The void between Universes 3514 and 3515 wasn't empty; it was a suffocating tomb woven from the necrotic fabric of 236 dead realities. Saganbo's suppressed energy pressed down with the weight of extinct civilizations. The Stardust Weaver, its crystalline baffles screaming under Merus's desperate infusion of Creation energy, bucked violently. Inside, the air crackled with tangible strain.
Netsudo gasped, crumpled against a shuddering bulkhead, his fungal cloak drenched in luminous sweat. Each breath was a ragged, painful rasp. "That's... so huge!" he wheezed, amber eyes wide with primal terror. "Feels like... my soul's being flattened... I can still hold on... Kinda..." Tiny, dying embers of magma flickered weakly around his clenched fists.
Beside him, Kagaya stood like a defiant mountain carved from emerald rage. His tribal markings blazed, veins standing out like cables as he resisted the crushing force. He slammed a fist against the groaning deck, the impact echoing. "OH YEAH! I'M TOTALLY FINE! JUST GOTTA WARM UP THESE SMASHING MUSCLES!" His roar was a physical defiance against the encroaching silence. Miryoku leaned against him, her turquoise light pulsing erratically, a fragile shield against the psychic onslaught. Kuro's movements were stiff, precise, his visor a blur of data streams compensating for the invisible chains dragging at him. Shirou braced himself against a console, the Whispering Wind held ready, his sharp eyes scanning the oppressive, starless nothing outside. Only Merus seemed anchored, cerulean power radiating from him, holding their fragile pocket of reality intact.
"Damn it!" Merus hissed, ancient eyes locked on the navigational hologram. Kokuto's void-shear signature pulsed like a malevolent star, already vanishing into the 3521st Universe. "He's pushing harder! We're losing him! Overload the dimensional shear compensators! We breach the 3519th NOW!"
The ship shrieked in protest. Reality tore as Merus poured more divine essence into the straining drives, clawing through the dense cosmic tar towards Universe 3519. Kokuto, a silent blade of entropic purpose, felt the gnats' persistence as a minor irritation. The throne awaited. The asset was secured. Lord Saganbo's will would deal with the rest. He sliced into the 3522nd Universe.
Merus's group fought into the 3518th. The pressure intensified like a physical blow. Netsudo whimpered, sinking lower. Miryoku's light dimmed visibly, her breath coming in short gasps. Kuro's analytical calm fractured for a microsecond, a flicker of strain crossing his features. "Structural integrity critical. Local spacetime exhibiting... gravitational crystallization."
"Five universes!" Merus commanded, his voice laced with unprecedented urgency. "Brace! Threshold breach in three... two... ONE!"
Universe 3523 :
Kokuto materialized onto the star-metal dais before the Throne of Weeping Neutrons, the unconscious forms of Shinji draped limply over his shoulders. He dropped instantly to one knee, head bowed low, the unnatural stillness of his crimson scarf the only movement. "I'm here, sir."
Saganbo, bathed in baleful purple-black radiance, didn't turn. A flicker of satisfaction touched his lips. "Welcome back, Kokuto. Efficiency, as always." He gestured idly. "Place him there. Now, we await Amado. His insights are paramount for integrating the Trascender's essence. With his counsel, our absolute dominion—"
He stopped. His galactic eyes narrowed. A subtle... absence... resonated through the oppressive energy field. Saganbo sat upright, a frown etching his features. He extended a hand, fingers splayed, feeling the cosmic currents. His frown deepened into confusion, then hardened into cold, disbelieving fury.
Kokuto remained kneeling, sensing the seismic shift in the void. "Lord Saganbo?"
Saganbo's voice was a low, dangerous hum that vibrated the star-metal floor. "It's... gone." He clenched his fist, space warping violently around it. "Amado's resonance... the constant, familiar hum of his presence... Extinguished. Not shielded. Not displaced. Annihilated. From the entirety of the multiversal weave." He turned his gaze, a storm of cosmic rage and genuine shock, towards Kokuto. "He has been... erased."
Before Kokuto could process the impossible, the Stardust Weaver, battered and leaking energy, tore through the dimensional boundary of Universe 3523. It materialized like a wounded insect before the monolithic, obsidian facade of Saganbo's mansion, its arrival a glaring beacon in the suffocating silence.
Saganbo's shock vanished, replaced by icy, calculated wrath. He looked from the sealed figures to the intruding ship, then to Raimei, Daganu, and the mortal recruits assembled below. "Refinement is a luxury denied us. The culmination begins now." He seized Shinji and the other sealed form, his energy flaring like a dying star. "Since we have... uninvited guests..."
