In the fragments of Nowa's memories at the age of twenty-eight… Resuming after the pause that came before Fenlia's death by his own hand.
He returned to the dying world of his, to the land of barren earth where he had once stabbed a crude cross into the ground and prayed for forgiveness. Now he placed a second cross beside Amy's. Fenlia. His daughter. The red fox girl who had called him Papa and laughed on his shoulders.
He sensed her coming long before she spoke. The familiar cold, the cold of the aunt who had never forgiven him. He stood and turned.
"Aunt… Mia…"
"You have the audacity to come back." She stood at the edge of the clearing, her hand resting on the hilt of the sword. The sword she had never drawn in his presence until now.
"I… I…" The words died in his throat. What could he possibly say? That he was sorry? That he hadn't meant to? That the fire had erupted before he could stop it, that he had been fourteen? None of it mattered.
"You killed her." Mia's voice trembled. "I was there. I was almost there. I was running toward her when… the fire took everything… But you…" She unsheathed the sword.
Then the cold took him.
Ice seized his body from the inside out. His blood slowed. His breath crystallized in the air. He couldn't move. Couldn't speak. Couldn't do anything but watch as his aunt raised the blade.
Then she swung.
Nowa's mind was a storm.
'Break through, Nowa! Break through—' But the thought fractured before it could complete. 'What's the point? It's my fault. She's right. I killed Amy. I killed Fenlia. Everything I touch dies. We didn't mean to. We did. Our hate killed her. We are a monster, Nowa…'
The blade met his neck.
His head fell. Blood sprayed across the barren earth. His body collapsed beside them. He didn't dodge, let alone fight back. He let Mia kill him, and in the final moment before darkness took him, a single thought surfaced: 'That is how it must be.'
He woke several days later in a trashbin.
He blinked. His hand rose to his throat. It was intact. His neck was whole. He touched his head. Still attached. Still thinking. Still alive.
"What…? My neck was sliced off…"
The question hung in the air. No answer came.
He lay back against the trash, watching the smoke-filled sky. The trashbin smelled of rot and rust. He didn't care. He didn't move. He couldn't. Not because his body was weak, but because there was nothing left in him that wanted to rise.
He had accepted death. He had let Mia kill him. And the universe, in its infinite cruelty, had refused to let him go.
His throat tightened, but no tears came. He had cried out everything to Fenlia. There was nothing left to shed. Just a dry, hollow ache where grief used to live.
Minutes passed. Hours. The sky darkened and lightened and darkened again. He didn't keep track. Time had stopped meaning anything a long time ago.
Then he giggled.
It was a small sound at first, a broken sound that slipped out. Then another. And another. The giggles built on themselves, feeding on the emptiness, until they weren't giggles anymore. They were laughter. Maniacal, unrestrained, the kind of laughter that comes only when everything else has been stripped away.
The laughter was hatred. It was fourteen years of suppressed grief erupting all at once. It was the sound of a man who had tried to be good, who had tried to believe in kindness, who had tried to protect the helpless, and who had been punished for it every single time.
The laughter died slowly, leaving behind a heavy silence.
"Hey, you there…" He spoke. Then he paused. The silence stretched.
"...Whatever. You're not useful to my situation anyway."
He stood up. His heart was a hollow shell. But his eyes, when they opened, were filled with burning wrath. And his lips formed into a predator's grin.
"Let's finish what we started, partner."
Moments later.
In another world, divine energy filled the air. The realm was orderly, a domain where gods performed their appointed duties without interruption. A goddess of atmosphere wove currents of breathable air, threading them into the connected worlds below. Others maintained the celestial machinery that kept their corner of existence running. It had been three years since the event. Three years since the mass genocide. The work was finally returning to normal.
One god sighed as he adjusted a conduit of prayer energy. "We're in trouble, aren't we? Gods are supposed to be stronger than the realms we govern. So why are there so many beings now who can match us?"
Another god, monitoring a prediction pool, shook his head. "It's messed up. Especially that one… what's his name? The one who caused the mass extinction in the Authority Lobbies of realm?"
