The air in the pocket dimension didn't just crackle; it screamed with the aftermath of violence. Molten obsidian wept around Merus's crumpled form, his cerulean blood a fading nebula on the dark stone. Daganu, the SpeedOff Monarch, stood over him, a statue carved from shadow and contempt. The memory of Kawabakomo – the vibrant light, the crushing failure, the erasure – had receded, leaving only the icy residue of absolute resentment. He raised his foot, a hammer poised to obliterate the reflection of his own buried weakness.
*After Lord Saganbo accepted the hollow shell that was Hayate, I wasn't granted power. I was granted an invitation to hell. A mere Trainee Monarch, weaker than the lowest void-scavenger. My speed, the only flicker of potential in the ashes of my failure, intrigued him. He saw not a survivor, but raw material.
The training wasn't exercise; it was annihilation. Saganbo cast me into pocket dimensions sculpted from pure agony
The Endless Acceleration Void where stillness meant dissolution. To exist, I had to move, perpetually, faster and faster, chased by spatial shears that peeled reality from my bones. Rest meant unmaking. I ran until my consciousness frayed, until time dissolved into a blur of screaming muscles and tearing sinew. Millions of years spent as a frantic mote fleeing entropy.
The Gravity Forges where Planets that compressed into singularities became my anvils. Saganbo would hurl me through their event horizons, forcing me to fold space just to avoid being crushed into a singularity myself. The pressure liquefied organs, shattered bones endlessly reforming only to shatter again. I learned to move within crushing gravity, to find paths where space bent like putty under desperation.
The Sensory Null Prisons, the absolute darkness. Absolute silence. Absolute zero. No sight, no sound, no touch, no up, no down. Only the awareness of my own failing body and the creeping madness. Here, speed wasn't physical. It was the frantic, desperate speed of thought, racing against insanity, learning to navigate by the echo of my own terrified heartbeat, by the subtle tremors in the fabric of nothingness. To slow down was to be consumed by the void within.
The Mirror Mazes of Failure with the illusions of Kawabakomo, vibrant and whole. My mother calling. Daganu – the real Daganu – laughing. Commander Soden praising my speed. And then Saganbo would force me to destroy them. Over and over. With my bare hands. With energy blasts. With the very speed I was honing. "Weakness clings to sentiment," he'd intone, his voice the only sound in the screaming silence of my soul. "Obliterate it." Each destruction scarred me deeper than any gravity well.
Eleven million years. Not of growth, but of erosion. Erosion of fear, of pain, of empathy, of the very concept of "Hayate." The nightmares ceased because feeling ceased. I became a vessel of motion, a will honed to a single, razor edge: Never be weak again. Never be that broken thing crying in the void. The training didn't make me strong; it made me empty. An emptiness Saganbo found useful.
The final test was simple. Escape a collapsing micro-universe designed to compress massively faster than light-speed travel. I didn't escape by outrunning it. I escaped by folding its collapsing space around me, riding the wave of its death throes like a surfer on a tsunami of entropy. I emerged, not breathing hard, not bleeding, feeling... nothing.
Saganbo materialized, a smile like a crack in reality on his face. "Congrats," his voice was a bored rumble. "You finished your Monarch Training. Efficiently hollowed. From this entropy, a new function arises. You are no longer 'Hayate,' nor 'Daganu the Failed.' You are the SpeedOff Monarch."
"SpeedOff?" My voice was flat, devoid of curiosity, merely processing data.
"The first half denotes the core vector," Saganbo explained, idly crushing a nascent star between his fingers. "Velocity, acceleration, the negation of stillness. The 'Off'... consider it a termination code. A state of being. Motion without purpose beyond its own execution. The 'Off' switch for anything that dares impede your vector. Sufficient?"
"Adequate designation," I responded. The name was a weapon, not an identity.
"So," Saganbo leaned forward, his purple eyes boring into mine, "how does it feel? To be unburdened? To be... fast?"
A sensation, alien after millions of years of numbness, flickered. Not joy. Not pride. Potential. The pure, terrifying potential of absolute, unimpeded motion. My lips twitched, not in a smile Hayate would recognize, but in the grimace of a predator tasting freedom. "I feel... unconstrained. As if the universe itself is viscous sludge awaiting my passage. I can move."
