High above, Nocturnis spread his arms wide. His shadow expanded, covering regions of the cosmos like a black curtain. Stars dimmed instantly. Moons cracked. The vacuum turned murky. "You think fifty percent will be enough!? You underestimate ME!" He thrust both palms forward. A tidal wave of shadow ripped through space, massive enough to tear through several solar systems. Gustav's projection raised one hand. Just one. "Shadow Genesis Sphere," Nocturnis roared. Gustav calmly replied: "Cancel." The tidal wave shattered. Nocturnis froze. "WHAT!?" Gustav tilted his head. "My authority over reality is higher than your manipulation of darkness." He moved faster than thought. BOOM! A punch to Nocturnis' ribs. BOOM! A second to his face. BOOM!!! A kick to his abdomen that created a crater in the void. Nocturnis staggered, coughing black ichor. "You miserable brat—HOW ARE YOU THIS STRONG ALREADY!?" Gustav's clone didn't answer. His silence was louder than words. The deity of shadows howled in rage. "Fine! If I cannot break you with strength—" His body dissolved, merging with the surrounding darkness. "—I will devour the source of your existence instead!" He vanished completely. The universe went pitch-black. Ria screamed. Endric clenched his fists. Sersi trembled. "Where did he go!?" Ria shouted. Endric could barely breathe. "He's… he merged with darkness." A chill crept into their bones. Gustav's clone blinked once without emotion... without a shred of panic. He knew exactly where Nocturnis was headed. And he moved instantly. A sonic boom of cosmic magnitude shattered the emptiness as he raced back toward the planet—toward his unconscious true body—toward the ritual-drenched sanctuary. He crashed through several layers of cosmic debris without slowing. Outerspace trembled, like a living creature realizing something far above its rank had stepped into its territory. The ripples of fear traveled through every atom when Gustav, shot through the darkness. The darkness of space could no longer hide Nocturnis... they parted from him, exposing his position. Ahead of him, thrashing through collapsing space-folds, wasthe Deity of Darkness and Death. A god whose name even the other deities whispered cautiously. A being who once feasted on collapsing suns as nourishment. A being who ruled the Dark dimensions. Yet now— He was running. His obsidian cloak of shadow whipped wildly behind him, bleeding darkness into the cosmos as he desperately tried to reform his arm… the arm Gustav had shattered moments ago with a single punch. But Gustav was already upon him. Nocturnis whirled around with eyes blazing like negative stars... darkness condensed so intensely they glowed. "You dare—!" Gustav appeared before him without traversing the space between them. One instant he was kilometers away… The next, he was right in front of Nocturnis, fist already fired. The strike landed. A thunderclap followed, echoing and ripping through spacetime and causing it to fold over itself. Entire light-years around them warped violently, bending like thick molten glass. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚 Nocturnis was thrown back at speeds that defied calculation. His body tore through the crust of a drifting moon and out the other side in a spray of cosmic debris. The moon shattered behind him, pulverized into a ring of glittering dust. Gustav appeared again, without moving before the fragments even finished scattering. "ENOUGH!" For the first time, Nocturnis stopped running. The darkness around him erupted outward, turning the void into a pitch-black ocean. Twelve shadow suns rose behind him, each burning cold, emitting anti-light that swallowed nearby starlight whole. The temperature of space dropped to absolute zero instantly. Even cosmic radiation vanished. A wave of death radiated from Nocturnis—an aura that would have ended the existence of entire galaxies if Gustav wasn't there to stop it. "You think shadows frighten me?" Gustav asked with an incredibly calm voice. His barrier around his unconscious self, far away near the ritual site, did not flicker in the slightest. Nocturnis thrust both hands forward. "VOID NECROSIS!" A pure and unfiltered beam of annihilation erupted from his palms, swallowing everything ahead of it. This wasn't an energy attack. It wasn't even destruction. It was unexistence, the rule Nocturnis commanded: to erase what should never have been. The beam engulfed Gustav. Sersi, Ria, and Endric, watching from a safe distance within a telekinetic sphere, flinched. Ria whispered hoarsely, "Did… it hit him?" Endric's lips trembled. "I don't know..." For the first time, Endric couldn't see the outcome of this battke. But as the death beam cleared, Gustav was standing there in space, completely unaffected. His expression unchanged. He lifted his hand and flicked a small, glowing marble of white light. That tiny ball detonated into a reverse singularity, pulling Nocturnis' attack backward, sucking the darkness through itself, and compressing