The masked man's private chamber was silent. He stood before a long mirror, his gloved hands rising slowly toward the edges of the white, featureless mask. He hesitated, his fingers an inch from the porcelain.
"Who are you?" a voice asked from the doorway.
The masked man didn't startle. He lowered his hands and turned. Adam leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching him.
"A lackey of Lionhead?" Adam continued, stepping into the room. "No. You're too powerful for that. Maybe he's your lackey. But you're Existence. Which means we're polar opposites."
A line of text flashed, cool and clear, in Adam's vision.
[SYSTEM CLARIFICATION: INCORRECT. YOU ARE NOT POLAR OPPOSITES. EXISTENCE IS THE MANIFESTATION OF 'IS.' YOU ARE THE MANIFESTATION OF 'IS NOT.' FROM NOTHING, EXISTENCE CAME. YOU ARE THE PRIMORDIAL NOTHINGNESS. THE PRECURSOR.]
Adam smirked. "Even my system says you're beneath me. So, out with it. Who are you? We're both Concepts. We're both from Earth, somehow. Rebecca makes three of us. There's a pattern here. We could figure it out together. Stop playing games."
The masked man let out a soft, strange sound. A sigh that was almost a laugh. "I never thought I'd see the day. Adam. Being sensible. I always figured you for the brute of the two of us."
Adam frowned. The voice… it was wrong. It was layered, disguised somehow, but underneath… it sounded weirdly like his own. The cadence was off, but the timbre was hauntingly familiar.
"Hey," Adam said, the smirk vanishing. "I'm talking to you because of our… situation. That doesn't give you the right to insult me. I'll make you eat dust."
"Why don't you come make me?" the masked man replied, his tone shifting into a direct, challenging taunt.
That did it. The last thread of Adam's patience snapped. He wasn't here for a philosophical debate.
He moved.
There was no wind-up, no warning. One moment he was across the room. The next, his fist was an inch from the mask. The air in the room didn't compress; it vanished, creating a vacuum that shattered the mirror and the window behind the masked man.
The masked man wasn't there. He'd slid aside, not with speed, but with a kind of inevitable presence, as if the space he occupied had always been meant for him. He grabbed Adam's extended wrist. His grip didn't feel like flesh. It felt solid, real, undeniable.
"You haven't changed," the masked man said, and threw Adam through the wall.
Adam didn't crash through stone and plaster. The wall where he impacted simply ceased to be, dissolving into a cloud of grey, non-existent dust. He flew out into the night air, high above the Academy's central courtyard.
The masked man stepped through the hole he hadn't made, walking out onto empty air as if it were solid ground. The fabric of reality itself seemed to solidify under his feet.
All across the Academy, alarms began to blare. Lights flared in towers. Students and instructors spilled out into courtyards, looking up.
"What is that?!"
"Is that the masked overseer?!"
"Who's he fighting?!"
Adam righted himself in mid-air, hovering in the nothingness he commanded. He grinned, a wild, exhilarated look in his eyes. "Alright. Let's play."
He didn't charge. He pointed a finger at the masked man and erased.
A sphere of perfect, silent void bloomed around the masked man, a bubble of nonexistence that consumed light, sound, and matter. It was the end of everything.
For a second, the masked man was gone.
Then, the bubble shimmered. It didn't pop; it was filled. Reality rushed back in, forceful and bright, the erased space reasserting itself with a thunderclap that shattered every window on the north side of the courtyard. The masked man stood unharmed, a faint, glowing aura of tangible 'being' surrounding him.
"My turn," he said, his voice now carrying across the campus.
He clenched his fist. The air around Adam didn't attack him; it became him. The very concept of space solidified, turning into a crushing, inescapable prison of pure pressure. The Cultivation Tower behind Adam groaned as the immutable force pressed against it.
Adam strained, his body flickering at the edges. He was being forced into existence, into a defined, solid, vulnerable form. He grunted, pushing back with the power of negation. "Not… today!"
He tore a hand free and swiped it downward. A whole wing of the library below them—the Forbidden Wing—didn't explode. It silently vanished from the foundation up, as if it had never been built, leaving a clean, empty scar of bare earth.
Gasps and screams echoed from below.
The masked man gestured, and the empty space was immediately filled by a grotesque, shimmering growth of crystal and stone, a chaotic, sudden existence that was wrong and jagged.
They shot toward each other.
The collision wasn't physical. It was conceptual.
CLANG—SCRAAAAAPE—
A sound that was no sound, a sensation of tearing metal and breaking worlds, echoed across the entire Academy grounds. The sky above them fractured like glass, showing brief, terrifying glimpses of a swirling grey void beyond. Mana lamps exploded. The ground quaked, and the central Combat Arena's walls cracked down the middle.
Half of the Academy was in ruins. Not from fire or impact, but from alternating states of erasure and violent, uncontrolled creation.
In the wreckage of a collapsed observation tower, Rebecca stood shielding Elizabeth with her body, a dome of absolute stillness around them, negating the chaotic fluctuations. She watched the battle above, her face pale. "They'll destroy everything…"
Elizabeth clung to her, her golden eyes wide with terror. "How do we stop them?!"
"We don't," Rebecca whispered, a strange recognition in her eyes. "This is personal."
High above, Adam finally closed the distance. It was a feint. He let the masked man solidify the space around his right arm, then used the left, which he had kept purely null. He bypassed the aura of existence entirely and slammed his fist directly onto the white mask.
It didn't crack.
It shattered.
Porcelain shards fell away like falling stars.
Beneath it was a face.
Adam's fist stopped, an inch from the man's nose.
He stared.
The face was his own.
Older, maybe. Softer around the eyes, which held a weary, ancient intelligence Adam knew he didn't have. But the structure, the jaw, the mouth… it was like looking into a mirror that showed a different life.
The man, his twin, looked back at him, a faint, tired smile on his lips.
Adam's furious expression dissolved into blank shock. His arm dropped to his side.
The chaotic energies died instantly. The sky sealed itself. The groaning of breaking stone ceased.
Silence, heavy and profound, fell over the shattered Academy.
Adam blinked. Then he let out a single, sharp bark of laughter. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated disbelief.
The man—his brother—smiled wider, and a quiet chuckle escaped him too, echoing Adam's disbelief.
Without a word, Adam stepped forward and pulled him into a crushing hug. It wasn't sentimental. It was fierce, a grip of absolute confirmation. His brother stiffened for a second, then hugged him back just as tightly, a shudder going through his frame.
Down below, the entire student body, the teachers, the guards, all stood in stunned silence, staring at the two figures embracing in the sky above the ruins.
Elizabeth's jaw was slack. "They… they have the same face. Adam has a brother?"
Rebecca's protective dome flickered out. She stared upward, her cold composure completely broken. Her mind was reeling, connecting dots at a terrifying speed. Two brothers. Two Absolutes. From Earth. A pattern becoming a weapon.
Adam finally pulled back, holding his brother by the shoulders. "Alex?" The name came out, old and rusted, from a childhood he'd buried in another life.
His brother, Alex, nodded, his eyes glistening. "Hey, little brother."