Time had become a syrupy, indistinct thing within the leviathan's gut. There was no sun to mark the hours, only the perpetual, oppressive darkness, broken by the faint, sickly bioluminescence that pulsed from the fleshy walls.
The air was a physical presence, thick with a cloying humidity that carried the stench of a forgotten ocean trench, a mélange of salt, rotting kelp, and the sharp, metabolic tang of a vast and alien digestion.
Nulls had not moved for a long while. He sat cross-legged on a broad, floating slab of what had once been a city street, the concrete pitted and slowly dissolving at the edges. The coarse, damp wool of his stolen trousers was a constant, minor irritation against his skin, a grounding sensation in the overwhelming sensory deprivation.
Each breath was a conscious effort, drawing in the foul, heavy air and exhaling it slowly, as if by regulating this simple rhythm he could impose order on the chaos. The only sounds were the gentle, sloshing lap of the acidic sea and the deep, resonant thrum that vibrated up through the debris, the leviathan's own primordial heartbeat.
"Is this really the right path?"
The question surfaced in the quiet of his mind, not as a sharp query, but as a slow, unwinding thought. It was the part of him that was still, inexplicably, tethered to the fleeting concerns of a mortal perspective. He observed the thought with detached curiosity, like a scientist studying a peculiar specimen.
His introspection was shattered not by a bang, but by a tear. It was a sound that defied easy description, less a rip and more a localized un-stitching of reality itself. The air in the center of the cavernous stomach shimmered, distorted, and then parted like a curtain, revealing a glimpse of a storm-wracked sky before snapping shut. A woman dropped from the point of the tear, landing with a practiced, silent grace on a nearby island of rusted steel.
The silence that followed was profound. She straightened, and a cool, platinum aura began to emanate from her, a tangible field of absolute permanence that made the very air around her feel solid and still. The ozonic scent of charged space cut through the biological rot. Her eyes, a flat and wintry grey, found his in the gloom and held them. There was no surprise in her gaze, only a cold, weary recognition.
The attack, when it came, was almost a relief, breaking the tense silence. A Morbus, a grotesque engine of claws and chitin, erupted from the acid. The woman's response was not a spell she cast, but a state of being. Her platinum glow intensified. She made a single, precise gesture, and a blade of solidified nothingness bisected the creature. The two halves slid apart with a wet, tearing sound and hit the surface of the digestive sea, each half sizzling and popping as it was consumed, releasing a fresh, gag-inducing wave of cooked meat and voided ichor.
Nulls watched it all, his expression unreadable. A slow, genuine smile finally touched his lips, but it did not reach his eyes. This was not a threat. It was an opportunity, delivered to him in the belly of a beast.
The leviathan, agitated by the internal wound, responded with a languid, terrible grace. From the weeping, fleshy walls, chitinous appendages uncoiled, their movement sinuous and deliberate.
Nulls rose to his feet. The air around him began to shimmer as his constellation ignited. It was not a flash, but a gradual blooming of points of light, a silent, three-dimensional schematic of interlocking potentialities that cast complex, shifting shadows on the stomach walls.
He observed the nearest tendril as it arrowed towards him, analyzing its velocity and trajectory with a calm that bordered on boredom. A single, supernova point within his celestial sigils brightened. The tendril's kinetic energy amplified with a deep, resonant thrum, and its path curved in a perfect, unnatural arc, aiming directly for the woman's heart.
She was prepared. Her own innate power solidified the air before her into an invisible, unbreakable wall. The impact was not explosive, but a shuddering, deep-toned crash that echoed through the chamber. The shield held for a moment, then fractured with a sound like a mountain of glass collapsing in on itself.
A shard of the chitin, sheared off by the force, punched through the broken defense and buried itself in the meat of her shoulder. A soft, choked gasp escaped her. She staggered back, her good hand already rising, the platinum glow around her flickering as she fought to stabilize her power.
