The sky above the Isle of Trials did not merely flash; it ruptured.
The colossal, swirling black-and-gold singularity of the Big Beng—the legendary spatial-type universal collapse art channeled by sixty thousand combined fighters—collapsed inward with a deafening, reality-bending shriek. A blinding sphere of primordial energy expanded outward with astronomical velocity, threatening to erase Sector 4, the valley, and everything breathing within a fifty-mile radius.
Standing right at ground zero, engulfed by the oncoming wall of universal annihilation, Ninten didn't flinch. His Anomaly Merger form—a glitched, hyper-saturated synthesis of Martis, Thamuz, Lunox, Johnson, Kratos, Asura, Arceus, Souls protagonists, and Sun Wukong—hummed with a violent, multi-colored resonance.
Thunder glanced sideways at his reckless teammate, a flicker of tension in his electric blue eyes.
Ninten grinned, turning his head just enough for his glowing visor to reflect the oncoming apocalypse. He raised a hand, pointing right at the collapsing star of energy, and shouted over the deafening roar:
"Don't worry! I am not going anywhere yet—this little light show is nothing against me!"
With explosive timing, Ninten activated Martis's Skill 2 (Mortal Coil), supercharged a thousandfold by the absolute mobility, defense, and invulnerability frameworks absorbed from every action RPG in gaming history. His body dissolved into a spinning, multi-layered tempest of crimson blades, divine shielding matrices, and soul-dodge frames.
KABOOOOM!
The Big Beng struck. For three endless seconds, the universe seemed to hold its breath as white-hot light devoured the canyon. The shockwave stripped away stone, shattered automated drones, and flattened the surrounding ridges. Ninten's outer defense layers—the Lunox shields, the Arceus rings, the Johnson armor plating—fractured and shattered one by one under the unimaginable weight of sixty thousand pooled auras.
Yet, when the blinding smoke finally cleared and the shockwave dissipated into a gentle, settling mist, the crater stood silent.
Ninten was still standing. His armor was heavily dented, his glow dimmed to a flickering amber pulse, but he was upright, breathing heavily, and grinning like a madman.
"See? Just a scratch," Ninten laughed, coughing up a tiny wisp of digital pixel-smoke.
Around them, the remaining sixty thousand combatants who had poured their entire Sakti reserves into the ultimate attack were suddenly hit with catastrophic system backlash. Their energy reserves were completely drained, their bodies locked in physical exhaustion, and their defenses entirely wide open.
For Team Thunder, it wasn't just survival; it was an open-buffet invitation.
"Well," Mark said calmly, his cybernetic core whirring as targeting brackets locked onto hundreds of exhausted fighters simultaneously. "Their energy output has dropped to zero. The parameters are set. Let's harvest."
What followed was a ruthless, highly efficient exhibition of point-gathering and system ejections.
The opposing fighters, realizing they had exhausted their ultimate weapon and failed to scratch Team Thunder, began to panic. Fear turned into a chaotic, blind stampede as scores of participants turned and fled across the ridges, desperately trying to escape the exam zone before their scores hit zero.
Team Hira watched from a distance, their jaws practically glued to the canyon floor. Padma, Tista, Karnaphuli, and Surma stood frozen in absolute disbelief, while Magna Al-Hira stared directly at Ninten, her breath catching in her throat. Despite the absolute ridiculousness of his combat style and his obnoxious taunts, a deep, undeniable wave of awe washed over her—a quiet, involuntary spark of profound respect for a warrior who could stare down a universal collapse spell and simply shrug it off.
Team Suleiman, true to their proud Haque bloodline pride, refused to run. Samir tried to rally his brothers, but their exhaustion made them sitting ducks.
"We don't retreat!" Samir yelled, trying to launch a kinetic punch.
Before his fist could travel an inch, Ninten vanished in a flash of spatial distortion and appeared right beside him, tapping him on the forehead with a glowing finger. Instantly, Samir's health bar flashed, the system safety net triggered, and he was violently ejected from the exam in a pillar of white light.
"And stay out!" Ninten cheered, immediately absorbing the massive bounty of points, which instantly restored his depleted energy reserves back to peak efficiency.
The rest of Team Thunder unleashed absolute mechanical and martial fury across the remaining clusters:
* Fi moved like a human wrecking ball, his glowing kinetic fists driving through defensive auras like wet tissue paper, sending rival combatants flying off the cliffs with systematic precision.