A third god spun around, his face pale. "That guy?! Are you insane?! Do not speak his name, or he'll—"
A siren tore through the dimension. Every divine instrument flickered red. Every prediction pool went dark. And then a voice, raw with panic, amplified across the entire realm, shattered the calm.
"THE COSMIC SLAYER IS ACTIVE AGAIN. RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!"
Cold dread seized them all. The orderly realm erupted into chaos. Thousands of gods fled in every direction, tearing open portals to distant dimensions, scrambling for emergency shelters, knocking over celestial machinery in their desperation. Some screamed. Some prayed. Some simply ran, their divine forms blurring with the speed of absolute terror.
And then—
Nowa landed with a crater on the central clearing ground. The impact shattered the marble, sending cracks outward. The gods who had been fleeing froze mid-step. Fear spread as a man with cold wrath burning in his eyes and a predator's grin rose from the dust.
Dozens of gods lined up against him. Desperation outweighed terror. They would make their stand here.
"Hold the line!" one commanded, his voice cracking. "Unleash everything!"
A goddess of celestial light raised both hands, and the sky above them ignited. "STARFALL JUDGMENT!" A thousand lances of condensed stellar fire rained down, each one capable of vaporizing a mountain.
A war god in obsidian armor slammed his fists together. "REALITY SEVERANCE!" The space around Nowa fractured, splitting into jagged shards that should have cut him into pieces scattered across a dozen dimensions.
A gaunt god of time raised a skeletal hand. "CHRONAL DECAY!" Nowa's form shimmered as a billion years of entropy tried to crash down on him in a single heartbeat.
A goddess of silence opened her mouth, and all sound died. Not just in the air, in the fabric of reality itself. Vibrations ceased. Molecules stopped moving. The world became a frozen module.
A twin-faced god of duality spoke in two voices: "PARADOX BINDING!" Nowa's existence was pulled in opposite directions, created and destroyed, present and absent, alive and dead, simultaneously, an impossible contradiction designed to unravel anything that existed.
A serpentine god of venom exhaled a cloud of conceptual poison. "ESSENCE ROT!" The miasma didn't attack flesh. It attacked meaning. It rotted the idea of the target until there was nothing left to exist.
A god of thresholds slammed his staff against the ground. "ABSOLUTE BONDIVERE!" A wall of pure denial erupted between Nowa and the gods, not a barrier of matter or energy, but a fundamental law stating that nothing could pass. It was not a shield. It was a rule.
A goddess of truth opened her third eye. "INEVITABLE VERDICT!" The attack didn't strike the body. It struck the soul, passing judgment on every sin the target had ever committed, and the weight of that judgment would crush whatever it found unworthy.
A god of entropy raised a single finger. "HEAT DEATH WHISPER!" The air around Nowa dropped to absolute zero, not just cold, but the end of all energy, the final silence of a universe that had forgotten how to burn.
A goddess of reflection conjured a mirror that showed Nowa his own face, twisted, monstrous, every evil he had ever committed reflected back at him. "SELF-INDICTMENT!" The image stepped out of the mirror, and Nowa found himself facing himself, the monster made manifest.
And then—
The attacks struck. The plaza was consumed in a cataclysm of divine fury. Light. Silence. Cold. Entropy. Judgment. The combined might of a pantheon, unleashed on a single mortal.
When the light faded, the gods stared at the crater where Nowa had stood. Nothing moved. The silence stretched.
"Did we… did we get him?" the war god whispered.
From within the smoke, a voidflame flickered out, a figure stirred. Unharmed. Unmoved. The predator's grin had not wavered.
Nowa stepped forward. The absolute boundary shattered like glass. The chronal decay slid off him like rain. The paradox binding unraveled, unable to touch something that had already surrendered its future. The self-indictment found a target that already knew exactly what it was.
"Impossible! That was divine judgement— strongest conceptual attack to ever exist—"
"My turn."
His form disappeared. From where he stood, the ground cratered further, shattered marble erupting outward. He reappeared in front of the war goddess before she could blink. Her eyes flew wide, her divine senses screaming too late, his hand had already pierced her chest, fingers tearing through divine flesh and bone. He pivoted the strike within her ribcage and drove upward, ripping through her heart, her lungs, her throat, and out through the top of her skull in a spray of blood and shimmering ichor.
