novelraw Chapter 459: “Void”
Chapter 459: “Void”
Jamie’s senses immediately detected Kael’s intention for a follow-up strike, and he swung the Galaxy Sword at an angle, the blade’s edge sliding along Kael’s claws to deflect the strike, then immediately slammed his left fist into Kael’s chest, a concentrated burst of spatial power flooding inside Kael’s body.
|!Guk|
The internal spatial rupture forced them to violently cough up streams of grey blood as they were rocketed backwards across the endless vacuum, and Jamie, twirling the hilt of his sword around his fingers, spoke calmly.
|Hey. You call yourself Kael, right? I hope you haven’t forgotten that I told you you’re nothing but a False Ultimate.|
Jamie glanced at his left palm and clenched his fist, streams of cosmic energy flowing through his energy circuits as he continued,
|We’re matched when it comes to energy capacity and output, as well as Dimensionality so in the end, this all comes down to the remaining factors that comprise our Existential Magnitude.
Our Influence over universes, dimensions and realms across the Cosmos, Existence Declaration Integration, and most importantly...|
Jamie looked up at Kael, his body turning translucent as Kael’s claws passed right through it like he wasn’t even there, and with a casual swing, he slashed at Kael’s back, forcing them to quickly turn their body into fog to avoid the strike and reform it elsewhere.
However, even then, Jamie’s slash still split through their back, drawing grey blood, much to their shock.
And then, Jamie calmly finished his words, |Our Aspect and Dictum Complexity. The ’Authority’ which you do not possess.|
Kael tried to regenerate the damage Jamie had dealt, but no matter how much cosmic energy they poured into it, the wound continued leaking grey blood.
|It took me a while to get used to it,| Jamie said, casually swinging his blade and releasing another slash across all trajectories simultaneously.
Kael instantly coated their claws with energy and crossed them in front of their body, their strike meeting Jamie’s slash across all potential attack vectors, but Jamie’s slash still broke through their claws, and their body was carved apart by intersecting cuts that spread across them like a lattice of glowing fractures.
’What!? I blocked it!? So why did I still take damage?!’
Kael was flummoxed, and Jamie, noticing their uncontrolled expression, spoke up to answer their internal question.
|Aren’t you listening to what I’m saying? We were evenly matched before I acclimatised to my Realm, but now that I’ve understood how to properly exert the new power my Dictums have gained...|
Jamie didn’t finish his statement, only silently shaking his head, but what he implied still reached Kael, and their confused expression instantly contorted into rage.
|Y-You’re saying you’ve won...? That I’VE LOST?!|
The grey energy around their body erupted outward without limit, flooding the surrounding space in endless torrents of destructive force that drowned several layers of reality beneath its pressure.
Kael ignored the logic of technique entirely, attempting to overwhelm Jamie through sheer brute force alone.
As the grey energy erupted, Jamie watched calmly, not a single change in his expression.
The volume of Kael’s energy had no conceivable end, but the Authority behind it was flat. It lacked the qualitative, conceptual evolution of a true Ultimate, and to him it appeared like an infinite pool of water trying to drown the concept of dry land.
Kael’s spiralling irises burned with maddening frustration as they hurled a massive, multi-layered sphere of grey energy, a compressed cluster of dead multiverses turned into a single conceptual bomb.
|DIFFERENCE IN AUTHORITY MEANS NOTHING BEFORE INFINITE SCALE! I WILL BURY YOUR PARADOX UNDER THE WEIGHT OF A BILLION, BILLION COLLAPSED CREATIONS!|
Jamie didn’t dodge.
There was no point, because the attack wasn’t travelling toward him, but was already upon him.
He simply held the Galaxy Sword with both hands, the single galaxy shining on its blade spinning as he drew upon the full power of the Rule Breaker, and with a calm breath, Jamie brought the blade down, meeting the oncoming apocalypse with the absolute clarity of his integrated soul.
Jamie’s sword met the attack, and for an instant, everything went completely white.
