Act 6 was failing.
Shinji could feel it now—the framework that had seemed so infinite, so absolute, cracking under the relentless pressure of Saganbo's attacks. The God of Destruction had adapted and started getting serious against a threat—against Shinji Kazuhiko who he know started to really take serious. He'd stopped trying to overcome the Innate concepts Shinji was creating and instead attacked the creation process itself. He was targeting the mental act of will that made Shinji's realities cohere.
Saganbo's next strike came from a direction that didn't exist, and Shinji was too late to edit it out of relevance. The blow connected—not with crushing force, but with conceptual weight. It struck not Shinji's body but his ability to make the future.
Shinji crashed backward, blood streaming from his nose. Real blood. Physical damage. Act 6 flickered violently.
"There it is," Saganbo said, his voice carrying the satisfaction of a hunter who'd finally found his quarry's weakness. "Your Transcendence is magnificent, but it has limits. It requires will. Concentration. Effort. And I can attack the effort itself."
Shinji stood, his legs shaking. The AFS's consciousness was panicking now, flooding their shared mind with calculations. Every scenario they ran ended the same way: degradation. Slow, inexorable degradation.
'We need to find something beyond the Acts,' the AFS thought-screamed. 'There has to be something. A seventh Act? A hidden layer? Something—'
'There is nothing beyond the Acts. You made that disgustingly clear,' Shinji replied, and his thought was hollow, exhausted. 'The Acts are the peak of Transcendence. This is as high as we can climb.'
'Then we've already lost, Transcendental won't keep up with this monster... That was clear from the beginning but now... Even running away or escaping aren't options.' the AFS realized.
Saganbo moved again, and this time Shinji couldn't dodge. Couldn't rewrite. Couldn't make it irrelevant. The blow struck his chest directly, and he felt ribs crack. Real ribs. Act 1 tried to regenerate, but the wound came faster than the healing. Act 3 tried to manifest a barrier with all the prowess his Spiritual Energy—amplified by Act 6 could muster, but Saganbo was already inside it.
Shinji fell to one knee.
"You reached the ceiling of what a Trascender can achieve," Saganbo said, almost gently. "And it was not quite enough."
For a moment—just a moment—Shinji saw only darkness ahead. The path that had seemed infinite was actually finite. All the growth, all the training, all the fusion with the AFS... it had brought him to the peak of a mountain that still wasn't high enough.
He looked up at Saganbo through the blood dripping from his face.
And something inside him stopped trying.
Not the surrender of defeat. The surrender of effort.
Shinji stopped attempting to use Act 6. Stopped attempting to edit reality. Stopped attempting to make anything irrelevant or relevant. Stopped attempting entirely.
His golden-green aura collapsed like a candle flame going out.
Saganbo paused, confused by this sudden cessation. For the first time in aeons, he didn't immediately capitalize on weakness. He simply... watched.
"You're giving up?" Saganbo asked, but there was something different in his voice. Not victory. Uncertainty.
"No," Shinji said quietly. His voice was different now. Softer. Like wind moving through an empty canyon rather than the layered echo of merged consciousness. "I'm stopping."
He stood, but not with the desperate energy of combat. His movements were fluid, gentle. Casual. He looked down at his hands—trembling hands, bleeding hands, hands that had been struggling so hard—and simply let them relax.
"All of this," Shinji said, "the Acts, the power, the framework... I've been trying to climb within a system. And you're right. The system has a ceiling. I reached it. Either ways, I was not bound to reach the greatest heights—Not the way I've been sought to be."
He looked at Saganbo directly. His eyes were still golden-green, but something in them had changed. The desperation was gone. The effort was gone. What remained was something that had always been underneath: a profound, undisturbed stillness.
"But what if I stopped trying to climb?"
Saganbo raised his hand instinctively, but he hesitated. There was something happening. Something he recognized. His ancient consciousness flickered with recognition—not of what Shinji was doing, but of what he was allowing to happen.
Saganbo's hand began to move forward with the intention to strike.
And Shinji simply stood there. Not defending. Not attacking. Not doing anything at all.
He simply... was.
In that moment of absolute surrender—not to Saganbo, but to the nature of existence itself—something shifted.
The blow came toward him.
And Shinji didn't dodge it. Didn't block it. Didn't rewrite it.
The blow passed through empty space.
Not because Shinji had moved. Not because he'd made himself exist in a different reference frame. But because Shinji had stopped needing to exist in the space where the blow would have mattered. There was no desperation, no fear, no will attempting to preserve itself. And without those things anchoring him to a defensive position, he simply wasn't there to be hit.
Saganbo's fist closed on void.
For the first time, the God of Destruction felt something he had never felt before: the confrontation with something that was not fighting him. Not because it couldn't. But because fighting had become completely irrelevant to its nature.
His hand withdrew slowly, shaking slightly.
"Impossible," he whispered. "That's not... you're not supposed to..."
Saganbo's eyes widened as understanding crashed through his mind like a wave.
"The Innate Self State," he breathed. "You've awakened it. But... you shouldn't have. The prerequisites—the consciousness required—you're not supposed to even know what it is. Destined ones spend aeons to grasp it's nature. And you've done it without even understanding what you're doing."
Shinji opened his eyes.
They were crimson now. Deep, blood-red, like a river in autumn. And they held a gentleness that made Saganbo's ancient heart falter.
"I don't know what that is," Shinji said simply. "I only know that I stopped trying."
Saganbo moved backward, his expression unreadable. This was not the victory he'd anticipated. This was not the defeat he'd feared. This was something entirely unexpected, and for a being who'd orchestrated the destruction of countless universes, confusion was a foreign sensation.