The gods who had lined up against him scattered like startled birds. Nowa swung his occupied arm, discarding the body with a wet thud, while his free hand drew the Rune Revolver. He aimed at the back of a fleeing god.
BOOM. The shot punched through the god's spine and pulverized a clean hole through the torso, dropping the deity mid-run.
Nowa spun the revolver. The runes along its barrel flared and reconfigured.
A god of storms turned mid-flight, lightning crackling between his fingers. Nowa fired. The bullet arced, not straight, but bending mid-trajectory, curving around the god's hastily raised shield of wind and striking him through the temple.
He spun the revolver again. The runes shifted.
A goddess of tides hurled a wall of conceptual water. Nowa's second shot crackled through it. The Lightning bullet rode the current of divine energy back to its source. The goddess convulsed as electricity arced through her form before she collapsed in a heap of singed and smoking flesh.
Spin. The runes reconfigured.
A war god charged, bellowing, his massive axe splitting the air. Nowa fired directly into his chest. The Explosive bullet burrowed, and a heartbeat later, the god's torso erupted from the inside out, organs and armor fragments raining across the plaza.
Spin. The runes shifted again.
Three gods of the same lineage fled together, weaving a shared defensive barrier. Nowa fired once. The Splitting bullet struck the barrier and fractured, each fragment seeking a different target. Three bodies dropped. Three entry wounds. One shot.
Nowa spun the revolver. As the gun rotated, the runes along the barrel pulsed with duplication magic. A second revolver materialized within the spinning motion, identical and his right hand closed around it as it completed its rotation. Both weapons hummed in his grip, runes flaring in perfect synchronization.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Each blast was a world-ending shot. Gods fell in droves, their divine forms no match for the twin weapons in the hands of the Cosmic Slayer. He didn't stop moving. He didn't stop firing. The revolvers spun and spat death in every form, bending, crackling, burrowing, fracturing, and the pantheon that had once ruled this realm was reduced to twitching corpses and divine ash.
Several days later. Inside a cathedral that dwarfed mountains, the air continuously hum with panicked, hushed terror. Normal people, the god's devoted followers, clustered together, their whispers echoed. At the center, upon a throne sat their deity: a colossal dragon with the writhing, tentacled face of a deep-sea horror. A Cthulhu lookalike.
One brave soul broke from the crowd, lay himself flat on the ground face downward before the throne. "God, I beg you, reconsider your ways! The one they call the 'Cosmic Slayer' is now active and hunting your kind. Thousands of the Equilibrium gods are once again gone. He ignores gods who help, but he slays those who use their power on a whim… and you are among them! Please, we cannot lose our God to this anomaly!" A unanimous, fearful murmur of agreement rippled through the followers.
The dragon-octopus god's many eyes narrowed in frustration. It rested its head on a fist, the gesture of disdain. "Why should I? Because I am part of the equilibrium that eliminated his two friends, and now he seeks vengeance on all its members? We gods have our roles. I will not change for this… this pathetic human aberration." It leaned forward. "And if he kills me, all you know will collapse. Without my will, the balance of this reality will fall."
BOOM. The cathedral's immense doors exploded inwards. A figure stood in the entrance, silhouetted against the dying light outside. All heads snapped toward him, and a wave of pure terror swept the chamber. The people fell to the floor, pressing their faces to the cold stone. Only their god remained upright.
"You finally arrive, Cosmic Slayer," the god intoned, rising to its full, terrifying height that dwarfed him. "You disappeared for a year, Slayer. We thought you were finished. What changed? Did you finally find something you couldn't burn? There are so few of us left while you abandoned your work. Are you satisfied?" Without waiting for an answer, it unleashed its power, a barrage of null-concept energy designed to eviscerate the very idea of its target.
Nowa didn't dodge. He simply let the Voidflame coat his body. The null-energy struck the black fire and was erased on contact. His eyes were hollow, twin pools of white eyes, devoid of everything but a cold, absolute wrath and a smile of a predator. He moved in a blur.
The god, a being of reality control, warps the space, to rewrite the laws of physics around him.
Nowa tripped and fell on the ground, something was cut off from him. With no time to figure it out, he rolled over before the god stepped over him in an instant, and stood to his feet. He opened and closes his palm feeling the power within him but there was none.