* Mark raised his wrist controller, deploying a synchronized cluster of laser suppression nets that corralled and ejected one hundred students simultaneously in a single, perfectly calculated sweep.
* Thunder moved with terrifying electrical speed, wiping out an entire elite squad in a fraction of a second with a chain-lightning discharge, then pivoting immediately to erase a second squad before they could even draw their weapons.
* Dent and Gic anchored the frontline and flanks, Dent erecting absolute defensive barriers to block stray counter-attacks while Gic maintained a purifying aura that kept male combatants neutralized and shielded the zone from outside interference.
The battlefield was rapidly clearing, reduced to a high-speed cleanup operation.
Seeking to cement their dominance, Thunder strode across the shattered stone until he locked eyes with Jamuna Al-Hira. Jamuna, having managed to recover a portion of her Sakti through emergency breathing techniques, gripped her cracked Astrager Abha armor and stepped forward, her eyes blazing with stubborn royal pride.
"You may have defeated the alliance, Thunder, but I will not—" Jamuna started, raising her hands to weave a spatial-elemental vortex.
Thunder didn't even let her finish the sentence. In a blinding flash of blue lightning, he closed the distance instantly. His palm struck her shoulder with a concussive shockwave that shattered her remaining armor shards, sweeping her off her feet and sending her skidding backward across the gravel. As she hit the ground, gasping for air with system warning lights flashing around her, Thunder stood over her, his hand glowing with a paralyzing electrical charge ready to finish the ejection.
"Your resolve is commendable, Princess," Thunder said evenly, his voice devoid of malice. "Your execution, however, is too slow."
Before Thunder's final strike could land, a dense, swirling vortex of dark void-energy violently tore open the space directly above Jamuna.
CRACK-BOOM!
A heavy, oppressive wave of aristocratic spiritual pressure slammed into the earth, forcing Thunder to slide back two steps. Emerging from the spatial rift with a chilling, arrogant smirk was Freak (Arsh-Al-Qur-Haque).
Freak landed smoothly between Thunder and the fallen Jamuna, his dark robes rippling with an aura of supreme, terrifying dominance. He cast a sidelong glance at Jamuna, then turned his dark, piercing eyes toward Team Thunder.
"Leaving so soon?" Freak drawled, his voice dripping with condescension. "I step away for a few moments, and you clowns nearly turn my lords and ladies into pixelated dust."
Ninten stepped forward, his Anomaly Merger form flaring with bright, chaotic energy as he pointed one of his glowing crescent blades directly at Freak's chest. A wide, competitive grin spread across his face.
"Oh, look who decided to show up to the party!" Ninten laughed loudly. "It's you, Freak! Sure, you got the better of me last time we crossed paths, but I've got news for you, pal—things are a little different today. You aren't catching me off guard twice!"
Freak let out a low, mocking chuckle, his eyes narrowing. "Different? You're wearing a cobbled-together digital skin suit and you think you've transcended? Let me show you what true power looks like."
Without warning, Freak raised his palms toward the violet sky. A miniature, concentrated replica of the very same Big Beng cosmic anomaly that the sixty thousand fighters had just cast materialized in his hands—only this version was infinitely denser, stabilized by Freak's personal void-energy matrix.
"Thanks, Team Thunder, for gathering all this free energy for me," Freak mocked, a cruel smile touching his lips. "Let's see how you like it returned!"
With a flick of his wrists, Freak didn't just throw the Big Beng at Ninten—he used a high-level spatial manipulation technique to divide the massive universal singularity into trillions of microscopic, razor-sharp energy fragments, scattering them across the entire valley like a deadly meteor shower raining down on every remaining combatant.
"Duck!" Thunder barked, instantly erecting a magnetic dome over Mark, Dent, Gic, and Fi.
Ninten, however, didn't dodge. He stood his ground, channeling his merged gaming mechanics into an absolute offensive stance.
"Ninten, fall back! That density will shred your core!" Thunder warned from inside his dome.
"No way! I'm taking him head-on!" Ninten yelled back.
Freak suddenly shifted his posture, his body erupting with draconic energy as he launched forward at hyper-velocity, executing a devastating, crimson-scaled Dragon Ascent straight toward Ninten's chest.
Ninten raised his dual blades to block the impact, sliding backward across the stone with a screech of grinding metal. He looked up at Freak with a cheeky grin through the sparks.
