The universe was dying around them — not with a bang, but with a deep sigh of cosmic resignation.
Each of Mei's breaths warped the air like a sun about to collapse, bending space into patterns of luminous interference. Each step Vernasha took — slower now, heavier — made space scream in dimensional agony. The very dimensions, unable to bear what they witnessed, tore into fragments like glass under unbearable pressure. Shards of worlds and memories mingled in sublime chaos: forests of crystal grew from oceans of liquid steel; floating cities of extinct civilizations dissolved into stellar dust; and through every crack, the primordial void peered in, indifferent.
The Silence That Came Before the Thunder
Mei moved first.
Her solar body shifted without sound, like a divine flare that transcended the need to disturb the air. When her fist — a compact mass of conscious plasma — struck Vernasha, the impact produced no explosion.
It produced silence.
A silence so absolute that sound itself fled in fear, leaving behind only the vacuum of pure perception. It was the stillness that exists between the heartbeats of a god, the moment when creation holds its breath.
But Vernasha did not retreat. Instead, she opened her hands in a gesture reminiscent of an inverted blessing, and the space around her shattered into irregular prisms. Each fragment reflected not just light, but alternate realities — thousands of different Vernashas, each fighting in a distinct timeline, a multidimensional symphony of coordinated chaos. An attack not against a body, but against the very concept of singularity.
Mei looked up — or the consciousness that served as sight — and understood.
Every prism, a possibility.
Every reflection, a different choice.
But I am not a body occupying a point.
I am a process occupying a state.
And then… she existed in all of them.
She did not divide. She did not multiply. She simply allowed her nature as an energy field to interact simultaneously with every overlapping layer of reality. Every reflected Vernasha was struck at once by a golden punch, a blow that did not pass through glass, but through the very idea of separation.
The realities merged and imploded in a collapse of possibilities, and what remained was a pure, terrible white void — a space where even time knelt and confessed its own impermanence.
Vernasha roared — and the roar echoed through a hundred universes simultaneously, a chorus of fury that made the vacuum shudder.
From her eyes, now fissures into an inner abyss, living black energy wept — the final seal of Azaroth breaking completely, releasing what remained of the demon's essence. The shadows did not wrap around her; they fused with her, weaving themselves into her flesh, her bones, her soul. Vernasha's body assumed a form that was less biology and more perverted theology: wings of solid shadow that sliced through dimensions like hot knives through butter; eyes that did not see, but perceived pasts, presents, and futures intertwined; hands whose fingers were laws of physics twisted into shapes of claws.
With one such hand, she reached up and tore the sky.
From the tear emerged two moons — or the idea of moons. One was made of purple fire, the same as the spheres, but now continuous and pulsing like a sick heart. The other was liquid darkness, a weighted absence that drank the light around it. When they collided — slowly, inevitably — they formed an eclipse of pure destruction. The brilliance born from their meeting was something that should never have existed — a color that hurt the senses, a light that was cold, a sound that was a shrieking silence.
The eclipse descended upon Mei like a cosmic funeral shroud.
And for the first time since her transcendence, her fire wavered.
The impact pushed her backward through nothingness, and the incandescent sand below — what remained of a floor — turned into molten glass that solidified into grotesque shapes of frozen pain. Vernasha closed in with a flash of pure intent, each of her strikes multiplying into ten through the manipulation of causality. It was not just strength; it was the fury of fallen ancient gods, the primordial chaos remembering its power through her.
Mei dodged, but the entire world seemed to move against her. Reality had become Vernasha's instrument. Every gesture of Mei was accompanied by solar flames twisting into beautiful, deadly spirals, but Vernasha danced between them as if she knew each step before it was taken.
Until she achieved the impossible — a direct, clean, inevitable strike.
The black energy — the antithesis of creation — struck Mei's chest like a spear of absolute darkness. It pierced her luminous body not by puncturing, but by unraveling, tearing a rift in the energy field that seemed to suck the very fire into an insatiable void.
The sound that followed was not a scream. It was thunder tearing through the layers of the soul itself, a cosmic lament that echoed through all dimensions connected to that battle.
Mei staggered. The golden form lost consistency for an instant, its edges becoming blurred, ghostly.
Vernasha seized the moment, striking with both hands in a sequence that did not follow linear time. Each impact created miniature universes from the clash of energies, only to destroy them in the same instant — an infinite cycle of birth and death that drained Mei's stability.
— I AM THE BEGINNING AND THE END! — Vernasha roared, her wings slicing infinity into shards of shattered reality.
But then… Mei stopped moving completely.
