Chương 78: 77: The Accident

A passenger jet suddenly flashed toward him. Zeinai's eyes widened. What...? Hs mind refused to process what he was seeing. He... actually threw a damn passenger jet? There wasn't time to think. It struck before he could rise. BOOOOOOOOOM. The airliner detonated across the crater, fire and twisted metal erupting skyward as the blast swallowed him whole. The Dweller walked toward the burning wreckage through the flames, calm as ever. The explosion registered as little more than a dull vibration.

His suit didn't even bother dispersing it. The impact fell so far beneath the threshold required to drain Apis reserves that the armour simply tanked it outright. Realisation settled over Zeinai. The Dweller hadn't thrown the airliner because it would hurt him. He'd done it because he could. Just as he'd casually parried the bat against a simple wakizashi, sharpening the blade with every impossible clash instead of avoiding them, it had all been theatre. A showman putting on a performance....

The syringe flashed into Zeinai's hand as he lunged. His kick passed straight through. A hologram. The real Zeinai was already flashing in from the side. It meant nothing. The Dweller flowed through the assault. Every attack arrived to find empty space, a kick sending Zeinai crashing into a crater hard enough to fracture bedrock. 14... 13... 12... The Dweller stood over him, gray eyes carrying the same weary patience.

"Are you done fooling yourself?" His gaze settled on the syringe. 11... 10... 9...

"You really thought that would work?" Zeinai laughed, blood staining the sound.

"Already has." The Dweller's expression shifted. 8... 7... 6...

"The syringe was the distraction," Zeinai said, dragging himself upright.

"The real agent locked onto you five seconds ago. Undetectable. An aerosol. It seeped through your pores while you were watching the shiny thing in my hand." The weariness disappeared from the Dweller's eyes. The drug struck instantly. His pupils shrank to pinpoints as overwhelming awareness flooded his body. Blood coursing through his veins. Heart valves closing with every beat. Air moving through lungs that suddenly demanded conscious effort.

Muscles, nerves, organs - every automatic process forced into the foreground. He staggered. 5... 4... 3... Zeinai rose. This time, the Dweller was too slow. Every action demanded thought. Every movement had to be consciously chosen through a mind drowning in sensation. Zeinai's fist tore straight through the Dweller's left shoulder, flesh, bone, and blood erupting into the night as the severed arm spun into the darkness. The Dweller grunted. Real pain.

Zeinai pressed the attack, driving another punch toward the Dweller's head. CRUNCH. His fist connected. At the exact same instant, an unseen technique detonated inside Zeinai's left arm, shredding it beneath the suit. 2... 1... 0. MAGIC REVOCATION FIELD: EXPIRED. Sixty seconds were over. The Dweller's magic returned in a flood. Telekinesis. Full force. Zeinai was ripped from where he stood and hurled into the crater wall, carving a man-shaped imprint into solid rock. SUIT INTEGRITY: 2%.

WARNING: CATASTROPHIC FAILURE IMMINENT. Blood streamed beneath his mask. He tried to stand. His body refused. The Dweller rose. His ruined shoulder reversed before Zeinai's eyes. Bone regrew. Flesh knitted together. Blood flowed backward from the ground into reopened veins until the arm was whole again. The world followed. Shattered skyscraper windows reassembled. The crater smoothed itself into pristine asphalt. Civilians lowered their phones and wandered off as though nothing had happened.

Zeinai lay broken, watching reality undo itself.

"How?" he rasped.

"I landed the hit. Your technique was gone." The Gloom Dweller regarded him quietly.

"I have nine perfected techniques. You only disabled one." He stepped closer.

"The strike that destroyed your arm was an improvisation of my swimming kick. I normally vibrate my leg at a precise frequency and redirect the force of impact through whatever touches me. This time, I vibrated my entire body and reflected your own strength back through the point of contact." He paused.

"I used it against Crook once. It failed. I've been refining it ever since."

"…The skyscraper?"

"That was different." He shook his head.

