The first meteor screamed through the atmosphere directly above him, its trail burning with the blue-white heat of atmospheric compression, the color of the ocean reflected in its superheated plasma wake.
Nulls opened his four eyes and watched it descend, a rock the size of a house falling from the stars with enough kinetic energy to turn this section of the island into a crater. More followed behind it, dozens of them, their trajectories converging on his position with the precision of a guided weapon system.
He rose from the sand and placed his hand on the serpent's flank.
"Wake up sunshines."
The earthquakes began before the serpent opened its eye, the island's bedrock groaning under the creature's shifting mass, the sand beneath Nulls's feet trembling in waves that spread outward toward the tree line.
The serpent's eye opened, the pupil contracting to a slit as it tracked the falling meteors, and its tail rose from the water with a speed that belied its size. The tip of that tail, a single scale among thousands, tapped the nearest meteor with the gentleness of a parent touching a child's cheek.
The rock shattered into fragments that scattered across the sky, harmless now, their kinetic energy dispersed into a thousand smaller pieces that would burn up before they reached the ground.
A silhouette flickered at the edge of the jungle, barely visible in the chaos of falling debris and rising dust. The figure bent down, picked up something small, and flicked it toward the serpent with the casual ease of someone skipping stones across a pond.
The rock accelerated. Nulls tracked its trajectory with his four eyes, watching as it should have burned up from the speed, should have fragmented into dust before it crossed half the distance. It did neither.
The rock closed the gap between the silhouette and the serpent in less than a heartbeat, and when it struck, the impact sent shockwaves through the air that knocked Nulls back a step.
The serpent, a creature whose body mass could be measured in mountain ranges, was launched backward across the ocean like a child's toy flung across a room.
Water erupted where the serpent's body slammed into the sea, a wall of displaced ocean rising high enough to block out the stars.
The tsunami that followed would reach the nearest continent in hours, would scour coastlines clean of human habitation, would kill thousands of people who had never heard of Nulls or the Rapax Morsatra or the end of the world.
Nulls manifested Marky, the scythe forming in his grip with its familiar weight, its hunger for decay thrumming through the connection between them.
He used the Time Equation, setting the distance between himself and the silhouette to zero, and the world blurred around him as he closed the gap.
He swung the scythe with his entire body, the blade carving through the dust cloud that obscured his target.
When the dust settled, the silhouette was gone. His question died in his throat as the sky itself pressed down on him.
The force came from everywhere at once, a pressure that drove him into the sand, that cracked the bedrock beneath him, that made the air around him thicken into something that felt like honey and stone simultaneously.
His arms shook under the strain of holding himself up, his legs buckled beneath him, and for a moment, he remembered the weight of the ocean at the bottom of the Scylla trench.
But it still within the range of what his transformed body could endure. Moving would be difficult, yes. But not impossible.
He reached out with his will and woke the rest of his leviathans.
Walpurgis rose from the ocean first, its thousand mouths opening and closing in a synchronized yawn that released steam and the smell of ancient decay.
Regie followed, its mountain of flesh breaking the surface in a cascade of white water that turned to foam in the wind.
The serpent had already recovered, its body coiling beneath the waves, its eye fixed on the point in the sky where the pressure seemed to originate.
Nulls used the Time Equation again, setting the distance between himself and Walpurgis's head to zero, and appeared on the fused creature's highest point, the scythe still in his grip.
"Level the island," he said. "Leave nothing standing."
Regie's beams fired simultaneously, a thousand lances of violet light that converged on the island's surface from every angle. The jungle comlletely vaporized leaving only a barren charred wasteland
The beach turned to glass that shattered under the heat. The bedrock melted and flowed like water, pooling in the depressions left by the impacts. The island shuddered, cracked, and began to sink.
But a circle in the center remained. The jungle within that circle still stood, the trees untouched, the ground unbroken, the silhouette still standing in the center of it all. Moonlight broke through the clouds for the first time since the battle began, and its silver glow illuminated the figure of a woman.
She was tall, taller than any human had a right to be, her white uniform pristine despite the destruction around her.
Her hair was white as well, braided and coiled at the base of her skull, and her eyes glowed with a light that came from somewhere deep inside her skull. Stars seemed to move in those eyes, constellations turning and shifting, and when she looked up at him, he felt the pressure around him intensify.
Nulls leaped from Walpurgis's head. He positioned his body in midair, angling for maximum force, the scythe held in both hands behind his back, the blade parallel to the ground. The air around him turned to plasma as he fell, the speed of his descent igniting the atmosphere in a corona of white-hot fire.
He swung. The scythe struck something, some invisible barrier that had not been there a moment before, and the collision released energy equivalent to a nuclear warhead.
The island's foundation pulverized beneath them, the ocean around it vaporizing in a sphere of superheated steam that expanded outward at the speed of sound.
