A moment is time given meaning by its passing and when nothing passes, meaning dissolves into nothing.
***
Far in the distant sky across the dunes' horizon, atop a towering obelisk, stood a young man who appeared to be in his early twenties.
A divine aura of golden radiance emanated from his body with overwhelming presence. His bronze skin was dusted with flecks of gold that shimmered like scattered sunlight. Dark, wavy hair fell loosely around his face, and long ornate earrings of gold and crystal swayed softly in the wind.
But the most enchanting part is the golden radiance of Sun tattoo on his forehead.
"That should be the death of Zayyn Illya Kovalenko…"
Everything should now proceed according to the future he had foreseen, converging into a single point.
"All according to plan... Now that the first domino has dropped, let us wait for it to fall into the inevitability already set in motion," the man muttered in cryptic words, his indifferent eyes fixed on the distance.
Aten.
He who sees everything, anything, everywhen, all at once.
The golden sun upon his forehead glowed intensely as he watched the inevitable future unfold in his vision. The death of Zayyn Illya Kovalenko that he had brought about, the arrival of the girl of time, and the eventually challenge against him...
Until-
Aten closed his eyes as his body enveloped by the golden radiance that would teleport him, as it always had, as it always would. As he now arrived at the moment he had already seen, stepping into an outcome long since known.
Suddenly-
SHUUUUUUUUNG
PUFF
A slash of black instantly tore across his body from the horizon. He did not realize it at first, something unthinkable for those who knew of his power. And as he slowly opened his eyes, within nanoseconds he saw that half of his body had simply been unmade in an instant, vanished without a trace, along with the air around it, the dust it touched, and the wind that had been fluttering against his skin.
It turned into nothing.
As if it had never existed in the first place.
And at that moment, for the first time in his existence, something moved beyond his sight.
A fracture in the inevitable.
A future he had neither seen nor experienced.
A sight that should not exist.
As no thing could perceive nonexistence.
"Hu-"
A strange feeling filled his heart for the first time. As it surged within him, he realized that the black flash would unmake his entire existence in an instant.
But a fraction of a second before that could happen, a flash of blinding radiance suddenly illuminated the empty air a few meters to his side. Almost as fast as light, it formed into a body. And simultaneously, the golden sun on his forehead suddenly disappeared.
As-
FWUOOOM
Immediately after that, Aten ceased to be as he turned into nothingness, simply vanishing from existence.
But as the light took shape, a new body formed.
A new Aten emerged, and the golden sun slowly radiated once more from his forehead.
The past, present, and future flooded his mind once more.
But this time, they had changed.
Yet one thing remained the same. He still did not see Zayyn Illya Kovalenko there.
At that converging point.
Aten then opened his eyes again.
His gaze was filled with something foreign, something new.
Surprise.
A smile appeared on his face, as if something he had long yearned for had finally been granted in the most unexpected way. But then his expression shifted.
Uncertainty.
Anger.
Fear.
He needed to kill Zayyn Illya Kovalenko.
"The future… has changed. No… no, no, no, no… it cannot be. Impossible. It should not be. I should not be dying now. I cannot die, Not until…"
It was as if he reacted to something he had never felt before.
"ARGHHHHHHH!"
Aten screamed.
And then, an enormous golden radiance burst forth like a tsunami surging upward into the sky, instantly turning it gold. The aura was so vast that it seemed like an extension of the obelisk itself, formed from pure Divine Sun.
A low, searing hum filled the air as it superheated everything around it.
And slowly, the blue desert sky of Heliopolis was painted in a glimmering divine radiance, the brightest among the Egyptian gods.
The One True God.
But then, as he arrived at the inevitable future once again, Aten's body was engulfed in Divine Radiance. In an instant, he vanished, leaving the sky of Heliopolis bathed in gold in his wake. And almost immediately-
SHUUUUUNG
Another black slash appeared, cutting into the towering Divine Sun like a thin crack of void within its vast existence. And then, just as suddenly-
SHWO-
A sharp, sizzling ripple echoed as its very presence, which had been superheating the air and the space it occupied, abruptly vanished.
As the towering obelisk of the Divine Sun was erased in an instant, reduced to nothing.
And all that remained was silence in the air and the golden sky of Heliopolis.
***
In the distance, atop the crimson dragon, Jay let out an exhausted breath after unleashing the second slash of Absolute Nonexistence toward Aten.
Sensing the man's divine imprint vanish from his Avesta, Jay lowered his sword and straightened his posture as he just staring into the distant dunes' horizon.
'Is he running away?' Jay thought.
