There is a profound, malicious joy in watching a kaiju fight when you are sitting in the nosebleeds with a bucket of popcorn.

  Or, in my case, sitting on a ridge thirty miles away, shielded by the [Nullifying Veil], while eating a protein bar and piloting a mana-clone.

  Below, in the crater that used to be a city, theology and physics were having a violent argument.

  The Abyssal Ravager, Zareth’s “guest” from the Third Layer, didn’t move like a biological creature. It moved like a glitch. The massive centipede-wolf hybrid phased through the ruined buildings, its thousand legs not touching the ground but seemingly ripping traction out of the air itself.

  Against it, Malak-Thul, the Herald of the Synod, was a monument to terrible order. Its six wings of grey scripture didn’t flap; they shifted, rewriting the air pressure to keep the entity afloat.

  “Clone,” I commanded mentally, projecting my will like a pilot flying a drone. “Go for the knees. Ravager, take the head.”

  Down in the arena, my Clone laughed. It was a sound amplified by mana, echoing across the valley.

  “With pleasure!”

  The Clone — a suicidal construct with all of my aggression and none of my survival instinct — [Void Walked] directly onto the Angel’s chest.

  The Herald reacted instantly. It raised its scythe, a weapon that looked like a cutout of the night sky.

  “Order,” the Herald projected.

  The air around the Clone turned into solid crystal. A type of Stasis lock, attempting to stop my Echo from teleporting.

  But I was piloting.

  “Edict: Entropy,” I whispered on the ridge.

  The Clone mimicked the command. The [Domain of the Ashen Phoenix] flared inside the crystal. The stasis shattered into sparkling dust. The Clone didn’t stop; it drove a fist wrapped in the [Void-Star’s Hunger] into the Herald’s weeping mask.

  The impact rang like a struck gong.

  The Herald reeled back, black oil spraying from the crack in its face.

  Before it could recover, the Ravager struck. The Void-Beast unhinged its jaw — a maw of rotating, fractal teeth — and bit down on the Angel’s left wing.

  There was a sound like metal tearing.

  The Herald shrieked — a digital, screeching glitch-noise. The Ravager tore a chunk of the scroll-wing off and swallowed it. The scrolls turned to ash in the beast’s stomach, feeding the Void.

  “It works,” I analyzed, watching the mana values fluctuate via my Perception. “The Synod’s power is Bureaucracy. Contracts. Rules. They impose rules on reality. But the Void is the absence of rules. We are the anarchists burning down the courthouse.”

  Azrael didn’t like that.

  Standing atop his cocooned tower, the Necromancer screamed.

  “Blasphemy! You dare consume the Word?”

  He slammed his staff down.

  The ground around the Titans erupted.

  “Rise! Grave-Guardians! Gabriel’s Horn has spoken!”

  He wasn’t done. He pulled souls from the reserve.

  Four massive crypts exploded open. Out rode four Horsemen — towering constructs of bone and green fire, wielding lances made of spinal columns. One rode a skeletal steed breathing plague; another, a mount of burning famine.

  “Conquest, War, Famine, Death,” I muttered. “A bit on the nose, Azrael. Classic Apocalypse tropes. Tier 6 Elites though.”

  Azrael transformed. The shadows wrapped around him, turning him back into that colossus of black armor I had fought before, but larger. A customized war-form. He launched himself at the Clone.

  “I will tear your soul out, Eren Kai! You will not stop the Silence!” Azrael roared, swinging a scythe of his own.

  My Clone dodged, dancing backward in the air.

  “Get in line!” the Clone taunted, then turned to the Ravager. “Big guy! Handle the angel! I’ll take the trash!”

  The fight became a chaotic blur.

  The Ravager wrestled the Herald, tentacles wrapping around the Angel’s limbs to stop it from casting its Reality-Erase spells. Every time the Herald tried to speak an Edict, the Ravager would just vomit void-acid into its mouth.

  Meanwhile, my Clone was fighting a one-man war against Azrael and his Four Horsemen.

  “Right side, gravity implosion,” I muttered, twitching my finger on the ridge.

  The Clone ducked a bone-lance from War, grabbed the Horseman by the helm, and used [Apex Mana Authority] to invert the gravity inside the armor.

  The Horseman folded in on itself like a crushed soda can.

  “Three left,” the Clone announced.