The golden glow ceased to pulse. The flames froze in place, as if time had stopped only for her. For an instant that lasted an eternity, she merely stood there — motionless, silent, as if she had given up, as if she had finally found an insurmountable limit.
Vernasha, panting, triumphant, raised her fist for the final blow. Her hand concentrated all remaining energy — from Fenra, from Azaroth, her own — into a single point of annihilation.
— DIE, NUHAY!
And the universe froze.
A single sound echoed through the frozen vacuum:
Thump.
Slow. Deep. Ancient. Not a sound for the ear, but for the bone, for memory, for the soul.
Thump.
The fire around Mei contracted violently, like a heart in systole, sucking all light and heat back into a central point. The void grew darker, colder, more absolute.
THUMP.
And then it expanded.
Not like an explosion, but like a revelation.
What emerged from the epicenter was no longer the Empress Nuhay, nor the solar goddess. It was something more fundamental, more terrible, more beautiful.
It was the Heart of the Sun.
Her body lost all recognizable form, becoming pure, pulsating golden energy, spiraling hypnotically around a core of white intensity so severe it was unbearable. The core did not shine — it existed with such force that light was an insignificant byproduct. The heat it radiated was so absolute that the concepts of time and space began to melt like wax, losing meaning. Distance, duration, matter — all became fluid, malleable, dreamlike.
With every pulsation — every primordial *thump* — the artificial dimensions Vernasha had created simply… ceased to be. They were not destroyed. They were not undone. They were unconjured, as if reality had forgotten them.
Vernasha tried to move, but her body did not respond. She was trapped not by force, but by truth. Her black wings ignited with silent golden flames, consuming themselves not as matter, but as concept. The power of Azaroth within her screamed in a final act of rebellion — and was silenced not by sound, but by a greater presence.
Then, Mei spoke. Or something resembling speech — a communication born from the fundamental vibration of the cosmos, understood directly by consciousness, not by ears.
— You do not understand, Vernasha...
The words were slow, heavy, each carrying the weight of an epiphany.
— I am not merely fire.
— I am not merely what burns.
— I am the reason fire exists.
— The need that precedes the flame.
— The attraction that makes oxygen seek fuel.
— The vacuum that cries out for heat.
The "ground" — whatever still served as a reference — vanished.
The "sky" turned into pure light, indistinguishable from any other direction.
And Vernasha was thrown back, not as a body, but as a rejected idea. Her physical form shattered into fragments of pure energy that tried, in vain, to maintain cohesion.
But she did not fall. She floated, disintegrating, and her gaze — what remained of it — still burned. Not with fear. Not with hatred.
With ecstasy.
— So this is it… — she murmured between panting laughs, each syllable costing pieces of her existence. — You became the very heart of the universe… the source… the prime mover…
She coughed, and the cough was light and shadow mixed.
— But there is still a limit, Empress. Every flame, however eternal it seems, needs fuel. And when the fuel runs out…
Her eyes found Mei's — or the point where eyes should have been.
— …the Sun also dies.
Her words echoed through the luminous chaos, finding resonance in something not even Mei could completely hide.
For behind the divine radiance, behind the glory of the Heart of the Sun, a hair-thin crack — almost invisible, but impossible to ignore — ran through the center of the white core.
The crack pulsed in sync with the beats. And each pulsation made the surrounding space writhe in subtle pain, as if the universe itself bled through that fissure.
Vernasha smiled with what remained of her lips.
— I made you burn more than you should have, Mei Nuhay. More than anyone should. You consumed your own essence to reach this state. And essence… is not easily replenished.
Mei's gaze — the consciousness observing from the solar core — turned slowly toward her. An attention so total that any other creature would have disintegrated under the weight of being perceived. But Vernasha was made of divine stubbornness and mortal desperation.
— And still you smile… — said Mei, her voice reverberating like thunder born inside stars before they existed. — Even shattered. Even before absolute end.
Vernasha spat — or tried to spit — black blood that evaporated before touching any surface, turning into mist of decaying energy.
— I do not smile for pleasure. I do not smile for triumph. — She raised what might be called a face. — I smile because, for the first time in uncounted ages… I see something that reminds me why I wanted so badly to be a god. Why transcendence was worth the pain. You… your light… your absolute purity… reminds me of the dream I had, before I lost myself in the powers I stole.
She breathed, if she still breathed.
— And it reminds me that you are growing exactly as I intended… even if it means my destruction.
The air — or the idea of air — exploded in a chain reaction of dimensional unraveling.
