The air within the pocket dimension wasn't just shattered; it was screaming. Reality itself, already frayed by the Labyrinth of Dissolution and the preceding cataclysm of Shinji's capture, vibrated with the aftershocks of divine and relativistic violence. Merus, the God of Creation, lay sprawled across a fractured plane of obsidian that wept streams of molten stone. Cerulean blood, thick and luminous as captured nebulae, pooled beneath him, its glow dimming like a dying star. His divine aura, once a comforting beacon resonating with the fundamental song of existence, now sputtered and flickered erratically, casting long, desperate shadows. The magnificent pearlescent suit was rent, stained with soot, alien plasma, and his own vital essence. Before him, radiating cold fury that seemed to leach the warmth from the very photons around him, stood Daganu, the SpeedOff Monarch.
Daganu didn't merely move. He violated sequence. One moment, he was a silhouette against the swirling entropy backdrop, a statue carved from event-horizon darkness. The next, the space between him and Merus simply ceased to be relevant. He existed at Merus, bypassing distance and time with a causality-rending lunge. His fist wasn't propelled by muscle; it was a singularity of pure kinetic intent, compressed to a point aimed squarely at erasing Merus's skull from the multiverse.
Instinct, not divinity, was Merus's savior. Millennia of conflict, wars waged in the birthing fires of galaxies against entities that gnawed at the fabric of creation, had honed reflexes that screamed louder than agony or despair. A micro-twist of his neck, a desperate contraction of divine muscle fiber. The Light Bullet, a projectile moving faster than the physics it temporarily unmade, grazed his temple. Not a clean miss. A furrow of vaporized flesh, bone, and divine matter exploded outwards in a spray of luminous gore. The shockwave wasn't sound; it was a localized reality quake that slammed Merus backwards like a discarded doll. He skidded across the glassy slag, carving a trench of superheated stone, each impact sending fresh jolts of agony through his battered form. The taste of suffocation and his own blood filled his mouth.
Gritting teeth slick with cerulean blood against the white-hot agony blooming in his skull, Merus reached. Not with his hands, but with his will, strained and frayed as it was. He plunged his consciousness into the unstable, volatile maelstrom of the Yellow Ring fused around his torso – the forced marriage of Gorogilian plasma and divine essence. It was like wrestling a dying star. Golden veins, thick and pulsing with savage, untamed energy, erupted beneath his torn skin, snaking up his neck, across his face. His muscles, already defined by eons of existence, swelled grotesquely, armored plates of borrowed, feral power rippling beneath his ruined suit. His eyes, usually deep pools of ancient, calm wisdom, now blazed with feral, predatory yellow light, the pupils slitted like a cornered beast.
He launched himself not with divine grace or telekinetic might, but with the brutal, tectonic lunge of a planetary titan roused to fury. A Gorogilian-enhanced kick, trailing arcs of unstable golden plasma, aimed not to disable, but to shatter Daganu's spine, to pulp the Monarch into constituent atoms against the unyielding fabric of the pocket dimension.
Daganu didn't dodge; he repositioned his existence. He was simply elsewhere before Merus's foot completed its devastating arc. The kick connected with nothingness, its unleashed fury detonating against a distant mountain range kilometers away. The range didn't crumble; it vanished in a silent, blinding flash of superheated plasma and shattered spacetime, leaving only a smoldering scar on reality. Before Merus's enhanced senses could even register the catastrophic miss, the counter-strike arrived. Daganu's boot, sheathed in compressed space-time, impacted Merus's ribs with the force of a neutron star collision. CRACK-THOOM! The sound echoed like the death knell of a universe. Ribs, reinforced by divine biology and Gorogilian augmentation, splintered. Merus was hurled backwards once more, a comet of pain and golden-cerulean light, crashing through petrified energy spires that shattered like sugar glass. The Yellow Ring flared violently, then sputtered, its borrowed power draining Merus further even as it fueled him, a parasitic, unstable symbiosis.
Daganu didn't pause to savor the impact. He didn't gloat. His eyes, devoid of triumph, held only cold, relentless purpose. He raised a hand, fingers snapping forward with contemptuous ease. Five points of impossible darkness blossomed at his fingertips – Amped Light Bullets. Not projectiles, but micro-Air Bullets propeled to FTL velocities, screaming through the tortured space towards Merus's crumpled form. They weren't aimed; they were destined to unmake.
