3rd POV
Time did not flow in the Timestream.
It hunted.
Moments twisted upon themselves, past and future tearing into one another in a ceaseless frenzy. Thought could not exist here. Identity could not endure. Any being cast into this current would be torn apart, their mind scattered across a thousand broken timelines. Unless one was blessed by time itself.
And yet…
In that endless expanse, something remained unaffected and unbent.
She moved through it as if it were nothing more than another hunting ground.
As if the laws that governed all existence simply did not apply to her.
Valka Fors looked upon the world with the bored eyes of a predator.
The currents bent around her presence. Not out of respect, but because they could not touch her. Time moved, clawed, and pressed against her being, trying to unravel what stood before it, but it failed again and again.
"You came all alone."
The Timestream recoiled as a black sphere began to form. It pulsed, stretching outward, resisting the flow that sought to tear it apart.
Then it began to take shape.
Limbs forced themselves into existence. Clawed, massive arms tore free first, followed by a torso wrapped in dense darkness. Legs formed and spikes pushed outward from its back, shoulders, elbows.
At its center, a white skull mask emerged.
Within its hollow sockets, crimson light burned.
A third eye split open across its forehead.
"Ah, can you feel my power, human? I have ascended. So this is what divinity feels like. I am a Paradeus of Time and Darkness—"
WHUMP
The sound was not a crack or a snap, but a heavy, existence crushing weight.
For a brief, impossible instant, even the flow of the time hesitated.
The demon's voice died in its throat.
In utter disbelief, the demon looked down to see that his newly reinforced body, a vessel he believed to be the pinnacle of evolution, had a gaping hole blown through the center of its chest.
The darkness that made up its body tried to close, tried to reclaim what had been lost, but something lingered within the wound. Something that did not allow it to mend.
Its newly gained divinity stalled.
Even with Cognitive Acceleration activated the whole time, his thoughts running a thousand times faster, he had not seen her move. There had been no shift in mana, no distortion it could perceive, even with foresight, it could not see her move. One moment it stood whole, the next it did not.
The third eye flared open wider, crimson light surging as it searched, rewinding, pushing against the stream to find the moment of impact.
There was nothing.
No cause and only the result.
"Don't misunderstand."
Valka's petrifying voice rang through the silence, stripped of its playful tone and its teasing giggles. There was a intensity to her words that suggested she was no longer speaking with just a human throat.
"There will be no more talking now. I don't need to worry about the world or my people anymore. I don't have to hold back my hands for fear of destroying the ground I walk on or the sky I fly through. Here, in this empty place, I can finally show you the monster you were so desperate to become. I will make you pay for every drop of blood you took from my Sieg."
Valka clenched her fist before her face.
Silver mana seeped from her eyes, not bursting, not flaring, but leaking in a steady, suffocating presence that the Timestream itself could not disperse.
The demon stared at her, a cold realization finally dawning within his three eyes. This woman wasn't special simply because she had given birth to that child. It was the other way around. She was someone who had broken through the fundamental constraints of the world, a force of nature so potent that she was the only one capable of bringing such a destiny into existence.
He understood now that he never truly had a chance of winning. Every moment he had survived until now was not due to his own strength, but a string of insane, impossible luck. It was the same luck that had allowed him to survive the extermination of his race.
"Yes…"
If the universe had let him live this long, he reasoned, then fate itself must refuse to let him die here.
As if the world were answering his desperate plea, a nameless voice echoed deep within his mind.
"Do you wish to win?"
The demon did not understand it, but it did not matter.
"I do."
The response came without hesitation.
At once, something broke open inside his mind.
In an instant, a torrent of forbidden information poured into his mind. Utilizing a state of Cognitive Acceleration paired with Split Cognition, he began to weave the complex threads of a high-level summoning spell, his thoughts moving a thousand times faster than his physical form.
Barely a moment had passed since Valka finished speaking. The demon opened his mouth, trying to buy the precious heartbeats he needed to complete the ritual. "How about—"
He never finished the sentence. A blow caught him squarely in the face, a strike so heavy that he felt his very soul shudder within its dark shell. The impact sent him careening through the turbulent currents of the timestream like a discarded stone. While still in motion, he felt a series of crushing forces collide with his limbs, obliterating his arms and legs in a rapid succession of silver flashes.
He reached for control, forcing telekinetic force outward, trying to seize even a fragment of stability.
For a moment, the momentum faltered.
A moment was all he needed, but it was taken from him.
Another strike came from behind, caving into his spine.
Then from above.
Then from a direction he could not perceive. The assault was relentless, every hit chipping away at the foundation of his soul.
"Slowly feel the pain my Sieg felt."
The voice surrounded him.
The demon could no longer track her movements. He was being toyed with, reduced to a target dummy for a woman whose anger had turned into plain old slaughter.
He tried to defend, but barriers formed and shattered in the same instant. He tried to counter, only for his attacks to strike nothing but empty space. He tried to think, yet each thought fractured and crumbled before it could even reach completion.
The demon's motion came to an abrupt halt.
An unseen force pressed into what remained of its body from every direction, crushing, pinning, denying even the slightest movement. Every time he tried to shift his weight or manifest darkness to heal, the pressure intensified, threatening to collapse him into a single point.
Valka Fors finally stepped into view.
There was no rush in her movement. She approached as one would approach something already dead. Her expression devoid of any human warmth, her eyes carrying a cold detachment as if she were inspecting a particularly disgusting bug that had dared to crawl across her path.
She moved with a speed that defied all logic, she reached out and ripped the third eye directly from the demon's forehead, the sound of tearing metaphysical flesh echoing around.
