Under the moonlight, Zoran hummed an obscure little tune as he floated out of the alleyway.
He glanced at the chaotic world around him and shook his head helplessly. Under the laws governing this realm, even a devil slain by his own hand would eventually be reborn in the Netherworld. The price of that rebirth, however, was the total loss of all their memories and original, formidable strength.
Makima's end had been swift and absolute. Her fragile, meager power stood absolutely no chance against Zoran, leaving her without a single shred of leverage to mount a resistance.
As he drifted clear of the alley, the chaotic plights of everyone nearby unfolded vividly within his sight. Denji and Reze were desperately fleeing for their lives, while Kobeni was frantically shifting gears, her car violently plowing back and forth through the crowded streets. The brand-new automobile she had only recently acquired was already battered beyond recognition. One of its wheels wobbled precariously, smeared with fresh blood, a clear testament to the absolute ordeal it had just endured.
In the driver's seat, Kobeni pouted miserably, tears streaming down her face like a cascade of tiny pearls. Zoran couldn't quite tell whether she was weeping out of sheer terror or out of utter heartbreak for her beloved car. He figured it was likely the latter.
He had no intention of stepping in to help them. The youth needed to learn to handle their own affairs.
His silhouette glided gracefully along the edge of the thoroughfare, moving in the exact opposite direction of Denji and Reze's frantic escape route. Countless human puppets were currently surging forth from every conceivable direction, completely gridlocking the streets. It was a brutal world; every single one of these puppets had originally been an ordinary human being. It was simply far too difficult a task for regular people to live a peaceful, stable life in a world like this.
The puppets possessed no independent thoughts, let alone the common sense to recognize who they were dealing with.
Zoran let out a soft sigh.
A surging wave of gravitational force erupted and tore through the street, instantly slicing the obstructive mob into a cloud of drifting, fine powder. Thousands of puppets vanished into absolute nothingness under the wake of that single, sweeping strike.
Consider the path cleared.
With that, at least half of the world's clamor finally quieted down.
Zoran floated smoothly down the newly opened path. After a brief moment, he suddenly paused in his tracks. His gaze shifted toward a few rather tactless individuals who had just disrupted the peace, lunging out from a cross street.
It was the foreign assassin, Quanxi, accompanied by her harem of four fiends.
"Looks like there's another devil hanging around here," Quanxi remarked, letting out a lazy yawn.
She had once been a Devil Hunter herself, exceptionally skilled in hand-to-hand combat, and had even been the trusted partner of Kishibe, the strongest hunter in the Special Division. However, after resigning to work in the private sector, she had parted ways with the Public Safety Devil Hunters of Japan. The four beautiful fiends hovering closely at her side were her female companions.
"Lady Quanxi, that devil looks like he might be trouble," one of the fiends whimpered, clinging tightly to Quanxi's arm in a spoiled manner.
In the distance, the faint, roaring rev of a chainsaw echoed through the night. They had come explicitly to claim the heart of the Chainsaw Devil.
"Hey, you! Devil! Out of the way!" shouted the female fiend with a ribbon tied in her hair, glaring defiantly at Zoran.
Zoran cast a casual glance over them and smiled faintly. "If you wish to pass, you will have to carve out a path of your own."
"Ah, seriously, how incredibly noisy! We don't have time for this!" Quanxi broke free from her companions' embraces. Her eyes turned fiercely cold, and her figure vanished instantly from the spot.
She was a master of close-quarters combat and was a hybrid weapon human, the Bow Devil. Among all the assassins currently vying for the Chainsaw Devil's heart, she stood a remarkably high chance of success.
Unfortunately for her, it seemed her luck had completely run out today.
Her vanished silhouette materialized abruptly right at Zoran's flank. Yet, before she could execute a move, she was violently hurled backward by an uncontrollable force, crashing heavily into a building lining the street. The impact sent a massive cloud of dust billowing into the air, leaving her status entirely unknown.
The four female fiends reacted in an instant. Before they even had time to process their worry, the fiend with the ribbon tied in her hair locked her gaze directly onto Zoran's true form. Suppressing the rising fury in her eyes, she spoke in a soft, eerie whisper:
"The corpse is..."
"The corpse is talking," Zoran interrupted smoothly, finishing her sentence for her with absolute composure.
A Repulsion Slash ripped violently across the street.
The strike mercilessly severed her voice right in its tracks. It was an incredibly swift, instantaneous bisection. The female fiend didn't even have the chance to finish uttering her own signature phrase before her lines were stolen and her body was outpaced by the sheer velocity of the slash.
She looked down at herself in complete bewilderment, staring blankly in a daze.
"So... fast..." she murmured softly.
In the next breath, her body split neatly into two halves.
Terror began to ferment in the air.
Zoran lightly lifted his finger. An invisible, silent wave of gravitational force erupted outward once more, instantly sweeping past two more of the disrespectful fiends, obliterating them.
However, the final remaining fiend managed to successfully trigger her unique ability at the absolute last second. With a cold, detached expression, she pressed her hands downward, and the world around them radically transformed.
Zoran hovered quietly in midair, calmly observing the sudden shift in his surroundings.