Desperation, colder and sharper than any blade, fueled Merus's next movements. He rolled across the searing slag, phasing partially through a jagged obsidian spire (a divine trick costing precious energy), twisting his shattered torso in a maneuver that would liquefy mortal bone. Three Bullets shrieked past, tearing rents in the dimensional walls that wept void-stuff. The fourth grazed his shoulder – divine muscle and Gorogilian-hardened tissue sheared away as if by an unseen cosmic scalpel, spraying more luminous blood. The fifth struck his thigh. KRA-KOOM! Not an explosion, but an unmaking. A miniature supernova of negation erupted, vaporizing flesh, bone, and armor from the knee down in a silent, terrifying bloom of light and entropy. Merus roared, a sound ripped from the core of his being, raw and un-godlike, a symphony of purest agony. He collapsed onto his remaining knee and elbow, his truncated leg a cauterized, smoldering stump. His divine regeneration, taxed beyond its ancient limits by exhaustion, injury, and the parasitic Yellow Ring, sparked feebly, golden and cerulean energies sluggishly attempting to knit the horrific wound amidst chaotic flickers.
*Dammit...* Merus's thoughts were thick, syrupy, drowning in a sea of pain, exhaustion, and encroaching despair. *Spiritually drained... core flickering... This borrowed power... it's a star going supernova inside me...* tearing me apart atom by atom. Each breath was a ragged, wet gasp that scraped his throat raw, tasting of copper, ozone, and the bitter ash of failure. Blood – cerulean streaked with volatile gold – dripped steadily, forming a small, morbidly glowing pool on the dark stone. His vision swam, the majestic tapestry of creation he was sworn to uphold receding into a distant, mocking dream, replaced by the immediate, crushing reality of defeat. Shinji, the prophesied hope, was captured, a neural-sealed trophy for Saganbo. His allies – Kuro shattered, Miryoku broken, Kagaya near-death, Shirou and Netsudo lost – were scattered or destroyed. And he, Merus, God of Creation, architect of nebulae and weaver of stellar nurseries, was reduced to this: a broken, bleeding wretch on the floor of a destroyer's abattoir, his borrowed power failing, his divinity a fading ember.
Daganu materialized before him, not with the triumphant speed that defined him, but with deliberate, heavy steps that cracked the unstable ground beneath his boots. Each step resonated with finality. He looked down, his eyes scanning Merus's broken form. There was no battle-lust, no cruel enjoyment, not even the predatory focus of a hunter. Only profound, icy disappointment, colder than the void between galaxies. It was the look one gives a malfunctioning tool, a promise unfulfilled.
"So disappointing," Daganu's voice was a low, grinding bass, like continental plates shifting under unbearable, ancient grief. He nudged Merus's shattered form with the toe of his boot, a gesture devoid of malice, filled only with utter dismissal. "Even the lava mortal... that unstable, shrieking creature burning itself to ash... pushed me further. Made me bleed." He gestured vaguely towards Netsudo. "You?" His gaze flickered to Merus's smoldering stump. "A flicker of borrowed fury, a spark easily snuffed. Pathetic." The word landed with the weight of a collapsing star.
Merus couldn't lift his head. The combined weight of his injuries, the insidious drain of the Gorogilian fusion gnawing at his divine essence, the crushing, soul-deep despair of utter failure – it pressed him down, an anvil forged from cosmic futility. His gaze remained fixed on the blood-slicked stone mere inches from his face, the patterns of his own blood mocking him.
Daganu crouched, bringing his face unnervingly level with Merus's downturned head. The movement was fluid, predatory. His voice dropped to a venomous whisper, laden with a bitterness so ancient it seemed etched into the fabric of his being. "I truly resent weaklings, you know?" The word weaklings wasn't merely an insult; it was a key turning in a lock of profound, unhealed trauma, a raw nerve exposed to the corrosive air of the Labyrinth. It vibrated with a personal history Merus couldn't fathom.
Merus managed only a weak, bloody gurgle, a bubble of blood bursting on his lips. "Dam-n yo-u..."
Daganu's fist lashed out. Not with the universe-shattering speed of a Light Bullet, but with brutal, contemptuous force. A piston of condensed hatred. CRUNCH! It connected squarely with Merus's already damaged jaw. Bone fractured anew. Teeth, fragments of divine enamel, shattered and sprayed. The God's head snapped back violently, snapping tendons in his neck, spraying a fresh arc of luminous blood across the dark stone. He slumped sideways, consciousness a fragile raft tossed on a sea of agony, threatening to capsize completely.
"DO SOMETHING!" Daganu roared. The sound wasn't loud; it was a pressure wave that vibrated the dimensional substrate, making the very light seem to shudder. He surged forward, grabbing a fistful of Merus's torn suit and the flesh beneath, hauling the semi-conscious god partly upright with terrifying ease. Merus's head lolled, his yellow-ringed eyes struggling to focus. "You wear the mantle of creation! You dared invade the sanctum of destruction itself! WHY?!" He shook Merus violently, the God's body a ragdoll in his grip. "Why did you come here in the first place, you arrogant, weak ASS?!" Another savage kick, fueled by that bottomless well of resentment, slammed into Merus's already shattered ribs. WHUMPH! The sound was sickening, final. Merus was hurled across the chamber like discarded offal, landing in a broken heap, limbs akimbo, the Yellow Ring sputtering like a dying candle.