But then his mind returned to the strange occurrence earlier.
'My first attack should have hit him. How is he…' He had sent the second slash because that same divine imprint had suddenly reappeared after he had just felt Aten's existence disappear for a moment.
A confusion filled his mind.
'Does it have something to do with him being one and the same with this realm?' Jay wondered as he stared at the golden sky of Heliopolis. A beautiful shimmering sky filled with pure Divine Aura.
"Zayyn-kun! Are you alright!?"
Freya's voice called out from behind him, followed by Rossweisse as they rushed over to check on his condition. Meanwhile, Bastet remained silent, at a loss for words as she stared at the horizon where Jay had struck with his attack.
"No, I'm fine…" Jay said, gesturing lightly with his left hand. He only felt a bit spiritually exhausted after using the pure form of Absolute Nonexistence twice in a row.
Freya and Rossweisse stopped behind him as both of them stared at the sword in his hand as the black energy enveloping its blade slowly dissipated.
'What is that black thing? And why did my very being scream at me to run from it?' Freya thought, a bead of sweat forming on her forehead.
Meanwhile, Jay's eyes never left the distant obelisk. He had thought that attack would kill Aten instantly, but it was as if Aten's existence had been transferred somewhere else before the slash of Absolute Nonexistence could completely unmake it. The speed at which he did it only made it more troublesome.
'I should have sent a bigger slash, or closed the distance and engulfed him instantly with Absolute Nonexistence to prevent him from doing something like that,' Jay thought.
But something caught his attention.
A trembling voice suddenly broke the silence, drawing Jay, Freya, and Rossweisse's attention.
"Your attack… it hit him," Bastet said, her voice shaking. Her shimmering blue eyes stared at Jay, filled with disbelief and fear.
Jay gave her a brief glance.
"Yeah... Though he somehow survived it," he said casually.
Bastet was at a loss for words, her body trembling slightly.
"Do you… do you even understand what you just did?"
"Hm?"
"You hit him. No… you almost killed him with that attack! That has never happened. No one has ever managed to land even a single hit on him!" Bastet's voice rose, unsteady as she then continued.
"How… how did you do that?"
Jay just glanced at her for a moment.
"Right…" Jay muttered.
He had thought about it before coming here, and it seemed the thing he had expected had just been proven true. He had not come to face an omniscient god out of recklessness. This was a calculated risk to test his theory.
The theory being...
'Aten cannot perceive nonexistence. Not in the past, the present, or even the future. Because it is nonexistence, hence it should not exist in anything…' Jay thought.
Then another question surfaced.
'But when? Was it when I engulfed myself in the black flame to block the second attack?' Jay thought.
'Was that the moment he believed I was already dead?'
Hearing no response from the young human in front of her, Bastet placed her slender hand on her silver hair and ruffled it slightly.
'I… I need to report this to Father, he…' Bastet's blue eyes carried a flicker of hope as she looked at Jay.
'He might be the key to defeating Aten… the only key.'
Then, suddenly, Jay felt a shift in the sky.
He glanced upward and his eyes widened slightly before narrowing again.
"Ah… so he's just hiding to attack from a distance," he muttered.
There, high above, the sky of Heliopolis manifested in a golden hue, shimmered by a pure Divine Sun aura. Hundreds of thousands of gigantic divine serpents appeared across the heavens. They looked small from this distance, but Jay knew each of them was at least dozens of meters long up close. Some appeared no larger than distant stars scattered across the sky. Every single one of them began converging toward their position.
"By the Norns…" Rossweisse was at a loss for words as she stared at the sky with empty eyes, her legs slowly giving way before she collapsed onto the hard obsidian scales of Draghignazzo.
"This amount of divine aura… how is it possible for a single deity to hold this much energy?" Freya said.
"It's not possible…" Jay said as his Avesta ignited.
However, his focus was not on the horde of divine serpents, with each of them carrying a life within their bodies, but instead on the divine barrier field above the sky, the fake sky that formed this realm of Heliopolis. It was the same sky he had tried to burn with black flames to escape, only to discover that it was composed of layers and layers of the same divine barrier field beneath it.
'So that is where he draws his energy from. The layered barrier field that constructs this realm... Which means, the more he uses his power, the more those layers thin themselves out because as Ra said, he and Heliopolis are one and the same.' Jay thought.
Though it all made sense now. There was no God of Infinity in the supernatural world yet, as Solomon had said. Even Aten, who was nearly all-powerful in this realm, and whose existence was intertwined with the realm itself, still had a limit. It was just that the amount of divine aura stored in this realm was absurd, because this was the realm of gods, constructed since the primordial age by the primordial gods.