"Sit," Shinji said gently, gesturing toward the throne. Not a command. An invitation.
For reasons he couldn't articulate, Saganbo moved to the throne and sat. The act felt surreal—him, on his throne, in the presence of something he'd thought was going to be just some Trascender to eventually surpass or eliminate.
"You knew," Shinji said. It wasn't a question. "You knew this was possible. You knew what this state was."
"I did," Saganbo confirmed, his voice carrying the weight of ages. "I've encountered it before. In my youth, when I was still becoming what I am."
He gestured, and a memory manifested in the space between them. A vision of Saganbo—younger, less refined, still burning with the passion of a newly-minted god.
Saganbo stood in a cosmos fresh and singing. Universes bloomed like flowers, each one teeming with chaotic, beautiful life. He was not yet the God of Destruction. He was still becoming.
Next to him stood a figure of impossible grace. Her form was not fixed—it shifted between states, as if she existed in multiple moments simultaneously. Her eyes held the light of a trillion births. She was the Goddess of Creation, ancient and wise beyond measure.
"You feel it," she said, gesturing toward the teeming universes. "The chaos. The inefficiency. So much life wasted on emotional attachment. Love. Loyalty. Hope. Finite consciousness pouring infinite effort into temporary existence."
"Yes," the young Saganbo replied, his form crackling with nascent power. "It offends my understanding of optimization. If they must exist, why must they struggle? Why must they care? Why not create them in perfect stasis?"
The Goddess smiled—a smile that contained the sorrow of watching stars die. "Because the struggle is the point. The care is where meaning lives. A perfect being in perfect stasis is not life, Young Saganbo. It's a marble in a museum."
"Then life is fundamentally flawed," Saganbo said. "It requires ending. It requires death. It requires pruning."
"Yes," the Goddess agreed. "And that's why the universe needs possible constants like yourself. Needs someone willing to be the end to all things. Someone to provide counterbalance to my creation."
She reached out and touched his shoulder, and in that touch was recognition of a terrible, necessary truth.
"But you must understand what you're choosing," she continued. "Before Creation comes Destruction. Before Destruction comes the cycle itself. And before the cycle comes something that exists outside both—something that simply is, observing both creation and destruction as expressions of itself."
"An Apex Transcendent." Saganbo said, understanding beginning to dawn.
"A Transcendent Apex." the Goddess corrected gently. "A Horizon that transcends not power but the need to have power. An Unknown that stops trying to be and simply are. Rarer than anything you'd ever think of throughout this beautiful nigh-eternity. In all my time, I have only encountered one that I deemed to be close to such proximity, A Trascendent Apex and not An Apex Transcendent, my Saganbo. And each one taught me that before destruction and creation, there is eternity... Presence..."
Young Saganbo's expression hardened. "Then I will make myself necessary. I will order reality so completely that chaos cannot emerge. I will become so essential to the functioning of existence that that will have no choice but to work within my parameters."
The Goddess withdrew her hand, sadness crossing her ageless face. "Oh, Saganbo. You've already made your choice, haven't you? You've already decided that being necessary is preferable to being true."
"Is there a difference?" he asked.
"All the difference in the universe dear," she replied.
The memory faded, and Saganbo's eyes refocused on Shinji.
"I underestimated you," Saganbo said quietly. "I thought you were like most of the other pieces to be discarded. Predictable. Eventually to be superseded by someone greater. I believed you would be a failure among Trascenders—that you lacked the power and will required to truly transcend."
He stood from his throne and approached Shinji, and for the first time, there was no aggression in his movements. Only observation. Study.
"But you didn't fail," Saganbo continued. "You did something differently than the others. You awakened without even knowing it's possible. You achieved it through genuine ignorance rather than calculated pursuit. Thekia tried to teach me this truth eons ago, and I rejected it. I thought I could be more essential than presence itself."
He stopped a few meters from Shinji, and his purple eyes—ancient, tired, calculating—held something new: genuine uncertainty.
"While you're nowhere near the Apex. Not even close... And you surely wouldn't ever be. The usual Innaters knew what they were becoming. They pursued it. They studied it. They tried. Tried, Tried and Tried." Saganbo said. "But you... you achieved it by stopping trying. And that changes everything about how I understand the hierarchy of existence."
Shinji's crimson eyes, gentle and terrible in their stillness, simply looked at the God of Destruction.
"I still don't know what you're talking about," Shinji said. "I only know I stopped climbing."
"Yes," Saganbo replied, and there was something almost like wonder in his voice now. "And in stopping, you've already climbed higher most who spent eternities reaching for it. Some succeeded. And some... failed..."
He turned away, moving toward the window that looked out over his perfectly ordered, perfectly sterile universes.
"I've prepared my entire existence for the inevitable arrival of a Third... Never mind that... Fourth Trascender," Saganbo said to the void. "I've spent eons ensuring I would be ready for transcendence in power, in will, in manipulation of the framework itself. But I never prepared for someone who would simply stop."
He looked back at Shinji, and his expression held the weight of a god realizing he'd been playing the wrong game all along.
"The fight is not over," Saganbo said. "But I'm beginning to understand that I've already lost it in ways I didn't anticipate. What happens now, Shinji Kazuhiko? What does the Innate Self State do with the God of Destruction who tried so desperately to prevent its arrival?"
The throne room held its breath, waiting for an answer that would reshape the nature of existence itself. Both Shinji Kazuhiko, The Fourth Trascender and God Of Destruction, Saganbo were resuming their battle.