Take it, the voice in the void suggested. One choice, and every wound is cauterized. Rule, and the world will fold to your will.
For the first time since the Crucible began, temptation did not feel like a distant echo. It felt warm and immediate. Lucien imagines the King of Hell his crown pressing cool metal to his brow.
Lucien started losing his mind. He could reach for that power, and in that reach he would become an answer — decisive, final, and terrifyingly simple.
But then he remembers what the King can never buy. He would never hear the ragged laughter of his team in the command post, Rylen's hands steady on the wheel of someone who refuses to harness others' terror. Jason his early morning jokes. Emiluna here soft personality and her kind heart. He remembers the faces of the people who made him want to be better than a solution.
"Never. My answer is no," Lucien says, not loud but iron in the bones. "I will not wear that crown. I will not become the King. Im a human."
The King's grin curdles. "You would throw away power for eternity for your own pride?"
"No," Lucien replies. "I throw it away for truth."
And then after he refused the thrown, with a movement so quiet it feels like a sin, Lucien reaches inward. Not for the power of the God of Vengeance but to the exploratory wound he sewed himself in this battle. His evolution power gave him something new.
He names it, silently: Reset Genesis.
Time does not merely step backward. It recoils.The blasted stones lift and stitch themselves whole. The ring on his chest blinks, obedient: The time on his ring changed.
1:30.
Everything blinks as if awoken from a dream. Lucien sees his comrades again at the boundary line. He feels it. Above them, the Creator of Gods tilts her head like a scholar intrigued. Then in the underground world. The King of Hell's eyes narrow, tasting new danger.
Seryx, eyes still sharp knows it too. He meets Lucien's gaze and does not look surprised. Somewhere in the snapped thread of causality another echo answers — and recognizes the hand that touched it.
Lucien exhales. He set the everything and everyone back to 1:30 not to cheat fate, but to teach it a new language.
"Again," he says simply. "No kings or gods. Just the end we earn."
Seryx smiles at Lucien.
"You rewound it. You rewound time itself," he says. Not accusation. Not surprise. Just fact.
Lucien's shoulders uncoil. "I did. Got a problem with it?"
There is a curious warmth in Seryx's eyes. "No i don´t. When to ring hit zero i wanted to see whether you'd use borrowed thrones or invent your own."
Lucien replies with a laugh that tastes like exhaustion and iron. "I will not be a puppet. I will not take that piece of shit his crown. And I certainly don't want the Creator's pity. I will forge my own path."
Seryx's grin spreads into something like amusement and admiration. "We are the same remember, When you folded time, I felt it. I knew it the second you did decided to do it. The fold is not a secret anymore. We share the upgrade. You will never beat me Lucien becaue we are the same" The immortal's voice is soft as winter snow. "You took a risk that even I had not taken."
Lucien's gaze burns. "I don't want anyone´s thrown. I am human and i always will be," he says again. "I want to end this with my own hands."
"You could have taken the quickest route and you would have become the new King of Hell," Seryx says. "You could have been tempted. Instead you wrote a new rule."
"And you?" Lucien asks.
Seryx looks inward, his smile folding over into concentration. "I changed while you broke me. When your spear found its way to every version of myself and killed every version of me, I learned… I folded those possibilities until one fit. We both walked away different."
Both the Creator and her son the King of Hell sense a game altering its axes. Both shockingly, feel respect for both of them.
"You're ambitious Lucien. You always have been. When i was created by the first he gave me all your memories. I saw it, your struggles and yout rise to greatness. Even if you can rewind time. Your rise will stop here," Seryx says.
"I am determined. Thats why i will beat you. You might look just like me under that mask, but you still have your own personality. Because of your big ego, you'll be defeated, Seryx. I promise you that. Even if I have to turn back time a million times. I'll defeat you.," Lucien answers.
'' Then let us begin," Seryx says. "And count carefully Lucien."
The first exchange between them was an earthquake.
Lucien's Purgeflame Pinnacle erupts out of nowhere, a column of heat and will that tears a corridor through reality. Seryx answers with Nexus Collapse Spiral, a motion that doesn't just redirect force. It unpairs meaning from motion, making strikes arrive and then pretend they never traversed space.
Lucien strikes again but now with Fractal Cataclysm Edges. It were blades that fold into themselves, each strike a recursive punishment that splits into a hundred smaller judgments. Seryx replies with Infinite Paradox Cascade, turning each shard into an impossibility that devours the logic behind its creation.
