Inside the main laboratory, the air felt incredibly thin. No Name's dark aura slowly swirled around him, creating enough pressure to make the titanium floor beneath his feet crack apart.
Tora, Scyte, Arrow, and Rare stood silently, waiting for the final order.
No Name reached into his suit pocket. He pulled out the Blue Stone, radiating an absolute ocean-blue light, then tossed it toward Arrow.
Arrow caught the stone swiftly. An icy chill instantly spread across his hand.
"Use that stone to protect the headquarters and yourselves," No Name ordered flatly. "No matter what happens, do not let anyone interfere with these coordinates."
Tora frowned. "What about you? You're really planning to jump into that void alone?"
No Name fell silent for a moment. His eyes shifted toward the Achronal Miasma hourglass resting on the table, then moved toward Rare.
"No. Rare, take the hourglass. You're coming with me."
Scyte and Tora's eyes widened instantly. "Hah?! You're bringing this kid into a suicide zone?!" Scyte protested, his smug grin disappearing immediately.
Rare looked at his boss with sparkling eyes full of excitement, showing absolutely no fear.
He nodded firmly, hugging Excalibur with one arm while holding the purple hourglass in the other. "Understood, Boss!"
"Your holy energy from Excalibur, combined with the temporal mist inside that hourglass, will become my final shield," No Name said to Rare. "Once we enter, you only have one task: preserve our existence. Ignore everything else."
Without wasting another second, No Name raised his hand.
He concentrated his Pure Darkness together with the absurd physical power of the Red Stone.
The space in front of him began to distort and bend until finally
TRRRESSSH!
The dimensional wall was violently torn apart, revealing a crack that possessed no color, no sound, and no light.
It was not darkness.
It was absolute nothingness.
"We're going," No Name said before stepping into the rift, with Rare following closely behind him.
0.0000000000001 seconds.
That was the limit before their existence would be erased by the universe itself.
To ordinary humans, it would have been less than nothing.
But for No Name's mind, which had long surpassed the boundaries of logic, that fraction of a microsecond stretched endlessly like eternal torture.
Inside the Void Rift, there was no up, down, left, or right.
Only an endless pale whiteness that hurt to perceive.
No Name's skin instantly began peeling away into cosmic dust. Reality itself rejected his existence.
"RARE! NOW!" No Name roared, his voice echoing directly into the mind rather than through sound.
Rare immediately plunged Excalibur into the empty void.
The young man shattered the Achronal Miasma's glass. Purple mist exploded outward at once, merging together with Excalibur's holy golden aura.
The combination of energies wrapped around No Name and Rare like a glowing cocoon.
The cracks spreading across No Name's skin suddenly stopped, restrained by time itself being forcibly frozen by the purple mist.
However, blood began dripping from Rare's nose and eyes.
The burden of resisting the laws of absolute nothingness was horrifying.
There was only space.
There was no time.
No Name forced his eyes open. In the middle of the white void, he saw it.
A green stone radiating eternal life.
The Green Stone.
But what stopped No Name in his tracks was not the stone itself.
It was what was connected to it.
From the Green Stone stretched trillions of impossibly thin threads of light, spreading in every direction across dimensions.
Those threads pulsed in rhythm with the heartbeat of the world itself.
They were the threads of reality.
No Name realized it instantly.
This stone was not merely an energy source.
It was the stake holding the entire universe together.
If he pulled the stone out... those trillions of threads would snap apart. The entire world, the earth, the sky, his headquarters, even The Four Pions waiting for him... would vanish.
The warning from the woman of light echoed through his mind once more.
"If you go there, beware of the Primordial Darkness."
Suddenly, from the corner of his fading vision, No Name saw a faceless black silhouette standing behind the Green Stone.
The entity that had once granted him power.
It was as though the being had been waiting for him to make a mistake and destroy everything.
No Name grinned.
His demonic smile spread across the emptiness itself.
"You think I'll back down? Or that I'd destroy my own world?" No Name thought coldly. "Don't underestimate me."
He would not sever the threads.
He would not destroy the world.
With slow movements filled with absolute agony, No Name lunged forward. His hand, wrapped in Pure Darkness, grabbed hold of the Green Stone.
But instead of pulling it out
No Name drove the Green Stone directly into his own chest.
JLEBB!
An explosion of energy beyond description erupted instantly.
The trillions of world-threads that had once converged upon the void were now forcibly dragged into No Name's body itself.
His heart had become the new core of reality.
The Red Stone carrying absolute power, the Pure Darkness that devoured all things, and the Green Stone supporting life itself violently collided, destroyed one another, and fused together within his bloodstream.
No Name's body nearly exploded apart. His eyes glowed both green and red simultaneously.
He screamed soundlessly, enduring the weight of trillions of lives and entire galaxies upon his shoulders.
Behind him, Rare vomited blood as the purple-and-gold barrier finally shattered completely.
Their time inside this dimension had run out.
Their existence was beginning to be erased.
"WE'RE GOING BACK!"
Using the power of the Green Stone now fused with him, No Name grabbed Rare by the collar, violently tore open the Void Rift dimension from the inside, and hurled both of them back toward their original coordinates.
Back inside the underground laboratory, Tora, Arrow, and Scyte stood tensely.
Suddenly
The space at the center of the lab exploded.
BOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!!!!!
A shockwave carrying energy of three different colors, red, green, and black, swept across the entire room. Titanium walls shattered apart. Console screens exploded instantly.
Tora, Scyte, and Arrow were thrown violently into the walls. Fortunately, Arrow reflexively activated the Blue Stone's protection, creating a deep blue barrier that prevented their bodies from being torn apart by the leftover dimensional pressure.
Thick smoke and debris covered the now completely ruined laboratory.
Scyte coughed violently while pushing twisted metal wreckage off his body. "Cough! Cough! Boss?! Rare?!"
Tora stood back up, his eyes widening at the sight in the center of the newly formed crater.
Rare lay unconscious near the crater's edge, his breathing weak but stable. Excalibur beside him had lost all its light, completely drained of energy.
But at the center of the crater
No Name knelt on one knee.
His black suit had been destroyed. His body was covered in burns and glowing cracks.
Thick smoke rose from him. From his chest spread glowing green and red veins that crawled across his neck and arms, merging together with a Pure Darkness aura that now felt millions of times more absolute and primordial.
Slowly, he lifted his face.
His cold eyes no longer resembled those of a human being.
They were the eyes of something carrying the weight of all reality itself.
That man...
had just swallowed the world.