The Almighty's gaze had shifted from imperious certainty to something uglier, darker. His infinite eyes burned like suns collapsing into themselves, emanating the kind of purity that was not holy but corrosive—the kind of light that murdered perception itself. With a single gesture, He immobilized Leo's entire form.
It wasn't just paralysis in the physical sense—no, this was ontological petrification. Every conceivable layer of Leo's being—flesh, marrow, thought, narration, even the phantom echo of his "place" inside existence—was locked down. Leo's body stiffened into the imitation of a statue, suspended like an abandoned monument in a realm of obliterated meaning. No flex of muscle, no flicker of thought could escape that clamp. To anything else that had ever existed, this would have been a final state: the death before death, a frozen casket carved from absolute law.
And yet, Leo's heart… continued to beat.
Not wildly. Not erratically. It was steady. Normal. A rhythm so unassuming it was terrifying—because it should not have been possible. The Almighty scowled at this pulse, this infuriating declaration of ordinariness that refused to acknowledge the gravity of His assault. He intensified His punishment.
From His infinite core, He summoned the Afterlight, the blinding radiation beyond comprehension. It spilled forth as a sea of raw brilliance, but brilliance that functioned more like a weaponized infection. The light was not illumination—it was erasure. A background so white that it drowned out foregrounds, details, colors, and boundaries. When it touched the pupils of any living being, it would not merely blind—it would perforate, rupture, and hollow out their eyes, leaving nothing but a permanent vacancy where vision once lived. No magic could heal it, no divine panacea could reverse it, no rewriting of history could return what was lost. It was blindness not as a condition but as a cosmic law rewritten into anatomy.
He unleashed this torrent directly into Leo's eyes.
The radiance pierced the twin emerald orbs, drilling through optic tissue, lancing into the skull, weaving into the delicate mesh of nerves and meaning. Any mortal, any god, any abomination would have screamed, clawed, collapsed. And yet—Leo remained still. His pulse continued its quiet ticking. His respiration did not falter. His Hollow Heart Engine—an unfathomable organ that did not beat with blood but with narrative disobedience—absorbed the flood of metaphysics, recycling it, digesting it like air passing through lungs, rendering the catastrophe inert.
The Almighty's sneer deepened into rage. His words fell like thunder that carried philosophy in every syllable:
"You dare reduce My infinity to a toy, mortal? You dare stand before what even concepts kneel to? I am not light. I am the cancellation of shadow. I am not law. I am the annihilation of disorder. And yet you—"
The Almighty's voice cracked, a rare fracture in an eternal authority.
"—you stand unbroken. It is unacceptable."
His hands glowed again, brighter, hotter. The Afterlight transmuted into something far worse: it evolved into the Color of Mortality, a shade forbidden, neither black nor white but the negative sum of all chromatic consequence. A tone so lethal it could never be painted or spoken of in human tongue. To gaze upon it was to watch the concept of "end" drown everything that pretended to endure. This was the hue beyond ultraviolet, beyond gamma, beyond cosmic—this was the color that only extinction could see.
And with it, The Almighty did not stop. He stacked fourteen abilities simultaneously, weaving them into one singularity of destruction:
The abolition of Leo's name.
The erasure of mathematics itself: Alpha, Beta, Aleph, endless hierarchies collapsed.
The undoing of narrative continuity, ripping his arc into incoherence.
The suspension of dimensional scaffolding.
The reversal of temporal inevitability.
The incineration of cause and effect.
The nullification of sound, silencing the scream before it could form.
The subtraction of sensation, hollowing touch itself.
The obliteration of orientation, scattering coordinates into unrecoverable entropy.
The drowning of logic in paradox until it choked.
The folding of memory into infinite recursion.
The redefinition of identity as "error."
The swallowing of future into absolute void.
And, above all—the attempt to delete Leo's possibility to exist ever again.
This final maneuver was not just power. It was surgical metaphysical genocide. Even immortality would bow to such craftsmanship. The Almighty's hand glowed like a book burning itself before ever being read, aiming to unmake Leo on every page simultaneously.
And then…
Leo moved.
Not by permission. Not by resistance. Not even by defiance. He simply moved.
Like a tear in the fabric of an animator's film reel, Leo's body skipped frames. One instant he was there, frozen. The next—he was five frames forward. Then seven. Then ten. Then twenty. A body leaping through unlicensed frames of existence, like a drawing scribbled between panels where nothing was supposed to be drawn. It wasn't teleportation. It wasn't super speed. It wasn't omnipresence. It was off-screen locomotion, the transition of matter through spaces that weren't even storyboarded into the canvas of being.
The Almighty blinked—if blinking could even occur at such scales—and for the first time in billions of ages, He missed something.
Leo's fist came down.
A simple punch. No ornamentation. No spellcraft. No cosmic reverberation. Just a hand striking forward with human simplicity. And yet when it landed, the consequences were cosmological warfare condensed into knuckles and bone.
The Almighty's fused abilities shattered like thin glass. Fourteen collapsed at once, all unraveling in chain reaction. The color of Mortality splintered back into unseen photons. The Afterlight fractured into pieces of meaninglessness. Every law He had summoned bent inward, screaming as they broke.
The Almighty reeled. Pain—long banished, surgically removed from His repertoire—came screaming back. In that single blow, Leo reintroduced the possibility of agony into a being who had excised it eons ago.
The Almighty, gasping, retaliated instantly, forcing Himself to amputate sensation again. He ripped pain out of His existence, forcibly sealing it away so He would not feel the wound that Leo had forced upon Him. His fist shot back, arcs of annihilation flaring like collapsing galaxies, aimed to obliterate Leo where he stood.
And as their forms collided once more—two incompatibilities grinding like tectonic plates not meant to touch—the void rang with the sound of contradiction incarnate.
To Be Continued.