  Famine rode forward, swinging scales that tipped toward decay. A wave of starving mana washed over the Clone.

  “My hunger is bigger than yours!” the Clone shouted.

  He opened his hands.

  [The Void-Star’s Hunger].

  A vortex of black spiraled out of his palms. The starvation curse was sucked in, pulverized, and converted into raw mana to refuel the Clone’s reserves.

  “Thanks for the refill!” the Clone shouted.

  “How?!” Azrael screamed, his composure cracking. “My decay… it should rot you! It ages all types of magic!”

  “I’m not magic,” the Clone smirked, borrowing my favorite line. “I’m a hungry math problem.”

  It was… honestly, a little exhilarating to watch. Is this how opponents felt fighting me? Just pure, unadulterated frustration against a target that refuses to play by the physics engine?

  Stolen story; please report.

  The Herald, noticing his summoner struggling, disengaged from the Ravager with a burst of blinding white light. It floated higher, above the city.

  The vertical slit on its face tore open completely. The sound of a thousand trumpets blew at once — discordant, terrifying.

  The Horn of Judgement.

  “Oh, not good,” I whispered. “That’s the Seven Seals being broken simultaneously.”

  The sky turned red. Meteors of green fire began to rain down. The earth split open, revealing magma veins.

  “Ravager!” I mentally commanded. “Intercept!”

  The Ravager roared and leaped into the sky, creating a platform of void-glass to jump from. It intercepted a meteor the size of a building, swallowing it whole.

  But the Herald wasn’t done. It pointed a finger at the Clone.

  “Edict: Penance.”

  Chains of gold light erupted from the ground, binding the Clone’s arms and legs.

  “Hey!” the Clone shouted. “Personal space!”

  Azrael seized the opportunity. He lunged forward, his scythe glowing with the souls of the sacrificed millions.

  “Judgment is here!”

  He swung. The clone barely dodged, raising his empowered arm to use it to deflect at the last moment. The scythe cleaved right through.

  The limb fell off, turning into dissipating mana.

  “Ouch,” I winced on the ridge. “That feedback stings.”

  The Clone didn’t falter. He regenerated the arm instantly, but instead of flesh, he formed a blade of pure Void-matter.

  “Judgment denied,” the Clone snarled.

  He met Azrael’s next swing with the void-blade. The weapons clashed, sparking black lightning that tore rifts in the atmosphere.

  “Okay, go all out,” I ordered. “The Herald is charging something again.”

  The Angel, heavily damaged, its wings tattered, began to glow. That Halo I had seen in the Glimpse appeared.

  “The Final Verse,” the Herald intoned, its voice distorted and broken.

  It was trying to nuke the board.

  “Ravager!” I commanded. “Try to see if you can eat the Halo!”

  The Void Beast didn’t hesitate. It abandoned defense. It lunged upward, unhinging its jaw to an impossible degree.

  As the Halo of white ‘End-Time’ light formed, the Ravager bit it.

  It didn’t explode. It imploded. The interaction between Absolute End and Infinite Hunger created a localized singularity.

  The Herald looked up, its eyeless face confused for the first time.

  “Null?”

  The Ravager slammed the Herald into the ground.

  Azrael watched his god fall. He watched his city crumble. He watched his invincible army turned into snacks.

  And he snapped.

  “No…” Azrael whispered, floating in the air, his armor smoking. “No. I will not be a footnote. If I cannot save this world… I will judge it.”

  He turned to my Clone.

  He dropped his weapon. He ripped the armor off his chest, exposing his actual body underneath — a withered, grey husk of a man with a glowing green hole where his heart should be.

  “Mutual Damnation!”

  It wasn’t a spell. It was a suicide tether. A Soul Sacrifice.

  A chain of burning green light shot out of Azrael’s chest.

  My Clone, currently busy ripping the head off the second Horseman, didn’t dodge in time.

  The chain connected.

  “Gotcha!” I winced on the ridge. “That’s… that’s high level Soul magic. If that hit me, it would try to burn my actual soul to fuel his ascension.”

  Down below, Azrael laughed maniacally. His body began to disintegrate, burning away into light to power the curse.

  “Die with me, Void-Walker! Our souls are linked! I burn, you burn! Let us go to the Silence together!”

  He waited for the scream. He waited for the terror.