When he repeated the maneuver, she was ready. As the next amplified tendril shot towards her, her power flared not defensively, but spatially. The air around her seemed to lock into place, becoming a fixed point in the universe. Then, with a nauseating lurch of perception, the coordinates of that fixed point and Nulls's own location were seamlessly transposed.
He felt it before he saw it, a sudden, vacuum-like pressure in his chest, followed by the wet, punching sensation of the tendril erupting from his own sternum. He looked down, his smile still in place, and observed the obsidian point with clinical interest.
He wrapped a hand around it, the texture slick and strangely warm, and pulled. The sound was a soft, grating tear. He tossed the bloody shard aside, watching as the wound sealed itself, leaving only a faint pink line that faded to nothing.
"What a stubborn fellow." He murmured, the word a quiet concession.
His constellation shifted above him, the points of light drifting into a new, more complex alignment. A new light kindled at its heart, the pale, dusty color of an hourglass's sand.
From this light, the Beast of Time emerged. It did not roar; it simply was, a creature of layered, translucent moments, its form flickering between what was, what is, and what could be. A sound accompanied it, a low chorus of countless clocks, each ticking at a different, slowing pace.
To Skylar, the world turned to amber. The sloshing of the acid sea deepened to a sluggish, drawn-out groan. The lashing tendrils became slow-moving spears of obsidian, drifting through the thick air.
And Nulls became a streak of crimson motion, a blur that wove between the frozen threats. He did not attack them. He merely touched each one, a golden point in his constellation flaring with each contact, guiding their paths, bending their purpose. He was a painter, and the tendrils were his brushes.
To her, it happened in a single, horrifying instant. One moment, he was a distant figure. The next, a dozen spears of chitin had simultaneously impaled her body with a unified, sickening chorus of wet impacts. The pain was not sequential, but a single, overwhelming wave of agony that stole her breath and her voice. She was a specimen, pinned and displayed, the metallic reek of her own blood flooding her senses.
The Beast of Time vanished. The slow, deep sounds of the stomach returned to their normal rhythm. Nulls, no longer a blur, walked towards her, his footsteps quiet on the floating debris. He reached her, his expression one of mild curiosity. He placed a single finger under her chin, the touch cool and dry, and tilted her head up until her glazing eyes met his.
"You wear the same clothing as the inconveniences I met earlier," he said, his voice calm, almost conversational. The silence stretched out, filled only by her ragged, bubbling breaths. "Are you perhaps one of them?" He paused, his head tilting slightly. "I don't know why I said that. Of course you are." He studied the life fading from her eyes. "Don't look at me like that. You... all of you. Brought this upon yourselves."
She offered no response, couldn't.
A huge, manic smile spread across his face, a stark contrast to the carnage. He gave her bloody cheek a playful, patting slap. His voice returned to its normal, calm tenor.
"You good? You didn't say anything since we first met." He paused, a flicker of something like genuine confusion in his eyes. "Does everyone I meet do that? First the leviathans, and now you? What are your thoughts?"
She summoned the last dregs of her will, forcing the words out on a final, bloody exhalation. "Go to hell, bastard."
The effect on Nulls was instantaneous and profound. His body went rigid. His eyes widened, the pupils dilating in the gloom. His jaw went slack, revealing the fine, sharp points of his fangs. That voice, the husky texture of it, the way it curled around the insult, it was an echo. A ghost from a dead universe had just spoken to him.
He moved without thought, closing the distance and wrapping his arms around her broken form in a tight, crushing embrace. Fresh blood, warm and slick, soaked into his tunic from her wounds. "Keep talking," he demanded, his whisper harsh, stripped of its earlier calm, raw with a sudden, desperate authority.
"I-I can't b-breathe. Moron!" she choked out, the words gurgling.
Her defiance, the very shape of the insult, was a key turning in a lock he thought sealed forever. A single, hot tear escaped, tracing a clean path through the faint spray of blood on his cheek. He held her tighter, as if he could squeeze the memory from her flesh. The sound of her ribs finally giving way was a dull, internal crack, followed by a final, wet rattle deep in her throat.
