The silence after the merged declaration was not empty. It was dense, pregnant with the death of a universal constant.
"Act 6. Transcendental."
It was not an attack. It was a correction.
The golden-green chains, which had thrummed with the shared agony of God and Trascender, did not snap. They ceased to be relevant. One moment they were the unbreakable law of their connection; the next, they were obsolete, like a forgotten language. They faded, not breaking, but becoming transparent, then invisible, then memory.
Saganbo stared at the space between them. His hand, which had been resting on the chain, closed on nothing. A faint, cold surprise touched his ancient heart. This was not a greater force overcoming his own. This was... a loophole. An oversight in the code of reality itself.
"Intriguing," he murmured, his voice a low hum that once made stars shudder. "You didn't break the rule. You declared it void."
Shinji stood. But it was not the Shinji who had fallen, raging and desperate. His posture was different—eerily efficient, devoid of the subtle imbalances of a living being. The vibrant yellow-green of his hair seemed muted, as if viewed through a filter of time. The golden-green energy around him did not flare; it hung in a serene, perfect sphere, a boundary that reality itself seemed to respect.
"Rules are suggestions made by lesser entities," the voice replied. It was no longer a strained duality. It was a synthesis, smooth and cold, like polished stone. "I have moved beyond the need for suggestions."
Saganbo's lips curled into a smile that didn't reach his eyes. This was new. This was a puzzle. For a being who had seen the rise and fall of countless cosmic cycles, a new puzzle was the only true rarity.
"A suggestion, then," Saganbo said, and flicked his wrist.
The air around Shinji did not tear. It un-wrote itself. A sphere of absolute spiritual energy bloomed. It was not an explosion; it was the imposition of a divine truth: This space, and all within it, is null.
The sphere contracted, touching the serene golden-green energy around Shinji.
And dissolved.
It didn't collide. It didn't resist. It simply... stopped being a sphere of energy. Its purpose, its very definition, was gently but firmly declined. The space it had occupied was just space again.
"You are not deflecting it," Saganbo observed, his scientist's mind whirring. "You are... editing its properties. In real-time. How... crude."
'Crude?' The thought was Shinji's, a spark of his old self flaring in the cold forge of the fusion. 'This is the pinnacle of power!'
'No,' the AFS's consciousness countered, a weary teacher to an excited student. 'It is the pinnacle of potential. He sees only the effect, not the mechanism. To him, it is magic. To us, it is syntax.'
A memory, unbidden, flashed in their shared mind—a ghost:
Khoseph, the Magikill Monarch, smugly conjuring his spatial portals. "My magic has infinite variations!" he'd proclaimed.
Shinji, desperate, analyzing, finding the "violet anchor point." He had to find a flaw, a weakness in the structure.
Now, there was no need to find a flaw. He could simply declare the structure invalid.
"Concepts are tools for limited minds," the merged voice stated aloud, answering Saganbo. "I have set the tools aside."
Saganbo's amusement finally evaporated. The smile vanished, replaced by a flat, analytical stare. "Then feel a concept that requires no tools. The first concept. The one from which I forged my throne."
He did not move. He did not gesture. He imposed.
The concept was PAIN. Directly conveyed through pure spiritual energy that screamed Destruction.
It was not a wave of force that shattered bones. It was the universal law of agony made manifest, hammered directly into the core of Shinji's being. It bypassed nerve endings, bypassed the brain. It was the absolute, undeniable truth of suffering, written into every quark of his existence. His body, a biological instrument, reacted with perfect fidelity. It convulsed. Blood streamed from his eyes, his nose, his ears. His muscles locked in a rictus of absolute torment. Biologically, he was experiencing a hell so profound it would have vaporized a galaxy's worth of souls.
Shinji—the part that was still the boy from Tokyo—screamed. Or he would have, if he had control of his mouth.
But the pilot in the cockpit, the merged consciousness, merely observed.
'The vessel is registering extreme stress,' the AFS noted, his thought-stream calm, clinical. 'Sensory overload is catastrophic. Recommend we decline the input.'
'IT HURTS!' Shinji's ghost-wail echoed in their shared psyche. 'MAKE IT STOP!'
'The sensation is an illusion of a limited framework. Observe.'
