The Clone's POV — At Full Power
The journey took a week. I flew toward the Core at an unhurried pace, giving the original time. Even so, it was a very long trip.
But at the end of it, a white, alien planet materialized before me. Enormous, truly enormous. Some stars considered large were at minimum several thousand times smaller than the colossus floating before me.
White stone covered the planet, at times surging into towering peaks and sheer cliff faces. Nestled among these heights sprawled a vast palace built from that same white material, primarily stone. It resembled a wide-reaching castle, but with pagoda-style roofs between each floor, appearing to be made of wood — white wood, naturally. Everything here was white. Only the shades differed.
Those Otsutsuki and their love of white. Their aesthetic was practically the same everywhere. But here, another obsession was on full display: size. A structure measuring several billion kilometers tall spoke for itself. In deeper layers of reality, such things were possible.
I made no effort to conceal myself or my power. There was no doubt the local Progenitor had already sensed me. When she received my energetic knock-knock and my inquiry as to whether she'd be amenable to a brief conversation, she agreed.
At that, I watched the massive gates beneath the lowest pagoda of the castle swing open, and I stepped inside.
My body had been scaled to a size appropriate for the local resident's sense of proportion. At sixty million kilometers tall, I could walk through the building as comfortably as an ordinary person strolling through an ordinary, if pompous, structure.
In preparation for the meeting, I had dressed with some style: a black coat, a dark tunic threaded with shifting luminous patterns, wide trousers, and tall boots.
The Eyes of God blazed to life in my gaze.
The corridor, long and hung with tapestries, passed quickly. In this layer of reality, it was possible to move many times faster than light, but I calibrated my pace to cover the distance in about a minute.
Ahead, another set of gates appeared. These, too, opened on their own. This time, they revealed a throne room.
Long. Lined with hundreds of immense columns. A wide carpet, white, as one would expect, ran the length of the floor toward an enormous throne on a raised dais, ascending several steps. Undeniably magnificent. All of it white.
On the throne, my eyes found an enormous shadow. No, something darker than shadow. Something that didn't reflect light at all. A silhouette shaped like a human woman, judging by the absolutely black locks that fell below the level of the throne and the proportions of the figure overall. But on her head rose graceful horns. She was seated in a languid pose, one arm resting on the armrest, her head propped against her fist.
She was so vast that a medium-sized star could have fit in her palm.
The only thing that broke through that all-consuming darkness were her eyes. No irises. No pupils. Only whites as black as the abyss itself, from whose centers radiated a blinding, blue-white luminescence, like the light of an exploding supernova. Those two blue stars were each the size of a sun.
Silence hung between us.
"Greetings, Progenitor of the Otsutsuki," I began, relaxed, projecting my thoughts through waves of chakra and shaping them with my mouth as though they were sound waves. "I'll be honest, I expected you might look something like your descendants. But your appearance is rather distinctive." And with that, I introduced myself.
"..."
She didn't answer.
My conversational strategy, for the record, was to act as though I hadn't done much research on her at all. Too much obvious knowledge might escalate things, and that was the last thing I needed.
Waiting a few more seconds, I continued with a reasonably polite conversational preamble, letting my gaze drift around the chamber.
"You know, I used to think I had a thing for white. But compared to you, apparently not. I'm also a fan of going big... though again, next to you, mine barely registers. Eat a lot of Grow Your Biggest as a kid?"
"..."
Still nothing.
Given her complete indifference, it seemed time to drop the small talk.
"Anyway, here's why I came. I recently became a god myself, and I wanted to ask you something. Is there, by any chance, a sealed Thing around here that might, totally accidentally, destroy our universe? If so, I'm happy to lend a hand."
Only once those words were finished did Daidare finally deign to move.
She lifted her head from her hand and straightened smoothly, eyes never leaving me.
Her mouth, invisible by reflected light but clearly distinguishable to my other spectra of perception, finally moved.
A moment passed, and the entire Substrate trembled, carrying the resonance of her deep, chest-born voice:
"...My... Radiant... Divinity... Brother," Daidare began, measured at first, then building to a normal tempo. "You... who strayed from the Lane of Eternity... You, bearing the omen of the Bent Threshold..."
