Volume 10 – Chapter 12: "Beyond the Author"
Silence.
The kind that even gods couldn't survive.
The battlefield wasn't a place it was everything. The stars themselves twisted into symbols, the laws of logic cracked like glass, and the echoes of eternity froze mid-breath.
In the middle of it all stood Erevan, surrounded by the golden-black aura that pulsed like the heartbeat of creation itself. His armor glowed and cracked under the strain of his own existence divine light and void storm colliding across his skin.
Opposite him, the Outer Author appeared a shifting figure of quills, words, and eyes that blinked in every direction. Reality trembled whenever it moved, because everything it did became true.
"Even you," the Author whispered, its voice everywhere and nowhere, "were born from a sentence I wrote."
Erevan's gaze didn't waver. His tone was calm not defiant, but certain.
> "Then it's time the story learned to write itself."
The clash was instant.
A single blow shattered infinity.
Each strike tore through dimensions, universes, and timelines. When their fists met, the concept of cause and effect disintegrated. Sound vanished replaced by the roar of pure existence.
Erevan's body cracked his essence unraveling. The Author pressed forward, rewriting his form with each motion. Erase. Erase. Erase.
And yet he endured.
The multiverse fell apart around them, but his eyes still burned.
In the fragments of his own dying soul, Erevan remembered everything every fight, every realm, every life he'd shaped. He saw what he had been, and what he was becoming.
> "You can't kill what doesn't need to exist," he whispered, rising again.
And from that truth he transcended.
Light and darkness erupted together. His body reformed divine flame interwoven with void energy. His new aura spread outward like wings made of paradox: creation and destruction united, beginning and ending intertwined.
The Author stepped back for the first time, uncertain.
Erevan moved faster than thought, faster than story. He struck once and every page, every law, every written thing trembled.
Reality itself flinched.
His new power was not just manipulation it was Transcendence of Definition:
He could exist without being written.
He could act without cause.
He could fight beyond meaning.
The Author raised its quill but Erevan's hand closed around it, and for the first time, the pen that had written all things… cracked.
> "Your story ends," Erevan said quietly. "But mine never began."
And with that, the Author dissolved not destroyed, but unwritten.
Erevan floated in the void that followed silent, endless, beautiful.
Death couldn't reach him. Story couldn't bind him.
He had become the Living Paradox, the one who existed beyond existence.
The cosmos began to rebuild itself around his heartbeat.
And when he opened his eyes again the new reality shuddered, awaiting his first word.