With a act of will that was less about effort and more about perception, the merged entity reclassified the data. The screaming nerves were not reporting agony; they were reporting... energetic dissonance. The blood was not a sign of damage; it was an inefficient coolant leak. The pain was not a feeling; it was a obsolete feedback mechanism.
Externally, Shinji's shuddering body stilled. The flow of blood stopped, not because the wounds healed, but because the concept of "bleeding from metaphysical trauma" was no longer accepted. He lifted his head. His eyes, a disconcerting blend of green and obsidian, were dry and clear. He looked at Saganbo with the detached curiosity of a programmer examining a particularly stubborn bug.
"Inefficient," the voice stated. "A brute-force method. You waste energy broadcasting a concept my existence no longer acknowledges."
A flicker of something dark and cold passed behind Saganbo's purple eyes. It was not anger. It was the irritation of a master craftsman being criticized by a machine that had no appreciation for art.
"Brute force?" Saganbo whispered. "You think that was force? That was a whisper. Let me show you the scream."
The serene golden-green energy flickered.
Shinji was not in the throne room. He was in the dojo behind his house, the wooden floor warm under his bare feet. Kiyomi, sixteen and vibrant with life, her crimson hair a splash of color in the afternoon sun, was laughing, spinning away from his grasp. "Too slow, Shinji!"
The memory was so vivid he could feel the humidity in the air, smell the polish on the floor. The warmth of it, the sheer, uncomplicated joy, was a physical ache in a chest that no longer seemed capable of feeling anything but cold certainty.
'Yes,' a part of him sighed. 'This. I want this back. I want the struggle. I want the feeling. This... emptiness... is worse than death.'
"SENTIMENT," the AFS's voice boomed in their shared space, no longer calm, but urgent. "IT IS A WEAPON. A VECTOR FOR THE OBLIVION CONCEPT. DECLINE IT. NOW."
'No!' Shinji fought back, clinging to the ghost of his sister's smile. 'This is what we're fighting for! This is why we have to win!'
'That is not a memory. It is a poison tailored to our core. Look.'
The image of Kiyomi flickered. Her laughing eyes widened in the terror he'd seen on her dead face. The sun-dappled dojo walls melted into the blood-stained walls of his home. The warmth became the cold steel of Kokuto's blade. The memory was being inverted, used as a key to unlock the very despair Saganbo offered an end to.
The conflict was not physical. It was a civil war inside a single, fused consciousness. The part that was Shinji Kazuhiko, the boy who loved his sister, fought to feel. The part that was the Alternate Future Self of his, who had already lost everything, fought to survive.
With a silent, spiritual scream that tore at the fabric of their merged being, they didn't push the memory away. They didn't defeat it.
They archived it.
The love, the warmth, the loss—it was all filed away into a cold, logical database. It was no longer a feeling that could hurt or save him. It was a historical document.
The golden-green energy snapped back into place, its serenity now terrifying. The allure of oblivion vanished, finding no purchase in a psyche that had just reclassified its own heart as a reference file.
"I have also transcended sentiment," the voice informed Saganbo, its tone flat, devoid of the turmoil that had just raged within. "Your symphony of nothingness is playing to a deaf audience."
Saganbo's face went perfectly still. The last vestiges of amusement drained away, leaving only the cold, hard diamond of his true nature. He was not just a force of destruction. He was its curator. He took pride in his work. And this... this thing was dismissing his masterpiece as "inefficient."
The pressure hit Shinji like a fist through his spine.
Not metaphorically. Saganbo moved—not with speed, but with inevitability. One moment they stood across the throne room, separated by obsidian columns and the weight of cosmic authority. The next, his hand was already through Shinji's chest.
Except it wasn't.
Shinji didn't think to dodge. There was no moment of calculation, no activation of Act 2's Danger Sense. Instead, something in his merged consciousness simply declined the premise. The hand was moving toward his chest. The movement was sound. The physics were correct.
The action itself was simply... not happening.
Saganbo's fingers stopped mid-penetration, suspended in golden-green energy. Not blocked by a shield. The shield hadn't formed yet. The hand had simply arrived at a point where continuing forward was no longer relevant. The God of Destruction stared at his own wrist, genuinely confused for the first time in recorded history.
"Curious," he murmured, withdrawing slowly. "You're not reinforcing your body. You're not meeting my strike with counter-force."