They trade blow after blow. One of Lucien strongest attackts the Absolute Wish Strike attempts to impose intent upon impact; Seryx's Temporal Mirror Haven twists that intent into the mirror of its origin and strikes the attack right back at Lucien. Lucien then counters with Palindrome Echoes. A new power that entangled time itself so that an action answers itself twice, and Seryx fractures consequence with Causality Unmake Pulse.
Every loop ends the same: stalemate after stalemate. From 1:30 to 0:00, they collide and nullify eachother every single time that they clash, each learning the other's language until mere force becomes obsolete. Lucien rewinds time with Reset Genesis. They begin again.
Ten loops turn into a hundred. Then number thousand hits. The Crucible's architecture ages and heals with each reset.
Lucien invents new powers after so many battles. Silent Pulse Annihilation. Its a strike so quiet it deletes the notion of 'impact' from the target's perception. Violet Crown Barrage — a storm of blows layered with conditional laws that trigger upon being believed. Fateglass Rend which is a slash that cracks the lens through which destiny watches the pair.
Seryx has an answer everytime. Nexus Tyrant Echo summons tyrant-aspects of himself from paths where he ruled with cruelty. Folded Eternity Guillotine slices along futures, delivering cuts that fell from every timeline where a blade could fall. Heatroot Severance unmakers heat's origin, leaving strikes that never warmed.
By loop one thousand, both have forgotten fatigue and their on autopilot. By loop three thousand, their counters blur into dancing maneuvers that map onto dimensions. By loop five thousand, they forgot to think and looked like figures from a game.
And still Lucien rewinds every single time without a second thought.
At the end of five thousand loops, both stand in the same crater of unmade time and breathe, having replaced brute strength with something that scratches the stars: mutual comprehension, and an arsenal of impossible tools.
On the five thousand and first loop, Seryx does not strike immediately. He watches Lucien with a strange tenderness edged by steel.
"There is one thing I don ´ t understand about you Lucien. Why not go further back?" Seryx asks quietly, genuinely curious. "Back to minute ten, where it all started. You were stronger then me at minute ten. You could have ended me outright right there and then. You could have taken the easy victory."
Lucien's muscles tense in an answer that is more memory than motion. "Because that would be a theft. I won't rob you of what makes this a duel. I want to win on equal terms, the same ground, the same frame. If i go back to minute ten i would be a fraud to myself."
Seryx's laugh is small and not unkind. "Then you are more honest than I anticipated. Maybe you are a bigger threat than i thought you would be."
They collide again. Lucien senses the tempo of his own evolution quicken for the first time after five thousand rewinds. It is microscopic, a slip of time that would make no practical difference to any mortal chronometer: 0.00001 seconds. Yet in a dance of gods and near-gods, it is a chink that yawns into a door.
They trade big bang cosmic punches that tear at the lattice of causality; they hurl keys of intent that reforge the arena on contact. Lucien's Absolute Wish and Seryx's Temporal Mirror clash into fractals of possibility. Lucien's attacks begin to contain loops within loops: strikes that fold back and hit the idea of being struck. Seryx's counters bloom into nested defenses — where one defense breaks, twelve more appear like flowers in winter.
At 0.01 seconds on the ring, everything converges.
Lucien feels himself unhook from the Crucible and rise into a new stage of absolute power. The Oververse, the place above all dimensions where the gears of reality whir like quiet machines. the creator of gods made that place for chosen one who would one day become so strong that he would reach the Oververse and be able to see everything with it. Here every law is a lever and every possibility a rope to be pulled. His God of Vengeance power flares and he clamps it around his self-made evolution until they fuse — not as dominance and instrument, but as a marriage of intent and possibility.
In that fused moment a weapon forms — not a blade, but a principle given edge: the Spear of Immanence — Final Genesis. It is wrought from paradox and will; its shaft is the seam of dimensions, its tip a promise that evolution can be halted like a clock. Where this spear pierces, change ends. The struck being's capacity to fold, to evolve, to rewrite is sealed like a wound cauterized with light.
Lucien has written a kill that is more than death. It is cessation. It is the lock on becoming. The thought of it terrifies him and also steadies him.
He breathes. Around him the arena's sound narrows to a single note.
Lucien hurls the spear towarda Seryx who could only watch.
It moves not through space but through a topography of all possibilities. Even the possibilities that don ´ t even exist, finding the one locus where Seryx exists across all branches of being. It is quick beyond speed's language. Time detonates and stitches itself in the spear's wake.
0.01.
The spear of immanence cuts through the vastness between where Seryx is and where he could be.