The largest Archon moved. It did not lunge. The space between its obsidian fangs and Nulls's chest simply ceased to be a measurable quantity. It was an application of a principle Nulls understood intimately: on this scale, geometry becomes subjective.
One moment, the leviathan was a distant mountain. The next, Nulls's vision was a cathedral of teeth, each fang a slick, black pillar wider than a skyscraper was tall, driving together to scissor his existence in two.
The displaced water hit him first, a solid wall of pressure that would have flattened a city. Nulls's arms, sheathed in the crimson flesh of his new pact, snapped up. He did not brace. He became a fixed point in reality, an axiom in the chaotic geometry of the fight. The fangs slammed against his palms.
The sound was not a clank, but a deep, resonant THOOM that was less a noise and more a fundamental vibration, a shockwave that propagated through the water and turned the nearest Calamity-Class Morbus into a cloud of chitinous mist.
He held.
Stolen divinity strained against primordial hunger. In the leviathan's single, cyclopean eye, a swirling morass of a dead sea, Nulls saw not just hunger, but a flicker of cold, calculating recognition. This was not a beast. It was a scholar of gluttony.
The daggers struck.
From the velvety, fleshy darkness within the Archon's gullet, a nest of whip-like appendages uncoiled. They were not mere limbs. They were scalpels of chitin and malice, each the length of an ancient redwood, moving with a speed that rendered the concept of travel obsolete. They did not move from point A to points B; they were manifested at their destination, already mid-cut.
The first slash opened a canyon from Nulls's right shoulder to his left hip. It was not a clean wound. The edges frayed, reality itself unraveling at the touch of the blades. The second pass took his left arm at the elbow. There was no spray of blood, for his blood was now a thick, smoking ichor that clouded the water with the scent of ozone and a metallic tang, like copper coins left on a forgotten grave. The pain was a cold, sharp clarity, a diagnostic report from a body that was now more concept than flesh.
A localized True Vacuum Decay, the calculation formed in his mind, pristine and perfect. A bubble of non-reality to un-exist them from the inside out. The first syllable, a phoneme that predated the first star, began to form in his mind, a shaping of will into sound.
One of the scalpels, its tip vibrating with a frequency that nullified coherent thought, shot into his open mouth.
It did not pierce his brain. It lodged in his throat, a physical and metaphysical blockage. The spell died, stillborn. He gagged, a wet, choking sound, his body reflexively trying to expel the appendages. A thousand psychic needles bloomed in his throat, each a tiny scream of aetherion. The taste was of static and the faint, cloying perfume of forgotten roses.
The Archon holding him did not roar in triumph. It chanted.
The sound was not a voice. It was the universe groaning under a stress it was never meant to bear. Three notes, each lower than the last, vibrating not through the water, but through the quantum foam of local spacetime. The other two Archons added their voices, weaving a dissonant chord that structured the chaotic hunger into a single, focused imperative of erasure.
The world turned white.
There was no heat, no explosive force. There was only the cessation of being. In a perfect, nine-thousand-kilometer sphere, everything, water, light, the seething swarm of Calamity-Class Morbus, was simply deleted from the ledger of existence. One moment, a frenzied ecosystem of nightmare biology; the next, a memory, a scar on reality.
Nulls was at the epicenter. The energy took him in the chest. It was not an impact, but an unraveling. He felt his ribs, forged from solidified shadow, begin to disassociate into their constituent concepts.
The white wool of his fleece began to sublimate directly from his body into nothingness. He was thrown back, a puppet with its strings cut, his trajectory a straight line through the perfect, soundless vacuum they had created.
He had subjugated pantheons and outlived cosmic ends. Theos wisdom, cold and vast, calculated the variables. These leviathans were not more powerful than the horrors of his past; they were a different kind of problem. A lock to be picked, not a wall to be broken.
Entombed, Nulls forced his one free arm to move. His fingers found the cover of his Codex. He caressed the scarred leather, and it responded, not with a glow, but by drinking the light around it, creating a sphere of perfect blackness that pushed the crushing weight of stone and ocean away from him. The runes etched into the bubble's interior were not light, but the absence of it.
"YOG!" The roar was a demand, not a plea. It was the first time he had spoken the name aloud since the pact was sealed. He waited. Only the oppressive silence of the deep and the distant, rhythmic THUMP from above answered him. Yog would not come. The power had been given. The rest was his to wield.
"It will not end like this," he snarled, the words a vow. His will hardened, focusing not on sustaining the sphere, but on the nature of the thumps themselves. Each impact was a data point.
The thumping intensified. A web of cracks splintered across the sphere's shell. A jet of water, colder than death, burst through, striking his eye. It popped, releasing a stream of black ichor that dripped down to his feline-like feet. He let the sphere fall.
As the ocean flooded back in, the corner of his mouth curled. Not a smile of joy, but the baring of a predator who has finally identified the scent of his quarry's weakness. His sigils were disabled.
Grand chanting was blocked. But they had focused on disabling the symptoms of his power, the waves, not the ocean itself. The source, the Nexus energy within him, remained. He could not cast a great spell, but he could write a small, vicious one into being.