Raimei stepped forward, violet lightning crackling eagerly around his spiky red hair. "Worry not, Lord! Retreat to your sanctum. We shall handle these distractions. They won't lay eyes upon you."
A cruel smile touched Saganbo's lips. "Oh, they will stumble towards oblivion. Amado, ever the meticulous architect, even in absence, prepared a welcoming gift." He raised his free hand. Across the vast obsidian face of the mansion, intricate, glowing purple lines ignited – a sprawling, impossible pattern that pulsed with trapped spatial energy, twisting perception. "The Labyrinth of Dissolution. Six chambers. Each a self-contained pocket hellscape echoing the scale of a thousand universes. My sanctum is the seventh core." His gaze swept over his defenders. "Activate it. Draw them in. Let them break themselves upon its trials. Disappointment carries a terminal cost."
Raimei, Daganu, Sasaki, Shinaru, Raigan, Ubiginu, and Kokuto bowed as one, their voices a chilling chorus. "By your will!"
As Saganbo vanished with his prizes, the mansion's façade didn't open – it unfolded. Reality itself distorted, swallowing the Stardust Weaver and its occupants not through doors, but into the shimmering, fractal heart of the glowing purple maze.
The Labyrinth Threshold :
They spilled out onto cold, seamless black stone. The crushing weight of Saganbo's direct presence lessened, replaced by a disorienting sense of infinite, shifting corridors and oppressive stillness. The entrance vanished, replaced by smooth, glowing purple walls stretching into fathomless darkness. Three identical, pulsating archways yawned before them.
Netsudo collapsed, retching violently, trembling like a leaf in a storm. "C-can't... think straight..." Kuro knelt instantly, a hypospray hissing against Netsudo's neck. "Neuro-stabilizers and cortical enhancers administered. Ambient energy is structured – less crushing, more... insidiously draining." He stood, movements precise but visibly weighed down. Miryoku leaned heavily on Kagaya, her luminous aura flickering like a guttering candle as she fought the disorientation. Shirou scanned the archways, rifle raised, his usual detachment replaced by razor-sharp focus. Kagaya cracked his neck, emerald energy flaring around his fists, a low growl rumbling in his chest. "WHICH WAY TO THE SMASHING?!"
Nine figures coalesced from the shadows near the archways – not living beings, but jagged constructs of solidified void-energy, shifting silently with eyes of cold purple fire. They lunged with predatory silence.
PING! PING! PING! PING! PING! PING! PING! PING! PING!
Shirou didn't shift his stance. His rifle became an extension of his will. Nine hypersonic slugs, trailing emerald light, erupted in a staccato rhythm. Each found a construct's core with surgical precision. Nine silent detonations of dissolving void-energy filled the corridor, leaving only fading purple mist.
"Efficient neutralization," Kuro noted clinically, unimpressed.
Shirou lowered his smoking rifle fractionally. "Three paths. Splitting maximizes coverage, minimizes funnel vulnerability."
Merus surveyed his fragmented team: Netsudo barely conscious, propped up by Kuro; Miryoku drained but resolute beside the immovable Kagaya; Shirou, the lethal pragmatist, ready. "Agreed," Merus declared, his voice cutting through the Labyrinth's oppressive hum. "I take the first path. Kuro, Netsudo – the second. Shirou, Kagaya, Miryoku – the third. Survival and progression are paramount. Rendezvous at the seventh sanctum... or not at all." His cerulean eyes held the weight of dying stars. "Move!"
Without hesitation, they stepped into the pulsating, unknown voids of the archways.
Chamber One:
Merus stepped through into swirling grey mist beneath an empty, starless sky. The doorway vanished. Before him stood Asakagi Sasaki, her heterochromatic eyes (ice-blue and deep brown) fixed on him with unnerving stillness, her stark half-white, half-black hair framing a face of cold purpose.
"The only way to exit this room," Sasaki stated, her voice devoid of inflection, "requires the cessation of one life-signature. In short you're going to die."
Merus sighed, the sound ancient and weary. "A mortal bars a god's path? Your defiance is a leaf before a tree. Stand down."
Sasaki moved. Not with speed, but with a disconcerting phase, blurring across the distance. A palm strike, crackling with kinetic energy capable of shattering battlecruiser armor, lanced towards Merus's core.
Merus didn't evade.
THOOM!
