[Last Episode: And it had finally, properly, completely begun]
Chapter 117, Episode 117
[The Seam Between Universes — Isaac vs Mercurius: The Final Push]
[The seam had stopped pretending to be a stable environment]
[Every wall of compressed reality had at least three fresh tears in it]
[The folded universes pressing in from both sides were leaking material into the space]
[Isaac in Helios Absolute Afterlife burned with the heat of the universe's first second]
Helios Absolute Afterlife
[He stopped regulating the form. Let it run at the full output it was capable of]
[The Big Bang state that had predated Logic Lines, predated causality organizing itself into chains, predated the concept of before and after having any relationship with each other]
[The seam registered it by simply stopping being something the seam could hold]
[The walls of compressed reality peeled back]
[They were fighting in raw dimensional space now]
[The folded universes around them no longer folded. Just present. Every one of them, layered, simultaneously visible, their physics all running at once. Stars from a hundred different realities visible at the same time.]
[Laws that contradicted each other existing in the same breath of space]
[Mercurius felt the output of the form and recalibrated]
Mercurius: You released the regulator.
Isaac: Yes.
Mercurius: The form is running without a ceiling now.
Isaac: That's right.
Mercurius: The first-universe heat at full expression will destabilize every dimensional layer in this space.
Isaac: Already doing it.
[Mercurius looked at the collapsing dimensional walls around them. At the hundred simultaneously visible universes. At the physics contradictions that were being generated by the form's unregulated output.]
Mercurius: You're using the dimensional destabilization as a weapon.
Isaac: The seam is already broken. Might as well use it.
[He moved at the dimensional layer beneath him. At the foundation that the Chaos Hyper Form needed to operate across — the space-time continuum itself]
[Which Mercurius had become, which required the dimensional framework to have a surface to be across]
Helios Absolute Afterlife — Primordial Alpha-Omega
[He became simultaneously the beginning and the end of all things. The form that preceded even the first-universe heat]
[That state had no framework]
[No dimensional layers]
[No space-time continuum]
[Mercurius, who was the space-time continuum, suddenly found the ground that his form was standing on missing]
[Isaac had gone back further than the continuum's origin and was operating from a state that the continuum was downstream of]
[Mercurius felt his form wobble]
Mercurius: You're operating from before my origin state.
Isaac: Yes.
Mercurius: That's—
Isaac: I know.
[Cinder moved.]
[She had been a blade at Isaac's side for the whole fight. Small. Bright]
[The familiar shape of a fire phoenix compressed into something that could be held. She moved now not as a weapon but as a coordinate]
[She positioned herself between Isaac and the state he was reaching from, serving as a living anchor point between the pre-origin state and the current moment]
[Cinder]
「Isaac. The form's limitation is that the pre-origin state can only be maintained while the anchor exists. I am the anchor. Do not let go.」
Isaac: Never do.
Final Spark of Hope
[The tiny white flame that contained the blueprint to restore any erased multiverse appeared at Isaac's core]
[The core which the pre-origin state had a vector to operate from. Something that belonged to the present moment, connected to the pre-origin state through Cinder's anchor, giving the attack a path from before the beginning to the now]
[The form reached through Cinder, through the Final Spark, into Mercurius's position]
[As the thing that fire would eventually become. Before fire had a name. Before heat was a concept. Before the laws that fire followed had been written]
[Mercurius raised every defense he had]
Chaos Hyper Form — Space-Time
[Every millisecond of the past and every version of the future reinforcing his present state]
[The combined force of every second that had ever existed or would ever exist pressing back against the pre-origin attack]
[Every second of time against the state that existed before time had seconds]
[The collision did not produce a sound, it produced an absence of sound that was louder than any sound]
[Everything in the dimensional space went still as mercurius went through it]
[Not through Isaac's position. Through the dimensional space itself. Three, four, five universes peeling back as he traveled. He hit the sixth universe's compressed wall and stopped]
[He was in the sixth folded universe standing]
[He looked at his own form. At the Chaos Hyper Form's structural state]
Mercurius: You cracked it.
Isaac: Yes.
Mercurius: The Chaos Hyper Form.
Isaac: Yes.
[A pause. Mercurius, who was every millisecond of the past and every version of the future simultaneously, looking at the crack in the structure that was supposed to be unkillable.]
Mercurius: How.
Isaac: Because your form requires the space-time continuum to exist across. You became the continuum. So I went back to the state before the continuum and hit you from outside what you were standing on.
Mercurius: You hit the floor instead of me.
