The moment the second day began, it did not feel like a sunrise.
No light broke through the cosmic battlefield.
Because Armageddon—the dragon-phoenix-qilin-kunpeng aberration born before the first star ever flickered—had swallowed an entire cluster of suns during the night.
The void glowed faintly from the molten remnants drifting inside its throat.
And Ashura Bellet, The Eternal One, Sovereign of the Black Light, stood before that world-eater with his sword Kuroha lowered at his side, breathing steadily, chest rising and falling like a man who had not fought for a day and a night.
Which was a lie.
His divine-mortal body should have been flayed apart by now.
His bones should've cracked.
His muscles should've seized.
But Ashura was no longer a creature bound by mortal capacity or divine limitation.
Every birth across the worlds gave him strength.
Every death across all realms fed his authority.
Every soul passing through the cycle of Black Light poured more duskfire into his veins.
He grew while fighting.
He grew while bleeding.
He grew even while resting for a heartbeat.
And Armageddon—this primordial catastrophe that once devoured twenty thousand suns and drove six pantheons to extinction—had realized it.
The beast's four heads watched him with flickers of unease.
Armageddon's phoenix head shrieked first—
a cry that tore through the cosmic vacuum and made nearby planets vibrate into dust.
Its dragon head inhaled.
The qilin hind-leg kicked against the asteroid beneath it, shattering the rock into a million sparks.
The kunpeng wings expanded, blotting out galaxies.
Then—
FWOOM
A cosmic storm burst from its maw, the burnt-gold breath of devoured stars compressed into a beam as thick as a continent.
Ashura's hair whipped back.
His coat tore apart.
The endless black fire within his eyes shimmered.
He didn't dodge.
He lifted Kuroha, blade tilted downward, aura rising in black spirals.
And then—
SILENCE
The star-devouring breath stopped one meter before touching him.
The beam curved around his body like water brushing a stone, pulled into the authority of Black Light.
The void trembled.
Armageddon's phoenix eyes widened.
Ashura smiled—just a little.
Not arrogance.
Not mockery.
Acknowledgment.
"You're learning," he murmured.
He stepped forward.
The breath he had diverted compressed behind him into a miniature star, whirling faintly.
And with a flick of his finger—
BOOM
He sent that star back at Armageddon.
The explosion split the celestial horizon in half.
The shockwaves rippled through constellations.
Fragments of reality peeled like ripped cloth.
Armageddon reeled backward, wings flaring, the force rolling over its scales.
But the beast did not stop.
It roared again—
"Good," Ashura whispered.
The beast's four forms merged for an instant—
scales shifting into feathers, feathers into flame, flame into storming clouds of primordial qi.
Its qilin hooves became talons.
Its kunpeng wings cracked open to reveal a second pair beneath.
Its phoenix crest burst into a mane of voidlight.
Its dragon head lengthened, fangs dripping anti-solar venom.
Then it vanished.
Not through speed.
Through predation.
It devoured the dimensional layer itself, slipping between folds of space like a serpent through grass.
Ashura's eyes narrowed—
because he felt the gap closing behind it, sealing quicker than any teleportation he'd ever seen.
"Ah. You're adapting too," he said softly.
He closed his fist.
And the space around him shattered like black glass.
A ring of broken reality exposed something beneath—
a deeper darkness, the Underlight Realm, the primordial layer beneath existence where Black Light governed.
Ashura stepped into it.
His body dissolved into dusk.
Armageddon rushed through the subspace tunnels, claws raking through the walls of unreality, body slipping between layers like wildfire leaping between trees.
It wanted distance.
It wanted time.
Not to escape—
To evolve.
The beast that once ate suns sought now to understand the power that could kill gods.
Because Ashura's authority was something it had no memory of facing.
Death.
Rebirth.
Void.
Light.
Balance.
Cycle.
The Throne Hall of Black Light granted him dominion over everything that ended, everything that began, and everything that returned.
He was the arbiter of the three pillars that held reality together.
And Armageddon sensed that if it didn't evolve, it would die.
For the first time in millennia, the beast felt pressure.
So it dug deeper into the dimensional abyss, carving a new tunnel with each movement.
But—
He was already inside.
Ashura walked beside the beast as if the Underlight bent to his footsteps, as if he were strolling through his own garden.
Armageddon's four heads snapped toward him.
A growl rippled through the void.
Ashura tilted his head.
"Kuroha."
The blade sang.
A thin line of dusklight trailed from its edge.
Armageddon attacked instantly.
The phoenix head lunged.
The dragon tail snapped.
The qilin hoof stomped.
The kunpeng wings folded like crushing mountains.
Ashura didn't move.
But the Underlight moved for him.
Tens of thousands of souls—those passing through death, those being reborn—flowed around him in rivers of dimmed luminance. Their passage bent reality, forming a shield of migrating spirits guided by his authority.
The phoenix flames washed over the river of souls—
—and vanished.
The qilin stomp hit a barrier shaped like a gate of reincarnation—
—and rebounded.
The wings crushed down—
—and shattered against a cyclone of funeral light.
Armageddon recoiled, not from pain—
—but from understanding.
This was not a man.
Not a god.
Not a force of nature.
He was everything that begins and everything that ends.
And Ashura raised his blade.
Kuroha's edge glowed with a dim, almost soundless radiance.
The blade did not shine brilliantly.
It did not roar.
It did not radiate power like other divine weapons.
Because Kuroha was the opposite of creation—
it was the hushed breath before a star dies,
the quiet stillness before a soul reincarnates,
the whisper between life and death.
Ashura swung once.
Just once.
The Underlight broke open.
