Date (Wonder World): Year 0, Day 150.
Date (Real World): Tuesday, February 28, 2025. Approximately 11:00 AM.
Null's personal Code Garden—the conceptual Blood Sea—had stabilized into a cruel, endless training ground. For five months of conceptual time, he had fought non-stop, mastering the terrifying balance of the Sovereign Code Discharge.
For this session, he chose a new environment: a stark, orange desert of conceptual sand, where the light felt abrasive and the concept of exhaustion was magnified.
He faced his target: a Rank 4 Legendary Creature unlike any he had fought before. This creature was perfectly humanoid, with taut, sculpted muscle covered in smooth, chilling white skin. Its eyes were pure, hostile red, and its ears were sharp, pointed like ivory shards. It was the Demon of Kinetic Purity—a conceptual entity that fought with nothing but devastating martial arts.
The Demon didn't speak; it only smiled—a wide, razor-sharp grin that radiated pure, malicious focus.
The Duel of Purity
The fight was brutal, immediate, and utterly grounded. The Demon lunged, not with magic, but with a simple, blindingly fast Taekwondo axe kick. Null barely blocked it with an armored forearm, the impact shaking his entire Nexus Suit.
The Demon didn't use Code; it used perfect, conceptual martial kinetics. Every punch was a concept of force; every kick, a concept of speed.
Null, forced to fight physically rather than conceptually, relied on his Void King Regeneration to absorb the punishment. He tried to retaliate with a sweep of Shadow Mastery, but the Demon danced through the void, negating the strike with an impossible flick of its wrist—a conceptual block that demonstrated an innate understanding of Absence.
Thud! The Demon connected with a devastating Muay Thai knee strike to Null's ribs. Null flew backward, skidding across the conceptual sand.
"It knows my weakness," Null grunted, pushing himself up. The Demon wasn't fighting the Shadow Code; it was fighting the body that held the Shadow Code. It was trying to destabilize the conceptual anchor by shattering the physical one.
Null channeled the Sovereign Code Discharge, a bolt of dark purple lightning crackling around his fist. He thrust it forward—a final, absolute move.
The Demon simply met the strike. It didn't try to block or dodge; it absorbed the elemental chaos into its palm using a Judo deflection stance, conceptually redirecting the kinetic force of the lightning harmlessly into the sand.
The clash was even. Null was pushed back by the sheer mastery of the attack redirection, realizing his brute force was useless against the Demon's perfect Conceptual Martial Arts.
Memory Recurrence: The Master's Hand
As the Demon advanced, Null braced for the next blow, but his consciousness fractured. The pain of the past—the white streaks in his hair—flared, forcing a vision into his mind.
He saw the face of an older man: strong, kind, but deeply worried. Soren's father. The memory was so vivid it burned away the sensory input of the desert.
A child's body, small and tense. Soren.
"Control the chaos, Soren. The Code is the energy, but the body is the anchor. If the anchor is stable, the Code is stable."
The vision shifted to a sunlit dojo. The father was demonstrating footwork—not for power, but for balance and deflection.
"Judo teaches you to use the enemy's weight against them. You are not a wall; you are a river, my son. Taekwondo gives you the height. Muay Thai gives you the unbreakable core."
The memories were not complete, but the muscular commands—the muscle memory of Soren—surged back, overwriting Null's frantic Code use.
The Counter-Attack: The Unwritten Fist
Null stopped focusing on the Shadow. He dropped his stance, adopting the low, unmoving base of Muay Thai.
When the Demon of Kinetic Purity charged, Null didn't use a Code blast; he used a move of pure, defensive stability. The Demon launched a fierce combination of three rapid strikes.
Block: Null met the first punch with a hard, conceptually-reinforced Muay Thai block to the forearm, absorbing the shock into his core.
Deflect: As the Demon followed with a kick, Null fluidly shifted his weight, executing a perfect Judo sweep, using the Demon's own immense kinetic momentum against it.
Counter: The Demon, caught off guard by the conceptual Judo throw, stumbled just enough. Null seized the advantage, launching himself into the air with a blinding Taekwondo spin kick—aimed not at the Demon's head, but at the conceptual anchor point in its chest.
The hit was solid. The Demon, for the first time, cried out—not in pain, but in conceptual surprise. The strike had used the purity of martial law to briefly destabilize the Demon's Rank 4 Code.
Null pressed his advantage, unleashing a flurry of disciplined, learned movements. The Sovereign Code Discharge was no longer a wild blast; it was now layered around his fists and knees, turning his martial arts into weapons of elemental chaos.
The Demon, now genuinely wounded, tried to reassert its Rank 4 influence, summoning a conceptual shield.
Null broke through the shield with a lightning-fast sequence of strikes, remembering his father's final lesson: The Code must follow the will.
The final blow was a conceptual uppercut, powered by the full, focused blast of the Sovereign Code Discharge. It hit the Demon square in the jaw.
The Demon of Kinetic Purity shattered, its white conceptual form fracturing into a million pieces of sand that dissolved into the desert.
The Price and The Purpose
Null stood alone in the orange heat, his body burning with conceptual energy, his mind reeling from the recovered memories of Soren's childhood.
He felt the change immediately. The white streaks in his hair had noticeably widened, weaving further into the darkness, signaling a significant conceptual memory integration.
More profoundly, his eyes had changed. While the Code energy was still gold, the cross-shape of the Void King Code—the cross within the gold—was now a cold, unsettling grey. It symbolized the integration of the brutal truth: the sacrifice and the necessary violence.
Null looked down at the spot where the Demon had been, his voice resonating with a new, cold authority—the voice of Soren's protector and the Void King's heir.
He spoke the words that crystallized his new resolve, a line both fatalistic and poetic, aimed at the unseen King of Stone.
"The void consumes memory, yet it
remembers the debt. Every sacrifice
paid is simply the cost of my ascension."
End of chapter 62
See you tomorrow