Craters opened on the ocean floor, tens of kilometers wide, deep enough to reach the magma below. Tsunamis radiated in every direction, waves the height of mountains racing toward countries that would not exist in the morning.
When the dust settled, she was still standing. Unscathed. Her white uniform untouched by the heat or the pressure or the force of his strike.
His body hung suspended in the air, pressed against the same invisible barrier, the scythe only inches from her face. She had not moved. Had not flinched. Had not even seemed to acknowledge that he had attacked at all.
This might be the biggest inconvenience he had encountered in this world.
He released entropy into the tip of Marky's blade, a concentrated pulse of decay that should have eaten through whatever held him back. The woman's eyes widened, the first sign of surprise he had seen from her, and she vanished.
The barrier disappeared with her, and Nulls fell to the ground, landing softly on what remained of the island's bedrock.
The water rushed back in, crashing against the crater's edge with force enough to shift the remaining landmass, but where the water reached her position, it curved away in a perfect sphere, repelled by something that made the laws of physics turn their heads and pretend they hadn't seen anything.
She floated above him now, her white uniform illuminated by the moonlight, her glowing eyes fixed on his face.
Nulls stood and looked up at her, the scythe resting on his shoulder, his four eyes tracking her movements as she drifted in the air.
"I assume your gimmick is based on gravity manipulation," he said, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the returning water. "Given what you did to Faust."
The woman said nothing. Her eyes continued to track him, the stars within them turning and shifting, and the pressure around him increased again.
Eros materialized on his left, the time beast's sand-form shifting and flowing, its claws reaching toward the woman with hunger that transcended mere physicality.
Barbatos appeared on his right, its split body showing both its prime and its death, the line between them pulsing with the light of unresolved paradox.
Marky changed shape, the scythe melting and reforming into the humanoid form it had worn during the battle in the void, its smoky limbs reaching for the woman with the promise of decay.
The three beasts lunged simultaneously. The woman raised her hand, and the world around her reversed.
Gravity, which had pulled everything toward the planet's core for billions of years, pulled away from her instead.
The air around her thinned, rushing outward in a wind that knocked trees from their roots and sent water flying in geysers that reached the stratosphere.
The ground beneath her cracked and rose, chunks of bedrock the size of buildings floating upward, caught in the sphere of negative gravity that surrounded her white form.
She was a walking white hole. Space did not sink where she stood. It rose. It repelled. It pushed everything away from her with a force that should have been impossible but was simply, dangerously inconveniently real.
The time beast's claws closed on empty air as the woman's gravity deflected its attack, the force of her repulsion field bending the creature's strike away from her body.
Barbatos came next, its dichotomy claws seeking leverage on her form, but the line between its living and dead halves flickered as the gravity distorted its paradoxical nature.
Marky simply dissolved in her presence, its smoky form unable to maintain cohesion in the face of forces that pulled it apart at the molecular level.
Nulls watched, she is not untouchable. Just inconvenient. Very, very inconvenient.
"Your ability is impressive," he said, walking toward her through the chaos of floating debris and inverted gravity. The rocks that drifted past him did not touch him, the beasts reforming behind him, the leviathans circling in the water beyond the crater. "But you are not threatening me. You are annoying me. There is a difference."
The woman's eyes narrowed, and she gestured with both hands.
The floating rocks accelerated toward him, their velocity increasing as they entered the sphere of her influence, and Nulls raised the scythe to meet them.
The blade passed through the first rock, entropy consuming it, reducing it to dust that scattered on the wind.
The second rock followed, then the third, then a dozen more, each one decaying as it touched the blade, each one failing to reach him.
But the pressure continued. The force pressing down on his shoulders, his arms, his legs, his chest, increased with each passing second. Walking had become difficult. Fighting would become a trial. He would need to end this quickly, or he would need to adapt.
"Your name," he said, swinging the scythe to shatter a boulder that had broken free from the ocean floor. "What do they call you, inconvenience?"
The woman's lips moved, forming a word that the wind tore away before it could reach him.
"Aaliyah," she said, louder this time, her voice carrying through the chaos with the clarity of a bell.
"Aaliyah." He tasted the name, rolled it around his mouth, decided it fit her. "Its the name of one of mine."
He swung the scythe in a wide arc, clearing a path through the debris.
"I will remember it when I kill you."
She did not respond. Her hands moved in patterns he recognized as sigil-weaving, the gestures precise and practiced, and the gravity around her shifted again.
The ground beneath him heaved.
He leaped, the force of his jump carrying him through the sphere of negative gravity and into the open air beyond. Below him, the bedrock cracked and folded, tectonic forces compressed into a single point, the island's remains grinding against each other with the sound of a world ending.
He landed on Regie's head, the mountain's flesh soft beneath his feet, its eyes all turned toward the woman who floated above the crater.
"Attack," he commanded. "All of you. Do not stop until she is dead or gone."
The leviathans moved.
