Location: The Dead Zone — Between the Sanctuary and the Sea.
Date: Wednesday, March 1, 2025.
Null hit the ground like a meteor, but there was no crater. The earth beneath his boots didn't shatter; it turned into a fine, grey powder that didn't even have the strength to kick up dust.
He stood in a wasteland of his own making—a circle of silver light pushed against a horizon of creeping, yellow fog. Five miles away, the General stood motionless.
"You're remarkably fast, Silver King," The Plague's voice rattled in Null's mind, sounding like dry leaves skittering on a tombstone. "But speed is just the desperate struggle of a thing that knows its time is running out. Why run toward the end?"
Null didn't answer with words. He gripped his scythe, the white veins on his black arm glowing with a fierce, unstable light. He vanished.
[God-Speed: Step of the Void]
Null reappeared instantly inches away from The Plague. The scythe swung in a horizontal arc designed to cleave through the General's porcelain neck. The blade hissed through the air, vibrating with the power of the merged Prime Stones.
CLANG.
The blade stopped an inch from The Plague's skin. There was no shield. There was no parry.
The air itself had become so dense with decay that the kinetic energy of the swing had simply... died. The momentum of the scythe had "rotted" before it could make contact.
The Plague slowly tilted his faceless head. The amber eye in his chest dilated, staring into Null's crimson irises.
"Your weapon is beautiful," the General whispered. "A masterpiece of the Axiom. But tell me, Null... what is a masterpiece once the ink begins to fade? What is a God once he realizes he is just a man with a very long fuse?"
I. The Philosophy of the Rot
The Plague raised a hand—the one with the green, pulsing veins. He didn't strike. He gently reached out and touched the edge of Null's scythe.
Immediately, the black blade began to rust. High-frequency vibrations of Void-energy were silenced. The white-veined etchings dimmed and began to peel away like old paint.
"Satan hated you because you were strong," The Plague said, his voice dripping with a terrifying, calm pity. "I don't hate you. I pity you. You have just achieved 'Everything.' You are a God. You have power, friends, a destiny. And yet, the moment you reached the peak, you began your descent. I am simply here to make the fall... faster."
Null felt a coldness spreading from the scythe into his hands. His Divine Intuition screamed: DISCONNECT. THE CODE IS BLEEDING.
Null kicked off the General's chest, flipping backward and retracted his scythe into his shadow. He looked at his hands; they were trembling. Not with fear, but with a sudden, localized fatigue. His muscles felt like they hadn't slept in a hundred years.
"You talk a lot for someone who has no mouth," Null rasped, his eyes glowing brighter as he forced his Sanctified Physiology to flush the rot out of his system.
II. The Plague's Domain: The Gray World
"I speak the truth that the Almighty hides," The Plague replied. He spread his arms wide. "The King of Stone understands. The universe is a wound that won't stop bleeding. I am the scab. I am the end of the pain."
[Entropy Field: The Grey World]
Suddenly, the yellow fog didn't just move; it ignited. But it wasn't fire. It was a wave of pure, conceptual "End."
The ground for miles turned into a liquid slurry of grey ash. The sky turned the color of a dead man's eyes. Null felt his Aura Compression being ripped away. His Godhood was being pulled out of him—not to be stolen, but to be wasted.
Null fell to one knee. He looked at his left arm. The glowing white veins were turning a sickly, bruised purple.
"Is this it?" The Plague asked, walking slowly toward him. Each step the General took caused the reality around him to crack and dissolve. "The Great Silver King? The hope of the rebellion? You're already wilting, Null. You're a flower that bloomed in a graveyard."
III. The Counter-Code
Null gritted his teeth, his fangs baring in a snarl. The pain was different than the physical agony of the False Son. This was a soul-deep exhaustion. He felt his memories of Haruto, of his parents, of his training—they felt "thin," as if he was forgetting the details.
The Plague was rotting his Identity.
If I can't out-muscle him... I have to out-exist him, Null thought.
He closed his eyes. He didn't reach for the Void. He didn't reach for Life. He reached for the Axiom—the original rules set by The Almighty.
"The Almighty didn't forget to delete Entropy," Null whispered, his voice gaining a new, crystalline clarity. "He created it... so that New Life could have room to grow."
Null placed his hand on the grey, rotted earth.
"[Divine Code: Rebirth of the Axiom]"
A shockwave of pure, blinding white light erupted from Null. It wasn't an explosion; it was a Restoration.
Where the light touched the grey ash, green grass exploded into existence. Where it touched the yellow fog, the air became bloody clear. The purple bruise on Null's arm vanished, the white veins snapping back to brilliant life.
The Plague stopped. His chest-eye widened. For the first time, the General looked... surprised.
"You... you are using the High Code to reverse the flow?" The Plague hissed, his voice losing its calm. "Impossible. No mortal can command the Axiom to that degree!"