Mei moved. She did not move. The Heart of the Sun manifested in front of Vernasha, a flash of intention crossing the void. Vernasha, in response, raised arms that were now more concept than flesh, and chaos answered. A field of black energy formed, distorting the dimensional fabric into spirals that defied geometry, creating a labyrinth of inverted physical laws.
The two powers collided not with impact, but with integration. Golden fire and liquid darkness mixed like inks in water, swirling in a cosmic whirlpool where every particle of light fought a particle of darkness. Every clash was a simultaneous creation and extinction — miniature galaxies were born and died in silent supernovas.
Vernasha tried to trap Mei in an infinite temporal cycle, folding time upon itself like a Möbius strip of causality — a dimensional trap not even the ancient gods could break.
But the golden fire did not acknowledge time. The Sun does not wait. It does not hurry. It exists, and its existence redefines the "now" around it.
Mei passed through the cycle not by breaking it, but by being greater than it. She tore through time not as a barrier, but as an illusion. Her fist of light — an extension of her will — passed through the space where Vernasha was.
But it was a clone. An overlaid replica, one of the thousand layers of illusion Vernasha wove like a cosmic spiderweb. Mei passed through the clone, which dissipated like smoke, and in the same instant, Vernasha — the real one — seized her energy arm with a strength that made reality itself groan.
— YOU WON'T FINISH THIS SO SOON! — Her roar was the sound of Azaroth's seal exploding completely, unleashing the last reserve of forbidden power.
The black explosion that followed did not spread — it grew, like living ink spilled onto the fabric of existence. A sea of primordial chaos swallowed the golden fire, trying not to extinguish it, but to corrupt it, to turn light into shadow, order into randomness.
Mei cried out — not from physical pain, but from cosmic exertion. Her fire expanded in response, a controlled supernova, but the crack in her core grew. Each intense pulsation tore tiny, yet essential, fragments from her own divine essence. She was consuming herself to keep the flame alive.
Vernasha advanced through the storm she herself had created, her flesh dissolving and remaking itself every nanosecond, a cycle of death and rebirth accelerated. Her strikes now had no physical form — they were rewritten laws, inverted rules. One strike dissolved heat. Another, sound. Another, the very concept of resistance. She was dismantling Mei's reality piece by conceptual piece.
But Mei responded with something that was no longer technique, nor strategy, nor even power. It was pure instinct. The fire moved of its own will, as if the universe itself, through her, was defending itself from the anomaly that was Vernasha. Flames were born from empty points, forming barriers that did not block, but denied. Heat radiated not to burn, but to affirm itself.
The floor, the sky, the stars — what remained of everything — burned in a final conflagration. Nothing remained but the two entities and the empty space between them, which was no longer space, but the empty stage after the show.
Vernasha, in one last, desperate, glorious effort, concentrated everything — all the chaos, all the darkness, all the perverted will — into a single point in her hand. And she struck.
Not Mei's body. The center of the Sun. The white, pulsating heart.
And the world stopped.
This time, it really stopped.
Mei's body — the Heart of the Sun — did not resist. It exploded.
A golden wave of pure energy, so violent, so absolute, that it dissolved the last remaining layers of Vernasha's domain. There was no roar. There was an undoing. The red water ceased to be conceivable. The starry sky was erased from the cosmos's memory. Everything became white light and void, indistinguishable from one another.
When the brilliance finally receded — taking centuries or an instant, there was no longer a difference — Vernasha floated at the center of absolute nothingness.
Her body was shattered. Half of her had already been consumed by solar energy, reduced to cosmic ashes slowly drifting away like dust from a dead star. The other half held form through sheer stubbornness. She looked around.
Nothing.
No sound. No light beyond the residual glow. No time. No space. Only the final vacuum after the end of everything.
She gasped, if gasping were still possible.
Then, something glowed above her.
A point. Tiny. Golden. Fragile as a seed of light.
It pulsed slowly, irregularly, like a dying heart.
— No… — Vernasha's voice was a whisper the void swallowed greedily. — She still… she cannot…
The point pulsed once more. Stronger.
And began to expand.
Slow. Painfully slow. Like a flower blooming under snow. The fire rose again from impossibility, not with the fury of before, but with a sad, resigned majesty.
Mei reappeared.
But different. Now, her body — a golden human silhouette — hovered beside a separate, flaming heart that floated independently, pulsing with the irregular strength of a universe being reborn against its will. The heart was beautiful and terrible: veins of white fire ran across its surface, and at its center, the crack was now a luminous scar, a wound that glowed.
