The Observer raised his massive stone sword, his eyes gleaming with the ugly ecstasy of victory, and shouted with a loudness that shook the very foundations of the place: "This time, you will find no one to sacrifice their soul for you! Die alone, you wretch!"
He swung the blade with all his might toward Arius's neck, and suddenly... existence itself exploded!
The blade did not strike Arius's body; it rebounded as if the universe had decided to reject the attack. A pure white light erupted, a light that completely covered the deep valley, unleashing a windstorm that wasn't ordinary "Raizo" energy, but a pulse of absolute nothingness. The dark armies retreated and scattered like dust, and Wang, Arlin, and Raimus were blown away by the terrifying atmospheric pressure that rattled the valley to its core.
Amidst this cosmic whiteness, Arius rose. He rose with a chilling coldness, and the deep wounds torn open by the Observer began to knit together and vanish in fractions of a second, as if his body were rewriting its own history. He walked with calm steps toward Yuna's corpse and bowed in silent reverence. He gently closed her lifeless eyes, patted her hair in a final farewell, and then stood up...
Arius turned slowly. His eyes were no longer blue; they had transformed into a cold silver, a silver resembling eternal ice, with a gaze as sharp as armor-piercing bullets that could pierce the soul.
A funerary silence fell over the place. Everyone's breathing stopped, even the Observer's, who stepped back, whispering in terror: "What... what is happening?"
At a distance, Arlin leaned on Wang, trying to see through the light: "H-his eyes! They are completely different!" Wang replied, astonishment and anticipation filling his face: "Yes... they were blue before, now they are silver. Arius is no longer in his normal state... the final barrier within him has broken once again. Let us watch, for we are now before something that transcends logic and cognitive perception."
Suddenly, Arius opened his silver eyes wide, and a pillar of white energy shot from his body, piercing the tower's sky all the way to the endless horizon. This pressure caused those who remained weak to faint, and the rest were forced to shield their faces from the intense glare.
Arius emerged from the heart of the light. His silver hair glowed and moved as if woven from stars, and a focused, white "lavender" silver aura surrounded his body—an aura terrifyingly calm, emitting neither sound nor vibration, yet erasing everything it touched.
Raimus whispered, trembling: "I can no longer feel his power... it has vanished completely!" Arlin responded in amazement: "Is this not the transformation he showed during our great battle in the tenth world?" Wang answered with certainty: "Yes, it is him... and the surprise is that I too, despite my rank, cannot feel a single drop of his energy. It is as if he is nothing... and yet, as if he is everything all at once."
The Observer landed in front of Arius, trying to gather the fragments of his shaken courage, and screamed at him: "Do you think I will fear you just because you changed the color of your energy and your form again? You will fall before me no matter your power, just as you fell before!"
Arius did not reply. He did not utter a single word, nor did he show any expression. His features were devoid of anger, devoid of pain, and devoid of mercy. He was looking at the Observer as if looking at an invisible insect not even worth the effort.
The Observer burst into hysterical laughter, trying to banish the fear that had begun to creep into his stone limbs: "I will kill you no matter how you try! This transformation will not change your reality as a failure!"
Arius began to walk. He did not run, he did not fly; he walked with calm, rhythmic steps upon the shattered valley floor. With every step he took, the pressure in the place increased to the point of making the air groan. Suddenly, something no one expected happened: the Observer stepped back, then screamed in horrifying panic: "Get away from me! Get away from me, you evil monster!"
It was a surreal sight; the "Observer," who had been boasting of his immortality and authority just moments ago, was now trembling like a child before a man who was merely walking. The Observer screamed in madness: "I told you to get away!" Then he fired a destructive energy beam that wiped out the entire area in a white explosion that covered the horizon.
Wang and Arlin held their breath, but as soon as the dust cleared, Arius appeared from the center of the wreckage, continuing his cold walk, his glowing silver hair completely unaffected. In the blink of an eye, the distance between them vanished; the Observer found himself face-to-face with Arius, who grabbed his hand in a flash.
The Observer froze, whispering in shock: "H-how? When did you reach me?" He tried to punch Arius with his other hand, but Arius vanished from in front of him and appeared by his side, pushing him with the back of his hand—a light shove that threw the Observer hundreds of meters to crash against the valley walls.
The Observer got up, trying to comprehend what was happening, but he was shocked to find Arius standing directly above his head in the air, looking down at him with his lethal silver gaze. The Observer raised his hand to crush Arius, but Arius suddenly appeared directly in front of his face, delivering a lightning-fast kick that threw him away again as if he were a soccer ball.
