Xerva 213, 11:59 p.m., Sphinx, Borysthenis Star System, Eridanus Gaxy, Cyus Universe.

  The void screamed as Kaelion's fist collided with Tharazen's halberd, a deafening shockwave detonating between them. The impact sent out a rippling concussion of pure force, ripping through the very fabric of space. Bck fissures spiderwebbed outward, crackling like shattered gss holding back an abyss of unformed existence.

  Golden radiance cshed against crimson destruction, light and fury made manifest, the sheer energy atomizing three nearby pnets with a sickening, soundless implosion. The taste of burnt ozone and raw, ionized metal lingered in the void, the remnants of obliterated worlds scattering like dust motes caught in a cosmic wind.

  Lesser cultivators, their souls trembling in their vessels, fled like rats from a colpsing temple. Even those who stood at the precipice of immortality felt their bones vibrate from the resonance of these two titans, the battlefield twisting and convulsing under forces beyond mortal comprehension.

  Tharazen's ughter boomed across light-years, the sound like splitting tectonic ptes, a primal, grating reverberation that made weaker souls clutch their chests in agony. His breath was molten, each exhale warping the space before him in heat shimmers, distorting reality itself. His obsidian horns gleamed like polished onyx, etched with ancient, forbidden runes that pulsed in eerie synchronicity with the murderous thrum of his bckened heart. The air, or what passed for it in this abyssal battleground, carried the acrid tang of scorched void-stuff, a scentless stench that burned the mind rather than the nose.

  "KAELION!" The name was a war cry and a death sentence, flung across the battlefield with the weight of a colpsing sun. Tharazen's rage-drenched voice rattled the marrow of all who heard it, a sound that made entire star systems tremble in their orbits.

  Kaelion wiped blood from his lips with the back of his hand, smearing gold across his knuckles. The taste of iron and divinity mixed on his tongue, bittersweet and electric. His white robes, impossibly pristine despite the carnage, whispered around his frame, the embroidered sigils of his sect shimmering as though whispering forgotten prayers. His golden eyes locked onto Tharazen’s, unblinking, fathomless, an ocean of calm before a storm that would swallow the cosmos itself.

  The stillness before the next csh was the sharp inhale of a universe on the brink. Then—

  Tharazen’s Empyrean Zone erupted outward.

  The void screamed as the weight of his will distorted existence itself. Space turned getinous, time convulsed. The unseen force carried the pressure of a colpsing singurity, crushing atoms into dust. A grotesque, twisting groan filled the battlefield as reality resisted, but only barely.

  "Gravity Maelstrom!"

  The halberd descended like judgment itself, the airless vacuum singing a high, thin keening as the weapon cut through space. It was weight incarnate, a bde that carried the burden of infinite force, bending light around its crimson edge. Stars shuddered, their ancient fmes flickering as gravity twisted their cores in submission. The swing was a tidal wave of absolute obliteration.

  And then—

  Time fractured.

  It wasn’t a pause. It was a catastrophic rupture, a jagged, raw break in reality that sent shockwaves through the very concept of causality.

  Kaelion moved.

  His fists became golden phantoms, each blow a whisper of motion too fast for time itself to contain. The smell of burning space filled the void, the friction of impossible speed igniting the atmosphere of a dying world light-years away.

  "Chrono Blitz!"

  Fist met flesh. Bones cracked in muted echoes across dimensions. Each strike was a detonation of raw force, nding in pockets of fractured time where defenses were meaningless. Tharazen’s ribs shattered like brittle onyx, his colossal frame whipping backward, spinning like a celestial body torn from its orbit.

  Then—impact.

  His body pierced a pnet’s crust, the detonation ripping its core apart in an instant. A wave of molten rock and atomized metal washed over the void, glowing tendrils of pnetary entrails stretching outward before fizzling into stardust.

  But Tharazen emerged ughing.

  His ughter was a chorus of madness, yered echoes of a thousand victorious battle cries from a thousand past lives. His wounds sealed with wet, grisly sounds, draconic blood fizzing like alchemical fire, knitting flesh back together with disturbing efficiency.

  "Finally showing some spine!" Tharazen's voice shook the cosmos itself, the vibrations turning floating debris into dust. "The Dao of Time itself? You always were an overreaching bastard!"

  A burly cultivator in the distant crowd, barely able to breathe in the warping atmosphere, let out a low whistle. "Unprecedented… both of them are… pushing beyond known limi—"

  His words died on his lips.