"Because force implies I'm accepting the battle as a contest of power," the merged voice replied. It was two people speaking in perfect, eerie synchronization—Shinji and the Alternate Future Self, no longer separate but not quite fused. A duality functioning as singularity. "I'm not. I'm declining the entire framework."
Saganbo attacked again, faster this time. His hand phased—not through space but through the concept of space—moving sideways to reality as he'd done before. This technique had worked on the Labyrinth's Monarchs. It bypassed conventional defense.
Shinji's hand was already resting against Saganbo's wrist when the strike completed.
No dodge. No block. Saganbo's attack had unfolded in its entirety, and Shinji was simply... already there, in the path, waiting. The God of Destruction felt it then—the first prick of genuine uncertainty. How did something mortal react faster than inevitability itself?
"You're not reacting," Saganbo realized, his voice taking on a sharper edge. "You're existing in multiple states simultaneously. Schrodinger's defense."
"No," Shinji said, and now the layered voice had three distinct tones underneath—the boy Shinji, the AFS's old consciousness, and something else. Something that sounded like it had been present all along. "I'm existing in the state that's most relevant to this moment. Offense doesn't compute if you're positioned in the defense that was always going to be sufficient."
Saganbo withdrew completely, creating distance by a simple act of will. The space between them elongated not through movement but through declaration. Fifty meters became a hundred. A hundred became impossible to traverse without crossing through something that no longer existed.
Then he unleashed his full spiritual pressure.
It wasn't a wave of force that needed to cross space. It was the imposition of a universal law: Gravity. Entropy. The inevitable descent into nothing. The 60% output that had turned planets into dust now pressed down on Shinji with the weight of a billion dying stars. The obsidian floor cracked under the sheer spiritual gravity. The walls bowed inward. The throne room began to collapse as if the universe itself was compressing around this single point.
Shinji stood in the center of it.
Not enduring. Not resisting. Not being protected by any shield or ability. He was simply there, and the pressure flowed around him like water around stone. The stone had not grown harder. It had not redirected the flow. The water was simply moving in a pattern that excluded the stone as a viable target.
The pressure searched for resistance to crush against. Finding none, it had nothing to anchor to. It was like a fist clenching against absolute acceptance—the very concept of defeat had been declined.
Saganbo pulled the pressure back, and the throne room stabilized, leaving smoking cracks along every surface.
"You're not absorbing it," Saganbo said, his voice taking on the tone of a scientist making observations. "You're not converting it. You're not creating an equal and opposite force. The pressure exists. The universe still contains it. Yet it has no effect on you whatsoever."
"Because effect requires acknowledgment in a shared framework," the merged voice said. "I acknowledge the pressure exists. I decline its relevance to my continued existence. There's a difference."
"A philosophical distinction," Saganbo replied, but his purple eyes had darkened to near-black. "One I find I'm not disposed to accept."
He changed his approach entirely.
Saganbo's form began to shift. His skin, already the color of deep void, started to absorb light rather than reflect it. His eyes became holes in space. The aura around him—which had previously been merely oppressive—became wrongness given form. He was no longer a being occupying space. He was beginning to occupy the concept of space itself.
When he moved, it wasn't forward.
It was lateral.
A direction that didn't exist in conventional geometry manifested, and Saganbo stepped sideways through it. He was suddenly everywhere and nowhere—attacking from six impossible directions simultaneously. North, south, east, west, up, down—and then from angles that didn't have names because they existed perpendicular to the room's dimensions.
Six hands reached for Shinji from six angles that should have been mutually impossible.
Shinji didn't counter each strike. The strikes all completed their trajectories.
And all six passed through the space where Shinji had been, meeting only the obsidian walls and vaporizing them. The back half of the throne room exploded outward as six different impact zones simultaneously created six different reality-shearing events.
Saganbo coalesced back into singular form, his expression reflecting genuine analytical confusion. His attacks had landed. He'd felt them complete their trajectories. The space they'd struck was definitely solid before impact. And yet—
"You shifted your reference frame," he said slowly. "You're not in the same coordinate system as my attacks. How is a mortal—a creature bound by linear time and singular spatial positioning—simultaneously existing in a state where my actions pass through empty space?"
Shinji didn't answer verbally. Instead, he moved.
His hand arrived at Saganbo's sternum in the only way that made sense: by existing there. Not traveling. Not crossing distance. Simply was in that location by virtue of it being the necessary state for this moment.