Arlin muttered in amazement: "Impossible... he is toying with him!" Wang commented, watching with intense focus: "Arius is not just superior... he is on a level the Observer cannot even perceive with his senses."
The Observer flared with rage, creating thousands of copies of himself, and shouted defiantly: "Every copy here is me! They possess my same power and immortality! You will not survive!" The copies surrounded Arius from every side, but in mere seconds, with movements the eye could not track, all the copies were shattered and vanished like mist, leaving Arius standing in his place as if he had not moved at all.
The Observer was completely bewildered, and his stone body began to vibrate. Arius slowly raised his hand toward the Observer while he was in the sky and released a light energy that seemed like a breeze. The Observer smiled mockingly: "This flicker won't even scratch—"
He did not complete his sentence, as Arius diverted the trajectory of the energy in the air with a flick of his finger, causing it to collide with the Observer's arm with indescribable force. The sound of the explosion was deafening, and the Observer emerged from the smoke trying to maintain his pride with a forced smile... but the smile faded immediately, replaced by absolute horror.
He was trying to use his "absolute immortality" to regenerate his shattered stone arm, but... nothing happened! The arm did not return, and the stone cells remained dead, as if Arius's energy had "erased" immortality from that part of his body.
The Observer felt genuine confusion and panic for the first time, while Arius remained steadfast at the height, with his silver hair and calm lavender aura, watching him with total coldness, silent as the grave, as if waiting for the moment he would erase this entity's existence entirely.
In a fraction of a second, before the Observer realized what happened, the air split with a terrifying sonic boom directly in front of his face. Arius appeared like a ghost, delivering a punch that was not mere physical strength, but a focused "erasure." The Observer fell at extreme speed, slamming into the ground and shattering it for hundreds of meters, and as his stone statue-like body crumbled and collapsed entirely, Arius descended slowly and coldly, placing his feet on the ground without a sound, as if a feather had fallen in the midst of a hurricane.
Amidst the thick dust and shattered stone debris, something began to emerge from the heart of the broken statue. A creature coughing violently, the sound of its coughing like tearing paper or breaking glass.
When the smoke cleared, everyone froze in their places at the horror of the sight. Raimus said, taking a step back: "W-what is this thing? Was this inside the statue the whole time?"
It was not human, and it was not rock. It was a distorted body overflowing with thick black energy resembling a "dark void," its body vibrating and glitching as if it were a programming error in the fabric of the universe, and its face had no fixed features, but was a constantly moving, turbulent cosmic nebula.
Arlin said in shock and disgust: "Is this really human? Impossible... his energy is so distorted that it hurts my eyes!" Wang commented in a sad tone while analyzing the entity: "It is clear he was cursed by a higher entity... and it seems he was practicing forbidden rituals or actions that exceeded his capacity every time he did so, he must have done something forbidden, which led to the erosion of his soul and the distortion of his body in this hideous way. Unfortunately... despite all his evils, his state evokes pity."
The distorted "Observer" raised his head toward the silent Arius, and with a shaky, overlapping voice as if coming from several dimensions, he screamed bitterly: "You bastard! Are you satisfied now seeing me like this? You villain... do you know how I became like this? Every scar on my soul, every atom of distortion in my body... it is all because of you! You are the one who exiled me, and you are the one who drove me to the darkness so I could stay alive in this cursed vault!"
But Arius, in his current state and with his eyes resembling a sky devoid of stars, did not move. He was not affected by his story, and he did not shake at his hideous form. He was looking at him with total coldness, as if the Observer's words were nothing but meaningless noise in the presence of the void that Arius now represents.
The Observer said in a broken, distorted voice, where sadness intersected with madness: "You, of course, do not know... for you are a bad person and will never understand what I went through. But, thanks to the cursed power and abilities I obtained, I now understand the reason for your condescension toward me before... As for this form of mine, I will never blame you, for I am the one who chose the path, but this monster is better than what I was before... Now I can call myself a 'monster,' can't I?"
The Observer smiled an ugly smile that split his nebular face, and suddenly Wang screamed at the top of his lungs, warning Arius: "Arius! Beware! He is copying you entirely! Do not let him finish!"
Arius launched like a silver bolt toward the Observer to end this existence with a finishing blow, but the Observer had already completed the activation of the "Cosmic Mirror" ability in less than a fraction of a second. In that second, Arius felt something strange being pulled from his essence; he looked at the Observer to find that the opponent's eyes had turned completely silver, just like his own, even though his hair remained distorted and dark.
BOOM!
