In the dying breath of a universe, where stars had been atomized by cosmic battles and galaxies crushed into gravitational singularities by the sheer force of single combat, only two souls remained to witness the final act of creation's greatest tragedy.
The first stood silhouetted against the apocalyptic ballet of colliding worlds framed above, their form encased in armour that seemed to drink in the fading light of dying suns, their countenance cold to the world.
Each plate had been forged from the remnants of legends—the strongest metals, the most resilient alloys, and then reinforced with powers beyond mortal comprehension. Yet even this pristine protection could not contain the terrible aura that radiated from within, a presence so overwhelming that reality itself seemed to bend and warp in their vicinity.
In their gauntleted grip, they held a blade that defied description. It was not merely a weapon but a monument to conquest—forged from the fragments of every sword that had ever existed, it was more a concept than a weapon.
The metal gleamed with an inner light of deep purple, and within its surface, the ghosts of entire galaxies swirled like trapped memories of what once was.
As they approached their final opponent, each step sent ripples through the fabric of space itself. The very air seemed to scream in protest at the power radiating from that armoured form.
The second soul presented a stark contrast—a figure of ethereal beauty that glowed with the universe's last remaining light. She was tall and regal, with features that spoke of ancient nobility and crystalline wings not to dissimilar to a dragonflies that wilted from her shoulder blades..
Atop her head, a tiara of impossible craftsmanship rested against pointed ears, its crystal surface fractured and stained with the golden ichor that was her blood. She was the final guardian, the last protector of a universe that no longer existed to protect.
The woman's breath came in ragged gasps as she crawled across the barren remains of what had once been a thriving world. Every movement sent waves of agony through her broken form, but still she persevered, driven by some desperate hope that perhaps, somehow, she could still end this destruction.
Behind her, the Terrarian's footsteps echoed with the weight of inevitability, each step slow and methodical as though taunting her.
The inevitable conclusion came in the form of cold steel piercing her leg, pinning her to the ground like a butterfly to a collection board. She screamed—not just from the physical pain, but from the wound the sword inflicted on her soul.
The armoured boot that struck her chest carried the force of a collapsing star, sending her tearing through the ground before she eventually came to a stop with her back against the remnants of a building.
Closing the distance the Terrarian loomed over her like a dark angel of the apocalypse, and in their shadow, she could see the reflection of her own failures.
"…why?" The word escaped her lips like a dying prayer, carrying with it the weight of every life lost, every world consumed, every star extinguished in the name of one being's insatiable hunger for power.
The laughter that answered her was harsh and bitter, echoing off the ruins around them. His voice was hoarse from wounds inflicted by the rampant energy that contributed to the destruction around them, but it was unmistakably his own.
Before her was no longer the curious young man she had once watched over, but something far colder. "Why else? …Power, obviously. With your death, I'll have the final ingredient I need to ascend to godhood and rebuild this world as I please."
As her strength failed her, the Empress of Light's mind drifted to the beginning—to when he had first appeared to aid the world. She remembered the curiosity, the potential, the spark of something that could of and should have been greatness.
She had watched over him like a mother watches over a gifted child, celebrating his victories against the remnants of the Moon Lord, worrying during his struggles, believing that here, finally, was someone who could help her to heal the world of the corruption that afflicted it.
She had even indulged his request for a duel, sending forth an avatar to test his strength. The ease with which he had destroyed it should have been her first warning. Power without wisdom, strength without restraint—she had seen these signs before, in the rise and fall of countless civilizations.
The turning point had come with the Devourer of Gods. Its death caused its divine power to rampage mindlessly and the Terrarian had simply stepped over its corpse and moved on to his next target.
He had shown no interest in the consequences of his actions—no concern for the godly essence that now raged uncontrolled through reality like a wildfire of pure destruction.
She had begged him to help her contain it, to take responsibility for the power he had unleashed. But his hunger for the next fight, the next victory, the next surge of strength had already consumed his attention. While she worked desperately to contain the rampaging divine energies, he had continued his bloody path through the cosmos.
