The firmament was not a sky.
It was a tapestry of dismembered realities, each one torn apart, collapsed, fused against its will by the scars of the multiverse.A dissonant symphony of cosmos, impossible shapes, and impossible colors rippled across every corner of the final battlefield.
And there they stood.
Elisa, carrying the weight of countless worlds upon her back, the hat glowing with a quiet, dark calm.Astrid, the brooch beating like a furious heart, bearing the lost echoes of her extinct dimension.
The moment hung suspended—eternal—as if existence itself were holding its breath.
"I will not do this with hatred," Elisa said with a trace of sadness, her voice cracked by the history that had led her there. "But I will not allow you to continue."
"And I will not do it out of vengeance," Astrid replied. "But I will not stop. Not after everything I have seen and lived through."
There were no final words.
Only action.
Elisa surged forward in a swift motion, wrapped in a trail of shadows and void. Every step she took left behind echoes of nonexistence—patches of space that turned into absolute silence. Time itself trembled in her wake.
Astrid rose like a star that refused to die. With a movement of her brooch, newborn universes blossomed around her: columns of never-before-seen matter, constellations vibrating like flowers opening. The ground beneath them shattered and was replaced by a platform of crystals formed from pure space.
The first impact unleashed a wave of ontological collision: a rupture so deep that a million alternative possibilities were aborted in an instant. Worlds that could have been… ceased to be possible.
Their entire journey across the multiverse had strengthened their bond and control over their artifacts. Now they possessed a power that could be compared to absolutely nothing else, surpassed only by the gods of the First Existence.
Elisa struck with a blow of pure void, an attack that did not merely destroy matter but denied the possibility that anything had ever existed there at all. Astrid countered with an expansion of existence, a burst of new physical laws that altered the direction of time across kilometers of dimensional space.
The heavens collapsed and rebuilt themselves at the same time.
Both of them spun, dancing an ancient dance between what is and what should never have been.
"Your power is pure negation!" Astrid shouted, dodging a ray of fractured darkness. "You represent the death of all possibility!"
"And you are arrogance made flesh!" Elisa shouted back, now surrounded by fragments of realities she used as shields. "Not everything must be saved! Not everything must be one!"
They fell into one of the many dimensions Astrid had created, where each blow tore the space itself apart.
Astrid watched as one of the universes she had created was being destroyed by her own hand.
Every attack she launched pushed her deeper into rage as she realized she was destroying the very things she had created. Yet that only strengthened her determination to win this fight—focusing on the battle and on rebuilding that universe afterward.
And there, without saying another word, the battle continued.
Their physical forms began to distort. Elisa at times became an abstract shadow, an entity of impossible angles, a blur within perception. Astrid answered by becoming pure light—an archetype of all living things, as if she were the mother of all reality. Then both unleashed a burst of power that tore the entire multiverse apart, causing it to deteriorate further and further—a strike that shattered every concept and every logic.
They returned to their original forms and passed through a dimension where only conscious thoughts survived. In that place, weapons were ideas, blows were contradictions, wounds were revelations.
"Do you truly believe uniting the dimensions guarantees stability?"
"And you think infinite suturing is safer? How many worlds have died because they weren't united?"
The battle continued, and both channeled their powers to create two projections—pure existence and pure inexistence. They clashed, delivering a blow that caused that entire world to collapse, sending them once again into another universe.
They returned to physical space, surrounded by the cosmic dust of a thousand civilizations that had been extinguished in a single second.
When they stood up, they attempted to launch another attack—but nothing happened.
Both of them remained confused for a few seconds until they noticed something: their artifacts were no longer on them. The shockwave of the previous attack had knocked them away, and now they lay on the ground in front of them.
They stared at each other for a moment, then rushed forward to grab them.
But Astrid scooped a handful of dirt from the ground, and before either of them could reach their objects, she threw it into Elisa's face, clouding her vision. Astrid seized her artifact first and regained her powers.
When Elisa recovered her sight, she saw Astrid levitating, her eyes shining. She knew it might all end there.
Astrid prepared to launch an attack and said:
"Forgive me."