It wasn’t a flash of light, but a total erasure of visual data across the local Hyperverse as two absolutes tried to occupy the same conceptual coordinates, their respective transfiguration of reality attempting to overwrite one another.
Kael’s sphere of collapsed creations screamed under the weight of infinite mass, trying to crush Jamie’s presence out of the Cosmos, but the blade held. Jamie’s paradox active meant that as the crushing weight of the multiverses pressed against his sword, the spatial fabric beneath the impact point collapsed into void, neutralising the pressure, while the void simultaneously gave the edge of his blade the perfect, unyielding contrast it needed to cut deeper.
With a roaring burst of cosmic energy, Jamie forced the sword fully through the sphere, cleaving the multiversal bomb cleanly in half. The two halves detonated behind him, the resulting shockwaves violently rippling through distant space-time continuums, but Jamie was already moving.
Bypassing the concept of distance entirely, he manifested directly in front of Kael, his sword coming down in a blinding diagonal arc aimed straight for the Annihilation Catalyst’s featureless face.
Kael raised their hands to block, but Jamie’s sword cleaved through their claws, arms, and split their body diagonally from head down through the torso in one motion.
The slash Jamie unleashed flew off into the distance, cutting apart everything in its path, growing ever larger until it eventually vanished.
|...|
|..!|
Both of them fell silent, their eyes calmly meeting one another as Jamie completed his swing and pulled the Galaxy Sword back.
Kael’s body was knocked backwards, grey blood uncontrollably spilling out from the massive gash that divided it in two, the liquid scattering through the surrounding broken reality that could no longer properly contain cause and sequence.
The shattered distortions around them no longer possessed stable temporal order, causing the streams of blood to seep through fractured gaps in time itself.
Droplets vanished into ruptured layers of space and appeared across different points along the timeline of that same location, splashing across terrified individuals who had once occupied the area long before the battle had even begun.
At the same time, other streams pierced forward through unstable temporal fractures, staining the bodies of those who would one day occupy that space in futures that had not yet occurred.
Of course, such a thing would not kill Kael.
In fact, Kael’s existence was slowly beginning to regenerate, their body transfiguring under the power of their Fifth Concretization, restoring itself to perfectly embody their Annihilation once more.
But Jamie... Jamie wasn’t going to simply remain there and wait for Kael to complete the process.
He calmly raised his right hand, a thousand and one techniques tied to his Aspects and Dictums crossing his mind, none but one satisfying him in that moment.
Feeling cosmic energy flow into Jamie’s hand, Kael’s expression turned anxious for the first time, and they immediately attempted to escape.
Even though they had only just reached the Ultimate Realm, the two of them were anomalies who had already reduced distance into a lower-order dimensional constraint.
To them, it was as if to move was now to simply be at the destination.
However, Kael’s existence couldn’t move an inch as Jamie’s cosmic energy locked it into the coordinates of the existence it occupied.
And raising his right hand, Jamie snapped his index and thumb together, muttering a single word.
|Void.|
An azure-rimmed portal of endless darkness spiralled into existence before Jamie, its edge glowing faintly as the void within expanded in absolute silence, curving outward until it arched over Kael’s immobilised body like a descending eclipse.
For the first time since the battle began, Kael’s expression lost all rage and madness, their spiralling irises widening as genuine disbelief and terror overtook them at the realisation of what was before them.
Their body could not struggle, their power could not expand, and even their endless cosmic energy failed to react as the Void descended upon them.
Then the darkness consumed everything.
Kael’s existence silently began to crumble apart, not merely their body, but everything they were, everything they are, and everything they could ever become.
Their form fragmented into collapsing traces of unreality as the Void erased every layer of their existence simultaneously, reducing all possibilities connected to them into nothingness.
At the final moment before they completely vanished, Kael’s face was frozen in horrified disbelief.
Then the portal rapidly shrank inward, collapsing into a single azure point before disappearing entirely, leaving behind only Jamie floating alone within the endless darkness.