The serpent struck first, its body coiling through the water, its jaws opening wide enough to swallow the entire crater. Aaliyah raised her hand, and the creature's momentum reversed, its body slamming into an invisible wall of distorted gravity that sent it tumbling backward across the ocean's surface.
Walpurgis attacked from the other side, its thousand mouths opening and closing, its fused bodies pressing against the sphere of negative gravity with the weight of continents. The sphere held. The creature pressed harder. The sphere flickered.
Regie fired its beams, a thousand lances of violet light that converged on the woman's position. The beams bent as they entered her gravity field, curving around her, striking the ocean behind her and vaporizing millions of tons of water.
Nulls leaped from Regie's head, the scythe raised, his body arcing through the air toward the woman.
She caught him with her gravity.
The force pressed against him from every direction, holding him suspended in the air, his limbs pinned to his sides, his scythe trapped against his chest. He could not move. Could not swing. Could not even turn his head to look at her.
"I see how Adams and his team fell to you," Aaliyah said, her voice calm, almost bored. "The irony's so thick I could just scrape it off. O' Adam, if only you could see this."
He released entropy from his body, from his skin, from the air around him. Decay spread outward in a wave, eating through the gravity that held him, rotting the force itself until it collapsed under its own weight. He fell, caught himself on the scythe's blade, and landed on a floating chunk of bedrock.
"Eros," he said. "'Now'."
The time beast accelerated through the woman's gravity field, moving faster than her perception could track, its claws reaching for her throat. She raised her hand to deflect, but Eros was already behind her, its claws closing on empty air as she teleported away.
Nulls tracked her emergence point, his four eyes following the distortion of light that marked her arrival.
"Barbatos reversed some of the anti particles and their massed."
The paradox beast lunged, its living and dead claws striking the sphere of negative gravity from opposite sides. The sphere flickered again, strained and fractured. But not yet broken. But close.
"Marky consumed the mass."
The smoky beast flowed into the cracks in the woman's defenses, its form pressing against the gravity field from the inside, decaying the forces that held it together. The sphere shuddered, contracted, expanded, and for a moment, just a moment, it failed.
Nulls swung the scythe. The blade passed through the gap in her defenses, through the space where her gravity had faltered, and struck her across the chest. The cut was shallow, barely more than a scratch, but the entropy in the blade sank into her flesh and began its work.
She screamed. The sound was raw, undeniably human and broken. She clutched at her chest, blood seeping through her fingers, and the gravity around her intensified in a desperate surge that threw Nulls back across the crater.
He landed hard, rolled, came up with the scythe ready.
She was healing. The wound was closing, the entropy fighting against her regeneration, but she was winning. She had resources, reserves, power that he had not anticipated.
"Aaliyah," he called out, walking toward her across the cracked bedrock. "That is a beautiful name. Tell me, how did you get it? Were you named after someone? A grandmother, perhaps? A saint? A character in a story your mother loved?"
She looked up at him, her eyes blazing with the light of dying stars, her hands shaking with rage or fear or something else entirely.
"My mother named me after the stars," she said, her voice tight.
"Ah. The stars." Nulls gestured at the sky above them, where the meteors still fell, where the constellations he did not recognize still turned and shifted. "Your mother must have been a romantic. She gave you a name that means something beautiful, something that will outlast your species."
He raised the scythe.
"I will outlast your stars."
Their claws connected across the crater, the entropy blade meeting the gravity field in a collision that released plasma balls the size of mountains, that carved canyons into the ocean floor, that sent shockwaves racing across the planet's surface.
The breakthrough came when Nulls stopped trying to overpower her white hole and started to understand it. Antimatter surrounded Aaliyah like a second skin.
The positrons and antiprotons annihilating any normal matter that touched them, converting contact into pure energy, using E = mc², she converted the energy into masses and flipped them using her powers.
Making them into negative mass and instead of sinking the space she elevated them, reversing gravity and repelling everything around her.
Barbatos reached through the dichotomy beast's split nature and touched that antimatter with its living side, its dead side, and the line between them.
The beast flipped the antimatter. Positrons became electrons. Antiprotons became protons. The white hole's substance converted into normal matter in a cascade that spread across her barrier like fire through dry grass.
Marky flowed into the fractures that Barbatos created, the entropy beast's smoky form consuming the newly created matter, eating it, erasing it from existence.
The white hole's defenses chipped away, layer by layer, particle by particle, until Aaliyah's perfect sphere of negative gravity became a patchwork of holes and gaps and vulnerabilities that Nulls could exploit.
The battle that followed carved new geography into the ocean floor.
They fought on the bottom of the sea where the water had been vaporized by the heat of their clashes, the bare rock exposed to the sky for the first time in millions of years.
Nulls swung the scythe and Aaliyah deflected with gravity, canyons that stretched for hundreds of kilometers was carved from the result of the shockwave from their collision, trenches deep enough to reach the magma below.
