The air in the Mammoth King's territory tasted of ozone and petrichor, charged with the residual energy of their latest spar. Indra stood at the center of a clearing, the ground gently steaming. Before him, Heracles, the Mountain That Walks, observed with eyes that held the patience of continents.
Indra: "The synchronization is uneven. When I manifest Palkia's spatial dominance, Dialga's temporal stream lags by 0.3 seconds. It creates a dissonance in the unified field."
Rias: She was perched on a sonic-wood platform she'd grown from the soil, her fingers dancing in the air as she conducted silent symphonies of green and violet energy. "It's a conceptual impedance. You're not trying to blend water and oil, my love. You're trying to make them recognize they are the same substance."
Heracles: A rumble, like stones grinding deep within the earth, translated as speech in their minds. "The young goddess of sound speaks truth. Your templates are facets of a single crown. You see them as separate dragons. See them as the claws, the breath, and the scale of one being."
Indra closed his eyes, the Eternal Mangekyō-Sharingan–Rinnegan hybrid gleaming softly beneath his lids. In his mind's eye, the Palkia Devil, a being of shimmering pearlescent scales and spatial fractures, and the Dialga Devil, armored in blue-steel and moving through frozen moments, circled each other warily. Between them, the Giratina Devil, a shadowy wraith of antimatter and distorted gravity, pulsed like a heartbeat.
They are not allies. They are pieces.
He didn't force them together. Instead, he reached for the core feeling, the reason for his power. Not control. Not dominance. Protection. The will to create a sanctuary so absolute, so immutable, that not even time or space could violate it. The desire to weave a reality where his loved ones could thrive, forever.
A warmth, unfamiliar and profound, bloomed in his chest. It wasn't chakra. It wasn't Gourmet energy. It was the crystallized essence of his sovereign will.
The three Devils stopped circling. They turned inward. And they began to merge.
________________________________________
In the real world, Heracles took a seismic step back. Rias's breath caught, her sonic constructs dissolving into harmonic dust.
Indra's eyes snapped open. No longer just the Rinnegan's concentric circles. Now, within the purple iris, three pinpricks of light swirled—one silver (space), one azure (time), one void-black (distortion)—orbiting a central point of brilliant white.
The air around him fractured. Not like broken glass, but like a puzzle being simultaneously solved and scrambled. A sphere, ten meters in diameter, manifested around him. Inside, the laws of physics wrote and rewrote themselves in real-time.
Indra: His voice echoed from everywhere within the sphere. "Spacetime Labyrinth: Genesis."
One moment, Rias saw a rain of crystal feathers falling upward within the sphere. The next, the feathers were stone, sinking sideways through air thick as honey. A third moment, they were beams of light tracing the outline of a tree that grew from canopy to root.
Heracles: "A self-contained causality loop. Impressive. But can you control the exit?"
Indra raised a hand. Within the Labyrinth, a miniature sun ignited, then collapsed into a black hole that evaporated into a splash of liquid time. With a clenching fist, the entire sphere collapsed in on itself with a sound like a universe sighing, leaving only untouched grass and a mildly surprised Indra.
Indra: "The control is… intuitive. The Labyrinth isn't a prison I build. It's a question I ask reality. Reality within it must answer."
Rias: She floated down, her eyes wide with analytic wonder. "The energy signature is completely novel. It's not just altering space and time; it's imposing a localized narrative. A story where the rules change paragraph by paragraph."
Indra: "It's draining. Maintaining that for more than a minute would burn through even my reserves. But as a tactical zone…"
Heracles: "It is a territory of absolute sovereignty. None may challenge a king within his castle. This is the first step toward True Appetite's ultimate expression: not consuming the world, but defining it."
________________________________________
For three days, Indra practiced. The Labyrinths grew from ten meters to fifty. He learned to layer them, creating a maze where one room had accelerated time, another inverted gravity, and a third looped sound endlessly. He could now create a stable exit—a doorway of shimmering light that led back to baseline reality.
On the fourth day, as he dissolved a particularly complex Labyrinth containing a miniature ocean in a temporal stasis bubble, the system chimed in his mind.
[ Milestone Achieved: Conceptual Synthesis. ]
[ Palkia Template Synchronization: 50% ]
[ Dialga Template Synchronization: 50% ]
[ Giratina Template Synchronization: 53% ]
[ Directive: Unify. The Triune Awaits. ]
A pressure built behind his eyes, deep within his soul. The merged core of the three Devils stirred. It was time.
Indra: "Rias. I need to summon it. The full form."
Rias: She didn't hesitate. Her hands came together, and a dome of resonant sonic wood erupted around them, a protective amphitheater that hummed at a frequency to stabilize space itself. "I'll anchor this sector. Give him hell, darling."
Indra took a breath that drew in the light around him. He didn't call upon chakra. He didn't summon Gourmet energy. He reached for that sovereign will, the crystallized core of his desire to protect and define.
"Manifest. Not as three. Not as one. As the unity that commands both."
The world broke.
Not violently, but like a chrysalis shedding. From Indra's form erupted not the familiar violet-black skeleton of the Storm Monarch, but something… primordial. Energy the color of a nebula—swirling gold, silver, and deepest cosmic black—coalesced into a humanoid shape, but one that refused to be pinned down.