  Because Tharazen grinned.

  Then, with a crack of splitting dimensions, the battlefield fractured.

  Shadows bled into existence.

  A hundred. No, a thousand.

  The air became thick with the scent of ozone and something darker— something primal, like the musk of a beast too rge to be hunted. The temperature plummeted, the creeping cold of a thousand phantom presences suffocating reality.

  "INFINITE DOMINION!"

  The void breathed murder.

  The clones surged forward, each carrying Tharazen's exact malice, each swinging their halberds in a symphony of screaming steel. The battlefield became a red-streaked hurricane, a sughterhouse of flickering images and screaming metal.

  Kaelion's body twisted between bdes, but even he couldn't avoid them all.

  A halberd bit into his shoulder, the wound blossoming like a ruptured star, golden blood spraying in a wide arc. Another tore into his thigh, nerve endings screaming in protest, his pristine robes turning vermilion with divine ichor.

  Yet—he still smiled.

  The expression was darker now, almost mocking, his teeth gleaming as he spat golden blood into the void. "Always hiding behind your copies," he sneered. "The great Tharazen Dervucror, too afraid to face me alone!"

  A mistake.

  Tharazen roared, his real form detonating through his illusions like a meteor breaking through clouds.

  "AFRAID?!"

  The force of the word snuffed out distant stars, the sheer depth of his outrage manifesting as a gravity quake that sent debris spiraling into oblivion.

  The halberd swung with the finality of an executioner’s axe.

  Kaelion barely blocked, his bones rattling with the impact, but before he could recover—

  "Gravity Bind."

  The void colpsed around him.

  The pressure was immediate, suffocating, endless.

  His ribs buckled. His vision blurred. Blood trickled from his eyes, his ears, his nose—a grim testament to the strain of merely existing within this prison of absolute force.

  Then, Tharazen's voice seeped into the darkness like a bde against raw nerve.

  "How many of my kin have you killed, Kaelion?"

  A heartbeat of silence.

  Then—

  Kaelion’s eyes changed.

  The shift was imperceptible at first. But then—something broke.

  And in that breaking—vengeance was born.

  Golden light erupted like the birth of a new sun.

  The darkness shattered.

  And Kaelion's roar shook the gaxy itself.

  "YOU BURNED HER ALIVE!"

  The temperature in the void plummeted. Kaelion's Empyrean Zone expanded explosively, its golden light taking on a darker, more menacing hue. Time didn't just stop—it shattered into fragments, each moment splintering into a thousand possibilities.

  Kaelion's fist shot forward, trailing temporal afterimages. It caught Tharazen in the jaw with a crack that echoed across light-years. Before the dragon-blooded warrior could recover, Kaelion was already moving again, his body blurring between frozen moments.

  "Time Fracture Assault!"

  Each punch nded in a different fragment of time, bypassing Tharazen's defenses completely. Bones shattered. Armor cracked. Blood sprayed into the void in frozen droplets as Kaelion's fists turned into instruments of vengeance.

  Tharazen roared in pain and fury, his own aura exploding outward to match Kaelion's rage. "You self-righteous HYPOCRITE!" His halberd swept out in a devastating arc, trailing crimson death. "She attacked our young! What was I supposed to do?!"

  The weapon caught Kaelion in the chest, tearing through flesh and bone. But instead of falling back, Kaelion grabbed the halberd's shaft, blood pouring from his ruined torso.

  "She was SIXTEEN!" Kaelion's free hand formed a fist wreathed in golden fire. "A child who got caught in YOUR feud!"

  The punch connected with Tharazen's face, shattering his left horn and sending him spiraling through space. But Tharazen recovered almost instantly, his draconic bloodline healing the damage even as he moved.

  "ENOUGH!" Tharazen's form began to shift, scales erupting across his skin. "I'll show you true power, you arrogant worm!"

  His humanoid form dissolved into pure crimson light as his true shape emerged—a cosmic dragon of impossible proportions. Each scale gleamed like a river of blood, each tooth longer than mountains. His wings spread across the void, casting shadows over entire star systems.

  But Kaelion didn't back down. His own power surged to match, the Heaven Devouring Physique activating fully. Golden cracks spread across his skin as his body began absorbing the very essence of destruction around them.

  "Come then, dragon!" Kaelion's voice boomed across space, all pretense of serenity abandoned. "Let's finish what our ancestors started!"