The demon felt a spike of intense pain that threatened to break his consciousness, but he ground his teeth together and subdued his voice. He refused to give this woman the pleasure of hearing him scream.
He watched through his remaining eyes, blurred by agony, as Valka scoffed at the prize in her hand. She looked at the eye with utter contempt before closing her fist and crushing it into a fine, sparkling dust that drifted away into the currents.
The demon let out a tired, raspy laugh, and he whispered the command that would change everything.
"C-come forth."
A force lashed across Valka Fors with violent intent, a whip of condensed mass that slammed into her and sent her spiraling back through the warped currents. The impact rippled outward, distorting fragments of time around her.
She steadied herself mid flight, halting her momentum with sheer force of will.
Before she could retaliate, massive pyramid-shaped structures materialized around her, locking into a geometric cage that hemmed her in from every axis. Beams of incandescent light, traveling at near-relativistic speeds, erupted from the apex of each pyramid and converged upon her.
A violent burst of energy swallowed her form, light devouring everything in its radius as the pyramids continued their assault without pause. One beam followed another, relentless, unyielding, as if attempting to erase her existence from every moment at once.
The demon's raspy laugh intensified, turning into a guttural roar of triumph as green tentacles extended from above to support his broken body, holding him upright. The appendages wrapped around his torso, weaving through his shattered ribs and stitching his dark flesh back together with terrifying speed. As the third eye on his forehead knitted itself shut and reopened with a fresh power, he looked toward the two titanic entities he had summoned through the ancestral bond of their shared origin.
"Welcome, my brothers."
The first was Ahtael, a gargantuan being whose dome shaped main body was an absolute black, punctuated by a thousand lidless green eyes that peered in every direction at once. Countless tentacles, long as mountain ranges, trailed beneath it.
A being responsible for the fall of countless civilizations that once roamed the stars.
Beside it floated, Krystanna, a colossal, floating crystalline octahedron, formed by two pyramids fused at their base, one rising above and one descending below. Pure white and hauntingly beautiful, its form was as mesmerizing as it was dreadful. Countless worlds that once placed their faith in Aethelhum had been reduced to nothing beneath its presence.
Both of these beings, like the Unending Demons, were born from Darkness itself, thus, they could not ignore the summons of a being so closely related to their origin.
The sound of grinding stone reached the demon. He watched as the attacking pyramids were crushed into a fine sparkling pulp discarded like trash as Valka Fors emerged from the smoke entirely unharmed. Her expression remained bored, her eyes tracking the new arrivals with a dismissive flick of her gaze.
"So this was the brilliant plan? Calling for more to die?" Valka asked, her voice carrying an edge of genuine disappointment. "Is this really the best you could do?"
"No," the demon replied, his voice layering with confidence in his companions. "This is the best we could do."
Valka noticed small green particles beginning to drift down like a toxic snowfall. Her gaze flicked upward. The particles drifted down from Ahtael's massive form.
She swiped her hand through the air, the sheer pressure of her movement clearing the immediate area of the green rain.
In the next instant, she closed the distance, her fist already in motion as it drove forward with enough force to break the very structure of reality, but Krystanna shifted its geometry in an instant, flattening into a massive, multi-layered square shield that interposed itself between her and her prey. The crystalline surface absorbed the impact of her punch, distributing the force across its entire geometric body to neutralize the strike.
The space around them trembled.
"You think this will stop me?" Valka shouted, pulling her fist back to deliver a blow that would break through the crystal once and for all.
Then something warm touched her lips.
A thin stream of golden blood slipped from her mouth.
The strength vanished from her arm. Instead of a battle cry, a sudden, violent cough tore through her throat, and golden blood sprayed across the white crystalline surface of the shield. She covered her mouth in a hurry, her eyes wide with a confusion that quickly sharpened into alarm. She looked down at her arms and saw her veins pulsing with a sickly green light, her muscles beginning to constrict in painful spasms.
The demon watched her, his smile widening.
"How does it feel?"
There was no mockery left. Only extreme satisfaction.
"A virus… that has ended entire worlds. It does not care for your divinity or your strength, it only knows how to consume the life that feeds it."
Krystanna shifted its geometry back to its original octahedron form, its white surfaces lighting up. From every facet of its crystalline body, ten thousand pyramid-shaped shards erupted, locking into a formation around the immobilized woman. They hung around like silent executioners, their apexes glowing with a accumulation of energy. In a coordinated flash that defied the senses, every single shard discharged a particle beam at ninety-nine point nine percent of the speed of light. The concentrated fire struck Valka with cruelty, followed immediately by Krystanna itself unleashing a massive, central particle beam. The sheer magnitude of the combined assault consumed the entire sector, creating violent gravitational distortions that tore at the space, causing the helixes above to extend and twist unnaturally.
At the center of it all, where destruction gathered without mercy, there was nothing left to see.
"How is it?" The demon shouted, "Tell me, why don't you answer, human? You should have killed me when you had the chance, while you still had the strength to move those heavy hands of yours.".
The demon laughed, his voice booming with a satisfaction more profound than any he had felt in his long, blood soaked existence. Unlike others of his kind who took a simple, primal joy in the act of slaughter, his greatest pleasure had always been the manipulation of hope. He loved to grant his prey the illusion of the upper hand, allowing them to believe they were the masters of their own destiny, only to pull the rug out at the moment of their triumph. The taste of a human who had lost everything, whose eyes had become empty husks of despair, was the only thing that truly sated his hunger.
