I stood in the heart of the regional Fold's Nest, the massive, pulsating Folding Engine dominating the cavern. The air was a thick, organic noise of Primal Chaos. Guarding it was the Fold Lieutenant, its corrupted, humanoid form fused into the Engine, making it a conscious, intelligent system.
"We are the mechanism of rebirth, High Divisor," the Lieutenant's voice resonated through the cavern, calm and ideological. "You accept the inevitability of collapse. Surrender your Inversion, and we will grant your host purpose in the new architecture."
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I. The Ultimate Threading
The Lieutenant wasn't attacking with brute force; it was attacking with conceptual integration. It began to thread its own chaos into the fundamental Law of Spatial Stability surrounding the Engine, attempting to make the Nest impossible to locate or destroy.
I knew the necessary response, and the true cost it entailed.
To destroy the Nest and collapse the regional Fold, I could not use a clean, contained Null Strike. I needed to create a massive, systemic paradox that would rupture the dimensional anchors of the entire region.
This would create a massive, unavoidable Dimensional Backlash — a calculated consequence that would instantly annihilate the fighting forces still on the surface.
I closed my eyes behind the blindfold, filtering the Lieutenant's ideological pleas, the humming of the Engine, and the distant, desperate, but predictable frequencies of the Supreme Divisors fighting above.
I found the most powerful, rigid Law of Order anchoring the Folding Engine.
I initiated the most complex Existence Threading I had yet performed. I focused all the raw Inversion Energy from the Blivixis Gradient into a single, geometric truth:
The Law of the Nest's Stability is mathematically dependent on the concept of its own immediate, absolute non-existence.
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II. The Price of the Formula
The effect was instantaneous and absolute.
The Fold Lieutenant screamed — not in pain, but in philosophical agony as its entire consciousness was consumed by the paradox.
The Folding Engine did not explode; it imploded, collapsing into a violent, anti-causal singularity.
Above, on the surface of the scarred landscape, my Echo Mapping registered a single, sharp, agonizing sound: the collective, simultaneous snapping of the dimensional anchors sustaining every Demidemon, Supreme Divisor included, who was fighting in the immediate vicinity.
The loss was total.
Thousands of lives, including the hostile Zylos and the elite fighting corps, were wiped clean from causality by the successful destruction of the Nest. They had become the "necessary input" for the victory output.
When the singularity vanished, the layered Abyss resealed itself instantly, the landscape restored to a mundane, desolate plain, utterly silent.
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III. The Validation of the Inverter
I emerged from the site of the collapsed Nest, alone, my aura vibrating with the residual energy of the catastrophic dimensional rupture.
I felt nothing.
No grief for the lost, no triumph in the victory.
The loss was not registered as suffering, but as successful execution.
The formula had been sound.
I accessed the faint, distant frequency of Elysa. Her pulse was now spiking — not from personal terror, but from the massive, overwhelming data report of the instantaneous, unexplained loss of the entire strike force. She was struggling to categorize the total, systemic sacrifice.
My survival was the only variable that mattered. The successful collapse of the regional Nest, achieved at a total, ruthless cost, cemented my inverted morality and proved my status as the High Supreme Divisor who transcends the ethical concerns of Order.
Far away, in the heart of the Academy, Fenrir Alistair Blivixis sat back, watching the catastrophic news reports.
"Magnificent," Fenrir murmured, raising a glass of dark liquid to the silent chaos.
"He has completed the Inversion of Empathy.
He is no longer calculating the cost; he is calculating the necessity.
The human component is nearly gone.
The Primordial Reset approaches."