"What are you without your power?" The god asked.
Nowa just scoffed. "I am me." His grin widened even more. And ran towards the god.
The god laughed. "There is nothing you can do! I am the last controller of reality! I will not fall for your cheap tricks, Cosmic Slayer!"
It raised a hand, and reality bent to its will.
"GRAVITY CRUSH!" The air around Nowa became a thousand times heavier. The marble beneath his feet shattered into powder. His bones screamed. But he was already moving, not through the gravity, but with it, letting the weight carry him into a roll that slipped beneath the crushing field.
"SPATIAL MAW!" The ground in front of him tore open, a mouth void where matter ceased to exist. Nowa's momentum should have carried him straight into it. Instead, he kicked off a chunk of falling debris mid-run, using the broken marble as a springboard to arc over the hungry mouth.
"TEMPORAL STUTTER!" Time fractured around him. One moment he was mid-air. The next he was three steps back, his own timeline glitching. The god's next attack, a lance of pure energy, should have impaled him. But Nowa had already learned the rhythm of the stutter. He threw himself sideways a heartbeat before the fracture, and when time snapped back, the lance passed through empty air.
"REALITY CASCADE!" The world around him became a waterfall of broken physics. Gravity reversed. Light bent sideways. The ground became sky and the sky became fire. Nowa ran through it, barefoot on nothing, navigating the chaos by raw instinct. He had spent years fighting gods. He had trained under Bion. He had learned that reality was just another opponent, and every opponent had patterns.
"CONCEPTUAL BINDING!" Chains of pure meaning wrapped around his limbs, not physical restraints, but fundamental laws. You cannot move. You cannot resist. You cannot exist. Nowa felt the commands trying to overwrite his being. But he had already surrendered his future. He had no fate for the chains to anchor to. He had given up everything that could be taken from him. The bindings passed through him like smoke.
"ABSOLUTE ZERO FIELD!" The temperature around him plummeted to the point where even atoms stopped moving. Frost coated his skin. His breath crystallized in the air. But his body, the body that had steamed water off itself since birth, had never been touched by cold. The frost melted as fast as it formed. He kept running.
"VOID IMPLOSION!" A sphere of nothing erupted where he had stood a heartbeat before. Nowa dove, rolled, and came up sprinting, the void snapping shut behind him.
"DIMENSIONAL SHEAR!" The space around him split into parallel realities, each one trying to pull him apart. Nowa jumped, not toward any single dimension, but through the gaps, the narrow seams of fractured space. He had no special sight. He didn't need it. He had spent three years erasing pantheons. He knew the feel of breaking reality. He could read the fractures in his bones.
"SOUL SEVERANCE!" A blade of pure divine will swung at his spirit. It should have cut him in half. But Nowa's soul was already a patchwork of wounds, the pit, the slaughter, the trashbin, the laughter. The blade found nothing whole to sever. It passed through the cracks.
"RECURSIVE NIGHTMARE!" The god forced Nowa's mind into a loop of his worst memories. Amy. The alley. Fenlia. The cross beside her grave. The laughter in the trashbin. Over and over. Nowa stumbled, his first falter and the god's fist of solidified reality caught him across the jaw, sending him skidding across the broken marble.
He pushed himself up. Blood dripped from his lip. His grin had not wavered.
"FINALITY DECREE!" The god spoke the word that meant ending. The word that meant conclusion. The word that meant nothing comes after this.
Silence.
The god lowered its hand, breathing hard. The divine words still echoed in the shattered air.
Nowa stood up. Slowly. Deliberately.
"I already died five times," he said, wiping the blood from his mouth. "In an alley, watching Amy die, Lancer and Bion dying, my daughter dying, in a trashbin. What more could the universe take from me."
The god's eyes widened. "Impossible… that decree is absolute. It cannot be—"
"Your rules." Nowa cracked his neck. "Not mine."
He had been running, dodging, weaving, not to survive, but to study. Every attack the god used, he catalogued. Every manipulation of reality, he analyzed. He had spent three years fighting gods alone. He had learned that reality was not a force of nature. It was a language. And every language had grammar.
