The frozen rain hung in the air like glass beads.
Inside the massive silver dome of the Time Dilation Barrier, the world was perfectly still. Except for the three Saints.
They moved with terrifying, synchronized precision. The leader raised his glowing silver blade, aiming it directly at Arthur's neck. There was no hesitation. No anger. Just the cold, mechanical execution of a high-priority threat.
"Target locked," the Saint droned. "Eradication."
Arthur didn't dodge. He didn't even look at the blade descending toward him.
He simply opened his hand and let the [Abyssal Heart] drop.
It didn't hit the ground.
The pitch-black singularity fell perfectly into the shadow pooling beneath his boots, sinking directly into the open, waiting chest of the ruined Abyssal General.
There was no explosion. No blinding light. No shockwave.
Instead... there was a CRACK.
It wasn't the sound of stone breaking. It was the sound of reality itself fracturing.
The glowing silver blade of the Saint stopped exactly one inch from Arthur's neck. Not because the Saint had hesitated, but because the blade... simply ceased to exist.
The top half of the S-Rank holy sword had vanished. It wasn't melted. It wasn't shattered. It was just gone, leaving a perfectly smooth, impossible cross-section.
The Saint's faceless visor tilted downward, his internal logic frantically trying to process the impossible data.
From Arthur's shadow, the world began to bleed.
The darkness didn't rise; it pulled everything down. The light inside the silver dome literally bent, dragged into the massive gravitational pull of the singularity that had just been planted.
The ruined, cracked crystal armor of the General began to dissolve, but it didn't fall apart. It was consumed by the heart, violently rewritten by the Void and the furious, trapped soul of the Plague-Drake King.
The heavy, imposing figure of the General morphed. It grew leaner. Taller. The dark-purple crystal was replaced by something that wasn't a color. It was a textured absence of light—a solid shadow that glitched erratically at the edges, as if the universe was constantly trying, and failing, to render its existence.
Where the head should be, there was no face. Just a vertical, jagged tear in the void-matter. And burning deep inside that tear was a swirling, furious emerald vortex—the trapped, eternal engine of the Dragon King.
[Analyzing Entity...]
...
[ERROR]
...
[ERROR]
The blue screens in front of Arthur flickered violently. Lines of code broke apart, splitting into fragments of meaningless text. The System itself was breaking down, desperately trying to categorize the abomination he had just forged.
[Forced Override...]
[New Species Created: Voidbound Sovereign - The Null Executioner]
[Level: ERROR]
[Tier: Mythic (Anomaly)]
[Skills:]
- Existence Erosion (Passive)
- Null Cleave
- Void Anchor
- Abyssal Collapse
The Null Executioner stepped out of the shadow.
The space around it trembled, groaning as if reality itself was under immense, crushing strain. The concrete beneath its foot didn't break; a perfect, circular hole simply appeared. The matter was deleted to make room for its presence.
In its right hand, it held no sword.
It held a tear in space. A jagged, shifting line of absolute nothingness.
The three Saints immediately broke formation, jumping back thirty meters in a synchronized evasion protocol. For the first time since they had descended like mechanical angels, their absolute perfection shattered.
"Threat level... recalculating," the leader droned, his voice glitching as his helmet's visor flared with rapid red warning signs. "Target parameters unknown."
"Error," the second Saint whispered, staring at his scanner. "Mana signature... zero. Threat level... unquantifiable."
They didn't attack immediately. They analyzed.
And what they analyzed terrified their logic processors.
The leader didn't panic. He fell back on his S-Rank programming.
"Coordinate strike. Overload the anomaly's capacity," he ordered sharply.
The three Saints moved in unison, their hands glowing with condensed, blinding holy magic. They didn't aim for the Executioner's body; they aimed at the space around it, launching three massive, intertwined spears of pure light designed to completely purge dark energy.
The Null Executioner slowly turned its faceless, glitching head toward the incoming barrage.
It didn't raise its jagged tear to block. It didn't try to dodge.
The three holy spears struck the Executioner... and simply vanished into the textured absence of its body. There was no explosion. No resistance. The light was just deleted from the equation.
The Saints froze. Their ultimate purge protocol hadn't even scratched the anomaly.
The Executioner turned its vertical tear toward the Saint on the right.
The Saint immediately activated a high-tier movement skill, turning into a streak of silver light to reposition and flank the creature.
The air distorted heavily. The shadow beneath the fleeing Saint violently twisted.
And then—
It didn't walk. It arrived.
The Executioner was suddenly standing directly in front of the fleeing Saint, matching his hyper-speed without crossing the distance.
It raised its left hand and clenched its fingers.
[Skill Activated: Void Anchor]
The silver streak of light slammed into an invisible wall and crashed heavily to the ground. The space around the Saint had been locked. Teleportation, speed skills, even basic movement—all rendered completely useless. He was pinned to the fabric of reality.
The Executioner raised its right hand.
The Saint brought up his heavy, enchanted shield, channeling every ounce of his remaining holy mana into a desperate, blinding wall of golden light. The holy light flared—fighting, resisting, desperately trying to push back the encroaching void.
Then... it blinked out.
The Executioner didn't swing its blade with force. It simply passed the jagged tear of nothingness through the shield.
[Skill Activated: Null Cleave]
There was no sound of impact.
The S-Rank enchanted shield was deleted.
The thick, holy silver armor was deleted.
The right half of the Saint's torso, shoulder, and head... were deleted.
The remaining half of the Saint's body stood frozen for a second, a perfectly smooth, bloodless cross-section exposing his internal organs, before collapsing heavily onto the concrete.
One strike.
No blood. No struggle. No failed resistance. Just erasure.
Arthur watched the S-Rank executioner fall.
A human being, an elite who had spent decades mastering holy magic, was unmade in less than a second.
Arthur waited for the horror. The revulsion. He waited for the basic human empathy that should have screamed at the sight of such absolute, unnatural erasure.
He felt nothing.
He recognized the emptiness inside his chest, the hollow space where his fear and pity used to be. He knew that he was losing pieces of his humanity, rapidly becoming a monster himself.
And he accepted it. The price of sovereignty was absolute.
The remaining two Saints froze.
Their programming, their training, their absolute lack of emotion—it all broke.
They took an involuntary step back.
Arthur Pendelton stood amidst the bending light, his hands in the pockets of his Epic Mantle. He looked at the trembling Saints. He didn't shout. He didn't gloat.
"Existence is not a right," Arthur said quietly, his voice echoing with the oppressive weight of the [Calamity Seed]. "It's a decision."
The Null Executioner turned its faceless vertical tear toward the leader, the emerald dragon engine spinning furiously inside its chest.
"You wanted an anomaly," Arthur whispered into the dead air. "I made you a embodiment of extinction."