The water rushed back in to fill the void and they teleported away before it could touch them, the Time Equation carrying Nulls across the battlefield while Aaliyah's spatial manipulation resulted by gravity manipulation to bent the distance between them into a Mobius strip of endless approach.
Aaliyah raised her hand and the sky answered. Orbital Anchor locked a chunk of the island's remains into a fixed path around her position, the rock the size of a city block becoming a guided projectile that she hurled at Nulls with a flick of her wrist.
He swung the scythe and the rock decayed into dust, but Tidal Shear followed behind it, a differential gravitational field that pulled the near side of his body toward the planet's core with ten times normal force while the far side experienced only one-tenth.
His ribs cracked under the strain, his spine compressing, his organs shifting in ways that should have killed any living creature.
His body was not living. Nexus flowed through channels that had no organs, no blood, no flesh that could be torn by tidal forces. He straightened, the bones knitting together, and swung the scythe again.
Mass-Lightening reduced the scythe's weight to near zero, and the blade accelerated faster than sound, faster than thought, faster than Aaliyah's gravity could bend it. The edge passed through her defense and opened a wound along her arm, shallow but bleeding, the entropy in the blade already working to spread the damage.
Aaliyah retreated, her Gravitational Lens bending light around her until she vanished from sight. Nulls closed his four eyes and tracked her through the displacement of air, through the pressure of her gravity against his skin, through the faint scent of ozone that followed her teleportation.
"Inertial Redirection," he said, opening his eyes as the Lens failed. "You changed the direction of my attack. Smart. But not smart enough."
Frame-Dragging Field erupted around him, a rotating gravitational vortex that twisted his body, his beasts, his leviathans into a spiral of disorientation.
The serpent roared, its body bending in ways that should have broken its spine. Regie's beams scattered, their targeting ruined by the spinning spacetime. Walpurgis's thousand mouths snapped at empty air, unable to find purchase.
Nulls planted his feet and pushed against the field, his Nexus reserves burning, his muscles screaming. He took one step toward her. Then another. Then another.
Lagrange Trap caught him at the third step, gravitational forces pulling him toward five stable points around the battlefield, each one immovable, each one inescapable. He hung in the air, suspended in a web of balanced gravity, unable to move forward or backward or sideways.
Eros accelerated through the trap, the time beast moving faster than the gravitational forces could stabilize, and its claws raked across Aaliyah's face.
Blood sprayed from her cheek, three lines of red that matched the pattern of his strike, and she screamed with fury rather than pain.
Gravitational Slingshot launched her across the battlefield, the acceleration turning her body into a projectile that struck Nulls in the chest with the force of a falling mountain.
They tumbled together across the ocean floor, carving a trench that filled with magma from below, and came to rest at the bottom of a crater that glowed with the heat of the planet's core.
Nulls pushed her off him and rose to his feet, his chest dented, his ribs cracked, his Nexus reserves flowing to repair the damage. "You have many tricks," he said. "But, to a thing like me things like them are merely inconvinient."
Aaliyah's answer was a chant that lasted only seconds but caused the ocean floor to shake with the frequency of the planet's heartbeat.
The bedrock beneath them liquefied, turning to slurry that swallowed their feet, that pulled at their legs, that threatened to drag them down into the magma below. Nulls leaped, caught a floating chunk of debris, and swung the scythe at her from above.
Null-G Zone enveloped them both, the zero gravity sphere lifting them off the ground, sending dust and rocks and chunks of molten rock floating into the air around them. The scythe's arc carried Nulls past Aaliyah, the blade missing by inches, and he used the momentum to spin and strike again.
Gravity Well Implosion opened a miniature black hole between them, its event horizon ten meters across, its pull irresistible.
Nulls felt himself being drawn toward it, felt his beasts being drawn toward it, felt the leviathans in the distance being drawn toward it.
He swung the scythe at the black hole, the entropy blade sinking into the event horizon, and the singularity flickered, contracted, and collapsed.
Tidal Lock caused the ground beneath him to rotate, to keep its face turned toward Aaliyah, and the sudden movement threw him off balance.
She pressed her advantage, Mass-Inversion flipping gravity in a sphere around him, and he fell upward, away from the planet, toward the stars.
The stars were cold and distant and they did not care about him, soldiers who once answeared to their kings found him are but a stranger. For his crown and divinity is stolen, and his kingdom found themsleves to be rattling empty to the winds.
Nulls used the Time Equation to set his distance back to the ground to zero and fell back into the battle, the scythe raised, the entropy hungry.
Orbital Bombardment came next, Aaliyah's chant calling down a celestial body that she had pre-positioned in the sky.
The rock was the size of a mountain, its trajectory calculated to intersect with his position at this exact moment, and it fell with the fury of a deity throwing stones at ants.
