γπππππππ ππ-ZOKRAKS VS XORATH! ANGRY XORATH !γ
β¦Ruptured Plains β ring of smashed suns and the jagged margin where universe-fourteen once blinked outβ§
The ground under Wukong tasted like old battles. Dust rose in thin, smoking veils. He lay on his side, one hand curled around the staff that had become both prop and argument, chest heaving with the slow, satisfied burn of someone who'd just gambled with death and lived. The air around him thrummed; the echoes of Zokraks[1]' last blows still panged through his bones.
γWukongγ
β¦ Okii. Pork. I think you want to see my Bad Monkey forββ¦
γπππ πππππ ππππππ ππππ πππππ ππ ππππγ
He never got to finish the line. From the ring of wreckage, a fissure of motion answered.
Xorath rose.
It was not a slow, dignified standing. He stood and flickered, and the flicker was not the afterimage of pain but the prelude of wrath. Wings that had been ragged stitches in the last hours smoothed and snapped, the membranes brightening into streaks of molten glass. The BatβKing's eyes were a furnace that had been banked and then fed again; something in the old soldier had shifted from calculation to pure, hot response.
γWukongγ
β¦ Xorath, you need rest. I will see hββ¦
γπππ πππππ πππππ π πππππππ π ππππππππγ
He stopped, because Xorath did not follow the script. The BatβKing's head turned with a motion like a drawn blade. His jaw set. The flicker hardened into a presence that had the weight of old verdicts and unspent wars.
In a movement that had the simplicity of a single, inevitable order, Xorath raised a fist and punched a planet.
The planet did not explode with a single flare or theatrical fanfare. It imploded with the texture of inevitabilityβan implosion that crumpled core and crust like paper, unspooling magnetic fields that screamed as they tore. The atmospheric shell fractured into ribbons and then into dust. The shock rolled outward in a greenβwhite halo that made smaller suns cough light.
γXorathγ
β¦ β¦β¦
γπππ ππππ πππ ππ ππππ ππππ π ππ ππππγ
Wukong's breath caught. The staff trembled in his fingers. He had expected tricks; he had not expected this. The planet's remains spooled out like an answer to a question no one had asked.
Xorath followed the first deed with the second motion immediately: he tore a second, smaller planet from its nearβorbit and threw it toward Zokraks like a mortal flinging a pebble.
The arc of the thrown planet sang across the ruined sky. Zokraks, the ruler of three universes, watched it like a man seeing a child toss a stone. With a single, seemingly casual hand, Zokraks met the flying world and shattered it into flaring shards as though he were crushing a glass bead. The shards vaporized, and the shock of the impact fanned out and did little more than ruffle the distant dust.
For a beat the battlefield froze in the rhythm where the impossible had become usual: Xorath destroys a planet with a punch; Zokraks shatters a thrown world as if swatting a fruit; Wukong's jaw worked at the edge of a grin that was now respect braided with sharp surprise.
But Zokraks' casual dismissal did not erase the damage. The one thrown planetβcarrying Xorath's full intentβhad connected. It struck Zokraks in the flank with a force that did more than dent; it carved a wound into the ruler's composure. The blow left a bruise in space, a ring of dark where even Zokraks' ordered constructs trembled. The impact made him staggerβonly slightlyβbut Xorath's thrown strike had landed truth into the ruler's defenses.
γWukongγ
β¦ So this is his angry + emotional form.β¦
γπππ πππππ πππ ππππ ππππ πππ ππππ ππππππππγ
Xorath's eyes flicked at Wukongβno words, only a thin, almost private look that registered something like recognition. The BatβKing's aura flared. Wukong watched and, in the same watching, filled the missing syllables in his head. He knew the stories: the form that had ended kings and toppled orders. The form Xorath carried now was the one written into nightmares of rulers β the form that had once killed nine kings and reduced entire sovereignties to ash. It had been that form's ferocity that had burned Universe Fourteen into nothing.
γWukongγ
β¦ In this form he killed nine kings. Their clashes destroyed whole universe 14.β¦
γπππ πππππ πππΟ»ππ ππ π πππππ ππ πππππππππγ
Zokraks' jaw tightened, not in pain but in a recalculation. He had been composed, a ruler confident in the universes' scaffolding under his hand. But Xorath's sudden, raw forceβemotion turned into kinetic lawβpulled a new equation into the air.
The two titans moved.