They were now standing inside a vast, sweeping library. The opponent had dragged him into a domain that heavily resembled an Innate Bounded Field. Countless volumes of books rested perfectly organized upon endless, towering rows of bookshelves that stretched out into infinity.
The fiend sat regally right in the dead center of the library, looking up at Zoran as she spoke, "I am the Cosmos Fiend."
"And within this space lies the accumulated knowledge of the entire universe."
"And?" Zoran smiled, completely unfazed.
The Cosmos Fiend shook her head slowly. "An excessive inundation of knowledge will utterly obliterate a person's cognitive mind, reducing them to a raving lunatic. It appears you have fully prepared yourself to receive the entire collective knowledge of the cosmos."
Her voice was chillingly detached, her countenance entirely devoid of emotion.
Zoran let out an amused chuckle, sweeping his gaze across the expansive library. So, this is it...
Forcing a massive, overwhelming influx of disorganized and chaotic knowledge directly into an opponent's mind to completely shatter their mental fortitude… it was an undeniably powerful technique.
Yet, he couldn't help but feel he had heard of a concept like this somewhere before. What was it called again? Unlimited Void?
Zoran let out a low, amused laugh. This creature's ability truly was quite fascinating, and the physical manifestation of this massive library was undeniably magnificent.
The Cosmos Fiend extended her hand directly toward Zoran. Instantly, the entire library began to warp and distort as an infinite, torrential wave of universal knowledge came hurtling straight toward him.
Yet, through it all, Zoran merely stood perfectly still, floating serenely in midair. He lightly clapped his hands together and spoke smoothly, "The Cosmos Fiend, is it? Fascinating. As it happens, I know a little something about a technique like this myself."
He let out a resonant, booming laugh. "It appears you are far more qualified than Makima ever was."
The Cosmos Fiend froze for a fraction of a second, caught off guard. "Qualified for what?"
Even as the infinite ocean of knowledge converged to completely engulf him, Zoran slowly extended his own hand, pointing his finger right back at her from across the vast distance.
In the very next second, a deep, profound radiance erupted from the tip of his finger. It was a shade of violet so dark it bordered on absolute black, thick and dense like an unresolvable pool of ink, flowing backwards along his hand and into the space behind him.
An immense, irresistible gravitational pull slammed into the Cosmos Fiend, violently dragging her toward the expanding black abyss manifesting right before her eyes. Not even the deepest midnight of the mortal realm had ever possessed a darkness so deeply terrifying. It felt as though an entirely different universe was being bred within that void.
This was a direct clash of two absolute domains.
Yet, it was immediately and abundantly clear that this cosmic library possessed nowhere near the structural integrity required to withstand a cataclysmic force of this magnitude. Under the oppressive wake of the pitch-black radiance emanating from Zoran's fingertip, the library distorted violently before shattering into a million pieces.
The Cosmos Fiend's expression froze in pure shock.
It was as if her entire world had suddenly been thrown onto absolute mute. She felt as though she were sinking rapidly into the deepest, darkest trenches of the ocean, utterly devoid of sound. The brilliant light above her head was rapidly condensing into a solitary, narrow beam before completely vanishing.
The universe before her eyes plunged into absolute pitch-black darkness. When she looked down, she could no longer even see her own hands.
A sudden, overwhelming panic gripped her heart. She flung her head back, and through the absolute last remaining thread of fading light, the face she beheld looking down upon her belonged to none other than that very same demon from before.
Zoran closed his palm. With that final gesture, the world was cast into total, unyielding darkness.
Following the utter obliteration of the cosmic library, Zoran's true form now suspended majestically amidst a vast sea of glittering stars. Countless books from the shattered domain drifted aimlessly through the vacuum of space alongside the crumbling remnants of the architecture.
His true physical manifestation was staggeringly, terrifyingly colossal, standing tall and abstruse within the absolute vacuum of the cosmos. He stood on equal footing with the vibrant, azure planet floating not too far away, though its faint blue luminescence could only cast a pale reflection upon his Daoist robes, lighting up a meager, subtle fraction of the fabric.
Floating directly in front of his eyes were two distinct marbles. One was slightly larger, while the other was a bit smaller.
The smaller marble rested gently over his outstretched, upturned palm—a tiny, pale violet crescent moon. It was the literal moon of this specific world, bobbing and floating unpredictably right within the hollow of his hand.
As the crescent moon slowly rotated, it revealed the absolute darkness of its hidden, far side. Within that pitch-black expanse, a microscopic speck of light remained entirely imprisoned.
An indescribable, esoteric cosmic frequency washed continuously over the Cosmos Fiend, who now found herself tightly sealed within the dark side of this world's moon.
In direct contrast to her own ability, which overwhelmed targets by flooding them with endless information, this absolute void of darkness was relentlessly, continuously eroding away the Cosmos Fiend's own intellect and wisdom. Furthermore, within this specific pocket of the moon's dark side, the flow of time had begun to aggressively accelerate.
"Domain Expansion..." the staggeringly colossal demon murmured with a faint, amused smile. "I know a little something about that too."
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