The sea did not merely stir—it recoiled.
Within a hundred meters of the collision, the ocean itself fled, driven back by a force so absolute that water became vapor before it could remember its nature. In the span of a heartbeat, a vast hollow bloomed in the deep: a cathedral of absence, a cavern where the sea had once ruled, now stripped bare and trembling with the echo of violence.
Silence followed.
Not peace—never peace—but a suffocating stillness, heavy with the promise of what would come next.
At its center, El-Mond was thrown.
His body, slight against the immensity of the abyss, was hurled like a fallen star, streaking downward with ruinous speed. The colossal beast loomed above, its presence a nightmare carved into the fabric of the deep, its power still rippling through the void it had forced into existence.
El-Mond struck the seabed.
The impact did not land—it detonated.
Stone fractured. The ancient floor of the ocean split apart in jagged lines, shattering outward as though the world itself had been struck by a god's hammer. Dust and debris spiraled upward in slow, ghostly currents, suspended in the unnatural emptiness.
And then—
The sea returned.
The hollow collapsed in on itself with a deafening roar, the waters rushing back like a vengeful tide reclaiming stolen territory. The void vanished. Pressure returned. Sound returned. The abyss swallowed all trace of that fleeting, impossible stillness.
El-Mond lay at the center of it.
A ragged cough tore from his chest, blood blooming darkly into the surrounding water, dispersing like ink in a dying hand's grasp. His body trembled—not with fear, but with the strain of survival, of bones that had endured too much and yet refused to break.
Still… his eyes burned.
Fierce. Unyielding. Alive.
This…
The thought did not come gently. It tore through him, jagged and raw.
This is beyond anything I've faced…
Fragments of memory flickered—another life, another battlefield, victories and deaths etched into a past that should have prepared him for anything.
It hadn't.
Both then… and now…
His fingers twitched against shattered stone.
If I hold back—if I hesitate for even a moment…
A pulse of pain shot through him, sharp and absolute, anchoring him in the present.
I will die.
His teeth clenched, blood slipping past them in a thin, defiant line.
And I refuse.
The words were no longer thought. They were will—solid, immovable.
Not now.
The seabed cracked beneath his palm.
Not ever.
Power surged.
El-Mond moved.
The ocean floor ruptured as he launched himself upward, his body becoming a spear of force, cutting through the dark waters with explosive speed. The fractured earth beneath him gave way in his wake, expanding the ruin he had carved into the deep.
His hands stretched forward.
Something answered.
From his very essence, it formed—void blood.
Dark. Pulsing. Alive in a way that defied nature.
It gathered instantly, a dense orb the size of a clenched fate, its surface trembling with restrained annihilation. Without pause, without mercy, he hurled it forward.
The sea screamed.
The colossal beast answered.
Its tentacles lashed outward in a storm of motion so swift it defied perception—strikes measured not in seconds, but in fragments of time too small for thought. They tore through the water, slicing paths of destruction toward him, a relentless barrage meant to erase his existence.
But El-Mond did not falter.
He flowed.
His body abandoned rigidity, becoming something fluid, instinctive—less a man and more a current weaving through death itself. Up. Down. Left. Right. He moved between the strikes with impossible precision, each motion threading the needle of annihilation by margins thinner than breath.
And he did not merely evade.
He answered.
From his hands, from his will, void blood erupted in torrents—hundreds upon hundreds of strikes unleashed in relentless succession. Each one collided with the beast's immense form, detonating upon contact, vaporizing flesh, carving wounds into its monstrous body.
The deep trembled with the echoes.
CRASH.
SHATTER.
WHOOSH.
The sounds did not travel—they lingered, embedded in the violence itself.
El-Mond surged higher.
He broke above the beast once more, his silhouette cutting through the chaos, and from his throat came a scream—raw, primal, torn from the very core of his being.
It was not a cry of pain.
It was war.
The void answered him.
From above, he rained destruction.
A storm of darkness descended, countless void blood strikes falling like a celestial judgment, each one a fragment of annihilation given form. The beast was swallowed beneath it, its massive body battered and torn beneath the unrelenting assault.
The ocean churned.
Dust and smoke—if such things could exist in that abyss—clouded the battlefield, obscuring sight, distorting sense. Still, El-Mond did not stop.