Isaac: The floor was you.
[A very long pause.]
Mercurius: That is the most elegant thing anyone has done against me in two hundred years.
Isaac: Ereshkigal wanted me to move people. Not just hit things hard.
Mercurius: She succeeded.
[He straightened. The Chaos Hyper Form's crack was real but not catastrophic.He was still capable of reforming. But reforming took time and Isaac was not going to give him time.]
Plasma Overlord — Void-Burn — Initiated.
[The form shifted]
[The transcendent deity state where his flames turned a color that couldn't be perceived. Void-flames that didn't produce heat but erased the mathematical constants of the universe on contact]
[Mercurius saw the form's output change]
Mercurius: A second form.
Isaac: Yes.
Mercurius: You have two.
Isaac: I didn't know about the second one until just now.
[Cinder]
「The void-flame and the pre-origin state together. The void-flame targets what exists. The pre-origin state operates from before existence had targets. Combined, they cover everything.」
Isaac: Right.
[Twilight]
「Isaac. Finish it.」
Isaac: Yes.
[He moved at the combination of Plasma Overlord Void-Burn and Helios Absolute Afterlife produced something that didn't have a name because the conditions for naming it hadn't existed yet when it was first possible]
[He hit Mercurius with it]
[The sixth folded universe registered the impact by briefly becoming a different sixth folded universe and then slowly negotiating back to the original]
[Mercurius flew through the space between dimensional layers, which was the space that existed between the concept of having a place to be]
[He stopped as he was floating in the between-space]
[He looked at Isaac through the torn dimensional walls]
[His form was holding]
Mercurius: You've won.
Isaac: Yes.
Mercurius: The Chaos Hyper Form is at its limit.
Isaac: I know.
Mercurius: If you hit it again at that level—
Isaac: It breaks.
[A pause.]
Mercurius: You're going to hit it again.
Isaac: Yes.
[Mercurius was quiet for a moment. Looking at Isaac across the torn dimensional space]
Mercurius: You know what I find interesting.
Isaac: Tell me.
Mercurius: When we started, I said you were learning faster than expected. I thought that was notable. You did something in this fight that I have genuinely never had done to me. You went before my origin and hit the floor.
Isaac: You mentioned that.
Mercurius: I'm mentioning it again because I want you to understand that I don't say this lightly. You are the most difficult opponent I have faced since the Great Destruction.
Isaac: And Voriath's servant is telling me I'm difficult.
Mercurius: Yes.
[Isaac looked at him across the between-space.]
Isaac: Then you understand what that means for Voriath.
Mercurius: Yes.
[Pause.]
Isaac: Will you tell him?
Mercurius: He already knows. He's been tracking this fight from wherever he is.
Isaac: Good.
[He raised his hand.]
Primordial Alpha-Omega
[The attack that existed before everything hit the form that was everything]
[Mercurius went down]
[The same state Voriath had put The Manipulator and Siriusniyo in — the state of being fully present and completely unable to continue]
[The between-space held him where he stopped]
[Isaac let out a breath]
[The Helios Absolute Afterlife form dimmed slightly. Still running. But the breath was real]
[Meanwhile at the Seam — Beatrice vs Xuantian]
[While all of that was happening fifteen dimensional layers away, Beatrice was fighting Xuantian]
[She had her hands in her coat pockets for the first eleven exchanges]
[Both hands in her coat pockets, sword still on her back, fighting Xuantian's Zero Hyper Void Form with nothing but Time Magic and footwork]
[Xuantian noticed the hands]
Xuantian: Your hands are in your pockets.
Beatrice: Yes.
Xuantian: You're fighting me with your hands in your pockets.
Beatrice: Is that a problem?
Xuantian: It's disrespectful.
Beatrice: It's honest. I haven't needed them yet.
[A pause. Xuantian looked at her across the space. At the Time Magic running around her — not the frantic]
[He activated Zero Hyper Void Form at full output]
[The space around him became negative space]
[A doorway to infinite pressure. Anything that touched him was spatially deleted. Anything that entered his gravity anchor's reach was pinned absolutely]
[Beatrice tilted her head]
[The sword didn't come out]
Time Magic — The Eternal Now.
[She stepped sideways out of time entirely by existing in the gap between the current second and the next one, where the Zero Hyper Void Form's gravity anchor had no temporal coordinate to pin her to]
[Xuantian's gravity reached for her but found nothing]
Xuantian: What... is she immune gravitational forces and....You're between seconds.
Beatrice: It's comfortable in here.