She raised one hand, as though her gesture traced the arc of a comet crossing the universe.
"..." This time I stayed quiet, wanting to hear her out.
"To me... who has dwelt in the womb of the Substrate since the age when stone knew no form... you have come, with purpose, to ask: 'Is there a hidden Creature, one that carries ruin to all that Is?'" Her speech was not exactly clear, but I caught most of the meaning.
"..." I gave a nod, sending a corresponding energetic pulse. We seemed to have understood each other correctly.
She fell silent. And with her, everything around us sank into stillness.
A moment later, her eyes, flaring with bursts of energy, narrowed slightly.
Slowly, she rose from the throne and, without touching the floor, began descending from the dais.
Soon she stood before me. Our eyes were level.
Daidare was stronger than me, but that kind of gesture wasn't going to make me flinch.
"I know... Your nature is uncorrupted by Shadow, yet you are dust in the dark, unknown as Wind in the Bone Reaches. I would know the forge that shaped you, for your Strength holds a thread from Death by the lock. But where power is forged, so too does fruit ripen. And that fruit ripens now, in the World of the Great Tree... in the Grove of the Lightless."
So she was calling me powerful and wanted to know where something like me had come from. The part that followed was something like: where strength exists, so does danger. And the end seemed to be an invitation to go look at a tree whose fruit was nearly ready. That very last part, though, I didn't quite follow.
She stepped to the side with a gesture, and in the middle distance, between the columns, an opening formed, a portal into another world. Through it, tangled, colossal roots were visible, and at their apex, a glowing fruit the size of the moon. Tiny by our scale, but what mattered was that my clones were already there and had gathered considerable intelligence, enough that I could draw some conclusions.
"Come with me, Wanderer. Look upon what Nature has woven without the hand of a Great Midwife. Perhaps this is what you seek: the embryo of a God... or the seal of the abyss. But if we approach it with discernment, the answer may reveal itself without sacrifice."
She stepped toward the portal, but seeing that I wasn't following, she stopped and turned.
She looked at me. Waiting.
"...You know what? How about you just tell me about it here. I am the one offering help, after all."
I had no desire to go through that portal. That was exactly where I had positioned my contingency, in case things went sideways.
The fruit on the other side was energetically weaker than me, but not by an enormous margin, roughly the gap between myself and the Otsutsuki Progenitor, give or take. And this was the strongest of the four fruits. Which lit up a very clear realization in my mind: there was a ninety-nine percent chance I had absolutely no business going in there.
These were her trees. And it was extremely, extremely plausible, given the properties of the fruits' energy emissions, that she could draw on that energy even now. Which meant stepping through that portal would put me in a very, very bad position.
She was not pleased.
"I am not your enemy, Wanderer. If I wished your death, you would know it. I call you to Sight, not to a Cell." She tilted her head, inviting me again. "This is a moment the Chronicle will not repeat. If you enter, the secret will bare itself. Not to me. To you."
"I think I'll pass, actually. Thank you for the hospitality—"
I didn't get to finish.
A wave of energy rolled off Daidare, and I slipped out via teleport. The Goddess herself lunged toward the portal. But when she had already covered a significant distance toward her wormhole, she stopped dead, because the picture beyond the threshold had just ignited.
"Surprise," I smirked.
Daidare froze halfway to the portal. Those star-like eyes of the goddess widened in disbelief as we both watched one of her primary assets, something she had cultivated for millions of years, dissolve into nothing.
The planet beyond the portal was tearing itself apart from the inside in a blinding flash. The explosion was of such magnitude that spacetime itself could not hold. The world collapsed, forming a new, young black hole, with most of the released energy going into shaping its Axis.
What a shame, destroying an energy source like that, crossed my mind. But who knows what else this Goddess packed into that Fruit, or whether I'd even be able to sort through it. Destroying it was the rational call — cut off her support immediately.
And before the blast wave reached the wormhole between us, she swiftly closed it.
Without a sound, Daidare turned and opened a second portal, leading to another Tree.
Again, disappointment awaited her.