A circular incision sliced through the dimensional abyss, a perfect ring marking the boundary between two states of existence.
Armageddon's dragon head twisted out of the way—
barely.
Even so—
SHRRK
A third of its horns disappeared, erased so thoroughly not even dust remained.
Armageddon screamed—
—a low, thunderous cry that warped the darkness.
Ashura blinked.
"Oh?"
A faint amusement crossed his expression.
"You avoided that? Not bad."
He stepped forward.
The beast retreated.
And what followed was a dance of apocalypse.
Armageddon's body mutated mid-fight—
scales shifting into prismatic armor, flesh knitting into celestial patterns, blood burning into starfire.
Each time Ashura cut a limb—
it regrew in a new shape.
Each time he severed a wing—
another took its place.
Each time he pierced its chest—
the beast's internal sun splintered into multiple smaller cores.
It wasn't immortal.
It was ever-changing.
But Ashura was not merely growing stronger—
He was learning the beast's rules,
and then breaking them.
Armageddon's phoenix head unleashed a scream that distorted gravity—
Ashura locked gravity into stillness.
The dragon head spat an anti-solar flare—
Ashura extinguished the flare with the authority of endings.
The qilin hooves stomped to summon primordial qi storms—
Ashura stripped the qi from existence with the authority of void.
The kunpeng wings whipped open a dimensional rift—
Ashura closed the wound with a gesture, stitching the fabric of space.
Armageddon realized something horrifying:
Ashura was growing faster than it was.
And so—
It gambled.
It devoured the dimensional abyss itself.
Armageddon inhaled.
A column of raw existence flowed into its maw—
space, time, qi, souls, fragments of dead gods, shards of ancient civilizations, forgotten languages, relics drifting in cosmic streams.
Everything.
It devoured everything.
The beast's form expanded until it blocked the Underlight horizon, burning from within like a hollow star.
Then it roared—
and the roar tore the Underlight realm apart.
Ashura was thrown backward, skidding across the collapsing spatial floor.
The void itself trembled.
He felt his bones vibrate.
He felt his body blister from the internal radiation.
He felt the beast's new power crackle through existence.
Ashura let out a breath.
"…I see."
He stood.
Black Light flared from his body—
not as flames,
not as explosions,
but as a calm, heavy twilight that dragged everything around him toward silence.
The souls orbiting him expanded in number—
thousands, tens of thousands, millions—
all those who had died in this moment across all worlds, all pulled into the passage of reincarnation and now orbiting him like a vast constellation.
Their glow dimmed.
Then went black.
And the Underlight froze.
"Devouring existence…" Ashura murmured.
"A clever trick."
He raised Kuroha.
"But I govern endings."
Ashura swung Kuroha downward.
The blade did not blaze or scream.
Instead—
All things stopped.
The Underlight froze.
The drifting souls paused mid-orbit.
The collapsing dimensions froze mid-shatter.
Armageddon froze mid-breath.
Because the blade did not cut flesh—
it cut momentum.
It decapitated time.
And then—
Ashura stepped forward.
The moment resumed.
A massive explosion erupted from Armageddon's chest as the time-split wound reappeared violently—
a giant cross-shaped rupture.
The beast howled in overlapping layers of agony.
Blood made of molten galaxies sprayed outward.
Its phoenix head flickered.
Its dragon head convulsed.
Its qilin spine twisted.
Its kunpeng wings beat in desperation.
But the cycle had begun.
The fight became cataclysmic.
Ashura and Armageddon crashed through the Underlight, tearing across realms.
They shattered pocket dimensions, slashed through reincarnation rivers, and broke open ancient sealed universes long forgotten.
Armageddon lashed at him with universe-eating talons—
Ashura grabbed the talons with one hand and snapped them like twigs.
Armageddon swallowed him whole—
Ashura cut through its stomach and stepped out, brushing dust off his sleeve.
Armageddon unleashed a roar that erased sound—
Ashura answered with silence that erased roars.
But slowly—
surely—
the beast weakened.
Not because Ashura out-powered it—
but because Ashura's authority eroded the beast's evolutionary ability.
Change required beginning.
Growth required beginning.
And Ashura was the sovereign of beginnings and endings.
He simply denied the beast permission to evolve.
Armageddon stepped back.
For the first time, its four heads showed the same expression.
Fear.
The dragon's pupils narrowed to pinpoints.
The phoenix's flames dimmed.
The qilin's breath shook.
The kunpeng wings trembled.
Because Ashura—
standing barefoot on the broken spine of a dead dimension,
coat torn, chest bare, hair drifting in black currents—
smiled at it.
A quiet, calm smile.
He lifted Kuroha.
The blade hummed.
Armageddon roared in terror.
And the universe shook.
Ashura slashed horizontally.
A line of dusk radiance extended outward—
not bright, not dark, not sharp, not blunt—
simply inevitable.
Armageddon's phoenix crest split open.
Blood rained like falling stars.
Its dragon wings snapped apart.
Its qilin ribs shattered.
Its kunpeng feathers burned into black sand.
The beast collapsed into the void, body trembling, scales shedding, flame flickering.
Ashura approached slowly, Kuroha dragging behind him, leaving a faint trail of Black Light in the Underlight's dust.
Armageddon tried to rise—
Ashura placed a foot on its head and pushed it down gently but immovably.
"Tomorrow," he said.
The beast froze.
"Day 3," Ashura continued, voice soft, authoritative, absolute,
"—is when you kneel."
The beast shuddered.
And Ashura stepped off it, turning away, not even glancing back.
The universe trembling around the two titans—
one broken,
one untouched,
both waiting for dawn that did not exist.