〘𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝟐𝟖: 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐏𝐄𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐃𝐎𝐎𝐌𝐒𝐃𝐀𝐘〙
⟦Multiversal Battlefield — Between Collapsing Galaxies, just after Unessory Time unwinds⟧
The universe inhaled like something relieved. Time returned to its crooked, violent rhythm. Particles resumed their fall, embers finished burning, and the light that had been paused spilled through the wound in space as though nothing monumental had transpired inside the ninety-meter sphere. Where Cleaving had stood there was only shredded armor, crusted slag, and a series of scorched craters mapping the precise geometry of his undoing.
Xorath stood alone amid the ruin he had cut into being. He watched the collapsing eddies of stardust settle into new orbits as if testing whether the cosmos would remember who had made them. His breath, if such a thing could be called breath in the cold void, came steady and measured. For an instant the battlefield was merely a place that had been cleaned with terrible efficiency.
Then the sky tilted.
It was not a slow, apocalyptic rotation. The nearest spiral flipped like a coin caught at the edge of a table. Comets reversed tails. Gravity hiccupped. Xorath's first thought was tactical—an imbalance, an incoming attack, a trick of some god's petty imagination—but the sight that followed was something stranger and, in its way, almost obscene.
Above them, a galaxy hung upside down in a fist.
Not a shard or a fragment, but a full, trembling galactic cluster: a smeared wheel of stars and gas and newborn suns clenched between thick, callused fingers. The hand holding it belonged to a being the size of a small moon's spine and the expression on its face was one that read as childlike glee intersecting with predatory intent.
Doomsday.
He was broad and bristling, hair coarse as meteorite wire and skin shot with star-scar patterns. Where most creatures of that scale move with the stately violence of tectonics, Doomsday moved with the impulsive cruelty of a child smashing toys for fun. In one gargantuan hand he cradled the galaxy like a bunch of grapes—tight clusters of light rolling against his palm.
In the other hand he held the galaxy's stem and, with the careless amusement of someone who had spent too long destroying things and never been told to stop, he flung it—not at Xorath, not at the void, but with a flick meant for someone farther off-field.
Wukong.
The galaxy described a lazy arc, a comet with murderous purpose, a planet-sized projectile arcing toward where the Monkey King had been last seen. For a second the throw was almost beautiful; the light braided like silk through the black.
Xorath registered the motion with a soldier's clarity. He would have met the arc with countermeasures, with molten blades and re-anchored gravity, to shred the projectile into harmless dust. He reached, already calculating offsets in his head.
Wukong moved faster.
He was not where the galaxy was headed—he was moving. He twisted through the remains of a pale ring of asteroids, somersaulting across broken worlds with a grin that looked, for a sliver of a second, perfectly delighted at the universe's continued incompetence. The thrown galaxy slammed into the place Wukong had occupied a heartbeat ago and tore it into a spray of nascent suns, but Wukong had slipped. He had an uncanny talent for being one hair's breadth from death.
The galaxy exploded outward on contact with nothing, a deliberate apocalypse of its own making. Debris screamed in all directions; a dozen tiny stars were born in a chorus of shrieks and silence. Wukong landed on a floating slab of shattered crust and blinked through stardust, his staff tucked at his shoulder as though he'd merely arrived late for a party.
He had escaped the intended destruction. There was a flash—equal parts mockery and satisfaction—on his face when he looked up at what remained of the tossed galaxy. It was a grin that said the universe hadn't been allowed to kill him today.
Doomsday's eyes moved like the sweep of a hurricane. In the space of two heartbeats his expression bunched and hardened. He looked for his brother and did not find him.
No brother. Not where he expected. No answering laugh, no sign of the brother's battered silhouette among the ruined orbits.
The change in Doomsday was immediate and terrible. Where he had been a careless child moments before, a new machinery of fury engaged. His jaw tightened until the nearby dust quivered. The grip on the remaining piece of the galaxy tightened until its arms—if planets could be said to have arms—strained and flared with radiation. Doomsday took a step and the shadows on surrounding debris deepened as if afraid.
Xorath watched the shift with narrow attention. He too noticed the missing brother; his senses were honed to patterns of alliances and vendettas across the stars. There was danger now that had a different flavor—one of personal vendetta rather than cold strategy. Doomsday's rage would be less about domination and more about loss, and the latter is a trigger far harder to outmaneuver.