He felt a fleeting moment of genuine sadness that he could not physically consume this woman. He closed his eyes, tilting his skull-mask upward to fully immerse himself in the euphoria of his imagination. He pictured her face, twisted in the very despair he craved, and envisioned a scenario where he restrained her, forcing her to watch as he slowly dismantled and devoured every single thing she held dear. To see her, with all her world-ending strength, rendered completely powerless to stop the slaughter of her precious home and her 'Sieg' would have been the ultimate vintage.
"Ah... Such a waste."
The demon sighed. He allowed himself to linger in that dark daydream for a moment longer, savoring the mental image of the light fading from Valka's eyes as she realized her failure was absolute.
Multiple sounds tore through the battlefield as if something fundamental had just been undone.
The demon opened his eyes, his mind still swimming in the euphoria of his imagined victory, but his vision returned in fragments.
Ahtael lay high above, or what remained of it. The once towering, dome-shaped mass had collapsed inward, crushed from all directions as if the world itself had clenched around it. Its tentacles drifted aimlessly, severed and lifeless, no longer extensions of will but debris without purpose.
Beyond that, something even worse.
Krystanna's vast crystal body hung in the air, tilted unnaturally. A clean, devastating hole in its body, a wound too big to comprehend. Fractures spread outward like last screams and with each passing moment pieces of it broke away, dissolving into nothing.
Its gaze shifted a little down and existential dread settled over him as he realized he was staring at his own headless body.
The realization was followed by an unbelievable pain, a tearing awareness below where its neck should have been. Its perception dragged downward, and there she stood.
Valka Fors.
She held its head in one hand as if it weighed nothing. Her form was unmarred, save for faint burn marks that seemed almost insulting in their insignificance.
"Like I asked, is this really the best you could do?"
Her voice carried the same bored, weary tone she had possessed since the very start of the encounter.
The demon struggled to piece together what had happened. It was a failure of logic. The virus should have rotted her divinity from the inside out, the particle beams traveling at the brink of light speed should have erased her physical existence from the history of the universe.
She should not exist.
"J-just what are you?" the demon asked, the question slipping out not as defiance, but as something far closer to desperation.
"Valka Fors."
That was all.
The answer provided no technical explanation. No big revelation. Just a name.
And yet, those two words pressed down on its consciousness with a weight it could not rationalize, as if they carried meaning far beyond language itself.
Under the fog of his confusion, the demon noticed that his body, though headless, was still responding to his frantic commands. Seeing a final, desperate chance, he reached into the darkest corners of the forbidden knowledge he had gained.
As Valka raised her fist, ready to end everything without ceremony, the demon acted. Its headless body twisted violently, closing the distance with a burst of speed. He pointed two fingers and jabbed them into Valka's spine, screaming the incantation of a unfamiliar language: "⟁⟟⧖ꙮ⩝⟊Ꙩ⧗⟒⩔"
A violent current ran through Valka's body, a curse designed to bypass the flesh and strike directly at the core of the soul. She saw a kaleidoscope of colors flash before her eyes, and for a moment, her body slumped as if life had been snuffed out of her.
For a heartbeat, silence followed as the demon observed for a few seconds.
Then the demon smiled.
"It worked… it actually worked."
A high-grade instant death curse, one refined through countless iterations, designed to bypass all type of resistance, to extinguish existence at its root.
It reached for its body, commanding it to retrieve its head, to complete the act, to consume what remained of her and reclaim dominance.
The body moved to fulfill the command… and then it exploded.
Force erupted outward as something struck it from the side, a single backhand that reduced it to fragments before the motion had even fully registered.
"!!!!!"
"Oh, in the name of that stupid tree... what was that?" Valka Fors slowly straightened her back, rubbing her temples as if she had a mild migraine. "It reminded me of those weird things I once smoked. Ugh, my head. It feels like a massive hangover."
"Impossible... That was a high-grade instant death—"
The demon stopped himself, finally remembering that this woman was someone who had broken through every constraint and law of this world. Measuring her by any known standard was a fool's errand. He began to panic, his thoughts racing in a frantic circle.
"I need to think of something. Something. I can't feel my body anymore. I can't regenerate. I can't reverse time either…"
"Stop running your brain," Valka said quietly, her eyes locking onto his remaining lights. "Tell me, how does it feel to be completely empty-handed after using every single trick in your box? Do you feel… fear?"
The demon felt his very soul shiver. He tried to open his mouth, thinking he could still talk his way out of the inevitable, hoping to find some shred of mercy or a bargain to strike. "L-listen, huma—"
The demon felt his existence begin to unravel. The fist obliterated his outer flesh first, erasing his skull mask before reaching deep into the very center of his being. He could feel his soul cracking like glass.
He started to lose consciousness in a way he had never experienced before from which he knew he would never wake up.
The demon's soul comes apart in silence, its fragments carried away by the indifferent current of time.
The fight was over.
The mayhem in the timestream finally subsided, leaving Valka Fors floating in the center of the wreckage. A single pressing thought circled through her mind.
"Ah, shit. How am I supposed to go back now? I really didn't think this through."
Her lips pressed into a thin line as irritation crept in.
"I said all those dramatic things because I could feel an eerie presence coming from timestream. Anything could have happened, so I wanted to be prepared for the worst," she said, her voice carrying a faint defensiveness even though no one stood to hear it. "Grr, it is all Lady Seer's fault for sending me that letter yesterday asking me not to enter the time dungeon. In the end, she was worrying for nothing."
As Valka drifted there, the adrenaline began to fade, and she slowly started to replay every single word she had uttered during her grand departure. The memories of her solemn advice and her tearful farewell began to weigh on her more than anything.
"Ugh, it all sounded so good and heroic at that moment."
