The air in the Sky Deer's domain thrummed with a new, urgent frequency. It was not the calm atmospheric melody the Stag King usually conducted, but a discordant, deep-space pulse that vibrated in the marrow and made the very light seem queasy. Indra and Rias stood before the Four Beast Kings, who had assembled in a rare confluence. Heracles' mountainous bulk, Bambina's coiled, restless energy, the Sky Deer's serene yet now-troubled presence, and the haunting, pressurized aura of the Ocean King's communication crystal.
Sky Deer: Its voice was usually the whisper of the jet stream. Now, it was the crackle of a geomagnetic storm. "A tremor in the world's appetite. A hunger that does not nourish, but annihilates. It has awoken from its slumber in the gastric abysses of the western continent."
A holographic image, woven from atmospheric ice crystals and sunlight by the Deer, shimmered before them. It showed a vast, rolling landscape of what looked like crystalline forests and magma rivers. Then, a shadow fell. Not a shape, but an absence—a crawling blot of null-space that consumed the light, the landscape, the very detail of the image itself. Where it passed, only a smooth, glassy, sterile plain remained.
Bambina: The Monkey King scratched his chin, his eyes sharp with predatory interest. "The Planet Devourer. 'Mazu's Bane.' CL… fluctuating. Estimates place its active feeding state at 3100. Maybe higher. It doesn't just eat biomass. It consumes ecosystems, ambient energy, historical resonance… the very 'story' of a place."
Ocean King: The voice from the crystal was the crushing groan of tectonic plates. "It is anathema. It leaves only void in the deep seas. A scar upon the world's flesh. My territories have receded 200 leagues in its path."
Heracles: "It is a lesson in true hunger. An appetite divorced from the cycle of life and death. A cosmic error. It must be corrected."
Indra: His Rinnegan eyes were already analyzing the null-scar in the image. "Conceptual consumption. It's not digesting matter; it's deleting information from the material plane. This is a spatial-temporal erosion event."
Rias: Her fingers traced the soundwaves emanating from the crystal image. She flinched. "The harmonic signature… it's a silence that screams. It's anti-sound. It doesn't break the resonant frequencies of life; it convinces them they never existed."
Sky Deer: "The IGO has marked it as an 'Extinction-Level Event.' All previous capture attempts have ended in the complete loss of hunting parties and the annihilation of the staging grounds. It is considered an unstoppable force of nature."
Indra and Rias exchanged a look. It was a silent conversation of raised eyebrows, slight tilts of the head, and the faintest curve of a smile on Rias's lips. In it was the understanding of two sovereigns who had rewritten their own destinies, who had tamed concepts and sung to stones.
Indra: "An unstoppable force… meets an immovable object. One that writes laws."
Rias: "And a very persuasive argument."
Heracles: A low, approving rumble shook the ground. "You would hunt the Devourer. Not for food. For order."
Indra: "For the sanctity of the world that has been our teacher. And to prove that no hunger, no matter how absolute, is sovereign over our will."
Bambina: The Monkey King cackled, a sound like shattering chimes. "Brat's got spine! A month, I give you! A month of running, hiding, and maybe—just maybe—landing a scratch!"
Ocean King: "The depths wish you fortune. You carry the hopes of a living world into a place of un-being."
________________________________________
Week 1: The Trail of Silence
Their pursuit began on the Glass Plains of Gula, the most recent feeding ground. The transition from the vibrant, super-saturated life of the Gourmet World to this wasteland was jarring. It wasn't a desert. It was a blank page. The ground was flawlessly smooth, obsidian-like, reflecting a stark, colorless sky. No bacteria, no residual energy, not even atomic dust. It was pre-creation void.
Rias: Kneeling, she placed her palm on the glassy surface. She didn't hum. She listened. Her face tightened. "There's no vibration. None. Not even the deep, slow resonance of planetary mantle. It's… acoustically dead. This isn't earth. It's a sculpture of absence."
Indra: His Rinnegan scanned, peeling back layers of reality. "Time here is… flat. No past echoes. No future potential. It's a singular, eternal 'now' of nothingness. The creature doesn't just eat. It imposes a permanent, sterile present."
He focused, channeling the Dialga aspect. "Temporal Echo-Seek."
The world rippled. Faint, ghostly afterimages flickered at the edge of perception—the roaring crystal forests, the flowing magma, the vibrant creatures that once were. They were being sucked toward a single point on the western horizon, like video playback in reverse, before winking into nothingness. The trail was clear.
Indra: "It moves against the flow of time, consuming history as it goes. We're following the wake of an eraser."
They traveled for days, the void giving way to a "fringe" ecosystem—a twisted, nightmarish borderland. Here, plants grew in frantic, spastic bursts, trying to outrun the Devourer's approach, becoming predatory and desperate. Animals were either catatonic with terror or hyper-aggressive, their flavors corrupted by fear.