it into a point the size of a grain of sand before snuffing out completely. Nocturnis staggered. "That shouldn't be possible…" "It's simple," Gustav replied. "I rewrote its attribute." Nocturnis roared and condensed himself into pure shadow, losing physical form entirely. In that state, he could not be touched... no matter, no force could interact with him. He rushed at Gustav only as an endless onslaught of tendrils, claws, blades, and shadow storms, capable of slicing through neutron stars like butter with each one. Gustav lifted his hand. Reality froze. Not Nocturnis himself… but everything else. The broken moon fragments. The cosmic dust clouds. The shockwaves radiating from their last clash. Even the flow of local spacetime. Only the deity remained unfrozen. "What trickery is this?!" Gustav answered by snapping his fingers. "Matter Reformation..." The stray energy around them reshaped itself instantly, forming colossal crystal pillars, thousands of kilometers tall, which shot toward Nocturnis like living spears. The tip of each pillar emitted blinding lights that were a thousand times brighter than that of shooting star. Nocturnis countered by re-manifesting his physical form and unleashing a wave of death energy, shattering the pillars into dust. But Gustav was no longer there. Behind Nocturnis... Above him... Beside him... Within his blind spots... The Outworldly appeared in eight positions simultaneously. These were neither illusions nor clones. Gustav just folded layers of existence like paper. All eight threw a punch and the universe trembled. Nocturnis was hurled across parsecs, smashing through asteroid belts and tearing through a dwarf star whose eruption painted the darkness with violent light. But Gustav caught up instantly, flying beside him as he rag-dolled through space. He grabbed Nocturnis by the face and slammed him downward. The deity smashed into the crust of a lifeless planet. The entire world shattered. Nocturnis rose from the debris, burning hot. He opened both arms, and space behind him cracked open like breaking glass, revealing the Realm of Eternal Night, his dimension. Billions of shadow souls screamed from within. Massive, eldritch beasts made of pure darkness surged outward. Each one was a god-level entity in its own right. "OUTWORLDLY!" Nocturnis thundered. "I AM THE END OF ALL LIGHT!" The shadow army rushed at him. Gustav sighed softly. "Annoying." He extended his arm. "Matter Reconstruction Burst..." A dome of inverted energy expanded in a flash, touching nothing… but erasing everything. The shadows evaporated instantly. The eldritch beasts imploded. Even the entrance to Nocturnis' realm shrank violently before collapsing into a void-point. Nocturnis gasped. "You destroyed the gate… to my dimension…" "I removed its 'darkness' property," Gustav replied. "You can rebuild it later." Then he kicked Nocturnis so hard his physical form distorted into ribbons of shadow. Gustav couldn't seal the dark dimension away while fighting Nocturnis at the same time so this was the best he could do in the meantime. He rushed forward again with his fists turning into miniature blackholes that spun rapidly. Not destructive enough to ruin the universe, but easily potent enough to harm deities. With each punch he sent hurling at Nocturnis, some of his godly essence was ripped out and consumed by the swirling singularities. Nocturnis shrieked, backing away in sudden panic. "You… you dare drain ME?!" "I am draining your shadows," Gustav corrected casually. "You'll live… or not..." Nocturnis lashed out, using Darkspace Freeze, an ability that locked the movement of anything within a ten-light-year radius. But Gustav didn't even slow down. He stepped out of the freeze like walking through fog. Before Nocturnis could react, Gustav raised his hand— This single gesture changed the surroundings entirely. Space inverted. Up became down. Forward became inward. The vacuum became dense matter. The stars nearby rearranged their positions like chess pieces shuffled by a bored god. Nocturnis blinked rapidly. "STOP WARPING REALITY AROUND ME!" "I like the aesthetic," Gustav replied. Nocturnis pulled his power inward, compressing all of it into a single sphere of pure death. A ball of swirling darkness, colder than the concept of cold, throbbed with the ability to end existence entirely. "You force my hand… OUTWORLDLY!" With a scream, he hurled it. The Veil expanded, tearing through the layers of existence like ripping paper. Entire sections of spacetime collapsed into it. Endric gasped while Ria's knees buckled. Sersi whispered, "An attack that could erase us from existence even at this distance…" But Gustav simply raised one finger. He touched the incoming wave. And… It reversed. The entire Entropy Veil imploded backward, collapsing the destruction into itself until it vanished. "No," Nocturnis breathed. "No, no, no—" Gustav appeared before him. "Relax. Like I said, I changed its attribute. It returns things instead of erasing them now."