The serpent caught it with its tail. Faust's coils wrapped around the falling mountain, the leviathan's scales scraping against the rock, and the creature squeezed until the mountain shattered into fragments that rained down around them.
The serpent's eye fixed on Aaliyah, and its body uncoiled, lunging toward her with jaws wide enough to swallow her whole.
Gravitational Redshift slowed time around her, a bubble where seconds stretched into minutes, and the serpent's attack seemed to crawl across the battlefield. Nulls used the window to close the distance, the scythe swinging for her throat.
Dark Matter Binding caught him mid-swing, invisible walls of inferred gravitational anomaly pressing against him from every direction, holding him in place. The walls were invisible, intangible, inescapable.
Barbatos reached through the dichotomy beast's paradox nature and touched the invisible walls. The beast did not break them. It asked them whether they were there or not there, and the walls could not answer. They flickered, dissolved, ceased.
Nulls fell through the space where they had been and swung the scythe.
The blade opened a wound across Aaliyah's stomach, shallow but bleeding, and the entropy in the cut began its work. She clutched at her belly, her eyes wide, her breath coming in ragged gasps.
"This is the part where you run out of tricks," Nulls said.
Aaliyah's response was Continental Drift.
The ocean floor shifted beneath them, tectonic plates grinding against each other, the island's remains rising and falling as the crust folded under the force of her will.
Mountains rose from the sea, volcanoes erupted, tsunamis raced toward horizons that had never seen such waves. The battle had become a war against the planet itself, and the planet was losing.
Gravity Wave Pulse erupted from Aaliyah's body, a cone of gravitational distortion that struck Nulls with the force of a supernova, that flung him across the battlefield, that sent him crashing into Regie's flank with enough force to crack the leviathan's scales.
The mountain roared, its thousand eyes blinking in sequence, beams firing wildly at the woman who had hurt its master.
Orbital Perturbation altered the path of the moon. The satellite shifted in its orbit, its gravitational pull on the planet changing, and the tides responded with violence that tore coastlines apart.
Water rushed across continents, drowning cities that had survived the tsunami, killing millions who had not yet heard of Nulls or the end of the world.
Singularity Projection opened a true black hole at the center of the battlefield, its event horizon a centimeter wide, its tidal forces sufficient to annihilate everything within a fifty-meter radius. Nulls saw the distortion, recognized the danger, and commanded his leviathans to retreat.
Walpurgis was too slow. The black hole's tidal forces caught the tower's fused bodies, pulling at them, stretching them, tearing them apart at the molecular level.
Walpurgis screamed with a thousand mouths and its bodies separated, the chains that bound them together snapping under the strain.
Aaliyah saw her opening and seized it. She poured her remaining Aetherion into her defense, the white hole property expanding outward, her barrier brightening until she became a dot on the horizon, a point of light that was too bright to look at, too distant to reach.
The black hole at the center of the battlefield collapsed and formed a singularity that she compressed with her will, reducing it to the size of a needle's point, a pinprick of absolute destruction.
She flicked it toward Nulls. The black hole accelerated across the battlefield, ignoring everything except its target.
Nulls used the Time Equation to set his distance to the far horizon, to the edge of the ocean, to the limits of his ability, and the black hole followed.
It curved around mountains, passed through solid rock, tracked him across the sea with the patience of something that had no concept of time.
He commanded Walpurgis to intercept. The tower's fused bodies lunged at the black hole, its thousand mouths opening to consume it, and the singularity passed through the creature's mass as if it were not there.
Walpurgis thrashed, its internal organs being absorbed, its flesh collapsing inward, its screams becoming wet and gurgling as its throat was drawn into the event horizon.
Nulls tried to undo the damage. He commanded his beasts to enter Walpurgis, to find the black hole inside it, to break it from within.
Eros accelerated through the creature's flesh, its time powers searching for the singularity. Barbatos reached into the wound, its dichotomy claws trying to reverse the black hole's suction.
Marky flowed into the creature's core, its entropy eating at the event horizon, reducing its mass by a quarter. But the black hole was still lethal. Still hungry. Still consuming.
Walpurgis collapsed inward, its thousand bodies folding into the singularity, its screams fading as its mouths were drawn into the dark.
The leviathan was gone, reduced to a point of infinite density that floated in the air where the creature had been.
Nulls stared at the space where his child had died. His four eyes widened. His claws curled into fists. His lips pulled back from his needle teeth in a snarl that showed every row of sharpened bone.
"You killed my child," he said. His voice was calm. His voice was quiet. His voice was the stillness before the end of the world.
Aaliyah stood at the edge of the crater, her white uniform torn, her blood dripping onto the rock, her eyes still burning with the light of constellations. She did not answer. She did not need to.
Nulls raised his hands and called his beasts to him.
Eros flowed into his right hand. Barbatos flowed into his left. Marky flowed into his chest. The three beasts merged, their forms overlapping, their powers combining, their essences twisting into something that had never existed in this reality.