Each body he left behind became a new source of uncontrolled power. The death of Draedon's greatest creations—mechanical gods who stood above almost all others only further added to the problem.
By the time he got to the Supreme Witch Calamitas, most life had already perished from the uncontrolled power the Empress tried so hard to purify in time, but when Calamitas fell she released enough raw magical force to ignite entire star systems.
And when he finally defeated the Nameless Deity that existed above even her, the unleashed energies began to literally tear apart the fabric of reality itself.
She had warned him. Even Yharim the Tyrant King—a ruler whose own path of conquest had nearly led to similar devastation before he learned to temper his ambition—had tried to counsel him.
The ancient king, who had walked the same dark road and pulled back from the brink, had spoken of the price of unchecked power. But the Terrarian had dismissed their warnings as weakness, as fear of his growing strength.
The "corruption" wasn't some outside force that had claimed him—it was the inevitable result of his callous disregard for the consequences of his actions.
Every divine being he had slaughtered without thought had left behind a fragment of their essence, and those fragments had become mindless, destructive forces that consumed everything in their path.
His greed had blinded him to everything but the pursuit of power, and his casual indifference to the devastation he left behind had transformed him into something far worse than any of the monsters he had slain.
The battle that followed had been less a fight than a catastrophe when he finally turned his sword on her. Their clashes had atomized planets, and caused entire galaxies to collapse into black holes.
The sheer force of their combat had been enough compress the remnants of destroyed worlds into gravitational singularities that devoured everything around them. Through it all, she had fought not to win, but to protect—to preserve some fragment of the universe from the mindless destruction that followed in their wake.
Now, as she lay broken and bleeding in the ruins of what had once been his first humble dwelling, she understood that she had failed in the most complete way possible.
"You still don't understand, do you?" His voice was hoarse and strained, carrying the weight of absolute conviction despite the damage to his throat. The words came out in a rasp that spoke of divine energies burning him from within.
"This universe was broken beyond repair! Only I possess the vision and the power to create something better." His words were sharp against her ears from the power with which they were spoken "I will remake everything from nothing, and this time there will be order."
With trembling fingers, she reached up to touch the cold metal of his helmet, his gaze hidden behind the visor. For a moment, she thought she could sense something of who he had once been—the curious, determined young man who had arrived in their world with such promise.
"…please," she whispered, her voice barely audible as her body failed, tears of ichor streaming down her cheeks. "If I must die, let me see your face one final time. Let me remember who you were before... before all of this."
Sighing in annoyance he pulls out a dagger and stabs it through her good leg before reaching up to his helmet, hesitating for a moment the man he once was seemed to war against who he now was, before slowly he lifted the helmet.
The face beneath was one she barely recognised, twisted by radiation and scarred by the blades of his enemies it was barely human. Blisters dotted parts of his face as the skin peeled away to reveal bone in other places.
Worst of all were his eyes, where once they were bright and full of life now they were cold with only greed within. It was clear the person before her was not the one she had rooted for all those years, before her now stood only the results of greed and arrogance, a monster in human skin.
"…you aren't *cough* him anymore," she whispered, tears streaming down her face as she coughed up blood. "…I'm sorry… I'm so sorry, I couldn't save you."
In that moment of perfect despair, the Empress of Light made her choice.
Deep within her core, she still carried a tiny spark of purified energy—the last clean power in a universe drowning in the consequences of one man's actions. She had been saving it, hoping against hope that it might be used to heal rather than destroy. Now, she realized, it had a different purpose.
Time seemed to slow as she began to draw in every trace of uncontrolled divine energy that polluted the dying space around them. Her consciousness accelerated to near light-speed, and she became a living vortex of clashing powers that tore holes in reality itself.
The Terrarian, for all his power, could only watch in stunned silence as she transformed into a blazing tornado of pure cosmic force. The energies that had been rampaging unchecked for years—the abandoned power of gods and primordials—she pulled them all into herself despite the agony it caused.
Her body began to change, to mutate, to expand as the conflicting divine energies warred within her. She grew to the size of countries, then planets, then stars.
