.
Why?
Because in that final microsecond—that sliver of time between the dark orb's impact and his complete dissolution—Shinji's consciousness had done the only thing it could: it had retreated.
Not fled. Not escaped. Retreated into the one thing Saganbo's erasure couldn't touch without unmaking the very concept of "Trascender" itself from the multiverse's ledger. The core wasn't part of Shinji's body. It was the anchor of his soul, the foundation upon which his existence was built.
To erase it would require erasing the category of Trascender, not just the individual. And even Saganbo, in the Intermediate Stage, operating at the level of system-revision rather than simple blastings, couldn't do that casually. It would require the Final Stage, and preparation, and time.
Time he hadn't taken because Shinji's body had dissolved so completely, so thoroughly, that assuming total erasure was logical.
But logic didn't account for a core that had survived being crushed once already, for a will that had transcended mortality and couldn't quite remember how to accept death, for a consciousness that had touched the Innate Self State and learned that the only true defeat was accepting defeat.
The eye stared into the void with single-minded, manic intensity. There was no thought behind it—not coherent thought, anyway. Only imperative. Only command. Only the fundamental, human stubbornness that had defined Shinji Kazuhiko since the moment Kokuto's blade had first pierced his chest in that blood-soaked apartment.
Return.
Fight.
Hold.
The core pulsed, responding to the will even through the cracks, even through the damage. The Voidheart Surge—that evolutionary engine that had carried him through impossible odds—stirred weakly within the fractures. It was confused, disoriented, searching for a body to enhance and finding only void and a single eye.
But it was there. And where there was Voidheart, there was potential for adaptation, for evolution, for survival beyond survival.
Shinji's consciousness—reduced to the barest spark, a pilot light of selfhood in the vast darkness—seized control of what little remained. Act 3: Spiritual Energy Manipulation. Not for attack. Not for defense. For propulsion.
He poured the dregs of his existence, the final embers of power from a core that should by all rights be extinct, into a singular purpose: movement.
Golden-green energy erupted from the cracked core itself, a crude jet of desperate force aimed backward, propelling the fragment—eye, hair, core—forward through the void. It was inefficient. It was ugly. It burned through reserves that didn't exist, drawing on some deeper well of sheer refusal to fuel the impossible.
But it moved.
The coordinates were burned into his fading consciousness with the precision of trauma: Universe 3523. Saganbo's throne room. Where his friends had gone. Where the final stand would be made.
If there was to be an ending, let it be there. Together. Not alone in this grave of erased stars.
The eye stared forward, unblinking—it couldn't blink, lacked the eyelid to do so. The hair streamed behind like a banner. The core pulsed its dying rhythm, each beat a declaration: Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.
The fragment shot through the void, a comet of shattered hope and final defiance, leaving a faint, fading trail of golden-green energy in the graveyard universe—a scar across emptiness that said, however briefly: Something was here. Something refused.
Universe 1923 - The Fractured Nebula
Space here was torn. Not metaphorically, but literally—great rents shimmered with unstable energies that bled colors the human eye had no names for, nebulae were shredded into cosmic confetti that drifted in impossible patterns, and the corpses of shattered planets drifted like morbid asteroids through a void that had been fundamentally violated by the combat that had raged here.
Stars in this region had dimmed, their light siphoned away by the aftershocks of power that operated on scales beyond conventional warfare.
In the epicenter of the devastation, two figures hung, locked not in combat but in a tableau of mutual, absolute ruin.
X materialized slowly, his non-reflective grey cloak now tattered to the point of uselessness, hanging from his shoulders in strips that revealed glimpses of luminous silver skin beneath. That skin was crisscrossed with deep, smoking gashes that bled shimmering argent light in slow pulses, something that served a similar function for whatever X truly was. One arm hung at an unnatural angle, the elbow bent backward in a way that suggested fundamental structural damage. His breathing, usually imperceptible to the point of nonexistence, was now a ragged, wet sound that echoed wrong in the vacuum.
Opposite him, Dentetsu was a ruin that somehow still possessed a pulse.
His bare torso—normally a canvas of intimidating, raw power—was now a mass of deep puncture wounds that wept dark blood, burns that pulsed with unstable black and violet energy like infected wounds, and impact craters where blows had landed with enough force to crater his divine flesh inward. His spiky dark hair was matted with his own blood, plastered to his skull. One eye was swollen completely shut, purple and grotesque. The other glared with feral, exhausted hatred that somehow remained undimmed despite his body's betrayal.
