The silence of Universe 3588 was a new kind of silence. It wasn't the quiet of peace, but the hush of a courtroom awaiting a verdict of execution. It was the sound of reality itself holding its breath before the gavel fell. And Saganbo was the gavel.
His transformation was complete. This was not a healing, but a molting. The persona of the manic, theatrical God of Destruction had sloughed away like dead skin from a serpent, revealing the skeletal truth beneath—something ancient, patient, and utterly without mercy.
His aura was gone. In its place was a condition—a sphere of absolute negation that consumed light, sound, and hope, making the distant stars seem to bleed their luminance into its event horizon. Space around him didn't warp; it decayed, flaking away into static at the edges of his presence like reality's own dead skin cells. The "gentle breeze" Shinji had felt before—the pressure that had seemed quaint against the mountain of his Innate Self State—was now the solar wind of a dying sun, scouring the very concept of "Shinji" from the cosmic record with each passing moment.
Shinji felt it immediately. The shift wasn't quantitative—it was categorical. This wasn't more power. This was a different kind of power, operating on principles his transcendence hadn't been designed to address.
"Intermediate Stage," Saganbo stated. His voice was no longer a sound, but a data stream of pure finality injected directly into Shinji's soul, bypassing ears, bypassing thought, arriving as simple, inarguable fact. "Destruction... Unbound."
The pressure hit.
It was not a force to be resisted, but a truth to be accepted: You are obsolete. It was the weight of a universe that had already voted for entropy and found life to be a charming, but ultimately negligible, anomaly. It slammed into the Innate Self State like a tidal wave crashing against a cliff, and for the first time since awakening, the boundless calm bent.
The serene crimson light, once an infinite ocean lapping gently at the shores of existence, was compressed into a desperate, flickering shield tight against Shinji's skin. He felt his spiritual architecture—a symphony of transcendent harmony mere moments before—groan under the strain of a melody it was not designed to play: a single, silent, terminal note that hummed with the finality of all things ending.
His breathing, which had been a metronome of perfect rhythm, hitched. Just once. But it was enough.
A muscle in Shinji's jaw feathered. Sweat—something he hadn't felt since achieving the State—beaded cold on his temple in the airless void. "That's... actually quite tough," he forced out, the words stripped of their former resonance, ground flat by the weight of a collapsing paradigm.
This was no longer a fight. It was an audit, and he was failing.
Internally, the AFS's consciousness stirred, urgent for the first time since the merger. 'This isn't pure power. This is ontological shift. He's not hitting harder—he's operating under different fundamental laws... this is something that exists outside the framework itself.'
Shinji's reply was silent, grim: 'Then how do we counter something that negates the concept of "we"?'
No answer came.
Saganbo observed this internal struggle with the detached interest of a scientist watching a fascinating chemical reaction reach its inevitable conclusion. "You feel it now, don't you?" he asked, and there was something almost like compassion in the clinical tone. "The weight of actually being finite. Your Innate Self State taught you to exist outside struggle, outside effort, outside fear. But I am not struggling, Shinji Kazuhiko. I am not fighting. I am simply... concluding."
He moved.
He did not traverse space. He edited his coordinates. One moment he was a statue of negation kilometers away; the next, he was simply there, his right fist already completing its journey through the intervening distance as if the distance had never truly existed. It was not a punch; it was a conclusion, sheathed in a darkness that was the physical absence of hope.
Shinji reacted, not with thought, but with the fused instinct of a thousand battles and his transcendental clarity screaming in unison. He crossed his forearms, layering defenses like a man building a dam against a tsunami:
The spiritual density of Act 3, compressed to diamond hardness and the conceptual resilience of Act 6, rewriting the space around him to make impact "irrelevant" plus the desperate, crimson pulse of the Voidheart Surge, flooding his limbs with every ounce of his evolutionary power.
He built a fortress of self to hold back the tide of non-self.
The dark fist connected.
There was no CRACK-SHATTER. There was a whisper of unraveling. Shinji's defenses did not break—they were deleted. The intricate spiritual code, layer upon painstaking layer, was nullified line by line upon contact, like a program being systematically erased by an administrator with root access. Act 6's reality-warping met something that didn't acknowledge reality's jurisdiction. Act 3's density encountered something that negated the concept of resistance. The Voidheart Surge found nothing to surge against—only the cold certainty that it, too, was temporary.
