To the mortal eye, the clash on Tartarus-4 would not have been a battle. It would not have even been a blur. It would have been a single, instantaneous flash of blinding platinum light, followed immediately by the apocalyptic sound of the atmosphere tearing itself apart.
But for Inquisitor Cassian, time was no longer a river. It was a frozen lake, and he was the only thing moving on the ice.
As the twenty God Hounds lunged—a collapsing dome of pitch-black anti-reality closing in from all sides—Cassian pulled the heavy, conceptual chains in his soul.
[ TRUE WEAPON MANIFESTATION: TIER X — THE AEGIS OF THE FIRST ]
The manifestation did not explode outward; it imploded inward.
The ambient Aether of the entire planetary sector was violently sucked into Cassian's marrow in a fraction of a millisecond. The pristine white silk of his tunic instantly vaporized, replaced by a second skin of liquid, blinding platinum.
The Aegis was not a clunky, mechanical suit of Vanguard poly-steel. It was the anatomically flawless, hyper-dense armor of a dead cosmic god. It flowed over Cassian's muscles, interlocking plates of shimmering starlight and condensed white-dwarf matter. A halo of slowly rotating, geometric hard-light ignited behind his head, acting as a supreme, localized processor for the universe's physics.
Cassian's four Tier V [All-Seeing Eye] cores were forcibly hijacked by the Tier 10 armor, their liquid-silver processing speed amplified a million-fold.
Second one
The twenty Hounds hung suspended in the air, their jagged, faceless snouts inches from Cassian and the unconscious Jax. To the Hounds, they were moving at terminal velocity. To Cassian, they were statues.
Cassian did not feel the crushing fifty-G gravity of Tartarus-4 anymore. Wearing the Aegis, he possessed more mass than the planet itself.
He gripped the bone hilt of Terminus. The Tier 8 void-blade, sensing the proximity of the Tier 10 armor, let out a psychic, blood-curdling shriek of pure, unadulterated ecstasy. The blade ignited, a secondary aura of platinum fire wrapping around the absolute darkness of the steel.
Second two.
Cassian moved.
He didn't use a spatial fold. He simply stepped forward, his platinum boot striking the black glass. The kinetic feedback of that single footfall was so immense it sent a shockwave through the planet's crust, instantly liquifying a mile-wide radius of obsidian into a boiling crater. Only the tiny patch of glass beneath Jax remained solid, anchored by the protective shadow of the Aegis.
Cassian reached out with his free, platinum-armored left hand and grabbed the nearest God Hound directly by the face.
The anti-reality violently attempted to unmake the Aegis. It was like throwing a bucket of water onto a dying sun. The platinum armor didn't even scuff.
Cassian squeezed. The Tier X gauntlet physically crushed the concept of the Hound's anti-reality. The entity imploded into a singularity within Cassian's palm, popping into nothingness.
One.
Second 3
Cassian pivoted, turning the momentum of the crush into a devastating, horizontal sweep with Terminus.
With the strength of the Aegis behind it, the Tier 8 blade didn't just cut matter; it severed the spatial coordinates the Hounds occupied. A crescent wave of void and platinum fire erupted from the sword, completely bypassing the concept of distance.
The wave passed through the next four Hounds in the circle. For a microscopic moment, nothing happened. Then, their pitch-black forms simply slid apart at the molecular level, their halves violently sucked into the void before they hit the ground.
Five.
Second 6
The remaining fifteen Hounds, processing at their own terrifying, cosmic speeds, realized the threat. They abandoned their lunges toward Jax and synchronized their anti-reality auras, attempting to create a localized zone of absolute erasure around Cassian.
The space around the ancient Inquisitor turned completely black. The sound, the light, the heat—everything was deleted.
Cassian stood in the absolute dark. He wasn't using Jax's frictionless Bagua flow. He was an ancient Vanguard warlord, and he fought with pure, unyielding, overwhelming force.
[ ART OF THE FIRST: SUPERNOVA BREACH ]
Cassian drove the hilt of Terminus directly into the chest plate of his own armor. The Tier 10 Aegis resonated with the Tier 8 blade, acting like a cosmic tuning fork.
A pulse of hyper-compressed, blinding starlight erupted from Cassian's body. It hit the sphere of anti-reality and shattered it like a sledgehammer hitting a glass Christmas ornament.
The backlash of the shattered erasure slammed into the surrounding Hounds. Five of them were caught in the immediate, point-blank shockwave of the Supernova Breach. Their anti-reality matrices were instantly overwritten by the blinding light of creation. They didn't even have time to implode; they were atomized, reduced to sub-atomic ash that scattered into the vacuum.
Ten.
Second 11
Ten Hounds left. They were now actively retreating, their programming recognizing that they were fighting a conceptual impossibility. They began to strobe, attempting to blink into the unmapped void to escape.
"You don't get to leave," Cassian's voice boomed, overlapping with the resonant, metallic chorus of the Aegis.