"Bro really tried to use Rayquaza's signature move on me! Classic!" Ninten joked, channeling a massive, concentrated beam of mixed Kratos-Asura kinetic fury right into Freak's midsection.
Freak didn't even flinch. With a casual wave of his hand, a translucent barrier of pure conceptual energy manifested around him—Protect (Normal Type Attack)—completely nullifying Ninten's blast without a single scratch.
"My turn," Freak whispered coldly.
Freak snapped his fingers. A cluster of swirling, gravity-warping stellar anomalies materialized around Ninten—the devastating space-type art known as Nebula Cluster. The gravitational pull instantly crushed the space around Ninten, locking his joints and plunging his health metrics into the red zone.
"He's done for!" several observing students whispered in horror.
"Not a chance!" Ninten roared.
Pushing his system core past its absolute thermal limit, Ninten triggered a move he had copied directly from the Pokémon universe: Explosion.
KABOOM-BAM-CRASH!
A blinding, self-sacrificial detonation engulfed both Ninten and Freak in a cataclysmic ball of fire that tore the remaining canyon floor apart. When the smoke finally cleared, Ninten was panting heavily on his knees, his armor smoking and his energy reserves critically depleted.
Freak, meanwhile, stepped out of the center of the blast completely untouched. Not a single thread of his dark robes was singed. His Paryabeksanik Abha—an absolute, conceptual passive defensive armament that rendered him immune to conventional and anomalous kinetic damage—had absorbed one hundred percent of the explosion without registering a single unit of fatigue.
Freak smirked, shaking off a tiny speck of dust from his shoulder. "Is that the best your copyright-infringement form can do?"
Frustrated, Ninten leaped forward, unleashing Yin's Ultimate from Mobile Legends, trapping Freak in an alternate dimension of shadow and martial combat. But Freak merely raised his fist, punched straight through the dimensional fabric of the domain from the inside out, and shattered Yin's realm like cheap glass in less than a second.
Undeterred, Ninten shifted forms again, merging with Dyrroth's Orochi Chris skin and unleashing his ultimate execution strike—a barrage of dark, demonic claw slashes powered by ancient demonic heritage.
Freak didn't even raise his arms. He simply let the slashes land on his chest, his Paryabeksanik Abha glowing with a faint, iridescent sheen that deflected every blow harmlessly into the ground.
Ninten gritted his teeth, finally realizing the mathematical wall he was hitting. His Abha... it completely nullifies standard kinetic, magical, and spatial attacks by warping reality around his skin. To hurt him, I have to bypass his combat logic entirely.
Before Ninten could formulate a counter-strategy, Thunder flashed across the intervening space, stepping in front of Ninten with an authoritative command.
"Ninten, stop overextending! I know you got defeated by him once already; don't let your ego cloud your tactical read," Thunder instructed sharply.
Without missing a beat, Thunder unleashed a high-frequency Thunder Blast, combining his raw electrical output with advanced magnetic arrays to create an inescapable electromagnetic cage around Freak, attempting to pin his nervous system.
Freak's body sparked, but his Paryabeksanik Abha adapted instantly, allowing him to phase right through the magnetic bars as if they were made of mist.
"Useless," Freak scoffed, lunging forward with a void-dark blade.
"Not quite," a deep, serene voice echoed from the side.
Gic stepped into the fray, his hands glowing with holy golden light as he chanted a sacred, ancient Arabic invocation—the Fiery Seal (Fire-type Du'Ah). A ring of burning, sanctified halal fire erupted from the stone beneath Freak's feet, binding his ankles and temporarily dampening the void-energy flow of his Abha.
"Now, Fi!" Gic shouted.
Fi materialized in a kinetic blur right in front of Freak. Channeling every ounce of his pent-up martial training and kinetic acceleration, Fi delivered a devastating, bone-shattering right hook straight to Freak's jaw—the very first strike of the entire battle to bypass the outer edge of Freak's defensive equilibrium.
CRACK!
Freak's head snapped sideways, and a single drop of dark blood welled up at the corner of his lip. For the first time all day, Freak's arrogant smile flickered into genuine surprise.
"You..." Freak snarled, his eyes flashing with dark fury.
Before Fi could land a follow-up combo, Freak channeled a concentrated sphere of dark energy into his palm and slammed it directly into Fi's chest—the devastating space-type art known as Galactic Gravitational Blast.
BOOM!
The impact sent Fi hurtling backward through two stone pillars, tumbling across the dust until he came to a dead stop, completely unconscious and systematically ejected from the active combat roster.
