The world still trembled.
Where once stood Karveth's heart now lay a wound—a sinkhole vast enough to swallow a district whole, glowing faintly from beneath as the crust cooled from NOVA's fury.
The news had spread fast.
Too fast.
The Circuit Guardians had seen defeats before, but not humiliation—never like this. Five of the strongest, brought to their knees by one man who called himself Merciless and walked away without a scratch. And though the city still smoldered, far away beneath the western ridge, John Merciless was already gone.
The second base was not a bunker nor a fortress—it was an absence, a place that the world forgot existed. Hidden within a crescent valley surrounded by eternal mist, it was called Veyrhal, known only among the 10 Kings and Queens as The Hollow Horizon.
It was beautiful in the quietest way.
White spires rose from black stone cliffs, half-drowned in fog that shimmered faintly with circuit residue. Rivers of molten silver flowed through carved canals that glowed like veins under the skin of the earth. Every wall seemed alive, pulsating with the faint hum of dormant magic.
This was where John's army had rebuilt what the world destroyed—a place made from nothing but intention.
Inside, beneath the vast ceiling of glass and smoke, the Kings and Queens waited. Reiji, arms folded, stared at the holographic display of the ruined city. The others—Selara, Kael, Myra, Ven, Yoru, Cassian, Ishir, Vorn, and Aeliah—stood scattered in a crescent formation, the weight of exhaustion written in every twitch of muscle and breath.
And then, he appeared.
Not like thunder this time. Not like a god.
Just John.
The doors of obsidian slid open with a hiss, and he walked through the mist—mask gone, his silver hair slicked back, coat torn at the shoulders, faint burns marking his hands from the edge of NOVA's recoil. His eyes were calm. Too calm.
For a moment, none of them spoke. Then Kael smirked, always the first to break silence.
"You look like hell," he said.
John exhaled a small laugh, brushing soot off his collar. "Hell looks worse," he replied. "Trust me."
Selara stepped forward, her voice soft, almost motherly. "The others?" she asked.
"They'll live," John said simply, walking toward the center table. The map shimmered, flickering as his circuit signature synced with the base's core. "I made sure of it. They'll remember why they lost."
Reiji's eyes narrowed, crimson glinting under the dim light. "And what if they come again? The Guardians won't stay humiliated for long. You've shaken their faith—they'll either collapse or become monsters."
"Then," John said, sitting, "we'll become something they can't define."
In the far reaches of the Guardian's central council, chaos had erupted.
The Grand Chamber of Circuits, a monolith of ivory and light in the center of Astralis, buzzed with panic.
The five who had faced John were bandaged, resting, their faces pale with disbelief. The Overseers—a group of robed figures who watched over the circuit nations—stood in a semicircle, their murmurs overlapping like a storm.
"Five of our finest brought to their knees," one of them said.
"An attack that erased a city block in seconds," another hissed.
"He could've killed them all, yet he didn't. He was measuring us."
"He's not human," said a third. "His eye—what is it? How do we counter something that nullifies the laws of motion?"
The Overseer at the center, a woman whose circuits glowed faintly blue under her skin, silenced them with a raise of her hand.
"There is one," she said slowly. "One we've never had reason to summon."
The others froze. Even the walls seemed to hum differently at her words.
"You don't mean—"
"Yes," she interrupted. "From the faraway land beyond our maps. The one erased from all historical archives. We called him once—and it nearly cost us the continent."
A silence spread through the chamber like frost.
His name was Seirath Valen.
No nation claimed him. No record mentioned him. He came from a land so distant that even the stars shifted differently there. A place where circuits weren't born from logic or elemental balance, but from impossibility itself.
They called his circuit Aether Null, a paradox that defied structure.
While every other circuit worked by channeling energy, Seirath's consumed it—rewriting whatever it touched. He was immune to distortion, immune to immobilization, and could absorb pure force. Even NOVA, they theorized, could only scar him.
His eyes were pale grey, almost transparent, and his hair a dull silver that caught no light. He wore no crest, no sigil, no emblem of allegiance—only a long coat etched with runic scars, shifting like ink under water.
He wasn't evolved—at least, not in the way others were. His evolution was subtle, quiet. His body had learned to stabilize chaos itself.
When he walked, the air folded instead of moving.