Elisa covered herself and lowered her gaze.
But after a few seconds of feeling nothing, she looked up—and saw her hat floating before her, protecting her, holding back Astrid's blast as if it had reacted to the danger on its own.
Elisa and Astrid both stared in surprise.
But Elisa remembered that this was not the first time the hat had reacted to her emotions. With a smile, she placed it back on her head.
"It's time to start round two."
They resumed their battle, which grew more and more apocalyptic with every passing moment. Their power and control increased to the point that both began to evolve, developing new abilities as their bond with their artifacts strengthened with every blow they gave and received.
The fight was no longer only about who was stronger—but about who could progress faster and surpass the other.
Astrid created a star in her hands and hurled it at Elisa. Yet Elisa stopped it with nothing but her gaze, slowly turning it into a mass of shadows before sending it back toward Astrid.
Astrid was utterly stunned. That was an ability she had never seen before.
"Every light creates a shadow, and every shadow blocks the light," Elisa said as she returned Astrid's own attack.
Astrid tried to resist, but the darkness soon began to envelop her in a dome that started to overwhelm her.
But Elisa was not the only one improving.
Astrid stopped fighting the shadow and instead began to purify it. Raising her hands, she illuminated the entire dome until it dissolved and concentrated into her palms.
"And just like every shadow, it follows the one who blocks and receives the light," she replied.
She then hurled the purified shadows back at Elisa. The attack struck her directly, illuminating the entire galaxy they were in.
Elisa slowly rose again, deeply surprised that Astrid had returned her own attack purified. In her mind she wondered if the fact that her own power had harmed her meant she was incredibly strong—or incredibly weak.
Still somewhat shaken, she steadied herself.
"Now it's my turn," she said with defiant determination.
Elisa invoked Nullity—the final technique of her hat: a field of inexistence that spread outward, extinguishing not only matter but emotions, names, bonds, and time itself, as though they had never existed.
Astrid countered with Primordial Creation, a surge of pure existence that generated miniature realities—each one blinking with the illusion of hope. They were thousands of pocket dimensions, literally the size of a pocket.
And so, nothingness and everything embraced and destroyed each other simultaneously.
The clash of power seemed endless. Minutes passed as they struggled to overpower the other, neither able to surpass her rival.
"You don't understand what I'm protecting," Astrid said, exhausted and weakened, the light of her brooch flickering faintly. "It's not a whim! It's… a sanctuary. A unified dimension where the pain of losing everything will never happen again."
It almost sounded as if she were not speaking to Elisa—but to herself. As if she were trying to convince herself not to abandon her goal.
"And you don't understand what you're destroying," Elisa replied, tears floating weightlessly in the air. "Chaos, difference, freedom—they are life too!"
The attacks finally exploded, warping all reality.
Both concentrated their remaining power into their fists and delivered one final blow that caused space-time itself to collapse.
The ground—or whatever it was they were standing on—shattered. They were left suspended above the dimensional abyss they had created.
Elisa won the clash of fists.
The shockwave was so immense that Astrid's entire attacking arm was completely destroyed.
And there, at last, Elisa gathered all the strength she had left.
Not with anger.
With compassion.
"I admire your dream. But I can't allow it. Not even for you."
"I… I know," Astrid trembled.
Elisa moved forward in a swift motion.
Astrid did not move. She no longer had the strength to keep fighting.
A beam of pure darkness pierced the chest of the traveler of light.
And then there was only silence.
The brooch fell into the dimensional void and shattered like glass, completely disintegrating.
Astrid fell slowly, a broken smile on her face. Her body began to glow and slowly fade away as she coughed up blood that shone from her mouth.
"…Thank you… for understanding me… even if it was too late."
Elisa extended a hand.
But she could not reach her.
Before disappearing completely, Astrid saw one final hallucination—her mother and her sister standing behind Elisa.
Though sad for having lost, a smile formed on her face knowing she would finally see her family again.
"...Sister… I think you were right. Maybe I did want to die."
Astrid then completely disintegrated.
Astrid's life faded away.
And her existence vanished.