The silence in the Argus-steel cell was absolute. The hum of the runes was a physical pressure against his eardrums. Nulls's eyes, cold and analytical, scanned every seam, every imperfection in the dull metal. Empty. As expected.
He focused on his right hand, trapped against his chest within the stiff canvas. He wiggled his fingers, the movement minute. He concentrated, envisioning a point of absolute nothingness at the tip of his index finger. It was a pathetic, strained effort, a flicker of the power he once commanded.
A faint wisp of grey smoke, barely visible, curled from his fingertip. He pressed it against the inner lining of the straitjacket. There was a soft, sizzling sound, and the smell of scorched canvas filled the small space. A tiny, blackened hole appeared. It was a start.
His gaze then lifted, tracing the walls until he found them: near the ceiling, a series of narrow, hexagonal vents, no wider than his thumb. Airholes. A necessary flaw in any sealed environment. A way in, and a way out for things smaller than a man.
A plan, brutal in its simplicity, began to form.
He bit down hard on his own lower lip, the coppery tang of blood immediately flooding his mouth. He sucked on the wound, gathering a mouthful, then leaned forward and spat a thick, crimson stream onto the floor in front of him.
The blood was shockingly bright against the sterile grey steel. He repeated the process, twisting his head and using his limited range of motion to sketch out a crude, five-pointed star. The lines were wobbly, smeared, and far from geometrically perfect. But Yog hadn't said it needed to be.
Next, the Codex. He shuffled his body around, maneuvering his legs. With a careful, measured kick, he nudged the leather-bound book. It slid across the floor, coming to rest roughly in the center of the bloody pentagram. The movement smudged one of the lines. Annoyed, he bit his lip again, fresh pain flaring, and spat another glob of blood to patch the broken seal.
Now, for the catalyst. He took a deep, steadying breath, then bit down on his own tongue. The pain was sharp and blinding, a white-hot flash behind his eyes. He grunted, stifling the sound, and spat a chunk of fleshy, bloody tissue onto the center of the Codex, where it lay like a grisly offering.
Then, he waited.
The hours crawled by. The only change was the slow, dark drying of his blood on the floor. His body ached from the unnatural position. The thirst was a rasping dryness in his throat. He focused on the silence, on the hum, on the slow, patient beat of his own heart.
Near the end of the fourth hour, he heard it. A faint, collective buzzing. From the air vents, a small swarm of insects, tiny, opportunistic scavengers drawn by the scent of fresh blood, descended onto the pentagram, skittering across the lines and his Codex.
Nulls didn't hesitate. He shifted his weight and brought his foot down, not with fury, but with precise, grinding force. Once, twice, a dozen times. The buzzing ceased, replaced by the silent, smeared carnage of dozens of tiny bodies crushed into his own blood.
He focused his will, pushing past the pain and the fatigue, and uttered the four names into the silence, his voice a raw, bloody whisper.
"The Lurker beyond the Threshold."
"The Tome and the Knowledge."
"The Noosphere Monarch."
"The Calamity of Oneiros."
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a tremor ran through the Codex. The smeared blood and insect viscera on its cover seemed to sink in, absorbed. A trickle of power, cold and vast, flowed from the book and into him. It was not the ocean he was used to, not even a river. It was a puddle. But it was wet. It was functional. And it was all he needed.
His eyes glinted in the dim light. First, he crafted a new command, a work of microscopic precision. From the lingering entropy in the air, he summoned a new Marky. This one was no larger than an ant, a speck of animated nothingness. He directed it to the manacles on his wrists and the straps of the straitjacket.
The effect was silent and slow. Where the microscopic beast crawled, the reinforced canvas and enchanted steel didn't break; they simply ceased to exist at a molecular level.
Threads unraveled into dust. Metal thinned and dissolved. With a final, rotten tear, the straitjacket fell away from his chest and arms. The manacles, though weakened, were still partially lodged in the flesh of his wrists and ankles, their core enchantments stubbornly clinging. He couldn't remove them yet, not without more power. But he was free to move.
Now for the real work.
He looked at his own hand, at the bloody stump of his bitten finger. Without a flinch, he bit down again, lower, severing the finger at the knuckle. The pain was a distant, academic observation.
Using the bleeding stump as a gruesome brush, he began to paint. He moved around the cell, sketching the largest, most intricate pentagram the floor could hold, the lines thick and glistening with his own vital fluids. He placed his Codex back in the center.