He continued.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Time stretched.
A minute passed.
And at last—
He ceased.
His chest heaved, each breath a labor fought for and barely won. His skin had grown pale, drained by the monstrous expenditure of power. His limbs trembled with exhaustion that threatened to drag him into the dark.
He ignored it.
Pain was irrelevant.
Only victory mattered.
Slowly, he lowered his gaze.
And froze.
His eyes widened—not in awe, but in disbelief.
The wounds…
They were closing.
The countless ruptures, the torn flesh, the devastation he had wrought—it was all vanishing. Before his very eyes, the beast's body knit itself back together, its form restoring with terrifying speed.
Seconds.
That was all it took.
As though time itself had chosen to favor it.
"What… is this…?" His voice was hoarse, strained. "How… is it healing…?"
His gaze flickered, sharp and searching.
"Eldred… how did the Emperor powerhouses kill the other one?"
Beside him, Eldred hovered, his spectral form wavering with unease.
"Master…" His voice carried a weight of old knowledge, of truths buried in legend. "According to the scrolls… after receiving what was believed to be a fatal strike… the beast sank into the sea."
He hesitated.
"The Emperor powerhouses were exhausted. Wary of one another. When its energy vanished… they assumed it dead."
Silence followed.
Then—
El-Mond's jaw tightened.
"Cowardly bastards."
The words were quiet.
Furious.
"DAMMIT!"
The curse tore from him, sharp enough to cut through the ocean itself.
His eyes hardened.
Focus returned, sharper than before.
"It either dies… or I do."
No hesitation remained.
No doubt.
"And I'm not planning on it being me."
He extended a trembling hand toward the leviathan, siphoning the final, bitter dregs of his spirit. Behind clenched teeth and shuttered lids, he felt it: a primordial surge—viscous, searing, and utterly alien—uncoiling from the very marrow of his bones.
His ocean-hued eyes snapped wide, hemorrhaging a blinding celestial white.
In that synchronous flash, his spine buckled, his frame convulsed, and the world fractured.
Void bloomed where a man once stood.
It was not a mere absence of light, but an infinite, star-flecked depth. His skin dissolved into a translucent, midnight-blue membrane, revealing a galaxy swirling beneath the surface of his flesh. He became a splinter of the firmament itself, his silhouette outlined in the pulsating silver of distant nebulas. His hair unspooled into a weightless cloud of spectral white, drifting upward as if suspended in a vacuum. Those burning eyes cooled into liquid spheres of immeasurable indigo, depthless and rotating with the slow, rhythmic pull of planetary rings.
El-Mond had ceased to be.
In his place stood an Avatar of the End.
The beast felt the shift.
For the first time in an epoch, the predator recoiled. An ancient, cellular terror gnawed at its monstrous heart—the fear of erasure, the dread of being unwritten from the ledger of existence. It lunged in a desperate, thrashing blur, tentacles erupting like black lightning to strike the space he occupied.
But he was elsewhere.
Space folded like parchment.
In a heartbeat, he stood before the creature—unavoidable, an anchor of oblivion. He raised a hand, and when he spoke, the sound did not travel through the brine; it vibrated through the very tapestry of the universe.
"Be gone."
The cosmos obeyed.
The sea didn't just move; it shattered.
One.
Two.
Three.
Three colossal strokes of metaphysical force carved through the deep, cleaving the titan into jagged, weeping sections. The ocean groaned, forced aside by a command it could not defy.
For a heartbeat, the silence of victory reigned.
Then, the night broke.
The starlight in his veins flickered and died. El-Mond's form collapsed, the ethereal brilliance snuffed out by the staggering tax of the divine. He went limp, a hollow shell claimed by the mercy of unconsciousness.
He began the long, silent descent into the dark.
"Master!" Eldred's scream was a jagged edge in the silence. "Wake up! It's still alive!"
Below, the severed masses of the beast began to grope for one another. Flesh sought flesh; gore reknit with a wet, impossible hunger. The regeneration defied all natural law, fueled by a spite that refused to die. The creature's maw unhinged—a cavernous throat wider than a grave.
It waited.
A living void eager to reclaim the light that had dared to strike it.
And El-Mond, senseless and falling, drifted straight into the throat of the end.