Blood—thick, dark, almost black—streamed from his nose and mouth in a continuous flow, forming floating spheres around him that drifted in the low gravity like morbid pearls.
He was barely conscious. Barely functional. But the hate in that one remaining eye could have ignited stars.
X raised a trembling, silver hand—the one that still worked—and touched the deep gash across his chest where Dentetsu's final blow had nearly bisected him. Where his fingers made contact with the wound, something changed. The bleeding slowed immediately. The edges of the gash shimmered like a mirage in heat. And then, with disturbing organic fluidity, the wound began to knit itself closed. Flesh and energy rewove seamlessly, the process accelerating until within seconds the gash was simply... gone. Not healed in the conventional sense—revised. As if the injury had been retroactively edited out of X's recent history.
"I have no more time for this diversion," X stated, his voice toneless but carrying an undercurrent of strain and urgency that hadn't been present before. "The situation has evolved beyond parameters. I'll excuse myself."
Dentetsu tried to surge forward—every muscle in his body screaming defiance even as they failed him. His attempt translated to a pathetic spasm. His body convulsed violently, and a fresh gout of dark blood erupted from his mouth, hanging in the void like an accusation. He choked, his words slurred almost beyond recognition, his tongue thick and uncooperative. "D-Damn i-t... Y-You th-in-k... I'll l-let you... g-get a-away?" He tried to raise a fist, the limb trembling so violently it was almost seizure-like. Black energy sputtered weakly around it, flickering like a dying flame. "I-I'll... k-kill—"
The energy died. The fist dropped. His remaining eye began to roll back.
X regarded him with something that, if he were capable of such things, might have been respect. Or perhaps just professional acknowledgment. "You will not," he stated with absolute certainty, not cruelty but simple fact. "Because you are utterly exhausted. Your body is operating at minimum functionality. Your spirit is magnificent, your power..." He paused, and in that pause was genuine assessment rather than flattery, "...godlike. Truly, Monarch, you stand as a peer to the deities you openly scorn and secretly wish to supplant. But even gods have limits. You have reached yours."
He gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod—a gesture of acknowledgment from one warrior to another.
"Rest. Your fight... for now... is concluded. You are..." X's head tilted slightly, as if accessing data streams invisible to others, "...definitely almost as formidable as Saganbo himself in terms of raw destructive output. I acknowledge this. But I no longer have the luxury of time to continue this engagement."
Before Dentetsu could muster another word, another spark of energy, another ounce of defiance to throw at the uncaring universe, his remaining eye finally gave up the fight. It rolled back fully, showing only white. His body went completely limp, all tension fleeing at once. The sputtering energy around his fist winked out like a candle in a hurricane.
He hung there, unconscious, a broken god suspended in the wreckage of their battlefield—a testament to a battle that had pushed both combatants to and past the absolute brink of what they could endure.
X watched him for a long moment, eyes—visible now through the torn sections of his hood—scanning the unconscious Monarch with something approaching clinical curiosity. Then he turned away.
*Saganbo's sanctum,* X's thoughts were sharp and focused despite his injuries. *The Fourth Trascender's energy signature vanished 4.7 minutes ago. Total dissolution. The God of Creation and his allies have breached the throne room. Estimated time until total party elimination: 2.3 minutes if Saganbo engages seriously.*
*I am needed.*
A spatial distortion opened before him—not elegant or subtle, but crude and urgent, torn open through brute application of will rather than careful manipulation. It looked like a wound in reality, bleeding unstable energies at its edges.
X stepped through without hesitation, the fold sealing behind him with a sound like reality exhaling in relief.
Dentetsu remained, floating unconscious amidst the corpses of shattered worlds, slowly drifting on cosmic currents toward a distant asteroid field. The universe, indifferent to the struggles of gods and mortals alike, continued its expansion.
Universe 3523 - Saganbo's Sanctum
Saganbo was nearly finished with the throne's reconstruction. The obsidian was almost perfectly reassembled, the fractures sealed, the weeping neutron stars repositioned with meticulous care. He stepped back, admiring his handiwork with the critical eye of an artist, already mentally cataloguing the remaining imperfections that would need addressing.
Behind him, the broken forms of Shinji's allies lay scattered and still. Their breathing was shallow. Their blood pooled slowly on the floor. They were no longer even worth guarding against—mere broken toys to be disposed of at convenience.
He raised his hand to address the final imperfection, a slight misalignment in the throne's left armrest that offended his sense of symmetry—
CRASH!
Not through the door this time. Not through the wall.
Through the ceiling.
