Chapter 635: Acceleration (2) - War
Chapter 635: Acceleration (2) - War
Ash blurred across the fractured skies of the Prime Expanse, moving so fast that the unstable space around him warped and cracked in his wake.
In less than a second, he arrived at the colossal Wall of Death.
HUMMM!!!!
The barrier towered endlessly in both directions, a massive, ancient structure of condensed conceptual matter that spewed nonexistence essence.
Even now, it continued to pulse with a deep, rhythmic thrum, though faint fractures had begun to appear along its surface.
Without slowing down, Ash simply passed through it.
The moment he crossed to the other side, the atmosphere changed completely.
BOOOOOM!!!!!!
CRACCKLLEEEEEE
RUMBLEEEE!!!!!
What lay beyond the Wall was not a battlefield in any traditional sense.
It was pure, unfiltered chaos.
There were no clear frontlines, no organized formations, no strongholds, no places to recover, and no leaders giving orders.
No, everyone here was fighting with everything they had.
The entire space had devolved into a sprawling, nightmarish slaughterhouse where beings from both sides tore into each other with wild, unrestrained violence.
The forces of Nonexistence were particularly grotesque.
They were not simply monsters or soldiers.
They were horrors — and unlike those from the Null Firmament long ago....
These were entities that seemed to mock the very idea of form and reason.
Some were colossal, shifting masses of writhing black flesh covered in thousands of blinking, lidless eyes that wept dark ichor.
Others resembled twisted, multi-jointed abominations with too many limbs, their bodies constantly breaking and reforming in unnatural ways.
There were beings that looked like living voids — pitch-black silhouettes that absorbed light and sound, their true shapes hidden behind layers of impossible geometry.
And.... these creatures did not fight with strategy.
They simply devoured.
KRRRAAAKKK!!!!!
A towering warden from existence, his body made of condensed golden essence, was suddenly seized by a horror with dozens of jointed, insect-like limbs.
"ARGHHHHH!!!!"
The warrior let out a distorted roar as the creature’s maw unhinged far too wide, revealing rows of spiraling teeth.
With a sickening sound, the horror bit down, its jaws crunching through conceptual armor and flesh alike.
The warden’s form flickered violently before being dragged into the creature’s gullet, his existence unraveling mid-scream.
Not far away, a group of Sentinels clashed against a swarm of smaller horrors — eyeless, worm-like abominations that slithered through the void on countless tendrils.
[A/N: Just so you know, the battlefield is nothing but a void—a pitch-black emptiness with only a single white sun.]
SHKKKK!
One of the horrors lunged forward and impaled a Sentinel through the chest with a barbed tendril.
The Sentinel’s body convulsed as the tendril began to unravel his existence from the inside out, golden light leaking from his wounds like blood.
Before he could even react, two more horrors latched onto him, their circular maws latching onto his limbs and tearing with wet, tearing sounds.
SKREEEEE—!
A high-pitched, unnatural shriek tore through the battlefield as a massive Outer God like creature — a being whose body was a swirling storm of darkness and screaming faces — opened its maw wide.
A squad of golden-armored wardens was pulled into the void-like abyss, their forms disintegrating into nothing the moment they crossed its jaws.
Their final screams echoed briefly before being swallowed whole.
And as Ash took this all in, the explosions of raw power continued to ripple across the battlefield in chaotic bursts.
BOOOOM!!!!!
BOOOOM!!!!
BOOOOM!!!!!!
Some were blinding and radiant, born from the conceptual might of Existence. Others were dark and devouring, born from the horrors of Nonexistence.
The two sides clashed without pause, without mercy, and without any sign of retreat.
And yet, despite the overwhelming chaos, there was one strange, unspoken rule that governed the battlefield: there was no friendly fire.
Even though there was technically one leading or giving orders—since even those meant to lead were locked in life-or-death battles—these beings somehow maintained enough order to avoid killing their own allies.
Ash smiled faintly as he watched the chaos unfold before him.
"I can feel those triplets causing trouble even from here," he said before moving on.
With an easy shift in posture, he kept flying forward, unfazed by the explosions, screams, and clashing powers erupting all around.
Beams of strange, conceptual essence, waves of all-consuming darkness, and the warped cries of fading ideas ripped through the nearby void, yet somehow none of it so much as brushed against him.
He drifted across the battlefield like a phantom, slipping past the chaos unnoticed by either side he made his way through the shattered expanse.
After a while, the furious clash around him began to ease, the crowded violence giving way to sparser pockets of conflict.
The twisted shapes of Nonexistence horrors appeared more often, while the bright and vibrant warriors of Existence became rarer and farther apart.
The air shifted—growing colder, heavier, and thick with an oppressive emptiness.
Behind him, the noise of chaotic explosions and clashes slowly faded into the distance.
Ash had crossed into Nonexistence itself.
But, he was not here for any of the child’s play, so he simply kept flying at a speed that would impossible to follow with the eye.
Though he could have just teleported to his destination, it had been awhile since he saw new things personally.
The landscape grew increasingly alien the deeper he went.
The ground beneath him had long since disappeared, replaced by an endless, shifting abyss.
Massive, incomprehensible structures floated in the distance — some resembling broken cathedrals made of screaming stone, others looking like impossible geometric shapes that twisted the mind just by existing.
Horrors of all shapes and sizes drifted through the darkness.
Eventually, even the horrors became scarce.
Ash had gone beyond the Prime Expanse.
He had entered the Primordial Expanse itself.
And it was the same as it always was ....
The space was divided into three distinct regions: an endless expanse of pure white on one side, an endless expanse of absolute black on the other, and a thin, perfectly neutral bubble of emptiness in between — the First Absence.
Ash flew directly toward the black side.
As he crossed into the Father’s domain, the pressure around him became suffocating.
It wasn’t just power — it was every notion of absence made manifest. The deeper he went, the more "existence" itself felt like it was being gently unraveled around him.
Eventually, he stopped.
Floating before him, within the endless black, was a tall, elegant silhouette.
The Father stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his form so dark it seemed to swallow the very space around him.
Before him stretched the nascent state of the Primordial Ocean of Nonexistence.
His presence was immense, ancient, and utterly devoid of warmth.
Ash hovered a short distance away, unfazed by the crushing pressure, regarding the primordial being with a lazy, almost playful smile.
"Well," he said, his tone light and teasing, "you haven’t changed a bit."
EBE