A dull breath echoed in the void. Sakolomé felt the space around him fold, as if the dimensions themselves were twisting beneath an invisible hand. Saiko's incandescent gaze sharpened, and his words fell like blades:
— If you want to touch transcendence… then you must see the unnamable.
Before Sakolomé could answer, the ground beneath his feet vanished. A black light, as deep as oblivion, engulfed him all at once. No scream, no breath. Only absolute vertigo.
When his eyes reopened… the world he found was no world at all.
Before him stretched Chao.
It was not a space, not really. It was a fracture in reality, a matrix where all form, law, and logic had been torn away and shattered. The sky? There was none. Only a shifting ocean of shadows and lights, impossible colors twisting, spiraling, and blending into a senseless ballet. Each hue seemed alive, as if the colors themselves were conscious and sought to devour the mind of anyone who gazed too long.
Beneath his feet… nothing solid. He walked on a ground that breathed, a cosmic flesh beating to the rhythm of a titanic invisible heart. With each pulse, the space undulated like a sea of nothingness.
Then Sakolomé heard a sound. Not a roar, not a cry… a collective whisper, like thousands of voices speaking unknown tongues, all at once. Sentences that seemed to want to enter his mind.
He raised his eyes… and his breath caught.
Shapes. Silhouettes. Creatures.
But none resembled anything his brain could conceive. Some were clusters of fractal limbs, others spheres covered with eyes opening and closing in a sacrilegious rhythm. Bodies made of moving texts, concepts made flesh, serpents of infinite light whose scales seemed to reflect all possible futures.
They did not fly, they did not walk. They simply were. They occupied space by mere right of existence, crushing the logic of gravity or causality. Every step Sakolomé took seemed watched by these entities… but not with eyes. With something older than perception.
Then he understood.
These beings… were Deviants, certainly from another world.
Not gods. Not demons. Not dragons. Something else. Transcendent existences, freed from every chain. Each one, by its mere presence, threatened reality itself. If they fully manifested in a causal universe, they would annihilate it in an instant.
A shiver tore down Sakolomé's spine. His breath grew heavy, almost painful. His senses screamed: You shouldn't be here.
Then Saiko's voice echoed… everywhere. In the sky, in the ground, in his mind.
— Welcome to Chao, Sakolomé. The only world that follows no law… because it lies beyond laws. Here live the fragments of true freedom. Here live those who broke causality like you… to become too heavy for reality.
An oppressive silence followed his words. Then Saiko appeared as a moving constellation in the fractured sky, his eyes burning like two black stars.
— Here, your being will be stripped bare. Here, you will see what it means to transcend. But beware, Sakolomé… Chao devours the weak. If you falter, you will not die… you will cease to exist.
Suddenly, one of the Deviants raised a formless limb… and the entire world seemed to vibrate.
Sakolomé panted. His dilated pupils reflected a battlefield beyond all understanding. The sky itself seemed torn from the narrative sustaining it: constellations bled, their lines of light hanging like broken veins, while an incandescent void swallowed the foundations of reality.
Before him… true Deviants. Not impostors, not partial transgressors like himself. But those who had shattered even the notion of law. Fractal silhouettes, twisting at angles that the concept of "direction" could not grasp. Each of their steps made an axiom collapse. Each breath erased a language.
Sakolomé clenched his fists.
— I am capable of doing it, I can do it… I am a pseudo-Deviant… I can hold on…
A voice burst in his consciousness, without sound, without vibration. A pure injunction:
"Lie."
That was all. And with this word, his body was pierced by a foreign truth. He felt erased from a moment that had not yet happened. His chest stitched back immediately thanks to his regeneration, but the effect remained: the world now rejected him in places. As if he existed in fragments.
Another Deviant extended an arm — or rather a living equation, pulsating with impossible glyphs. The mere equation rewrote mass, inertia, and narrative order. In an instant, the notion of gravitational balance was denied. Sakolomé crashed against the ground… then found himself sucked into the sphere of a paradox, crushed by his own non-weight.
— Tch…! He forced his being to reconstitute itself, tearing his conceptual chains one by one. "You think I'll bow…?!"
He materialized a weapon: a noetic blade, forged in the non-being of his identity. A strike cut through space — a blow beyond causality. The impact hit a Deviant squarely… but the latter was already no longer on the plane where the strike had meaning. It merely turned a gaze that was not a gaze, and Sakolomé felt his own idea of victory burn away.
His arm almost dissolved, but he screamed, regenerated, counterattacked by fracturing three layers of physical axioms. Collapse waves made the dimensional theater shake. Yet the Deviants did not flinch. They were not opponents, but moving abysses.
A third Deviant stepped forward. His voice echoed through all strata:
— You who believe yourself free, why do you still fight with tools bound to the very concept of combat?
Their attacks no longer even resembled gestures. A simple choice of intention was enough to unleash metaphysical cataclysms. A wave inverted the notion of simultaneity: Sakolomé lived three defeats in advance, all while still fighting.