He formed a syllable. A faint blue pentagram scorched the air behind him, heating the nearby water into plasma and reducing the rock to ash. From it burst the beast of entropy, this time smaller, its form more concentrated. Its height was now equal to his, unlike the previous iteration, which had been the size of a building.
As the beast fully emerged, the molecular structure of the nearby rock and water disordered, leaving them in a localized vacuum. Nulls commanded the beast to increase its output.
The beast complied. A grey light pulsed from its core. Where the light touched, the world simply unmade. The rock of the ravine, the water, the distant Morbus, all silently dissolved into a fine, inert dust. The beast shuddered, its form flickering, the effort visibly consuming it. Then it lowered its output, ensuring the effect only applied to things in contact with its skin.
With the ravine destroyed, Nulls and his beast were exposed to the three archons.
The three Archons hung in the emptiness, their forms shifting in the non-light. The psychic link was still severed, but their instinct was one. The prey had brought an aid. They sensed that this new thing could change the tide of the battle.
The three leviathans chanted again.
This time, the sound was a physical weight, pressing outwards from their combined forms. The notes were longer, layered with harmonics that spoke of stellar cores going cold and black holes withered. They poured more of their ancient, hungry power into the spell, reinforcing it, amplifying it beyond its previous bounds.
The second blast was not white. It was black. A sphere of absolute consumption ten kilometers in radius erupted from them. Where the first spell had erased, this one devoured. And for a single, terrifying instant, Nulls, for the first time in eternities, felt the true void of the space between universes. It was colder than the water around him, and infinitely more viscous.
The eruption sent his beast into a frenzy. Instinctually, it roared back. The devouring energy crawled over Nulls, annihilating every trace of his existence, reducing him to a state more hollow than nonexistence.
The entropy barrier around the beast fought back violently. Subconsciously, the beast amplified its output a thousandfold, forming a ball of true vacuum half the size of the blast. The clash produced a dead zone where nothing could exist.
The beast thrashed, desperately pushing back. But with its master gone, its power shrank at an alarming rate. The beast, filled with unwavering determination to avenge him, forbade itself from resting until its enemies were ash and bone.
The zone of true vacuum shrank rapidly. If the beast didn't think of a solution fast, it would share its master's fate. It focused on the Codex, its cover unscathed by the blast. Driven by pure instinct, it reached for the tome.
Its fingers were mere centimeters away, but it was too late. The nexus in its arsenal, although vaster than a planetary ocean, had run dry. The protective vacuum ceased instantly. The blast reached the beast in a slice of time thinner than zero.
The beast was slain, meeting the same fate as its master. The effects of their clash would scar the battlefield for millennia. No organism, corporeal or not, could withstand the conditions of the wrecked seabed, with four exceptions.
The light of the world was not banished; it was murdered. Photons were stripped of their energy, their wave functions collapsed into a state of not-having-been. The very space within the sphere underwent a phase change, becoming a substance more rigid than neutronium and colder than the background temperature of the cosmos for a perfect, universal deadzone.
The sphere erupted outwards, not with fire, but with the pressure of countless dead stars. The ocean did not vaporize; its molecules were unmade, hydrogen and oxygen atoms sheared back into the constituent quantum foam that predated matter. This un-creation propagated faster than light, a wave of non-being that ate sound, ate light, ate the very fabric of space.
The seabed beneath it, a continent of ancient basalt, did not shatter. It ceased to be stone. For an instant, it became a seething plasma of fundamental particles, which were then themselves simplified into pure, featureless energy, which was then extinguished.
The three Archons, untouched at the eye of their self-made storm, rode the collapsing fury upwards. They breached into a world gone mad. The sea was a chaos of tsunamis thousands of meters high, each wave a drowning curse upon the sky. Water streamed from their impossible scales as they rose, and they scanned the heaving, featureless ocean with senses that could taste a single atom of power across a world.
They tasted nothing. The feast was over. The tantalizing signal that was Nulls was gone, extinguished. Below them, the abyssal plain was now a tomb of plasma, a monument to their hunger. Omni mortis. All death.
Nulls played dead. It was not a strategy of the body, but of the soul. He let the Yog-power within him recede, pulling it back from the bleeding edges of his form until he was, for all sensory purposes, a cooling corpse. For ten minutes, he existed in a state more hollow than nothingness.
And from that, he began to rebuild.
It started with the Codex. The book, untouched and unscathed, materialized first from the void within his spirit. It did not appear in his hand, for he had no hand. It simply was, a fact of the universe that had been temporarily hidden and was now revealed.
Then, his body knitted itself back from the surrounding darkness and sediment, pulling carbon and trace minerals from the mud to weave over the skeleton of shadow. It was a slower, more deliberate process than the violent reclamation Yog provided. This was his own power, the core intellect of the Theos, operating on a level this reality was not equipped to detect.