Saganbo felt it—a pressure that wasn't force but inevitability. His body was responding to something external, something other, that pressed against his divine essence with the gentle insistence of a law of physics. He tried to phase away as he had done before, his form rippling as he attempted to slip into the void-between-spaces.
He couldn't move.
Not because he was trapped. Because the void had been reclassified. Shinji had made it so that "displacement" was no longer a valid action from this position. Not impossible—invalid. Like trying to activate a function that no longer existed in the code.
"What—" Saganbo began.
Shinji pressed harder.
The God of Destruction unleashed his full, unfiltered power—a cascade of pure negation that would have unmade galaxies in the old timeline, when he was the only force capable of such things. It crashed against Shinji like a tsunami against a cliff, spreading around him, dispersing outward with enough force to buckle the dimensional anchors of the throne room itself.
The back wall didn't crack. It wasn't vaporized. It began to exist in a state of permanent crumbling—the damage was archived, filed away as something that "had occurred" rather than "was occurring." The castle froze mid-collapse, caught between the state of "destroyed" and "not yet destroyed," unable to resolve which was more true.
Saganbo felt his own negation being catalogued, processed, and filed into the category of "historical events" rather than "present threats."
"STOP!" he commanded, and the word carried the weight of divinity. It echoed through creation itself, carried by a voice that had ordered the annihilation of countless multiverses. It was the fundamental expression of his will made manifest.
Shinji simply looked at him.
In that look was the complete, utter acknowledgment that Saganbo had spoken. His command had definitely occurred. He had definitely possessed the power to speak it. And it was completely, utterly irrelevant.
"You're still operating within the framework of power," Shinji said, and now the voice had taken on a quality that made even the void seem substantive. "Still thinking in terms of action and reaction. Cause and effect. Attack and defense. I've moved beyond needing to engage with those concepts."
He removed his hand from Saganbo's chest.
As he did, a wound appeared there.
Not new. Ancient. A scar from a battle Saganbo had fought some trillion years ago, a battle he'd won so completely, so thoroughly, that the memory had calcified into certainty. The scar had healed long ago. The battle was victory. This was history.
Shinji had simply reclassified it into the present moment. The scar now bled with black blood, as if the ancient wound had never truly healed—had merely been postponed. He'd edited the timeline so that the wound existed "currently" rather than "in the past."
Saganbo staggered, his hand moving to touch the wound. Black blood, warm and impossible, welled between his fingers. "How—you're not tearing open old wounds. You're making them... true... now."
"I'm clarifying," Shinji corrected. "Your strike missed me earlier—not because I moved, but because you calculated the wrong distance. Your assault on my core was incomplete—not because you failed, but because you destroyed an echo instead of the source. Your wound was sealed long ago—not because it healed, but because time moved past it."
He raised his hand.
Saganbo moved to defend, his form shifting to create a barrier that should have been impenetrable—a shield composed of the same negation that erased universes.
But the shield arrived too late, not in the temporal sense but in the logical sense. It constructed itself after the attack had already landed. The sequence had been reversed. Shinji's strike had already occurred, and Saganbo's defensive construction was retroactively irrelevant.
The attack struck his chest directly.
Not with overwhelming force, but with the inexorable certainty of something that had already happened. Saganbo was hurled backward violently, his armor cracking, his body bleeding, not from physical trauma but from the logical consequence of being struck. The damage didn't spread. It was archived as "already present" rather than "currently occurring."
For the first time in ages, the God of Destruction looked entertained.
"What are you?" Saganbo whispered, his voice small.
Shinji stood in the center of the throne room, his breathing ragged, his body trembling from the accumulated strain. His golden-green aura flickered erratically around him, destabilizing. Act 6 was still active, still holding, but it was straining. He could feel the framework of Transcendence cracking under Saganbo's relentless assault.
"I'm the point of view from which the story is told," he said, but the words came through gritted teeth. "Everything else is secondary to that. Attack and defense. Power and weakness. These are concepts for characters in a narrative. I'm becoming aware I'm something else entirely."
But even as he said it, doubt crept in. The AFS's consciousness, usually so composed, was wavering with uncertainty.
'He's too strong,' the AFS thought-screamed. 'We're holding, but we're not winning. Act 6 is the pinnacle and we're still just... surviving.'
'Then we find something beyond the pinnacle,' Shinji replied, but he could feel the desperation in his own thought.