The fists of Arius and his "Observer" copy collided in an energy explosion that disintegrated what remained of the lower valley. Due to the intensity of the pressure and speed, they vanished from the place entirely as if they had evaporated, to appear above, over the surface of the first earth, where a cosmic struggle began that made mountains tremble and the earth split from the sheer force.
Down below, sadness and destruction prevailed. Raimus, Arlin, and Wang descended to Yuna's laid-out corpse. Raimus leaned down and carried her in his arms, tears streaming down his cheeks profusely, and he screamed bitterly as he punched the ground with his other hand: "What will I tell Lina now?! How will I face her and tell her that the mother we waited so long for is gone?! Damn this world!"
Wang stepped forward with reverence and sadness, summoned a bed covered with a layer of energy glass, placed Yuna inside it gently, and hid it in a safe storage dimension, saying in a low voice: "A truly unfortunate thing... that a great woman like her should depart in this hideous way. I hope her soul rests in eternal peace far from our conflicts."
Arlin cut the moment of sadness short, pointing her fingers toward the horizon; where the dark army (the 99 quadrillion) began to form again from the shadows, and the countless numbers began to surround them from every side with silent, deadly faces. Arlin said while preparing to fight: "Guys! We must focus here... sadness will not protect us from them now."
The three joined in a vast round of destruction, where Raimus's orange energy, Arlin's crimson power, and Wang's combat wisdom exploded to reap everyone who appeared before them in a desperate attempt to endure, waiting for the outcome of Arius's battle above.
The upper space turned into an arena for the clash of concepts; Arius in his silent silver version against the Observer who had become a distorted mirror of him. The fight was no longer just an exchange of blows, but a tearing of the fabric of reality. The Observer was laughing madly as he moved with the same speed as Arius: "This is unbelievable! I feel as if I possess the world with this strange ability... we are completely equal, boy!"
The clashes intensified, and the terrain of the Observer's private dimension began to crumble and turn into cosmic dust. They circled the dimension at imaginary speeds, billions of times per second, in a race of speed and madness to impose efficiency. On Arius's system screen, numbers flashed madly: [Warning: Current opponent power: 220 Septillion... Power is continuously increasing]
The Observer noticed that his power was not stopping at a limit, but flowing like a raging river, so he screamed while delivering a kick that Arius blocked: "I understand now! This ability of yours increases power without stopping... and it seems that you too are increasing in power even though I cannot sense its extent, but it does not matter, for we are now in a tie race!"
Suddenly, the Observer's tone changed, and his distorted body began to shake with terror: "But... what is this terrible feeling?! I feel as if my emotions are being stolen from me madly... as if there is a pit of fire devouring my memories to give me this power! Is this the price?!"
Arius did not utter a letter. He was moving with robotic coldness, and when the Observer tried to direct a treacherous punch to catch Arius off guard, Arius's body moved automatically (Reflex) and avoided it with a skill that stunned the Observer. Both tried to trade blows, but each time, each of them avoided the other in the final moments, as if the void refused for them to collide.
And in a moment of violent engagement, the Observer gathered all his energy in one burst and threw Arius far away. Arius flew like a silver projectile to collide with a strange-shaped planet in the far reaches of the dimension, and upon impact, the planet exploded, and it did not stop at that; the pressure resulting from the throw led to the explosion of millions of vast universes surrounding the area, as if they were soap bubbles exploding in a hurricane.
Arius emerged from the middle of the planet's wreckage and scattered rocks, brushing the dust off his shoulder coldly. The place around them had turned into an absolute dark void; there were no more stars, no planets, no universes... only Arius and the Observer in the darkness of nothingness caused by their fight.
The Observer looked around in panic, seeing the void he had created: "We have erased everything... nothing remains but you and me in this blackness."
Arius did not speak a word; he looked around at the void their fight had created, and suddenly his image vanished from its place. Before the Observer realized what happened, Arius's silver fist had settled in the depths of his stomach. Waves of cosmic pressure exploded from the place of the punch, beginning to distort the fabric of the dark void and tear it as if it were a worn-out garment, then the void returned to settle after the strike had absorbed the Observer's entity.
The Observer felt a pain he was unaccustomed to, a pain that pierced his distorted essence. He tried to respond, tried to hit Arius by any means, but he was fighting a ghost; Arius avoided and disappeared with total ease, as if he saw the moves before the Observer even thought of them.
The Observer flared with rage and decided to use Arius's weapon against him: "[Activation: Void Field]!" The Observer created a huge, wide-ranging field that swallowed everything and neutralized abilities. The Observer's eyes shone with hysterical joy: "Your end has come! In this field of mine, you are just an empty body!"