The moment the portal opened, a wave of destruction punched through it. The second clone had done its job, as had the rest.
Thrusting her hand forward, she quenched the relatively weak blast with a simple manipulation of energy.
"N-no..." Daidare whispered, her eyes beginning to glow even brighter. But instead of a destructive wave, the air trembled with her fury, raw, primordial rage, the fury of a being whose plans, laid across unimaginable spans of time, were crumbling before her eyes.
Daidare closed the portal and turned to face me.
Silence fell between us.
Her star-eyes pulsed brighter.
And I, understanding that negotiations had collapsed, waited no longer.
My Eyes of God ignited in response as they fired a merged, singular Vector of Absolute Annihilation. Spreading into a fan, it sliced horizontally in an instant. The black beam passed through Daidare and through the entire palace behind her. Walls, columns, throne, all bisected clean.
The upper half of the alien slowly slid to the floor, dissolving into nothing. The palace began to collapse.
But there was no triumph in my stance. I had a grim smile.
As I'd suspected, what stood before me was only a focal point. The real Daidare was the planet itself. And beyond that, the attack had been substantially suppressed, distributed, channeled into the planet via some ability of hers. Something like Absolute Inertia, dispersing incoming damage across the whole surface.
The lower half of her avatar-body also slid to the floor, spilled darkness absorbed back into the bedrock. The palace stopped collapsing. The ruins hung motionless in the air, then slowly began to sink into the surface, as though the planet had started chewing its own remains.
Then, into the oppressive silence, a voice cut through, more magnificent, more ancient than before. And this time, not from a single point, but from everywhere.
"Wanderer... You, who have shattered the fruits of My Eternity... You, who have desecrated the harvest of eons..."
A pause. The bedrock beneath my feet began to pulse like living flesh.
"A̷T̷R̷O̷P̷H̷Y̷ O̷F̷ B̷E̷I̷N̷G̷... shall devour all that you are," her words fell like a sentence, echoing inside my skull with the sound of ancient funeral bells.
The world around me seemed to breathe. With a crack, like a thousand bones snapping, the planet's surface began to split apart beneath my feet. The white stone fissured, and from beneath it came something dark, alive, pulsating. Tendril-veins, thick as rivers befitting this world, tore from the crust with wet, sucking sounds and began anchoring themselves into the fabric of space around me.
I instinctively tried to pull back, teleporting above the floor. It didn't help.
Instantly I felt it: thousands of invisible needles driving into every particle of my body, pulling. Chakra, energy, even the momentum of my own movement, all of it began draining toward the planet. Simultaneously, a thin, cutting wail, like distorted flutes, spread through space, interlaced with something far deeper, something guttural.
My head spun for a moment. The vibrations of the Substrate were disorienting, and the Aegis hadn't yet adapted to this type of assault. In a single instant, I had lost a noticeable percentage of my reserves.
"S-shit..." I hissed through my teeth.
But a moment was all I could afford. The Aegis-Carapace went into overdrive, analyzing the absorption pattern. Completely blocking it was not yet possible, but the drain slowed immediately. I pulled myself together fast.
Looking around, I noted the space was shrinking: the ruined walls, the sky, the horizon, all of it creeping inward, folding like paper. The planet-Daidare was trying to wall me in inside herself.
I had to move quickly.
I raised my head, and along the trajectory of my gaze, space immediately began to densify.
No, you eldritch Lovecraftian horror. My ability doesn't work quite like that. Smiling inwardly but keeping my face still, I snapped my arm to the side.
A Vector shot from my hand, this time thin as a thread, following the arc of my arm, punching through spatial distortion after distortion, layer by layer, boring a tunnel through the collapsing reality toward the "surface" of the dimensional planet.
In that same instant, I activated two more abilities of the Eyes of God. Phase Shift, to scatter my essence across several layers of reality, so that Daidare's Atrophy of Being, instead of hitting at full force, could only graze the drifting "projections" across the layers, sharply reducing the energy drain. And Palm of Spatial Transformation, to stabilize the metric inside the tunnel I'd drilled, preventing space from collapsing behind me. And for one singular moment, canceling the previous ability, folding myself into a thin column.