Cassian engaged a heavily modified Tier V [Spatial-Fold]. But he didn't fold his own body. Anchored by the infinite weight of the Tier 10 armor, he reached out and folded the plateau.
He mathematically crumpled the spatial geometry of the battlefield, pulling the retreating Hounds back toward him like fish caught in a tightening net.
As they were violently yanked back into his melee range, Cassian became a localized storm of platinum and void. He moved with a brutal, elegant precision that had taken centuries to perfect.
He drove his elbow backward, the platinum spike on the Aegis completely pulverizing the skull of the eleventh Hound.
He spun, Terminus tracing a flawless figure-eight in the air, cleanly decapitating the twelfth and thirteenth.
He didn't use the sword for the fourteenth. He simply caught it out of the air by the throat, engaged a Tier IV [Kinetic-Discharge] directly through his gauntlet, and detonated the creature from the inside out.
The fifteenth Hound lunged in a desperate, suicidal strike, its claws scraping across the Aegis's breastplate. It managed to leave a microscopic, smoking scratch on the starlight metal before Cassian drove his knee into its chest, breaking its spine over his armored thigh and casting the imploding remains into the magma.
Fifteen.
Second 16
Cassian turned his blinding, platinum gaze toward the remaining five God Hounds. They were clustered together, their anti-reality forms shivering, backed up against the edge of the boiling magma crater.
Cassian raised Terminus. He was going to end it. He was going to wipe the last five from the canvas and secure the sector.
He took a step forward.
CRACK.
It didn't come from the Hounds. It came from inside his own chest.
Second 18
A blinding, agonizing pain ripped through Cassian's marrow. The halo of hard-light behind his head violently flickered and shattered.
The Aegis of the First was not designed for a modern human soul. It was a relic of an era when the First Crusades were fought by beings of incomprehensible Aetheric density. Cassian was old, and he was powerful, but his spiritual architecture was still mortal. He did not possess the Sovereign's domain to infinitely process the weight.
He was using his own soul as the fuel rod for a cosmic reactor, and the rod was melting down.
Blood instantly filled Cassian's lungs. His four All-Seeing Eye cores didn't just overheat; they began to physically crack under the catastrophic output demanded by the Tier 10 armor.
WARNING: VESSEL INTEGRITY AT 4%. COMMENCING EMERGENCY JETTISON.
The automated, ancient intellect of the Aegis recognized that its host was 0.2 seconds away from total spiritual immolation.
Second 20
Time slammed back into normal speed.
The sound of the localized vacuum collapsing finally caught up to reality. A deafening, apocalyptic thunderclap echoed across the dead world, sending a tsunami of magma crashing against the distant cliffs of black glass.
The blinding platinum light of the Aegis violently retracted, folding back into the deepest depths of Cassian's soul to save his life.
Cassian dropped.
He hit the shattered obsidian, his breath leaving him in a ragged, bloody cough. His pristine white tunic was gone, his torso covered in terrifying, glowing Aether-burns from the sheer friction of housing the armor. His liquid-silver cores were completely dark, shut down by the trauma. Terminus clattered to the glass beside him, its void-flame extinguished, returning to its dormant state.
He forced himself up onto one knee, his muscles screaming, his vision swimming in a haze of red and black.
Through the smoke and the falling ash, Cassian saw them.
The five remaining God Hounds.
They had survived the microsecond massacre. They shook off the spatial distortion, their pitch-black forms stabilizing. They looked at the smoking, ruined crater that used to be a plateau. They looked at the fifteen localized singularities where their packmates had been unmade.
And then, their faceless snouts turned back to Cassian.
The armor was gone. The Inquisitor was broken. The prey was soft again.
The five Hounds fanned out, their low, vibrating growls starting up once more, inching forward across the glass to finish the hunt. Cassian tried to reach for the hilt of his sword, but his fingers wouldn't close. His nervous system was completely fried.
"Well," Cassian coughed, blood spilling over his chin, a weak, bitter smile touching his lips. "I suppose... fifteen out of twenty isn't a terrible ratio."
Behind Cassian, resting on the single intact pillar of obsidian, Jax gasped.
The teenager's golden eyes snapped open, wide and bloodshot. The shock of the temporal clap and the violent shift in the Aetheric pressure had violently jolted him awake from his exhaustion.
Jax sat up, his body screaming in protest, his Bagua flow barely a trickle in his veins.
He looked around.
The fifty-yard plateau was gone, replaced by a massive, boiling crater of liquid fire. The sky above was scarred with lingering streaks of blinding platinum light. The air tasted like ozone and cosmic death.
He looked at Cassian, the untouchable, ancient god of the Vanguard, kneeling in the ashes, completely burned out and defenseless.
And then, Jax looked at the five shifting, jagged silhouettes of anti-reality slowly stalking toward them through the smoke.
Jax's wide eyes locked onto the nightmare, his heart hammering against his bruised ribs as the absolute, terrifying reality of the deep dark finally set in.