"You even talk like him," he whispered into her hair. "And now you can't talk at all."
He severed the tendrils holding her with a precise, clawed gesture. Her body slumped to the wet stone with a heavy, final thud. For a long moment, he simply looked at it. Then he sat, cross-legged, before the corpse.
His constellation shimmered back into existence above him, the points of light shifting until a deep, crimson light pulsed at its core. The spell that washed over her was silent, but the effect was visceral. It was the sound of un-breaking bones, of flesh re-knitting with a wet, squelching whisper, of a heart stuttering back to life with a sudden, violent lurch.
She drew a sharp, gasping breath, her eyes flying open. Disorientation lasted only a second before training and memory took over. A dagger of solidified space, humming with a high-pitched, lethal frequency, materialized in her hand. She lunged.
Before the tip could find its mark, a cool blue point in Nulls's constellation brightened. "Cease motion," he said, his voice flat.
Her body locked, every muscle frozen. She was a statue of fury and pain, carved from marble, though her head and eyes remained free to move, her chest rising and falling in frantic, shallow breaths.
He wants information, the thought screamed in her mind, a desperate attempt to cling to protocol. I must not—
"I want to join your organization," Nulls said, his voice cutting through her internal mantra.
The statement was so absurd, so utterly disconnected from the violence of the last few minutes, that her mind blanked. She could only stare.
"What's it called?" he asked. He reached out, his movements slow and deliberate, and placed his fingers on the blade of her spatial dagger. He didn't force it; he simply guided it aside with gentle, inexorable pressure.
"It's... classified," she managed, her voice a hoarse croak.
"Classified?" Nulls repeated, as if tasting the word. "What a strange name."
"No, it wasn't, you idiot!" The insult was a reflex, a spark of her defiance igniting. "Even if you torture me, I won't tell you a single letter!"
"Im not gonna do any harm to you from this point on, you have my words, you have... something that I find comforting." He leaned forward and, with a simple, effortless motion, snapped the chains connecting the Spatial Codex to her hip.
He picked the book up. It felt warm and alive in his palm, a stark contrast to her frozen body. "Unfortunately, I have a friend that are a little bit possessive. He doesn't want me to have another."
He let the stasis spell drop. She stumbled forward a step, catching her balance. She could move, but the fight had gone out of her. The whiplash of death and resurrection, the sheer, illogical nature of his demand, had left her unmoored.
Aha, he thought, a grim, hysterical triumph rising in him. I've civilized a monkey! Xael would be proud!
"Perhaps I've spoken too much," Nulls said, as if privy to her thoughts. He rose and took a single step forward, his height suddenly dominating her space. She had to crane her neck to meet his eyes. "But that's beside the point. Can I join your organization?"
"No," she stated, the word automatic, drilled into her by a thousand briefings. "You're an Apex-class entity. A threat equivalent to an Armageddon-class Morbus. You must be terminated."
Nulls took a long, slow, deep breath, his chest expanding as he savored the foul air. He was a predator exhibiting infinite patience.
"How about this," he began, his tone that of a reasonable man presenting an obvious solution. "You have a problem you can't kill. The leviathans. I am the one who can subjugate them." He paused, letting the immensity of that claim hang in the stagnant air. "It's a win-win. You get your 'Armageddon-class' in your arsenal, and your problem is gone." He gave her a look of condescending patience, the kind one reserves for a slow child. "Even an animal with the smoothest brain knows this is the most optimal scenario."
Skylar stared back, the institutional denial dying on her lips. She looked from his calm, smiling face to the weeping, organic walls of their prison, to the Codex held loosely in his hand. The war outside was a distant rumble, a promise of extinction. And this… this demon was offering a path, however terrifying, that led away from it. The choice was no longer about rules. It was a slow, dawning, and horrifying realization about survival.