His final preparation was a masterpiece of horrific theater. He lay down on his back, directly on top of the Codex, concealing it with his body. Then, he began to mutilate himself.
He used his own nails, his teeth, the sharp edge of a remaining manacle, anything he could find, to carve shallow, bloody gashes across his arms, his chest, his face. He was careful not to inflict fatal damage, only to create a scene of utter, shocking brutality. All the while, the ant-sized Beast of Entropy continued its silent, patient work, a hidden asset.
And as their warmth soaked into him, he would utter the honorifics once more. This time, the puddle would become a lake. And then, the real work could begin.
The four hours passed with the slow, grinding certainty of a glacier. Nulls lay perfectly still, a statue of self-inflicted carnage. He felt it not as a vibration, but as a profound shift in the hum of the runes, a disconnection, followed by a long period of weightless, directionless transit. They hadn't come to his cell. They had moved the entire cell. An impressive, paranoid precaution.
It changed nothing. His plan was a binary wager: failure yielded a neutral outcome. He remained a prisoner, while success yielded a positive one. He gained power. There was no logical reason to deviate.
Finally, the journey ended. The new hum of the runes was different, deeper, resonating with the immense pressure of what could only be the Abyssal Station Zero. A series of heavy, mechanical clunks echoed from the door, followed by the shrieking groan of metal being torched. They were cutting their way in. That explained the delay.
With a final, deafening clang, a section of the Argus-steel door was severed and fell inward. Bright, sterile light flooded the cell, illuminating the scene in all its horrific glory.
There was a sharp, collective intake of breath.
Nulls lay in a pool of his own dried and fresh blood, his body a canvas of shallow, cruel gashes. His face was a mask of gore, one finger a mangled stump. He looked like a man who had tried to claw his own existence apart.
"Great Inferno..." one of the four armored guards whispered, his weapon lowering a fraction.
That was the cue.
The lead guard rushed in, his boots splashing in the blood. "Confiscated it! Secure the Codex!"
As the first guard reached for him, Nulls gave the silent command.
Unmake.
From the shadow of a smeared bloodstain, the ant-sized Beast of Entropy moved. It was a flicker of non-motion. It touched the back of the lead guard's helmet. A perfect, pinprick circle of the advanced armor, the underlying bone, and the brain tissue within simply ceased to exist. The guard crumpled forward without a sound, his body slamming down on top of Nulls, his life's blood adding a new, warmer layer to the ritual circle.
The other three guards froze for a split second, their training warring with the impossible horror. "What–"
Unmake. Unmake.
Two more pinpricks. Two more silent, collapsing forms, their weight joining the first atop Nulls, their weapons clattering to the floor.
The fourth guard managed to scream and level his rifle. A hail of Aetherion-charged rounds filled the cell, ricocheting off the walls in a deafening whine. None touched Nulls, shielded as he was by the bodies of his comrades. The beast, a speck of patient death, simply drifted up and applied its touch to the shooter's jaw. The scream was cut off as the lower half of his face vanished. He fell.
Silence returned, thicker and heavier than before, now saturated with the smell of blood, ozone, and voided bowels.
Four bodies lay upon him, their warmth seeping into his cold skin, their blood mingling with his on the floor, soaking into the Codex pressed between his back and the steel.
Nulls closed his eyes, ignoring the crushing weight and the stench. He focused his will, the newly acquired Nexus from the insects a tiny spark ready to ignite a bonfire.
He whispered the names, his voice calm and clear amidst the slaughter.
"The Lurker beyond the Threshold."
"The Tome and the Knowledge."
"The Noosphere Monarch."
"The Calamity of Oneiros."
The Codex beneath him drank. It drank the blood, it drank the latent life force, it drank the shock and terror that still hung in the air. The power that flowed into him was not a trickle. It was a torrent.
The puddle became a stream.
The stream became a river.
The river became a great, dark lake of pure, undiluted Nexus.
He felt it flooding the hollow spaces within him, replenishing, expanding, roaring back to life. The lingering ache from his wounds vanished. The fatigue evaporated.
He opened his eyes. The faint, glowing manacles on his wrists flickered and died, the enchanted metal pinging as it fell away, the lodged pieces forcibly expelled from his flesh by the surge of power within.
With a gentle, effortless motion, he pushed the pile of corpses off him. They slid to the floor with wet, heavy thuds.
