The Philosopher standing before Sol was no longer the same man he had faced in the corridors of Iris. His body trembled as if it were an oil painting left under acid rain; the black voids in his being were not mere holes—they were predatory nothingness, devouring light and matter around him. The "High Critique Pens" hovered around him like metallic crows, pecking at the fabric of reality and leaving behind irreparable white fractures.
"Sol… fall back!" Constantine shouted, trying to pull Garrett away from the aura of nothingness radiating from the Philosopher. "He's no longer using erasing tools… he's using The Anti-Ink! It's a substance that erases meaning before it erases form!"
The Philosopher raised his hand, and the black pens began spinning at insane speeds, emitting a shrill, ear-piercing whistle.
"You think gathering these pigments will save the world, Sol?" the Philosopher said, his voice echoing as if from a thousand years past. "You fill a crumbling canvas with bright colors, while rot gnaws at its frame. The Painter did not flee out of fear of ugliness; he fled because he realized the idea itself was flawed from the start."
With a flick of his finger, the critique pens surged toward Sol. They did not move in straight lines but "jumped" across visual time, disappearing and reappearing in unpredictable spots.
Danger surged into Sol's being. He focused the combined power of the two pigments in his right eye: the celestial fluidity and the graphite rigidity. Then something astonishing occurred; the transparent blue merged with the steel-gray to form an aura of Malleable Reality.
"I'm not trying to save the old canvas," Sol whispered, raising his diamond-tipped brush, which began to transform into a long blade of materialized light. "I am painting a new one!"
Sol employed his new ability: Structural Synchrony. Instead of blocking the pens, he made his body "synchronize" with their frequencies. When the first pen tried to pierce his chest, it passed through like a phantom, because Sol matched his visual density to the pen's in that fraction of a second.
The Philosopher was stunned. "How does a sketch recognize the frequency of negation?"
Sol responded not with words but with action. He surged toward the Philosopher, leaving behind lines of existential ink that could not be erased. He did not attack the Philosopher's body but the voids that composed him. He was "filling in" the black gaps with solid graphite pigment, forcing the Philosopher to regain a heavy, painful material form.
"Stop!" the Philosopher screamed as his body stiffened, transforming into a leaden statue under Sol's strikes. "You do not understand… if you fill the voids, the world will lose balance! Rot needs an outlet!"
Suddenly, a deafening scream shook the entire Graphite Realm. It was not a human scream but the Painter's scream: a stored sonic echo in the fabric of reality, erupting all at once.
Visions flashed before Sol: a man crying before a blank canvas, a brush breaking under a desperate strike, tears falling and transforming into seas of black ink.
"This is the rot…" Sol realized in shock. "Rot is not an external evil… rot is the creator's despair!"
The Philosopher seized Sol's moment of distraction and launched one final, desperate attack. He concentrated all the Anti-Ink into a single point and unleashed it toward Sol's heart. The force was enough to erase an entire continent from visual existence.
"Sol! Nooo!" Garrett shouted, leaping in front of him, attempting to shield him with his transparent armor.
But Sol placed his hand on Garrett's shoulder and gently pushed him aside. He raised his diamond-tipped brush, merging the two pigments at the maximum energy he could muster. The celestial pigment gave him imagination, and the graphite pigment gave him reality.
"Cosmic Drawing: The Sacred Eraser!"
Sol did not unleash a beam; instead, he "folded" the space around the Philosopher's attack. He compressed the destructive blast into a tiny speck of ink at the tip of his brush, then blew on it until it dissipated into the air like colored dust.
The Philosopher collapsed to his knees, his body cracking and shedding pieces of dead charcoal.
"You… you defeated negation with creation… how?"
"Because I no longer fight to survive," Sol said, standing above him, his blue-gray eye glowing with divine calm. "I fight to give this despair a new form."
Before Sol could seize the Philosopher, the ground beneath them began to melt. Not watery melting like in Aquarelle, but chromatic decomposition.
"It has begun!" Constantine shouted, looking at the sky, which was raining fragments of shattered mosaic. "The third world calls us! The Chrome Kingdom! A world of reflective colors and shining metals!"
A massive chasm opened in the Graphite Realm's floor, emitting dazzling lights that blinded the eyes, reflecting everything a thousand times over.
"The Philosopher is escaping!" Garrett shouted, watching their foe dissolve into the light, as if melting into a gigantic mirror.
"He won't get far," Sol said, grabbing Constantine and Garrett's hands. "We go after him. To the third world."
They leapt into the blinding light, immediately feeling their senses assaulted. In the Chrome Kingdom, everything was a mirror. The ground, the sky, the walls—even the air.
Sol saw himself repeated millions of times in every direction. He no longer knew which body was real and which was reflection. Above all, he heard a piercing musical sound, like diamond scraping glass.
"Welcome to the world of False Perfection," a haughty feminine voice echoed from every mirror around them. "Here, there are no sketches… here, everyone must be a perfect reflection. Any slight scratch in your image… means execution."
They had arrived in the Chrome Kingdom, where the third pigment awaited: Reflective Silver White. The bitter truth pigment that exposes all flaws.