Xuantian: My gravity needs a temporal coordinate to operate.
Beatrice: Right.
Xuantian: You don't have one right now.
Beatrice: Correct.
[She stepped back into time. Right behind him.]
Master Swordsmanship — Counter-Position.
[She hit him with the flat of her palm. Just her hand]
[The blow was gentle in the way that a geological event is gentle — technically soft compared to what it could be, but felt through the bedrock of everything in the area]
[Xuantian registered it and launched the Spatial Reaper before she could breathe]
Spatial Reaper — The Fold of Non-Existence.
[He folded the space to zero between his scythe and every position she could be]
Time Magic — Reality Time Theft.
[She stole the time it took the fold to complete]
[The fold stopped mid-fold as it was stuck in the act of becoming and then she stole that too and added it to her own reserves]
[Xuantian felt her speed change as she added the stolen time to herself]
[It changed significantly]
Xuantian: You stole the time of my technique.
Beatrice: I steal a lot of time. It's how I stay fast.
Xuantian: You're faster than before.
Beatrice: Every time I steal something I get faster. It compounds.
[He raised the Eraser of Nihility.]
Absolute State Hyper — Full Power.
[Hundreds of simultaneous Xuantians occupying every microsecond of the current minute at once]
[Every version real. Every version wielding the scythe. The Time-Hazard Zone activating around all of them, aging incoming projectiles to dust, freezing anything that entered the space mid-flight]
[Beatrice looked at the formation]
[She reached behind her back]
[The sword came out]
[She smiled]
Beatrice: Finally.
Master Swordsmanship — Flawless Prediction — Full Engagement.
[She knew where every simultaneous Xuantian was going to be before they were there]
[Because she'd spent a hundred years learning how to read a blade from the angle of its current position, and a scythe was still a blade no matter how many temporal copies it came in]
Time Magic — Khaos Duplication Time.
[Three Beatrices. The one from five minutes ago, the present one, and the one from five minutes in the future. All three perfectly synchronized. All three with a sword]
[The formation of hundreds of simultaneous Xuantians met three Beatrices who each knew exactly where they were going before they got there]
Xuantian: what—, what is going on, she is able to read the concept of speed itself by duplicating her own copies to match my mimics of my own... impossible
[The Time-Hazard Zone tried to age her attacks to dust]
Time Magic — The Immune Timeline.
[The concept of aging backwards or forwards didn't apply to her]
[She was immune to changes made to the past. Her sword was an extension of her timeline]
[The Time-Hazard Zone hit the sword and found something it couldn't age because it was locked into the End of Time's permanent state]
[The sword moved through the Time-Hazard Zone without difficulty]
[Three Beatrices with three swords that couldn't be aged or frozen, moving through a formation of hundreds of simultaneous Xuantians with perfect prediction about where each one was going]
[The formation broke]
[Xuantian collapsed back to singular]
[He looked at his scythe. At the three cuts on its surface.She had hit the exact structural connection points between his simultaneous selves each time]
[The same technique Leo had developed by reading the connection and severing it]
[But where Leo had found it through an hour of debt collection, Beatrice had found it in three exchanges]
Xuantian: You found the synchronization connections.
Beatrice: The connections between your temporal selves? Yes. First exchange.
Xuantian: The first exchange.
Beatrice: I've fought time users before. The connection pattern is consistent. The casual roll of a hundred years of practice. You're the best time user I've ever fought. But you use time like a god. I use time like it's air.
[A pause. Xuantian looked at her. Really looked at her this time.]
Xuantian: You've been holding back.
Beatrice: Indeed I have
Xuantian: The whole time.
Beatrice: Well. I drew my sword. That's something.
Xuantian: What level are you actually at.
[Beatrice considered this question with the particular expression of someone who finds the answer mildly embarrassing in its honesty.]
Beatrice: I'm not sure. I don't compare myself to other people's scales very often. I've had a hundred years and I've spent all of it on two things. Time Magic and swordsmanship. Not fighting. Not war. Just those two things.
Xuantian: And when you apply both simultaneously.
Beatrice: It gets complicated.
Xuantian — Unsealed Hyper God — Full Activation.
[His body flickered between dimensions. 3D, 2D, 4D, Higher simultaneously]
[The voice that rippled through neighboring universes when he spoke. The gravity that cracked reality at the edges of his presence]
[The full form. No holding back]
[Beatrice felt it, but her expression didn't change]
Time Magic — Exponential Growth — Passive Running.