  The dragon's maw opened wide, gathering power that made reality itself scream in protest. "SOVEREIGN TYRANT'S CATACLYSM!"

  A beam of pure annihition erupted forth, its crimson light consuming everything in its path. Stars, pnets, entire systems—all vanished into nothingness as the attack carved a line of absolute destruction through space.

  Time stopped.

  Not the gentle pause of Kaelion's earlier techniques, but a violent shattering of temporal w itself. His fists blurred into countless strikes, each one carrying the weight of a thousand moments compressed into a single point of impact.

  "HEAVEN-RENDING FIST!"

  Golden light met crimson death in an explosion that defied comprehension. The csh of their powers created a cataclysm that rippled across the gaxy, destroying everything it touched. Space itself began to tear apart under the strain.

  In that final moment, as reality buckled around them, both warriors caught a glimpse of something beyond—a higher realm of power that no cultivator had reached in recorded history. The mythical Empyrean Overlord Realm beckoned, promising power beyond imagination.

  But it was too te. The force of their csh had torn a hole in space itself, a wormhole born from the death throes of their battle. The st thing anyone saw was Kaelion's broken form being pulled into the spatial tear, his golden light flickering like a dying star.

  Tharazen's massive dragon form had already begun to disintegrate, consumed by his own power. His final roar of fury echoed across the cosmos as his body scattered into motes of crimson light, leaving nothing behind but the memory of his overwhelming presence.

  The void trembled in the aftermath. Silence reigned, a heavy, suffocating thing, but it was not true silence. Space itself groaned where it had been torn apart, reality struggling to knit itself back together. The air—if there had been any—would have reeked of burning ozone and the acrid tang of cosmic destruction. Instead, only the sensation of absolute ruin remained, a raw presence that clung to the survivors like ghostly ash.

  Fragments of shattered pnets drifted aimlessly, their surfaces seared bck from exposure to raw energy. The wreckage of ancient spirit vessels floated in the void, their once-proud runes flickering like dying embers. Cultivators who had barely survived clutched their chests, the lingering force of the battle pressing against their souls like an iron brand. Those closest to the battlefield found their robes in tatters, their skin marked with unseen burns from the sheer intensity of the csh. Some coughed up blood, the pressure of absolute power having ruptured something deep within.

  And then—Kaelion was gone.

  The st golden flicker of his existence had been swallowed by the colpsing wormhole, leaving only the echo of his power in the shattered remains of space. For the first time in what felt like eternity, Tharazen was silent. His form, no longer solid, bled into the cosmos, crimson embers dispersing like scattered fireflies. What remained of his consciousness flickered in and out, tasting the bitter edge of oblivion.

  The watching cultivators, those who had not been turned to dust or driven to madness by witnessing power beyond their comprehension, stared into the ruined battlefield. Someone exhaled, a shaky, disbelieving breath that sounded deafening in the eerie quiet.

  “Gone,” a voice murmured. It was barely more than a whisper, but in the raw stillness of space, it carried.

  The burly cultivator from before wiped at his face, only to find his fingers trembling. His spirit ached, his bones felt carved from lead, and his mouth was dry with the taste of lingering energy—like scorched air and something metallic, something wrong. He licked his lips, but it did nothing to rid him of the feeling that he had just witnessed something that should never have been possible.

  Across the void, another survivor drifted near the remains of a shattered spirit vessel, their breaths ragged. “Did… did they reach it?” Their voice was hoarse, barely audible.

  No one answered.

  They had all seen it—that impossible moment where the csh of their powers had opened something beyond the reach of mortals. A glimpse of the Empyrean Overlord Realm, a power beyond even their myths. But if Kaelion had reached for it, he had been swallowed instead, torn from existence before he could grasp what y beyond.

  A younger cultivator, his eyes still wide with shock, clutched at the frayed edges of his robes. His heart thundered in his chest, each beat a reminder that he was still alive when others were not. “So that’s what it takes…” he muttered, mostly to himself. “To push past the limits.”

  A cold wind should have blown through the ruins of the battlefield, carrying the smell of scorched flesh, of blood burned away by cosmic energies. Instead, there was only the emptiness of space, the void swallowing all things.

  Somewhere, far in the distance, a fragment of a destroyed pnet turned zily, the molten edges cooling into jagged obsidian. The remains of a world lost in a battle that had no victor.

  Kaelion had vanished.

  Tharazen had been unmade.

  And the gaxy would never forget the day two gods cshed—and shattered everything in their wake.