The silence stretched, thick and heavy as the stomach's humid air. Skylar's mind, usually a fortress of protocol and clear-cut binaries, threat or ally, terminate or contain, was now a ruin. The corpse-memory of a dozen impalements phantom-ached in her flesh. The taste of her own blood was a ghost on her tongue. And this… entity… was looking at her with the placid expectation of a merchant who had just offered a perfectly fair trade.
Her mouth was dry. She worked her jaw, the motion feeling alien. "A… down payment," she repeated, the words hollow. "You healed me. That's your collateral?"
"It is a tangible demonstration of utility," Nulls corrected, his tone gentle, as if guiding her through a simple logic puzzle. "I have repaired a valuable asset. Your continued functionality benefits my proposal. It is a small, initial investment in our future partnership."
Partnership. The word curdled in her stomach. She looked at the Spatial Codex in his hand. It was inert, a slumbering beast. In his grasp, it looked like a child's toy. "You can't be trusted," she whispered, the statement feeble even to her own ears. It was a reflex, a last bastion of her training.
"Trust depends on emotional states, therefore it is a suboptimal currency," Nulls stated. He began to slowly pace around her, a professor circling a nervous student. His footsteps were silent on the damp stone. "I deal in incentives and consequences. Your incentive is the continued existence of your species, streamlined through the preservation of your organization. My incentive is the optimal acquisition of resources and influence to achieve a larger goal. Our interests are, for the moment, aligned. That is a far more stable foundation than trust."
He stopped in front of her again, his head tilting. "The consequence of refusal is the scenario I outlined. I wait. You perish. I proceed unimpeded, albeit slightly… inconvenienced." He gave a slight, almost imperceptible shrug. "The math is rather simple, Skylar."
The sound of her name in his mouth, spoken with such casual, intimate knowledge, sent a fresh jolt of ice down her spine. He hadn't asked for it. He just knew.
"How?" she breathed.
"Your identification tag," he said, his gaze flicking to a small, almost invisible patch on the collar of her uniform. "The weave of the fabric, the residual Aetherion signature of the enchanter who warded it, the specific dialect of the spatial theorems you favor… it all tells a story. It is the same reason I knew you were from Valerius's institute. You all carry the same… scent of methodology."
He wasn't just powerful. He was perceptive on a level that felt like violation.
"So," he continued, folding his hands behind his back. "You have a choice to make. But understand, it is not a choice between right and wrong. It is a choice between your species's survival and extinction. Will you be the instrument of either, Skylar? Or will you and everything you've ever known become a footnote in the leviathan's digestive process?"
He was giving her no room for heroics. No room for a defiant last stand. He had reduced the fate of her entire order to a cold, clinical cost-benefit analysis. And the most terrifying part was that he was right. From a purely strategic standpoint, he was right.
She looked past him, at the vast, dark, pulsing chamber. Somewhere beyond these fleshy walls, her comrades were dying, their spells flickering out one by one against an unstoppable force. Bringing him in would be like inviting a supernova into a candlelit room. It would solve the problem of the dark, but it would annihilate the candles.
But the candles were about to be snuffed out anyway.
Her shoulders slumped. The fight drained out of her, not in a rush, but in a slow, weary exhalation. The rigid, platinum-ready posture melted away, leaving only a tired, wounded soldier.
"The Rapax Morsatra Institute," she said, the words tasting like ash. "It's called the Rapax Morsatra Institute."
Nulls's smile was beatific. "Rapax. A shield. How quaintly aspirational." He stepped forward and held out her Codex to her. The gesture was unnervingly polite.
She stared at the offered book, her life's work, her soul's anchor. After a long, suspended moment, her hand rose, trembling slightly, and took it. The familiar weight of it in her palm offered no comfort. It felt like she was holding her own coffin nail.
Skylar stared at the offered book, her life's work, her soul's anchor. After a long, suspended moment, her hand rose, trembling slightly, and took it. The familiar weight of it in her palm offered no comfort. It felt like she was holding her own coffin nail.