Three abilities. One fluid motion. I shot upward through the tunnel and burst onto the surface of the dimensional planet.
Here, on the surface, the Atrophy of Being operated at full power.
The white stone below pulsed like a heartbeat. With each beat, biological-seeming waves rolled across the crust, like the skin of a colossal creature contracting. And with them came wet, gurgling sounds.
From the cracks, new tendril-veins were climbing. Dozens. Hundreds. They did not attack me directly. Instead, they anchored themselves in the space around me, weaving a three-dimensional net of absorption. Each tendril was a conduit, pulling energy from everything within range through the Atrophy.
The wailing and the flutes intensified to their limit.
I grimaced: the disorientation was making it hard to focus, and the Aegis was still adapting. My reserves continued bleeding, slower than inside, but perceptibly.
A war of attrition guarantees my defeat, the thought was crystalline. This Daidare is like a massive reservoir. I need to find her soul, or...
I decided to try an unconventional approach. Through the Eye of Absolute Perception, I formed a powerful mental construct, essentially the pinnacle of genjutsu, a fundamental distortion of the information field capable of disorienting even a cosmic-scale being.
The construct dove into the bedrock, into Daidare's "body."
Nothing.
It simply dissolved into that vast, sucking thing before it reached anything resembling a mind.
Her consciousness is distributed across the entire planet. There's no single point of impact. And even if there were, the Atrophy would consume any impulse before it arrived.
I analyzed it once more and abandoned genjutsu entirely.
The Gaze of Harmony and Dissonance scanned the planet. Layer by layer, I saw the monstrous depth of energy strata, each one denser than the last. Deep down, very far, soul-cores flickered, exactly what I needed.
But the distance and thickness of the protection were such that any Vector would cut through the outer layers and exhaust itself long before reaching the target, its energy converted to fuel for Daidare.
The direct path is closed, I noted. Need a different approach.
The Gaze shifted from the depths to close range. And still, I found something: the tendril-veins were direct channels.
Using the Palm, I crafted an energy construct, a "decoy" radiating tempting, appetizing energy. Then I let the nearest tendril latch onto it.
It began drinking greedily, and received a dissonant pulse straight into its system, generated by the Gaze.
The planet shuddered.
The technique wasn't especially powerful, wasn't lethal, but its effect was visible. A wave rolled across the surface to the horizon.
The wailing and flutes cut off for a moment. And into the silence that followed came a voice, not furious so much as startled:
"Guided by Audacity... You have pricked the Flesh of Eternity. This... was not known to me from the Stones of the Beginning..."
A smirk appeared on my face:
"Pain means you're still alive! Enjoy it while you can~"
I wasn't hanging around up close for nothing. This proximity allowed for far faster analysis. And it was precisely in this moment that the Aegis-Carapace completed its full adaptation cycle to the Atrophy of Being. The energy drain stopped. Absorption was now beating against the "second skin," anchored primarily around the soul, and simply sliding off.
Daidare felt it too.
The planet's pulsing accelerated sharply. The tendril-veins began twitching like exposed nerve endings.
"...You... Refused my Hunger? This... was not known... since the First Age..."
"Yeah, yeah, I'm special and Mom's favorite! You already mentioned that!"
"Who forged you, Wanderer? For the Substrate has never birthed your kind..."
"I forged myself," I said with a short laugh.
Daidare reached a practical conclusion: the tendrils were now nothing but a liability. They were swiftly retracted, and the planet's surface went smooth and white once more.
Instead of Atrophy through the channels, she shifted to spatial suffocation. The space around me began to contract, not sharply, as it had in the throne room, but slowly and methodically. Concentric layers of distorted reality built up around me one by one, like layers of an onion. The goal was not instant death but entombment in a bubble where the Atrophy of Being would work even through the adapted Aegis, simply through time and pressure.
She's not rushing, I took stock. She knows time is on her side. Every minute means resources lost for me and gained for her. I need to move.
Even with the main tendrils retracted, the Gaze revealed that beneath the planet's surface, roots remained, subtler but still active absorption channels. Thinner than before, but still leeching energy from the fabric of space.