The blow struck his chest. Cerulean light flared, absorbing the impact with a resonant chime. Merus remained unmoved. Dust puffed from his robe at the point of impact.
Sasaki recoiled, skidding back, her composure fractured. Shock widened her mismatched eyes. "How... weak? Unable to evade a mortal strike? And you claim you're a god?" Contempt dripped from her voice as energy gathered again in her palms, glowing white-hot. "That's a far cry from Lord Saganbo."
Merus raised a hand. Not to attack, but contemplatively. A faint, viscous, iridescent fluid swirled around his fingertips – Gorogilian plasma, Shirou's hard-won prize. "Weak? No. Selective." His eyes, ancient and suddenly blazing with an alien, bestial light, locked onto Sasaki. "Gorogilians... touched by nascent divinity. They've got micro divine essence in them... their essence... compatible." The plasma flowed into his cerulean skin, merging. A ripple of raw, predatory power surged through him. A subtle, yellow ring of energy flared briefly around his torso before subsiding. "I am Creation. I absorb. I integrate. I ascend. Anything divine... fuels my purpose. That's my prowess."
Sasaki's eyes dilated in primal terror. She unleashed her gathered energy – a searing beam of annihilation.
Merus vanished. He reappeared behind her, his hand, now shimmering with cerulean light threaded with iridescent yellow, resting lightly on her shoulder. His voice was a glacier's whisper. "Disrespect towards divinity... carries a singular consequence."
SHHRRKKT!
A blade of pure Creation energy, woven with Gorogilian savagery, manifested from his fingertips. It passed through Sasaki's neck like light through smoke. Her head toppled, eyes frozen in horror, before her body dissolved into shimmering grey motes, absorbed by the hungry Labyrinth. The mist parted, revealing an exit.
Merus stepped through, the yellow ring fading, leaving only the chilling silence of the path ahead.
Chamber Three:
The second archway deposited Kuro and Netsudo into blinding, searing white light. Not heat, but pure, oppressive velocity. Air screamed past at hypersonic speeds, the light itself streaking into blurred lines. Netsudo cried out, slammed against the wall, his magma motes extinguished instantly. Kuro anchored himself with gravitic boots, visor polarizing to maximum, data streams flooding his display.
In the eye of the maelstrom stood a titan. Daganu. His event-horizon armor devoured the streaking light, rendering him a silhouette of absolute darkness against the blinding fury. He wasn't vibrating; he was the embodiment of kinetic fury.
"Chamber Three," Daganu's voice boomed, grinding over the hurricane roar. "I am Daganu, SpeedOff Monarch. Your journey concludes right here, right now."
Kuro shoved Netsudo behind a hastily projected energy barrier, its surface already rippling under the atmospheric onslaught. "Monarch confirmed. Hyper-kinetic manifestation. Chamber parameters amplify his signature exponentially." Data screamed warnings in his visor. "Netsudo! Inertial anchors! Now!"
"W-working on it!" Netsudo gasped, pressing his hands against the shrieking wall. Superheated magma burst from the floor, cooling rapidly into jagged obsidian spikes. He clung to one, battered by the wind.
Daganu moved. Or rather, he ceased occupying a single point and existed simultaneously in a thousand positions, fists lashing out faster than thought, aimed at Kuro from impossible vectors. The pressure wave alone threatened to pulverize Netsudo's fragile anchors.
WHUMP! WHUMP! CRACK!
Kuro's barrier flared violently under impacts that could shatter moons. Fractures spiderwebbed across its surface. "Velocity exceeds predictive models! Barrier integrity failing! Netsudo, ANCHOR THE FIELD!"
Netsudo screamed, pouring his terror and will into the stone. "PYRAS ANCHOR: MOLTEN CORE!" The obsidian spikes exploded outwards, not as projectiles, but as a rapidly expanding sea of viscous, super-dense magma that surged across the chamber floor. It cooled almost instantly into a treacherous, uneven landscape of razor-sharp black rock, forcing Daganu's impossible speed onto unstable, punishing ground. His thousand afterimages flickered, coalescing momentarily onto a single, unstable point.
Kuro's tech-gauntlet reconfigured, barrels humming with building power. "Trajectory variance mapped. Predictive countermeasures: Algorithm Zeta online." He didn't fire at Daganu. He fired at the space around him – micro-gravitic pulses designed to warp the very fabric Daganu's speed relied upon. The SpeedOff Monarch snarled, a sound like grinding planets, his rhythm disrupted.