Nulls stood up in the center of the blood-drenched pentagram, drenched in gore but utterly unscathed, his body already knitting itself back to perfection. He looked down at the four dead guards, then at the open doorway leading into the heart of the Rapax Morsatra's most secure facility.
A pleasant, welcoming smile spread across his now-unmarred face.
"Now," he said to the empty, bloody cell. "Where's skylar?"
Nulls walked calmly from the blood-soaked cell, his bare feet leaving crimson prints on the sterile, polished floor of the corridor. The hallway was a study in paranoid order, lined with identical, seamless doors, each marked with a stark, white designation. He passed "Containment: Asfalis-Class," "Storage: Reliquary-Gamma," his eyes scanning the labels with detached curiosity.
Then one door made him stop.
CONTAINMENT: ARMAGEDDON-CLASS
The same classification Skylar had given him. A slow, intrigued smile touched his lips. He reached out, not with a spell, but with raw, physical might amplified by the lake of Nexus within him. His fingers dug into the reinforced alloy like it was soft clay, and with a deafening shriek of tortured metal, he peeled the entire door from its frame and tossed it aside like a piece of scrap.
What lay inside was not what he expected.
It was another cell, but the containment was exponentially more severe. The centerpiece was a Codex, its cover a deep, bruised purple, bound not just in chains, but in a latticework of them, woven so thickly it was almost a solid shell of enchanted metal. The sheer overkill of it indicated one, terrifying fact: the Rapax Morsatra believed this object was far more dangerous than he was.
As he stared, he felt it. A call. Not a sound, but a psychic pull, identical in nature to the one that had first drawn him to Yog. It was a siren song of immense power, whispering directly into his soul.
His hand rose, almost of its own volition, his fingers stretching towards the bound tome.
NO!
The mental shout was not a whisper, but a psychic detonation that rocked his consciousness. It was Yog, and the voice was raw with a fear Nulls had never sensed in the ancient entity.
"Yog... I know you didn't want to share," Nulls thought back, his mental tone laced with annoyance, "but please, at least have some dignity and don't shout like the vermin you despise so much."
"This isn't about dignity or sharing!" Yog's reply was frantic, urgent. "That Codex... it uses the same energy source as us. The Nexus."
"Alright, and?" Nulls retorted, his fingers still hovering centimeters from the purple cover. "Just because you aren't special anymore doesn't mean you can overreact like that."
"You moron!" Yog's thought was a blast of pure frustration. "The Nexus comes from outside this universe's boundary. It's filtered through the boundary to create the junk Aetherion these arcanists use. Whatever that thing is, its origin mimics mine. We are both not native to this reality. I can conceive of only two possibilities: either my father created us but kept us hidden from one another, or it comes from a completely different, foreign source. Both are equally terrifying."
Nulls finally withdrew his hand, the psychic pull from the purple Codex fading to a dull, persistent hum. "So what is the best course of action, in your narrative?"
"We wait. We gather information. Then, I want you to touch it. That will be sufficient to establish a connection, to have an audience with it. Then, you will let me do the talking."
"You truly have no knowledge of it?" Nulls pressed, skeptical. "Surely you've encountered this Codex somewhere in your eons of existence."
"I am not... entirely sure," Yog admitted, his tone shifting to one of deep, troubled thought. Its signature is familiar, yet foreign. "I will spend some time in the Library of Babel, searching the archives of all that is and could be. I will be gone for some time. Do not die before our next audience."
Nulls said nothing, his gaze fixed on the chained Codex with a new, profound sense of awe and caution.
At that moment, a deafening, blaring alarm erupted throughout the facility. Crimson lights flashed, staining his skin the color of fresh blood. A panicked voice boomed from speakers in the walls.
"Subject RM-BV-001 has breached containment at threshold Aleph-Zero! I want all available Yager and Yagerin personnel at Aleph-Zero now! I repeat! Subject RM-BV-001 has breached containment! All personnel to Aleph-Zero! I want all available Yager and Yagerin personnel at Aleph-Zero now!"
Nulls's eyes narrowed. "Fuck."
The response was instantaneous. He turned from the Armageddon-Class cell just as the first squad arrived. A storm of gunfire erupted. Aetherion-reinforced rounds, each one thick with enough energy to add ten calibers to its mass, slammed into him. The impact was a continuous, concussive hammering against his crimson skin. It stung slightly. It left bruises. But it did not pierce.
As their rifles clicked empty, they lobbed grenades. The concussive blasts, amplified by Aetherion, were more severe, throwing him back a step and leaving superficial burns. But it was a negligible margin of damage.
