Trascender : The Fourth Gust

Chapter 20 : Luminara

Silence in Saganbo's citadel wasn't quiet; it was the thick, charged quiet before a planet cracks. Amado, his usually vibrant blue skin looking dull and washed-out under the Barrier's eerie, galaxy-trapped light, didn't turn. His focus was inward, processing an impossible absence. "That's bad."

Saganbo didn't shift on his throne of compressed neutron star. Only a single, defiant strand of purple hair stirred against the crushing gravity he radiated. "What is it?" The question was bored, but the power vibrating the air around the dais hinted at impatience.

"Dentetsu," Amado stated, his voice unnervingly flat. "Wiped the First Universe. Fighting something... significant. Total ontological erasure. Not fragmented. Not ruined. Gone. Like it never was."

Saganbo sighed, a sound like continents grinding deep beneath an ocean of void. He tapped a single finger on the armrest. Hairline fractures, impossibly fine, snaked across the neutron-star surface before vanishing instantly, healed by his will. "Damn him." The annoyance was bone-deep, weary. "A force of nature wrapped in apathy. Utterly uncontrollable. He plays with fires even I keep banked for specific... conflagrations." He flicked his wrist dismissively; the light around the gesture warped and bent unnaturally. "Merus can paste it back together later." He leaned back, ancient eyes glinting with cold, detached curiosity. "Did the idiot at least break a sweat? Find a moment's distraction from his crushing boredom?"

Amado remained silent, a statue carved from blue ice contemplating the chilling vista of absolute nothingness where a vibrant universe had spun moments before.

The Sanctuary within the rogue planetoid in the 6th Universe felt suddenly thin, fragile, like ancient parchment stretched over an abyss. Shinji Kazuhiko, attempting to find calm near the luminescent subterranean river, flinched violently, eyes snapping open. Beside him, Merus jerked upright, the soft, healing glow emanating from his wounds flickering out like a snuffed candle. A wave hit them; not sound, not light, but pure, soul-deep wrongness. The chilling echo of something vast and fundamental simply... ceasing. A cold, sucking vacuum opened in the fabric of existence itself.

"Yeah," Shinji breathed, the word tight, knuckles white on his knees. He pushed himself up, every nerve ending screaming. "Felt that. Monstrous. Like the universe just... hiccuped into nothing."
Merus paled visibly beneath his cerulean hue. The residual energy around his wounds sputtered and died completely. "Not a Monarch," he murmured, his voice strained, laced with a dread Shinji had never heard before. "They break. They shatter. They unravel. They occasionally end universes but... they don't... unmake like that. Not effortlessly." He met Shinji's stare, his glacial eyes reflecting a chilling, absolute truth. "Worst case? Saganbo stretched his legs. Flexed his true nature."

Shinji's blood turned to liquid nitrogen in his veins. Monarchs were nightmares. Saganbo flexing? That was the end of all stories. "That's... really, really bad." The understatement hung in the damp air like a tombstone.

"Hey."

The voice was casual. Utterly bored. It came from directly behind them.

Time didn't freeze. It shattered. Shinji's finely honed danger sense, the one that screamed multiple times alerting him over and over again, didn't spike. It simply... flatlined. Not only Shinji but Act 2 itself was hopeless. Cold, hard futility washed over him, drowning everything else. The pressure hit like a collapsing star, an invisible, physical weight slamming down, crushing the breath from his lungs, crushing coherent thought into dust.

They turned, movements slow, stiff, agonizingly deliberate, like figures trapped in hardening concrete.

He stood there, framed by the cavern entrance. Spiky, unkempt dark hair. Bare, muscular chest. Simple, worn chinos. Dentetsu. He wasn't imposing like Daganu's armored bulk; he was inevitable, like gravity given sentient, indifferent form. His brown eyes scanned them with the detached interest of a scientist observing insignificant insects under a microscope.