Simultaneously scanning for further weaknesses, I began methodically destroying the roots with the Vector as the Gaze located them. Each destroyed root weakened the absorption in its zone.
In response, Daidare began rewriting the laws of physics around me as I moved. Gravity would abruptly reverse direction, trying to snag me in sudden "wells." Inertia would flip, making forward motion a brake instead of propulsion. Light and energy behaved unpredictably, blinding portions of the Eyes of God's perceptual spectrum.
The Eye of Absolute Perception read each change in fractions of a moment, allowing me to correct course and dodge the traps. But even that was draining, requiring constant analysis and instant reactions. Several times I nearly fell into the "wells," and only reflexes sharpened by the Eye carried me clear.
This is a stalemate, I realized. I can't punch through the planet. She can't catch me. But she has all the time in the universe, and I don't.
Fortunately, the Gaze soon found another weakness.
Daidare's absorption was not uniform. There were patches of the planet's crust where energy converged more intensely, "mouths" of flow, like vents of underwater volcanoes. If I struck several simultaneously, I could trigger an internal imbalance and make the absorption choke on itself.
I moved immediately into preparation. The Palm fragmented the space around five "mouths," sealing them in airtight pockets so they couldn't bleed off pressure outward. Then the Vector drove five precise strikes into the center of each isolated "mouth."
The planet convulsed. Deep fissures split the crust, and pillars of raw energy blasted from them. Absorption in the strike zones went haywire: instead of drawing energy inward, it began consuming itself inside the sealed pockets. Five points on the planet lit up like open wounds.
For a few seconds, Daidare was silent. Absorption across the surface weakened further.
Then the planet, with a deep, visceral groan, began sealing the cracks. Stone flowed like lava, filling the wounds. Absorption restored itself, but harder and more aggressive than before.
"You... Root-Breaker... Weaver of Rupture... Know this: None in the Chronicle of Being has done this to me. But this... shall not occur again." There was unmistakable irritation in her voice, and unmistakable threat.
In answer to my little stunt, Daidare responded massively. The entire dimensional planet began generating gravitational waves of monstrous power. Not directed, but firing chaotically from every point on the surface. The space around me began shaking like jelly, making teleportation unstable and Phase Shift risky: the layers of reality started grinding against each other, and existing between them became painful. Without that ability, my overall protection dropped.
Simultaneously, space around me began collapsing, no longer concentrically, but from all directions at once. Daidare had shifted to a final sealing maneuver.
In response, I was forced to pull back from the surface.
It seemed the Otsutsuki Progenitor had grown tired of watching me walk across her skin like I owned the place, probing for the next spot to stick the knife. So she decided to end it faster.
I surged upward, pulling away from the dimensional planet, and immediately felt the absorption weaken with distance. But Daidare had no intention of letting me go. Her dimension began to grow, stretching toward me like something alive.
My mind ran through the options quickly:
Direct assault is useless. The planet is too vast, any damage is distributed and absorbed. The soul is unreachable, buried under monstrous layers. Attrition leads to defeat. I can cut the veins, but she regenerates them faster than I spend resources destroying them. The physics anomalies force me to burn energy just to survive.
My gaze slid past the planet into the black of this dimension's sky. And through it, into the ordinary cosmos beyond. And out there, very far away...
A supermassive black hole.
Daidare wasn't the biggest, baddest thing in this universe. At the center of the galaxy, there was something deeper, and more massive, than her planet.
A plan crystallized in my mind.
I need to make her follow me there. And for that...
I needed her rage. I needed Daidare to go blind with fury that left no room for thought, to want to chase me, so that she would...
I turned to face the planet and, in a completely insane move, flew straight back toward the surface.
Not to a random spot. The Gaze had long since triangulated the direction of the soul-core. And I intended to hit it.
Vector of Absolute Annihilation, at maximum output. Everything I could pour into a single strike. An anthracite-black beam, layered with the anti-reflection principles from Shibai's Shinjutsu, pierced the planet's crust.