I never regretted the training. It wasn't hardship; it was necessary cauterization. The weakling had to be burned away. The only regret that remained, a fossil in the void where my heart was, was the existence of weakness itself – in me, in others. It was the universe's fundamental flaw, and my purpose, my function, was to erase it wherever I found it. The weak exist only to fall before the strong. It is the only true cosmic law.*
Present:
Daganu's foot descended towards Merus's skull, a Light Bullet of pure negation coalescing around his fist. "I truly resent you weaklings!" The words were spat like venom, carrying the weight of extinct galaxies.
A tremor ran through the broken god. With a gasp that sprayed luminous blood, Merus forced his shattered body up. One arm braced against the searing slag, the stump of his leg a smoldering ruin. He swayed, a candle guttering in a hurricane, but his eyes, though dimmed, held a spark Saganbo's training had extinguished in Daganu millennia ago. "Weak... yes," Merus rasped, blood bubbling on his lips. "But defeated? Not yet. Not while breath... remains."
Daganu's obsidian eyes widened a fraction – genuine surprise flickering through the icy disdain. "Not admitting defeat?" A cold, humorless chuckle escaped him. "Stubbornness is just delayed surrender. Very well. I'll carve the admission from your broken tongue before I silence it!" He vanished, reappearing point-blank. The Light Bullet wasn't thrown; it simply manifested against Merus's chest.
KRA-SHOOOOOM!
Merus didn't cry out. He folded around the impact, hurled backwards like a ragdoll, carving another trench in the dimensional floor. Cerulean and gold blood gushed from the crater in his chest. He lay still for a heartbeat, two. Then, impossibly, a trembling hand pressed against the molten stone. He pushed. Muscles screamed. Divine essence flickered wildly. He rose again, swaying violently, the Yellow Ring around his torso sputtering and dying, its borrowed Gorogilian savagery exhausted. His pearlescent suit was tatters, his white hair matted with blood and grime. He stood on one leg and sheer, impossible will.
Daganu stared, a flicker of that ancient, buried frustration resurfacing. "Still clinging to that pathetic defiance?" He raised his hand again. "Your persistence offends the natural order." Another Light Bullet screamed forth.
This time, Merus moved. Not with divine grace or stolen Gorogilian power, but with the desperate, lurching sidestep of a mortally wounded animal. The Light Bullet grazed his shoulder, shearing away more flesh, but missed the center mass. He staggered but remained upright, panting, a grim parody of a smile touching his bloodied lips.
Daganu's expression hardened, the surprise replaced by cold irritation. "Fine. If death is too quick an admission, I'll break you bone by bone. Let your screams articulate your surrender." A third Light Bullet lanced out.
Merus didn't dodge. He took it full in the abdomen. The force should have bisected him. Instead, it lifted him off his foot and slammed him into the leftmost wall of the pocket dimension with a sickening crunch of divine bone. He slid down, leaving a smear of luminous gore, collapsing in a heap at the base. His breathing was shallow, ragged. His vision darkened at the edges. The cold embrace of final oblivion beckoned.
*I'll protect them...* The thought was a dying ember in the freezing void of his consciousness.
Kuro's sharp, analytical eyes, burning with defiance even as his tech shattered.
Netsudo's terrified core, hiding the volcanic fury of Ignis.
Shinji... The Trascender, their hope, captured, sealed... but alive.
Protect them. The ember flared. Not as a god. As Merus. As the one who brought them together. As the one who failed them. The failure wasn't an end; it was a debt. A debt paid only by standing. *One more time.*
With a sound that ripped from the core of his shattered divinity – a raw, guttural scream that echoed the birth pangs of universes – "AAAAAAGH!!!" – Merus wrenched himself upwards. He didn't stand; he erupted from the ground. Power didn't flow; it detonated from within, fueled not by reserves, but by pure, incandescent refusal. He faced Daganu, bloodied, broken, one-legged, but radiating a terrifying, desperate light.
