The final, devastating memory of his father's forced sacrifice and the King's monstrous bargain left Kai mentally and emotionally eviscerated. He was back on the broken bridge, his body convulsing with silent, ragged sobs. The world was now secondary to the immense, crushing weight of his father's tragic reality.
"Dad! Stop! It's me! It's Kai!" he screamed, his voice dissolving into the night air.
He channeled the white-hot agony of his father's sacrifice into his nascent power. The awakened Air Prime Stone, fueled by pure grief, flared again, sending up a useless, desperate column of wind. He was trying to end the fight—to scream the truth into the void—but the figures of Null and Aris tore through the upper atmosphere, their destructive duel far beyond his reach. The fighting was escalating, and they couldn't hear him.
The King's Blade Perfected
Null materialized several miles above the earth, panting, his gold eyes struggling to focus. He was reeling from the sheer technical superiority of Aris.
Aris appeared opposite him, pristine and utterly controlled. He looked at Null with cold, analytical judgment, his single gray eye calculating Null's every desperate heartbeat.
"You have no structure, null," Aris stated, his voice a calculated monotone. "You rely purely on chaotic momentum and instinct. That is why you failed before, and that is why you fail now."
Null didn't reply. He threw a volley of chaotic crimson Shadow spikes—dense, reality-bending projectiles meant to destroy.
Aris did not move. He raised his enhanced right arm, and a field of pure, compressed Kinetic Force materialized around his hand. With terrifying efficiency, Aris copied the essence of Null's attack.
Dark, obsidian versions of the Shadow spikes erupted from Aris's hand. They were not made of Shadow, but of Kinetic Control compressed to infinite density, moving with faster-than-light precision. They were Null's ability, but perfected and purified by the King's technology.
The perfectly formed kinetic spikes met Null's chaotic shadow spikes. Null's creation shattered instantly.
"Your original technique is flawed by inefficiency," Aris stated clinically. "My enhancement allows me to replicate the effect of any Stone by simply calculating its required kinetic output. Your Shadow Prime Stone is now my weapon."
Aris charged, his obsidian blade replaced by a condensed, kinetic version of Null's Shadow Blade, wielded with absolute, non-negotiable discipline. Null was overwhelmed. Aris fought with the perfection of a machine, systematically picking apart every defensive maneuver and hitting critical weak points.
Null was battered back toward the atmosphere, his Shadow armor cracking, his consciousness flickering. He was losing, swiftly and definitively, to a superior version of himself.
This is the end, Null thought, falling toward the clouds. I can't do this alone. I need the strength of the past.
Fang! Null screamed telepathically, focusing on his reliable, ancient ally. Fang! I need the Code! I need the strength of the King!
Silence. Then, a voice answered. It was not the dry, ancient rasp of Fang. It was a different voice—darker, deeper, filled with a sound like crushing velvet and conceptual hatred.
"The Code cannot help you, little King. But Hate can. And the Void is always listening."
A chilling sensation, cold and absolute, flooded Null's mind. The voice offered no bargain, only a statement of fact: If you seek power, embrace the darkness you were born from.
Null screamed—a sound of absolute rage and desperate, utter acceptance.
The transformation was cataclysmic.
His gold eyes bled outward, the irises turning to solid, abyssal black, leaving only pinpoints of glowing white at the center. His short, yello hair lashed out, straightening and turning to an absolute, light-absorbing black.
Then, marking his ascendance, a jagged, impossibly dark Black Crown of coalesced Void energy instantaneously materialized on his head. It was made of raw, swirling shadow, pulsing faintly with the same agonizing white light as his eyes, a conceptual symbol of chaotic sovereignty.
The world around him was momentarily blotted out. The beautiful blue of the Earth and the black of space became saturated with a terrifying, pulsing crimson—the reflection of his soul, now pure power and pure hatred. This was the Void King.
He stopped his fall, levitating in the middle atmosphere. He no longer felt fatigue. He felt only the irresistible, crushing pull of the Void. The closer he was to the vacuum of space, the stronger he became, drawing limitless energy from the absolute darkness.
Aris paused, his gray eye widening a noticeable fraction. "A forced conceptual shift. Untamed. Dangerous."
Null roared, and the entire atmosphere around him seemed to turn to dense, pressurized shadow. He was crowned, he was awake, and he was consumed.
The Cataclysmic Global Fight
The fight was no longer a strategic duel; it was a conceptual war.
Null, moving with the reckless speed and abandonment of pure power, lunged at Aris. His attacks were now not just Shadow; they were massive, chaotic bursts of Void Energy that tore dimensional rifts just by their velocity. The Black Crown pulsed with every strike, fueling his devastating momentum.
Aris was forced to abandon his calculated replication and rely entirely on raw, brutal Kinetic Shielding and defensive maneuvers.
CLASH!
The impact of their first meeting after the transformation tore a massive hole in the sky above the Pacific Ocean. The sheer concussive force folded space around them, instantly transporting them across the globe.
One moment, they were shattering the atmosphere over the United States. The next, they violently reappeared, slamming into the ground near the coast of Japan, leaving a massive trench in their wake. They were moving too fast for human sight, a continuous, world-shaking boom following their passage.