[Every second since the fight started, her speed and strength had been doubling]
[She'd been in this fight for fifteen minutes]
[She moved into the Unsealed Hyper God form's dimensional flicker. Into the gap between the 3D and 4D layer that Xuantian was occupying simultaneously.]
[Because time existed in all dimensions simultaneously and she owned time completely]
The Law of the First Edge.
[Her sword became the literal definition of a slash]
[The concept of cutting itself. A blade that didn't need to travel through space to divide because it was the origin of the idea of division]
[She swung it]
[The dimensional layers of the Unsealed Hyper God form felt the cut not through any single dimension but through the concept that made dimensions have layers at all]
[Xuantian staggered]
[His four-dimensional form flickered hard]
Xuantian: Impossible!! You cut the dimensional layers.
Beatrice: I cut the concept of dimensional separation. Yes.
Xuantian: That's not—
Beatrice: A swordswoman who's owned the concept of the sword for a hundred years can do that.
[He gathered himself. The flickering stabilizing. The Unsealed Hyper God form running at full power even with the cut on its dimensional structure.]
Xuantian — Mathematical Eradication.
[He deleted the number four from existence. Without four, there was no 4D for either of them to operate in. Her cut couldn't target what it couldn't reach]
Beatrice — Chronos' Silent Guillotine.
[She cut the result of the Mathematical Eradication before it landed]
[The future where the number four didn't exist got severed from the timeline before it became the present]
[Four remained]
[Xuantian looked at the technique that hadn't worked]
Xuantian: You cut the future of my technique.
Beatrice: The result, yes. If the result doesn't exist, the technique has nowhere to land.
Xuantian: You cut it before I finished casting.
Beatrice: I saw where it was going.
[A long pause. The longest pause Xuantian had taken since the fight started.]
Xuantian: You knew where Mathematical Eradication would land before I finished casting.
Beatrice: A hundred years of swordsmanship teaches you to read a technique from the angle of its first movement. Before it becomes what it is. You telegraph slightly.
[Xuantian looked at her for a long moment]
Xuantian: Who are you.?
Beatrice: I told you.
Xuantian: A swordswoman from a village at the edge of everything.
Beatrice: Yes.
Xuantian: Nobody teaches that at a village.
Beatrice: Nobody taught me. I just practiced.
Xuantian: For a hundred years.
Beatrice: It's a long time. You learn things.
Xuantian — True Hyper Awakening — Nexus Borrowed Power.
[The final form. The blinding silhouette of dimensions]
[Every pixel of his body a window into a different universe. The Nexus at full expression. Time and space not as something he used but as something he was]
[The seam around them responded to the form by quietly considering whether it wanted to continue existing]
[Beatrice looked at it]
[She closed one eye master's FocusTriple the power of every other sense. Triple her physical speed]
[She saw the Nexus form's structure. Every dimension that was a window in his form]
[Every law he was now the source of, she saw all of it in one look. Then]
Time Magic — The Architecture of Infinity.
[She folded the timeline like paper. The beginning of time and the end of time colliding in the space between them, creating the zone where only her time magic worked]
Xuantian: Did she just collided the End and the beginning of time together??
[The zone where the laws that Xuantian was the source of had no jurisdiction because the timeline fold existed outside the framework those laws governed]
[Xuantian felt the laws he embodied go quiet]
[Beatrice stepped into the fold]
The Transfinite of the Eternal Now.
[The entire history of the universe concentrated into the edge of her blade]
[Every explosion, every movement, every second that had ever existed since the Big Bang compressed into one cutting edge]
[She swung]
Xuantian — Conceptual Shielding — Maximum.
[The protection that made attacks targeting his concepts fail. He was more fundamental than any concept used against him]
[The sword hit the conceptual shielding and Beatrice did something nobody had done to the Conceptual Shielding before]
[She taught the sword]
The Eternal Sensei
[Mid-swing, she taught her blade a new power]
[A technique designed specifically to counter conceptual shielding of this type which is developed in the half-second the swing took to complete]
[Based on everything she'd observed about Xuantian's structure in the last twenty minutes]
[The sword evolved during the swing]
[The evolved sword met the conceptual shielding carrying a property the shielding hadn't been designed to protect against, because the property had been invented to counter it specifically and had never existed before this swing]
[The shielding held for the first three layers]
[The evolved sword went through the next four]
[Xuantian felt the hit]
[He went through a dimension and a half. Landed in the space between the current dimensional layer and the next]
[He stopped there. Floating. The Nexus Borrowed Power form flickering at the edges]
[He looked at Beatrice through the dimensional boundary]
[She was standing exactly where she'd been as one eye still closed]
[Sword down at her side]
Xuantian: You invented a counter during the swing.
