The air within the pocket dimension wasn't just shattered; it was screaming. Reality itself, already frayed by the Labyrinth of Dissolution and the preceding cataclysm of Shinji's capture, vibrated with the aftershocks of divine and relativistic violence. Merus, the God of Creation, lay sprawled across a fractured plane of obsidian that wept streams of molten stone. Cerulean blood, thick and luminous as captured nebulae, pooled beneath him, its glow dimming like a dying star. His divine aura, once a comforting beacon resonating with the fundamental song of existence, now sputtered and flickered erratically, casting long, desperate shadows. The magnificent pearlescent suit was rent, stained with soot, alien plasma, and his own vital essence. Before him, radiating cold fury that seemed to leach the warmth from the very photons around him, stood Daganu, the SpeedOff Monarch.
Daganu didn't merely move. He violated sequence. One moment, he was a silhouette against the swirling entropy backdrop, a statue carved from event-horizon darkness. The next, the space between him and Merus simply ceased to be relevant. He existed at Merus, bypassing distance and time with a causality-rending lunge. His fist wasn't propelled by muscle; it was a singularity of pure kinetic intent, compressed to a point aimed squarely at erasing Merus's skull from the multiverse.
Instinct, not divinity, was Merus's savior. Millennia of conflict, wars waged in the birthing fires of galaxies against entities that gnawed at the fabric of creation, had honed reflexes that screamed louder than agony or despair. A micro-twist of his neck, a desperate contraction of divine muscle fiber. The Light Bullet, a projectile moving faster than the physics it temporarily unmade, grazed his temple. Not a clean miss. A furrow of vaporized flesh, bone, and divine matter exploded outwards in a spray of luminous gore. The shockwave wasn't sound; it was a localized reality quake that slammed Merus backwards like a discarded doll. He skidded across the glassy slag, carving a trench of superheated stone, each impact sending fresh jolts of agony through his battered form. The taste of suffocation and his own blood filled his mouth.
Gritting teeth slick with cerulean blood against the white-hot agony blooming in his skull, Merus reached. Not with his hands, but with his will, strained and frayed as it was. He plunged his consciousness into the unstable, volatile maelstrom of the Yellow Ring fused around his torso – the forced marriage of Gorogilian plasma and divine essence. It was like wrestling a dying star. Golden veins, thick and pulsing with savage, untamed energy, erupted beneath his torn skin, snaking up his neck, across his face. His muscles, already defined by eons of existence, swelled grotesquely, armored plates of borrowed, feral power rippling beneath his ruined suit. His eyes, usually deep pools of ancient, calm wisdom, now blazed with feral, predatory yellow light, the pupils slitted like a cornered beast.
He launched himself not with divine grace or telekinetic might, but with the brutal, tectonic lunge of a planetary titan roused to fury. A Gorogilian-enhanced kick, trailing arcs of unstable golden plasma, aimed not to disable, but to shatter Daganu's spine, to pulp the Monarch into constituent atoms against the unyielding fabric of the pocket dimension.
Daganu didn't dodge; he repositioned his existence. He was simply elsewhere before Merus's foot completed its devastating arc. The kick connected with nothingness, its unleashed fury detonating against a distant mountain range kilometers away. The range didn't crumble; it vanished in a silent, blinding flash of superheated plasma and shattered spacetime, leaving only a smoldering scar on reality. Before Merus's enhanced senses could even register the catastrophic miss, the counter-strike arrived. Daganu's boot, sheathed in compressed space-time, impacted Merus's ribs with the force of a neutron star collision. CRACK-THOOM! The sound echoed like the death knell of a universe. Ribs, reinforced by divine biology and Gorogilian augmentation, splintered. Merus was hurled backwards once more, a comet of pain and golden-cerulean light, crashing through petrified energy spires that shattered like sugar glass. The Yellow Ring flared violently, then sputtered, its borrowed power draining Merus further even as it fueled him, a parasitic, unstable symbiosis.
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Trascender : The Fourth Gust
FantasyWhat happens when death becomes impossible? Nineteen-year-old Shinji Kazuhiko's life shattered the night a masked killer invaded his home. Left for dead, he made a horrifying discovery: he cannot die. And with each death, something inside him grows...
