The Voice Beyond the Void

It had been some time since I first encountered the Paradox Hound, though time itself had become meaningless in this endless struggle.

Dodging. Evading. Surviving. What had begun as instinct had devolved into something far more desperate—a futile, ceaseless struggle against inevitability.

The Hound's attacks did not tear through me, did not break me, did not even erase me. They did something far worse.

They made it so I had never existed.

A brush of its claws. A fleeting touch. That was all it took. Entire pieces of my event horizon—gone. Not wounded, not damaged. Erased from all possibility.

It was unlike anything I had ever faced.

I had taken too many hits.

Not a full, direct strike. Not yet. But even the scratches were enough to unravel me. To make parts of me vanish.

At first, I had thought I was simply losing form. But the truth was worse.

I was being erased from history itself.

Slowly. Inevitably.

I was unraveling. Not all at once, not in some violent clash of power, but in a quiet, methodical dismantling of my existence.

Each flicker of the Paradox Hound's presence erased a part of me.

There was no pain. No impact. No sound.

Just absence.

More and more of my event horizon simply ceased to be.

And as I dwindled, I understood.

The Nova Reaper had only been the first move.

A probe. A test.

A tool sent to determine what I was, how I resisted, how I adapted.

And when I did not fall, the System had calculated its next step.

It had adapted too.

And so it had sent the Paradox Hound.

Not as a simple executioner.

Not as an enemy to fight.

But as an answer.

A correction.

A force that was not meant to eliminate me but to erase the very possibility of my existence.

Until now, I had spent every moment desperately clinging to life, believing that if I could just find an escape, I could survive.

But now, I realized —there was no escape.

There was no path forward.

There never had been.

I had always been playing a losing game.

Every moment, the Paradox Hound reclaimed what was never meant to be.

Every movement I made only delayed the inevitable.

And now, I had no more moves left to make.

This was how It would end.

No war. No final stand. No legacy left behind.

Just the slow, quiet, unstoppable reversion of an error.

I had spent so much time struggling to exist.

And yet, in the end, I would never have been here at all.

I let the weight of that truth settle, pressing against me like the collapsing remnants of a dying star. The realization was suffocating, an inevitability that crushed the last fragments of defiance within me. There was no struggle left, no unseen force waiting to intervene. Just the cold, silent truth of what I had always been—a mistake waiting to be corrected.

And then, in that moment—I made a decision.

Not to yield.

Nor to hesitate or negotiate.

If I could not escape the Paradox Hound, then I would make a last struggle to try and consume it.

It was my only choice.

One last attempt.

One final act of defiance.

Not to survive.

Not to win.

But because it was the only thing left to do.

I reached outward, my gravity roaring into the abyss.

I would drag it into me.

Or I would be erased.

I rushed forward.

The Hound's form flickered, bending, shifting. Its paw reached forward, closing in on me.

The strike that would end everything.

And in that moment—just when it was about to reach me—

I understood.

It was never something that could be consumed.

It was never something that could be taken in.

This was a being that did not exist within the same rules of consumption, of destruction, of existence itself.

To devour the Paradox Hound would be like trying to devour the concept of certainty.

It was beyond that.

I was never meant to win.

My gamble had failed.

The weight of it hit me all at once.

I was not a defiance of existence.

I was not a singularity against the system.

I was a flawed anomaly about to be erased.

There was no struggle.

No second chance.

No fight left to give.

I had reached my limit.

And I would have to accept it.

After all this time, all this struggle—it would all have been for nothing.

I started to let go.

Let go of the world.

Of everything.

And meet the end.

But then—

???: "Fool."

I felt it.

It was not a presence.

Not something within this existence.

It was something beyond.

Beyond the System.

Beyond the Paradox Hound.

Beyond the very reality I existed in.

In an instant—everything shifted.

The Paradox Hound—there just a moment ago—now gone.

Not erased. Not consumed.

Simply gone.

And with it, so was the System's presence.

The eyes that had always been watching. The silent, suffocating pressure that had loomed over me since the moment I had come into being—gone. In the emptiness that followed, I sensed it. This was not the same void I had been in before.

A moment ago, I had been in an endless abyss, locked in a battle for survival against an executioner of reality itself.

Now—

There was a planet.

Too close.

Before I could react, my singularity pulled it inward, devouring it instantly.

And it wasn't alone.

Celestial objects appeared where nothing had existed a moment ago.

Asteroids. Stars—some burning, some already dead. Entire planetary remains, shattered and drifting.

This place… had not been here before.

A moment ago, it had not existed.

Or rather—I had not existed in it.

Somehow, I had been moved.

Not teleported. Not transported.

The very space I had been in had been changed.

Reality itself had been shifted.

I had not escaped.

I had been removed.

Something had changed my spatial coordinates.

It had somehow taken me away from the System's gazing eyes.

I did not know how.

I did not know why.

And whatever had done it, I did not know.