Beatrice: The sword learns. That's what a hundred years of practice produces.
Xuantian: You taught the sword a new power specifically to counter my defense.
Beatrice: In about four tenths of a second. Yes.
Xuantian: In the middle of a swing
Beatrice: Swordsmanship is half movement and half thought. The thought runs faster than the movement.
[A very long pause. Xuantian, who was the Nexus itself wearing a shape, looking at a girl in an oversized coat who had just gone through his conceptual shielding by inventing the counter in real time.]
Xuantian: I misjudged you.
Beatrice: Most people do. Outside I'm just a person. Inside I'm a hundred years of uninterrupted practice. No family. No guild. No wars. Just time and the sword. Every day. For a century.
Xuantian: What does that produce."
Beatrice: This.
[She gestured at the fight. At the dimensional boundary between them. At the flickering Nexus form.]
True Ancient Law Form — 10% Expression.
[Just a fraction of it]
[The gold appeared at the edges of her form]
[Her fraction that meant: the law that governs existence recognizes me as an authority above the Nexus of space and time]
[Xuantian felt the 10% expression.
And understood what 100% would be]
Xuantian: That form., what an insane power
Beatrice: I'm not using it fully. I don't need to.
Xuantian: But at full expression.
Beatrice: At full expression, the law that governs all things listens to me. Including the law that the Nexus is built from.
[Xuantian was quiet]
[The Nexus Borrowed Power form, which was time and space itself, looked at the being who was the law those concepts were built on and did the logical thing.]
[It acknowledged the authority.]
Xuantian: You could have ended this at the beginning.
Beatrice: Yes.
Xuantian: Why didn't you.
Beatrice: Because you're worth fighting properly. And because Leo needed time to get to Voriath and because I was genuinely curious how long you'd go before you used the full form.
Xuantian: Thirteen minutes.
Beatrice: I was guessing twelve. Close enough.
[She raised her sword.]
Beatrice: Are we done?
[Xuantian looked at her. At the 10% True Ancient Law Form gold at her edges. At the sword that had just invented a counter mid-swing.]
[He lowered the Eraser of Nihility.]
Xuantian: Yes.
Beatrice: Thank you for the fight.
Xuantian: Thank you for telling me the truth about what you are.
Beatrice: I told you what I was at the beginning.
Xuantian: A swordswoman from a village."
Beatrice: Yes.
Xuantian: You were correct.
[He went into the same state as Mercurius — not gone, but present in the space between continuing and not. The specific state of a being who has run their race and reached the finish line before it ended the fight for them.]
[Beatrice put her sword back]
[She looked at the dimensional space around her. At the torn walls. At the between-state where Mercurius was resting. At the space where Xuantian had gone still]
[She was breathing normally]
[At the Invictus World The Between-Space — The Manipulator and Siriusniyo]
[They had been resting in the space between dimensions for what felt like a long time]
[Neither of them were in pain exactly. The state Voriath had put them in was not painful]
[The Manipulator was lying on his back looking at the dimensional ceiling]
[Siriusniyo was sitting]
[They had been quiet for a while]
[Then Siriusniyo said something]
Siriusniyo: When this is over.
The Manipulator: When this is over.
Siriusniyo: We should fight.
The Manipulator: You and me.
Siriusniyo: Yes.
[A pause. The ambient output of the other fights filtering through. Isaac finishing Mercurius. Beatrice finishing Xuantian. Leo and Voriath somewhere beyond both.]
The Manipulator: You want to fight me after all of this.
Siriusniyo: We've fought together for two hundred years. I've never fought against you.
The Manipulator: We fight against each other during training.
Siriusniyo: Training isn't real. Real fighting is different.
The Manipulator: You think you'd win.
Siriusniyo: I think it would be close.
The Manipulator: I think you'd lose.
Siriusniyo: Then we both have a reason to do it.
[The Manipulator looked at the ceiling.]
The Manipulator: After this is resolved. And Voriath's situation is handled. And the cosmology settles.
Siriusniyo: Yes.
The Manipulator: No weapons from either side.
Siriusniyo: You'd fight without the One Wonder Sword?
The Manipulator: If you fight without Sutur's End.
[A pause. Siriusniyo turned to look at him.]
Siriusniyo: You'd really fight me without the sword.
The Manipulator: The Source FALSE and your Source Zhar. No swords. No weapons. Pure source power.