The amalgamation grew, its shape non-Euclidean, its presence blasphemous, its nature an insult to every understanding of physics and magic and reality itself. It slouched forward on planes that denied Euclid, a gelatinous extrusion from angles that folded sight into nausea.
The mass was protoplasmic in its ceaseless flux, yet rubbery where unseen tendons pulled its shroud of living tissue across its endless rugose surface. Deep puckered folds gaped like wounds that dreamed, and its non-Euclidean body shifted constantly into forms that each defied nature.
"Qlippoth," Nulls commanded pointing at Aaliyah. "Devour."
The amalgam lunged at Aaliyah, its combined entropy-time-dichotomy powers focused on the black hole that still floated between them.
Qliphoth's strike split the singularity, the black hole tearing open, its contents spilling into the air. An arm, if it could be called that, grew from Qliphoth's body and reached toward the woman, its appendage passing through her defenses, through her gravity, through her flesh.
Aaliyah screamed as the beast's touch burned her, the entropy in its form decaying her skin on contact. She increased the output of her black hole, feeding it more mass, more energy, more power, and Qliphoth thrashed against the increased gravity, its form flickering, its cohesion failing.
Nulls gave a new command. "Spray your blood on her."
Qliphoth's body ruptured, and a stream of ichor shot from the wound, splashing across Aaliyah's face, her chest, her arms.
The stench was overwhelming, rafflesia combined with a mountain of corpses, a smell so foul that she gagged, and her stomach heaved, her eyes watered. She wanted to vomit and flee. She wanted to claw the substance from her skin. But despite all of that, she endured.
The black hole expanded, pushing Qliphoth back, and Aaliyah closed the gaps in her defenses. She teleported away, her form vanishing from the battlefield, and Nulls felt her presence shift to a new location.
He could feel her. The blood that Qliphoth had sprayed on her was a beacon, a trail that led directly to her position. She was not far, an island perhaps a hundred kilometers away, her black hole still at her side, her defenses still intact but weakened.
Nulls used the Time Equation, setting the distance between himself and the island's shore to zero. The cost was enormous, a fifth of his total Nexus reserve, but Walpurgis was dead. His child was gone. The cost did not matter.
He appeared on the island's beach, the sand white beneath his feet, the trees green behind him. The serpent and Regie materialized in the water beyond the shore, their massive forms blocking out the stars.
Qliphoth reformed beside him, its shape shifting, flowing, becoming something that might have resembled a horse if horses had been designed by a mad god with no understanding of anatomy.
Nulls climbed onto Qliphoth's back, the amalgam's flesh warm beneath him, its pulse steady and slow. He gripped the protrusions that served as mane and steered the beast toward Aaliyah's position.
The island's jungle parted before them, trees bending away from Qliphoth's passage, animals fleeing in terror from a presence they could not comprehend. The stars watched from above, cold and distant and indifferent to the battle that would decide the fate of this world.
Nulls rode toward the woman who had killed his child, and he did not intend to stop until she was dead.
The forest parted around Qliphoth's passage, each tree that came within reach of the amalgam's shifting form ceasing to exist as entropy consumed it.
Nulls rode with his body low against the beast's back, his claws gripping the protrusions of fused flesh, his four eyes fixed on the trail of Aaliyah's blood that glowed in his vision like a thread of fire.
The serpent and Regie waited at the shoreline, their massive forms visible as dark shapes against the stars, their presence a promise of destruction held in reserve.
The jungle gave way to cultivated fields, rows of crops that stretched to the horizon in neat geometric patterns.
Irrigation channels cut through the earth, their water silver in the moonlight, and roads of paved stone connected clusters of buildings that grew denser as he approached.
Lights flickered in windows, and the distant sound of music reached his ears, a melody that spoke of celebration and joy and the ignorance of people who did not know that death was riding toward them.
The cities were beautiful. Nulls admitted it to himself as he passed through their outskirts, as he saw the architecture that generations of humans had built, the towers that reached toward the sky, the bridges that spanned rivers, the monuments that celebrated victories and mourned losses.
He saw murals painted on the sides of buildings, children playing in courtyards, old couples walking hand in hand through gardens.
He saw life, vibrant and persistent, a species that had clawed its way from the mud and built something worth admiring.
None of it would matter in the end. None of it could stop him. But it was beautiful, and he acknowledged that beauty the same way he acknowledged the beauty of a star going supernova or a glacier carving a valley or a virus evolving to survive its host's immune system.
Aaliyah's blood trail led him through the city and into the hills beyond, the thread of light growing brighter as he closed the distance.
The buildings thinned, replaced by forests that had never been logged, by streams that had never been dammed, by mountains that had never been named.
He climbed, Qliphoth's form shifting to accommodate the steep terrain, its claws digging into rock where roots could not find purchase.