"An improvisation of the vibrating palm. I reduced the force acting on my body by transferring it elsewhere. The skyscraper... and the rest of the city. The damage was spread so thin you never noticed." Zeinai stared at him. The Cognizine had failed. The magic had returned. Yet even without either, this man had fought like something beyond human. He hadn't lost to magic. He'd lost to the man wielding it. Perhaps the Dweller wasn't powerful because of his magic. Perhaps his magic was powerful because of him.

And even if Zeinai had stolen it... there was no guarantee he could have done any of this. Zeinai's thoughts had already accepted defeat. His suit hadn't. Something struck the prism embedded in his suit. Sphinx's sphere. It dissolved into it, flooding the suit's systems. Yellow readouts flickered... then turned green. His visor whirred. The old combat HUD had only predicted attacks, warning him fractions of a second before they arrived. This was different. It generated infinite counters.

Zeinai frowned behind his visor. Antarctica's Stepper gear shouldn't have matched Talon technology, yet the sphere merged with his prism flawlessly. Had Sphinx stolen it... or improved it herself? He didn't know. His suit began vibrating, releasing tiny omission waves in short, invisible pulses that gently blinked the space around him. The same phenomenon Sphinx had forced through his HUD earlier.

So subtle nothing could perceive it, yet within those infinitesimal gaps, even a god became mortal for fractions of a second without ever realizing. This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. A solution appeared. TECHNIQUE DATABASE: COM PLETE. ALL PERFECTED TECHNIQUES: ANALYZED. COU NTERMEAS URES: GENERATED. PROBABILITY OF SUCCESS: 100%. Zeinai saw the opening. He hesitated. The sphere didn't.

Before he could question it, his body jerked upright as the suit seized control. Telemetry flooded his visor. The sphere wasn't sustaining maximum output. It flared Apis to astronomical levels for fractions of a second, just long enough to complete a step, strike, or turn, then dropped back to almost nothing before spiking again. The result was overwhelming speed at a fraction of the cost, each burst landing exactly when it was needed. Zeinai understood immediately.

A single Stepper from the Antarctic Faction could assassinate a speedster with ease. Against multiple enemies, they could hand control over to the suit's autopilot and watch it dismantle an entire battlefield. Only Talons were supposed to have this level of combat optimization. Then another realization hit him. The Mach 35 he'd recorded from Sphinx... She'd been playing around. The sphere hadn't even begun assisting her.

Properly used, it could push beyond millions of times beyond light for the tinest fraction and end fights instantly. Knowing Sphinx, she simply enjoyed the fight more than the kill. — The Dweller's expression changed. His palm shot forward, then faltered as a tiny disruptor struck his wrist, cloaked in Apis until the instant of contact. The technique stuttered. Zeinai's kick crashed into his ribs. BOOM!

Blood exploded from the Dweller's mouth as he blasted through a bank, tearing through the lobby, the vault beyond it, and bursting out the far wall in an avalanche of concrete, steel, and glass. The Dweller's body flickered between a defenseless human and a god. For a heartbeat, the reinforced vault doors and steel supports shredded straight through him, flesh peeling away in ribbons before Gloom surged back, knitting everything together almost instantly. Understanding hit Zeinai all at once.

The omission waves weren't merely suppressing magic. They were reverting their target to the baseline of an average, defenseless human. Every perfected technique, every supernatural instinct, every impossible refinement vanished for those infinitesimal moments before reality caught up and restored them again. Zeinai's feathers shrieked to life, vibrating hard enough to lift him from the ground as he rocketed after his target. His visor flashed. OMISSION WINDOW CONFIRMED. NEURAL SCAN: COMPLETE.

TECHNIQUE LIBRARY: DOWNLOADED. SIMULATION: PERFECTED. The Dweller wasn't fighting Zeinai anymore. He was fighting a computer-perfected version of him. Paris stepped in with Wing Chun. Zeinai's forearm intercepted the strike before it had fully formed. A Tai Chi redirection flowed seamlessly into a Judo shoulder turn, forcing the Dweller to abandon the exchange. His gray eyes narrowed. Something had changed.