Siriusniyo: That's a different kind of fight entirely.
The Manipulator: I know.
Siriusniyo: You'd actually do it.
The Manipulator: Yes.
[Siriusniyo was quiet for a moment.]
Siriusniyo: Then I accept.
The Manipulator: After this is over.
Siriusniyo: After this is over.
[A pause.]
Siriusniyo: We haven't lost, by the way.
The Manipulator: I know.
Siriusniyo: We're down. We're not done.
The Manipulator: We saved one thing.
Siriusniyo: Yes.
The Manipulator: We're waiting for the right moment to use it.
Siriusniyo: Leo needs to be in a position where it matters.
The Manipulator: He's in that position now.
Siriusniyo: Not yet.
[The Manipulator turned his head to look at Siriusniyo.]
The Manipulator: You're tracking the fight.
Siriusniyo: Yes. From here. The ambient output is readable if you know how to read fire.
The Manipulator: And?
Siriusniyo: Not yet. But soon.
[The Manipulator looked at the ceiling again.]
The Manipulator: Then we wait.
Siriusniyo: Yes.
[The Seam — After the Fights: Beatrice and Isaac]
[Isaac came through the torn dimensional wall with Cinder on his shoulder]
[He looked at Beatrice and Beatrice looked at him]
[They were in the space where the seam used to be]
[The walls were gone. Just raw dimensional existence around them, the hundred simultaneously visible universes slowly negotiating back toward their folded states now that the fights were over]
[Isaac looked at Xuantian resting in the between-state]
[Then at the space where Mercurius was]
Isaac: You got Xuantian.
Beatrice: Yes, very easily
Isaac: I got Mercurius.
Beatrice: I heard.
Isaac: How long did yours take?
Beatrice: Twenty minutes.
Isaac: Mine took a lot longer.
Beatrice: Mercurius is Omniscient. That's a different problem to solve than time and space.
Isaac: You knew about his form.
Beatrice: Time Magic. A hundred years of it. I track the ambient output of fights in my vicinity. What you did to him was very good. Going before the origin of the space-time continuum and hitting the floor.
Isaac: How do you know that's what I did.
Beatrice: Because that's what I would have done.
[Isaac looked at her for a moment]
Isaac: You held back with Xuantian.
Beatrice: Yes.
Isaac: A lot.
Beatrice: It was polite. He deserved a proper fight."
Isaac: What level are you actually at.
[Beatrice thought about it.]
Beatrice: High enough that the answer is a bit embarrassing.
Isaac: Try.
Beatrice: I have a form. It's called True Ancient Law Form at full mastery. When it's fully active, I become the fundamental rule that governs all of existence and everything's law becomes mine.I used ten percent of it on Xuantian at the end.
[Isaac was quiet for a moment.]
Isaac: Ten percent.
Beatrice: He was in his final form. He deserved the ten percent.
Isaac: What would a hundred percent have done.
Beatrice: Ended it faster.
[A long pause.]
Isaac: Right.
Beatrice: You're very strong too. What you did with the pre-origin state was something I haven't seen before.
Isaac: Cinder helped.
[Cinder]
「It was Isaac. I was the anchor. The idea was his.」
[Cinder was on his shoulder saying this to Beatrice. Beatrice looked at the small fire phoenix with the expression of someone who has not seen a being quite like this before.]
Beatrice: Is that Cinder.
Isaac: Yes.
Beatrice: She's smaller than I expected.
[Cinder]
「I am perfectly sized.」
Beatrice: You're right. My mistake."
[She looked at Isaac properly now. At the fire still running at his core. At the Helios Absolute Afterlife's residual warmth.]
Beatrice: We need to find The Manipulator and Siriusniyo.
Isaac: They went to the between-state when Voriath sent them. I felt it.
Beatrice: Can you reach them.
Isaac: I can look.
Absolute Deity Souls — Sensing Mode.
[The souls spread outward through the dimensional space as sensors by following the ambient output of Siriusniyo's fire which was distinctive even in a dormant state, because conceptual fire left a specific quality in the space around it]
[Isaac felt the direction]
Isaac: The between-dimensions space. The gap between the fifth and sixth layer.
Beatrice: That's near the throne room.
Isaac: The throne room.
Beatrice: Voriath's throne room is one of the most defended spaces in the cosmology. Getting in there—
Isaac: We need to try.
Beatrice: Yes. Do you have a way through?
Isaac: Fire can reach anywhere there's warmth. The throne room has been on fire for an hour. There's residual heat in everything connected to it.
Beatrice: Lead.
