Before the battle with Ava's team ever began, the story shifted back.
To what Team Game Over had been doing.
Multiple explosions ripped across a city.
Citizens ran in blind panic.
Four Dark Lord students another academy squad were tearing a world apart. Buildings melted. Streets burned.
Their leader grinned at the chaos.
"Good job, team. This is our fifth universe. A couple more galaxies and we move on to the next one."
He reached for his hypercube.
Ready to summon demons and claim the planet.
A streak of orange energy flashed past.
The hypercube vanished from his grip.
"What was that?" he snapped.
All four students stopped and looked upward.
They saw them.
Team Game Over hanging in the sky.
Rakshasas floated forward first, both heads laughing as he twirled the stolen hypercube in one hand.
The Dark Lord student leader screamed,
"What are you doing!"
Rakshasas only laughed harder.
Nullius drifted down beside him, white aura hugging his body like silk.
"It is simple," he said. "We arrive, you fall, we claim the glory. This world belongs to us now, not you."
One of the frantic students below shouted,
"That is not fair! We conquered this planet. You do not get to steal our glory!"
Sand swirled in a tightening vortex.
Khepri descended on his scarab, his voice a hiss of contempt.
"Be silent. The only glory people like you earn is dying. People like us decide victories. You are nothing but pawns… and we are the kings and queens who rule over you."
Gula said nothing.
Her coffin rattled.
Another student yelled,
"That is not fair!"
Nullius smiled and laughed.
"Not fair? Fine. Let us give you a chance. Let us play a game."
White energy rose off his skin like mist.
"Dimension Ascension's - Tabula Mortis — board game."
White light stormed outward, swallowing the planet.
His domain locked into place.
New laws.
New concepts.
Nullius's will rewritten across reality.
The four students froze in mid-air.
They could not move.
"What is happening?" one cried.
Nullius stood before them alone, his team hovering above like executioners.
"It is simple. We play a game. My Dimension Ascension already set the rules. Break them and you die. You wanted a chance at glory? Prove it."
He issued the command with casual authority, as though nothing that followed could possibly threaten him.
"All four of you will attack me at once. You unleash your strongest technique. I unleash mine. Whoever is still alive at the end wins, and your hypercube remains yours."
The four students exchanged looks.
Terror bled through their composure.
One of them whispered, almost trembling,
"I am scared. I do not think we can beat him."
Another forced the answer,
"We have no choice. We fight."
They gathered their energy, forcing technique into discipline.
Gentle Fist steadied the chaos of their power, allowed a universe-breaking output to compress into a controlled and survivable blast for the surrounding area.
Together they unleashed it.
The explosion swallowed Nullius completely.
Light and dust washed across the landscape, a storm of silence in its wake.
When the haze cleared, he was still standing, smiling as though he had been waiting for something interesting to happen.
"Good. My turn."
A sphere of white energy formed in his palm.
It was small, almost unremarkable until they felt what it contained.
He did not bother to stabilize it with Gentle Fist.
Panic broke their discipline.
One of them shouted,
"He is not even using Gentle Fist. That will kill us. That will destroy everything."
Two of the students tried to hold their ground, bracing for impact.
The other two acted from pure instinct, shattering the paralysis of Tabula Mortis and fleeing upward, desperate to outrun the attack.
The moment they crossed the boundary of the domain, their forms began to disintegrate.
Fingers broke into white dust.
Voices scattered into static.
Bodies faded like erased ink.
Nullius watched them unmake, expression unchanged.
"You broke the rules. So you die. Erased from reality."
The last traces of them vanished.
The remaining two had no time to reconsider.
The white sphere detonated against them.
There was no counter, no miracle.
The blast consumed the planet first, then the star system, then the universe itself.
The collapse spread outward into neighboring realities, unraveling everything the explosion touched,multiple universes destroyed.
When it was over there was no sky, no ground, no memory only a hollow void.
Nullius stood alone in the emptiness as though it were a victory stage.
"Game over. I win."
One of Rakshasas's heads exhaled with admiration.
"Good job, boss."
Khepri snarled,
"Stop being reckless. We were supposed to conquer, not destroy. How do we rank up if you erase everything? Use Gentle Fist next time."
Nullius shrugged.
"You are right. I could not help myself. I do not want trouble with the generals again. But fewer students means less competition. Less competition means a clearer path to becoming high generals."
He grinned into the nothingness.
Ambition sharpening into hunger.
Khepri scowled.
"The more universes we destroy, the fewer points we earn for conquering."
Nullius waved him off.
"I get it. No more full erasures. I will use Gentle Fist next time. Come on. We are not finished."
Team Game Over scattered.
They hunted other students, ambushed them, demanded submission.
Any world those students conquered was stolen.
Any resistance was punished.
Nullius dropped onto planets and erased civilians, memories, and history with a gesture.
Khepri went world to world, drowning nations in sand and unleashing colossal insects that swallowed continents.
Rakshasas shattered physics, splitting himself into multiple forms and spreading chaos across entire populations.
Gula used her raw strength and supernatural gifts to crush armies and plant their coffin-flags in the ruins.
Once the devastation was complete, they summoned a hypercube and released another wave of demons to enslave whatever remained.
When the occupation was secured, they turned away, left the world behind and moved to the next.
Team Game Over conquered hundreds of universes.
Their numbers climbed.
Their reputation darkened.
Until they regrouped again.
Nullius stood holding the fading hand of someone he had just erased from existence.
His team hovered beside him.
"You all remember that kid from earlier?" Nullius asked, smiling. "The one who dared talk back to me?"
Khepri nodded.
"Yes. That kid. His name is Ava. He reached the top twenty."
Rakshasas snorted.
"Yeah, boss. He was stupid for mouthing off. We should go punish him now. No generals around to stop us. Not even your father."
Nullius laughed, eyes sharp with resentment.
"You read my mind. That little brat tried to humiliate me in front of my father."
Khepri lifted his staff. Gold and green light gleamed.
"I know where he is. I put insect trackers on almost every student."
A portal opened, woven from the bugs' locations.
It locked onto Ava's position.
Nullius grinned.
"Perfect. Let us go."
They launched through the teleporter as a single unit.
That moment ended the story of the past.
The flashback dissolved.
Now the present returned
the battlefield waiting,
Ava and his team already preparing to face them.