"This is barely a warm-up."
The words hung in the air for a heartbeat. Then the thousand abominations roared as one, a sound that shook the earth and made lesser dragons cover their ears. Black ink sprayed from their mouths as they charged, a wave of corrupted flesh and twisted fury rushing toward Null.
Behind him, the dragon army tensed. Aurora's golden scales flared with solar energy. The elders prepared their elements. Warriors drew ether into combat patterns. They all moved to support their young prince against the impossible odds.
They needn't have bothered.
Null stood perfectly still, hands in his pockets, watching the wave of monsters approach. The ground shook under thousands of pounds of corrupted dragon flesh. The air filled with the stench of tar and wrongness. The first abomination to reach him was massive, three times the size of a typical dragon, its body a writhing mass of black ink barely holding a shape.
It brought down a claw that could crush buildings.
Null removed one hand from his pocket and threw a simple punch upward.
The impact cracked reality itself.
The air split with a sound like thunder multiplied by ten. The abomination didn't just die—it imploded. Its body collapsed inward as if grabbed by invisible hands and crushed into nothing. Black ink sprayed outward in a perfect circle, but none touched Null. The space around him rejected the filth.
The charging horde didn't slow. They couldn't. Momentum and madness carried them forward into the one who'd just erased their strongest with a casual gesture.
Null moved.
To the watching dragons, he became something impossible to track. A flicker of motion that appeared, struck, and vanished before the eye could process it. His Genius Mind calculated every angle, every opening, every optimal strike point. His teleportation made distance meaningless. His Cosmic Body made every hit apocalyptic.
An abomination lunged from the left. Null appeared beside its head, tapped it with one finger, and the creature's skull caved inward like paper. He vanished before the body hit the ground.
Three attacked from different angles. Null materialized in the center of their formation, spun once with his arm extended, and all three exploded from the spatial distortion his movement created. Their corrupted blood painted the ground black, but he was already gone.
Ten rushed him at once, thinking numbers would matter. He appeared above them, pointed downward, and space itself pressed them into the earth. The ground cracked in a perfect circle thirty feet wide. When the pressure was released, only stains remained.
The battlefield became a massacre disguised as a dance. Null flickered between enemies faster than thought. Each appearance lasted long enough for a strike that erased another abomination. He didn't just kill them—he dismantled them with surgical precision.
A claw slash that should have connected passed through empty air. Null had already teleported to the attacker's blind spot, his palm against its spine. The creature tried to turn, but space twisted, folding it backward until its body couldn't maintain cohesion. It dissolved into ink that evaporated before hitting the ground.
Twenty abominations surrounded him in a perfect circle, attacking simultaneously. Null smiled—the first expression he'd shown since the battle began. He raised both hands and spun. Space rotated with him, creating a vortex that caught all twenty and compressed them together. They'd become a single ball of corrupted matter when he stopped spinning. He flicked it with one finger, and it shot into the distance, disintegrating as it flew.
The rear ranks of the Order's army finally recognized the pattern. This wasn't a battle—it was systematic extermination. They adapted, falling back to create distance, preparing ranged attacks.
Hundreds of abominations breathed in unison. Black ink mixed with corrupted ether, forming projectiles that could melt stone and corrupt living flesh. They fired as one, a wave of death that blotted out the sun. Arrows of decay, spheres of corruption, beams of pure wrongness—all aimed at one small figure.
Null stopped moving. He raised one hand, palm up, and spoke for the first time since the battle began.
"Mini black holes."
Seven spheres materialized around him. Each one was perfect darkness ringed with bent light, miniature versions of the cosmic force in his eyes. Although they were only the size of marbles, space warped around them, reality bending to their impossible gravity.
The wave of attacks hit the spheres and ceased to exist—not blocked, not deflected, but erased. Every projectile that touched the event horizons vanished into nothing, swallowed by forces that shouldn't exist on this scale. The black holes grew slightly with each absorbed attack, their photon rings burning brighter.
When the barrage ended, Null looked at the seven spheres orbiting him. They hummed with consumed energy, space rippling around them like water.
"Your turn," he said quietly.
He gestured forward, and the spheres shot toward the abomination army. They moved slowly, almost lazily, but nothing could stop them. An abomination tried to dodge—the sphere curved through space to follow. Another tried to block—its body stretched like taffy as the black hole's gravity caught it, pulling it molecule by molecule into nothing.
Where the spheres passed, reality broke. Abominations weren't just killed—they were unraveled. Their matter stretched impossibly thin, spiraling into tiny points of infinite density. There was no blood, no corpses, just expanding circles of absolute nothing where monsters had stood.
The organized ranks of the Order's army were shattered. Panic spread through the corrupted dragons as they watched their allies disappear into holes in existence. Some tried to flee. Others charged in desperate fury. Most stood frozen, their twisted minds unable to process what was happening.