The beam drove deeper than any previous attack. Burning through layer after layer, each one absorbing the technique more aggressively, but the anti-reflection prevented the energy from simply dispersing, and the Eye corrected the beam's properties in real time, tuning it to each new stratum.
The beam finally died out, still far from the core. But deep enough to cause real pain.
The planet screamed.
The flute-wail surged into a shriek that began cracking the surrounding space. The Substrate trembled for trillions of kilometers in every direction.
"G̷A̷E̷S̷T̷U̷S̷ D̷O̷L̷O̷R̷I̷S̷!!!" Daidare roared, not naming a technique but voicing felt suffering. Her voice had become something feral. "Y-you... DARED... to touch... the Inner Sanctum... of my Temple..."
Having spent a genuinely significant portion of my reserves on that strike, I immediately spun and bolted back into open space, punching through the once-again-closed path with the Beam.
Daidare came after me.
I tore through the cosmos, and behind me came an entire dimension. The planet-Daidare moved through ordinary space like an icebreaker through ice. Stars caught in its path were shunted from their orbits by gravitational displacement.
Absorption was weaker at range, so the Aegis held. But Daidare compensated with scale.
It appeared the Progenitor had figured out I was leading her somewhere. So she decided to settle things along the way.
Sweeping past star systems, she used her gravitational will to rip stars from their orbits and hurl them at me. Blue giants, yellow dwarfs, they came one after another, flung like stones from a sling.
The first star I met with the Vector. A thick beam erased it from reality. Fast, but expensive.
So I adjusted.
The second star, a red supergiant hundreds of times the size of a sun, was incoming. Burning another full Vector on it was wasteful.
Instead, I used the synergy of several abilities. The Eye instantly analyzed the star's structure: core temperature, the balance between gravity and thermonuclear pressure, composition, density by layer. Then the Palm went to work with minimal expenditure, along with Omnipotence. Shinjutsu. Together, they rewrote the physical laws inside the star, asymmetrically destabilizing the balance of thermonuclear combustion. Pressure in one hemisphere plummeted while the other spiked.
Detonation was immediate. An explosion comparable to a supernova slammed back toward Daidare.
I shielded behind the Aegis against the shockwave, while the colossal blast hammered the surface of the dimensional planet.
The Atrophy of Being absorbed most of the energy, but not instantly. For a few seconds the surface ignited, and the outer layers of the planet were scorched. Not critical damage, but it bought a delay. The planet was forced to process an enormous volume of incoming energy, and its spatial attacks briefly weakened.
"Interesting way to turn your own teachings against you, don't you think?" I called over my shoulder without breaking stride.
The technique was repeated. Every star Daidare ripped from its orbit and threw at me was turned into an explosion aimed right back at her.
Daidare found herself under bombardment by her own ammunition. The blasts didn't only feed her, they left scars. But the Goddess pressed on in cold fury. Three directed supernovae in succession. Five. Seven. The dimensional planet shuddered with each hit. The surface rolled in waves under the impacts, and each time it was scorched, it cracked.
"You... turn my own flame... against my body... Ingenious. But futile. Fire feeds the Flesh. It does not destroy."
And honestly, she wasn't wrong. Every absorbed supernova ultimately bolstered her reserves. But that was never the point.
Tired of having her own ammunition redirected, Daidare stopped ripping stars. Instead, she accelerated, pouring more speed into her pursuit. The dimensional planet began to move faster, bunching space before it.
For a moment, the distance between us began to close. But I accelerated too.
Daidare, having built up such a considerable mass, could certainly move it with impressive speed. But my considerably leaner build came with certain advantages in knowing how to run even faster.
Ahead, a glow was growing more unmistakable. Billions of stars, thickening toward a center. A colossal, boundless accretion disc of plasma. And in the midst of it, a gaping emptiness.
The supermassive black hole.
At its borders, I dove into the depths of the layers, drawing ever closer. Stopping short of the event horizon, I began to orbit its edge.
At this depth, the axis of the singularity was a constant, pressing hum. The supermassive black hole descended to such depths that even the Eyes of God couldn't see the bottom.
I closed my eyes and gave myself fully to the "whisper of the cosmos."
