Chapter 1955: Breaking The Cradle (6) Unexpectedly, the Beast of Inevitability attacked first. It had previously been building up power to erase all of the corrupted Realities at once, but the mental attack and the ocean of ash had disrupted this build-up; however, the Beast was more wily than expected, as it did not truly lose its grasp on this technique, it just suppressed its blazing aura while allowing it to build up in secret. The Beast should have always been able to build up this power in a circumstantial manner, but it had shown its cards to lure its enemy into a trap, and now, its serpent’s tail delivered its fury. Faster than any of the Watchers could follow, the tail became a black lightning arc of pure inevitability with venom dripping in rivers that erased the distance between it and the Abomination, and a massive thudding sound resounded throughout space and time as the tail spears straight through the Abomination’s swollen flank. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢 The flesh of the Abomination was split apart as thick white pus, which was the distilled essence of devoured Realities, sprayed out in geysers thick as nebulae. With a quick retraction, the tail returned, and Eos could see that another powerful technique was quickly charging up, as the Beast of Inevitability focused on its opponents, red eyes tracking its every move. The wound suffered by the Abomination was vast, deep enough to expose the Abomination’s internal structure, which was layers of fused Realities stacked like meat in a butcher’s display. One of its exploded "rib bones" was a Reality of crystal spires visible inside, still inhabited, countless lifeforms frozen mid-scream as the wound gapes around them. A chuckle emerged from the Abomination as it observed its grisly wound, and Eos could feel a sense of admiration in that laughter, and then the wound began to close by folding inward. Lips form along the edges of the wounds as trillions of large mouths sprout from the flesh to kiss the gash shut, stitching flesh with threads of stolen sinew. The Realities inside are pulled deeper, digested alive, and screams echo from within as the bodies of countless lifeforms begin to sprout arms that were torn off to be used as a foundation for the wound erasure. Eos’ eyes tightened. There was something about the methods that Enoch was using to heal that struck him as odd, and he assigned a part of his consciousness to focus on this discrepancy he had noticed, before focusing fully on the battle. The Abomination exhales without any indication, one moment it was observing its closing wound and the next it was breathing out ash and memory with such great force it blasted out from its mouth like a beam of gray light that washed over the turtle, who had quickly retracted all of its body parts underneath its shell. The ash swept over the shell before turning around to cling to it, and as if it had a mind of its own, it began burrowing into any cracks that it could find. Where it touches, runes fade faster. Memories of protected lives, children laughing, lovers embracing, old ones dying gently, flash across the shell and vanish, consumed. The turtle had finished charging up another attack, and its tail emerged and lashed again. Barely seen, the tail strikes the Abomination’s underbelly, but the Beast did not tear through flesh; it saw that the previous tactics were not working well enough. What it did was more brutal. The snake head of its tail began to drill into the body of the Abomination, tearing through every obstacle in its way as the Abomination struggled to pull it out using billions of its arms, but the power and tenacity in that single appendage were unmatched. However, the arms of the Abomination were able to slow the progress of the tail, but it was too late; it had found its destination, and then the serpent head lashed out, and venom was injected directly into the Abomination’s corrupted heart, which was a throbbing organ the size of multiple Realities that had been visible through translucent flesh. The heart convulses, and for a moment, the Abomination staggers as so much of its corrupted lifeforce was erased, and as the venom traveled throughout its body, more of it was being erased with every passing moment. Then it laughs. The laugh was purely Enoch’s—childlike, wondering, mad. Then the heart that was pumping venom all through the body of the Abomination was pulled out by it, and with the same mad laughter, the Abomination threw the heart at the Beast. The tail of the Beast lashed out at the heart, crushing it into pieces. However, before those pieces could be erased, smaller abominations, each of them was exactly he same shape as the Abomination, and were all Realities that had been corrupted, miniature whales, each birthed from a single devoured reality, poured out from it. They swarm like piranhas, closing around the tail of the serpents, and from their bodies emerged millions of mouths that tried to chew through the tail, causing sparks that burned hotter than stars to pour out from the contacts. Hissing with outrage, the serpent’s tail thrashes, crushing hundreds of these Abominations, but hundreds more replace them. In the distance, the mighty body of the Abomination crumbled like a house of cards as it transformed into smaller Abominations that raced towards the Beast. The turtle roared in outrage, and it could not quickly lash out with its tail to erase the incoming danger due to the Abominations that still surrounded its length, and were restricting its smooth flow. In the blink of an eye, the flood of Abominations poured over the Beast, and they began to attack its shell as its legs shook under their weight. Enoch had been transforming these Abominations under the pressure from the Beasts, and when its venom had flooded the main body of the Abomination, it became all the trigger that it needed to evolve the individual pieces of itself to greater heights. They attacked the shell of the Beast with cold fury, and even though the lashing and striking tail from the Beast was killing hundreds at every moment, the Abominations were becoming harder to kill, and could no longer be taken down by single strikes, often requiring multiple strikes. Then one of the Abominations roared with victory as it saw a chink in the turtle’s shell, and calling on all the power in its body, it tore this gap open, and burrowed into the shell, and as if a flood gate had been open, more Abominations followed it into the hole like a flood of locusts. The first Abomination tunneled through the shell like a maggot through meat. Finally, it finds the Beast’s veins filled with its blood, which were oceans of pure inevitability. Opening countless maws filled with needle-sharp teeth, it tore through the vein and began to drink while simultaneously injecting its corruption into the vein of the Beast. The Beast had been bellowing with rage as it fought, and that cry suddenly transformed into pain. The sound shatters the nearby void, birthing temporary Realities that should have lived for long enough to give the Beast a temporary boost in power, but they faded quickly, as they died screaming. Filled with pain and madness, its serpent tail coils back and strikes its own shell, trying to crush the burrower, but the impact only cracks the shell wider, even though it crushed hundreds of the Abomination, but it caused their blood to seep into the wound, flooding more of the Beast with corruption as veins of white began to spread through the turtle’s shell.