Null, crowned with his volatile power, was relentless. He forced Aris back into the upper atmosphere, seeking the absolute darkness where his Void power thrived.
Null unleashed a wave of compressed Void energy that was too fast for Aris's kinetic armor to fully deflect, shattering it across his left shoulder and causing the first deep cuts on the King's Blade.
Aris responded by kicking Null with a kinetic blast that should have sent him toward the Moon, but Null simply halted the momentum with a cold wave of Void and slammed his opponent back toward the Earth.
Aris was getting worn down. His disciplined control was fraying. His kinetic shields shimmered too slow, and
...The fight was over, but the Void King had just been unleashed upon the cosmos.
The Retreat of the God
High above the silent Earth, Null floated, stabilized by the absolute darkness of space. He was a creature reborn, clad in churning, crystallized Void Energy, the vestiges of the jagged Black Crown still shimmering on his head. The power was limitless, chaotic, and terrifying.
Null's consciousness, though overwhelmed, fought back with a primal sense of purpose—the mission to secure the Code and survive. He desperately struggled against the sheer gravitational weight of the Void he was channeling.
The voice softened, laced with a cosmic amusement.
The influence was instantly, violently retracted. The presence of Umbros—the God of Darkness and Death—vanished, leaving Null alone with the overwhelming, volatile power he had stolen.
The immediate strain of controlling the unbridled Void forced Null's body to initiate a spontaneous, painful dimensional reversion. The Black Crown, having served its purpose as an anchor, dissolved into wisps of shadow, vanishing from his head entirely.
The process was agony. Null screamed internally as the raw Void energy retracted from his physical form.
His eyes, which had been abyssal black, violently snapped back to their original gold hue and the cross returns, the reversion leaving searing pain in his optic nerves.
His hair, which had been pure, light-absorbing black, violently reverted to its signature yellow, but the physical and conceptual stress of channeling a God's power left a permanent, horrific mark. Large, distinct streaks of absolute white now sliced through the yellow, looking less like age and more like physical scars carved into his very being. The white streaks pulsed with a raw, cognitive pain, signifying that the floodgates of his forgotten past had been irrevocably opened. The new memories—fragments of Soren's original life, the Code, the true meaning of the Prime Stones—were rushing in, threatening to rip his current sanity apart.
He was weakened by the reversion, injured by Aris's final blow, and now mentally shattered by the influx of his past. He forced his body to generate a powerful, controlled Void Engine for the descent. He began his slow, difficult, and agonizing drop toward the shattered world.
Kai: The Grounded Truth
Miles below, on the half-destroyed bridge, Kai's agony had given way to cold, crystalline purpose. He was driven by the terrible truth that his father was a monster only because he loved Kai.
He had secured the unconscious Vane—the key to the Space Prime Stone—in a dome of compressed, gentle air pressure. He knew Aris was gone, but the King's forces would return.
Suddenly, the atmosphere violently shuddered—not an explosion, but the controlled, massive pressure of Null's return. The impact site was close, deep in the dense, coastal forest bordering the river.
Kai didn't hesitate. He pointed his hand toward the forest. His Air Prime Stone roared, but silently, channeling immense air pressure behind him. He didn't run; he flew, propelled by a controlled burst of air that launched him over the river and toward the impact site in a matter of seconds.
The Crash and the Confrontation
Null crashed into the coastal forest, the impact vaporizing trees in a hundred-foot radius. He lay sprawled in the muddy crater, his power fluctuating wildly between controlled gold light and dangerous, volatile black shadow. The memory flood was overwhelming, threatening to dismantle his identity. He needed the Space Stone to anchor his mind.
Kai burst through the shredded perimeter of the forest, instantly spotting the smoking crater and the prone figure at the center.
"Null!" Kai cried, dropping to his knees beside him.
Null slowly raised his head, his gold eyes struggling to focus on the familiar figure. "Kai..." Null rasped, his voice rough and pained. He pushed himself up, leaning heavily on the destroyed ground, and caught sight of his reflection in a pool of rainwater nearby.
He saw the shock of his yellow hair, now streaked with the stark, traumatic white—the silent, painful monument to the memories of Soren that were now rushing into his mind.
"Kai, what happened to my hair? What... what did I do?" Null asked, his voice shaking, unable to reconcile his friend's terrified face with his own horrifying appearance.
Kai knelt there, looking at his friend—battered, branded with chaos, and utterly confused. Kai saw the Void King's lethal potential, but he also saw the vulnerable, trusting friend. He had the secret, and the burden was his alone.
"I know," Kai whispered, tears finally returning, not of sorrow, but of terrible, agonizing decision. "I know who he is. And I know why we have to stop him."
Kai grabbed Null's arm, his touch firm and urgent. "We have to go. We have to secure Vane. And we have to hide the Space Stone before my... before Aris returns."
The truth was out, the Void King was loose, and Kai, the son of the enemy, was now the protector of the only thing that could save his King. They were leaving the past behind, but the Air Stone and the white memory streaks ensured the past would never leave them.
End of chapter 54
This time only memories for next chapter
See you next time at crushing weight