Daganu stood over the broken deity, his breath coming in short, sharp bursts, not from exertion – such trivialities were beneath him – but from a rage that seemed to radiate from his core, a black hole of resentment consuming everything around it. He stared at Merus, his eyes burning with an intensity that went beyond hatred for the enemy before him. It was a deep, soul-corroding resentment, vast and ancient, directed at the very concept Merus now embodied: broken, defeated, weak. It resonated with a personal agony so profound it momentarily dimmed the cold fury, revealing a glimpse of something else beneath the Monarch's facade – a desolate, ancient sorrow, a wound that never healed. The chamber, the Labyrinth, the multiverse itself seemed to blur around him, not due to speed, but the unstoppable, drowning tide of memory.
58 Million Years Earlier - The 99th Universe, 1st Galaxy, Planet Kawabakomo
It was not merely a planet, but a colossal, living tapestry woven across a nebula of gentle, bioluminescent gas, The Veridian Drift. Imagine vast island-continents sculpted from resonant crystal, floating serenely amidst clouds that pulsed with soft pinks and blues. Forests weren't trees, but towering spires of light-conducting quartz that hummed symphonies in the solar winds. Cities weren't built; they were grown – elegant, organic structures spiraling up mountainsides that sang harmonies with the cosmic background radiation. The air itself thrummed with intellectual energy, the gentle ping of data-streams a constant counterpoint to the wind-runes etched into floating platforms. This was Kawabakomo – a civilization dedicated not to conquest, but to understanding the cosmos. Its people were scholars, explorers, cartographers of the infinite, guardians of celestial knowledge. Peace wasn't policy; it was their nature, woven into the harmonic resonance of their world. The Kawabakomo Astral Research Corps (KARC) was their pride, their shield, and their window to the stars.
"Hey!! Hayate!" A voice, warm as the nebula's glow and laced with familiar exasperation, cut through the melodic chime of wind-runes dancing around the high-altitude research balcony.
Hayate snapped his gaze away from the mesmerizing vista below. The Veridian Drift swirled in complex, beautiful patterns, its shifting hues whispering secrets he yearned to decode. He was young, perhaps equivalent to a human in his early twenties, with perpetually tousled white hair that defied gravity as much as his thoughts, and eyes the deep, captivating black (That later turns obsidian) of a certain type of Nebula, perpetually wide with wonder. His sleek grey-and-blue uniform, adorned with glowing circuitry that pulsed in time with Kawabakomo's ambient energy, marked him as a Junior Researcher of the KARC. He offered his best friend a sheepish, lopsided grin. "Oh, yes!? What is it?"
Daganu – not the Monarch, but Hayate's anchor, his confident counterpart – leaned against the crystalline railing. Daganu then was taller, broader, radiating a calm, grounded strength that perfectly complemented Hayate's boundless curiosity. His steady, intelligent eyes held a reassuring light, a constant in Hayate's whirlwind mind. "Were you daydreaming again? Commander Soden wants the stellar cartography reports for the Drift's eastern quadrant synced to the central core before the cycle shifts. You know how he gets about punctuality during harmonic convergence."
"Sorry about that," Hayate rubbed the back of his neck, his gaze irresistibly drifting back towards the swirling Drift. "Just... the harmonics. Did you see the latest sensor feed? The theta-wave modulation in Sector Seven... it's accelerating exponentially. Three times faster than the predictive models allowed for. It's... incredible. A lot has been on my mind lately..." His voice trailed off, already lost in the cosmic puzzle.
Daganu chuckled, a rich, warm sound that echoed the harmony of their world. He clapped a solid hand on Hayate's shoulder. "Always your head light-years ahead, Hayate. That's why you need me around, buddy. Keep you from drifting clean out of the galaxy." He said it with deep affection, a protective fondness born of countless times he'd reeled Hayate back from the brink of over-enthusiasm or distracted brilliance. Hayate was the dreamer; Daganu was the foundation.
*Hayate...* The name echoed in the Monarch's present mind like a phantom limb, a ghost note in a silent symphony. *Yeah, that was a truly great name... Lightfoot, the West Wind, freedom, boundless potential... I really embodied it, didn't I? Chasing speed, chasing the horizon, chasing foolish, beautiful dreams of understanding.* The bitterness that followed was a physical ache, a cold void in his chest. *All gone. Dust. Scattered across the void. Like Kawabakomo. Like Mom. Like... me. Hayate died in the Silent Belt. Only Daganu crawled out of the ashes.*
Later, Hayate stepped through the shimmering energy curtain of his family's dwelling – a structure grown from a single, massive harmonic crystal, its interior warmed by gentle, internally generated light that shifted hues with the occupants' moods. The scent of spiced root-tea – a Kawabakomo specialty – and the clean tang of ozone filled the air, a comforting signature of home.