The god had cut off his connection to the Voidflame. Fine. The god had rewritten the laws of physics around him. Fine. But the god had also, in its arrogance, shown him exactly how it controlled reality. Every attack was a lesson. Every manipulation was a demonstration. The god had spent a minute trying to kill him. Nowa had spent that minute learning the shape of the cage.
The Voidflame flickered at his fingertips. Not fully restored—the severance was still in place, but a spark. Enough.
"Reality controller," Nowa said, the tiny flame dancing on his palm. "You forgot something."
The god took a step back.
"If you control reality… then reality can be understood. And if it can be understood—" The Voidflame roared back to full life, burning through the severance, his power returning. "—it can be broken."
The god raised both hands, summoning every law, every rule, every fundamental principle it commanded.
"If there's a broken hole." Nowa grinned. "Then there's a way."
His movement blurred as he detonated himself, slamming the voidflame palm into the deity, and when he made contact, the god's stomach simply vanished, erased from existence.
The colossal being trembled, clutching at the void where its guts had been. "You fool! Do you think there will be no consequences?! The moment I die, this universe collapses!"
Nowa landed. "That won't be an issue," his voice was flat. He held up a glowing rune gem, intricate beyond comprehension. "I intend to replace you with my Framework Rune… I've learned that killing you all means the end of the multiverse after all… So I create and replace each one of you. A more efficient system than your whimsical judgment."
The god let out a guttural growl. "You think you are above us?!"
"No," Nowa replied. "But I will ensure every last one of you is erased and replaced. A better, forgivable and fair order."
In a single, silent motion, Nowa unleashed the flame. A wave of absolute blackness expanded from him. It did not burn; it un-wrote. The dragon-octopus god, its throne, and the entire upper half of the cathedral ceased to exist, replaced by a perfect, star-dusted void. The only things spared were the terrified onlookers on the floor, left to witness the terrifying silence of a universe now governed by a new, systematic and forgiving law it lacked before. He vanished before any of the onlookers could state their voice.
The memory shifted. On another world, under a bruised purple sky, the last member of the Equilibrium was fleeing from the walking apocalypse that pursued him. The god ran with the desperate, stumbling posture of prey that already knew it was dead.
BOOM. A shot obliterated the god's left leg at the knee. He collapsed to the ground with a scream, ichor pooling beneath him. He twisted onto his back, raising his remaining hand in a desperate stop gesture.
"Stop! Please stop!" he shrieked, dragging himself backward across the cracked earth.
Nowa's steps didn't falter.
"Why… why?! What have I done to deserve this?!"
Nowa stopped. His eyes narrowed. "...What have you done?" His voice was quiet, almost incredulous. "Are you fucking kidding me?"
"If you're talking about the death of your loved ones, I had nothing to do with it—"
BOOM. Another shot tore the god's right arm off at the shoulder. The divine flesh vaporized before it hit the ground.
"Nothing…?!" Nowa's teeth grinded together, his jaw locking with fury. "When I begged you people to save Amy, where were you?! When I was still hopeful, when I still believed in kindness, what did you people do?! When I was protecting the ones I loved…" His voice dropped.
"What. Did. You. Do."
"I DID NOTHING, DAMMIT!" the god cried, tears streaming down his face.
Nowa paused. The silence stretched. Then the fury erupted.
"YOU BEINGS ARE THE MOST USELESS THING IN EXISTENCE!" His voice tore through the air like a physical force. He reached out, not with his hand but with his will, seizing the fabric of existence itself and yanking the god toward him. The deity's broken body skidded across the scorched earth, helpless, and Nowa's fist was already waiting.
"WHO FORCED ME TO SURVIVE A CHILDHOOD OF TRAUMA AND HUNGER?!" His knuckles shattered the god's jaw. Divine ichor sprayed across his arm.
"WHO FORCED ME TO WATCH MY LOVED ONES DIE?!" Another punch. The god's cheekbone crumpled. Teeth scattered across the dirt.
"WHO FORCED ME, A CHILD, TO FIGHT A WAR THAT WASN'T MINE?!" He drove his fist into the god's face again and again, each impact a wet, grinding crunch, until the features were unrecognizable, a ruin of pulped flesh and splintered bone.