My semi-energetic body and the Supreme Chakra Core shifted into their true, energetic form. Power began concentrating inward, drawing from even the upper layers of my existence, pulling together here, so that from my form, a ripple began forming in the surrounding flow.
And I began to transmit my vibrations, in unison with the ancient, mighty song of the black hole.
Before long, the dimensional planet materialized, rising like a black pearl in a storming sea. Daidare's dimension expanded to fill the space, surrounding me on all sides except the one where the black hole gaped.
Daidare sensed I was doing something. The Substrate was changing. But she couldn't determine what, and perhaps she took my actions for the death throes of someone who had already lost.
"Wanderer..." the voice of the planet surrounded me from every direction. "Your strength fades. There is nowhere left to run. The Substrate knows: your Path leads into my Flesh. Accept this. And become part of Eternity."
My eyes remained closed. But I answered:
"Dissolve into eternity? No. I prefer eternity to dissolve into me."
The planet pulsed, and tendril-veins, hundreds of thousands, erupted from the crust and surged toward me. Simultaneously, her Atrophy of Being spiked to its limit: Daidare had decided to put an end to it.
The Aegis-Carapace, guided by a portion of my focus, shunted the first wave of absorption aside. The barrier's architecture was restructuring in real time, anticipating the pattern of the assault. The ability of the Eyes of God had studied the Atrophy of Being throughout the entire battle.
But it cost energy. And my reserves were only dwindling.
None of that mattered. My entire consciousness was in resonance.
She sings, passed through my mind. The black hole. Its rotation, its pull, all of it is one infinite note, sounding since the beginning of time.
My vibrations aligned with the vibrations of the singularity. The Substrate responded like a plucked string.
And from the event horizon, from somewhere behind me, a thread began to extend from an even deeper layer of reality.
The thinnest, murky strip, not matter, not energy, but spacetime drawn into a line, possessing the properties of a deeper event horizon.
The thread expanded. Quickly. Inexorably.
Daidare noticed it. And for the first time, truly, genuinely, she was afraid.
"WHAT... HAVE YOU DONE?!"
She tried to pull her dimension away. But before the planet could shift, a concentrated pulse of energy rolled out from me, once again in full synergy. Omnipotence, to carry the effect across the scale of an entire dimensional planet with minimal expenditure. The Palm, to lock the spatial metric around Daidare, nailing her to a point in space. And the Eye, to correct the lock in real time, countering every attempt she made to break free.
For a brief, sufficient moment, Daidare was frozen in space. Her dimension thrashed like a caught animal, but could not move.
And the thread of the event horizon, expanded to incomprehensible scale, reached the dimensional planet.
And drew it in, the way a tide swallows a shore.
The Goddess fought it. Her Absolute Inertia, that monstrous "mass" that distributed any blow, worked against her for the first time. She deliberately made herself denser, thinking it would help, but it only made the gravitational pull stronger. Her own fundamental "weight" became the anchor dragging her down.
"NO!!!" The roar of Daidare sent waves through the Substrate. "I AM ETERNITY! I AM BEFORE STONE! BEFORE LIGHT! I..."
In that moment I ripped upward, away from the expanding horizon, at maximum speed, wringing everything from Phase Shift. A chill ran through my entire being as the edge of the horizon passed at terrifyingly close range to my essence.
The thread, now a wall, snapped back toward the black of the singularity. The expanded horizon collapsed inward, taking everything caught inside it along.
The dimensional planet of Daidare, whole, with all its "depth," all its layers, all its monstrous mass, began its irreversible fall down the gravitational well.
In my perception, the planet-Daidare disintegrated before my eyes, particle by particle. Layer by layer. Stratum by stratum. Nothing escaped the walls. Not energy. Not matter. Not a sound.
However, the echo of the thread did not disappear. It began to rise along the axis, ever "higher," toward the "upper" layer of reality.
Reaching the top, the thread collapsed entirely, generating a catastrophic gravitational wave that radiated outward in every direction from the galactic center.
The accretion disc went dark in an instant, consumed. The upper layer of reality, unable to withstand such force, simply dimmed to anthracite black in the expanding radius of the gravitational passage.
