"Thanks for leading me to the sewers, rats," Khalud said coldly as he dispatched the last of the fodder. Their corpses fell like discarded footnotes—his ticket to the Resonance Hall now stamped in blood.
There he saw him.
A man in iron-black, angular armour—hewn from ebony and etched with names.
Victims, maybe. Martyrs. Echoes.
The armour was cracked. Whether by cultivation or battle, one could not tell.
The sombre warrior halted his actions.
Khalud narrowed his eyes.
"You must be one of the elites of the pathetic legion. I've no records of your existence, and yet here you stand—distinguished in battle. You must be the one they call The Forgotten Blade."
The man replied in a low, grave tone:
"Perhaps I am. But my men did a great service leading you here, Custodian."
Khalud raised his voice slightly:
"And I'm not alone either. Take him."
From the shadows, Khalud's own dead emerged—those he had once lost, now remembered only in pain. Their phantasmic forms charged.
But the sombre warrior lifted a hand.
"Stand down," he said—to his own men. "I'll handle this myself."
Khalud fired precise energy beams, calculated to disrupt cultivation patterns. His revenants surged in a swarm around the black-armoured warrior.
But the general was protected. Rifts, laid in advance, warped reality around him. He was untouchable.
"You're made of memories," the warrior said. "Then my blade must drink."
With a swing, the sombre warrior's blade cut down the revenants—erasing them into absolute nothing. With each slain foe, the weapon grew longer, darker, thirstier. He cleaved through Khalud's attacks as if they were dust.
From above, Thales watched through the Spire's oracular gifts.
He recognized the man.
Hannibal Voidclaw.
A general of the Legion.
And Khalud… was now in deep.
"You were not welcomed here, wraith!" Khalud roared.
He launched spiralling cycles of historical energy, each an echo of a civilization's rise and fall.
"Destruction without remembrance is meaningless!"
Voidclaw responded, calm and grim:
"Life in a tomb... even its memory is a prison."
He parried every strike, his massive blade shifting seamlessly. Then, he stabbed it into the ground—sending a wave of Oblivion crashing toward Khalud. The Custodian danced away, countering with a swirl of ordered chaos that sent Voidclaw flying.
The warrior rose, unbothered.
"Landing a hit never prevented the inevitable. But good job, Custodian. What is your name?"
Khalud stood proud.
"I am Khalud of the Heavenly Sands, from the Temporal Nexus. My family preserved legacies through generations. We have seen warriors come and go—and we remain. This will be no different."
He froze time locally and prepared to drop a bomb directly onto the general's head.
But Voidclaw didn't flinch.
He cut through the temporal fold with his blade—leaving a scar in time itself. Paradoxically, Khalud now couldn't remember using the technique.
In that instant, the blade pierced his gut.
Khalud coughed up blood… and fragments of his very identity.
"I hope they remember you," Voidclaw said, voice cold but not without respect. "Even with your stained legacy."
Khalud gritted his teeth.
"You think I'm done? Meaning will persist. We will persist. And a hero will rise—even if I fall."
He grabbed the blade, his energy corroding it—cracking it from within.
Voidclaw grunted and kicked him across the hall, irritated. The legendary weapon had been reduced to a butter-knife of former glory. His tactics would need to change.
Khalud, battered and gasping, lay on the floor.
But then he remembered.
He decelerated his own wounds—not healing them but slowing their consequence—and leapt to his feet.
He fired rapid energy waves, mixing in unpredictable patterns to eliminate Voidclaw's support—ensuring the general couldn't harvest his men for power.
Then he summoned armies of phantasms—heroes, warriors, past and future echoes.
The hall itself flickered through time, caught between memory, myth, and possibility.
Now… Hannibal Voidclaw was outmatched.
"I am grateful you pushed me this far," the general said, voice like a dark promise. "But I pity your fate, Khalud."
"No system will bind me. No civilization will rise again. All will fall—into the pit God abandoned."
His aura decayed the world around him.
"Retreat!" Khalud shouted to his living reinforcements.
They were vulnerable to what came next.
Voidclaw roared, the sound shaking the pillars of the hall.
Everything in his path was torn apart.
Memories were annihilated.
Energy blasts were forgotten, mid-flight.
Fifty men became one in seconds.
Even the hall's defences, woven into the architecture, were shut down by engines of entropy.
Voidclaw advanced.
He raised his hands—and from them emerged claws.
"These are my true weapons. Be grateful."
He swiped.
Khalud screamed. Pain beyond flesh.
Wounds that wouldn't heal—because the very tissue had been erased from time.
"Wouldn't you like the freedom… of permanent amnesia?" the dark knight asked, cruelly calm.
Khalud, maimed, still smiled.
"I see you watching, Thales Miray. Chaos like this forsakes the meaning of the cosmos.
The story of a bird who seeks the Mystery… can never reach it in oblivion."
He stood—bleeding, broken.
"I will not die alone. You will fall, warrior. I held back for the sake of the hall's preservation. But now…"
He raised one hand.
"This is the Final Collapse.
All systems are destined to reach it—including me.
Entombed, like a Pharaoh.
Welcome to Egypt, Voidclaw."
A massive time-loop emerged—trapping the general inside.
Voidclaw laughed. And then… shattered it with brutal force.
"Any more parlour tricks to throw into the void?" he mocked, kicking Khalud again, bones cracking.
"I will buy them time to preserve," Khalud croaked.
He activated his final cultivation:
Cycle of the Final Collapse.
A colossal imploding field formed around him, converting all structured and chaotic energies into raw potential—the primordial soup from which systems are born and to which they return.
It began tearing both men apart.
Then came the laughter.
Cold. Deep. Joyless.
"The world itself—its very will—craves obliteration. Who am I to deny that?
But I will deny the fragments that mistake themselves for the whole."
Voidclaw revealed the second layer of his claws.
He severed Khalud's metaphysical bond to the nektarfruit—cutting him on a level beyond flesh, beyond soul.
Khalud was frozen. Primal fear overtook him.
"The rot of systems. The suffering of nature. The beauty in decay.
That is what we call fate."
And then he cleaved Khalud's head clean off.
In the final flicker of his existence, Khalud spoke—not to anyone, not even himself.
Just a fragment echoing in the ether:
"Chaos breeds potential…
But without memory…
It becomes a vacuum.
Don't be sucked in.
Don't become a tool… of the Void's whims."
Hannibal Voidclaw stood silently. Then reached out.
He absorbed Khalud's memories—even though Khalud had greater cultivation.
Because physical, intellectual, spiritual, and metaphysical memory…
...meant nothing in front of this man's blades.