"Fi!" Thunder yelled, moving to catch his fallen comrade.
Freak wiped the drop of blood from his lip, his dark aura flaring wildly as he prepared to unleash another wave of destruction. "You insects are becoming a persistent nuisance."
From the dust of the crater, Ninten slowly pushed himself up. A strange, serene, utterly confident smile spread across his bruised face. He didn't look defeated; he looked like a programmer who had just figured out how to patch a broken game loop.
"You know, Freak," Ninten called out, his voice ringing clearly across the quiet canyon. "Your Paryabeksanik Abha is really impressive. Truly top-tier cheating. But you made one fatal mistake..."
Freak paused, raising an eyebrow. "And what mistake is that?"
Ninten raised both hands, snapping his fingers with a theatrical flourish.
"You let a reality-coder into your lobby," Ninten grinned.
With a blinding flash of multi-colored system code, Ninten cast his ultimate administrative ability, instantly materializing a literal, bounded game-zone over the physical reality of the canyon. A glowing, transparent holographic grid encapsulated Freak within a forty-foot radius, locking down the spatial coordinates with absolute administrative authority.
At the center of the game-zone, a massive, un-skippable system rule flashed in blazing neon letters across the sky:
> [ADMINISTRATIVE RULE SET ACTIVE]
> If Arsh-Al-Qur-Haque (Freak) attempts to attack, harm, hurt, or execute any offensive action whatsoever utilizing his Abha against Ninten, his Abha permissions will be instantly revoked and permanently transferred to Ninten.
>
Freak's eyes widened in sudden, profound shock as he felt the cosmic connection to his Paryabeksanik Abha violently sever, draining out of his veins and rushing across the holographic grid to pool directly inside Ninten's core.
For the first time since the tournament began, Freak was completely, utterly stripped of his ultimate defensive crutch. His Abha was gone.
Yet, even standing completely vulnerable inside the game-zone with his defenses stripped bare, Freak didn't panic. A slow, terrifyingly calm smile spread across his face. He cracked his knuckles, tilted his head, and looked directly at Ninten with dead, unwavering eyes.
"Without my Abha?" Freak murmured softly, his voice dripping with pure, bloodthirsty malice. "Wonderful. So I'll kill you with my bare hands now."
Far, far away from the shattered stone and roaring energy of the Isle of Trials...
The perspective violently sheared away from the battlefield, plunging through dimensional layers, star systems, and the dead voids of forgotten space until it reached a place where light had long since given up trying to exist.
At the center of an infinite, obsidian hall sat a massive, terrifying throne forged from compressed neutron star matter and weeping shadows. Sitting upon the throne was a cosmic entity whose entire physique was violently swallowed by roiling, abyssal Dark-Matter, rendering its face completely invisible beneath a shifting shroud of void-smoke.
The entity tilted its head back, staring up into the empty ceiling of the cosmos, and let out a laugh.
It wasn't a normal laugh. It was a terrifying, multilayered, sanity-fracturing sound that echoed across dimensions—a monstrous, guttural cacophony that started as a low, rumbling tectonic groan before climbing into a shrieking, manic, endlessly cascading howl of absolute delight:
"Ahhhhhhhh-hahhahahahh-ahahhahhaha-hahahaha-ashggdghhhrhh-hahahahahahahahaha-khhh-hahahaha-aghahahahahahaha…!"
The laugh echoed endlessly, rattling the very fabric of existence, carrying a weight heavier than all the stars in the sky.
When the laughter finally subsided into a sinister, echoing chuckle, the entity leaned forward, resting its dark-matter-shrouded chin on its hand, and spoke in a voice that sounded like grinding tectonic plates:
"Finally... the warriors are starting to forge. Everything is going precisely as we planned. All the pieces are falling into their exact designated squares... Just... I need to inform him when the timing is absolute perfection. But until that moment arrives..."
The entity slowly turned its invisible gaze downward, looking past the base of the throne.
Spread out across the endless flooring behind the throne, stretching as far as the eye could see across trillions of light-years, was a horrific, silent ocean: trillions of lifeless, broken bodies of trillions of different ANIMANS who had been systematically slaughtered, erased, destroyed,raped and tortured to the absolute, unimaginable limits of brutality across the forgotten epochs of time.
The entity let out one final, quiet chuckle, watching the silent graveyard of civilizations through the dark void.
"...Till then, I must thoroughly enjoy the scenario."