Blade in hand, Solanky strode toward the remaining mid-stage calamitous entities, still frozen in the shock of watching their strongest fall. The instant it broke, they scattered in every direction—entities moved through distances beneath the Beyond Realm the way a man might cross a room, the cosmos itself spread beneath their feet like a map traced in exacting detail. A single stride could carry them across several multiverses; the faintest shift of a limb might displace their body by light-years. For anything with lesser command over space and time, keeping pace with such movement was simply impossible.
Most of the fleeing ancestors scattered toward distant worlds and realms, vanishing into a void so vast that another entity of their caliber would have lost them entirely. But Solanky, standing a fraction stronger, needed only his observation techniques to know the truth: every one of them was still no more than a breath from death. He smiled, turning his gaze toward the place where one had already vanished. A faint trail of radiant light bloomed into his vision the moment he looked—tracing the entity's flight into the void, toward the boundary of infinite source space. Solanky followed without hesitation, closing the distance on a being that flickered in and out of alternate timelines, teleporting at speeds meant to outrun anything short of a god.
He caught the trail in his grasp and ignited his blue icy flames, and the light itself began to freeze—the entity's frantic passage across timelines slowing, faltering, until it stopped dead. The moment its body locked in place, its massive triangular head snapped around just in time to see a flash of blade energy already closing on it, faster than anything it could have outrun through time itself. Pinned, it could only spit out, "Damn it—how did you find me? Why was I even your target?" Solanky answered with a cold snort and a second swing of the source-severing blade, and its core shattered outright.
Unlike gods, devils, and the other races who fused their cores into worldborn energy the instant they comprehended source energy and ascended to entity status, calamitous beings carried a fatal weakness: their dense source energy did not melt into flesh and spirit until they reached the very peak of the entity level. Their cores, though present far earlier, remained near-indestructible—strong enough to shrug off attacks from most entities who hadn't yet reached the late or peak stage. Solanky, however, was not most entities.
He gathered the sliced corpse and the shattered core with a wave of his hand, then stepped back and let himself dissolve into infinite source space. At the entity level, a single thought was enough for him to perceive the whole of it—an advantage held only by those who had crossed into mid-stage and beyond. In that moment he became the space, and the space became him; every multiverse, every timeline, every source world nested within the endless expanse of infinite source space lay open to his awareness at once. He searched for any trace of another calamitous entity that might have fled here, ready to appear anywhere within that infinite reach the instant he found one.
He found nothing. No other entity stirred within the infinite source space. He withdrew, reappearing within the void, and there he noticed it—every radiant trail belonging to the fleeing entities bent in the same direction, deeper into the void's heart. Solanky smiled, sheathed the blade at his back, and followed.
The trails converged on a vast abyss, several billion light-years across, and something about it unsettled even the void around it—no light reflected from its rim, no glow touched its edges, only an absolute blackness and a faint, eerie pressure bleeding outward from within. Solanky stepped into it without hesitation. The instant he crossed the threshold, time and space began to warp around him, the distortion deepening the further he descended. Along the abyss's walls, he watched the tightly bound trails splinter apart, scattering into countless smaller paths that vanished into the stone—and beneath it all, he caught the faint, lingering trace of the grand calamitous ancestor's presence, worn into the walls themselves.
But Solanky paid the hiding entities no mind. He already knew where they nested now, and he could reach them any time he pleased. What drew his attention instead was the eerie aura threading through the abyss—something that did not belong to any calamitous being at all.
Hidden in their dark caves along the abyss walls, the calamitous entities watched him descend, ignoring them entirely, and some took quiet relief in being overlooked, as though he could not sense them at all. The grievously wounded grand ancestor watched with a different kind of interest, murmuring to itself, "Will he manage to enter that hidden space? I confess I'm curious what waits on the other side—something terrifying enough to unsettle even me. It must guard secrets that only late-stage entities could ever hope to touch. In more than three hundred billion samsaras"—a single samsara spanning a quadrillion years—"I was never once deemed worthy to cross into that hidden realm. Its restrictions, its pressure, its killing intent—they claw at the mind and the soul alike. Perhaps that realm was simply never meant for beings like us to find. I only hope I can catch a glimpse of it, if he manages to breach it himself."
As the watching entities held their breath, a black fog swallowed Solanky whole, and in an instant he was gone—no trace of his life essence or aura left for anything to sense. Far away, within the super infinite source world, the seated Supremo opened his eyes slowly. "The original forsaken realm," he murmured. "How has it surfaced within the realms beneath the Beyond? I need to see this myself. The source-defying body alone won't be strength enough—even the weakest of the forsaken creatures carries the power of a late-stage entity, and there may yet be transcendent entities sleeping within, waiting only to be woken." With that, the Supremo's body vanished, slipping past the hidden realm's restrictions without resistance, and not a single entity within noticed he had ever been there.