"This is impossible," Convergence said.
His voice carried sothing real beneath the amusent. A sliver of disbelief he had not managed to smooth over in ti.
"How does soone escape an Abyssal Being’s inevitability? How are you rembered?"
Severance said nothing.
He remained suspended in the sky, scythe in hand, staring upward at the darkening heavens as the second eclipse ford over the Big World.
And for one brief instant—
His silence looked familiar.
As though the sight above him belonged to an old mory he had never wanted to see again.
Then Moonfall Judgnt fell.
The beam descended from the moon with rciless precision like a sentence already decided, now rely arriving to be read aloud.
It ca for both of them.
That alone confird everything Lucien needed to know.
They had rembered him.
Soone had torn him back out of absence hard enough to wake a second eclipse.
Lucien smiled.
Below the descending beam, the battlefield changed all at once.
Convergence and Severance split apart in opposite directions at terrifying speed, each one abandoning the shared kill-space the instant Moonfall Judgnt locked on.
But the beam did not hesitate.
It chose.
And it chose Severance.
Lucien’s eyes sharpened.
Of course it did.
Between the two, Severance was the cleaner answer for annihilation.
The beam swerved after him with a cold, inhuman certainty.
Severance moved.
He dodged with perfect economy, cutting distance, cutting angle, cutting the path between where he was and where he intended to be. He even swung his scythe once and released a wave of Severance upward toward the descending Moonfall.
The result stunned even Lucien.
The wave vanished.
It was swallowed.
Moonfall Judgnt devoured the Severance wave and continued descending as though the attempted resistance had been little more than a small stone thrown into an ocean.
The Eclipse Array was more frightening than even Lucien had fully appreciated.
The Devourer had failed against it. Now even Severance’s direct answer could not halt it.
And that was exactly when the Luciens moved.
Hundreds of past selves surged forward as one.
Not toward where Severance was.
Toward where he would be.
Each Lucien entered a coordinated formation with the ease of soone following habits carved across many lives of struggle.
Dragon Beast Mode turned them into a rushing species of war all their own.
Their combined force shook the air.
They split into layered wedges and moving crescents, a living interception geotry designed to make dodging Moonfall Judgnt harder and harder until the beam itself beca the battlefield’s largest blade.
Convergence acted at once.
His hand moved, and the world tried to obey.
He created convergence points in the advancing swarm, forcing paths to cross, timing to collapse, and bodies to agree on the sa fatal coordinates so they would collide and lose all forward pressure.
He issued Edicts to the battlefield, twisted wind, altered angles, misdirected the moon-beam’s apparent lock, and tried to shift portions of the Lucien formation into positions where Moonfall Judgnt itself might burn through them instead.
Lucien answered imdiately.
He activated another drop.
Covenant of Unbroken Stampede — Enforces a unified advance where all aligned forces move as one, allowing montum to compound and rendering individual disruption incapable of halting the whole.
The effect spread through the temporal formation like a vow.
At once, the Luciens ceased being many in the ordinary sense.
They beca one advance. One force. One charge. One accumulating will.
Convergence’s convergence points still ford but they no longer stopped the movent.
Individual Luciens were disrupted. Paths bent. So collided. So were destroyed. It did not matter.
The whole kept advancing.
And because they were perfectly aligned under the Covenant, the montum of the formation compounded with every step. The more Convergence interfered, the more that interference fed back into the total mass of forward inevitability they were building for themselves.
Even his attempts to break them began failing.
Severance noticed too.
Now he had to dodge Moonfall Judgnt and fend off a stampeding army of his enemy’s own history.
He attacked.
His scythe flashed and whole lines of past Luciens were erased at once, cut from movent, posture, and continuation in single horrifying sweeps.
But the remaining Luciens adapted instantly through mory and mutual self-knowledge.
Under the eclipse, they switched into Eclipse attribute magic.
One Lucien raised both hands and cast Black Horizon Inversion, a spell that turned a severing wave into an eclipse-dark intake, swallowing the attack’s force into a field of compressed night.
Another answered with Whitefall Reprisal, releasing the gathered destruction back as radiant lances that split and descended on Severance from above and below.
Others joined in.
Umbral Tide. Pale Zenith Burst. Moonshadow Lattice. Eclipse Pulse: Twin Descent.
Black absorbed. White released.
Under the eclipse, those spells beca unnaturally potent. Severance’s attacks were eaten, inverted, and thrown back at him as pale celestial violence shaped by hundreds of coordinated selves.
For the first ti—
Severance stuttered in rhythm.
...
anwhile, Convergence could no longer devote himself fully to helping.
Because Lucien was already on him.
His dark form in Abyss Mode did not move like a body anymore.
It appeared.
It behaved as if distance itself had beco embarrassed to keep pretending it mattered.
Lucien erged beside Convergence in a sar of dark non-arrival and struck.
Nihility surged from his arm like a wound in the world.
Convergence punched him in the head.
Lucien did not dodge.
The fist entered the dark outline of his face—
and stopped.
There was no impact.
Instead, Convergence felt his hand sink into formless erasure. The mont contact held too long, Nihility began eating not the flesh of the hand, but the logic that allowed the hand to continue being confidently itself.
Convergence vanished from there instantly and reappeared on the ground below, having pulled forward the point in ti where he was already standing sowhere safer.
He shook his hand once, violently, stripping lingering Nihility from it with visible irritation.
"So that’s what the Abyssal being left you," he said.
His expression had changed again.
"Strong. Extrely inconvenient. Still not enough."
Lucien’s dark face held no readable emotion.
