The void katana hummed with compressed space, its surface drinking light like a starless night. Not black—absence. Where the blade existed, reality wasn't.
The Calamity's Core pulsed frantically, analyzing this new variable. Runes flickered across its body as it tried to categorize something that defied categorization.
Null didn't charge.
His thrust was perfect, economical. A simple forward motion that any novice swordsman could replicate. But as the blade moved, space tore. A rift shimmered open at the Calamity's flank, and the katana's tip emerged, aimed directly at the Core.
The Calamity's newly stolen spatial awareness saved it. It twisted, kinetic armor materializing to parry. Metal met void. Where they touched, the armor didn't scratch or dent—it ceased. The edge of nothingness carved through stolen power like it was smoke.
Null pressed forward.
Dozens of dinner-plate rifts bloomed around the Calamity. He executed a single, elegant kata—five precise slashes that would have looked beautiful in any dojo. But his blade emerged from every rift simultaneously. An omnidirectional storm of phantom strikes, each one perfect, each one lethal.
The Calamity couldn't adapt to a single attack. It unleashed everything. The air exploded with stolen power. Marcus's kinetic blades erupted in a sphere, colliding with the phantom void steel. Elena's death whispers tried to corrode the rifts themselves. Elarion's chains lashed out, intercepting strikes from impossible angles. It wasn't fighting back—it was drowning the battlefield in chaos.
"He's not fighting a monster," Marcus breathed. "He's fighting an army."
The Core flashed—not one color but all of them. Rainbow light that hurt to perceive. The Calamity's arm began to change. Kinetic energy enveloped it, but space began to tear along its surface—two incompatible concepts merging into something that shouldn't exist.
It swung.
The attack wasn't just a slash. It was a force that cut space, a distance that carried destruction. The wave didn't travel toward Null—it erased the journey, appearing at its destination without crossing the space between.
A passive field of warped space around Null distorted its path, but the fused concepts were more complex to deflect. He brought up a barrier of pure anti-space. The shield caught the attack, visible cracks spreading across its surface as it struggled to negate something that violated physics. The impact still launched him backward, his feet carving trenches through solid stone.
Fusing techniques? His thoughts carried genuine interest. Not just copying anymore. Creating. You really are interesting.
The Calamity pressed its advantage. A strike emerged from a rift beneath Null's feet, forcing him airborne. A kinetic blast infused with spatial tearing met him at the apex. From within the blast itself, ethereal chains emerged, seeking to bind—a perfect, inescapable combination.
Null's expression shifted. Not to worry or fear, but to absolute calm.
He vanished, leaving behind a collapsing point of infinite density. The void detonated, shredding the chains and devouring the blast. He reappeared a hundred feet away, floating. The game was over.
The battlefield fell silent. The Calamity stood below, its form a chaotic amalgamation of stolen powers. Runes of every school of magic covered its flesh. Space warped around it in unstable waves. It had become a living paradox.
Null watched it with the detached interest of a scientist observing a successful experiment.
You've learned so much, he thought. It's a shame I have to erase it all. This was a good fight.
He raised one hand. The effect was subtle. No flash of light, no dramatic gesture. But the space around the Calamity became absolute. Fixed. Immutable. It tried to move, to warp, to attack, but reality itself refused its commands—a fly trapped in amber, frozen in spacetime.
Null descended slowly, deliberately. He sheathed his etheric blade with ceremonial precision.
His hand rested on the hilt.
He hadn't moved yet, but a horizontal line of perfect black appeared across the Calamity's Core. Cause and effect inverted—the result manifests before the action.
[Oblivion Draw].
The heirs didn't see him draw. One moment, his hand was on the hilt; the next, it had returned. The blade had moved between heartbeats, between thoughts. The Calamity's Core split perfectly in half.
But Null wasn't finished. He raised the katana one final time, holding it vertically before him. This wasn't combat anymore. It was ceremony. An execution.
His swing was slow, deliberate. A grandfather clock's pendulum marking the end of time.
[Event Horizon Slash].
The arc his blade carved wasn't light or energy; it was a physical manifestation. It was a tear. A rift of absolute black that made the void katana look bright by comparison. Where it passed, existence came to a halt.
The bisected Calamity touched the rift's edge.
It didn't burn. It didn't dissolve. It didn't get pulled in.
It ceased.
The parts that touched the event horizon were retroactively erased. Not destroyed—removed from the concept of having ever been. The rift expanded with terrible patience, consuming light, air, dust, until nothing remained in that space. Not even emptiness.
The rift sealed with a soft pop—the only sound in the dead silence.
Null stood alone, his fury evaporated like morning mist. His expression had returned to its default: mild boredom mixed with distant calculation. The dimension slowly stabilized, reality remembering how to function normally.
The Nexus heirs stared, their minds unable to fully process what they had just witnessed.
Elena spoke first, her voice barely a whisper, asking the question they were all thinking. "What are you?"
Null glanced at her, his cosmic eyes reflecting nothing. "Bored again."
He turned away, already dismissing the entire encounter.