Zeinai grunted as the suit seized control again, wrenching his hips into a kick he'd never have attempted himself. His hamstring stretched beyond its natural limit, pain shot through his leg, but the strike still landed, forcing the Dweller back a step. Even disrupted, the Dweller remained terrifying. The disruptor rippled through the Dweller, throwing every rhythm in his body into chaos. He flowed with it. Instead of fighting the disarray, he aligned himself to it, moving with the instability itself.

By every law of his own body, he should've stopped. He stepped forward anyway. His Wakizashi flashed. Zeinai blurred from an ancient Tai Chi posture into a blistering barrage of chain punches that didn't belong to him. They were too smooth, too precise. His own style had been stripped apart, perfected, and returned colder than before. The Dweller cut in to intercept. The Wakizashi shattered. Skill alone broke it.

Zeinai's forearm struck the blade at an impossible angle, folding the steel against itself until it burst into glittering fragments. The Dweller saw it.

"... You're not choosing those." Zeinai's suit vibrated. He dropped through a wormhole and burst out above the Dweller. A kick shattered him. Hardlight. The real Zeinai erupted from behind. Paris turned to intercept. Another hologram. The real Zeinai had never moved. He still stood directly in front of him, one palm extended, vibrating at a frequency that made reality feel loose, as though Paris's soul were beginning to slip free of his body. Paris answered immediately, raising his own vibrating palm.

The two frequencies collided. ZZZT. Electricity exploded through Paris's body. His muscles locked, his technique faltered, and he dropped to one knee.... The Dweller hit the pavement. He wasn't in pain. He was afraid. His vibrating palm...... had touched the Earth.

"No..." The street beneath his hand trembled. Then the vibration spread. Concrete collapsed into powder. Steel unraveled into dust. Cars, buildings, people - everything caught in the resonance shook itself apart as molecular bonds slipped out of phase. The city dissolved. Then the state. Then the continent. The wave tore through the mantle, core and atmosphere in less than a heartbeat. Gravity failed as the planet unravelled into an expanding cloud of incandescent debris. Zeinai floated where Earth had once been.

It didn't stop. The Moon dissolved. Mars followed. Then Venus. Mercury. The Sun quivered as the resonance reached it, fusion falling silent before the star burst apart in a blinding sphere of light. The Solar System unravelled behind it, planets, moons, asteroids and comets collapsing into expanding clouds of dust. Still it spread. Stars dimmed. Nebulae collapsed. Entire star systems came apart as the vibration raced across light-years. Zeinai floated in a universe that was unravelling.

His HUD glitched violently, unable to process what it was seeing. Reality itself was breaking apart. Across the void, dimensions split open in vast fractures, unfurling like impossible flowers as the vibration rippled through the universe, exposing the seams between worlds. Zeinai couldn't breathe. His heartbeat became painfully loud inside his helmet. His thoughts fractured. No... No, no, no... He turned wildly, searching for something that still obeyed reason. There was nothing.

His hands began shaking uncontrollably. Every instinct screamed that this couldn't exist. His mind clawed for explanations, for logic, for some hidden trick his visor had failed to identify. It found none. The sheer scale crushed thought itself. Zeinai felt himself teetering on the edge of madness, as though one more impossible sight would snap whatever remained of his sanity. He wanted to close his eyes. He couldn't. He had to keep looking. UNIVERSAL STABILITY: MAINTAINED. UNKNOWN TELEKINETIC FIELD DETECTED.

FIELD SCALE: UNIVERSAL. FUNCTION: CONTAINMENT. STATUS: PREVENTING CASCADE INTO ADJACENT TIMELINES. He stared into the unraveling cosmos. The Dweller was holding an entire universe together with telekinesis alone, keeping its destruction from spilling into every other reality. Something moved. He turned. TARGETS DETECTED: 978, 646. Zeinai's breath caught. The void was full of Dwellers. Hundreds of thousands of identical figures drifted through the collapsing universe, moving with impossible coordination.

