The universe held its breath in the space between heartbeats. Golden light pulsed from the fractured eggshell, casting long shadows across the ruins of creation. The air smelled of ozone and burnt sugar, of something ancient waking from terrible dreams.
Payune emerged first.
Her dragon scales gleamed with the patina of a thousand shattered galaxies, each one etched with the names of forgotten battles. Where she stepped, reality crystallized and sang - a high, pure note that made the bones of existence vibrate. She flexed her right hand, watching as stray motes of stardust caught in the grooves of her knuckles.
"I can feel it," she whispered. "Every fight. Every loss. All leading here."
The Chef's corpse twitched, his cleaver fingers scraping against the ruined floor of the coliseum. "Took you long enough, little knife."
Hayuni's rebirth came as nine simultaneous explosions of blue fire. Her tails lashed like living constellations, each one containing the event horizon of a carefully nurtured black hole. When she opened her eyes - all three of them - the very fabric of space-time rippled in her gaze.
"You kept secrets from us," she said, her voice layered with the echoes of every version of herself across the multiverse. "Even in death."
The Third didn't so much appear as he unfolded - a glitch in reality's code given sentience and teeth. His form refused to settle, cycling through every possible iteration of might-have-beens and never-weres. Where his shadow fell, the ground became transparent, revealing the infinite kitchens beneath creation.
The Chef laughed, a wet sound like meat sliding off bone. "Secrets? I gave you the only truth that matters." He raised his cleaver, and the coliseum shifted, walls reforming into -
THE INFINITE GOURMET STADIUM
Floor tiles made from compressed dying stars
Audience stands carved from the fossilized remains of previous champions
The scoreboard displaying their power levels in real-time:
Payune: OVERFLOW ERROR
Hayuni: DIVIDE BY ZERO
The Third: NULL REFERENCE
The Dragonlord's ghost manifested as referee, his spectral whistle glowing with captive supernovae. "Final bout," he intoned, voice resonating across eleven dimensions. "No rules. No limits. Just... flavor."
Payune dropped into her stance, feeling the dragon in her blood roar to life. "We end this now."
Hayuni's tails wove an intricate kata through the air, foxfire tracing the kanji for annihilation. "For all the meals we never chose."
The Third simply smiled, and the smile kept expanding until it threatened to swallow the arena whole.
The Chef responded by removing his hat - and with it, the top of his skull - revealing the swirling cosmos beneath his skin. "Come then, my finest dishes. Let's see if you've finally learned... to taste."
Payune moved first, her fist carving through quantum foam and false vacuum alike. Each punch:
First Strike: "BIG BANG IMPACT" - Her knuckles birthing newborn universes in the wake of their passage
Follow Through: "SUPERNOVA GUILLOTINE" - An elbow drop that shattered an entire timeline's worth of defenses
Finisher: "SINGULARITY UPPERCUT" - The gravitational wake of her swing pulling the Chef's molecules apart
The stadium screamed under the assault, entire sections of seating evaporating into pure energy. Payune's scales began to crack from the recoil, each fracture leaking streams of liquid spacetime.
"HURTS, DOESN'T IT?" the Chef taunted, reforming from the cosmic broth of his own dispersed atoms. "COOKING IS PAIN. PAIN IS FLAVOR."
Hayuni responded with a dance of absolute precision, her tails weaving through:
Seven simultaneous dimensions
Every possible combat stance at once
The Chef's own attack patterns before he conceived them
Her ultimate technique unfolded like a deadly origami:
"Event Horizon Waltz"
Step one: Fold space into a lover's embrace
Step two: Dip through the resulting black hole
Finale: Pirouette while unraveling the target's molecular bonds
The Chef's left arm dissolved into aromatic smoke. "CLEVER GIRL," he chuckled, regenerating the limb from the ambient despair. "BUT CAN YOU SEAR THE CONCEPT OF DEFEAT?"
The Third fought like famine personified - every blocked strike only made him stronger. His movements were less attacks than they were consumptions:
Parrying with hunger
Countering with starvation
Finishing moves that left even nothingness feeling empty
When he finally spoke, the words came from everywhere at once:
"You taught us to consume. But you never learned... to be eaten."
His "All-Consuming Bite" took a chunk out of the Chef's very essence - and with it, the secret recipe for godhood.
As the Chef staggered, the siblings moved into formation:
Payune's dragon core overloaded, her body becoming pure celestial energy
Hayuni's tails intertwined, forming a reality-warping seal
The Third opened wide, becoming the conduit for their combined might
The resulting technique had no name - or rather, too many names, all of them true:
"Triune Apocalypse Strike"
"Omega Banquet Fist"
"The Last Supper's Revenge"
It hit the Chef like the death of every star simultaneously.
In the smoking ruins of the coliseum:
Payune's scales had cooled to living obsidian
Hayuni's tails now contained entire civilizations
The Third had developed a taste for endings
The Dragonlord's ghost materialized one last time, his whistle now silent. "And here... we... stop."
But in the distance, a new sound - the sizzle of something cooking in the void's embrace.
TO BE CONTINUED IN "INFINITE BATTLE DIMENSION"