He rose from the seabed not with a motion, but with an implication. One moment he was part of the mud. The next, he was standing upon it, whole once more, the gash in his torso sealed into a jagged, black scar, the stump of his arm regrown. The fleece was pure white again, a mocking banner of innocence. He left the faint, malevolent glow of the cracked Codex extinguished.
He looked up, through hundreds of millions of kilometers of crushing, black water, and saw them. Three vast shadows against the dim light of the surface.
His sigils were now unblocked, the leviathans' focus having shifted away from him. He wove a sigil, an equation of time with the variable set to a negative value. He did not swim. He violated causality.
He did not move from the sea floor to the surface. He erased the interval. The journey took negative two seconds. He arrived before he had even decided to leave, the universe frantically correcting the paradox of his presence.
There was no displacement of water, no shockwave. He was simply behind them, a silent, smiling ghost in their blind spot, his presence so subtle it was a hole in their perception.
The Archons sensed nothing. Their hunger, momentarily sated by the belief in their victory, was a dull roar. They had no concept of a predator that could outpace time itself.
Nulls observed them. He saw the way the largest one's scales shifted, a nauseating, impossible pattern that was its version of breathing. He heard the low hum of their biology, a sound that would liquefy a human's bones.
He smelled the ancient, cold stench of the void still clinging to their forms. He felt the turbulence of the water around their colossal bodies, and he tasted the lingering psychic residue of their spell, the flavor of extinction.
He did not attack. Not yet.
He followed.
They moved, and he moved with them, a shadow attached to their negative time. They traversed ten thousand kilometers in the space of a breath, and Nulls was there, a step behind, his claws resting patiently at his sides.
He was learning. He was calculating. The first battle had been a test of his new form, a clumsy brawl of raw power. This would be different. They had shown him their strength. Now, he would show them his intellect.
The largest Archon, the one of scale and nightmare, suddenly stilled. Its single, city-sized eye ceased its swirling. A tremor ran through its mountainous form. It had not seen him. It had not heard him. But on some primordial level, deeper than instinct, it had felt the universe twist around it. It felt the chilling certainty of a variable it had not accounted for.
It began to turn, its body moving with a slowness that was more terrifying than its speed, a glacier of flesh and malice rotating to face the void at its back. Nulls did not wait for it to complete the motion. He had all the time in the negative seconds of the universe to decide his next move.
From within negative time, Nulls wove another sigil. This one erased not his body, but his existential signature. Any trace of his presence was gone; he was more undetectable than ever before. Even his previous state of unmade nonexistence had been more perceptible than he was now.
He understood the cost. The sigil was a thermodynamic paradox, burning his own existence as fuel. It could not be sustained for more than thirty minutes. Exceed that limit by even a timeless instant, and the reaction would become self-perpetuating. His soul would permanently fade, his form unmade, leaving him a pure consciousness, incapable of ever interacting with reality again.
The leviathan, finding nothing, began to turn back. Nulls was a silent void behind the other two. Suddenly, it surged to its kin with violent speed, creating a wave as vast as the ravine that had once entombed him.
The wave slammed into Nulls, tossing him back and forth. Any innocent creature unfortunate enough to be in his path was vaporized upon collision. In the chaos, he wove a stabilizing sigil, calming the water around him.
As he floated on the surface he realized that his Nexus is getting dried at an alarming rate, with that in mind he deactivated negative time, letting the normal flow of causality to chained him once more.
He saw the leviathans were almost gone, their silhouettes just tiny shadows in the distance. All that remained was the sound of the crashing sea and the calls of nearby aquatic life.
"Where are they heading?" Nulls mused. He looked at the sky and realized they were heading directly towards the sun. "Why would they swim east?"
A fish jumped spontaneously from the water. Before it could collide with his head, Nulls snatched it from the air with his canine teeth. He swallowed it in two bites, the crunch of bone and scale a strangely pleasant sensation.
The sun beat down on him, his mind flickered with the image of Valerius's face. The chains. The metallic taste of his own ichor. The pathetic, small-minded cruelty. To say he had been treated like an animal was too generous. Even animals were fed. Even animals were given the basic resources for survival.
He, on the other hand, had been locked in chains, given no food, no water. For days, the only sound was the trickle of his own endless ichor onto the metallic floor, the only sight his own insides steadily leaking out.
Although Nulls had been contained and treated far worse in the past, he still ranked this recent imprisonment highly, three hundred and fourteenth place, topping some of the worst dungeons in the multiverse.
"Maybe I ranked it a little high," he stated. He glanced again in the leviathans' direction, but they were completely gone from sight. His objective was to subjugate humanity, not hunt sea monsters.
A true smile, thin and cold, finally touched Nulls's lips. Let Valerius think he's dead. Let the world believe the threat had passed. He had a new purpose. These Archons were a key. A key to a door he known must have existed.
The Archons were not vermin to be killed; they were my tool to be wielded. They were his vanguard. Let them shatter Valerius's organization and drown her civilization in tsunamis. They would soften the continent for his arrival.
His swim towards the west was not a retreat. It was a king walking calmly through the opening moves of a game only he knew how to play.