  My Clone just looked down at the green chain connecting them.

  Then he looked up at Azrael.

  And he tilted his head.

  “Dude,” the Clone said.

  Azrael froze. He was burning, his skin flaking away, pouring his very essence into the link to kill his enemy.

  But nothing was flowing back.

  The chain was hooked into… nothing. It was like trying to siphon water from an empty bucket. The Clone had mana, sure. It had a personality matrix. But it didn’t have a Soul.

  “What?” Azrael gasped, his eyes widening as his legs dissolved into ash. “Where… where is your Soul?”

  The Clone pointed a thumb over its shoulder, vaguely toward the mountains.

  “Remote work,” the Clone grinned. “Boss is working from home today.”

  Azrael stared.

  The realization hit him harder than any Void attack.

  “A… puppet?” he whispered. The sheer indignity of it washed over him. He hadn’t been fighting a rival human. He had fought a decoy. He was sacrificing his existence to kill a disposable construct.

  “No…” Azrael whimpered. “But… you are a coward!”

  “Nah,” the Clone said, stepping back as Azrael’s core went critical. “I think your ride is here.”

  The Clone looked up at the sky.

  “Sovereign!” the Clone shouted into the link. “It’s been a blast! Literally!”

  I offered a small mental salute.

  “Good job, me.”

  Azrael detonated.

  It wasn’t a fire explosion. It was a release of the Judgment energy he had stored. A sphere of pure, blinding white expanded outward.

  It swallowed the Herald, vaporizing the damaged angel instantly.

  It swallowed the Clone, who accepted it with open arms.

  It swallowed the Ravager, who shrieked and portal-jumped back to the Void Layer just microseconds before impact.

  The sphere expanded to the city limits, erasing the Bone Fortress, the Tower, the taint, and the history of the Pale Dominion in a single, blinding flash of rejection.

  On the ridge, thirty miles away, the wind from the shockwave nearly knocked me over.

  I sat there for a moment, listening to the thunder roll past.

  When the dust cleared, there was no city. No miasma.

  Just a massive, smoking crater in the earth, purified by the fire of a fanatic who tried to burn a ghost.

  Nexus Delta-31 was… erased.

  I took a bite of my nutrient dense bar. It tasted good, but the victory was sweeter.

  I stayed seated on the ridge, looking up at the sky above the crater, reflecting on the encounter. Zareth’s summon was impressive. Terrifyingly impressive. Azrael had to sacrifice over ninety percent of his entire Undead arsenal only to lose to something my Anima summoned within a minute. I hadn’t expected such a powerful Void beast, especially considering it being “uncivilized”. The Void was truly horrifying.

  “Jeeves, remind me to give Zareth a proper—”

  For a brief, terrifying second, I felt something.

  Not the Kyorians. Not Azrael.

  It was a Gaze. Distant, cold, and immensely heavy. Like a star had just opened an eye and focused a telescope on this specific coordinate. The Umbral Synod. They had noticed the sudden silence of their trumpet.

  Then, just as quickly, it was cut off.

  A shimmer of blue grid-lines appeared in the upper atmosphere. It wasn’t a barrier I recognized. But I recognized the same ancient Essence I have felt many times before. The Prime System itself.

  [External Interference Blocked.]

  [Planetary Quarantine Reinforced.]

  The gaze was severed.

  I exhaled a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

  “The Prime System,” I murmured. “It stepped in. It protected the Sandbox.”

  “Master?” Jeeves asked. “No hostile Essence signatures detected in your area.”

  “Yeah, it’s done,” I said, standing up. “Azrael was trying to invite a Titan to tea, and we obliged.”

  I looked at the smoking crater.

  “So the Synod is under the System too,” I analyzed. “Or at least subject to its jurisdictional boundaries. That makes things interesting. We aren’t just fighting wars; we’re fighting within a ruleset none of us fully understand yet.”

  I turned away from the ruin. The immediate threat was gone. The miasma was gone.

  “I’m coming home, Jeeves. I need to make sure Korg isn’t trying to invite his own eldritch horrors to the party while I was busy cleaning up this mess.”

  But as I portal-jumped away, I couldn’t shake the feeling of that heavy Gaze. The System protected us for now.

  But systems can be bypassed.

  I let the thought simmer, the deadline for the Coronation was ticking.