After thousands of kilometers, after hours of pursuit that felt like minutes, he crested a mountain peak and looked down at the valley below.
A large village spread across the foothills, its buildings clustered around a central square, its streets lit with lamps that burned with some power source he did not recognize.
The architecture was different here, older, more deliberate, as if the people who built this place had intended it to last for centuries.
Stone walls encircled the settlement, and guards patrolled the gates with weapons that glowed with the faint light of aetherion.
Stupid. Why would she come here? Why would she lead him to a place full of people who would die when he arrived?
He leaped from the mountain peak and fell like lightning.
The impact cratered the earth at the village's center, the shockwave leveling every building within a hundred meters.
Wood splintered, stone shattered, and the bodies of the people who had been sleeping in their homes were scattered across the rubble like broken dolls.
The guards at the gate had time to scream before the pressure wave reached them, before their bones turned to powder, before their blood painted the walls behind them.
Two buildings remained standing at the edge of the crater, their foundations cracked but their walls intact. One of them, Nulls assumed, was her house.
He walked across the rubble, stepping over debris and bodies, and climbed the steps to the door. The wood was dark and polished, the handle brass, the frame decorated with carvings of flowers and birds and words in a language he did not recognize. He knocked. Once. Twice. The sound echoed through the silent village, unanswered.
"Third time is the charm," he said, and forced the door open with his shoulder.
The interior of the house was warm and smelled of cooking herbs and old wood. His antlers scraped against the ceiling, knocking down a lamp that shattered on the floor, and spiderwebs clung to his face as he moved through the hallway.
He brushed them aside, his claws catching on the strands, and followed the trail of blood to a bedroom at the back of the house.
Two old people sat on either side of the bed, their hands holding hers, their faces wet with tears.
The woman had white hair like her daughter's, braided and coiled at the base of her skull, and the man had the same stars in his eyes, the same glow of celestial mechanics written into his irises.
They looked up as he entered, and the man reached for a shotgun propped against the nightstand.
Beams on light flashed every eyes in that room as the weapon fired point-blank into Nulls's chest. The pellets flattened against his skin and fell to the floor, harmless.
Nulls looked down at the small dents in his flesh, then back at the old man, and raised his claws to remove the obstacle.
Aaliyah's hand moved, and her parents vanished.
The air where they had been collapsed inward, sucking dust and debris toward a point that had no mass, no gravity, nothing except the memory of two people who had been there a moment ago. She had teleported them away, had used the last of her aetherion to save them, had left herself alone with him.
The black hole was gone. He could see the absence of it now, the way light moved freely through the space where its event horizon had bent reality, the way the air felt lighter without the weight of compressed singularity pressing down on it.
She must have released it when she realized she could not maintain it, had chosen to conserve her remaining energy for one final act.
He sat down on the edge of her bed. Aaliyah's face was flushed with fever, her skin hot to the touch, her sweat soaking the blankets beneath her.
The entropy wound on her chest had spread, black veins crawling across her torso like the roots of a dying tree, and her breath came in shallow gasps that rattled in her throat. She was dying. Slowly, painfully, inevitably.
"I don't understand," Nulls said. He tilted his head, his four eyes studying her, analyzing her, searching for the calculation he had missed. "You were at the brink of death. Your aetherion was so low you could only teleport once, and you used that one teleportation on two strangers."
"They are not strangers." Aaliyah coughed, and black blood sprayed across her lips. "They were my parents."
"So what?" Nulls leaned back against the headboard, his weight cracking the wood. "If it were my life on the line, I would sacrifice my progenitor. Is the goal of life not to prolong it by any means necessary? Is survival not the highest good, the only good, the good from which all other goods derive?"
Aaliyah's eyes flared with something that might have been anger, might have been disgust, might have been the last spark of a spirit that had not yet surrendered. "Your way of thinking is disgusting. You are no better than an animal acting on instinct. A beast that eats its own young to survive a harsh winter."
"Animals act on instinct to survive." Nulls spread his hands, the gesture encompassing the ruined village, the dying woman, the world that would soon follow. "I act on logic for the same purpose. What is the difference? Your parents are dead either way. They will die when I end this world, or they will die of old age, or they will die in some accident, or they will die of a disease. Their deaths are inevitable. The only variable is whether you die with them or live to see another sunrise."
Aaliyah closed her eyes. "You see the world as a collection of variables to be optimized, peoples as resources to be allocated. And love as a weakness. What Morbus put their hex on you?"
"I see things of what they truly are." Nulls lifted his hand and watched the entropy weave between his claws, the decay that would one day consume everything. "The universe is indifferent to your morality. The stars do not care whether you live or die. The laws of physics do not reward kindness or punish cruelty. Good and evil are stories humans tell themselves to make the emptiness feel less empty."
"Then why are you still talking to me?" Aaliyah opened her eyes and met his gaze. "If nothing matters, if survival is the only good, why waste time on conversation? Why not kill me and move on to the next target?"