Daganu recoiled, not physically, but in spirit. "You... truly are an anomaly! A cosmic cockroach! Still scrambling? Won't you just ADMIT DEFEAT?!" The last words were a roar, laced with a frustration that echoed his training voids.
Merus didn't speak. He launched himself, a comet of desperate fury, straight at the Monarch. Daganu blurred, moving to intercept with contemptuous ease. They clashed mid-air – not a contest of strength, but a collision of will against absolute speed. Daganu's fist, sheathed in void-energy, slammed towards Merus's head. Merus didn't block; he turned, taking the blow on his already shattered shoulder – CRUNCH – but using the impact's momentum to spin. As he spun, his head whipped forward, his mouth opening wide.
He didn't bite. He licked.
A swift, desperate swipe of his tongue across a spray of Daganu's dark blood – blood flung from the Monarch's own knuckles during the clash – that had spattered Merus's chest.
Daganu recoiled, genuine disgust and confusion twisting his features as he phased back a meter. "Huh?! Have you finally shattered?! What madness is this?! Licking blood like a starved hound?!"
Merus straightened, ignoring the agony in his shoulder. A strange, serene smile touched his lips, incongruous amidst the gore. "We are even," he whispered, the words thick with blood but clear.
Light erupted from Merus. Not the gentle cerulean of Creation, nor the volatile gold of Gorogilian power. This was Snowy. Deep, pulsating, Snow-white light exploded outwards. His hair, matted white, blazed into a cold, even longer white mirroring Daganu. Around his torso, where the Yellow Ring had sputtered, a new band of power materialized – a White Ring, crackling with contained lightning, radiating heat and terrifying velocity. Energy, raw and overwhelming, flooded his broken vessel, not healing, but igniting. His eyes glowed with the same fierce Obsidian light.
"Amazing..." Merus breathed, clenching his fist. Space crackled around it.
Daganu stared, his eyes wide, his perfect composure fractured. "How?! What abomination is this?! How did my blood grant you this?!"
"Not granted," Merus stated, his voice now strong, resonant, vibrating with stolen power. "Assimilated. A divine palate, refined by eons. A taste, a sample... is a blueprint. I don't just wield your power, Daganu. For this moment... I am Speed."
Merus moved. Not a blur. An absence. He vanished from his position and reappeared fist-first inches from Daganu's face. The shockwave alone would have pulverized a planet.
"Impossible!" Daganu gasped, twisting with instinctive, ingrained speed. The fist grazed his cheek, tearing skin and drawing a dark line of blood. He phased backwards, shock warring with fury on his face.
Merus pursued, a red streak against the dark dimension. "Right now," his voice echoed from multiple points, "I move at your frequency!" Multiple Invisible shockwaves, replicas of his own Light Bullets but tinged with divine energy, screamed towards Daganu from different vectors.
Daganu became a storm of motion. He flowed between the blasts, a phantom dodging rain, but the sheer volume and the unfamiliarity of defending against his own speed pushed him. One clipped his arm, another grazed his thigh – shallow wounds, but wounds nonetheless. Dark blood welled.
"Cheap trick!" Daganu snarled, unleashing a barrage of his own Light Bullets, denser, faster. "You're still half-dead! A flickering candle mimicking a supernova!" A bolt slammed into Merus's side, eliciting a grunt and a fresh gout of blood. The White Ring pulsed erratically.
Merus retaliated, matching bullet for bullet. White met the corrupted void-black white in mid-air, detonating in silent, devastating bursts of shredded space. The pocket dimension groaned under the strain. Merus landed more hits – a bolt to Daganu's shoulder, another glancing off his ribs. Daganu bled more freely now, dark ichor staining his black jacket. But Daganu's assault was relentless, fueled by millennia of perfected motion and rising fury. His Light Bullets hammered Merus back, each impact staggering the god, draining the stolen vitality as fast as he could wield it. Merus's snow white hair flickered, strands turning their regular white at the roots.
The barrage ceased. Both figures hovered, panting. Merus was a ruin – bloodied, barely conscious, the White Ring flickering like a dying star. Daganu bled from multiple wounds, his breathing ragged for the first time in millennia, his eyes burning with furious disbelief. Merus's Snow white hair faded entirely back to stained white. The White Ring dissolved into snowy embers that winked out. His stolen speed vanished, leaving only the crushing weight of his injuries and exhaustion. He sagged in mid-air.