"Mom? I'm back!" he called, shedding his lightweight field harness onto a hovering crystal receptacle.
His mother emerged from the culinary nook, her face a map of kindness and gentle worry etched by time and love. Her eyes, the same deep-space black as Hayate's, scanned him instantly, missing nothing. "Oh, dear! The deep-field survey near the Drift's instability pocket? The long-range comms were fractured... I was so worried..." She reached out, her hand brushing his arm, a tangible connection.
Hayate smiled, the nebula-light momentarily back in his eyes. "All good! Just standard boundary mapping and resonance calibration. Got some fascinating drift-particle readings! Daganu was with me the whole time, kept me from trying to pet a plasma eel." He said it with utter, unshakeable faith.
His mother's expression softened, though a shadow of maternal concern remained. "Oh, Daganu always saves you, huh?" It was a gentle tease, born of countless childhood scrapes and youthful misadventures where Daganu's steady presence had been Hayate's safety net.
Hayate puffed out his chest playfully, striking a mock-heroic pose. "Hey! I held my own! Besides," he leaned in conspiratorially, his voice dropping to a whisper, eyes sparkling with pure excitement, "during the micro-nebula traverse drill? I clocked the highest localized velocity spike in the team! Pushed the inertial dampeners to 98% tolerance! Ranked 6th overall in the KARC speed trials now! Daganu's still holding solid at 2nd, right behind Commander Soden... that's only natural for now." His voice grew earnest, passionate. "But Mom, I feel it. The potential! My reaction times, the way I sync with the frame's motivators... If I keep training, refining the neural interface, pushing the dampener limits... I swear, I'll be the fastest in this galaxy, maybe one day, the whole universe!" His dream wasn't of domination, but of exploration – reaching the unreachable stars, witnessing cosmic births, feeling the fabric of space at velocities no one had dared, all to bring back knowledge for Kawabakomo.
The next day, the usual harmonious hum of the main KARC assembly hall was replaced by a crackling silence thick with dread. Commander Soden stood before the gathered Top Eight, his customary aura of unshakeable authority replaced by grim resolve. Silver streaked his temples, but his obsidian eyes were chips of flint. Hayate and Daganu stood side-by-side, flanked by the imposing, fiercely loyal twins Yahaba and Akamaba (3rd and 4th in prowess), the stoic, unflappable sensor-master Kokochi (5th), and the quiet, utterly dependable support duo Nomeru and Osominu (7th and 8th). The holographic star maps usually dancing in the air were dark. The silence was deafening.
Soden's gaze swept over them, lingering on each face, imprinting the moment. "Your next assignment..." His voice, usually resonant, was gravel scraped raw. "...is classified S-Class. Maximum hazard protocol. Zero margin for error. I will be leading this deployment personally. We deploy with the full, undiluted strength of the Top Eight."
A ripple of shock, quickly suppressed, went through the group. S-Class meant existential threat. Soden leading personally was unprecedented in recent memory.
Daganu stepped forward, his usual calm replaced by a focused, steely intensity. "Commander? Target parameters? Location?"
Soden met his eyes, and for the first time Hayate saw it – a flicker of genuine, primal fear in the Commander's unshakeable gaze. His voice dropped to a low, gravelly whisper that carried through the silent hall like a tomb's seal closing.
"Intel is fragmented, pieced together from the final screams of dead worlds. The designation is 'Magikill Monarch.' All prior activity in that sector of the Silent Belt was minor, chaotic—the work of ambitious underlings vying for favor. This signature is different. It's refined, focused, and devastatingly potent. This isn't a hopeful acolyte; this is a proven instrument of the God of Destruction. We are facing a fully realized ancient Monarch. Location: 3rd Planet, Silent Belt sector. He or she is..." Soden swallowed, the word heavy as a dying star.
The word Monarch hung in the air, sucking the warmth from the room. Whispers of Saganbo, the God of Destruction, were galactic horror stories, myths used to frighten children. His named agents were spoken of in hushed tones, forces of pure apocalypse. Reality itself seemed to warp slightly with the utterance.
The 3rd Planet wasn't a planet; it was a tombstone. A desolate, frozen graveyard of asteroids orbiting a corpse-star, its light feeble and sickly. The Silent Belt lived up to its name – an oppressive, wrong silence that pressed in, making their advanced scanners shriek with discordant alarms and raising goosebumps beneath their flight suits. An energy permeated the void – cold, malicious, utterly alien to Kawabakomo's harmony. It felt like the antithesis of life.
Nomeru, youngest of the Eight, brash and fueled by unwavering confidence in KARC and his comrades, finally snapped under the suffocating dread. "Enough creeping in the dark!" he yelled over the comms, the sudden burst loud in the silence. He ignited his thruster array, its blue glow stark against the darkness. "We hit hard, we hit fast! Standard containment protocol alpha! Just like the sims!"