Nulls paused. His claws stopped moving. The entropy between them faded.
"Because I want to understand," he said, and the admission surprised him. "I have killed thousands of humans. I have slaughtered tribes, destroyed cities, ended bloodlines. I have never had the opportunity to speak with one of you afterwards, to hear what you think, to learn why you make the choices you make."
Aaliyah laughed, a wet sound that ended in a coughing fit. "You want to understand love. You have never felt it, have you? Not really. I bet you analyzed it then calculated its evolutionary advantages, but you have never experienced it. That is why you cannot comprehend why I would save my parents instead of myself."
Nulls said nothing.
"It is not logical," she continued, her voice growing stronger despite the decay spreading through her body. "There is no survival benefit to sacrificing yourself for someone who will die soon anyway. There is no evolutionary advantage to loving something that cannot help you reproduce. Love is wasteful, inefficient, and often fatal. And it is the only thing that makes life worth living."
He watched her face, the way her expression softened when she spoke of her parents, the way her eyes held a light that had nothing to do with the stars in her irises. He had seen that light before, in the faces of the people he had killed, in the moments before they died. He had never understood it.
"You fought me with everything you had," he said. "You used abilities that could have reshaped continents. You called down orbital bombardments and created singularities. You could have run at any time. You could have hidden. Instead, you chose to fight, and now you are dying."
"I chose to protect." Aaliyah's hand found his, her fingers cold against his claws. "I chose to stand between you and the people I love. I knew I would lose and die a horrible death. I made that choice anyway."
"That is stupid."
"Yes." She smiled, and the expression was beautiful in a way that made something in his chest ache. "It is. But it is also the most human thing I have ever done."
Nulls stared at their hands, at the contrast between his claws and her fingers, at the entropy veins that crawled up her arm toward her shoulder. He could stop it. He could lift the decay from her body, could reverse the damage, could let her live. There was no tactical advantage in doing so. She would heal, would recover, would fight him again. Letting her live was inefficient, illogical, stupid.
"Your parents," he said. "You love them."
"More than anything."
"And do they love you?"
"They raised me. They taught me to read the stars and calculate orbits, to see past the emptiness of the void and see its beauty. They gave me everything I am."
Nulls reached out with his will and touched the entropy wound on her chest. The decay resisted him for a moment, hungry, reluctant to release its prey.
He commanded it to leave her body and return to the void from which it came. The black veins receded, the fever faded, and her breath came easier.
Aaliyah's eyes widened. "Why?"
"Sooner or later, I will bring the eschaton to humanity. Letting you live will not affect me one bit." He released her hand and stood, his antlers scraping against the ceiling again. "But if you harm one of my leviathans again, there will not be a second time. I will make you feel hell as it is described in your holy scriptures."
He walked to the door, then paused.
"I am sorry for the minor inconvenience," he said, and stepped outside.
The night air was cool against his face, and the stars wheeled overhead in their endless dance. The village lay in ruins around him, the bodies of the people he had killed scattered across the rubble, and somewhere in the distance, a child was crying.
Qliphoth unmanifested, the amalgam dissolving into its component beasts, and Nulls felt the strain lift from his body like a weight removed from his shoulders. He stretched, his joints popping, and walked toward the building that had survived the destruction.
It was a church. The doors were open, and the light inside was warm and golden, and he could hear someone singing in a language he did not recognize.
He climbed the steps and entered.
The interior was simple, wooden pews arranged in rows, a altar at the far end, and a single figure kneeling before it. The figure wore a robe of white, and its head was bowed in prayer, and it did not look up as Nulls approached.
He sat in the back pew and waited.
He did not know what he was waiting for. He did not know why he had come here. He only knew that something had changed inside him, something small and fragile and barely perceptible, and he needed to understand what it was.
The singing continued, and the stars watched from above, and Nulls sat in the church and tried to remember the last time he had prayed.
He could not remember. He had never prayed, he is usually the things that mortals prayed to. At the beginning atleast, but as Theos get progressively advance they transitioned from the worshiper into the object of worship into the things that devoured the object of worship and its pantheon.
He sat in the pew and listened to the singing and wondered what it would be like to believe in something that could not be proven, to love something that could not love him back, to sacrifice himself for people who would die anyway.
He did not understand deep down he wanted to.
The singing stopped, and the figure turned, and Nulls saw that it was an old woman with kind eyes and weathered skin.
"Can I help you, child?" she asked.
Nulls opened his mouth to answer, and found that he had no words. He closed his mouth and shook his head and left the church without looking back.
The stars followed him as he walked through the ruins of the village, and the child had stopped crying, and somewhere behind him, Aaliyah was breathing easier.
He had not changed. He was still Nulls, still the last of the Theos, still the being who would end this world and a billion others. He had not changed.
Something had.
He walked through the night, and the stars watched, and he did not look back.