Above the sky, a black cube floated in silence. It did not shine. It did not move. Yet everything around it screamed.
The technique was called Absolute Defense… But what it defended against was not an enemy.
It was containment.
Creation and Destruction.
Primordial forces that should never exist in the same space.
The sky had already been torn apart once, now it rebuilt itself… In the wrong way.
Clouds gathered again, thick and suffocating, turning pitch black as lightning erupted endlessly within them.
Thunder did not roar.
It crawled.
The space surrounding the cube no longer resembled Earth.
It was closer to a boundary between realities.
And far beyond the immediate distortion… They began to arrive.
Not by movement.
But by awareness.
The first gaze came from the void itself.
Tiamat opened her eyes.
Her presence coiled through reality like a memory of creation undone.
Her gaze fixed on the cube.