Valka exhaled sharply, one hand coming up to cover part of her face as she stood there, visibly cringing at the recollection.
"Erik is definitely going to say something. Sieg might not, but that witch… she will not let this go."
The thought of them making fun of her grand sacrifice was almost more painful than the particle beams.
Her posture straightened slightly as a new thought surfaced.
"Wait. Sieg wasn't fully awake at the time, so I will just coerce him into thinking I didn't say any of that. It will be easy to convince a kid he was just dreaming. As for Erik and Tavian... Reyra once told me a hit in the right place on the head can cause temporary memory loss. Yes, that is it! I just need to knock them out the moment I get back. Now, as for that annoying witch woman, she has space magic, so I will have to jump her at her most unexpected moment to ensure she forgets my little performance."
Valka nodded happily to herself, finalizing her plan to rewrite the history of the last ten minutes. She felt a rush of renewed confidence, already imagining the precise angle she would need to strike Erik to make him forget her "last words."
However, the self-congratulatory moment was cut short as an uneasy chill settled between her shoulders.
She turned around slowly and her gaze fell upon the remains of the two beings she had defeated.
They had not vanished.
Their broken bodies were changing, losing structure as they melted into a dark, viscous liquid that seemed to ignore the laws of the space around it. The black substance gathered slowly, drawing itself into a single point as if guided by an unseen will.
Valka watched it in silence, her earlier thoughts pushed aside.
"You've got to be joking."
"So…"
A deep voice rose from the gathered darkness, the sound overlapping itself like several speakers talking in unison. "After all the knowledge I shared, he still could not secure victory. Well, that was well within the expected parameters of his failure."
As the colossal remains of Ahtael and Krystanna completely melted away into the sludge, the black mass pulling inward before rising upward in a slow motion. Form began to take shape, not in the way flesh should, but as if something fundamental was forcing structure onto formlessness.
Two elongated arms stretched outward first. From its back, six red wings emerged, unfolding with a unsettling grace. A head followed, smooth and featureless where a mouth should have been, while in place of eyes, two crimson cone-shaped protrusions extended outward, faintly pulsing with a dim inner glow. Below the waist, its body did not have legs, but darkness spreading outward like the roots of a tree.
Valka could tell immediately that the being before her was not the demon she had just dismantled. It was not a resurrection of the two world eaters either. The eerie, skin-crawling pressure she had felt before even entering the timestream—the very sensation that had prompted her dramatic farewell—was identical to the aura radiating from this new entity.
"Who might you be now?" she asked at last, her tone calm, though her eyes remained fixed on every detail.
"Someone of no consequence," the being replied, its voice unchanged. "If a name is required, you may call me Antithesis, Valka Fors."
Her eyes narrowed slightly.
"You know me?"
"Oh, I do. I know you, your husband, his ancestors, your son and his beloved, your grandchildren. This has been repeated for a long time, across what you would call past and future."
For the first time since its appearance, Valka's composure faltered, not outwardly in fear but in something far more immediate.
Her eyes widened slightly as the implications settled in, for those words confirmed that this being possessed information about the one thing Valka was most curious about in the entire universe.
Her focus sharpened instantly.
"Wait a second."
The shift in her tone was abrupt, cutting through the tension.
"Beloved…" she repeated, the word catching her full attention as her expression changed, curiosity rising with startling speed. "You know who my daughter-in-law will be? Tell me. Tell me. Is it Liora's daughter? No, wait, that's not even the important part."
Her excitement grew, completely overtaking the earlier weight of the moment.
"Is there just one, or are there many?" she continued, leaning forward slightly, her earlier irritation and caution forgotten. "My Sieg will be super handsome and hot in the future, I am absolutely sure of it. Women will probably be dying for him to just look their way. So, what is it? Does he have many? Or is he a heartbreaker?"
Valka leaned forward even more, looking more and more excited and animated than she had during the entire life-or-death battle. The threat standing before her seemed to vanish as she focused entirely on the potential gossip regarding her son's romantic future.
"I need to know if I should prepare for multiple weddings or just one big one."
A low, quiet laugh escaped Antithesis. The sound was devoid of malice, carrying instead a patronizing warmth.
"Curiosity about the future is perfectly normal, Valka Fors. In fact, it is that very curiosity that has brought me here to meet you."
One of its elongated arms extended outward, palm open and upward in a gesture of peace. "Valka Fors, I have a proposition for you. Would you like to work together?"
Valka's expression shifted into open confusion before settling into something far more dismissive.
"Huh? Work together?" she repeated, brows knitting slightly before a proud tilt returned to her posture. "You came all this way for recruitment? You might not know this, but I am the future owner of a duchy. I do not take jobs anymore."
Her chin lifted just a fraction.
"And answer my question."
"That may be the case in one version of events, but it is not a future that has yet come to pass. It is a fragile thing, a thread that might easily snap or change depending entirely on your actions."
"Hey, stop cursing my happiness and my retirement plans," Valka shouted, though her grip on her invisible aura tightened.
"No, no. You misunderstand my intent entirely," it answered, almost patiently. " I am not here to curse you or your family. I am here to offer you a gift that no god or king has ever granted your bloodline. I am here to give you a chance to be the master of your own fate for once."
The gossip-hungry look on Valka's face faded without resistance. The shift was jarring, her eyes sharpening with a lethal clarity as curiosity began to flicker in her gaze.
"Did I pique your interest?"
"…What are you talking about?" she replied, her voice flattening as her expression slipped into that familiar, controlled indifference she wore when she chose to conceal more than she revealed. "I am the MASTER of my own fate."
