The throne room flashed. The six masters appeared, and their power snapped together into a cage around Knull and Echo.
Valerius smiled. "Now."
Echo met Knull's mask, her light dimming with resolve. She tore the Nebula Crystal from her own core. "I was made to be your heart," she whispered.
She shattered it within herself. Her form dissolved into raw power, funneling into the cage and forging a single, crimson blade.
It lanced across the space and pierced Knull's chest.
He did not fall. He did not cry out. But his head tilted, looking at the blade. His perfect stillness broke. For a single, stunning second, he was frozen. Stunned.
Seeing Knull frozen for that one second, Valerius screamed his command.
"Now! Activate the Oblivion Cradle!"
The six masters obeyed. The artifact, Serana's Maw, ignited above Knull. It was a silent, black vortex.
It dropped over him.
Knull's head lifted. Through the violent torrent of his own essence being torn away, he met Valerius's gaze. The Premier's face was lit with triumphant scrutiny, a scientist observing a successful experiment.
For the first time, something shifted in the void where Knull's feelings should have been. It crystallized not as rage, but as a profound, icy hatred.
His voice, when it came, was not loud. It was flat, clear, and carried the finality of a closing tomb.
"You sought to break a weapon," Knull stated. "You will instead forge a consequence."
He opened his right hand, fingers uncurling. Above his palm, the air shattered like glass. From the fracture, a sword grew—small, barely the length of a dagger, its blade the color of clotting blood. It was the Sword of Leo.
Valerius's triumph shattered into pure, incandescent rage. "The First Swordsman's blade! NO! Drain him! Erase him NOW!"
But Knull was already moving. He flipped the tiny sword in his grip and plunged it not into an enemy, but into the fabric of reality at his feet.
The world did not scream. It unstitched.
The streams of the Maw flailed, severed from their source. The Oblivion Cradle flickered, its consumption suddenly meeting an absolute, opposing will—the will of a king who had conquered death itself.
With a sound like a sigh from the bottom of time, Knull vanished. The blood-red sword remained for a heartbeat, embedded in nothingness, before it too was gone
Three centuries passed.
In the heart of a forgotten forest, an obsidian embryo formed between the roots of an ancient tree. It cracked.
A man unfolded from the shards. He was naked, smooth, and featureless—no face, no eyes, no hair. A statue of flesh.
Knull stood.
He inspected his form, then turned his awareness inward. At his core, his psychic seed—once a well of limitless potential—now pulsed with a single, polluted stream the color of rotting gold.
And with it came the memory. Not as a thought, but as a raw, branded truth: the cage of light, Echo's dissolving form, Valerius's smile, the Maw's teeth in his soul, and the taste of his own unraveling.
Nothing came from his mouth. He had no voice yet, and no face to shape it.
He possessed only one thing: a perfect, silent, and total hatred—and a memory that told him exactly where to aim it.
He focused his will, the simple, crude power of a Tier 1 psychic flowing where universe-altering strength once resided. His smooth head prickled, then sprouted long, black hair that fell to his shoulders. A sharp jawline carved itself beneath where a mouth would be. A close-cropped, black beard textured the lower half of his face.
Finally, he formed eyes. Two pools of perfect, lightless black opened in the blank slate above his cheeks. He did not need them to see, but they were necessary. In his past life, he was an event. A phenomenon.
In this life, he would be a man. He would walk among those he hated, and they would not see him coming until it was too late.
His thought completed the form. He stood now as a man, naked and severe under the forest canopy. He looked down at his body. He could sculpt his flesh, but the psychic energy to manifest clothing from nothing was beyond his current reach. The fabric of reality no longer answered his casual will.
He was reborn. He was armed with memory and hate. And he was, for the first time, vulnerable.
He walked, naked, through the endless trees. His new body did not demand sleep, food, or water. He was an experiment, perfected—a machine of flesh and hate with only one need: progress.
Hours later, the forest frayed at its edge. Beyond it lay a city of impossible scale. Towers of glass and alloy stabbed a smoggy sky. Roads hummed with hovercars, and neon script bled light into the twilight.
Two men in synth-leather jackets stumbled out of a side alley, laughing, and nearly walked into him.
They froze.
"The hell, man?" the first spat, his eyes wide. "Why are you even naked? Don't you have clothes?"
The second squinted, his gaze dropping. He blinked, then snorted in disbelief. "Am I seeing this? Or… does he not have a dick?"
They stared. Where his groin should have been, there was only smooth, featureless skin. The Premier's final creation had been built for function, not form. For war, not reproduction.
Before Knull could move or even fix them with his black eyes, a sharp whistle cut the air.
"You! Stop right there!"
Two City Guards in grey armored uniforms marched over, stun-rods humming at their hips. Their eyes went from Knull's face to his body, their professional scowls tightening with disgust and confusion.
"Public indecency and morphological violation," the lead guard barked. "You're coming with us. Now."