The body by the black pool didn't stir. It unfolded, a grotesque blossom of impossible angles and shifting forms. One side was jagged, weeping obsidian, echoing the chaotic malice of Jade's core. The other was smooth, pitiless white marble, a perfect mirror of Zero's void. Its face was a screaming blur of both their features.
It didn't speak. It resonated. The very air vibrated with a dual-toned thought that was not a sound, but a violation of silence.
CHAIN... (Jade's voice, twisted with contempt)
...LOGICAL FLAW. (Zero's voice, cold and absolute)
Jade's lips peeled back from his teeth in a snarl. But deep within the throne room of his mind, Alter-Jade threw his head back and laughed, a sound of pure, unadulterated joy. On his throne of shadow and ice, he smiled like a monarch watching his most glorious war finally begin.
"FINALLY!" Alter-Jade roared, his voice echoing through Jade's soul. "A foe worthy of our annihilation! Don't just fight it, you fool! CONSUME IT!"
The Hollow Resonance moved. It wasn't an attack; it was a declaration. It raised a hand of obsidian and marble, and the space in front of it shattered, unleashing a storm of black ice shards, each one humming with the soul-numbing frequency of Chinmoku.
Zero flowed into motion, a silent river against a tidal wave. Gesshilla was a silver blur, deflecting, parrying, his body a poem of minimal motion. But the shards were endless. One grazed his arm, and his flawless stance faltered for a microsecond—a catastrophic event for him.
Jade saw it. And something in him snapped.
"MY TURN."
His voice was a glacier calving, low and world-ending. He didn't step; he appeared, a phantom of white hair and fury, placing himself between the storm and Zero. He didn't block.
He opened his mouth.
And he screamed.
It wasn't a sound. It was Obliterate given voice. A cone of visible, crimson-and-black annihilation erupted from him, meeting the storm of silence shards. The two opposing forces didn't collide; they unmade each other in a silent, terrifying explosion of prismatic light that tore at the fabric of the cavern.
The backlash hurled Jade back, skidding across the stone. He pushed himself up, his chest heaving, his crimson eyes now bleeding into a violent, psychotic purple. A wild, ecstatic grin stretched across his face. This was no longer about survival. This was about dominion.
The Hollow Resonance tilted its head, then mimicked the motion, its marble arm swinging down. A wave of absolute nothingness, a perfected Severance—shot towards Jade, aimed not to kill, but to edit him from reality.
Jade didn't dodge. He met it with a laugh.
He swung his scythe in a low, brutal arc, not at the wave, but at the ground in front of him. The star-iron blade didn't cut the stone; it unmade it, creating a fissure of hungry void that swallowed the Severance whole.
"YOU THINK YOUR EMPTINESS CAN CONSUME ME?" Jade roared, his form blurring as he charged, his movements becoming less human, more a force of nature. "I AM THE END THAT COMES FOR EVERYTHING! EVEN FOR NOTHING!"
He was a whirlwind of destruction, each swing of his scythe tearing a piece of the cavern away. The Hollow Resonance matched him, blow for blow, its synchronized power a perfect, horrifying counter. It was a dance of twin apocalypses.
Zero watched from the calm eye of the storm, his mind a supercomputer calculating a million variables per second. He saw it now. Their harmony was a trap. Their dissonance was the key.
As Jade launched into a reckless, glorious aerial assault, a falling star of pure malice, the Hollow Resonance prepared its perfect counter, a sphere of intertwined silence and severance that would permanently unmake him.
Zero didn't shout a warning. He didn't need to.
He became Implacable Stillness. Not a shield. An anchor.
He rooted himself, and the world around Jade froze. The chaotic energies Jade was unleashing stabilized, focused by Zero's unwavering void. The Hollow Resonance's perfect counter hesitated, its logic broken by the sudden, impossible stability in the chaos.
In that single, crystallized moment of perfect, chaotic order, Jade's scythe, blazing with psychotic purple energy, found its mark.
He didn't cut the Resonance in half.
He hooked its core with the blade and, with a final, ecstatic roar, tore it out.
The amalgamated form of the Hollow Resonance didn't scream. It came apart like a shattered galaxy, dissolving into motes of light and shadow that were sucked into the now-churning black pool, which then collapsed in on itself and vanished.
Silence.
Jade landed, crouched on one knee, his scythe embedded in the stone. His breath was ragged smoke in the cold air, his eyes slowly fading from psychotic purple back to glacial crimson. The grin was gone, replaced by a look of cold, hard satisfaction.
Where the pool had been, a single, pulsating crystal hovered: the Core of Self.
Zero walked over, his expression unreadable. He looked from the core to Jade, who met his gaze. No words. Just the shared, thunderous echo of the annihilation they had just unleashed together.
The Chain had held. The Whetstone had been tested in the fires of madness.
And they had proven they could shatter a god.