The silence of the pitch-black universe was a heavy, suffocating shroud that clung to the edges of my perception. We were 100 trillion universes away from the starting point of this conflict, a distance so staggering that the very concept of "location" had begun to dissolve into a meaningless abstraction. In this hollow pocket of the multiverse, there were no stars to provide a frame of reference, no planets to anchor the gravity, and no light save for the jagged, pale fissures I had torn into the fabric of space.
The cracks hummed with a cold, structural resonance, illuminating the void in brief, erratic pulses. Across the fractured expanse, Sagha—the God Breaker—stood as a silhouette of absolute negation. The dark energy radiating from his form was a violent contrast to the grey streaks of anti-matter I had been weaving into the vacuum. We had been locked in a rhythmic exchange of annihilation, a cycle of beams and deflections that turned the "nothingness" into a churning graveyard of raw power.
My vision tracked the flow of his mana with crystalline clarity. I could see the way his merged fire and black hole magic warped the light of my cracks, drawing the indigo-black gravity into a tight, pressurized sphere around his palms. Every time he fired, the vacuum groaned, and every time I deleted the concept of the strike hitting me, the universe seemed to shudder at the logical inconsistency.
Suddenly, the frantic pace of the blasts slowed. Sagha lowered his hands, his posture shifting from a combat stance into one of predatory observation. His laugh, sharp and resonant, echoed through the 100 trillion universes of the void.
Sagha suddenly said, "You do know that escaping that seal is impossible... well, I guess you are the exception."
The words drifted through the silence, carrying a weight that seemed to anchor the drifting debris of our battle. He was watching me through the shadows of his mask, his voice tinged with a genuine sense of amusement, as if he were acknowledging a feat that defied the natural order of the cosmos. The "seal" he mentioned was a memory of a confinement that should have been eternal, a structural prison designed to hold back the very essence of a candidate.
I didn't flinch at his remark. Instead, a slow, cold smirk spread across my face. I could feel the residual heat of my own power surging beneath my skin, a current of energy that was finally beginning to stabilize after the massive expenditure required to reach this point.
I just smirked and said, "I just unlocked 100% of my power and I deleted the infinite universe barrier that's keeping me inside, and I got back to 10%."
The declaration was not a boast, but a statement of mechanical fact. As I spoke, the aura around me flared with a blinding, iridescent intensity that momentarily drowned out the darkness of the void. For a singular, infinitesimal fraction of a second, I had touched the absolute ceiling of my potential. In that moment of 100% output, I hadn't just broken a physical wall; I had identified the "concept" of the infinite universe barrier—that multi-layered, recursive prison that was meant to be my final resting place—and I had deleted it from the record of existence.
The act of deletion had been so profound that it had sent ripples through the dimensions, a tidal wave of non-existence that had cleared the path for my arrival here. Now, having performed that impossible feat, my power had settled back into a manageable 10%—a fraction of the whole, yet still enough to stand on equal footing with the God Breaker in the heart of a dead universe.
Sagha just laughed.
It was a deep, guttural sound that vibrated through the cracks in the space between us. He didn't seem threatened by the revelation; if anything, the news of my power spike seemed to delight him. He raised his right hand, and the darkness of the void began to coalesce around his fingers. It wasn't the fluid, swirling energy of his black hole magic, but something more structured, more ancient.
He materialized his dark sword.
The weapon didn't just appear; it was drawn out of the very fabric of the vacuum. The blade was a sliver of absolute night, a jagged edge of shadow that seemed to drink the pale light from my fissures. It didn't reflect anything; it was a hole in the universe shaped like a sword, humming with a frequency that made the nearby cracks in space begin to widen in terror. The hilt was wrapped in a material that looked like frozen smoke, and the guard was a sharp, aggressive sweep of obsidian-like matter.
He didn't hesitate. Before the light of my smirk had even faded, he moved.
He sliced me with it.
The speed was beyond the reach of conventional reaction. The dark blade cut through the space between us, leaving a trail of indigo static in its wake. It wasn't a physical cut; the sword moved through my defensive aura as if it were nothing more than mist. I felt the cold, entropic edge of the blade pass through my chest, a sensation of absolute zero that sought to freeze my soul and my matter in the same instant.
The strike was clean, a horizontal arc that should have bifurcated me and erased the remains. I staggered back, a massive, jagged rent appearing across my torso, the edges of the wound weeping a grey, smoke-like essence instead of blood.
I regenerated.
The "nothingness" of the void rushed into the gap. My mana surged, the 10% output manifesting as a series of translucent, golden-grey threads that knit the wound back together. The grey smoke was drawn back into my form, and the skin closed with a sharp, metallic snap. Within a heartbeat, the damage was gone, leaving only the lingering chill of the dark metal in my nerves.
I looked at Sagha, my vision locked onto the blade he held. The recognition was immediate, a sharp, cold spike of memory that transcended the current battle. I had seen that edge before, or at least, I knew the legend of its edge.
I said to Sagha, "That sword... is that the same sword—"
I didn't get to finish the question. The air between us cracked as he moved again, his presence a violent distortion in the vacuum.
He cuts me off and said, "Yeah."
The confirmation was curt, devoid of the playfulness he had shown moments ago. It was the answer of a man who was no longer interested in conversation, only in the application of the weapon he held. The dark sword pulsed with a rhythmic, violet glow, as if the blade itself were breathing in time with the heartbeat of the void.
