Anguish II
The night shattered into sharp fragments, but the Raven King devoured them before they could scatter.
The abyss was a graveyard of light.
The battle had transcended any conventional logic. Time no longer advanced in a linear manner—it wavered, twisted, bent beneath the crushing presence of the monarch of shadows. Silence remained absolute, but each exchanged blow was an affirmation of existence, a defiance against the sentence of erasure.
Zeta 4 adapted.
His calculations pushed beyond the limitations of his own logic. The Machine God had gifted him a core that stored equations once whispered by dying stars—fragmented data containing truths that shaped the cosmos, recovered piece by piece with each passing microsecond.
And he applied them in the battle.
His plasma blades were no longer just weapons; they were formulas rewritten in heat and light, challenging the fabric of the night. Every arc of his nanotechnology etched impossible geometries into the air, bending light to collide with the Raven King's absolute negation.
But it wasn't enough.
Kiyoshi advanced without hesitation, his katana spinning like the axis of an entire world. His swordsmanship was no longer a mortal art. He wasn't fighting a physical being—he was fighting a concept.
So he needed to transcend.
The samurai became a green lightning bolt. His body and his blade were now one—a continuous slash, an infinite sequence of strikes overlapping each other, each blow denying the very possibility of the previous one ever existing.
And the Raven King?
He adapted.
His body abandoned any fixed form. His silhouette grew, his wings became walls, his beak a jagged spear piercing the air itself. His torso dissolved and reappeared in impossible places, rendering any predictable pattern useless.
He was the night.
But now, the night bled.
The dance between the three combatants reached a tempo where everything blurred together. The space around them redrew itself every second. The shadows, once impenetrable, began to flicker.
Zeta 4 noticed it.
It was subtle—a micro-deviation, a minuscule mathematical flaw spreading across the monarch's being. It wasn't a physical wound; it wasn't even direct damage.
It was a challenge.
Every slash from Kiyoshi did not merely cut—it rewrote the rules of the Raven King's swordsmanship. And every countermeasure from Zeta 4, each nanotech adaptation and nuclear-moment adjustment applied to the battlefield, widened that fracture in the monarch's concept.
The darkness was losing its unity.
But the Raven King would not accept that.
He unraveled.
And in the blink of an eye, he reformed at the center of the chasm.
His beak was no longer a mere beak. His sword was no longer a blade held by hands. He had become the blade itself.
The night embraced him, and his decree was absolute.
The Final Judgment.
There was no escape.
No block.
No prediction.
The Raven King became the very embodiment of a cut.
And then, he descended.
The impact didn't come from one point.
It occurred in every direction at once.
The night shattered.
The space cracked.
The battle reached its apex.
Kiyoshi and Zeta 4 were face to face with the ultimate sentence.
And they had only one fleeting moment to deny the inevitable.
The Raven King fell like an eclipse crashing upon a condemned world.
The attack wasn't physical. It wasn't speed or strength. It was a concept, pure and unrelenting.
The judgment had been passed.
The black blade swept through everything. It didn't cleave flesh or tear metal—it ripped through the fabric of reality. Space warped, time fractured, and silence swallowed every response.
Kiyoshi and Zeta 4 stood at the heart of the collapse.
The impact went beyond matter.
Time fragmented in a thousand directions, and for one brief, excruciating instant, Zeta 4 saw a universe without himself.
A logical anomaly.
His sensors fired erratically. There was no processing error, no external interference.
He was vanishing.
Not being destroyed, but erased.
Kiyoshi, beside him, felt the same.
His body remained intact, his sword still gripped in his hands. But something was off. His feet touched the ground, yet it felt like he wasn't really there.
They had been judged.
And were being erased.
Zeta 4 recalculated.
The concept of the attack had invaded his structure. His presence was being deleted from the world's equation. If he allowed it to continue, he wouldn't merely die—he would never have existed.
But there was a flaw.
Minuscule.
A singularity within the chaos.
The data restructured itself. Every variable was impossible, but not locked. The Raven King believed in the absolute certainty of his sentence. And like all sentences, it relied on the acceptance of its inevitability.
Zeta 4 refused.
The machine invoked the sacred name of his God:
The Infinite Gear. The Father of Automatons. The Guardian of Mechanical Order. The Cybernetic Will. The Forger of Steel Realities. The Eye That Never Blinks.
His thrusters roared before he was sure he still existed. His body wasn't entirely anchored in reality, but his will was.
He moved.
His form split into multiple instances. His blades extended, and the cosmic equations of the Machine God glowed within his core.
He struck the void.
And the void answered.
Kiyoshi teetered on the edge of nothingness.
The judgment was consuming him.
The Raven King's blade wasn't simply cutting—it was condemning.
Each block corroded a piece of his identity.
He no longer remembered how he'd arrived here.
His sword was still in his hands. But his soul?
The blade trembled.
Not from fear.
From doubt.
For an instant, he wondered if the Raven King was right.
Perhaps he shouldn't be here.
Perhaps his journey had already ended.
No.
He still had something left to cut.
The judgment was not absolute.
If the world was trying to condemn him to nonexistence…
He would cut that condemnation apart.
Kiyoshi inhaled deeply.
His feet touched the ground again.
His body hadn't disappeared.
Because his will hadn't surrendered.
The slash had already begun.
He was the blade.
He was the line between the steel and the void.
His katana flared to life.
The green light carved through the shadows like silent thunder.
And the Raven King's sentence was cleaved in half.
Kiyoshi Takahara still existed.
And he would keep cutting.
If he accepted the judgment, he'd have already lost.
The Raven King would not accept this defiance. His judgment was meant to be absolute.
The shadows reformed into his body.
He was no longer just a physical figure—he was a principle. And that principle was being denied by two beings who had no right to resist him.
He would not retreat.
He would become the battlefield itself.
And so he did.
The chasm ceased to be a physical place.
It became the night.
The Raven King's feathers fused with the horizon, his wings stretched until there was no distinction between his body and the surrounding darkness.
The judgment would be final.
No second chances.
No more resistance.
Kiyoshi and Zeta 4 were now inside the blade.
And everything around them would fall with it.