The hallway filled with thick, choking smoke from the explosions, a grey mist that pooled around the feet of the personnel outside.
Nulls stepped out of the smoke, unscathed and furious. This was the perfect chaos.
What followed was not a battle; it was a harvest. He moved through the smoke like a reaper, a blur of crimson motion. Claws found throats, spines were snapped, limbs were torn. In less than a minute, the hallway was a charnel house, filled with fifty corpses.
He needed a catalyst. His eyes scanned the bodies, finding the one with the youngest, most unlined face, a female soldier. He lifted her with a claw through her chest, holding her aloft like a grisly satay. She was still alive, her eyes wide with terror. He needed a place to work. The door adjacent to the Armageddon-class cell was labeled
"CONTAINMENT: CALAMITY-CLASS."
He kicked the reinforced door, and it buckled inward with a crash.
The scene inside was strange. It was dark, illuminated only by the flashing red alarm lights. A ten-foot-tall humanoid creature stood before an easel. Its hair was slightly translucent, revealing the pulsing grey matter of its brain beneath. Its eyes were pools of absolute black, and its skin was an impossible, bloodless white. Its fingers ended in sharp claws, and it was dressed in the same kind of modest, simple clothing he wore. It was... painting.
The creature reached for a tube of blue paint, then froze. It had seen him.
Nulls stood in the doorway, dripping with blood and gore. The blood from the soldier on his claw was draining rapidly. He had to act fast.
He set the woman down and conjured a pinpoint of intense heat at his fingertip, cauterizing the wound in her chest. She was still alive. She drew a breath to scream.
The sound that came out was a blood-curdling shriek of pure agony.
Nulls moved faster than thought. His hand clamped over her mouth, muffling the scream. With brutal efficiency, he snapped her jaw and punched several holes in her throat, instantly cauterizing each one with a sizzling touch. The scream died, replaced by a wet, gurgling silence. Effective.
He turned his attention back to the creature. Oddly, it was cowering behind its canvas, its black eyes wide with fear. A Calamity-class, afraid of him.
Nulls walked forward slowly, trying not to startle it. He failed. The creature tried to squeeze its entire body behind the flimsy protection of the canvas. When Nulls stood before it, the creature's claws shot out from behind the canvas, swiping at him.
He caught both wrists effortlessly.
The creature kicked out wildly, striking his legs, his torso, even his groin. The blows were weak, pathetic. The Calamity-class Morbus he had fought on the bridge was a far greater threat.
Nulls had had enough. He delivered a swift, powerful kick to the side of the creature's leg. There was a sickening crack, and the limb separated from its body. The creature wailed in agony.
You would make a fruitful sacrifice.
He cauterized the stump of its leg to prevent it from bleeding out too quickly. The creature screamed again as its flesh was seared by temperatures akin to a stellar core. It retaliated by beating its fists uselessly against his back.
He tried to snap its neck, but the creature thrashed wildly, making it challenging. Finally, with a hard, grinding crunch, he succeeded. The body went limp, but the head, its eyes still wide and aware, remained conscious. He had only severed the nervous system.
But it could still scream. He walked to his pile of corpses, ripped a large chunk of flesh from one, and forcefully stuffed it into the creature's mouth, muffling it completely.
Now, for the ritual.
He used the blood of the youngest soldier to draw a pentagram on the floor. It was massive, dwarfing his previous efforts by a factor of three. He placed his Codex in the center and began stacking corpses around and upon it, building a grisly pyramid of flesh and bone. The tower occasionally slumped, and he simply rearranged the bodies, piling them beside the book.
He knelt at the edge of the grand, bloody circle, the muted screams of his two living sacrifices providing a horrific chorus. He focused his will, the lake of Nexus within him swirling in anticipation.
He began to utter the honorifics, his voice a low chant that cut through the blaring alarm.
"The Lurker beyond the Threshold."
"The Tome and the Knowledge."
"The Noosphere Monarch."
"The Calamity of Oneiros."
The ritual completed. The vortex of stolen life and Nexus energy collapsed inward, flooding into Nulls with the force of a dam break. The power wasn't just restored; it was multiplied.
He felt the vast, dark lake within him surge, its shores expanding until his reserves stood at a staggering eighty percent, twice what he had wielded against the leviathans. A familiar, intoxicating sense of power washed over him.
The first thing he did was summon Eros.
