"Die! Die! DIE!"
Mephisto's roar tore through the Fallen Land, each blow of his causing the very air to lock.
His plane-powered body rampaged like a maddened titan, and even Soren master of time and space, had to give everything he had just to survive the barrage.
With every strike, the pressure of the abyss itself crushed toward him. With every breath, the warped origin Mephisto had devoured tried to smother him.
Yet Soren only grew more focused and angrier.
He watched Mephisto's attacks. The demon king had power, but rage had eaten his mind, exactly what Soren was counting on.
Enough.
Soren flicked his wrist; the sigils around his feet flared. "Time… still."
A green pulse silenced the battlefield…the world went motionless.
Mephisto's hateful, twisted figure halted, suspended like an insect in amber.
"…" Soren exhaled in relief, so the time seal could hold him.
"SOREEEN!"
Crimson light erupted from Mephisto's body as he forced the temporal lock apart, shattering it like glass.
The entire Fallen Land shook. "ROAAAAAR!"
"I am one with the plane's source now!" Mephisto shrieked, his voice overlapping with a thousand demonic whispers. "You think tricks of TIME can hold ME?"
He lunged again, tearing through the remnants of frozen space, driving Soren backward under a storm of blows that made entire mountains collapse.
Soren gritted his teeth.
Mephisto was right ordinary temporal or spatial restraints couldn't cage a being now fused with a portion of a plane.
But Soren wasn't out of tools.
He raised both hands, summoning twin sigils one brilliant green, one deep blue.
Time. Space. Two infinite forces, humming with barely contained violence.
"Space Lock."
"Time Reversal."
He cast them one after another, only to feel them snap uselessly against Mephisto's plane-fortified aura.
Worse, the attempts consumed a massive chunk of his mental strength. His mind lagged a fraction of a second behind his body, a lethal weakness at this level.
If this continued, he would die.
Mephisto sensed it too and his grin widened ecstatically.
"You can't run, Soren! You can't hide! I'll tear your soul apart!"
Soren didn't reply and simply stared at the demon king, then exhaled slowly, letting all hesitation fall away.
If time alone couldn't bind Mephisto…
If space alone couldn't restrain him…
Then there was only one option left.
A fusion.
The most dangerous technique he possessed. "Fine. Let's end this."
The sigils of time and space beneath him ignited, brilliant lines of green and blue intertwining like two serpents winding toward the same heart.
Their resonance deepened, expanded, merged until the air itself warped into spirals of distortion.
Mephisto staggered for the first time, his fury briefly drowned by instinctive terror.
That reaction told Soren everything he needed to know.
This was the one thing Mephisto feared, the one thing the plane's stolen origin couldn't fully defend against.
A blow that ignored the present.
A blow that ignored location.
A blow that destroyed the concept of 'now' itself.
"Time and Space…. ABSOLUTE ERASURE."
The circles overlapped, the runes locking together. Power flooded them as Soren's mental force poured like a river, guiding the twin infinities toward a single point of collapse.
BOOOOOMMM… rolled across the Fallen Land.
A force capable of unraveling time and space itself took shape at the center of Soren's dual magic arrays. It was his final trump card, something he had used only once before, against the avatar of Galactus, and which had erased that cosmic horror from existence.
Now, for the second and perhaps last time, Soren invoked it again.
Mephisto claimed he had become the plane.
Fine.
Then Soren would shatter the plane if he had to and take Mephisto with it.
The completed technique detonated outward.
Immediately, the atmosphere changed.
Mephisto's delusions and his rage vanished the instant the destructive tide brushed against him. A terror flooded his being. Even the corrupted plane-origin he had swallowed trembled violently, as if recoiling from the oncoming annihilation.
"S-Soren…!" Mephisto's voice cracked. "What~ what is that power?!"
It was too late, his true instinct took over.
Mephisto attempted to flee hurling himself backward, trying to rip open the plane-space, to tear a hole large enough to escape through.
But the space around him disappeared.
Under the influence of Soren's technique, reality itself ceased to exist. No matter how Mephisto struggled, there was nothing left to run into.
Desperate, he unleashed the entirety of the plane-origin inside him in a single violent discharge, hurling it at the incoming collapse of time and space, just as he had once done when Soren pinned him with spatial suppression.
This time, however, the stakes were far higher.
If the destruction reached him, Mephisto would not merely die, he would be erased so thoroughly that not even the abyss would remember he existed.
The two powers collided!
There was no explosion, no blinding light.
The destructive force simply ate the plane-origin, dissolving it in an instant, erasing it as if it had never been.
"Impossible~ NO!" Mephisto's scream shattered into disbelief.
He tried to hold the destruction back, pouring out more and more origin power, but his efforts were useless. The origin only delayed the inevitable by heartbeats.
Once exhausted, the tide rolled forward again…
It touched him.
And Mephisto master of deception, lord of the abyss, tyrant and usurper~
Vanished.
No body or ashes.
Nothingness.
His final word "SOREN!" echoed briefly, then faded.
The destructive wave did not stop.
It swept across the entirety of the Fallen Land like a tide of oblivion, devouring every trace of the extremely evil aura that had poisoned the abyss.
Only when Soren finally cut off the flow of power did the technique weaken and dissipate.
What remained of the Fallen Land was… peaceful.
For the first time in countless ages.
Mephisto was gone.
And with him, the source of the abyss's corruption vanished as if it had never been.