"NOMERU! STAND DOWN! MAINTAIN FORMATION!" Soden's command was a whip-crack of pure authority, but it was a microsecond too late.
Nomeru surged forward, a streak of defiance aimed at the epicenter of the chilling dark energy. "Why are you all scared? We've trained for worse! We just gotta rush it rig–"
His transmission dissolved into horrifying static, replaced by a sickening, wet schlick that echoed through every cockpit. On their visual feeds, Nomeru's sleek, agile scout frame, and the young man inside, were cleanly, effortlessly bisected along its long axis by a spatial tear that hadn't existed a nanosecond before. The halves drifted apart slowly, fluids and internal components flash-freezing in the absolute zero vacuum, a grotesque monument to instant annihilation.
From the spatial distortion where the tear had vanished, she stepped. Ashvania, the Magikill Monarch. Skin like polished coral, unnervingly smooth. Hair like liquid midnight, flowing in an unseen current. Eyes – depthless, cold blue, holding the absolute zero indifference of event horizons. Sleek, form-fitting armor, darker than the void itself, seemed to absorb the feeble starlight. She tilted her head, a predator examining insects that had dared buzz too close. "Tch. Ants."
Pure, primal terror, a sensation utterly alien to Kawabakomo's peaceful existence, seized Hayate. His hands trembled violently on his control yoke. His breath hitched.
Daganu reacted with the speed that had earned him his rank. A guttural roar tore through the comms, raw with fury and horror. His custom-built heavy speed-frame, a masterpiece of Kawabakomo engineering, blazed with maximum power as he rocketed forward, intercepting Ashvania's path. Fists wreathed in the Corps' most advanced force-projectors slammed towards her center mass. CLANG-SHREEE! The impact sounded like reality itself shearing apart. For a single, heart-stopping millisecond, they seemed locked in a titanic struggle, energy flaring violently.
Ashvania's lips curled into a disdainful sneer. "Cute." A negligent flick of her wrist. Daganu wasn't blasted back; the space immediately surrounding his frame violently contracted into a pinpoint and then detonated outwards with the force of a supernova. He vanished, transformed into a streaking comet of light and mangled metal hurtling uncontrollably across the star system – through the fragile, ice-bound 4th Planet. It didn't crack or explode; it shattered like glass under a hammer blow, exploding into a vast, silent cloud of glittering debris. Daganu's bio-signs on Hayate's screen plummeted from peak vitality to critical redline, flickering like a guttering candle. Fading.
"DAGANU!!!" Hayate's scream ripped from his throat, raw and ragged, echoing uselessly in the void. It was the sound of his world beginning to fracture.
Ashvania's cold, indifferent gaze snapped to Hayate's position. "Sentiment. How... tedious." She raised both hands, palms open. Space warped sickeningly around Hayate's lighter command frame. Two points of impossible darkness, no larger than his fists but radiating gravitational forces that warped the light around them, bloomed into existence mere meters from his cockpit canopy. They pulsed with annihilating hunger. He would be crushed into a singularity within seconds.
"HAYATE! BREAK RIGHT! MAXIMUM THRUST! NOW!" Osominu's voice, usually the calm center of any storm, was a shriek of pure terror. But he acted. His heavily armored support frame, designed for absorbing punishment, slammed into Hayate's lighter craft with desperate force, shoving it violently sideways on its lateral thrusters. Yahaba, screaming wordlessly over the comm, was a fraction of a second behind, interposing his own agile frame directly into the path of the second black hole. The twin singularities pulled. Osominu and Yahaba, their thrusters firing at absolute maximum burn, flames licking from overtaxed engines, were stretched into impossible, grotesque shapes by the irresistible gravity. Armor buckled, frames screamed in protest, and then, with terrifying silence, they both vanished into the pinpoints of darkness. Utter, chilling silence.
Hayate stared, numb, mind blank with shock, at the empty space where his comrades, his friends, his family within the Corps, had been seconds before. His mind simply refused to process it.
"Now that," Ashvania mused, her voice devoid of inflection, already turning her attention elsewhere, "was marginally more interesting. A flicker of self-sacrifice. How quaint."
Commander Soden erupted. Decades of command, of protecting Kawabakomo, guiding the Corps, fostering its ideals, crystallized into pure, incandescent, righteous fury. His frame, the pinnacle of KARC technology, the Kurokaze (Black Wind), blazed with power like a newborn star as he rocketed towards Ashvania, its primary energy cannons unleashing a sustained torrent of coherent destruction that could core a small galaxy.