Suddenly he dashed forward.
Sagha became a streak of indigo-black lightning. He didn't teleport this time; he used the raw, explosive force of his physical form, his feet finding purchase on the invisible ruins of the space I had cracked. The vacuum groaned as he closed the distance, the dark sword raised for a vertical crush that would split the concept of my existence in two.
And swung his sword.
The blade came down with the weight of a billion black holes. The air—or what remained of it—screamed as the shadow of the sword lengthened, a towering pillar of darkness that sought to overwrite the space I occupied. The gravitational pull of the weapon was so intense that it began to draw the very essence of my mana toward the edge, seeking to consume my power before the steel even touched me.
But I was no longer the prisoner of a seal.
But I deleted the concept of it hitting me.
I didn't move my arms. I didn't raise a shield. I simply looked at the descending blade and reached into the fundamental logic of the universe. I identified the "event" of the sword making contact with my physical form—the intersection of his weapon and my existence—and I erased the possibility of that intersection. I removed the "hit" from the list of logical outcomes for this moment.
I dodged it.
The dark sword passed through the space I occupied, but there was no impact. The blade moved through my shoulder as if I were a ghost, the indigo-violet energy of the swing continuing its path until it slammed into the "floor" of the void. A massive explosion of dark mana erupted from the point of impact, creating a new, yawning chasm in the 100 trillion-universe-away pocket of reality.
I stepped to the side, my movement fluid and effortless, the "concept deletion" providing a window of absolute safety that bypassed the need for speed. Sagha's sword hit nothing but the vacuum, the force of his own strike carrying him forward into the dark.
He didn't stay down. He spun mid-air, the dark sword dissolving back into a cloud of violet-black smoke as he transitioned back into his long-range assault. He knew that the blade, for all its power, would struggle to land a blow against a candidate who could edit the rules of the engagement.
We kept blasting each other.
The fight returned to its chaotic, high-intensity rhythm.
I raised my hands, unleashing a continuous stream of anti-matter pulses that fanned out like a grey web through the void. Each pulse was a point of absolute negation, seeking to catch Sagha in a crossfire of non-existence. He countered with a series of black hole beams, the indigo singularities weaving through my web and collapsing the grey energy into harmless sparks of subatomic dust.
Sagha retaliated with a barrage of merged fire and gravity magic. The violet-black flames roared through the vacuum, turning the "nothingness" into a sea of undulating heat. He moved through the fire like a shadow, appearing at different points in the void to launch concentrated bursts of gravitational force.
I answered with the 10% of my power, my vision guiding every response. I fired a beam of anti-matter that cut through his flames like a knife through silk, targeting the core of his next black hole. The collision sent a shockwave through the 100 trillion universes, the pale cracks in the sky expanding until they threatened to merge into a single, blinding rift.
BOOM. CRACK. SLICE. HISS.
The sounds of our exchange were a constant, bone-shaking roar.
I fired a pulse of anti-matter at his head; he deflected it with a flick of his wrist, the grey energy careening off into the distance.
He fired a black hole beam at my chest; I swiped it aside with a polarized shield of mana, the singularity collapsing behind me.
I launched a wave of conceptual erasures, seeking to delete the "source" of his fire; he teleported in the microsecond before the deletion could take hold, reappearing above me with a new vortex of violet heat.
The vacuum was no longer empty. It was a churning cauldron of fire, gravity, and annihilation. Every blast we exchanged created new fissures in the fabric of space-time, the 100 trillion universes acting as a hollow drum that amplified the violence of our struggle. We moved like twin gods of destruction, our auras clashing and recoiling in a rhythmic, lethal sync.
I could feel the 10% of my power hum in my veins, a steady, cold current that allowed me to maintain this pace indefinitely. Across the void, Sagha seemed equally tireless, his laughter occasionally cutting through the roar of the fire as he enjoyed the spectacle of our mutual destruction. The dark sword stayed in his mind, a silent threat that he was ready to manifest the moment I showed a gap in my conceptual defense.
The heat of the violet flames was a constant, searing pressure against my aura, and the pull of the black holes was a rhythmic tug that sought to unbalance my stance. Yet, I stood firm on the invisible ruins of the void. I fired another blast of anti-matter, the light-swallowing grey energy carving a path through the indigo shadows.
Sagha teleported, appearing fifty yards to my left, his hands already glowing with the next merged blast. I turned my head, my vision tracking the surge of his mana, my own hands rising to meet the challenge.
The exchange of blasts continued, a relentless, high-speed symphony of war that defined the boundaries of this pitch-black universe. We were two entities that had moved beyond the need for stars or light, carving our conflict into the very "nothingness" of the furthest reaches of existence.
Every blast was a word in a conversation that would only end when one of us could no longer speak. Every deflection was a period at the end of a sentence. And as we moved through the dark, the 100 trillion universes around us began to vibrate with the sheer intensity of our presence, the white cracks in the sky weeping the pale light of a reality that was being pushed to its absolute, final limit.
I fired again. A concentrated stream of anti-matter aimed at his core.
Sagha fired back. A vortex of black hole fire aimed at my head.
The forces met in the middle, a blinding detonation of grey, violet, and black that cleared a light-year of void in a single, terrifying pulse.
We didn't pause. We didn't look back. We kept blasting, the "First Candidate To Be A God" and the "God Breaker" locked in a dance that would echo through the void for eternity.