If the earlier clashes were earthquakes, what came after was tectonicβless measured than an established war and more like the first, angry moments when two mountains finally remembered they could collapse on each other. The collisions were immediate and monstrous.
Xorath came with the speed of a catapult and the intent of a judge.
Zokraks answered with orders made physical. He produced arrays that tangled and then unspooled into constructs that sought to restrain; they collapsed into geometry that tried to hold a god in place. But Xorath was not a thing to be corralled. He moved like an avenging law, a trained instrument that had become a weapon beyond calculation. He struck with fists that unmade tectonics and with wings that tore solar winds into knives.
The first contact sent a shockwave that rearranged the orbits of three tiny, nearby suns. Dust columns rose and fell like ocean tides. Zokraks' gauntlets, adorned with sigils that had commanded civicities and fate, met Xorath's strikes and rang, spitting sparks of authority.
Wukong stood back and watched; he measured not with fear but with a kind of delighted study. The Bad Monkey form could be cunning and cunning might win fights, but thisβthis was the raw, ugly arithmetic of two forces unmoored. It was the kind of battle that did not care for tactics or theater: it cared for dominance and the old, essential truth that when two titans touch, universes register the bruise.
They traded heavy blows. Xorath struck the ground and the eruption cleaved a small moon into a ring. Zokraks hammered back, and his blow bent the fabric of a nearby nebula into a column. Each collision was a sentence that left meteor-shards for commas.
At one point Xorath grabbed a remnant satellite field and whirled it like a club; Zokraks answered by summoning a lattice of ordered blades that braided through the field and snapped the whirling mass into tidy shards. The shards became so small they glittered like a rain of diamond dust.
It was not simply force against force. Xorath's strikes carried the memory of wars, of tactical cruelty learned from being a leader that had seen betrayals and triumphs. His motions were less raw than they were preciseβeach blow aimed to upset an equation, to find the place where Zokraks' law could not comfortably answer.
Zokraks, meanwhile, moved with the measured certainty of a judge reading a long, old ledger. His counters read like jurisdiction: where Xorath sought rupture, Zokraks answered with containment. He would not be wild; he would be inevitable. His palms contrived a gravity net; his shoulders unfolded armies of compressed order. Each counter was a policy enacted in motion.
But Xorath's fury had a peculiar quality: beneath the raw thunder was a tender edge. His strikes were precise because he knew the cost of miscalculation; every blow seemed to say both "I will end you" and "I will not let you harm what matters." The emotional blade found cracks in Zokraks' composure.
Their clash escalated until it resembled a war between two mythic beastsβless like duelists and more like storms that had learned to forage against one another. The lights around them folded into a cyclone of debris and radiation. Small galaxies that had been clinging to existence since before the fight trembled and either tore free or were consumed entirely.
At one point, a combined strikeβXorath's wing-shear timed to a foot-stamp that opened a corridor of vacuumβhit so hard that a nearby proto-star collapsed into a black knot. The drink of darkness swallowed it and spat a spray of particles that rained like a lethal hail. Zokraks staggered from that specific blow; his constructs faltered for a breath. Xorath seized the breach and hammered again, his blows carrying an oath.
Wukong felt the old thrill again, the one that bound him to fights of scales that made entire heavens smart. He felt small and vast at once, the witness and participant of history being re-carved. Even as he watched, he knew: this was the kind of fight that shifts the ledger of epochs.
The plateau rang with the noise of their war. Each strike altered the map of the battlefield: craters deepened, rings formed and tore, and the ambient hum of cosmos danced to the rhythm of the blows. Their movements had become monstrousβless conscious of consequence than focused on the art of breaking.
As the chapter drew to its close, the two figures continued to fight like creatures older than names. Xorath's emotional fury and Zokraks' cold jurisdiction traded dominance in a loop that would continue beyond the frame. The ruined stars circling the conflict sighed and settled into new drafts of motion; the very idea of Universe Fourteen hung like an old scar in the background.
The final image before the chapter ends: Xorath and Zokraks locked in a monstrous exchange, light and law smashing into each other; Wukong in the middling distance, staff ready, watching the clash that had once razed a universe and might very well do so again. No further storyline, no extraneous threadβonly the fight, heavy and exact, and the knowledge that when these two titans met, the cosmos kept score in ruptured orbits and names that would be remembered in ruins.
[1] THE RULER OF 3 UNIVERSE, ABSOLUTE MONSTER