"Pathetic," Daganu spat, wiping blood from his lip. He raised his hand, energy coalescing into a massive, vibrating Light Bullet, dense enough to swallow stars. "Your stolen moment ends. Admit defeat. This is your final chance to speak before silence."
Merus lifted his head, his eyes meeting Daganu's. No fear. Only exhausted, unbreakable resolve. "I... won't. Because..." He drew a shuddering breath. "...I'm still breathing. And that... is not defeat."
"Then breathe your last!" Daganu snarled, unleashing the annihilating orb.
It never reached Merus.
A wall of living magma, incandescent white at its core, erupted between them. The Light Bullet struck it – FWWWOOOMPH-SSSS! – and detonated, vaporizing tons of molten rock but failing to penetrate the core. From within the magma stepped Netsudo... or rather, Ignis albeit different from even the 2nd persona. Not the terrified Pyrasian, but the embodiment of planetary fury. His form was sculpted lava, eyes pools of solar fire, radiating heat that warped the dimensional fabric.
"Poor, hollow Monarch," This Ignis's voice was the crackle of continents splitting, devoid of Netsudo's fear, filled with terrifying, focused pity. "Trapped in your cage of speed. Let me grant you release. A swift end in the heart of the sun. Painless oblivion." His right fist clenched, drawing in the surrounding magma, compressing it into a miniature sun – blinding, searing, humming with contained stellar fury. "SOLAR EMBRACE!"
The heat radiating from the miniature sun washed over Daganu. His event-horizon armor glowed red-hot. Sweat, impossible in the vacuum, sizzled and vanished instantly from his brow. He gritted his teeth against the overwhelming thermal onslaught. "Dammit!! You insignificant maggots! You'll regret this interference! I'll dismantle you atom by agonizing atom!"
This Ignis didn't flinch. "Lord Merus," his voice boomed, the sun-fist growing brighter, hotter, "distract the hollow one. I require twenty seconds to perfect the ignition sequence."
Merus, summoning the dregs of his will, forced a nod. "Twenty... is all I have left..." He gathered flickering cerulean energy in his remaining hand.
"Make it forty."
The voice was cold, analytical, and came from directly behind Daganu. Kuro Okugami materialized, not from stealth, but from a localized spatial fold. His tech-glove crackled, not with raw power, but with complex energy matrices. And in his hand, held like a surgeon's scalpel, was the largest remaining shard of Nirvana's HeartDeath Rod, its tip pulsing with amplified negation energy. "Did you forget the scientist, Monarch? Data collection is ongoing."
Daganu whirled, faster than thought, a Light Bullet already forming. But Kuro wasn't attacking him. He slammed the amplified Rod shard point-first into the dimensional floor at Daganu's feet.
Kuro snarled. Energy, dark and impossibly dense, erupted from the Rod shard, not upwards, but outwards, weaving through the fabric of the pocket dimension itself. It formed a complex, fractal lattice of pure gravitational negation, anchored at a thousand subtle stress points Kuro had mapped during the previous ten minutes of the battle while seemingly inactive. It wasn't a cage of bars; it was a cage of stopped time within its boundaries, a zone where movement required overcoming the inertia of spacetime itself.
Daganu stumbled. Not from impact, but from shock. His effortless speed met sudden, immense resistance, like trying to sprint through neutron star core. He moved, but it was agonizingly slow, muscles straining against cosmic glue. "What?! This... this garbage! You think this can hold the SpeedOff Monarch?!"
Merus saw his opening. Ignoring his screaming body, he lunged, not with energy blasts, but with raw, divine fists wrapped in the last sparks of creation energy. THUD! THUD! THUD! Punctuated blows landed on Daganu's superheated armor, each impact jarring the trapped Monarch.
Kuro poured more energy into the grid, veins standing out on his neck. "I didn't build it to hold you forever, SpeedOff! Just long enough! The lattice draws power from your own kinetic energy! Struggle harder, it binds tighter!"
