It had no form, yet it was all forms. It was a shifting, iridescent stain on reality, a cancer of pure potential that defied the eye and the mind. It didn't radiate Ki or any known energy. It radiated absence. A hunger so profound it created a vacuum that threatened to suck the very soul out of the universe.
The Shard-of-Infinity hung in the space before Astra, and he felt his meticulously laid traps unravel. The gravitational mazes were simply... ingested, their complex energies absorbed without a ripple. The Void Anchors flared to life, creating bubbles of beautiful, absolute nothingness, but the Shard flowed around them, its edges avoiding the null-zones with an intelligence that was both ancient and utterly alien. It learned. Instantly.
This was not a battle of power. It was a battle of concepts.
Astra didn't wait for it to act. He thrust out his gauntleted hand and unleashed a Jōgen Lance refined by centuries of practice. A beam of pure, white-hot cosmic energy, capable of piercing a planet, shot forth. It struck the center of the shifting stain.
And vanished.
The Shard didn't absorb it. It comprehended it. The energy, the principle behind it, became data. A part of the entity. Astra felt a feedback loop of terrifying insight—the Shard now understood the fundamental composition of his Ki, his Mana, the very signature of his soul.
It was learning him.
The Shard reacted. It didn't fire a beam. It re-conceptualized the space Astra occupied. The vacuum around him suddenly had the pressure and chemical composition of a stellar core. It was an impossible, localized rewrite of physics.
Astra's [Dense-Body Constitution] and [Cosmic Energy Manipulation] flared, creating a stable bubble of his own reality within the hostile environment. He held it for a fraction of a second, the strain immense, before he used the Void Fist on a cosmic scale.
He didn't punch. He defined.
He asserted that the space within a kilometer of himself was a zone of null-physics. No energy, no matter, no laws. The stellar pressure vanished, replaced by a perfect, silent void.
The Shard recoiled. Not in pain, but in what felt like... curiosity. The null-space was the first thing it hadn't been able to immediately process. It was an anomaly. A paradox.
It tested the edges of the void, tendrils of its form dissolving as they touched the nothingness. It learned the boundaries, the shape of Astra's defiance.
Then, it adapted.
It began to project its own field, not of altered physics, but of competing reality. A wave of shimmering, chaotic possibility crashed against Astra's void. It was a billion different physical laws all vying for dominance at once—a place where gravity was repulsive, light was solid, and time flowed backward. The strain of maintaining his singular, nullified reality against this onslaught of infinite "what-ifs" was excruciating.
Sweat beaded on Astra's brow inside his helmet. This was the true horror. It wasn't just powerful. It was a creative force, a god of chaos that could endlessly generate new ways to unmake him.
He had held it at bay for less than a minute, and he was already at his limit. The Shard was an ocean, and he was a man trying to hold it back with a teacup of nothingness.
The First Contact was over. The assessment was complete. He could not win a war of attrition. He could not overpower it. He could only hope to outthink it, to be more clever than a fragment of infinity itself. And as the Shard began to generate a new reality based on the principle of "conceptual erasure," Astra knew the next move would be the last. He had one chance. One gambit.