The silence between them did not last.
One heartbeat—then the Beyond roared alive as Aiden lunged, wings of reality-rending flame tearing the emptiness, claws sparking against a shield of folded dimensions. The Beyonder, smiling in his human mask, braced with one raised hand, catching Aiden's strike. The impact thundered like galaxies colliding, ripples echoing across a plane where no time or space should have existed
Aiden's fist blazed like the birth of suns. The Beyonder's palm caught it, shattering constellations of logic itself. They broke apart, clashed again, their movements too fast for even concept to follow—two gods rewriting the rules of physics with each blow.
Aiden spat fire that burned through the canvas of reality, flame that ate possibility itself. The Beyonder answered with beams of raw conceptual energy, each one detonating in storms that erased Aiden's afterimages.
"You're stronger than I expected," Aiden growled, weaving through ruptures in space, his draconic aura crushing the weightless plane beneath him. "Your kind chose study, not battle. So why are you fighting like a god of war?"
The Beyonder grinned, his human eyes glowing with alien cruelty. "Because unlike my stagnant kin, I did not waste eternity. I trained. I honed. I walked among mortals, learned their hatred, their weapons, their tricks. They studied the void. I mastered it."
They clashed again—Aiden twisting space to dodge, his claws slicing through the Beyonder's torso—only for the wound to close instantly as if rewound by time itself.
"Not bad, Celestial-in-dragon's skin," the Beyonder mocked. "But you cannot kill what refuses to be undone."
The Beyonder stopped testing—and unleashed.He expanded, no longer bound by his human mask, his true form erupting like a nightmare of light and geometry. Aiden's eyes narrowed as the pressure mounted, the weight of a higher reality crashing down on him.
Bolts of sheer erasure cut through him, shattering his scaled armor, burning his flesh to raw light. Aiden roared, staggered—only to be blasted again, sent spiraling across the white expanse.
"Pathetic," the Beyonder thundered, his voice vibrating through every layer of thought. "You think yourself a savior, but you are a child playing with borrowed fire. Even now your enemy feasts—your delay feeds his rise!"
Aiden's chest heaved. He could see it in the corner of his perception—Knull laughing, consuming, growing. Time was the blade at his throat.
The Beyonder moved, striking with fists of compressed infinity. Aiden blocked with dragonfire shields, but they shattered, each hit breaking bone and scale, driving him down.
"Fall, little hybrid," the Beyonder mocked. "You will not save your world, nor theirs. You will only die… remembered as nothing."
Aiden's blood hit the void. It didn't fall—it burned. The draconic essence inside him fused with the infinite spark Infinity had left, swelling into something beyond rage. His wounds closed in fire. His eyes burned like twin collapsing stars.
He rose.
"...You talk too much." His voice was a blade.
Before the Beyonder could retort, Aiden was there—faster than comprehension. A claw through the Beyonder's chest. Reality-flame detonating inside the wound, forcing the being to scream for the first time.
The Beyonder reeled, hissing. "Impossible—!"
"Not impossible," Aiden snapped, his aura blazing so hot the void itself rippled. "Just earned."
He struck again—magic coiled with reality-breaking fire, spatial folds compressing his blows into killing weight. Each hit shattered the Beyonder's defenses, breaking them layer by layer.
"You're strong," Aiden admitted, his voice harsh as he forced the Beyonder back. "Stronger than the rest. But I don't have the luxury of a long fight."
His flames turned white—obliteration flame, the gift of Infinity mingled with draconic wrath. He crushed the Beyonder in a storm of claws, wings, and fire, every strike designed not just to wound, but to erase.
The Beyonder stumbled, form flickering. "No… I cannot fall to you… not I…"
"You already have."
A laugh rang out—slow, delighted, like a blade being drawn through silk.
Aiden's final blow slammed into the Beyonder, and for a second the void itself held its breath. Then the strike faltered. He felt it—an impossible pause in time—and his arm stopped mid-swing.
The Beyonder looked up at him, amusement carved on that too-human face. "Well? Why don't you end it?" he asked, soft as a benediction.
"You want me to end it…" the realization fell in Aiden like ice.
"Oh? You figured it out?" the Beyonder chuckled. Around them there was a silence so absolute it felt obscene.
Aiden's gaze swept the white field. The hosts of Beyonders who had roared and charged moments before were gone. All of them — dead. Some lay as Aiden had left them, unmade by his hands. Most had been slaughtered by something else. Knull's signature of void and blade still lingered in the air like fetid smoke.
Grief flared hot and sharp in Aiden's chest — an entire race erased, countless self-same lights snuffed — but grief would not buy time. Knull was eating strength, growing with every fallen god. That was the real math.
The Beyonder's voice lowered to almost a whisper, and the words were the kind that fell like prophecy. "Tell me, Dragon… what do you think is the key to unleashing Oblivion?"
Aiden's jaw clenched. He did not answer. He had only to listen.
"It is us," the Beyonder said. No pride, only a terrible calm. "My race. We are not mere beings. We are the gates. The Celestials—when they won—placed a truce because they knew it: our bodies are the physical manifest of the Gate to Nothingness. Kill us recklessly, and you sunder the seal. You tear the lock off the void."
Aiden's eyes widened as the truth snapped into place. The instigator, the mock outrage, the push to slaughter — it had all been bait. A sacrificial logic wrapped in blood and lies.
"And now…" the Beyonder continued, voice folding into something that could have been sorrow or triumph, "only I remain. I have become the Gate of Nothingness. Kill me, and the path is open."
Aiden's claws flexed. The world narrowed to a point. He had come to stop Oblivion; instead he stood at the threshold of it.
A chill slid across his spine. He sensed rather than saw the motion behind the Beyonder — a shadow, a hunger. Before he could turn, a hand made of crooked night and broken stars pierced the air and plunged into the Beyonder's back. Fingers of black, claws of void. The Beyonder did not scream. He smiled.
Knull's voice was a dark hymn that wrapped around them both. The slaughtering god stepped forward through the rent silence, the necroswords at his belt humming like a chorus of knives.
Together, their words dropped into the white like an invocation—simultaneous, terrible, absolute.
"Come… Endless Origin and Truth… Return existence to your embrace," the Beyonder breathed, eyes bright with the madness of purpose.
"May Oblivion take the world," Knull intoned, hungry, exultant.