Null stood up, his silver hair flowing in the wind of his own power. He wasn't just compressed now. He was Purified.
"I'm not a mortal," Null said, his crimson eyes locking onto the General's amber eye. "And I'm not just a God. I'm the one who's going to make sure your 'End'... has a beginning."
Null pointed his finger at The Plague. A spark of white light, small as a diamond, appeared at the tip.
"Your rot is just a lack of light," Null declared. "Let's see how you handle the Sun."
The white light of Null's [Rebirth of the Axiom] had turned the immediate area into its original state. Grass swayed in a wind that shouldn't exist, and the air felt hellish. But as the light faded, The Plague didn't look defeated.
The General's porcelain head cracked. A jagged, black fissure ran from the top of his skull down to his chest-eye.
"You use the Code of the Father to fix the toys of the children," The Plague hissed, his voice no longer a rattle, but a screaming chorus of a million dying breaths. "You think 'Restoration' is the answer? You are simply providing me with fresher meat."
I. The Second Form: The Harbinger of Terminal Decay
The Plague grabbed his own featureless face and tore it open.
The porcelain skin shattered, falling away like broken eggshells. Beneath it was not flesh, but a core of pure, pulsing Emerald Singularity.
His body began to expand and distort. His tattered robes fused with his skin, turning into long, weeping tendrils of black smoke. His two arms split, becoming six long, spindly limbs that ended in needles of obsidian. But the most terrifying change was the Chest-Eye. It grew until it took over his entire torso, the amber iris turning a blood-streaked violet.
[Apotheosis of Rot: The Terminal God]
He no longer looked like a man. He looked like a giant, six-armed insectoid deity made of smoke and cracked jade. From his back, wings made of decaying "Scripture"—billions of lines of Code that were literally rotting off the page—unfurled into the sky.
"Now," the Terminal God boomed, the sound vibrating in Null's very marrow. "Let us see you 'Restore' a reality that no longer remembers how to exist."
II. The Pandemic Field
The Plague didn't point a finger this time. He simply exhaled.
A cloud of violet mist erupted from his central eye. This wasn't a fog; it was a Conceptual Pandemic.
When the mist touched the "Restored" grass Null had just created, the grass didn't turn to ash. It mutated. The blades of grass turned into tiny, jagged teeth that began eating the soil. The air didn't become dusty; it became toxic to the soul.
Null tried to use [Rebirth] again, but this time, the white light flickered and died.
"What...?" Null gasped, his crimson eyes widening.
"Restoration requires a Blueprint, Null," The Plague mocked, his six arms weaving a complex pattern in the air. "I have infected the Blueprint itself. I am not rotting the object; I am rotting the Memory of the Object. Your Axiom can't fix what it no longer recognizes as 'Broken'."
III. The Terminal Strike
The Plague vanished, moving with a flickering, glitchy speed.
He appeared behind Null. One of his six obsidian needles pierced Null's right shoulder—the human shoulder.
Null screamed, but it wasn't a sound of physical pain. It was the sound of a person losing a part of their history.
"That memory," The Plague whispered, leaning close to Null's ear as the violet eye in his chest pulsed. "The time you first learned to walk? The smell of your mother's hair? Deleted."
Null's eyes went blank for a second. A massive chunk of his childhood was suddenly... gone. A void opened in his mind where a memory used to be. The needle had injected a Concept-Eater.
"No!" Null roared, spinning around and swinging his scythe.
But as the blade passed through The Plague's smoky body, the scythe itself began to "glitch." The blade turned into a pixelated mess, then into a pile of autumn leaves, then back into a blade. The Entropy was so high that the scythe was losing its definition as a weapon.
"You are fighting the inevitable, Silver King," The Plague laughed, his six arms reaching out to embrace Null. "By the time I am done, you won't even remember why you are fighting. You will be a God of Nothing, ruling over a kingdom of Dust!"
IV. The Choice
Null backed away, his breathing heavy. His right arm was hanging limp—not broken, but "uninstalled" by the virus.
He looked at the Terminal God. He realized that the Path of Divine Grace gave him the power to fix the world, but he was still fighting like a warrior. He was trying to "hit" a disease.
If he's attacking my memories... if he's rotting the Blueprint... Null thought, his remaining crimson eye burning with a desperate light. ...then I have to stop being the 'Object.' I have to become the 'Code'.
Null let go of his scythe. He let his Aura Compression fail completely.
"You want to rot my memory?" Null said, his voice sounding like a choir of a thousand Nulls. "Fine. Take it. But you're going to find out that the Void... has no bottom."
Null's body began to glow, not with white light, but with a terrifying Translucent Silver. He was beginning to turn himself into pure, raw Data.
End of chapter 77
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