The silence in the starless domain was broken by the sound of Nox's ragged, panicked breaths. He stared down at the gray, unhealing 'X' scarred into his chest, a permanent testament to a power that defied his very nature. The panic curdled, twisting into incandescent, universe-spanning rage.
"YOU… WRETCHED MORTAL SPECK!" The roar shattered the absolute silence of his own domain. The walls of the foundation trembled, not from force, but from the sheer conceptual weight of his fury. "YOU DARE MARK ME?! YOU DARE DEFY A BEING WHO HAS STOLEN THE AUTHORITIES OF GODS?!"
Nox's male form began to swell, starlight bleeding from his pores, his eyes becoming twin supernovae. "I will not just kill you! I will unmake the very memory of your existence! AUTHORITY OF NIGHT: CELESTIAL ANNHILATION PROTOCOL!"
This was no longer a technique. It was a divine decree. The space around Kenta didn't attack him; it convicted him. The laws of physics—causality, thermodynamics, atomic cohesion—were repealed in a localized area centered on his body. His very molecules were ordered to cease their bonds. His existence was declared an error by the cosmos itself.
This was the power that could slay an army of gods.
Against this, Kenta rose. The Dark Aura, that profound blackness, cloaked him once more, its cold embrace rejecting the heavenly decree. His ashen hair floated in a non-existent wind, his reverse eclipse eyes reflecting the dying stars of Nox's fury without a flicker of emotion. He was calm. The storm was not inside him; he was the storm.
He did not speak. He didn't need to. His blades answered for him.
Hikari no Ha and Yami no Hikari rose, not as separate entities, but as one. The light of the sun and the silence of the void fused, not into gray, but into a shimmering, mercury-like silver that seemed to drink all color from the world.
"ECLIPSE FORM: SECOND STYLE — EVENT HORIZON."
Kenta didn't move. He simply was.
He became a living singularity. The space where the laws of reality were being unmade instead met a deeper, more absolute law: the law of the end. The Annihilation Protocol's energy, the divine decree, didn't explode. It was pulled, spiraling into the mercury-like aura surrounding Kenta, consumed into a point of infinite density. He didn't block the attack; he made it, and the space it occupied, part of his own being.
Nox stared, his god-like arrogance finally, truly, cracking. "Impossible! That's not a power! That's… a state of being!"
THE PEAK OF THE BATTLE
Nox: (Eyes wide with a mixture of terror and insane glee) "I see it now! That form… it's temporary! You're a candle burning at both ends! You cannot maintain this! AUTHORITY OF SPACE: INFINITE FOLD!" He claps his hands, and the corridor, the castle, the very continent outside, begins to fold in on Kenta like a piece of paper being crumpled. Mountains of spatial pressure descend to crush him into a single point.
Kenta: (His voice is a calm, multi-layered echo, the sound of a collapsing star) "Your space is an illusion." He raises Yami no Hikari. "ECLIPSE FORM: THIRD STYLE — VOID REND." The dark blade doesn't cut through the folded space. It cuts the concept of the fold. The immense spatial pressure simply vanishes, the space returning to normal as if the attack never was.
Nox: (Screaming in frustration, bleeding starlight from the strain) "MIRROR FORM! REPLICATE: EVENT HORIZON!" His body shudders, his own aura twisting, trying to mimic the impossible. A flawed, flickering gray singularity appears around him, but it's unstable, a cheap imitation that begins to tear at his own essence. "It's not working! Why won't it work?!"
Kenta: (He takes a step forward. The ground doesn't crack. It simply turns to fine, gray ash in his wake.) "You can copy the motion. You cannot copy the silence within." He brings Hikari no Ha down in a simple, vertical slash. "ECLIPSE FORM: FOURTH STYLE — DAWN'S FINAL JUDGMENT." A blade of pure, silent light extends, not burning, but erasing the darkness of Nox's domain. The starless prison is bisected by a line of absolute day.
Nox: (Shielding his eyes, his form flickering between male and female as his power destabilizes) "NO! THE NIGHT IS ETERNAL! AUTHORITY OF DEATH: FINAL SUNSET!" He unleashes a wave of absolute cessation, the end of all things, stolen from a deceased god of death. It is the very essence of the end.
Kenta: (For the first time, a hint of something—not emotion, but acknowledgment—touches his pale eyes.) "I have already met my end. It holds no terror for me." He crosses his blades, the mercury-like aura condensing into a sphere between them. "ECLIPSE FORM: FINAL STYLE — TWIN SERPENTS' QUIETUS." He doesn't throw the sphere. He releases it.
It doesn't fly. It simply appears where Nox is.
There is no sound. No light. No explosion.
There is only a perfect, expanding sphere of nothingness.
When it vanishes, a massive, hemispherical crater is scooped out of the foundation, the edges smooth as glass. Nox is on his knees at the far edge of the crater, his male form broken, his starlight dimmed. The unhealing 'X' on his chest glows with a malevolent gray light. He is not dead. But for the first time in eons, he is truly, utterly defeated.
Kenta stands amidst the quiet, his Eclipse Form flickering, the Dark Aura receding. He had temporary control. He wielded the two blades as one. And he had faced a god-slayer's power with his own, and won.
He had held the line. For Sarah. For his masters. For the memory of a village that was no more. He had become the abyss, and the abyss had answered.