"Please," Antithesis said, not dismissive, but certain. "There is no need to lie. Your life has always been entangled in the roots of that tree. Do you truly believe it was all a coincidence? That you met Sigmund, fell in love, and that you conceived despite precautions you yourself trusted without question?" Can you even be certain those feelings are your own, or are they merely delusions planted within you to ensure everything reaches its starting point?"
…
Valka did not respond.
The words hit a nerve she had tried to keep numb for years. The same doubts had crossed her mind before. They had relied on that contraceptive spells for years without issue, flawless in every way, and then without warning she was pregnant, left with no explanation except the uneasy explanation that the spell had somehow failed.
"It's weird it suddenly failed."
And if it had not been failure…
It wouldn't be a shock if that meddling Fairy Queen had interfered with her life to force the birth. Now, the question she had always tried to ignore was laid bare before her. How many times had they pulled her strings?
Antithesis continued, its voice carrying that same steady certainty.
"They used you. They played with your emotions to create their perfect weapon, and now that your part is nearly played, they are ready to throw you away just as the gods always do. And now, they wish to do the same with your son, turning his life into a tragedy for the sake of their own benefits."
"!!!"
Valka's gaze sharpened and her eyes locking onto the being with a force that carried more than simple anger.
"Now, now, there is no need to direct your anger at me. I am not the architect of your misery. It is that tree, that silent parasite who has dictated every descision of your family. I am simply here to offer you the one thing the gods never would: A chance at genuine revenge."
"And how exactly are you planning to do that?" she asked, her voice remained calm though doubt lingered beneath it.
"I have been quietly gathering a 'cabal' of people, each one of them wronged by the fate of this world. Together, we will rip that tree from the ground and burn its roots. We will free every living being from its absolute control, including your son. I am even willing to make a soul bound vow that I will fulfill this promise to you."
Valka remained silent, her eyes studying it carefully.
"It speaks like it believes every word."
There was conviction in its voice, something that did not waver or shift, yet she had seen conviction before. High-ranking nobles could speak with the same certainty while hiding intentions far beneath the surface. Words alone meant little.
She knew that the most dangerous deceptions were always wrapped in a layer of truth. Yet, even if this being harbored its own secret, twisted agenda, the prospect of removing the Cosmic Tree was an allure she couldn't ignore.
"If the tree falls…"
Her thoughts slowed, narrowing toward a single point.
"Then Sieg is free."
For all this time, they had struggled against something intangible, a prophecy that could not be seen, could not be grasped, only resisted in fragments.
If they could actually strike at Aethelhum itself, perhaps they could end the cycle of destined tragedies once and for all. To destroy the source of the script seemed far more effective than trying to rewrite the lines.
Her gaze did not soften, but something within it shifted, calculation replacing hesitation.
Antithesis spoke again, its tone easing slightly.
"You do not need to give me an answer this moment, Valka Fors. Feel free to return to your world. Go back, think it over, and spend time with your family before deciding. If you accept this path, the fight will be a long and grueling one. I cannot guarantee when, or if, you will ever see your family again."
"Family…"
The word lingered on her lips.
"I have already said my goodbyes… in a way.
She glances toward the distant, invisible point where the rift connected to her home.
"Going back now, only to have to leave them all over again... it would be too difficult. Especially after seeing my cute little Sieg's face. If I am going to do this, if I am going to break his chains, then staying here and leaving now would be the only way I can bear it."
Her eyes lowered slightly, drawn to the hand still extended toward her. The weight of her choice felt like a mountain settling onto her shoulders, a decision that felt like betraying every single person she knew.
"I..." Valka began, her voice steadying as she let go of her hesitation.
"Hmm? Go ahead."
Antithesis inclined its head just slightly.
She moved closer, and slowly extended her hand toward the darkness.
Her arm blurred with a sudden, violent redirection and her fist drove straight into her own face with unforgiving strike.
A dull crack followed.
"What?" Antithesis spoke, its voice carrying a rare fracture of surprise."What are you doing, Valka Fors? Why would you hit yourself at the precipice of your own liberation?"
"Ouch, that really hurts! Well, I suppose it is my own attack, so the pain is to be expected." Valka exhaled a sharp breath, her head snapping back into place as she used her tongue to lick the small cut of golden blood from the corner of her lips, looking up with a clearer gaze than before.
"Heightening someone's emotions and whispering the exact words that would make them feel small and weak... Hah, I can't believe I almost fell for that cheap trick. It just proves that one should never make important life decisions while dealing with a massive hangover."
Antithesis did not respond.
Valka's eyes narrowed slightly, her tone sharpening.
"Are you not just one massive, hypocrite bastard after all that talk about the tree playing with emotions and scripts? You are absolutely no different. Even that demon, that dome-shaped thing, and the crystal were nothing more than throwaways to you, weren't they? You used the demon to summon them, then used that green rain and that death curse to systematically weaken my physical and mental defenses just to make me easy to manipulate. Did you come up with this entire theater on the spot, or have you been planning this charade for a very long time?"
There was no answer for several heartbeats.
A sound slowly emerged.
A sound of snickering began to emanate from the being's chest.
Valka watched as a thin line appeared across the being's otherwise featureless face. The line split open wide into a cavernous, toothless grin as a booming laughter erupted, and Antithesis began to clap his hands together in a display of twisted delight.
"Well done, Valka Fors. You truly are an enigma. Among the countless simulations I ran, you never once doubted me. Even in the paths where you went back home to think, you always eventually returned to accept my offer."
Its head tilted slightly.
"And yet, here you are. Now I find myself curious. What changed? How exactly did you find the flaw?"
Valka let out a quiet breath, her expression settling into something almost unimpressed.