A section of reinforced god-stone near the vaulted apex exploded inward in a shower of debris and a final, desperate burst of golden-green energy. It wasn't an attack—it was an uncontrolled, crashing entry, something moving too fast to stop, something that had exhausted every ounce of control it possessed just reaching this point.
Saganbo turned, his hand lowering, his expression shifting from irritation to mild curiosity. He expected perhaps Kokuto, finally freed from whatever had delayed him. Or possibly X, though the energy signature was wrong for that.
What entered the sanctum was neither.
It was a fragment. A horror. An impossibility given form through sheer, manic refusal.
A single eye—blue, blazing with agonized, manic defiance that transcended sanity—hovered near the shattered ceiling. The pupil was dilated to pinprick. The iris seemed to pulse with its own internal light. It stared down at Saganbo with an intensity that bordered on madness, on transcendence, on something that existed in the space between absolute determination and complete psychotic break.
Strands of hair—vibrant yellow tipped with green, the colors of Earth's spring—drifted wildly around it, tangled and chaotic, still carrying the life-colors even here, even now.
And beneath it, pulsing erratically like a heart on the verge of final arrest, was Shinji Kazuhiko's Trascender Core. The cracks had deepened, the fractures spreading like a windshield on the verge of shattering completely. Dark lightning arced between the fissures. Light bled from every crack in golden-green wisps that dissipated immediately, wasted energy hemorrhaging into the void.
But it pulsed. It existed. It persisted.
Trailing faint wisps of dissipating energy like the afterburn of a meteor that had crossed impossible distance on nothing but will, it hovered just inside the ruined sanctum.
Saganbo's violet eyes widened—not much, just a fraction, but it was there. Genuine surprise. A flicker of something that might have been impressed acknowledgment. "Oh?" he breathed, and a dark, thin smile touched his lips. "So the cockroach did leave a piece behind after all. More resilient than anticipated. Fascinating."
The surprise morphed quickly into cold amusement, calculation already spinning in that ancient mind. "However..." His aura shifted with terrible, casual ease, the purple-black deepening instantly, the light-devouring field intensifying as he transitioned smoothly back into the Intermediate Stage. The air didn't just crackle—it decayed, reality flaking away at the edges of his presence. "...what will you accomplish with only a fragment of your face remaining? You have no body. No limbs. No mouth to speak defiance. Merely an eye and the memory of what you were."
He raised his hand with the same terrible, patient precision he'd used before. Index finger extending, the motion carrying all the inevitability of the tide. The pinprick of infinite night ignited at its tip—that mote of absolute darkness that served as reality's delete key. "Allow me to finish the job properly this time. Permanently. With the thoroughness it should have received from the start."
The single blue eye locked onto Saganbo's raised finger. There was no flinching, no attempt to flee, no survival instinct asserting itself. Just focus. Absolute, manic, burning focus that refused to acknowledge the concept of its own impossibility.
There was no mouth to speak. No lungs to push air. No throat to form words.
But a voice resonated through the sanctum anyway—a psychic projection fueled by the core's final, desperate flickers, raw with pain beyond description, stripped of hope beyond recovery, yet vibrating with the kind of resolve that bent reality simply by refusing to acknowledge reality's verdict:
"I'LL HOLD YOU... UNTIL MY LAST BREATH!"
The words echoed in the minds of everyone present—in Saganbo's ancient consciousness, in the barely-conscious minds of Shinji's broken allies bleeding on the floor.
The core pulsed violently, gathering the absolute dregs of its power in a way that should have been impossible, that violated every understanding of how spiritual energy functioned, pulling from reserves that didn't exist, fueled by something deeper than power, older than technique, more fundamental than the Acts themselves.
It was pulling from self. From the bare, stubborn fact of "I am." From the refusal that had defined Shinji Kazuhiko since the first time he'd opened his eyes in a pool of his family's blood and chosen to stand anyway.
Saganbo's smile widened slightly, genuinely entertained now by the sheer audacity of the display. "Admirable," he murmured. "Utterly futile, but undeniably admirable. Very well, then, Fourth Trascender. Let us see your final stand."
The darkness at his fingertip pulsed, growing, hungry for completion.
The golden eye stared back, unblinking, unwavering.
And in the minds of those barely conscious on the floor—Merus laying unconscious, Miryoku's eyes fluttering open, Kagaya's fingers twitching—a single thought formed with devastating clarity:
*Shinji... is still alive.*
The fragment gathered its power, preparing to meet oblivion one final time, and the sanctum held its breath for what would surely be the absolute, undeniable end of Shinji Kazuhiko's impossible journey.