The silence of Universe 3588 was a new kind of silence. It wasn't the quiet of peace, but the hush of a courtroom awaiting a verdict of execution. It was the sound of reality itself holding its breath before the gavel fell. And Saganbo was the gavel.
His transformation was complete. This was not a healing, but a molting. The persona of the manic, theatrical God of Destruction had sloughed away like dead skin from a serpent, revealing the skeletal truth beneath—something ancient, patient, and utterly without mercy.
His aura was gone. In its place was a condition—a sphere of absolute negation that consumed light, sound, and hope, making the distant stars seem to bleed their luminance into its event horizon. Space around him didn't warp; it decayed, flaking away into static at the edges of his presence like reality's own dead skin cells. The "gentle breeze" Shinji had felt before—the pressure that had seemed quaint against the mountain of his Innate Self State—was now the solar wind of a dying sun, scouring the very concept of "Shinji" from the cosmic record with each passing moment.
Shinji felt it immediately. The shift wasn't quantitative—it was categorical. This wasn't more power. This was a different kind of power, operating on principles his transcendence hadn't been designed to address.
"Intermediate Stage," Saganbo stated. His voice was no longer a sound, but a data stream of pure finality injected directly into Shinji's soul, bypassing ears, bypassing thought, arriving as simple, inarguable fact. "Destruction... Unbound."
The pressure hit.
It was not a force to be resisted, but a truth to be accepted: You are obsolete. It was the weight of a universe that had already voted for entropy and found life to be a charming, but ultimately negligible, anomaly. It slammed into the Innate Self State like a tidal wave crashing against a cliff, and for the first time since awakening, the boundless calm bent.
The serene crimson light, once an infinite ocean lapping gently at the shores of existence, was compressed into a desperate, flickering shield tight against Shinji's skin. He felt his spiritual architecture—a symphony of transcendent harmony mere moments before—groan under the strain of a melody it was not designed to play: a single, silent, terminal note that hummed with the finality of all things ending.
His breathing, which had been a metronome of perfect rhythm, hitched. Just once. But it was enough.
A muscle in Shinji's jaw feathered. Sweat—something he hadn't felt since achieving the State—beaded cold on his temple in the airless void. "That's... actually quite tough," he forced out, the words stripped of their former resonance, ground flat by the weight of a collapsing paradigm.
This was no longer a fight. It was an audit, and he was failing.
Internally, the AFS's consciousness stirred, urgent for the first time since the merger. 'This isn't pure power. This is ontological shift. He's not hitting harder—he's operating under different fundamental laws... this is something that exists outside the framework itself.'
Shinji's reply was silent, grim: 'Then how do we counter something that negates the concept of "we"?'
No answer came.
Saganbo observed this internal struggle with the detached interest of a scientist watching a fascinating chemical reaction reach its inevitable conclusion. "You feel it now, don't you?" he asked, and there was something almost like compassion in the clinical tone. "The weight of actually being finite. Your Innate Self State taught you to exist outside struggle, outside effort, outside fear. But I am not struggling, Shinji Kazuhiko. I am not fighting. I am simply... concluding."
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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...