The Heart of the Sun beat once.
Thump.
And space was reborn around it. Not the old space, but a new one. Planes of existence rekindled from nothing, like ashes being blown back into stars. The energy flowing from Mei recreated existence, but each act of creation was accompanied by a tremor of agony. She was trading pieces of her essence for reality — a fatal spiral of creation and self-destruction.
Vernasha felt what remained of her body begin to disintegrate under the renewed power, but she laughed. An insane, beautiful, tragic laugh.
— So this is it... the final price... — she murmured, each word costing part of her cohesion. — You will burn the universe to keep yourself alive… and in the process, burn yourself until nothing remains.
Mei did not answer. She merely hovered, the heart beating, the light pulsing, the crack slowly growing.
The fire expanded a little more, and now the heat began to bend the very existential structure of Vernasha. She felt herself being unmade not as matter, but as history, as memory, as possibility.
She looked at the Empress one last time. At the woman who had become fire, who had become sun, who had become cosmic heart. At the masterpiece she herself had forged through conflict.
And smiled. A smile of farewell.
— Until the next life, Mei Nuhay. If things like us… have a next life.
The silence after the end of the universe lasted an instant stretched like an elastic band to the point of rupture.
Mei's fire still burned in the newly created void, but its light wavered dangerously, unstable. It was a star in terminal collapse, holding on only by force of will. The separate heart beat with effort, each pulsation fainter than the last.
Vernasha watched from within the process of her own dissolution. Her body was now more ghost than substance, emitting dark vapors — the final echoes of Azaroth's seal being purged by the light.
She understood, at last. Understood not with her mind, but with the soul she had left.
The Empress of Fire had reached the absolute apex. She had become a cosmic principle. But even principles… need a foundation. And Mei's foundation — her original essence, her transcended humanity — was running out. She was burning her own being as fuel.
Vernasha did something then. With an effort that consumed the last vestiges of her physical form, she forced herself to land gently upon what remained of a cracked dimension — a piece of reality stubborn enough to exist. The "floor" was made of memory fragments: faces of people who never existed, voices from forgotten songs, landscapes of worlds dreamed and never born — all slowly melting under the distant, dying heat of Mei's solar body.
Her smile returned. It was no longer one of triumph or ecstasy. It was cold. Lethal. Calculated.
— Alright, Mei… — she murmured, her voice so weak it was almost lost, but laden with an intention that crossed the void. — I suppose I'll have to say goodbye to you sooner than I thought.
She extended one of her hands — an almost graceful gesture — and the space around her, obedient as a trained animal, recombined. Fragments of dead dimensions moved, slotted together, forming a precarious but functional structure.
Vernasha's eyes — what remained of them — glowed with a strange light: half-golden (echoes of her stolen essences), half-gray (the color of the void Fenra had left behind). They reflected two colliding destinies, two heritages at war within her.
— But I promise you one thing… — she whispered, and this time there was a promise of venom in her voice. — This power you've attained… this glorious apex… will not be lost. It will be mine. One way or another.
Vernasha's body began to reintegrate. Not into its previous form — that was impossible. But into a new form. Hair that had been burned and severed grew in an instant, blending into shades of platinum-blond and black-tinged blue. The marks of Azaroth, once black and static, became alive, snaking over her reconstituted skin, pulsing like demonic veins drinking from the ambient light. Every beat of what could be called a heart now carried echoes of something greater, something that scraped against the borders between dimensions like claws on glass.
Mei, still in her diminished solar form, took a step forward. A single step that made the newly born universe shudder. The air rippled. Time, still tenuous, bent under her weight.
But before she could attack, before she could finish what she had started, Vernasha raised her hands before her face, palms together…
And clapped.
The sound was dry, solitary, almost pathetic in the vast void.
But the echo that followed was not of sound. It was of reality.
Instantly, the dimensions — all that Vernasha had ever dominated, all that she had torn, all that still existed as concept — overlapped. Not ten. Not a hundred. Thousands. Layers of reality were stitched over one another like sheets of glass and mirror, creating an infinite labyrinth of reflections, detours, existential dead ends.
Even Mei, with all her transcendent power, hesitated. Her expanded consciousness hit the walls of the labyrinth and found… more walls. Each time she broke through one dimensional barrier, ten more formed in its place, more complex, more intricate. It was like fighting infinity itself — an opponent that did not attack, merely existed before her, impenetrable.
Vernasha closed her eyes, a smile of profound weariness on her lips.