Ashvania sighed, a sound of profound boredom. She didn't even turn fully to face him. A tiny, almost imperceptible portal, a flaw in space itself, opened beside Soden's left leg actuator. A blade of pure spatial distortion, invisible and infinitely sharp, flickered out – SNICK. Soden's leg, reinforced armor and advanced myomer musculature, severed cleanly as if it were paper. Before the Commander could even register the shock, before pain signals could fire, Ashvania was behind him, moving with impossible, disconcerting ease. Her fist, wreathed not in energy, but in crushing gravitational negation, slammed into the back of the Kurokaze's head housing. CRUNCH. Not the sound of metal, but of fundamental structure failing. The mighty frame instantly went dark, its lights extinguished, its power signature flatlining. It tumbled away, a broken, lifeless husk, Soden's legacy snuffed out in an instant.
Kokochi, firing desperate, wide-spectrum sensor-jamming pulses from his specialized frame, tried to disengage, to flee, to warn Kawabakomo. Ashvania pointed a single, coral-pink finger. A lance of void-black energy, colder than the void itself, lanced across the distance. It didn't impact; it phased through Kokochi's shields and armor, detonating his power core from within. His frame vanished in a silent, blossoming sphere of plasma and shrapnel, another light extinguished.
Hayate was utterly alone. The paralyzing terror was gone, burned away by the sheer magnitude of loss, replaced by a hollow, ringing void that threatened to swallow his mind. He saw Yahaba and Osominu vanish saving him. He saw Kokochi erased. He saw Commander Soden, the indomitable rock of the KARC, broken and dead. He saw Daganu's bio-sign, a faint, fading ember amidst the debris of a murdered world. "Yahaba... Osominu... Kokochi... Commander Soden..." The names were a broken litany, whispered into the comms void, unheard by anyone but the uncaring stars. Then the dam holding back the horror shattered as he also sees the dissolving bodies of those that still got their dead bodies intact in the first place as their skin dissolved and they turned into dead rats. "AAAAAAGH!" It was a sound ripped from the depths of his soul, raw, animalistic, a scream of pure, unadulterated agony that echoed uselessly in the silent vacuum. "Oh, This is Liberation! This is the real reality! THIS IS MAGIC! LET THEM TURN INTO THE RATS THEY REALLY ARE!" Ashvania smiles at the display with a pure evil look and then laughs maniacally. He slammed his fists against his console, bloodying his knuckles, the pain a feeble counterpoint to the psychic torment. "All of this... because of me! All of this because I was too slow, too weak, too DISTRACTED!" Sobs wracked his body, tears welling and freezing instantly on his cheeks inside his helmet. He was paralyzed, useless, the dreamer whose foolish pursuit had led his family, his world, to slaughter.
Akamaba, Yahaba's twin, had been frozen in abject terror throughout the massacre, his frame trembling visibly on the sensors. Seeing Ashvania's cold, depthless gaze turn towards him, something within him finally shattered. Not courage, but abject, self-preserving panic. He powered down his weapons with frantic haste, overrode safety protocols, and blasted open his cockpit hatch into the lethal vacuum (his suit auto-sealing with a hiss). He scrambled out onto his frame's hull, throwing himself to his knees, pounding his helmeted head against the cold metal in a grotesque pantomime of abject submission.
"PLEASE! PLEASE FORGIVE ME!" His voice, distorted by panic, static, and the suit's speakers, was a desperate, whining keen. "LET ME LIVE! I BEG YOU! I'LL DO ANYTHING! SERVE YOU! CLEAN YOUR BOOTS! ANYTHING! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE–" The litany was hysterical, devoid of dignity.
Ashvania floated closer, a cruel, amused smile playing on her lips. She tilted her head, feigning consideration, enjoying the abject display. "Huh? And why should I spare a groveling insect? You offer nothing."
Akamaba froze, then frantically pointed a shaking, armored finger towards Hayate's drifting, crippled command frame. "HIM! KILL HIM! HE'S THE ONE! HE SLOWED US DOWN WITH HIS DAYDREAMING! HE'S WORTHLESS! HE GOT EVERYONE KILLED! KILL HIM AND LET ME GO! PLEASE!"
Hayate stared, disbelief cutting through the haze of his despair like a knife. *Akamaba? Yahaba's brother? His own twin sacrificed himself for me... and he...?* The betrayal was a fresh wound, deeper than any physical injury.
Ashvania's smile widened, a predator savoring the turn. "Alright, alright. Prove your worth, little insect." Her voice was sweet, poisonous honey. "Kill the crying boy. Make it quick. Then we'll... discuss your continued existence."
Akamaba didn't hesitate. He scrambled back into his cockpit, sealing the hatch with frantic speed. His frame's powerful forearm-mounted energy blade snapped to life with a vicious, high-pitched hum that vibrated across the comms. He turned his frame, thrusters flaring violently, and charged directly at Hayate's defenseless craft. "GET OUT OF MY WAY, HAYATE! YOU'RE EXPENDABLE! YOUR LIFE FOR MINE!"