The Beast of Time did not simply appear; it unfolded. It was no longer a hazy construct, but a fully manifested entity of terrifying beauty and precision. It was a clockwork behemoth of translucent, interlocking gears and shimmering crystalline facets, each one representing a different potential timeline. A low, harmonic hum of counting seconds filled the room.
Nulls raised a hand, his constellation of sigils igniting around him in a brilliant, three-dimensional schematic, ready for any threat. It was only then he noticed the tiny, ant-sized speck of Marky still patiently corroding a microscopic section of the floor. He had forgotten to dismiss it. With a flick of his wrist, the lesser beast winked out of existence.
His enhanced senses, now thrumming with power, detected the approach of a new force. The rhythmic, heavy tread of armored boots echoed through the station's substructure. The density of the energy signatures was immense, five times denser than the squad he had just harvested.
A slow smile touched his lips. Let them come.
He activated Eros. Time fractured around him. The world slowed to a viscous crawl, the blaring alarm deepening to a distorted, drawn-out groan. The flashing red lights became sluggish pulses. He saw the dust motes in the air hanging like frozen stars. The cost was immense, he calculated a drain of ten percent of his total reserves every three hours. A worthy price for absolute control.
He continued his tour, a red god walking through a world of frozen statues. The station was a labyrinth of steel and terror. He passed hundreds of heavily armed personnel, their faces locked in masks of determined fury, frozen mid-stride. He studied the doors, his intellect cataloging the patterns.
Asfalis and Logos class class had minimal Aetherion reinforcement. Contained trivialities.
Calamity-class containment chamber had a slight traces of Argus-metal. A sign the Rapax viewed the contents as a fraction of his own power, an assessment he had just proven laughably inaccurate.
Archon-class are rare. Only two. Fully coated in Argus-metal and hyper-concentrated Aetherion. These, he noted, might actually present a slight inconvenience.
Armageddon-class is an utter anomaly. Only one other besides his own designation. The pinnacle of their threat scale, reserved for entities on his level, like the chained Codex.
His walk led him to a vast control room, a nexus of blinking monitors and complex consoles. The scene was frozen, technicians caught in a perpetual state of panic. All but one.
In the center of the room, a researcher was hyperventilating, her chest heaving in real-time. She clutched a Codex to her chest like a lifeline. And she saw him. Her eyes, wide with terror, tracked his movement and the colossal, shimmering form of Eros looming behind him.
With a strangled gasp, she turned and ran, scrambling for the exit.
Why was she unaffected?
"Bring her to me," he commanded Eros.
He gave a silent command. Eros vanished from his side and reappeared directly in the woman's path in the blink of an eye from her perspective. A crystalline tendril wrapped around the back of her lab coat, hoisting her into the air. She kicked and struggled, never losing her grip on the book.
Nulls, meanwhile, turned his attention to the computers. He had been the finest researcher in Theos; this primitive technology was a triviality. But before his fingers could even touch the keyboard, Eros was back, holding the terrified researcher aloft.
A frightened whimper escaped her lips. If not for that distinctly mammalian sound, he might not have paid her any further mind. But it was a useful data point: fear as a defense mechanism. A foreign, but predictable, biology.
Slightly annoyed by the interruption, he walked towards them, his footsteps echoing in the vast, otherwise silent room. He reached out and pried the Codex from her grip. The moment her fingers lost contact with the leather cover, she froze, joining her colleagues as a statue in the slow-time field.
The book in his hand grew cold. Not a physical cold, but a physical chill that seeped into his Nexus-infused bones. This book… it knew him. Not in the way Yog knew him, as a partner or a tool. This was different. It felt like it had observed him across countless timelines, a silent witness to infinite versions of his existence. And yet, this particular iteration of him felt… unregistered. Uncharted.
A slow, predatory smile spread across his face. He traced a finger along the cover, leaving a faint, smoldering residue of his own Nexus energy, a brand.
"Miss me?" he murmured, his voice a soft contrast to the roaring power within him. "Vale told me that you made the perfect plan to contain me."
He continued tracing the cold leather, deliberately scorching a small, intricate pentagram into its surface, a permanent marker for any future encounters.
"Even though you have existed for potentially eons," he mused, his tone dripping with condescension, "your method of execution is sluggish."
He finally looked up from the book, his eyes, burning with resurrected power, scanning the frozen control room. He held the Codex up slightly.
"It's such a shame," he said, with every ounce of literal truth he possessed, "that such power was bound within the pages of something so… young."