It was like using Olympus as a source of divine aura, or Asgard of the Norse, or Tír na nÓg of the Irish, or even Mount Meru of the Hindus. None of them were infinite, but to quantify the amount of divine aura those divine realms contained was an almost impossible task.
Meanwhile, Bastet stood frozen in place, her body shaking, before she suddenly screamed.
Meanwhile, Bastet stood there, her body shaking as she screamed.
"We need to ru-"
But before she could finish, a massive sphere of pure divine aura appeared in the sky, resembling the sun itself.
Jay sensed the incoming attack and prepared to engulf them all in black flames to block the incoming attack. However, the sphere suddenly compressed into a small, concentrated orb containing an absurd amount of divine aura.
Jay raised his eyebrows in confusion.
And then-
SHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNG
A deafening sound echoed across the dunes as a concentrated Divine Sun-Ray Burst pierced through the air at the speed of light, aimed directly at Jay, intended to instantly evaporate his soul and body right then and there.
But with a flick of his wrist-
FWUOOOM
A black flame burst through the ray burst and instantly turned the pure divine aura into drifting ash, completely nullifying its attack potency that could killed a god in an instant.
Jay narrowed his eyes as a thought formed in his mind.
'That's bizarre… He didn't even try to kill the others. He is only trying to kill me.'
He had already grown suspicious of why Aten had never aimed at Freya, Rossweisse, Bastet, Sekhmet, or even Draghignazzo since the beginning. But now it was clear.
'What is your intention, Aten?' Jay thought.
Seeing what had just happened, Bastet froze in place.
She could not even react to the attack just now, and suddenly it had been nullified instantly.
As the horde of divine serpents launched toward them from the sky, Jay slowly stepped forward.
"Zayyn-kun, where do you want to go? Are you going to fight that many divine beasts alone?" Freya said from behind.
Jay stopped.
"If you haven't realized already, it seems Aten is only targeting me, so I doubt his attacks will stop even if I run away from here," Jay said.
"But still…"
Jay ignored Freya as he looked at the Goddess of Protection once again.
"Bastet," Jay said.
Bastet, still staring emptily at the young human, snapped back to awareness. With shaky voice she straightened her posture.
"Uh… yeah?"
"Go find Aten again, and inform me immediately if you locate him," Jay said.
Bastet froze for a moment, as if she did not know how to respond to the request, but then quickly nodded. She closed her eyes again as a blue light seeped through them, beginning her search.
Then, Jay moved his body as he left the two Norse women and the Egyptian goddess behind.
Freya gritted her teeth as she watched Jay step forward.
Jay then jumped and descended gracefully from atop Draghignazzo's head and landed on the sandy dunes. Avesta ignited as he stared at the hundreds of thousands of divine beasts created by Aten, filling the expanse with overwhelming divine aura and schorching heat.
He began to walk.
An obsidian scythe emanating a devious, demonic energy appeared in his left hand, materializing from thin air of his pocket dimension as he dragged it across the sand. Meanwhile, Habakiri in his right hand was enveloped in a shallow black flame to conserve his energy.
'This might become the most exhausting fight I have ever experienced,' Jay thought.
He needed to conserve as much energy as possible while remaining as efficient as possible. Fighting hundreds of thousands of divine beasts, each at least around Ultimate-class based purely on divine aura alone, would require a completely different approach.
But-
Jay looked up at the sky.
"Using this amount of divine aura will also cost Aten gravely... He won't use all of it unless he wants to risk this entire realm collapsing…"
Then Jay whispered a command into the air.
"The Time of Preservation has come. He who rules all…
Heed my call,
-Ars Theurgia."
And suddenly, on Jay's back, a myriad-colored hexagram suddenly manifested, its aura of the same color enveloping his entire body.
And a moment later-
You just called me to fight a fucking god of war, and now you're calling me again. This is not what was written in the con- What the fuck? What situation did you get yourself into? This amount of divine aura… Theurgia's voice rang inside his mind.
Shut up, T. I need your help. Jay replied as he kept walking forward.
Tsk… yeah, of course.
Then, an absurd amount of myriad-colored nature energy erupted from his body. He could not possibly use his own energy against numbers like these, so just as he had done against Ares and Sekhmet, he called upon the King of Nature Spirits.
As Avesta ignited in response to the approaching horde of divine beasts, Jay raised the Heaven-severing sword towards the horizon.
"Let's wipe them out, T."
YEAH!