Null dealt with them all equally.
For the fleeing ones, he raised his hand and made a pulling gesture. Space compressed, dragging them backward faster than they could run. They slid across the ground, claws leaving furrows in the earth, until they reached him. A touch, and they ceased.
For the charging ones, he didn't even move. He pointed at pairs of them, and space exchanged their positions. Abominations running at full speed suddenly faced each other, unable to stop before the collision. The impacts were devastating—corrupted bodies splattering against each other with force that shook the ground.
For the frozen ones, he teleported between them like a phantom. A tap here, a gesture there, each contact bringing immediate dissolution. He moved through their ranks like death itself, efficient and inevitable.
The battlefield grew quiet except for the sound of sizzling ink evaporating and the occasional crash of redirected monsters destroying each other. Where a thousand abominations had stood, now there were only dozens, scattered and broken.
One particularly large abomination, maybe a commander or elite, tried a final desperate attack. It gathered all its corrupted ether, its body swelling with power until it was twice its original size. Black lightning crackled around it as it prepared something devastating.
Null appeared directly in front of it. The abomination looked down at the figure standing calmly before its charging ultimate attack.
"Too slow," Null said.
He reached up and touched the creature's chest with one finger. Space inverted at the contact point. The abomination's attack, all that gathered power, reversed into itself. The beast had a moment to realize what was happening before it collapsed inward, its energy consuming it from the inside out.
The last few abominations tried to scatter in different directions. Null sighed, sounding almost bored. He brought his hands together, and space responded. The fleeing monsters ran in place, space stretching infinitely before them. No matter how fast they moved, they got no further away.
"This is tedious," Null muttered.
He pulled his hands apart, and the stretched space snapped back like a rubber band. The abominations were yanked backward at impossible speed, colliding in the center of the battlefield with enough force to turn them into mist.
And then it was over.
The entire battle had taken less than four minutes.
Where the Order's army of a thousand corrupted dragons had stood, there was now only devastation. Black puddles of ink that sizzled and evaporated. Craters where space had been compressed. Perfect circles of nothing where the black holes had passed. And in the center of it all, Null stood, not a drop of corruption on him.
He looked at his hand, examining it as if checking for dirt. Finding it clean, he slid it back into his pocket.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Behind him, the dragon army stood frozen, not in fear, but in complete incomprehension. They'd prepared to support their young prince, to protect him from the overwhelming odds. Instead, they'd watched him dismantle an army with the casual efficiency of someone performing a routine chore.
Aurora's golden form trembled slightly. Not from exhaustion or fear, but from recognition. The way he'd moved, the precision of his strikes, the tactical perfection of every choice—this wasn't raw power randomly applied. This was mastery. The kind that took centuries to develop.
Igniscor's flames had gone out, the Fire Elder too stunned to maintain them. Cryos's ice had melted, forgotten in her shock. Even Draconis, the Void Elder who'd seen centuries of impossible things, stood speechless.
Their five-year-old prince—because that's what he was beneath the transformed body—had just demonstrated power that matched or exceeded their own. He'd shown combat analysis that surpassed masters. He'd wielded space itself like a casual tool.
And he'd done it all without breaking a sweat, showing effort, or even seeming particularly interested.
Null turned to face the dragon army, his cosmic eyes scanning the gathered forces. His expression was neutral, almost apologetic.
"Sorry about the mess," he said, gesturing at the devastated battlefield. "I tried to keep the collateral damage minimal."
As if the complete annihilation of a thousand-strong army was an unfortunate accident. It was as if the display of power that had just shattered every expectation was barely worth mentioning.
Aurora found her voice first, though it came out strained. "Null… how?"
He tilted his head slightly, considering the question. "They were weak. Corrupted dragons with no technique, no strategy, just rage and numbers. It would have taken longer if they'd been actual fighters."
The casual dismissal of what they'd just witnessed sent another shock wave through the watching dragons. This hadn't been a triumph or even a real battle to him. It had been cleanup duty.
The implications were staggering. If this was what he considered easy, what would he look like when challenged? If this was him at five years old, what would he become at ten? Twenty? A hundred?
The Order of Ascension had spent four years building this army. Four years of experiments and corruption and careful preparation. They'd been destroyed in four minutes by a child who looked bored doing it.
Null started walking back toward the dragon forces, his footsteps leaving normal prints despite what they'd just witnessed. As he approached, dragons instinctively moved aside, creating a path—not out of fear but from a sudden understanding that they were in the presence of something beyond normal measurement.
He stopped in front of Aurora
"Can we go home now? I want to try maintaining human form while sleeping."
Aurora could only nod, still processing what she'd witnessed. Her five-year-old son had just revealed a level of mastery and analytical efficiency that shattered every known metric for growth.
And he was asking about bedtime.