"They won't listen to me," she said, her voice barely audible. "They'll see you, and they'll… they'll try to contain you."
"Let them try," Nulls said, his cheerfulness returning, a stark and chilling contrast to her despair. "It will be an invaluable learning experience for them."
He made a slight gesture, as if to indicate she should open the spatial tear. But then he paused, his head tilting with a new, more calculating thought. The smile on his face didn't vanish, but it became more fixed, more of a mask.
"Although, there is a logistical matter to discuss before we depart," he said, his tone shifting to one of casual, almost embarrassing confession. "I could, of course, free us from this place. It would be a trivial excercise."
He paused, letting the implication hang that he had allowed them to remain there for his own reasons.
"The issue is one of fuel," he continued, his gaze becoming intensely focused on her. "The energy I wield, Nexus is different from your Aetherion. It is… purer. More potent. And my reserves are currently at an all-time low."
He took a single, deliberate step closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that seemed to absorb the very sound of the sloshing acid around them.
"To breach the stomach this primordial leviathan, I will need to summon a Beast of Entropy. In my current state, I can only sustain one. And I can only give that beast five commands before my fuel is completely exhausted."
He let the number hang in the air. Five. A terrifyingly finite amount of cosmic power.
"At that point," Nulls said, his eyes locking onto hers, devoid of their usual mocking light and filled with a stark, unsettling seriousness, "I will be at my most vulnerable. A state I have not experienced in a very, very long time."
He leaned in slightly, the faint scent of ozone around him sharpening.
"So, I require a guarantee, Skylar. A simple promise. When I am spent, when I am defenseless, can you guarantee that you, or any of your colleagues we may encounter upon our exit, will not take advantage of that moment to… 'terminate the threat'?"
The question was a trap and a test woven into one. He was handing her a weapon and asking her to promise not to use it. He was showing her his throat and demanding she prove she wasn't the predator he believed all lesser beings to be. It was the most vulnerable she had ever seen him, and it was the most dangerous she had ever felt. Her answer would define everything that came next.
Skylar's mind, still reeling from the psychic whiplash of death and resurrection, seized onto this new information like a lifeline. Vulnerable. The word echoed, a stark contrast to the god-like power he had just displayed. He had a limit. A hard, quantifiable limit. Five commands. Then he would be defenseless.
For a breathtaking second, the tactical part of her, the part forged in the Rapax Morsatra Institute's war rooms, saw the perfect solution. Let him expend his power. The moment the fifth command was uttered, a spatial lance through his heart. It was clean. It was efficient. It was her duty.
But then her eyes, against her will, flickered to the fleshy, pulsing walls of their prison. The distant, muffled booms of the ongoing battle were a grim reminder. The Aegis Institute was losing. They were being slaughtered out there. This creature, this Apex-class entity, was offering a solution on a silver platter, a solution she had just been ordered to secure at any cost. His death would solve one problem only to cement their extinction.
He was watching her, his head still tilted, his expression one of mild, academic curiosity. He wasn't pleading. He wasn't threatening. He was… calculating the probability of her betrayal. She felt like a variable in his equation. Her promise, her guarantee, was the final data point he needed.
The internal war was violent but swift. The soldier in her screamed to kill the threat. The survivor in her, the one who had felt her own ribs crack in his embrace, knew that survival now hinged on a different path.
She let out a breath she didn't realize she was holding, the air leaving her in a shaky sigh that deflated her posture further. The tension drained from her shoulders, replaced by a weary, bone-deep resignation.
"You have my word," she said, her voice low but clear, carrying in the humid silence. "As a strata zero Yagerin of the Rapax Morsatra Institute. No harm will come to you from me or my forces during your… vulnerable state." The words felt foreign, treasonous on her tongue. She was vowing to protect the very thing she was sworn to destroy.
She met his gaze, forcing her own to be steady, to betray none of the turmoil inside. "But my guarantee is conditional."