"The more my head cleared, the more I noticed you were sounding exactly like one of those sleazy shopkeepers trying to sell a useless, overpriced product to a traveler."
Antithesis laughed again, softer this time.
"Remarkable," it replied. "Truly, you are not something that can be easily confined. But believe me when I say this: the only reason I utilized such methods was to make it easier for you to make the choice I knew you wanted—"
"Fuck off," Valka said, her silver mana blazing around her body. "In the end, all promises made by people like you are nothing but lies built on more lies. You must have used these exact same methods on that 'cabal' you claim to have assembled. You don't want allies, you just want puppets who think they have control. You are no different than that tree."
Antithesis sighed, shaking his head in a slow, theatrical display of disappointment.
"It is unfortunate that it has come to this," it said, the earlier ease in its tone now dulled. "I had hoped we could reach an understanding from the beginning."
He sighed once more. "But in the end, I simply cannot allow you to leave this place for good. Not with everything you have seen, and certainly not with the knowledge you now possess. You have become a variable I can no longer leave unchecked."
The air around him grew heavy, the playful curiosity he had exhibited moments before curdling into killing intent that pressed against Valka, a restrained threat that no longer needed to hide behind persuasion.
Valka's stance adjusted instantly, her expression sharpening as her mana continued to flare around her.
"Finally showing your true colors, you overgrown weed," Valka replied, her feet braced against the invisible currents as she readied herself for a fight that felt far more dangerous than the one before.
"That is enough."
A voice of authority cascaded from above, possessing a weight so immense it seemed to physically restrain the shifting tides of the timestream.
Both of them looked up.
A massive eye hung high above, its deep blue iris fixed upon them.
"Huge eye!" Valka shouted.
"Oh, it is you, Goddess of Time," Antithesis said, his voice regaining its casual, almost flippant edge. "What brings such a busy deity to this forgotten corner? We were actually right in the middle of something quite important."
"You would dare ask such a question? Open your eyes and look around you. Look at what you have done." The voice belonging to the Goddess reverberated with a mounting fury.
Her presence pressed outward, drawing attention to the surrounding space itself.
The structures that sustained the flow of time had been twisted beyond recognition. Helixes that once moved in perfect harmony were now distorted, overlapping and colliding, their forms breaking under strain as the current they guided faltered.
"Do you even begin to comprehend the damage you have caused? The countless time dungeons you have brought into being by your interference... the long, unforgiving task of restoring the balance now falls—"
Suddenly, the central pupil of the giant eye sank inward, as if it had been struck by something unseen.
A sharp groan of pain came right after.
"So you are the bitch who erased my attack! Because of you, my Sieg got hurt! I will poke the hell out of this eye until there's nothing left but a socket!" Valka shouted, her fist still extended from the strike she had just launched across the vast distance.
The response came immediately.
"Ouch! my eye! my eye!"
The change was unexpected.
The voice that followed was no longer all powerful and authoritative; it had shifted into something soft and tender.
The shift was so sudden that even the heavy atmosphere of the confrontation seemed to stall in confusion.
"Oh, it is not my actual eye."
The Goddess's voice drifted down, still carrying that oddly wounded, tender quality.
"Is that so?" Valka slowly crossed her arms, one brow lifting as she looked up at it with open skepticism.
The gargantuan eye blinked once, then twice as if seeing clearly for the first time. Realizing that the facade of a stoic, untouchable deity had been thoroughly dismantled by a single well-placed punch, the entity went silent for a moment. It was a heavy, awkward pause that suggested the truth was finally out.
"A-anyways, you cannot continue your fight here," the Goddess continued, her tone remaining timid and small, no longer even attempting to maintain the authoritative appearance she had initially shown.
Antithesis looked up at the sapphire eye, his six crimson wings twitching with a restless, dark energy. "So what is going to happen here? Are you planning to turn this into a three-way confrontation, or are you breaking the agreement to side with this human against me?"
"Feel free to fight to your heart's content, but not in this place."
As soon as those words were uttered, the fractured landscape of the timestream vanished, replaced by a vast stretch of grassland, the earth firm beneath their feet, a clear blue sky stretching endlessly above. A gentle wind moved through the field, carrying with it a sense of quiet that felt almost out of place after everything that had come before.
"Where is this place?" Valka asked immediately.
"Do not worry, this is not anywhere near your home, Lady Valka. It is a pocket universe originally created by my sister. It is an expanse almost as large as your own universe, designed to endure the weight of beings like yourselves. I will allow the one who remains standing to leave."
Valka drew in a slow breath as her senses adjusted to the change.
"So I can fight here without any consequence?" Valka asked, a spark returning to her eyes as she tested the air.
"... Lady Valka, do you truly believe the damage your battle has already carved into the timestream will have no consequences? Do not forget that when you hurt time, time eventually hurts you back. If the price is not paid now, it will be paid later. If it is not taken from you, it will be taken from someone close to you… Do not forget my warning."
With those final words, the giant eye in the sky faded.
"The moment one gains even a shred of divinity, they start talking in these insufferable, cryptic riddles. It is a tedious habit of their kind."
Antithesis remarked, shaking its head lightly, as if mildly inconvenienced rather than affected.
He looked so out of place in the vibrant sunlight, a silhouette of absolute darkness and root-like appendages that seemed to absorb the light rather than reflect it.
Valka spared it a glance before turning fully toward it. The wind moved softly through the grass around them, brushing past her as the last trace of that overwhelming presence faded from the air, both of them stood there silently observing each other.