They faced each other across the jagged, magma-born wasteland – Kuro, the cold analyst, and Daganu, the embodiment of relentless motion. The true clash hung in the screaming air, a breath away.
Chamber Six:
The third archway opened onto impossible opulence. A vast, crimson-carpeted theater stretched before them, gilded balconies vanishing into gloom, ghostly spotlights illuminating a solitary figure center stage. Raimei stood bathed in violet light, a conductor awaiting his dissonant symphony. He smiled, sharp and predatory.
"Chamber Six!" he announced, arms spread wide. "Welcome to the penultimate act! Where perception is the stage... and reality bends to my script!"
Kagaya roared, a sound of pure, unthinking fury. "ENOUGH WORDS! TIME TO SMASH!" He charged, a blur of emerald energy, fist aimed to obliterate the stage and the smirking Monarch upon it.
Raimei snapped his fingers. "VANISHING POINT!"
Kagaya didn't disappear. He ceased to exist within their perception. One moment he was a roaring juggernaut, the next... only empty space where he had been. Miryoku gasped, a hand flying to her mouth. Shirou's rifle snapped up instantly, sweeping the suddenly vacant stage and shifting shadows. "Kagaya! Damn it! Where—?"
Raimei's voice echoed, disembodied, from the swirling darkness above the balconies. "Perception is fragile. Can you shoot a ghost? MASQUERADE BALL!"
Shirou cried out, staggering, dropping his rifle to clutch his head. Before him, Miryoku's form melted into a snarling Gorogilian dripping void-blood. The gilded walls warped into Amado's decaying cosmic flesh. Kokuto materialized beside him, entropy blade raised. "Illusions! Fight it, Miryoku!" he gritted out, battling the overwhelming sensory assault.
Miryoku closed her eyes, breathing deep, drawing on the core harmony of Luminara. "No... this discord... it's forced! Artificial!" She raised trembling hands. Threads of pure, resonant turquoise light wove outwards, not attacking, but seeking the underlying truth beneath Raimei's chaotic tapestry. Where her light touched, the horrific illusions flickered like static on a screen, revealing glimpses of the gilded horror beneath.
A spotlight pinned Shirou, blinding him. Raimei materialized within the light before him, violet lightning dancing on his fingertips, his smile widening into a rictus grin. "The sniper who never misses... can you hit a lie? FINAL C—"
"GRAAAAAAAAAAH!"
A bellow of pure, unfiltered rage shook the theater. Not from the stage. From the ceiling. Kagaya, unseen, unfelt, but real, driven by instinct and fury alone, plummeted like an emerald meteor, fists aimed not at Raimei, but at the stage itself. He hadn't vanished; Raimei had made them forget him entirely. But Kagaya's will was a force of nature, untethered by perception.
KRA-KOOOOOM!
The stage exploded in a shower of splintered wood and crimson fabric. Raimei was hurled backwards with a startled yelp, his concentration shattered. The illusions dissolved like smoke. Shirou snatched his rifle, Miryoku's light solidified into crackling bonds, and Kagaya rose from the wreckage, chest heaving, eyes burning with emerald fire. Raimei scrambled to his feet, violet lightning crackling with genuine surprise and burgeoning fury.
The stage was set. The final act of Chamber Six began not with a script, but with the thunder of Kagaya's fist and the crackle of Shirou's rifle priming.
Elsewhere:
Shinji Kazuhiko drifted. Not in space, not in void. In nothingness. An absolute, suffocating absence. No light. No sound. No sensation of limbs or breath. Only a silence deeper than the grave of universes, pressing in from all sides.
Then, a disturbance. Not sight, but a terrible awareness. Shapes coalesced from the void – not forms, but manifestations: Loss, a chilling vortex sucking at his core; Rage, jagged shards of crimson lightning; Oblivion, a spreading stain of absolute black. They swirled around him, whispering in a language older than time, vibrating directly within the fractured prison of his sealed mind. He felt the cold steel of Kokuto's blade, the wet warmth of his aunt's blood, the hollow scream where his power should be... amplified into an unbearable crescendo.
A single point of warmth flickered, impossibly distant – a tiny, defiant ember of red light. Kiyomi? The thought was torn away by the whispering horrors before it could form. The light pulsed, fragile yet unyielding against the tide of formless dread. It was a lifeline in an ocean of annihilation, a silent plea in the deafening silence.
The dream deepened, the void-shapes closing in. The struggle within the sealed mind mirrored the desperate battles just beginning in the labyrinth's heart. The true fight for Shinji Kazuhiko had only just descended into the abyss.