Daganu roared, a sound of pure, primal fury. Dark energy, the true power of a Monarch pushed to the brink, began to erupt from his core. "ENOUGH! I'LL REDUCE THIS DIMENSION TO QUANTUM FOAM!" The gravitational grid started to fracture, brilliant cracks spreading through the dark lattice. Merus was flung back by the erupting dark energy.
The grid shattered. Kuro was hurled backwards, his tech-glove smoking. Daganu spun, free, his eyes blazing with annihilation, ready to erase Kuro and Ignis from existence.
He froze.
The enigmatic Ignis stood before him, arms outstretched. Between his hands, he held not a fist, but a star. The miniature sun had been compressed, refined, its fury focused into a sphere of pure, white-hot stellar annihilation, no larger than a human head but radiating power that made the dimensional walls scream. It was silent. It was terrifying. It was absolute.
"IGNITION SEQUENCE: COMPLETE." Ignis's voice was the calm before the supernova. "HELL'S JUDGMENT: ALL-COLLAPSE DELIVERANCE."
He didn't throw it. He released it.
The white-hot sphere drifted towards Daganu with deceptive slowness. There was no sound. No shockwave. Only the unbearable light, the impossible heat warping vision, and the utter certainty of obliteration. Daganu instinctively raised his arms, crossing them before him, pouring his dark energy into a desperate shield. The sphere touched it.
Light. Impossibly bright, all-consuming light. Then, silent, utter, annihilating force.
KRA-KOOOOOOM!
The explosion wasn't heard; it was felt on a quantum level. The pocket dimension buckled. Molten rock vaporized. The very light was consumed and then reborn in a blinding flash. Kuro shielded his eyes. Merus was hurled into the far wall again. Ignis stood immobile within the heart of his own creation's aftermath, his lava form dimming.
Silence descended, thick and heavy, broken only by the sizzle of cooling rock and Merus's ragged breathing. A vast, smoldering crater marked where Daganu had stood. Wisps of dark smoke curled upwards. No movement.
Kuro pushed himself up, breathing heavily, a grim smile touching his lips. "Good work! Lattice held long enough! Target annihilated!"
Netsudo (Ignis's form receding, revealing the exhausted Pyrasian beneath) slumped, panting. "Th-thank you... both. It's... finished." He managed a weak, relieved smile.
Merus, pinned against the wall by the residual force, couldn't speak. He could only manage a faint, bloodied smile of shared relief and exhaustion. The cost had been immense, but they had won. Daganu was gone.
The silence deepened. The smoke began to clear over the colossal crater. Then, a vibration. Subtle at first, felt through the stone rather than heard. It grew. A deep, resonant thrumming that made the shattered dimensional bedrock tremble. The smoke didn't dissipate; it was pushed aside by an invisible force.
From the heart of the crater, where only annihilation should have been, a figure rose.
Not Daganu as they knew him.
His hair, once stark white, now crackled with arcs of brilliant, electric blue energy, standing on end as if charged by a stellar storm. His eyes, no longer cold obisidian, blazed with captured lightning – pure, actinic white pupils surrounded by irises of swirling thunderheads. Dark energy, tinged with furious blue lightning, crackled around his form like a living storm front. His event-horizon armor seemed reforged, darker, sleeker, humming with contained power. The air itself ionized around him, smelling of ozone and cosmic static.
He hovered, not with effortless speed, but with the terrifying potential of a coiled lightning bolt. He looked at them – Merus broken, Netsudo drained, Kuro wary – not with contempt, but with a chilling, newfound intensity. A slow, dangerous smile spread across his face, devoid of warmth, filled only with the thrill of the challenge finally met.
"Fine..." His voice was different. Deeper, layered with the rumble of distant thunder, vibrating the air. "I acknowledge you." The words weren't praise; they were a declaration of war elevated. "You forced the hollow shell to crack. You made the SpeedOff Monarch... evolve." Blue lightning arced from his fingertips, earthing itself in the molten rock with vicious cracks. "Now... let's see if you can survive the Thunder."
The SpeedOff Monarch was gone. In his place stood the SpeedOff Thunder Monarch. The desperate struggle for survival was over. The desperate struggle against annihilation had just begun.