— You can break the cosmos, Empress… — she whispered, almost to herself. — You can tear the fabric of creation. You can become a principle. But there are places… forgotten places, places not even gods name… where even principles grow fragile. Where existence is a disease. And light… is merely another symptom.
She opened her eyes.
And Mei was already being swallowed.
The floor beneath Mei — the last point of reference — vanished.
Gravity, newly invented, inverted.
And from the nothing below — the true nothing, not the post-destruction void, but the active, hungry void — a colossal spiral of black and purple energy opened like a cosmic mouth.
Vernasha watched, her smile now tinged with genuine melancholy.
— Farewell, for now, Mei Nuhay. Sleep well… in the cradle of monsters.
Space distorted beyond recognition, twisting into the black spiral. The energy of Azaroth — or what remained of it, purified by solar light and perverted anew — roared at the spiral's center like thunder in creation's womb.
And Mei fell.
She was not pushed. She was not pulled. She fell, like a stone down a bottomless well, like a star into a black hole.
Not ironically — the fate so many feared, so many legends warned of, was now real. The final destiny of all who dared too much.
The Abyss.
The plane into which she fell was not a place of darkness or light. It was where both concepts went to die. Where the very idea of "existence" trembled with fever. A vacuum that was not absence, but antithesis.
And Vernasha, in her final act of strategic cruelty, did not throw her into just any part of that plane.
She threw her straight into the Demons' Cauldron.
That was where the creatures came from that not even the ancient Sif, in their infinite wisdom, dared to name. Beings that were not life, nor death, but persistent errors in reality's equation. Monstrosities so fundamental that human dimensions buckled under the weight of their mere presence, cracking like thin ice.
Entities of Keigaku-level — not a classification of power, but a diagnosis of existential danger. Living deformations of infernal will, vestiges of gods lost to darkness before the creation of light.
They rarely emerged. When they did, the devastation was so absolute that entire civilizations were erased not from history, but from the possibility of having ever existed.
Vernasha knew. She had studied. She had planned.
She knew that years ago, Mei Nuhay — already powerful, already fearsome — had suffered, bled, nearly died to defeat a single one of these beings, and that was in her own world, with all the advantages of home ground.
Now, Mei would face millions.
In their home.
Where the rules were written by madness.
Where humans — even humans transcended into gods — were foreigners, intruders, prey.
And this was Vernasha's final gambit. Not to win a fair fight. That was impossible now.
To wear down.
To force Mei to burn every last grain of her divine essence.
Every fragment of her soul.
Every memory of her humanity.
Until nothing remained but an empty sun.
A heart without a beat.
A power… ready to be harvested.
Vernasha watched, unmoving, as the golden glow of Mei disappeared into the profound darkness of the abyss, dimming, dimming, until it was swallowed whole. Like a sun being drowned in cosmic mire, its light extinguished not with a bang, but with a muffled sigh.
The echo of Mei's fire slowly dissipated, its last reverberations dying in the vastness.
Until only silence remained.
And then, from the depths, came the sound.
First, a single roar. Deep, guttural, laden with a hunger that made the vacuum tremble.
Then, another. And another more.
Until it became a chorus. A chorus of beasts awakening from eternal sleep, scenting something new, something bright, something delicious in the dark of their home.
Vernasha took a deep breath — an unnecessary act, but comforting in its ritual.
Her body still pulsed with residual power, and the marks on her skin glowed softly, like embers after a blaze.
— The flames have awakened… — she murmured to the nothingness, her voice laden with deep, dark satisfaction. — Now… it is time for my beloved lightning.
The space around her began to close, but not as before. This time, it cracked in clean, precise lines — gold and silver, as if reality itself were being cut by blades of electricity and will.
A genuine smile — the first in a long time — curved her lips. The smile of a player who knows the game is far from over, that the most important pieces are still on the board, that checkmate is a distant and glorious possibility.
Vernasha took the first step out of the ruined dimension — the final act of her presence there.
Every blink of her eyes now changed the sky around her — one blink golden (the void of her stolen essences), the next gray (Fenra). She was a kaleidoscope of stolen powers, a divine patchwork quilt.
And her mind was already flying ahead. To the next piece on the cosmic board. To the next throne to be shaken. To the next god — or goddess — to be tested, broken, or added to her collection.
Because Vernasha did not fight for power.
She was a collector.
And Mei Nuhay, the Heart of the Sun, had just become her most precious piece.
And, in the deep abyss, something roared again.
Louder this time. So loud it made the very fabric of the cosmos — even in other dimensions — tremble.
Mei's fire had touched hell.
And hell…
Hell answered.
To be continued...