But the shock that froze his heart was seeing Arius moving inside the "Void" with total fluidity; his silver auras did not disappear, and his abilities did not weaken, as if Arius's very existence had become higher than the concept of the void the Observer had created. And with total coldness, Arius activated [Portal Field] and broke through the wall of the field, exiting it as if passing through an open door.
The Observer felt genuine panic, and for the first time, thought of fleeing. He created a Pocket Hole and entered it quickly, trying to close it behind him, but Arius was faster; he dug his silver fingers into the edges of the temporal rift and tore it with his bare hands, to invade the dimension the Observer had escaped to.
They found themselves in a strange place containing countless overlapping spatial dimensions. The Observer screamed in terror: "Damn it! How did you manage to enter here?! This place is not entered except by those who control the paths of time and reality!"
Arius did not answer him, but rushed toward him and pushed him with tremendous force toward the heart of the void, then Arius activated his own [Void Field] skill. The Observer felt his energy fading and his abilities disappearing, so he tried in desperation to imitate what Arius did and opened dozens of portals to escape.
But he was shocked when he tried to enter the first portal; he found Arius coming out to him from its heart to push him inside again! He tried another portal, and found Arius waiting for him there too!
The real nightmare began; the Observer was stuck in a vicious cycle Arius had designed brilliantly. The Observer would enter a portal only to receive a crushing punch from Arius that threw him into another portal, to exit from a second side and find Arius's fist waiting for him to send a barrage of strikes. Trillions of strikes per second began to rain down on the Observer's distorted body as he flew between the portals inside the field bubble, unable to stop or defend, and Arius struck him with robotic coldness, in a scene representing the eternal hell for this "Observer" who dared to touch Arius's family.
In that critical moment, the silver aura faded from Arius's body and he returned to his normal form, as if his body had drained the load of that terrifying transformation. The Observer thought it was the chance of a lifetime, so he rushed with imaginary speed to direct a finishing blow, but Arius, even in his normal state, grabbed the Observer's fist with pure coldness and gave him a counter-punch whose power was enough to blow up the entire field and scatter the spatial dimensions from their original orbits.
The Observer flew far away, wiped the nebular blood off his face, and looked forward to see Arius advancing toward him again after transforming back to that state. Arius delivered a single punch that the Observer avoided with difficulty, but the effect of that punch in the air was terrifying; it had erased and exploded dozens of cosmic bubbles accumulated behind the Observer.
The Observer screamed in panic: "Impossible! How did you manage to erase those timelines with just the 'pressure' of a punch?!"
The Observer fled, flying through the alleys of the dimensions while looking behind him to see Arius stuck to him like his shadow. The Observer received a blow to his back that threw him inside one of the strange temporal bubbles, and Arius followed him with lightning speed. Inside, the Observer found himself in the middle of a huge, tiered network of golden lines. He touched one of the lines, and scenes from his old life appeared before him... his wife and children.
His eyes widened and he said: "This is it! The timeline of my accident!" The Observer decided to commit temporal suicide and change the past to end everything, so he jumped into the line, and Arius followed him madly.
A new temporal hole erupted and threw them into the sky of that old city... exactly at the time of the accident. The Observer saw his house and tried to rush toward it, but Arius collided with him violently to prevent him from touching the fabric of the past. The Observer flared with rage, and his size swelled to become a nebular giant that began to crush everything falling under his hand.
Arius found no choice but to match him, so energy gathered around him to be enveloped by a towering energy giant in his own shape, and the struggle of the giants began in the city's sky. Buildings began to collapse and people were fleeing in every corner. Arius fired an energy beam that threw the Observer far away, so the Observer lost his mind completely and decided to destroy everything.
The Observer charged his black energy, and wings emerged from his back, consisting of black holes from which energy meteors emerged, striking the earth randomly. Arius retreated to block the meteors and protect the civilians, while the Observer was striking with blind rage.
Suddenly... one of those cursed meteors fell directly on top of the Observer's family house.
The Observer froze in his place. His anger suddenly quieted, replaced by silent horror. He landed near the rubble to see what had happened, and turned to see his human copy (his old self) standing in front of the threatened house, looking in amazement and heartbreak at the bodies under the rubble.
In that moment, the Observer's entity collapsed entirely. He realized the bitter truth he had tried to escape for centuries: it was not Arius who killed his family... it was he who did it with his own hands in a fit of rage and temporal madness!
The Observer's balance wavered as he whispered: "I... I am the one who did it?" Arius did not grant him another moment of realization, so he appeared before him and delivered a "Supreme" punch that threw him outside the atmosphere, then followed him with lightning speed to take him completely out of the borders of that universe to the outer void, far from that painful past.