This was the Arceus Proto-Form.
It stood a hundred meters tall, yet seemed to exist in multiple places at once. Its "armor" was not plate or bone, but shifting constellations and event horizons. One shoulder pauldron swirled with the spiral of a galaxy (Palkia), the other gleamed with the rigid, geometric facets of a colossal diamond marking eternal instants (Dialga). Across its chestplate, a vortex of anti-light and impossible, non-Euclidean angles pulsed (Giratina).
Its head was crowned not with horns, but with a radiant halo of intersecting rings, each ring spinning at a different time-rate. Where its face should be was a serene, blank mask of white, from which the three-pronged pattern of his Rinnegan glowed softly.
Indra's voice resonated from the Proto-Form, layered and profound. "This… is not a Susanoo. It is a Testament."
He willed it to move. The Proto-Form took a step. Space didn't bend; it agreed to the step's occurrence. Time in its path didn't slow; it highlighted the moment of the footfall. Around it, reality sang a quiet note of stability.
Rias: "The energy output… it's not destructive. It's… authoritative. It's not breaking the rules, it's signing them into law."
Heracles: The Mammoth King, for the first time, lowered his head in a gesture that was not submission, but profound respect. "You have not merely tamed concepts. You have been recognized by them as their scribe. This form is a decree written upon the cosmos. The Gourmet World itself acknowledges your sovereignty."
The Proto-Form raised a hand. In its palm, a tiny, self-contained universe twinkled into existence—a Pocket Dimension. Not a volatile Labyrinth, but a stable, apple-sized orb containing a serene landscape of rolling hills under a tiny sun. Indra could feel its stability. It would last for centuries, perhaps millennia, sustained by a trickle of his will.
"A sanctuary," Indra's voice whispered through the form. "A perfect, immutable point."
He held the orb for a long moment, then gently let it dissipate. Maintaining the Proto-Form was an immense strain, even for him. With a final, graceful motion that seemed to fold the light around it, the Arceus Proto-Form dissolved, streaming back into Indra.
He landed on his knees, breathing heavily, sweat beading on his forehead. But his eyes shone with triumphant understanding.
Indra: "I see the path. The Arceus Decree… it's not an attack. It's the final sentence of a law I write. The conceptual erasure… it's the revocation of a concept's right to exist within my sovereign narrative."
Rias: She was at his side in an instant, a canteen of nutrient-rich sap in her hand. "You wrote your first law today. 'Here, a sanctuary may exist.'" She smiled, wiping his brow. "My beautiful, universe-defining husband."
________________________________________
Weeks passed in focused training. Indra grew more proficient with the Labyrinths and could sustain the Proto-Form for five minutes. Rias, inspired, made her own breakthrough.
Rias: "You define reality. I… convince it."
She stood before a plain mountain wall. She did not shout. She hummed. A complex, layered frequency that vibrated through the stone. The mountain didn't crumble. It… listened.
Under the guidance of her Banshee Bat Gourmet Demon and her own Wood Goddess divinity, the stone began to flow like clay, then reform into a magnificent, intricate castle of crystal and living granite, with veins of glowing green wood threading through it—a perfect fusion of mineral and plant, shaped by sound.
Indra: "Sonic Transmutation. You're not just shaping wood anymore. You're conducting the very essence of materials."
Rias: "Persuasion is a powerful tool. Everything vibrates. I just… suggest a more beautiful vibration."
It was during a survey of this new crystalline forest Rias had sung into existence that Indra's sensor network, tiny clones of himself dispersed through the ecosystem, pinged him.
Indra: "A deep resonance. Not biological. Not mineral. Something… in between."
They followed the signal to a cave behind a waterfall of liquid crystal. Inside, the walls were not stone, but solidified musical notation—fossilized harmonics. And in the center of the cave, growing from a bed of resonant moss, was a flower.
Its petals were shifting holograms of starfields. Its stem was a braid of crystalline time. It emitted a soft, perfect chord that made the soul feel calm and vast.
[ Discovery #1000 Logged ]
[ Designation: 'Symphony of the Silent Cosmos' (Tempora Harmonica Flora) ]
[ Classification: CL 2800 (Non-combative) ]
[ Property: Its harmonic resonance temporarily synchronizes the consumer's biological and spiritual rhythms with the local flow of space-time, granting perfect temporal orientation and spatial intuition for one lunar cycle. ]
Indra carefully harvested a single seed pod, the system cataloging every vibration.
Indra: "One thousand. A milestone."
Rias: She linked her arm with his, looking at the shimmering flower. "It's fitting. Our thousandth discovery isn't a monster or a fruit. It's a symbol. Harmony between all things. The very thing we're fighting to create."
They stood in silence, the cosmic flower's chord washing over them. The path ahead was clear. The Acropolis of Feasts awaited. They were no longer just powerful visitors to the Gourmet World. Indra was a Space-Time Overlord, writing laws of reality. Rias was a Goddess of Sound and Wood, persuading creation itself to sing her song.
Together, they were ready to ascend to the pinnacle and then, finally, go home.
End of Chapter – 65.