The nearest star systems were immediately stripped from their orbits. Thousands of stars, under mounting pressure, began their final journey toward the supermassive black hole.
The entire galaxy trembled. The gravitational wave was of such magnitude that billions of stars were set moving toward infinite darkness, to drown there forever.
I hovered in the relative safety of the Substrate's "depth" and watched.
"...Well, that's one hell of a clusterfuck," was my concise assessment of what had just happened.
A brief silence from my end.
"Good thing it's not my galaxy."
But spending too long being amazed wasn't very prudent right now. Instead, following the dictates of paranoia, I activated the full arsenal of the Eyes of God to confirm that my adversary was defeated.
Daidare did not surface. Nowhere. Not on a single layer, not across a single spectrum. Even the whisper of the future through the cosmos confirmed it: her signature was erased. Meaning my perception at the time had not deceived me.
That black hole is too deep. Even if she'd been ten times stronger, she wouldn't have survived it. Looks like she's truly finished.
My gaze extended outward, toward the distant point where the relay clone waited.
Twenty percent left. The original would have had something to celebrate. But a bitter smile crossed my face. Even if I can't feel it. Because with Daidare's death, the cosmos, no longer accounting for her opinion, simply disclosed to me that a fragment of this Progenitor had taken root somewhere.
This is an ancient being. So it wasn't too surprising that she had found a way to cleverly leave a part of herself embedded in another existence. And given that she is the ancestor of the Otsutsuki, who possess Karma, capable of completely overwriting a host to serve its master...
The uncertainty left my face.
I looked at the black hole and dove in without hesitation. Moving toward that physical phenomenon, my body crossed into the darkness beyond the horizon for the last time.
Uzumaki Naruto's POV — The Original
The clone had killed itself. That was what the other clone witnessed.
He had been weaker than Daidare and had won through the breadth of his arsenal rather than raw power. And the absence of that overwhelming raw power had made him unable to detect the apparent infection, an unknown method of interaction with energies, one never seen before. A pity.
But I am not someone who wallows in grief for himself. Not for long, anyway. Instead, before long, I, the original, turned to business.
The plan to deal with Daidare had gone... not the worst it could have. The Goddess was dead. But there were still others who needed to die for my future to be secure.
And so only a few years passed.
Standing in the expanse of open space, I flicked my hand and knocked the last Otsutsuki "god" aside. In terms of power, he fell very, very short of his Progenitor.
My eyes turned away from the body drifting through the Substrate and swept across the universe.
That was the last thread.
I had made note of every being connected to the trees at those points. All of it, in service of killing every Otsutsuki "god" among them.
As for Daidare, looking back, as befitting an ancient deity who devours life, she had tried to lure me into her trap to absorb me. What had I even been expecting from her, something wholesome? Right. That undying faith in the best of people. That's me.
Although, at least the legends that her motivations were difficult to parse turned out to be true. Mostly because I, like, to be fair, most of her descendants, had caught barely every other word of what she actually said.
My gaze moved toward where the worlds of the ordinary Otsutsuki had once been. The ones who had never ascended.
No one remained there either.
I'm a decent person, and deep down something of a softie. But not decent enough to leave parasites within my reach when the entire purpose of their existence was to devour everything. Their Goddess had made their views on diplomacy perfectly clear. And the rest of the clan did nothing to disprove her position.
But now... now I could live in peace.
My worlds were situated well away from the original galaxy. Just in case another threat materialized there, I didn't need that.
What remained was to keep growing. To keep developing. Without neglecting, of course, the simple pleasure of actually being alive.
Until the next threat came to disturb me.
My gaze shifted, toward the bonds I shared with the Avatars.
One had arrived and had been living out his life for several years already. I couldn't know what kind of life, he was too far away for that, but I could feel that he was alive. The second... was still on his way.
"Counting on you," warmth rose in my thoughts. "Maybe one of us will make it. And make what We-Are-One can become even stronger..."
End of Book.
_____
You can support me and read up to 20 upcoming chapters ahead of release at –> patreon.com/Welydora