In the blink of an eye, both of them vanished and reappeared mid-air in violent collision, forearms crashing against each other as they fought for dominance. Suddenly, Valka felt something wrap around her ankle; she was yanked downward and thrown with immense force by roots erupting from Antithesis.
She managed to arrest her momentum, but a wind funnel instantly swallowed her.The vortex moved at blinding speeds, dragging her through the planet's crust, carving deep canyons across the surface before plunging her into a massive body of water.
The air thundered as a bolt of crimson fell from the heavens. Valka thrust her hands outward, splitting the ocean in half and deflecting the bolt into the horizon. As she let out a heavy breath, she saw Antithesis high above, a sphere of light in one hand and a sphere of darkness in the other. He slammed his hands together.
"Harmony of Light and Dark."
A binary vortex of dual energies collapsed upon her, consuming the sea and the sky alike. The destruction expanded in a perfect radius, until half the planet was left scorched and lifeless.
Antithesis spun around as a shadow fell over him. One of the moons was falling toward him. He drove a fist into the lunar surface, a beam of dark energy erupting on impact and shattering the moon into a rain of debris.
"Damn it…"
Valka watched from the edge of the atmosphere, her clothes in tatters and blood trickling from dozens of small lacerations. She had barely escaped by using attraction to pull herself off-world.
The entire planet began to shudder. Oceans drained into the mantle as landmasses rose in impossible peaks. A rock fist the size of a continent emerged from the planet's core, reaching for her. Valka pulled her own fist back to strike, but something hit her from behind hard, really hard.
Another fist, formed from the mass of the second moon, struck her from behind. The two colossal masses collided with Valka at the center, shattering, melting, and partially vaporizing upon impact. Shockwaves rippled through the rock as massive debris fields were launched at escape velocity. The area became plasma-hot, glowing like a newborn star.
The star collapsed inward, vacuuming the surrounding debris into a single, dense point of gravity. Then, an unbelievable repelling force exploded outward. The shockwave slammed into the hollowed, dying planet, knocking it off its axis and sending the world rolling slowly.
In the center of the havoc, a massive wheel composed of thousands of silver lances spun as mana crackled between them. At the heart of the wheel, Valka Fors emerged clad in full-body silver armor that was both beautiful and imposing. Wings sprouted from the sides of her helm, and a mesmerizing gem pulsed with light in the chest piece of the plate.
Antithesis appeared before her observing without hesitation, a faint smile forming as it took in the change.
He raised his left arm, reaching toward the distant sun. A solar flare extended outward, stretching far beyond its natural reach before compressing inward, folding into itself until it solidified into a great sword of fire.
Its other hand opened.
The cold of deep space gathered instantly, condensing into a second greatsword, formed of black ice that absorbed light around it.
In response, Valka clenched her fists and two lances leapt to life in her grip as the wheel behind her answered. Hundreds of lances fired outward, each one cutting through space at extreme velocity.
Antithesis lunged forward, cutting through the barrage with perfect efficient strikes. His six wings extended to deflect the lances striking from his flanks as he closed the distance to the source.
Valka stepped in.
Her lances spun with her movement, striking in rapid succession as Antithesis met each blow head-on. The greatswords clashed against the lances in a continuous exchange, impact after impact driving shockwaves outward.
Fire surged from one blade, ice from the other, only to be instantly dissolved or snuffed out by the sheer pressure of Valka's mana.
They traded blow for blow, their speed increasing as they tore past planet after planet until they reached a gas giant draped in massive rings.
Valka exerted a gravitational pull breaking the ring as countless fragments were torn free, accelerating from every direction toward Antithesis.
He tightened his grip on the flame sword and executed a 360-degree slash, releasing a supernova of fire that evaporated the incoming debris. But Valka had already closed the gap. A condensed black hole swirled in her palm as she slammed it toward his ribs. A third arm erupted from the side of Antithesis's torso, meeting her strike with a black hole of his own.
For a second, the two singularities orbited each other, sending ripples through the fabric of reality. They began to merge, the space around them distorting into an unrecognizable mess.
Seeing the impending catastrophe, Valka and Antithesis shared a fleeting look of mutual understanding. Both extended their hands simultaneously, canceling the spells before the collapse could spiral out of control.
Valka moved the instant the collapse ended.
She closed the distance before the swords could swing, both lances driving forward, piercing through Antithesis's hands and locking them in place. The momentum carried through as she forced it down into a massive chunk of drifting debris.
Six more lances followed, skewering his six wings and pinning him deep into the rock.
Valka did not stop, she compressed the weight of a white dwarf in her fists and brought them down.
The entire rock they stood on detonated into dust.
Before it could scatter, gravity seized everything. Space folded inward as she formed a cage around the debris field compressing it from all directions. The cloud collapsed rapidly, crushing tighter and tighter until all of it was forced into a single point, shrinking into a sphere no larger than her palm.
Valka strained to crush the sphere into oblivion, but the resistance from within became immovable.
To end the stalemate, Valka shifted immediately, one hand maintaining the compressed sphere while the other began forming a black hole.
The sphere broke. A massive hand tore out from within and slammed directly into her chest plate. The force sent a shock through her body but she reacted instantly, releasing a wave of repulsion that blasted the arm away, but the moment was short-lived. A crushing force suddenly seized her from every direction, her body locked in place as an overwhelming force crushed inward, growing stronger with each passing moment. The weight increased relentlessly, pressing against her.
She pushed back, but the force did not slow.
She slowly realized, as she felt the flow of mana in her body, that it was her own mana feeding the spell.
Valka's eyes shifted downward. Red lines spread outward from a magic circle etched exactly where the hand had struck her armor.
Antithesis floated over her, now completely free of his restraints.