A faint, almost imperceptible spark of interest lit in his eyes. "Oh?"
"You will submit to a full debriefing upon our return," she stated, the authority returning to her voice, thin but firm. "You will answer our questions. And you will, under our supervision, demonstrate this supposed ability to subjugate the Leviathans. If you are lying, or if you attempt to betray us, all bets are off."
She was building a cage of terms and conditions around a tiger, hoping the paperwork would hold it.
Nulls considered this, his smile returning, wider and more genuine this time. It was the smile of a man who appreciated a well-structured deal. "Terms and conditions. How very restricting. I accept." He gave a gracious, almost theatrical nod. "Your word is sufficient. For now."
He took a step back, his constellation already beginning to shimmer into existence around him. The points of light were fainter than before, she noticed. The stars and crimson light were less brilliant, the blues less piercing. He had not been lying about his reserves.
"Shall we?" he said, his voice light once more, as if they were simply concluding a pleasant business meeting. "I believe you have a war to turn."
He turned his gaze inward, towards the faintly glowing schematic of his power, his focus absolute. But then, he paused, as if recalling a minor, almost forgotten detail. He looked back at her, his expression one of casual afterthought.
"Although, there is one thing I forgot to inform you," he said, the words dripping with feigned nonchalance. "My calculations were perhaps overly conservative. I only need one command to breach this leviathan. And three to subjugate all of them."
He let the numbers hang in the air, recalculating the entire balance of power between them in an instant.
"That leaves me with one," he concluded, his eyes meeting hers, the pleasant smile never wavering. "A failsafe. In the statistically unlikely event that you and your esteemed Institute decide to... renege on our agreement."
The air, already thick, seemed to solidify in Skylar's lungs. He hadn't just shown her his throat. He had shown her a carefully crafted illusion of it, only to reveal a concealed blade positioned directly over her own.
He wasn't just asking for a guarantee; he was stating the consequences of breaking it. He would have one command left. One final, unstoppable act of retaliation, fueled by the last dregs of a power that could unmake worlds.
The pact was sealed not with a handshake, but with a silently detonated threat. He had accepted her terms while simultaneously demonstrating that they were only binding so long as it served him. The apex was not in the cage; he was merely inspecting it, and he had just pointed out he could tear it down whenever he wished.
Defeated, hollowed out, and now utterly outmaneuvered, Skylar turned her back on him. The motion felt funereal. She raised her hands, the platinum glow returning, this time feeling heavier and more tainted than ever. She began to weave the spatial tear, her movements slow, deliberate, and filled with a dread that was colder than the void between stars.
Nulls watched her for a moment, then turned his attention inward. The air around him grew still, the faint shimmer of his constellation condensing, its light drawing inwards as if taking a final, deep breath before the storm. The complex, starry schematic collapsed, the points of light rushing together into a single, searing point at the center of his chest.
From that nexus of potential, the Beast of Entropy was born.
It did not emerge with a roar or a tremor. It simply unfolded into existence before him, a silent, shifting form of grey and absolute black. It had no distinct shape, its edges constantly dissolving and reforming like smoke over a battlefield.
It was a hole in reality, a pocket of not-being given a terrible, watchful presence. The low, resonant hum of the leviathan's gut seemed to dampen in its vicinity, as if the sound itself was being consumed. The faint, sickly bioluminescence of the stomach walls dimmed, the light bending and dying around the beast's form, deepening the shadows around them.
It simply waited, a void of patient, annihilating potential.
Skylar froze, her hands still poised in the intricate gestures of her spell. The sheer, passive presence of the thing was a weight on her soul. She didn't need to be told what it could do; every instinct screamed at her that this was the end of things, the essence of unraveling given form.
Nulls observed his creation with a look of profound satisfaction, then turned his calm, smiling face towards her, his eyes reflecting the nothingness of the beast.
"See?" he said, his voice a soft, almost intimate murmur that cut through the sudden, profound silence. "I told you it would be simple."