Doomsday roared, and the sound moved through space like a physical thing. It was not merely a battle cry; it was the noise of a god whose private world had been tampered with. He tossed aside what remained of the galaxy and advanced.
Wukong, perched on his slab of rock and still smiling with that infuriating, unkillable leisure, watched with a flicker of interest. He had been closest to destruction and had done what he always did—slip through death's teeth and come out snickering. But the look Doomsday now wore removed all amusement from the scene. Doomsday's fury was the sort that recruits the cosmos to its cause.
'Where is he?' Doomsday's voice was a rumble that rearranged constellations. It sought names. It sought blood.
Wukong's grin thinned into a line. He did not answer with words. He had no time for speeches; Doomsday's motion suggested that conversation would soon be interrupted by violence. Instead Wukong rolled, current of golden fur flashing, and positioned himself between the hulking pig-god and the trajectory he assumed Doomsday would take toward whatever—or whoever—he wanted.
For a beat everything was still as a held breath. The ruined galaxies seemed to lean in, awaiting the violence that had become their grammar.
Doomsday moved first.
He lunged with colossal speed, a shoulder like an impact crater aimed at the slab where Wukong balanced. The posture was simple: crush, obliterate, find the brother's scent in the ruin and tear it open. He struck the slab and it shattered outward into a rain of fragments. The force of the blow sent arcs of molten dust spinning; nearby dwarf-planets trembled on their orphaned axes.
Wukong's reflexes were a blur of ancient cunning and mischief. He dodged, the staff a golden line that carved counterpoints in the air. He struck back with the sort of light, stinging blows that make larger rivals overcompensate. One staff snap, precise, aimed at the joint of Doomsday's knee, and the hulking pig-god staggered.
Doomsday did not stagger long. He recovered with the sheer momentum of mass and rage and slammed his fist into the void, creating a shockwave that knocked three small moons out of orbit. Wukong flew across the blast and slammed into a ruined observatory, which peeled like a tin can.
The two of them traded blows across a battlefield that had already been through too much. Doomsday's strikes were punishing and catastrophic; each palm strike created tidal waves of radiation, each stomp adjusted the gravity in a hemisphere. Wukong's replies were evasions punctuated by precision—strikes that sought to irritate and unbalance rather than to finish. He darted between Doomsday's reach, taunting and jabbing with a humor that had teeth.
Xorath observed, making choices at the margins. He could have intervened, he could have thrown blades or spells, but Doomsday's anger was not only raw force; it was personal and would have made his wrath difficult to parry without deeper context. For now Xorath kept his distance, watching—always the general even in a field that asked for fist and fury.
Doomsday's attacks grew less practiced and more feral. He began to tear at the environment, uprooting spires of compacted dark matter and hurling them like clubs. He raged toward places he thought he might find his brother, ripping through wreckage and looking for a sign. Each miss made him louder, each absence honed the blade of his fury.
Wukong, in the middle of it, laughed—sharp as a thrown pebble. It was not a sound of mockery but of focused insolence, a way of turning Doomsday's rage into a rhythm he could read. For all the apocalyptic scale of his opponent, Wukong moved like a gossiping sparrow, slipping through cracks and making bold faces at the storm before slipping away.
But even Wukong is not untouched by scale. The way Doomsday searched—hands tearing, eyes burning—made it plain: the brother's disappearance was a wound that would not be soothed by spectacle. Doomsday's fury was a machine with a single missing cog, and missing cogs get replaced with violence.
The chapter closes on that building storm. Doomsday's face was a map of furious intent; Wukong was a bright speck of mischief and survival between the god's fists; Xorath watched, patient and wary. No resolution fell; no final blow landed. The search had become a hunt, and the hunt had become a fight.
The last image lingered: the thrown galaxy, shredded and drifting in a new orbit, a broken grape among cosmic teeth; Wukong, breathing dust and light, staff at the ready; Doomsday, roaring for a missing brother and promising a wrath that the multiverse had not yet fully felt.
The chapter ends there—on the tilt between fury and search, on the promise that Doomsday's wrath would have a direction now, and that the fight to come would be a response to a loss he would not forgive.