[The Invictus World — The Throne Room's Defenses]
[The throne room was not simply a room anymore]
[It had been a room before the fight. Now it was a concept wrapped in twelve layers of Voriath's authority, each one more fundamental than the last]
[The outermost layer was physical defense — compressed void-glass harder than any material in the cosmolog]
[ The second was spatial — the room existed at coordinates that were mathematically impossible to approach from any normal dimensional path]
[The third was temporal — every moment in the room's past and future was sealed, making timeline travel into or around it fail before it started]
[The fourth through twelfth layers were conceptual]
[The concept of entry. The concept of permission]
[The concept of this space having any relationship with any external space. The concept of the room having a boundary that could be crossed]
[The concept of the throne room and the world outside it sharing a dimensional adjacency]
[The concept of the people trying to enter being beings who could enter spaces like this]
[Each layer absolute]
[Each layer Voriath's]
[Isaac and Beatrice arrived at the outermost layer. They could feel the others behind it.
Isaac looked at the void-glass]
Isaac: This is very defended.
Beatrice: Yes.
Isaac: Twelve layers.
Beatrice: At least.
[They looked at each other.]
Isaac: Maximum output?
Beatrice: Maximum output.
Isaac — Plasma Overlord Void-Burn — Applied.
[The void-flames that erased mathematical constants hit the void-glass. The constants that made void-glass hard ceased to exist in the local space]
[The void-glass didn't shatter]
[It renegotiated its hardness from a layer deeper than the constants that had just been erased]
Isaac: It renegotiated.
Beatrice: Yes. The defense is multi-layered. Erase one property and it draws from a deeper one.
Beatrice — The Law of the First Edge — Applied.
[Her blade became the definition of cutting by applying to the conceptual layers of the defense]
[The second layer received it and drew from the third to compensate]
[They stood there for a moment. Two beings who had just finished fighting two of Voriath's most powerful servants, looking at a defense that was doing to them what they'd just done to their opponents]
[Refusing to give ground by finding deeper reserves]
Isaac: Twelve layers.
Beatrice: Every one of them Voriath's authority.
Isaac: We can't break twelve layers of his authority.
Beatrice: Not from outside.
Isaac: Then from inside
Beatrice: We'd need to already be inside.
[A pause.]
Isaac: The ambient fire in the throne room.
Beatrice: What about it.
Isaac: Siriusniyo's fire has been running in that room for hours. Conceptual fire at the Planck temperature. It doesn't obey the same laws as normal fire.
Beatrice: It predates the laws.
Isaac: So does my fire in the current form. If Siriusniyo's fire is inside the defense—
Beatrice: The fire connects. Your fire reaches his fire through the conceptual layer they share.
Isaac: And pulls through.
[Beatrice looked at him.]
Beatrice: That's very clever.
Isaac: I've been learning from people who are smarter than me.
Isaac — Aether-Flame — Applied as Bridge
[The Omnipresent Spark. The single microscopic spark connected to every flame in the universe]
[He found Siriusniyo's conceptual fire inside the throne room's defenses through the connection all fire shared at the pre-elemental level]
[The bridge formed through the concept of fire being fire everywhere simultaneously, which the defense hadn't specifically sealed because sealing the concept of fire sharing its nature across space would have required sealing the concept of fire existing, which would have affected Voriath's own fire-adjacent abilities]
Issac: He'll Yea!!!
[A gap the size of a conceptual thread]
Isaac: Found it.
Beatrice: Can we get through that?
Isaac: It's very small.
Beatrice: I fit through small things.
Isaac: I mean conceptually small.
Beatrice: So do I.
Beatrice — Dimensional Travel — Compression.
[She compressed herself into a state that had the size of a possibility rather than a person]
Isaac: That works.
[He did the same, the fire from his form compressing into a state that was a conceptual thread attached to a conceptual thread]
[They went through the gap]
[It took about three seconds]
[Then they were in the throne room or what was left of it]
[The throne room that had been the center of Voriath's power, the room he had built his identity around, the room where The Manipulator and Siriusniyo had made history holding three of his forms simultaneously, was currently not a room in any traditional sense]
[It was a space defined by where walls had been]
[The debris of conceptual architecture. The memory of absolute darkness mixed with the residual heat of 141 quintillion degrees and seven layers of deception that had burned themselves out]
[And in the between-space tucked into what had been the gap behind the former east wall, two figures]
[The Manipulator and Siriusniyo both of them looked up when Isaac and Beatrice came through]
Siriusniyo: How did you get in here.