He stepped back, one knee to the ground. His breathing was ragged. Each breath seemed to draw into his lungs an ocean of paradoxes. He knew… he was going to die. Not physically — he was going to be deprived of any possibility of having been Sakolomé.
Then, he heard that familiar voice. Saiko. His guide, his specter in this battle.
— "Sakolomé… you fight like a mortal with wolf claws in a war of concepts. Wake up."
— Saiko… I don't have your power… I'm not… like you...
— "Then create it. Forge a weapon that does not exist in the logic they tread. Not a spell. Not an idea. A meta-conceptual magic even more extreme than theirs. A structure that does not merely break causality… but redefines the meaning of 'possessing' a power."
Sakolomé lifted his head. His eyes bled symbols.
— A magic… that does not imitate… that appropriates…
The Deviants advanced. Each embodied a superior negation. If Sakolomé failed… he would be deducted out of the world.
Kneeling. His blood floated in the black air of Chao, dispersing like strands of torn narrative. His lungs gasped. Each breath tore away a part of his consciousness, swallowed by this pre-causal chaos where rules existed only to be betrayed.
Around him, the Deviants approached. Their impossible forms pulsed with living contradictions. They had no eyes, no voice, but Sakolomé felt their verdict:
"You were not meant to join us. Disappear."
He closed his eyes. Create my own meta-conceptual magic… Saiko's words echoed in his mind, but they seemed insane amid this apocalypse. How could a being like him, even a pseudo-Deviant, compete with those who shattered the very notion of Being?
The silhouettes lunged at him. Their mere movement erased entire swaths of logic. One strike erased the notion of right and left: space folded. A wave shattered the order of simultaneity: he lived his death before even understanding the assault.
But in this roar… he saw it.
A white, serene gleam. Saiko. His calm features like a cold star.
— "You can create your magic from my own transcendence… If you dare."
Time froze. Sakolomé detached himself from the theater where time had meaning. In this silence prior to all measure, he opened his eyes.
A shiver tore through his being. It was not pain, but a voluntary disintegration. Sakolomé abandoned his narrative attributes one by one. His memory, his name, his instincts… all were offered as initial input.
The void opened. Not the Chao where he fought, but a chasm beneath chasms. The Madhurya: the fundamental void, matrix of Meta-Concepts. Raw forms of meaning floated there, inaccessible, each being a law before the law.
Sakolomé stretched out a hand that was no longer a hand.
— I do not want their strength… I want what allows them to have strength.
A soundless syllable engraved itself in him: Zeerât, the primitive continuity that makes power possible. Then another: Myâtrhe, the principle of appropriation. Each glyph seared into his being like a transcendental branding iron.
A Deviant projected a wave of absolute Denial, seeking to erase his presence from the layers of causality. Sakolomé perceived the condition:
To erase, there must be a framework where "being" and "not being" are opposed.
He grasped this condition in the chasm, seized it, and made it his own.
Another Deviant brandished fractal immortality. Sakolomé saw the root:
Immortality exists because an absolute (Arenhâl) remains invariant.
He made this invariant an original copy within his own structure.
Each attack became a revelation. A door to a foundation.
He did not imitate nor steal. He re-declared the condition as his own.
Thus was born the Original Appropriation; not magic like the others but much more — an absolute verdict.
All that can be possessed is already possessed by me, because I exist the moment possession becomes conceivable.
No defense was possible. He did not need to barely touch his opponents nor wait for their move. Even before they thought, he had inscribed in himself the seed that allowed them to have this power.
Then he opened his eyes.
A roar tore through the world of chao created by Saiko. An explosion of red mana erupted, but it was no ordinary mana: it was a flux of broken fundamental states. Colors died. The local chao laws exploded. Even the Deviants recoiled, their forms blurring under the impact.
Sakolomé rose slowly. His wounds closed, but not by regeneration: he redefined the condition of bodily integrity as absolute for himself.
His eyes gleamed with a light belonging to no era. He smiled and said:
— Here is my magic… The Original Appropriation.
The Deviants did not remain indifferent; they attacked en masse, distorting all threads of existence within the chao.
One first struck with the negation of the notion of "beginning": all that begins is destroyed.
Sakolomé smiled.
— If you deny the beginning, I possess what makes "commencement" possible…
A arc of black light sliced the air. The Deviant exploded into axiomatic shards.
A second tried to superimpose identities to devour him from within.
Sakolomé grasped the condition of differentiation and made it his before the attack. He tore the space apart, reducing the creature to paradox dust.
Then he screamed. Pure rage. Not against them but at his own limits that he had just broken. Each cry summoned a wave of appropriation, pillaging primordial conditions one after another.
The Chao trembled. The ground split into layers of torn chao. The sky vomited shards of axioms. And Sakolomé, at the center, now embodied the threat of a convergence point of Meta-Concepts.
Saiko, observing, gave a crooked smile.
— "Well, little one… but beware. The more foundations you gather, the more you become a paradox that cannot exist in any reality…"
Sakolomé raised his head. His pupils were no longer eyes: moving glyphs, witnesses of Zeerât and Myâtrhe.
— I feel… different…