The firmament was not a sky.It was a tapestry of dismembered realities, each one torn apart, collapsed, fused against its will by the scars of the multiverse.A dissonant symphony of impossible cosmoses, shapes, and colors rippled through every corner of the final battlefield.
There they stood.Elisa, bearing the weight of countless worlds upon her back, the hat glowing with a dark, restrained calm.Astrid, her brooch pulsing like a furious heart, carrying the lost echoes of her extinct dimension.
The moment was suspended—eternal—as if existence itself were holding its breath.
"I won't do this out of hatred," Elisa said with quiet sorrow, her voice fractured by the history that had led her there. "But I won't allow you to continue."
"And I won't do this for revenge," Astrid replied. "But I won't stop. Not after everything I've seen and lived."
There were no final words.Only action.
Elisa surged forward in a swift motion, wrapped in a wake of shadows and void. Every step she took left behind echoes of nonexistence—patches of space that turned into absolute silence. Time trembled in her wake.
Astrid rose like a star that refused to die. With a motion of her brooch, nascent universes bloomed around her: columns of unseen matter, constellations vibrating like flowers opening. The ground beneath them shattered and was replaced by a platform of crystal, forged from pure space.
The first impact generated an ontological shockwave—a rupture so profound that a million alternative possibilities were aborted instantly. Worlds that could have been… ceased to be possible.
Their journey through the multiverse had strengthened both their bond and control over their artifacts. They now wielded power incomparable to anything else, surpassed only by the gods of the First Existence.
Elisa struck with a blow of pure void, one that did not merely destroy matter but denied the very possibility that anything had ever existed there. Astrid countered with an expansion of existence—a burst of new physical laws that altered the flow of time across kilometers of dimensional space.
The skies collapsed and rebuilt themselves simultaneously.
They spun and clashed, dancing an ancient dance between what is and what never should have been.
"Your power is pure negation!" Astrid shouted, evading a beam of fractured darkness. "You embody the death of all possibility!"
"And you are arrogance made flesh!" Elisa shouted back, now surrounded by fragments of realities she wielded as shields. "Not everything must be saved! Not everything must be one!"
They fell into one of the many dimensions Astrid had created, where every blow tore the space apart.Astrid watched as one of the universes she had created was being destroyed by her own actions.
Each attack she unleashed drove her deeper into rage, knowing she was destroying what she herself had made. Yet this only fueled her determination to win, focusing on the battle and on rebuilding that universe afterward.
And there, without another word, the fight continued.
Their physical forms began to distort. Elisa became, at times, an abstract shadow—an entity of impossible angles, a blur in perception. Astrid answered as pure light, an archetype of all living things, as though she were the mother of all reality. Together, they unleashed a barrage of power that tore the multiverse apart, degrading it further and further—an attack that shattered all concepts and logic.
They returned to their original forms and passed through a dimension where only conscious thoughts could survive. There, weapons were ideas, blows were contradictions, and wounds were revelations:
"Do you truly believe merging dimensions guarantees stability?""And do you believe infinite suturing is safer? How many worlds have died because they weren't united?"
The battle continued, and both channeled their powers to create two projections of pure existence and pure nonexistence. They collided in a blow that caused the entire world to collapse, hurling them into yet another universe.
They returned to physical space, wrapped in the cosmic dust of a thousand civilizations extinguished in a single second.
The fight grew ever more apocalyptic. Their power and control continued to rise, to the point where both began to evolve—developing new abilities as their bond with their artifacts strengthened with every blow they struck and endured. The battle was no longer just about who was stronger, but about who could grow faster and surpass the other.
Astrid formed a star in her hands and hurled it toward Elisa. Elisa stopped it with a single glance, then began turning it into a mass of shadows that flew back toward Astrid, leaving her utterly stunned—this was a power never seen before.
"All light casts a shadow, and every shadow blocks the light," Elisa said as she returned Astrid's own attack.
Though Astrid tried to resist, darkness soon enveloped her in a dome that began to overwhelm her. But Elisa was not the only one evolving. Astrid stopped fighting the shadow and instead began to purify it, raising her hands and flooding the dome with light. The darkness dissipated and concentrated in Astrid's palms.
"And just like every shadow, it follows the one who blocks and receives the light," Astrid replied, then hurled the purified shadows at Elisa. The attack struck her head-on, illuminating the entire galaxy they stood in.
Elisa slowly rose. Though still shaken by the blow, she did not yield.
"Now it's my turn," she said, her voice defiant and resolute.
Elisa invoked Nullity, the final technique of her hat: a field of nonexistence that expanded outward, extinguishing not only matter, but emotions, names, bonds, and time itself—as if they had never existed at all.
Astrid countered with Primordial Creation, a surge of pure existence that generated miniature realities, each flickering with the illusion of hope—thousands of pocket dimensions, quite literally the size of a pocket.
And so, nothingness and totality embraced and destroyed each other simultaneously.
The exchange seemed endless. For minutes, they struggled against one another, neither able to overpower the other.
"You don't understand what I'm protecting," Astrid said, exhausted and weakened, the light of her brooch flickering faintly. "This isn't a whim! It's… a sanctuary. A unified dimension where the pain of losing everything will never happen again."
It almost sounded as though she weren't speaking to Elisa, but to herself—trying to convince herself not to give up.
"And you don't understand what you're destroying," Elisa replied, tears floating weightlessly in the air. "Chaos, difference, freedom—they are life too!"
Their attacks finally exploded, warping all reality. The clash ended with both concentrating their power into their fists and unleashing a final strike that caused all of space-time to collapse.
The ground—or whatever they stood upon—shattered. They were left suspended above the dimensional abyss they had created. Elisa won the clash of fists, releasing a shockwave so vast that Astrid's attacking arm was completely destroyed.
And there, at last, Elisa gathered all her remaining strength—not with rage, but with compassion.
"I admire your dream. But I can't allow it. Not even for you."
"I… I know," Astrid trembled.
Elisa moved in a single swift motion.
Astrid did not move. She no longer had the strength to fight.
A beam of pure darkness pierced the light traveler's chest.Then there was only silence.
The brooch fell into the dimensional void and shattered like glass, disintegrating completely.
Astrid fell slowly, her smile broken. Her body began to glow and fade as she coughed up shimmering blood.
"…Thank you… for understanding me… even if it was too late."
Elisa reached out her hand—but could not touch her.
Before disappearing completely, Astrid saw one last hallucination of her mother and sister, standing behind Elisa.
Though saddened by the loss, a smile formed on her face, knowing she would finally see her family again.
"Sister… I think you were right. Maybe I did want to die."
Astrid then disintegrated completely.
Astrid's life went out, and her existence faded away.