Isaac: Your fire. And clever thinking.
The Manipulator: Whose clever thinking.
Isaac: Mine.
Beatrice: Mine too, a little.
[Siriusniyo looked at Beatrice. At the oversized coat. At the sword on her back.]
Siriusniyo: You're Beatrice.
Beatrice: Yes.
Siriusniyo: You defeated Xuantian.
Beatrice: Yes.
[A pause. He looked at her for a moment with the expression of someone who has just recalibrated a mental model significantly.]
The Manipulator: Isaac.
Isaac: Yes.
The Manipulator: Mercurius.
Isaac: Down. Not gone. In the between-state.
The Manipulator: He'll be there for a while.
Isaac: Yes.
[The Manipulator sat up. The first time he'd sat up since landing in the between-space. The motion of someone who has found the thing they were waiting for and is now ready to be upright again.]
The Manipulator: Leo.
Isaac: Somewhere in the seam between universes. Fighting Voriath.
The Manipulator: We felt it start.
Siriusniyo: The fight's been going for a while now
Beatrice: We need to get to the Primus World.
The Manipulator: He'll be heading there. Voriath gravitates toward larger spaces during extended fights. He prefers room
Isaac: Then we go to the Primus World.
[The Manipulator and Siriusniyo looked at each other. The look of two beings who have been in a between-state deciding whether to continue.]
[They stood up.]
Siriusniyo: We have something left.
Isaac: One thing?"
The Manipulator: One thing.
Beatrice: Then we use it when it matters.
Siriusniyo: Yes.
[Isaac looked at all three of them]
Isaac: Then let's go.
[They moved toward the Primus World's direction.]
]And found the way blocked]
「The Dimensional Path — The Barrier」
[The path from the Invictus World to the Primus World was not a physical path]
[It was a dimensional adjacency. The relationship between one vast cosmological space and another. The conceptual thread of proximity that made it possible to move between them]
[Voriath had severed the thread]
[Severed it and replaced the space where it had been with something that was the opposite of a path]
[A presence. A dense, compressed statement of authority that said this way does not lead anywhere you are permitted to go]
[The four of them stood at the boundary where the path used to be]
[Beatrice pressed her hand against it first]
[She pulled her hand back]
Beatrice: That's not a wall.
The Manipulator: No.
Beatrice: That's a definition. He's defined this space as not being a path.
The Manipulator: Yes. Not destroying the path. Removing the concept of it being traversable. The distinction matters.
Siriusniyo: Can your fire burn a definition?
Isaac: I can burn concepts. But a definition Voriath wrote specifically to block the path between his world and the Primus World—
Concept Erasure Flame — Applied.
[The fire aimed at the definition of the space as non-traversable]
[The definition received the fire and acknowledged that fire burned things]
[And continued being a definition]
Isaac: It's acknowledging the fire without being changed by it.
Beatrice: The definition has authority behind it. Voriath's authority. Fire burns things that exist. This thing's existence is backed by the source of what defines existence in the Invictus World.
[The Manipulator raised his sword]
Lies of Fate — Applied to the definition.
[He declared the definition False]
[The definition received the declaration and continued being a definition that was true]
The Manipulator: He anticipated this.
Siriusniyo: He anticipated everything. He's been in this world for two hundred years. He knows every way in and out.
Beatrice: Then we don't go through it. We go around it.
Isaac: Around the definition?
Beatrice: Around the concept of the path existing at all. He defined the path as non-traversable. He didn't define us as non-movers. He didn't define the Primus World as unreachable. He defined the specific path between the two as blocked.
The Manipulator: You're going to find a different path.
Beatrice: I'm going to fold time until the Primus World and where we are occupy the same temporal moment, which makes the spatial path between them irrelevant. If we're already at the same moment, the distance is a formality.
Siriusniyo: Can you do that at this scale.
[Beatrice considered.]
Beatrice: I've never done it at this scale. But I've spent a hundred years getting good at time.
Isaac: Let's try.
Beatrice — The Architecture of Infinity — Maximum Scale.
[She folded the timeline as large as it would go. Bringing the moment of the Primus World and the moment of their current location into the same temporal address. Not moving through space]
[Eliminating the space by making the two points exist in the same moment]
[The definition of the path being blocked didn't cover this because you don't need a path if there's no distance]
[The fold held for three seconds]
[Three seconds was enough]
[All four of them were in the Primus World before the definition could update to cover the new approach]
[And the Primus World was loud with the sound of something enormous happening in the sky above it]
To be continued...