Hayate couldn't move. He could only watch the searing blade of his former comrade, his friend's brother, hurtle towards him, a final, personal betrayal before the end. He closed his eyes.
A mangled streak of scorched metal and flickering emergency lights intercepted with suicidal speed. Daganu's frame, torn apart, missing its entire left side and most of its thrusters, engines sputtering dying plasma, slammed bodily into Akamaba's path. Daganu's remaining arm, the armored gauntlet half-melted, grabbed the energy blade's emitter housing with a sizzle of vaporizing metal. He held, anchoring himself with sheer, desperate will.
"HAYATE! GO! NOW! DON'T LOOK BACK!" Daganu's voice was a static-laced roar over the comm, thick with unimaginable pain and urgency. With a final surge of his dying frame's power, he wrenched the entire energy blade assembly sideways with brute strength. The searing plasma sliced cleanly through Akamaba's cockpit canopy and the traitor within. Akamaba's scream was cut off instantly, his frame spinning away into the void, lifeless.
Daganu's frame drifted, dark smoke pouring from multiple gaping rents. He somehow turned his shattered cockpit view towards Hayate. Through the cracked, blood-smeared visor, Hayate could see Daganu's face, pale, bloodied, but eyes burning with desperate intensity. "You... damn... traitor..." he gasped, each word a struggle. His voice softened, pleading. "Hayate... I'll buy you time... Run... Get as far away... as you can... Live. For Kawabakomo. For... us." The comm signal dissolved into final, mournful static.
Hayate, his mind a white noise of horror, grief, and guilt, obeyed the last, desperate command of his best friend. He slammed his thrusters to maximum overload, bypassing safeties, feeling the frame shudder violently. He fled blindly into the starless void of the Silent Belt, leaving Daganu alone with the Monarch. He didn't look back. He couldn't bear to see the final act.
Time lost meaning. Hours? Days? Hayate drifted in the crushing, silent emptiness of the 2nd Galaxy's uncharted fringe. His command frame was a dead husk, life support failing, power reserves drained. He floated in his suit within the freezing cockpit, staring out at unfamiliar, cold constellations that offered no comfort. The faces haunted him: his mother's worried smile, Daganu's confident grin, Commander Soden's stern pride, Yahaba's loyalty, Osominu's quiet strength, Kokochi's calm focus – they flashed before his eyes, accusing, disappointed, dead. Because of him. Because of his weakness, his distraction, his foolish dream of speed.
A subtle, wrong ripple in the fabric of space nearby. Ashvania materialized before him as if stepping through a curtain, utterly pristine, untouched by the carnage she had wrought. Suspended beside her by threads of dark energy was the mangled, barely recognizable wreckage of Daganu's frame, and within the shattered cockpit, Daganu's body. Lifeless. Eyes open, staring vacantly through the broken visor, frozen in an expression of final, desperate effort.
"Pathetic," Ashvania stated, her voice utterly flat, devoid of even mockery now. Pure, unadulterated dismissal. "Not worth the Magic expenditure to finish. A cosmic stain." She gestured negligently behind her. Hayate's passive sensors, miraculously still flickering on emergency power, displayed the horrific truth. The entire 1st Galaxy... was gone. Not just destroyed planets, but the space itself seemed... scoured. A vast, swirling vortex of absolute nothingness remained where Kawabakomo, his home, his laughing mother, the singing mountains, the libraries of light, everything he had ever known and loved, had existed. Ashvania hadn't just killed his team; she had erased his entire universe, his past, his future, his reason for being.
Hayate didn't scream this time. The sound that tore from him was beyond despair, beyond agony, beyond the capacity of human or Kawabakoman vocal cords. It was the raw, guttural shriek of a soul fracturing into a million irreparable shards, echoing only within the confines of his helmet. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!" He beat his fists against the reinforced transparisteel, wanting to shatter it, to let the void claim him, craving oblivion more than breath. He slammed his head against the console, welcoming the pain.
Ashvania watched his complete, utter breakdown with detached, analytical curiosity, like a scientist observing a specimen's death throes. "You are cosmically fortunate it was me who found you. I still appreciate the... artistry of despair. Had Lord Saganbo dispatched the First or the Enigmatic Trickster..." She gave a slight, almost imperceptible shudder, a genuine reaction she quickly suppressed. "Kokuto would have ended you with a single, dispassionate stroke before you could even form a thought, before your brain even sends a single microsopic signal to start traveling. No pain, no fear, just... nothing. Raimei... he would have made you believe you'd won, that your friends were alive, that you'd escaped, and you would have lived a thousand happy lives in a single second before he unmade the very concept of your existence. My magic is swift, but their methods are... crazy. As pathetically insignificant as you are," she said, her voice cutting through his silent convulsions of grief, "I have a... proposal." Hayate continued to shudder, self-hatred a physical agony twisting his insides. "Align yourself with us. Swear fealty to the God of True Power. Serve Destruction. Within that crucible," her voice held a hint of perverse fascination, "you might yet forge something... marginally less worthless from the dross of your existence. Perhaps even... redeem your staggering failure... Mortal."