The fist did not slow. It carried the momentum of a universal constant—all things end—into Shinji's crossed forearms.
THUD-WHAM.
Agony, a sensation he had philosophically dismissed as irrelevant to his State, became his entire universe in an instant. It was a white-hot brand of negation searing not just his flesh but his soul, burning through the layers of transcendence like acid through silk. He was hurled backward, a comet of pain carving a path through the glittering shards of phantom glass nebulae. He tumbled for light-seconds, arms pinwheeling uselessly, finally arresting his motion against the searing plasma of a black hole's accretion disk, the superheated matter washing over him like a tide of fire.
He gasped, a hollow, useless act in the vacuum, his lungs finding no purchase. He looked down, and horror colder than any void gripped his heart.
Dark, crimson blood—his blood—welled from spiderwebbing fractures across his forearms. The skin wasn't broken; it was blighted, unnaturally inert, the color of old bruises, resisting the frantic crimson pulse of his regeneration with stubborn, alien persistence. The Voidheart Surge thrummed like a panicked drumbeat, pouring evolutionary force into the wounds, finally forcing the fractures closed with agonizing slowness—but a phantom ache remained deep in the bone, a permanent footnote to his newfound fragility.
For the first time since awakening the Innate Self State, Shinji felt vulnerable.
Saganbo drifted closer through the void, his movements unhurried, observing the healing process with the detached interest of a scientist noting a specimen's last, futile twitches. "Efficient," he conceded, and the praise felt like a scalpel. "A delay. Not a defiance. Your regeneration is admirable—evolutionary perfection given form. But evolution operates within a system. I am what happens when the system itself is revoked."
He raised his hand, index finger extending with surgical, terrifying precision. Not aimed at Shinji's core, not at his head or heart—but at his left arm. Just his arm.
Shinji's Danger Sense detonated.
It wasn't a warning; it was a shrieking, primal imperative localized entirely on that limb, screaming with an intensity that drowned out thought itself. The threat wasn't of damage—it was of editing. Of something far worse than death. The instinct wasn't "dodge" or "block." It was "THAT LIMB WILL CEASE TO HAVE EVER BEEN."
He voidstepped on pure, screaming instinct, pouring raw terror into the spatial shift. The universe folded around him like origami, reality bending to accommodate his desperate flight. He reappeared a hundred kilometers away, heart hammering against his ribs like a prisoner beating against cell bars, his breath coming in ragged, soundless gasps.
FZZZT.
A line of non-existence connected Saganbo's fingertip to the space Shinji's arm had occupied a microsecond before. It was not a beam. It was not energy. It was the absence of permission for things to be. The line pierced the fractured half of a nearby gas giant—a massive world of swirling methane storms and crushing gravity.
There was no explosion. No shockwave. No dramatic collapse.
A perfect cylindrical section of the planet, thousands of kilometers across and extending all the way through to the other side, simply ceased to be. The remaining halves hung in silent, gravitational horror, their edges impossibly smooth, before slowly collapsing into the new-made void like sand pouring into an hourglass.
Shinji stared, the boundless calm of his Innate Self State frozen solid, locked in place by a terror so profound it transcended emotional response and became simple, factual acknowledgment. He clutched his left arm—the arm that was still there, still attached—feeling the phantom sensation of absolute annihilation clinging to it like frost that wouldn't melt. Sweat, cold and alien and utterly wrong for someone in his state, trickled down his temple in the airless void, each drop a betrayal of his transcendence.
"Why did you dodge?" Saganbo's voice was quiet, conversational, amplifying the horror through sheer mundanity. "You are immortal. You regenerate from atomization. True Immortality, the first passive of the Trascender—was that not your truth? Your absolute constant?" He tilted his head, genuinely curious. "Or does your immortality sense its own redundancy in the face of something it cannot classify?"
Shinji's mouth was dry. His voice, when it came, was ash. "That... was erasure."