Saganbo laughed—a sound like collapsing stars. "You're exhausted. I can feel it. Your Transcendence is burning out. You've reached the ceiling of what a Trascender can achieve, and it's not quite enough. You were just spewing some badass lines to infuriate me."
He was right. Shinji could feel it too. Act 6 had seemed infinite a moment ago, but now the limits were becoming apparent. He could rewrite causality, but only locally. He could make things irrelevant, but Saganbo's power was so vast, so ancient, that even irrelevance had boundaries.
And they were running out of space.
Saganbo charged again, but now his movements were wild, almost feral. The calculated precision was gone, replaced by desperation. He threw everything—spatial tears that should have cleaved reality into fragments. Reality warps that should have inverted the laws of physics. Concepts given form: a binding that compressed the structure of spacetime itself. A wave of OBLIVION that should have erased existence itself.
All of it met Shinji and became past tense.
Each attack was allowed to exist, allowed to have occurred. But was no longer occurring. It was filed away in history. The damage unwrote itself not because it was healed but because Shinji had reclassified when it happened. The bind that should have compressed him: he made it so it "had bound him" ten seconds ago, and thus was no longer binding. The spatial tear: it "had torn reality" in a moment that was now behind them. The wave of oblivion: it "had occurred" and thus was no longer a threat.
By the fifth attack, Saganbo's movements became increasingly erratic. By the seventh, he was screaming.
"I can destroy you!" His voice cracked with desperation. "I felt your core break! I held it in my hand and crushed it!"
"You destroyed an anchor," Shinji said calmly, stepping forward. Each step took him exactly where he needed to be because the concept of "not being there" was something he had declined to accept. "An interface my mortal mind required to interact with infinity. The moment you attempted to weaponize it against me, I released it. The core you held was an echo. A necessary fiction for a mind still partially bound by linear thinking."
"Then what are you?" Saganbo howled. "What remains if the core is gone?"
Shinji raised his hand. Not to attack. To gesture—a casual movement toward his own chest.
A new core manifested there.
Not forming from energy or reassembling from fragments. It simply was, blooming into existence from the conceptual space where Shinji's consciousness now dwelt. This core was different from the first. It didn't throb with chaotic potential. It simply existed with the quiet inevitability of a law of physics.
"The core was a crutch," Shinji said. "A focal point my mortal mind required to interface with the infinite. I have transcended the need for it. But more than that—I've understood what I am underneath all the power, underneath all the trauma, underneath all the growth."
He stepped forward again.
Saganbo retreated, and the sight of it—a God of Destruction actually backing away—would have been amusing if it wasn't so fundamentally wrong. The very order of creation was inverted.
"I'm not immortal," Shinji continued, his voice now carrying a harmonic quality, as if he was speaking from multiple moments simultaneously. "Immortality exists within a system, opposed by mortality. I have left that system. I am... a persistent statement. A permanent entry in the ledger of existence. I simply am, and that fact cannot be opposed because opposition requires us to be in the same framework. We're not."
He moved closer.
Saganbo raised his hands to defend, to attack, to do something, but the movements came too slow, or Shinji was already there, or the distance had been reclassified. Causality itself was becoming negotiable in his presence.
"The battle is over," Shinji said. His eyes were clear now. Ancient. Still. Holding depths that predated the current universe. "You were fighting something you thought could be fought. But I'm not something that can be fought. I'm something that can only be recognized."
He placed both hands on Saganbo's shoulders.
The God of Destruction felt his entire existence being reviewed, audited, reclassified. His power, his purpose, his fundamental nature as an ending—all of it was being examined by a consciousness that existed at a different level entirely. Not above. Orthogonal. At right angles to everything Saganbo understood about existence itself.
"You are a function," Shinji said gently, and there was something almost like compassion in the layered voice. "Destruction. A necessary process in the cycle. A tool that serves purpose within a system. But you are not the system itself. You have never been."
The throne room stopped vibrating.
The universe held its breath.
"I am," Shinji continued, and the words were not a boast but a simple, terrifying statement of fact. "I am the system. The framework in which everything—including you—exists."
Saganbo's eyes widened in fascination as if understanding came down on him.
And for the first time since long ages, the God of Destruction truly, completely understood what it meant to be obsolete in front of infinite potential. As he smiled maniacally.