I ignored the notification.
Whatever the system wanted to say could wait. This moment could not.
The void slowly settled as the shockwave faded, debris still drifting in long arcs around me. Chunks of shattered platforms rotated lazily, their broken laws bleeding faint light before going dark. The second layer below was scarred too, its once-ordered structure fractured into a ruin of floating wreckage.
And right in front of me—
Upita.
Half of his body was gone.
Not wounded. Not damaged.
Gone.
From the center of his chest upward, the right side of his form had been pulverized. His shoulder was missing. Half his neck. Half his face. Where his head should have been whole, there was only erasure.
Black blood leaked out in thick streams, drifting through the void like oil in water. It did not fall. It did not disperse normally. It clung to him, pulling itself back, writhing as if alive. Deathmist poured out of the wound in heavy waves, spreading in all directions, staining the space around him with a suffocating presence.
And still... he was not dead.
I watched as the black blood began to move with purpose. It crawled over the torn edges of his body, thickening, hardening, trying to rebuild what had been lost. The remnants of his face twitched, broken jaw moving as if he were testing whether speech was still possible.
That was enough.
I flashed forward and appeared directly in front of him, close enough that the leaking deathmist washed over my Essence shield. My hand shot forward without hesitation and slammed against his chest, right where his core should have been.
I invoked the Law of Space.
To break.
The space around my palm fractured instantly. Hairline cracks spread outward like shattered glass, not through the void, but through him. The fractures crawled across his body, ignoring flesh and blood, cutting directly through the spatial integrity holding his form together.
Upita’s body convulsed.
Cracks raced along his remaining shoulder, down his torso, across what remained of his face. Wherever the fractures spread, his body tore open again. New wounds burst apart violently, spraying more black blood into the void. The regeneration faltered, struggling to bridge gaps that no longer aligned.
For the first time, I felt his panic.
Not fear.
But urgency.
I did not give him time to react.
I expanded my will outward and formed a pocket space around us, folding the surrounding void inward until the battlefield vanished. The noise, the armies, the layers, all of it was cut away in an instant. We were sealed inside a closed fragment of space, isolated from everything else.
Only him.
And me.
The system notification pulsed at the edge of my awareness again, stronger this time. Something about capture. About conditions being met.
I ignored it.
Instead, I reached inward.
To the Null Core.
To the place where every summon I had ever bound had begun.
My Essence surged and the familiar response came immediately.
A chain emerged from my chest. It shot forward and latched onto his chest.
The instant it connected, his regeneration stopped.
Completely.
The black blood froze mid-motion. The deathmist pouring from his wounds shuddered, then stalled, as if cut off from its source. His body stiffened, spatial fractures locking him in place.
Upita’s remaining eye turned toward me.
I willed the chain to pull.
It moved.
Barely.
The resistance answered immediately, heavy and absolute, like trying to drag an entire world through a crack in space. The chain vibrated violently, its links humming as opposing authority pushed back.
So this was it. The weight of an Eternal soul.
"I’m in a hurry," I said calmly.
The Star of Origin trembled in response.
The deathmist leaking from Upita’s broken body did not disperse this time. It reversed. Like water escaping from a broken dam, the black mist was torn away from him and devoured directly into the Star of Origin. His resistance weakened instantly.
The chain surged.
Something tore free.
From within Upita’s chest, a glowing blue orb emerged, dense with soul fluctuation. It resisted for a heartbeat, flickering violently, but the chain wrapped around it completely and pulled it into me.
The moment it merged, I felt it.
Inside the null core, beside the calm white rotation of the primary core, a new, smaller core formed. Blue. Unstable. Spinning rapidly as it settled into orbit. It carried pressure, memory, and something sharp and alien that did not belong to this universe.
But this time my Psynapse was high enough to put the memory on hold.
I stared back at the Eternal.
He could not speak but transferred his voice directly into my mind.
’You will not escape.’
Then his body lost cohesion almost immediately.
Without the soul to anchor it, his remaining form began to break down. Black blood turned brittle, flaking apart instead of regenerating. Cracks spread through what was left of his frame as the laws holding him together collapsed.
I did not let it go to waste.
I devoured it all.
Blood. Deathmist. Fragments of law. Every last trace was pulled into the Star of Origin until the space where an Eternal had existed was empty.
I had acquired a new summon.
I did not bring him out.
Some weapons were better kept hidden until the moment they were truly needed.
I released the pocket space with a wave of my hand.
The battlefield rushed back in.
Below me, the second layer was chaos incarnate. Fire storms tore through corrupted structures. Deathmist surged like living tides, clashing violently with blazing laws of destruction. Entire sections of the layer were collapsing, drifting apart into ruined fragments.
At the center of it all was Saleos.
He moved like a calamity given form. Half the layer burned because of him alone, his fire laws carving wide arcs of annihilation through anything that stood in his path. On the other side, Ragnar, Silver and Aurora were no less devastating, their presence turning the battlefield into a slaughter ground.
I glanced inward.
Inside the Dawn Core, two Fractured Unity bombs still rotated quietly, untouched. I left them there. The core layer might still need them.
Then I extended my perception fully.
The space around the remaining two layers and Eternal defenses was locked, preventing any large scale and long range teleportation.
I answered it.
I released a spatial ripple of my own.
It surged outward with a sharp whoosh, colliding directly with the imposed seal. The lock shattered like brittle glass, the control unraveling in cascading fractures.
The space was free again.