They poured into widening fractures as though they themselves were thread, flying through the gaps and stitching reality shut before it could tear apart completely. He blinked. Nine hundred and seventy-eight thousand... six hundred and forty-six? His visor recalculated. The number didn't change. He can clone himself to this extent...? A colder thought settled over him.... Was the one I'd been fighting even the real Dweller at all? He didn't even have time to feel the shock. THOOOOOOOOOOOM.

A planet slammed into him. The impact swallowed his body, driving him through continents, oceans, and molten mantle before the entire world lurched beneath the collision. A heartbeat later, the planet tore free of its orbit, flung out of the Solar System like a stone from a sling, then accelerated harder still, ripping past stars until it blasted clean out of the Milky Way. Everything went black. Part Seven: The Mountain He woke to cold air and the scent of pine.

Clean white bandages wrapped his bare torso, circling his ribs, shoulder, and the stump where his left arm had been. The suit and mask were gone. Someone had laid him on a flat stone with a folded jacket beneath his head. He looked at the wound. A clean amputation. The serum had already begun knitting the flesh together, but the arm would never return. As the haze cleared, so did the memories. Earth unraveling. The Solar System collapsing. Space itself splitting apart.

His heart, which moments ago had been pounding itself raw, settled back into a steady rhythm. The panic drained from him, leaving only the strange feeling of waking from a nightmare that had somehow been real. The Dweller had reversed it. He'd turned time back. He sat up. The Gloom Dweller sat cross-legged nearby, his long coat spread across the grass, gray eyes closed as the wind stirred his curly hair. Behind him, the setting sun bathed an endless mountain range in gold. These weren't Japan's mountains.

They were older, wilder, and the air carried the bite of altitude and distant snow. His HUD flickered weakly. LOCATION: Himalayan Range, Northern Nepal. ELEVATION: 4, 200 meters. TIME: 17: 43 local. His mask rested beside him. He left it there.

"Why didn't you kill me?" His voice came out raw. The Gloom Dweller opened his eyes, their ancient, patient weariness settling on Zeinai.

"It wouldn't have changed anything." Zeinai lowered his head.

"…I'm sorry." The words felt foreign leaving his mouth.

"I made a mistake." The Gloom Dweller only shrugged.

"I've seen worse." His gaze drifted toward the mountains.

"Back during the Sin War, I unlocked one hundred percent of my power for the first time." He smiled faintly, though there wasn't any joy in it.

"I powered up so hard that I unraveled existence itself. Time. Space. Causality. Concepts stopped existing because there was nothing left for them to define." His eyes returned to Zeinai.

"I had to recreate them from scratch just so I could reverse what I'd done." Only then did his gaze settle on the bandaged stump.

"I knew why you were fighting me. I can't bring her back without her consent. She's been gone too long." Zeinai froze.

"I've spoken to her." The words settled over the mountains. His eyes drifted to the wound. The amputation was clean, wrapped in fresh bandages already stained with faint traces of something that wasn't quite blood. A thin veil of dream mist rose from the stump before fading into nothing. It wasn't healing. The serum kept trying, but every strand of new flesh dissolved the instant it formed, unraveling into mist as though the wound itself rejected reality. The punch. He remembered it now.

The strike he'd thrown with everything he had, Apis screaming through his prism at full output. The Dweller hadn't blocked it. He'd caught it, and the Apis detonated between them, taking Zeinai's arm when the light faded.

"I couldn't heal it," the Dweller said quietly.

"That punch was saturated with Apis. Every spell I use dissolves into dream mist the moment it touches the wound. It doesn't resist healing. It turns healing into something that was never fully real." Zeinai looked down as another wisp drifted from the bandages.

"The serum can't fix it either. Every regenerated cell becomes the same dream-stuff. The wound remembers being unmade... and keeps trying to finish the job. Your eye's the same." Zeinai nodded.

"I deserve that." His voice was empty. Then something caught in his mind. He looked up.

"Wait..."

"You said... you spoke to my sister?"