"You still think in terms of action and consequence," Saganbo said, and the statement was a correction of Shinji's entire worldview, delivered with the patience of a teacher addressing a promising but confused student. "'Erasure' implies something was there to be removed. 'Unmaking' suggests a process acting upon matter. This is simpler. Purer." He gestured to the bisected planet, its halves now slowly spiraling into mutual gravitational collapse. "It is the revocation of permission for something to be. I am not acting upon your arm. I am not destroying it. I am concluding its narrative thread in the tapestry of reality. Your regeneration is a story your body tells itself—a continuous, insistent declaration that you persist. I am not interrupting the story."
He paused, letting the cosmic chill of that statement settle like snow on a grave.
"I am proving it was always fiction."
His finger snapped up again, aimed with the same lethal, casual precision at Shinji's left arm.
Shinji voidstepped, pouring his will into a complex, evasive fold—aiming to appear behind his foe, to gain distance, to buy time to think. *He has to follow a trajectory. He has to perceive me. If I move faster than his reaction time—*
Saganbo's finger moved.
Not to follow Shinji's body. Not to track his motion. It moved to intersect the concept of Shinji's left arm at its future coordinate, targeting not where Shinji was, but where the universe's causal chain dictated he would be. It was a targeting of fate itself, of inevitability made manifest through divine will.
FZZZT.
Shinji screamed.
A soundless, agonized wrench from the core of his being, the cry of something fundamental being torn away. He reappeared in a tumbling, chaotic sprawl, instinctively clutching his left side with his right hand. His fingers closed on nothing.
There was no blood. No wound. No cauterized stump.
Where his bicep, elbow, forearm, and hand had been—where the limb that had blocked Kokuto's blade, that had held his sister's hand, that had channeled Act 3 energy in his first true battle—there was a perfect, smooth, spherical void. Not missing. Not severed. Simply... absent. A hole in reality shaped like an arm, its edges unnaturally inert, reflecting nothing, radiating a wrongness that made his stomach churn.
His regeneration did not flicker. There was nothing to heal. The arm hadn't been severed from his body; it had been retroactively destroyed out of existence. The history of "Shinji's left arm" was now a blank page, and the universe had accepted the edit without protest.
But the horror—the true horror—was more than visual.
A cascade of associated memories in Shinji's mind flickered, their emotional cores hollowed out like rot spreading through wood. The memory of using his arm in fights, blocking a strike with that forearm—the sensation of impact was there, but the specific, tactile feeling of bone absorbing shock was gone, replaced by a generic, vague impression of "I blocked something." The memory of holding his sister Kiyomi's hand with that hand remained—he could still see her face, still hear her laugh—but the specific weight of her small fingers in his palm, the warmth of her touch, had vanished into a vague emotional outline, a photograph with the colors faded to grey.
The unmaking wasn't just physical. It was leaching backward into his past, poisoning the well of his own identity, erasing not just the limb but the meaning the limb had carried.
Shock, cold and absolute, drowned the Innate Self State like a stone thrown into a still pond. The serene crimson light around Shinji guttered like a candle in a gale. He stared at the void where a part of him had been, his mind refusing to process what his senses were reporting.
"What..." His voice was a whisper, stripped of all resonance. "What abomination is this?"
"True power," Saganbo stated, and it was delivered not with pride, but with the calm certainty of a cosmologist stating a fundamental law of physics. "Not breaking. Not killing. Not even destroying in the conventional sense. Unmaking. Erasure from the tapestry of concept, history, and potential." He gestured to the smooth void with something resembling academic interest. "Anything truly destroyed ceases to have ever been. Your regeneration seeks to restore what is. It cannot restore what never was."
He let that sink in, watching Shinji's face cycle through stages of comprehension and denial.
"Do you understand now?" Saganbo continued, his voice carrying the weight of eons. "The difference between conventional destruction and what I embody in this state? A building can be demolished—but the materials remain, the memory persists, the space it occupied is still defined by its absence. That is destruction within the system. What I offer is destruction of the system. When I erase something, I erase its causal chain. The building was never built. The materials were never gathered. The architect never conceived of it. The void left behind isn't an absence—it's a statement that nothing was ever present."
Shinji's remaining hand trembled. The philosophical implications crashed over him like waves. "Then... you're not a God of Destruction. You're an editor. A reviser of history."