"Let’s see."
Then they clashed.
This phase of the battle was unlike anything before it.
Convergence no longer lingered in lee. He struck, pulled, redirected, and withdrew. His attacks beca more conceptual now that Abyss Mode had forced him to stop treating Lucien like a mostly physical opponent.
He punched at "presence." He kicked at "arrival." He twisted the battlefield so that Lucien’s next position beca the worst place he could stand.
Lucien answered in kind.
In Abyss Mode, he could erase distance himself. Convergence pulled lines together; Lucien deleted the distance between two incompatible points and stepped through the wound.
Convergence completed conclusions. Lucien removed the aning that made those conclusions stable.
The fight turned terrible.
No ordinary observer could have followed it.
They vanished and reappeared across the battlefield faster than sight had the right to na. Their clashes produced no neat explosions, only local wrongness.
Empty dents in space, erased trajectories, broken premises, and brief monts where the world seed to forget which event was supposed to happen first.
Lucien could match him in this form.
For a while.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that Convergence adapted frighteningly fast.
His punches now ca packed with conceptual consequence. If they touched Lucien deeply enough, they would force his current state to agree with damage before Nihility could erase the process cleanly.
Lucien was hurting him too.
Every ti Convergence touched him, the hand that struck him paid a price. Dark radiance crawled up the skin, devouring certainty, making the shell rebel against contact. Convergence often needed half a second to shake the lingering Nihility off.
And in a battle at that speed, half a second was an opening.
Lucien exploited every one of them.
He carved black scars into the shell. Forced misarrivals. Drove Convergence through places where he had already erased local agreent and turned even the Primordial’s footing dangerous.
They hurt each other.
They did not stop.
But as that happened, more and more Luciens were falling elsewhere.
Severance was too strong.
The Covenant of Unbroken Stampede made the formation unstoppable as a whole, but it did not make the individuals durable.
A single clean Severance strike still erased each past Lucien almost instantly. One after another they died...
Yet each death returned its divine energy to the ground, where it seeped downward in invisible lines, joining sothing Lucien had begun preparing long before the battlefield noticed it.
He did not worry.
That part was still according to plan.
Severance’s hostility only rose as the swarm and Moonfall Judgnt continued to box him into tighter and tighter spaces. He was killing Luciens in growing numbers now, but the longer the clash lasted, the more unstoppable their total stampede beca, and the more the battlefield beneath all of them filled with hidden geotry.
Then Lucien noticed the problem.
Moonfall Judgnt had lasted too long.
Longer than it should have.
He knew what it cost to activate the Eclipse Array even once. He knew the second use had to be worse. He knew, with a tightening ache he did not want to na, that the people sustaining it were paying for every extra second with sothing real.
And his own Abyss Mode was fading too.
The dark radiance around him had never been infinite. It had only made pain look irrelevant. It had never erased the fact that he was already exhausted before he entered it.
Now the fuel was running out.
As he and Convergence exchanged dozens of clashes in a single second, Lucien felt the first thinning at the edges of the black form.
The beam from the eclipse began receding until it disappeared completely. It lasted for exactly 10 seconds.
More Luciens were being cut down. Their returning divine energy sank into the earth.
Convergence noticed the weakening imdiately.
"So," he said between clashes, "you’re running out of fuel."
Lucien’s eyes hardened.
One more second.
That was all he needed.
They exchanged another blur of impacts. Convergence struck. Lucien erased half the damage. Convergence redirected. Lucien shortened distance. Convergence stepped into the future version of safer footing. Lucien carved away the confidence of that footing and forced him to retreat.
Then the dark radiance finally gave out.
Abyss Mode faded.
Lucien returned to human form in midair.
At once, the pain returned with full ownership.
His breath turned ragged. His heart raced too hard. His limbs felt heavy. His vision blurred at the edges.
Convergence saw everything.
He pulled back one fist.
Lucien looked straight at him.
"Punch in the chest if you dare," he said with a smile.
Convergence raised a brow.
"I didn’t know you had that kind of fetish."
But he agreed.
The punch landed squarely into the Beloved Bastion.
The armor held.
The impact did not.
Once again, Convergence forced the destruction past the outer refusal and into Lucien’s body. Lucien felt the inside of himself collapse around the strike as he was thrown toward the ground.
This ti he did not get up.
He lay there, unable to stand, his insides burning with pain, his body too weak now to pretend otherwise.
Convergence did not rush him.
That was telling.
Instead, he turned and began helping Severance reduce the remaining Luciens.
Hundreds had already beco fifty. Fifty beca thirty. Then fewer.
Every fallen temporal self dissolved back into divine energy and sank into the earth.
Lucien saw it.
And smiled.
Then he laughed.
A huge, broken, exhausted laugh that sounded almost mad.
Convergence turned first.
Severance also looked back between evasions.
Another Lucien fell beside the original and dissolved into light.
The final line completed.
At last—
The formation was done.
Lucien’s fingers dug into the dirt.
And then the battlefield answered.
A massive formation lit beneath him.
It had been there in pieces all along, hidden beneath the seeped divine energy of the fallen Luciens and built through the exact routes, timings, and deaths he had forced the battle to produce.
Lucien fed his own essence into it.
He had never used Essence desperately. Never so cornered. Never with the honest desire that if he had to die here, then one of them was coming down with him.
The array ca alive.
A structure modified through Lucien’s ingenuity and Seran’s warped strategic mind.
The stolen Gargoyle logic. The refined execution geotry. The preserved heart of an old monster answer.
It awakened under him.
The Execution Circle lit the ground.
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