Hayate's frantic movements ceased abruptly. His choked sobs died in his throat. He floated perfectly still within the dead cockpit, tears streaming silently down his face, freezing into tiny, diamond-like crystals on his cheeks and helmet interior. The spark, the dream, the boundless curiosity, the Hayate that was... extinguished. Utterly. Only a hollow vessel remained, filled with ashes and absolute zero. His voice, when it finally came through the comm, was flat, dead, devoid of all inflection, all hope, all care, all sense of self. It was the voice of the void itself.
"I don't... care... anymore."
Time became meaningless. Drifting through the interstellar void, a speck of consciousness in a suit adrift in an uncaring universe. How he arrived was irrelevant. He simply was standing before the impossible throne in Universe 3523. The sheer, crushing, annihilating power radiating from Saganbo, the God of Destruction, should have vaporized him instantly. Instead, it felt... fitting. An absolute void to fill the absolute void within him. It was gravity for his soul's black hole.
Saganbo, lounging amidst the anguished light of weeping neutron stars, examined the broken figure. Amado stepped forward, his drowned-moonlight blue skin and eyes like frozen event horizons assessing the survivor dispassionately. "My Lord, this is the sole biological remnant recovered from the Kawabakomo... incident. You always told me you'd like a Monarch with Speed based prowess, meaning that Ashvania made the right call. Preliminary designation: Survivor Zero. His designated appellation was–"
"Daganu."
Saganbo paused, his languid posture shifting slightly. His purple eyebrows, like storm clouds, lifted a fraction. His voice, a deep, tectonic rumble that vibrated the marrow of existence, cut through the throne room's oppressive hum. "Sorry, didn't quite parse that amidst the delightful screams of collapsing realities. What," his gaze intensified, a flicker of morbid curiosity within the cosmic indifference, "is your name, boy?"
The figure who was once Hayate slowly, mechanically, lifted his head. His eyes, once deep nebula-black and filled with starlight and wonder, were now the cold, depthless obsidian of despair, utterly devoid of light or life. There was no hesitation, no flicker of memory, no trace of the being he had been. Only the absolute acceptance of the abyss, the embrace of the annihilating power that had unmade his weakness and his world. The name was an epitaph, a shield, a weapon forged in the ashes of everything.
"My name," he stated, the word final, irrevocable, a declaration of death and rebirth, "is Daganu."
Present:
Daganu blinked. The visceral, agonizing memory of Kawabakomo's vibrant light, the crushing weight of his failure as Hayate, the searing heat of betrayal, the unbearable, soul-rending loss – it slammed back into his consciousness with the force of a Big Bang. The meticulously constructed Monarch facade, the armor of cold fury and resentment, cracked wide open, revealing the raw, suppurating wound beneath – a wound 58 million years old and still bleeding. He looked down at Merus, the broken god gasping in his own luminous blood at his feet. He didn't see an enemy. He didn't see a divine being. He saw Hayate. He saw the weakness he had sacrificed everything – his name, his world, his soul – to annihilate, both within himself and in the universe he now helped scourge. He saw the pathetic dreamer whose failure demanded obliteration.
The resentment burning in his eyes wasn't just for Merus. It was for the universe that birthed such weakness. It was for Saganbo, who offered only the hollow power of destruction. It was, most profoundly, agonizingly, for himself – for the part of him that remembered Hayate, that still felt the phantom pain of that loss.
With a guttural sound that was half-snarl ripped from a bestial core, half the choked sob of a lost child, Daganu raised his foot. Not for another contemptuous kick, but to bring it down like the hammer of an angry god upon Merus's skull – to erase the reflection, to silence the ghost, to finally kill the weakness Hayate represented forever. Simultaneously, a Light Bullet, not a micro-singularity but a compressed orb of pure, focused hatred and negation, formed around his clenched fist, its dark light casting stark, terrible shadows.
Merus, through the haze of pain, the encroaching darkness of unconsciousness, the sputtering failure of the Yellow Ring, saw the blow descending. He saw the unfathomable torment in Daganu's eyes, a maelstrom of ancient grief and self-loathing. He saw, with the terrible clarity of a dying god, Hayate. And in that fractured, crystalline moment before annihilation, Merus understood the true, horrific depth of the SpeedOff Monarch's desperation with no words. It wasn't just rage. It was a mirror, reflecting his own profound, cosmic despair.
The foot descended, a shadow blocking out the chaotic light. The Light Bullet of hatred flared, poised to unleash absolute negation. Desperation, in its most brutal, terminal form, reigned supreme in the Labyrinth of Dissolution. The outcome hung suspended in the agonized silence between heartbeats and the battle continues.