"I am the final word in the sentence of existence," Saganbo corrected gently. "Every god has their domain. Creation shapes what is. Preservation maintains what persists. But I? I dictate what was never allowed to be. That is the difference between a God of Destruction and the God of Destruction." He raised both hands, palms facing each other. "Let me demonstrate the full implication."
Between his palms, darkness condensed from the surrounding void—not the purple-black of his previous aura, but something deeper, something that hurt to perceive. A swirling nexus of negation took form, pulling at the fabric of space like a gravitational anomaly, but wrong—pulling not at matter, but at concept. It devoured light, yes, but more than that: it devoured potential. The distant stars didn't just dim; their futures flickered, probabilistic outcomes collapsing into singular, terminal endpoints.
It was the opposite of a creative spark. It was the final period at the end of existence's last sentence.
It grew, pulsing with silent, universe-ending hunger, radiating waves of existential dread that made Shinji's skin crawl and his remaining hand clench involuntarily. His Danger Sense was no longer a warning system—it was a continuous, white-hot brand of pure, primal terror screaming a single message: Contact is cessation. Not death. Not even oblivion. Something worse. Something without a word.
'The Voidheart cannot surge from nothing!' The thought was a primal scream in Shinji's shared consciousness. 'The State cannot transcend non-existence! If that touches us, there won't be a "us" to recognize it happened!'
'Then we don't let it touch us,' Shinji thought back, but even he could hear the hollowness in the certainty.
His liberation—the Innate Self State that had made him feel like an unchained god mere hours ago—now felt like a beautifully crafted boat on an ocean that was itself being drained away. What was the value of perfect equanimity, of transcendent clarity, of boundless calm, in the face of something that could simply decide you had never existed to feel those things?
The question wasn't rhetorical. It was survival.
Saganbo thrust his hands forward. The vortex surged, an expanding wavefront of nothingness, swallowing light and space in a sphere of absolute negation. Its event horizon grew to encompass Shinji's position, reality buckling and screaming at its edges like metal being torn.
Instinct, defiance, and the State fused in a final gambit.
Shinji roared, a soundless expulsion of will that carried every ounce of his being. Crimson light, desperate and bright and defiant, erupted from his core and remaining hand in a torrent. He did not dodge. He did not flee. He met annihilation with a spear of pure being—a concentrated lance forged from Act 3's density, Act 6's reality-rewriting authority, the screaming fury of his Voidheart Surge, and beneath it all, the stubborn, human insistence that I am, I exist, I persist.
It was more than energy. It was an argument. A thesis of self against the antithesis of nothing. A declaration written in crimson fire that even if the universe forgot him, he would fight to be remembered.
The energies collided.
SILENCE.
For a microsecond—an eternity compressed into a quantum instant—opposing absolutes warred. Creation's last stand against Entropy's final word. Being versus Non-Being. The space between them didn't explode; it screamed, reality itself crying out at the fundamental violation of its laws. Light bent wrong. Time stuttered. Cause and effect questioned their relationship.
Then the leading edge of Shinji's crimson spear began to unravel.
Not disintegrate. Not disperse. Unravel, like a tapestry being pulled apart thread by thread. The concept of his attack was being negated in real-time, its causal reason for existing invalidated by something that had the authority to edit causality itself. The disintegration raced backward along the beam toward him at the speed of thought, faster than he could react, faster than he could think—
With a final, desperate scream, Shinji abandoned the attack entirely, severing his connection to it and flinging himself sideways in a chaotic, reflexive Voidstep with no destination in mind except away.
FZZZZZZZZZZT-BOOOOOM!
The dark vortex didn't pursue. It simply expanded, and Shinji's desperate evasion put him at its periphery. The outer edge of absolute negation touched him in two places: his left leg below the knee and the remaining fingers of his already-maimed right hand.
There was no impact. No sensation of contact. Only instantaneous, chilling absence.
Shinji tumbled through the void, his momentum carrying him away from Saganbo. He stabilized after a moment, using his remaining leg and the stump of his right hand, and looked down.
His left leg, from the knee down, was gone. Three fingers from his right hand were erased, leaving perfectly smooth, inert stumps where flesh should have been. No blood. No crimson light of regeneration. Only void where integral parts of "Shinji Kazuhiko" had been moments before.