The pain was indescribable as her soul fractured under the clash of powers that were never meant to coexist, but she endured it all with her gaze locked solely on the Terrarian attempting to flee, she would put an end to him now so other universes could be spared.
The Terrarian, realizing the magnitude of what she was attempting, tried to escape. But the gravitational pull of her transformation was too strong. Like debris caught in a cosmic whirlpool, he was drawn inexorably toward the epicentre of her final attack.
When he reached the eye of the storm, he found her there—or what remained of her. She had become something beyond description: a living neutron star, channelling the power of entire galaxies through her transformed being. Cosmic energies poured into her from every direction, and she had grown to dwarf the very stars themselves.
With limbs that spanned planets, she reached out and embraced him, pulling him close to her . When she spoke, her voice carried the weight of every star that had ever burned, every world that had ever lived.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, and in those words was contained all the regret of a universe that had died too soon, all the love of a guardian who had failed to protect what mattered most.
The implosion that followed was beyond the scale of any supernova. It was the death of death itself, the end of endings.
The energies that had been building within her were released in a single, universe-shattering instant that reduced both the Terrarian and herself to their component atoms, then to their souls, then to fragments of consciousness itself.
The explosion created a singularity that consumed everything—not just matter and energy, but space and time themselves. The universe folded in on itself like a paper crane crushed in a giant's fist, and for a moment that lasted eternity, nothing existed but the memory of what had been.
All the parts that ever where existed in a single instant, a perfect conglomerate of all things fused into one thing that hovered stable yet immensely volatile. Then with a flicker a spark touched the thing.
And it exploded.
*********************
Across the vast expanse of space and time, on a small blue world named after the very dirt it was made from, the first ripples of that ancient explosion finally arrived perfectly coinciding with an ancient scheme.
The wave that washed over Earth was invisible to most, but its effects were immediate and profound. Reality itself seemed to shiver, and in that moment of cosmic vertigo, doorways opened between dimensions.
Most of the gates glowed with the soft blue light of stable dimensional rifts. But in one isolated continent, something different happened. In Australia, the gates pulsed with shades of pink and rose, their light carrying within it the memory of an ancient sacrifice.
As humanity struggled to understand and combat the threats pouring through these dimensional wounds, few realized that they were witnessing the echo of the universe's greatest tragedy.
The pink gates were not just portals—they were a link to an ancient catastrophe that had ended a universe. And within them, the uncontrolled divine power that had once destroyed an entire universe began to seep through, seeking new worlds to ravage.
Deep within the most dangerous of these gates, crystalline formations began to appear. Beautiful, crystalline butterflies that seemed to pulse with their own inner light. To the humans who discovered them, they were simply the keys to closing the portals.
But they were so much more than that.
Deep in one of the most dangerous gates, an A-rank portal that had claimed the lives of humanity's strongest hunters. The first unique relic was discovered eight years after the gates appeared, and sat as a captivating of unknown power just outside their reach.
It wasn't until the tenth year after the gates appeared that a particularly motivated group delved the gates depths. Comprised entirely of S -rank hunters the party crossed the continent lost to the gates and delved through the hordes guarding this particular gate.
Inside the hunters fought through wave after waves as they made their way deeper, at the deepest point their treasure finally revealed itself.
Set within a large chamber massive rainbow crystals grew taller than buildings, each of these magic crystals would be worth millions alone but it was the relic in the centre that truly got their attention.
There growing out of a crystal effigy lay a blade of light, its colour constantly changing as though it was a kaleidoscope made present upon reality.
Walking forward the leader of the party approached the relic with greed clear on his mind, gripping the hilt of the sword he attempts to free it from its crystal prison but finds no luck.
Enraged he strikes out with his fist over and over until the crystal holding it shatters and he can grab the blade. Pleased with his prize he orders his men to grab as many of the crystals before retreating.
Unbeknownst to him or any other human a small crack slowly spread its way up the largest crystal of the span of a few weeks, within which was one of many crystalline butterflies coveted by many.
As the crack reached the butterfly it seemed to stop for a bit, before with a resounding crack the entire crystal split from top to bottom.
And with it the butterfly fell to the ground, two pieces fractured by the greed of a single man.