"How does it feel to be crushed by the weight of your own power?"
"What did you do?" Valka demanded, her muscles bulging as she physically pushed against the invisible walls of the force field.
Antithesis smiled, relishing the explanation.
"It is my special ability, what you humans call an 'Arcana.' I reversed your last spell. Instead of repelling everything outward, the force is now repelling inward. I also placed an energy-drawing curse upon you the moment I touched you, ensuring you power your own execution."
Valka gritted her teeth, her silver armor groaning under the pressure.
"The power keeps increasing. It feels like the spell is being activated again and again. That should be impossible."
Valka couldn't understand what was going on. A spell could be activated multiple times simultaneously, but once active, it generally could not be recast until the initial instance ended. This situation was different from simply increasing the gravity of an ongoing spell; Valka could feel the exact same spell being layered upon itself for increased effect and power.
"You look confused," Antithesis said, watching her struggle, "You see, this is an advanced mana casting technique called spell loop. In it, a spell needs to be cast just once, you know, the usual chanting, magic circle, and such human nonsense, but here's the best part, after the spell is used its activation isn't discarded, the spell stays active in the soul crucible and mana veins, from there it keeps triggering itself again and again, cycling almost automatically."
He leaned in closer. "It's efficient and incredibly fast once it starts, but it also puts constant strain on the caster because they have to maintain that loop the entire time. Of course, in this case, that 'caster' is you."
"That sounds just like…" Valka began, forcing the words out against the crushing pressure.
"Yes. Yes." Antithesis nodded, floating in a slow circle around her. "It is the same principle as the blood trait carried within the mana veins of the Atividade family. A technique that will be perfected in a few years, after a certain someone observes the inner workings of those very veins." He spoke as if implying something, but Valka was no longer listening to his riddles.
She attempted every countermeasure in her arsenal. She tried to manifest a secondary spell, but her mana was being forcibly redirected to power the spell crushing her. She reached for telekinesis, but the massive force pinned her invisible influence to her own skin. She even tried to disengage her armor to slip the curse, but the red lines on it refused to let go.
"It was fun while it lasted," Antithesis said, closing the distance. "Sadly, killing you outright would require more effort than I am willing to expend today. So..."
His six wings flared with a sickly light. Mana bled from the feathers, surrounding Valka and weaving into a translucent red cube. "I am sealing you away."
Valka forced everything she had against it, but the cube only grew more opaque. It began to shrink, compressing her space until the entire prison was small enough to be rolled between two fingers.
Antithesis flew over a massive gaseous planet where a hyper-storm raged. With a casual flick of his fingers, he dropped the cube into the eye of the vortex.
Inside, Valka remained fixed in place, pressure unrelenting, her body locked in the same strained position.
"Damn it… damn it… there has to be…"
She stopped talking because she realized there was a way. It was an offer she was given a long time ago. But accepting that offer would mean shredding the little bit of humanity she had left and she would never be able to go back.
One by one, faces of her family surfaced in her mind, each one leaving a deeper ache than the last.
Her eyes closed, as if afraid they might fade if she looked away. "In the name of Siegfried…"
Outside, Antithesis turned away from the storm, his posture relaxed and victorious. "Oh, Goddess of Time! The victor has been decided~" he sang with a playful tone, but no response came.
"Am I meant to leave on my own?" it continued, tone light but edged. "I do not mind, but I doubt this pocket universe will remain intact if I do." Still, the silence of the goddess remained absolute.
"Very well." He shrugged his shoulders, his six wings unfurling as he prepared to tear a hole.
Reality shifted. Images of absolute destruction appeared all around, yet Antithesis remained unharmed, having partitioned himself from physical space to tear a hole in the dimension.
He turned slowly.
The sight was enough to stagger even an ancient being like him. In the place of the gaseous planet now sat a stellar-mass black hole, its gravitational pull warping the surrounding stars. The silver accretion disk swirling around it was not composed of dust or gas, it was pure, condensed mana, and the man signature left no doubt as to what or better who its source is.
Valka stepped forward from the event horizon.
Her armor was shattered along the arms, fragments drifting away into the pull behind her. Her helm was gone. Blood traced down from multiple wounds, her body marked by the force she had endured, yet she stood straight with a certainty in her eyes.
"What did—" Antithesis began, the realization hitting him mid-sentence.
"She must have stopped resisting the gravity crushing her and concentrated all of it into a single point. She must have poured more and more mana into it to accelerate the collapse, but she should have been crushed to a pulp or torn apart. Even with her status as a Paradeus, there shouldn't be this much resistance to—"
"You accepted the Divine Throne of Force," Antithesis said, straightening up, its voice full of slow surprise.
"No. I just touched it for the moment I needed protection," Valka whispered. Her voice could be heard clearly even in this vacuum where sound shouldn't exist, it was stoic, stripped of all emotion.
"You truly are an enigma," Antithesis replied as swords formed again, fire and black ice igniting in its hands as it moved forward without delay.
Valka moved at the same time, the mass of the black hole behind her, its power condensing into her strike as she drove forward.
A single clash occurred and released a burst of light that expanded outward, consuming everything. The force tore through the pocket universe, cracks spreading across the fabric of this constructed reality.
The false world fractured and began to collapse, crushed under a weight it could no longer contain.
"Victor: Valka Fors," the voice of the Goddess of Time declared, but there was no one left to hear it.
In the gap between worlds, a faint silver light could be seen falling endlessly.
It fell and fell through the cold reaches of the between, with no one there to catch or embrace it, until the last remains of its light extinguished, leaving behind a quiet, final blessing for the future it had fought so desperately to protect.