The loss was more than physical. It was a violation of his fundamental identity. The Voidheart Surge pulsed within him, confused, desperately searching for wounds to heal and finding... nothing. No injury. No damage. Just... less. He was less than he had been, and the equation of his being had been permanently simplified.
He stabilized in the void, breathing ragged, soundless gasps that his body performed out of habit rather than necessity. He stared at the stumps—at the places where reality had been edited.
The horror was bone-deep. Existential. He was less. Not wounded—less. And it was permanent.
Saganbo floated closer through the void, the vortex dissipating into harmless shadow as if it had never been. He observed the injuries with clinical detachment, his expression unreadable. "Your body fails to comprehend the nature of the injury," he noted, almost conversationally. "There is no trauma to process, no cellular memory to rebuild from. Your regeneration is a masterful sculptor, Shinji Kazuhiko—perhaps the finest expression of biological persistence I have encountered in my tenure. But it cannot sculpt from void. It cannot heal what was never wounded because the concept of 'wound' requires something to have been damaged. And these..." He gestured to the stumps. "...were not damaged. They were concluded."
He raised his right hand once more, deliberate, inevitable, the motion carrying the weight of cosmic finality. His index finger extended, and that pinprick of absolute darkness coalesced at its tip—a mote of infinite, hungry night, reality's delete key made manifest.
Not toward Shinji's core. Not toward his head or heart.
He pointed at Shinji's right arm—the limb still attached, the hand now reduced to a ruined claw of thumb and palm.
"You fought well with that arm," Saganbo noted, and the calmness was more terrifying than any roar could have been. "A testament to mortal tenacity elevated to transcendent heights. It landed blows on my form that few beings in existence could claim. It channeled power that shook realities, carved wounds into divine flesh, held back annihilation itself in that first clash." The darkness pulsed at his fingertip, ready to unleash its sentence. "It served its purpose admirably. It carried you to heights you could not have imagined when you first awakened your potential in that blood-soaked home on 'Earth.'"
He paused, and in that pause was the weight of all endings.
"But spirit, however potent, however pure, however transcendent... cannot ultimately defy destruction. The essence of Destruction is absolute. It is not a force to be overcome, not a challenge to be met. It is a conclusion to be accepted." The finger held steady, an executioner's blade hovering over a condemned man's neck. "Your arm served its purpose. It fought its fight. It earned its place in your story."
The darkness pulsed, growing, hungry.
"Now," Saganbo said, and his voice carried the finality of a book's last page being turned, "it is time for it to be destroyed. Not damaged. Not removed. Destroyed in the only way that matters—erased from the record of what was permitted to be. And when it is gone, Shinji Kazuhiko, you will continue. You will persist. Your immortality will ensure that much. But you will be less. And you will remember, in whatever hollow way your edited memory allows, that you were once more."
He tilted his head, genuinely curious.
"Tell me—when I erase this arm, and you can no longer recall the sensation of your first Act 3 manifestation coating your fist, will you still believe you earned your transcendence? Or will you understand that everything you've achieved was always, ultimately, subject to my permission?"
Shinji stared at the finger, then at his maimed, ruined hand—the claw that remained of something that had been whole. The boundless sea of the Innate Self State, which had weathered Saganbo's earlier assaults with serene calm, was now a churning tempest of fear, rage, and desperate calculation. The crimson light flickered like a star on the verge of collapse.
He was cornered. Diminished. Facing a verdict against which there was no appeal, no defense, no clever counter or desperate gambit that would change the fundamental truth Saganbo represented.
The True Essence of Destruction wasn't violence. It was inevitability. The certainty that all things end, and some things end so completely they are erased from the memory of ever having begun.
And Saganbo's finger, that single point of infinite darkness, was its final, unwavering instrument.
The God of Destruction smiled—not with cruelty, but with the satisfaction of a teacher watching a student finally grasp the lesson.
"Lesson concluded," he whispered.
The darkness surged forward.
"Now. Die."
And Shinji, the Fourth Trascender, the one who had awakened the Innate Self State through pure, unconscious cessation, had exactly one thought before the end:
*I am not enough.*