Back in Veyrhal, John stood on the balcony overlooking the misty valley. He could feel it—change. The circuits of the world were trembling, whispering of something old returning. Something foreign.
"Someone's coming," he murmured.
Reiji, standing beside him, nodded. "Whoever it is, they're not ordinary. I can feel the dissonance through the net. Like the world doesn't know how to register him."
John's lips curled slightly. "Good. I was getting bored."
But beneath the smile, his mind was racing.
He knew the tremor. This wasn't a soldier. It was a cipher.
His eye—Koketsu—flickered once. Inside the depths of that crimson lens, symbols danced: numerical structures, waveforms, equations, probabilities. He was running simulations before the enemy even arrived.
"Reiji," he said, "send the others into perimeter defense. Quietly. If he's who I think he is, NOVA won't work twice."
"What will you use then?" Reiji asked.
John's gaze rose to the horizon where the mist glowed faintly silver. "Something beyond reaction… beyond causality."
He turned, resting his hand on the railing. "When NOVA ends, it erases what exists. But what if I use a circuit that doesn't erase—but calculates?"
Reiji frowned. "You mean—"
"Yes," John said, his tone distant, almost lost in thought. "Every force, every variable, every number in the universe obeys one principle: balance. If I can rewrite the logic of impact, then I don't destroy—I equalize."
He smiled faintly.
"I'll call it… ZERO-SUM."
Meanwhile, in the Grand Chamber, the Overseers began the ritual.
Through a gate of liquid glass, the mist parted—revealing Seirath Valen.
He stepped through the portal barefoot, silent, his eyes drifting lazily across the room as if none of it mattered. When the Overseer bowed, he didn't return it. He simply said, in a voice that was more breath than sound:
"Where?"
The Overseer hesitated. "Veyrhal. The Hollow Horizon."
He nodded once, his tone unreadable. "Good. I wanted to see him."
John stood at the center of the observatory, alone now, the Kings and Queens stationed beyond the mist. His circuits pulsed faintly under his skin, his coat rustling in the wind.
The air distorted.
Space folded.
From the fog stepped Seirath Valen.
For a long moment, the two men simply stared at each other. Two figures of entirely different ideologies, standing in silence that hummed louder than thunder.
Seirath's eyes flicked briefly toward John's left eye. "Koketsu," he said quietly. "So the myths were true."
John smirked. "You know it?"
"I was born before its first user died."
"Then you're ancient," John replied. "Or lying."
Seirath tilted his head. "I'm neither. I'm irrelevant."
John chuckled softly, then said, "You'll forgive me for not believing in ghosts."
"You will," Seirath said. His hand lifted slightly, and the air stopped moving. Not shattered, not frozen—stopped. Even the mist hung suspended like painted smoke.
John's smile faltered for the first time.
So this was the power of Aether Null—the circuit that denied movement, denied interaction, denied reality itself.
Seirath looked at him, unblinking. "You shouldn't have used NOVA. It sent a signal. It told the world there's someone worth summoning again."
"And you think you're the world's answer?" John asked, voice low.
"No," Seirath said, stepping forward once. "I'm the correction."
Time felt slower now. John's thoughts ran in parallel—hundreds of them. Equations, theoretical constants, molecular shifts. He analyzed Seirath's movement, the resonance of his presence.
The world around them was a machine. Every atom, every breath, every reaction a number in a vast equation.
"Interesting…" he whispered. "If NOVA erases, it's the subtraction of infinity from reality. But if I calculate the universe as an equation, every action has an opposite. Every particle, a counterweight. If I can rewrite the ratio…" His hand flexed. Circuits lit across his arm.
"I can make the universe itself cancel you."
Seirath raised his hand, the mist cracking like broken glass. "Then show me," he said. "Show me what your logic can build."
John's eyes glowed crimson.
"Very well," he whispered.
The air bent—numbers and equations spiraling like halos around him. The symbols of balance, division, and entropy merged in his circuit core.
"ZERO-SUM: INITIATE."
And with that—the Hollow Horizon itself trembled.
The fog ignited into silver.
Two impossibilities met.
And for the first time since NOVA, John Merciless smiled—not as a monster, but as a man who had finally found an opponent worth breaking the laws of the universe for.