While the King of Stone's fortress hung in the silent, cold air of the upper atmosphere, the Wonder World below had turned into a literal hellscape. The "Peace" that Sophie had tried to build was being dismantled by a scorched-earth invasion.
The Battle of the Marble Sanctuary
In the heart of the Wonder World, Sophie stood atop the highest spire of the Marble City. Her hands were blurred in motion, weaving threads of pure Grace into a massive, shimmering dome that protected the refugees.
"Hold the line!" she screamed, her voice cracking.
Below her, Sooji was a whirlwind of violence. She wasn't using a sword; she was using her Axiom of Kinetic Redirection. Every time a stone-demon swung a club at her, she didn't block she touched the weapon and sent the force back into the demon's own skull.
CRACK.
A demon the size of a building exploded into pebbles. But for every one she killed, ten more emerged from the crimson sea.
"They're endless!" Sooji yelled, her breathing ragged. "Sophie, the dome is thinning!"
Sophie didn't look down. She bit her lip until it bled, pouring her very life force into the shield. "Null is at the gate. If we fall now, his journey means nothing. Fight until your bones turn to dust!"
Kai, who had been silent for hours, finally stepped forward. He didn't look like the calm strategist anymore. His eyes were glowing with a frantic, golden light. He reached into the air and pulled out a spear made of pure mathematical equations.
[Logic Strike: Division by Zero]
He hurled the spear. Where it landed, the rules of space simply ceased to exist. A group of five hundred obsidian knights was erased not killed, but mathematically removed from the timeline.
"I can hold them for ten minutes," Kai gasped, his nose bleeding from the mental strain. "After that... the Wonder World belongs to the Stone."
The Corridor of Ashes
Back in the High Kingdom, the silence was deafening.
Null stood before Aris, his scythe's blade resting on the floor. Behind him lay the Walk of Death the corridor filled with headless giants and evaporating demons.
Aris stood up from the stairs, tapping the ash out of his pipe. He looked at the white veins pulsing in Null's black arm and then at the Iron Crown.
"You hear them, don't you?" Aris asked, gesturing with his one arm toward the floor, as if he could see through the clouds to the Wonder World below. "Your friends are dying. Sophie is burning her soul to keep a roof over some orphans. Kai is literally deleting his own brain cells to stop my brothers. And here you are... walking."
Null didn't blink. "They chose their path. I chose mine."
"Cold," Aris remarked, a dark, whistling wind beginning to gather around his feet. "I like that. It makes it easier to kill you."
Aris moved.
He didn't use "God-Speed." He used [Structural Displacement]. He didn't travel through the air; he simply decided he was now six inches in front of Null. His new blade, the Aether-Reaper, came down in a vertical strike that carried the weight of the entire fortress.
CLANG.
Null didn't dodge. He raised his scythe, catching the massive blade with the crook of the handle. The shockwave blew the remaining doors off their hinges and sent a tremor down to the Earth that recorded as a magnitude 7.0 earthquake.
"You're heavy, kid," Aris hissed, pushing down. "But weight is just gravity. And I... I am the wind that gravity cannot catch."
The Liquid Void vs. The Invisible Blade
Aris vanished. Not a teleport, but a complete dissolution into the air.
Null felt a cut on his cheek. Then his shoulder. Then his thigh. He was being hit by a thousand invisible strikes a second. Aris was moving so fast he had become the very atmosphere in the room.
Null closed his eyes. He didn't try to see Aris. He looked inward, back to the Archive of the Unworthy.
I am the mess. I am the ink.
[Human-Axiom: Blackout]
Null didn't attack. Instead, he released a burst of thick, obsidian ink from every pore of his body. Within seconds, the grand hallway was filled with a liquid darkness so dense that light couldn't penetrate it.
The invisible strikes stopped.
"I can't see you," Aris's voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. "But you can't see me either."
"I don't need to see you," Null's voice came out as a distorted growl. "You are 'High-Rank.' You are 'Pure.' In this ink, there is no purity. There is only the rot of the world."
The ink began to move like a sentient beast, searching for anything "ordered" or "divine" to consume. Aris, who was made of perfect obsidian code, was like a beacon in the dark.
Null found him.
He appeared behind Aris, his black hand glowing with those white, divine veins. He punched Aris in the back not a strike to kill, but a strike to infect.
The Infection of Reality
Aris screamed. It wasn't a sound of pain, but of horror. Where Null's hand touched his obsidian armor, the Perfect Code was turning into common clay. The Executioner was being demoted in real-time.
"What... what did you do to me?" Aris gasped, stumbling away, his armor crumbling off his shoulders in grey, dusty chunks.
"I gave you what you've been avoiding for ten years," Null said, stepping out of the ink. His Iron Crown was glowing a fierce, dull red. "I gave you a life that matters. I gave you mortality."
Aris looked at his remaining hand. It was shaking. It was bleeding—not gold, but red, human blood.
"Mortality..." Aris whispered. A strange, twisted smile crossed his face. He gripped his sword with his bloody hand. "So this is what it feels like to be 'Unworthy.' It's... terrifying. I love it."
Aris threw away his helmet, revealing a face covered in scars and eyes that were finally starting to see the world clearly. He let out a roar of pure, unadulterated human rage and charged Null one last time.
The Final Gate
Their final clash didn't use magic. It was a brutal, bone-breaking exchange of steel. Aris fought with the desperation of a man who knew he could die, and Null fought with the weight of a billion souls who had already died.
With a final, decisive sweep, Null's scythe caught Aris's blade and snapped it in two. The momentum carried the black scythe through Aris's chest, pinning the Executioner to the final obsidian doors of the Throne Room.
Aris coughed, red blood staining his chin. He looked at Null and nodded.
"Go on, kid," Aris wheezed. "He's waiting. But remember... once you open these doors, the 'Human' you are right now... he won't be coming back out."
Aris's head slumped forward. The Executioner was dead.
Null stood alone before the final doors. Behind him, his friends were dying in the Wonder World. Before him sat the King of Stone.
Null placed his ink-stained hand on the obsidian gate.
"I know," Null whispered.
He pushed the doors open.
This is sad
End of chapter 85
See you later