"WHO FORCED ME TO BELIEVE THERE WAS STILL HOPE?!"
His fist hung in the air, trembling. The god's face was gone. What remained was a crater of divine flesh, barely recognizable as something that had once been alive. And still the god breathed. Still it clung to existence, refusing to die.
The pummeling stopped. Nowa's chest breathed. His knuckles were raw, bleeding, his own blood mixing with the ichor that coated his arm. He stared down at the ruin he had made, and the god stared back through the shattered remains of its eyes.
Tears ran down both their faces. The Cosmic Slayer and the last god. Two beings who had once been something else. Two beings who had lost everything and become this.
"You– erased the– innocent members– of our order from– history," the god whispered through broken teeth. "My friends. I was– one of them. And we weren't– even there– when the war started."
"So what."
"My friends… I was one of them… And we weren't even there when the war started…"
"So what?!" Nowa's voice cracked. "I was robbed! Of my childhood. My freedom. Of love. Of kindness. Of my family!"
"I did nothing—"
"THAT'S ENOUGH!" Nowa's chest breathed. He stood over the broken god. "You beings. Gods…" He paused. "Gods. You all should have done your jobs properly! Help people in need! Help the helpless!" He gestured to himself, to the blood on his hands, to the predator's grin that had become his only expression. "Look at me. Look what I've become! It is all because of you insignificant beings!"
He stared down at the god, and for a moment, something flickered behind the wrath, something tired. Something that had been screaming since the alley.
"You call yourselves gods? What a complete joke." He raised his palm down. "If you beings are useless… then gods shouldn't exist in the first place!"
He aimed, and with a final, merciful burst of Voidflame, he ended the being's suffering.
The silence that followed was absolute.
His vengeance was complete. He had erased every pantheon in his home multiverse. Every Equilibrium god who had ever been worshipped, every divine Equilibrium being who had ever claimed authority over mortal lives, gone. By his hand. For his family. For Amy. For Fenlia. For Lancer. For Bion.
And it felt like nothing.
An absolute, howling void where satisfaction should have been. He stood alone on the scorched earth, surrounded by the silence of a universe that no longer had Equilibrium's faction, and he felt nothing at all.
He tried laughing. The sound was hollow, a dry rattle that died in his throat. He tried despairing, but his despair was shallow, a well that had been drained empty years ago. He tried thinking of positivity, of Bion's voice telling him to dwell on hope, but the thought slipped away before it could form.
He couldn't face Chris. He couldn't face Kai or Shin. The thought of their eyes on him, the brother who had pulled him from the pit, the cambions he had helped save, was a physical ache in his chest. What would he even say? The war was over. He had won. And the victory was empty.
He fell to his knees, looking upward at the bruised sky. His voice came out as a whimper, fragile and lost.
"Why… why do I care about others… when I am living in my own hell?" The question was not a prayer. He had stopped praying long ago. It was just a cry into the void. "Someone… please, tell me…"
The void gave no answer.
The memory shifted one last time. He stood on the original planet, the world where he had been born, where Amy had found him, where everything had begun and ended. Before him stood two simple crosses, weathered by wind and time. Amy. Fenlia. The two people he had loved most. The two people he had killed.
He knelt. The tears that fell onto the dry earth were the first honest expression of grief he had allowed himself in years, not the calculated sorrow of a performance, not the hollow echo of a heart too scarred to feel. Just grief. Raw and unadorned.
His body gave out. He collapsed forward, his arm hitting the dirt, and a broken, whimpering shriek was torn from his throat.
"I'm sorry… Mama… Fenlia… I'm sorry…"
He stayed there, prostrating before the graves. The Cosmic Slayer, the Dead End of Stories, the predator who had ended pantheons, was just a man. A man who had been a boy. A boy who had loved his mother and his daughter and had lost them both.
The memory, saturated with this ultimate despair, finally released its hold. It drifted upward, carrying him away from the graves, away from the silence, away from the nothing at the end of the road. It swam through the fragments of his unconscious mind and surfaced into the present, to the worried faces gathered around his bed in the Scarlet Devil Mansion, and to the consequences of the monster he had made of himself.