[ Discovery #1001: 'Frenzy Moss' – Grows only in the psychic panic-field preceding a Planet Devourer. Consuming it induces uncontrollable combat reflexes and temporary pain negation. Potentially useful for combat tonics, ethically fraught. ]
[ Discovery #1002: 'Chrono-Scarab' – A beetle that instinctively flees into microscopic temporal eddies to escape the Devourer. Its shell contains faint residues of 'yesterday,' usable for short-range temporal cloaking. ]
They adapted. Indra used minute Spacetime Labyrinths to calm the frantic chrono-scarabs, allowing Rias to commune with them, learning to sense the subtle temporal tremors of the Devourer's passage. She, in turn, used gentle, persuasive harmonies to soothe the frenzy moss, studying its growth patterns to gauge the Devourer's proximity—the more frantic the growth, the closer the beast.
Week 2-3: The Dance of Avoidance
They first saw it on the horizon of the Churning Bone Forests. Not the creature itself, but its effect. The sky was being pulled inward, like liquid down a drain, into a distant point of darkness. The magnificent, mile-high bone-white trees were silently deliquescing, not falling, but unmaking, their colossal forms streaming as pale smoke into the void.
The pressure was immense. Not physical, but existential. A sucking despair, a voice in the hindbrain whispering 'give up, you are food, you are nothing.'
Rias: She gasped, her sonic-wood armor vibrating in distress. "It's singing the anti-song. It's trying to convince my very cells that they are hypothetical."
Indra: His Arceus Proto-Form flared around him for a second, a protective nebula of sovereign law. The pressure eased. "Its presence is a passive-area negation effect. A walking null-field. Direct confrontation now is impossible. We cannot fight where reality itself is revoked."
This began the true hunt. A relentless, month-long game of cosmic tag. They could not attack. They could only observe, track, and survive.
They witnessed it consume a "River of Memories," a flowing stream of liquid time and emotional echoes. The Devourer drank it, and the riverbed became a dry canal of amnesia.
They saw it encounter a herd of CL 2800 Granite Titans, beings of living mountain. The Titans charged, their roars capable of shattering continents. The Devourer simply… opened. A maw that was not a mouth, but a fracture in dimensions. The Titans, their roars, the seismic energy of their charge, the very concept of their "attack"—all were silently ingested. The fracture closed. Only smooth glass remained.
[ Discovery #1020: 'The Devourer's Aura' – Analysis confirms it is a localized collapse of multiple quantum fields. It's not a biological creature in a conventional sense; it is a walking 'reality failure.' ]
[ Discovery #1021: 'Null-Residue' – Samples of the glass plains show a complete absence of spiritual and informational particles. This is the base state of matter after conceptual deletion. ]
They learned to move in its blind spots—not spatial, but conceptual. Indra discovered the Devourer's perception was tied to the active "narratives" of things. By using his Labyrinths to create zones of such bizarre, contradictory physics (like "Here, gravity is a fond memory" or "In this zone, color tastes of regret"), they became indigestible noise to the creature's senses. It slid past them, focusing on cleaner, more coherent ecological stories.
Rias crafted shelters of "Sonic Paradox Wood"—trees that sang a constant, self-referential chord that meant nothing, a culinary nonsense poem that offered no nutritional or narrative value to the Devourer. They hid within these groves, watching the silent apocalypse pass by.
Week 4: The Pattern & The Plan
After a month of pursuit, mapping its path, measuring the frequency of its feeding pulses, and analyzing the "flavor" of the realities it preferred, they found a pattern.
Indra: He was etching equations of light in the air, diagrams of space-time folds. "It feeds in cycles. A major conceptual consumption, followed by a 37-hour 'digestive' period where its null-field weakens by approximately 4%. It retracts to a stable, non-feeding form to process the stolen narrative."
Rias: She was growing a model of the local ecosystem from resonant fungi, showing the paths of energy flow. "It's a gourmand, not a glutton. It seeks specific, rich stories. The memory river, the Granite Titans' primal saga. It's currently heading for the 'Symphonic Geode'—a cave system that holds the fossilized soundwaves of the world's first song. The ultimate narrative prize."
She looked at Indra, her eyes alight with strategic fire. "That's our window. When it consumes the Geode's song, it will be sated. It will enter its digestive stasis. Its field will be at its weakest."
Indra: Nodding, he pointed to a convergence of three ley lines on his map. "Here. The geomantic nexus will boost my ability to create a large-scale, stable lock. We prepare the trap at the Geode. We give it the feast it wants… and then we enclose the feast, and the feaster, in a bottle."
The plan was audacious. Insane. IGO would have court-martialed them for even suggesting it.
Phase 1: Let the Devourer begin its consumption of the Symphonic Geode, distracting it with the ultimate prize.
Phase 2: Indra would enact a Grand Spacetime Lock—a Labyrinth of unprecedented scale and permanence, designed not to confuse, but to isolate. To create a sealed universe where the Devourer's null-field could not leak out.
Phase 3: Rias would perform the "Ragnarök Requiem"—a new technique. She would not attack the Devourer. She would weave a cage of Sonic-Wood, but one whose resonant frequency was tuned to the positive concept of "Being." A song of existence, of story, of immutable fact. She would sing the cage into reality inside Indra's lock, a secondary barrier of affirmed reality to contain the null.
Phase 4: Capture, not kill. Seal the bottled reality.
The Symphonic Geode
The Geode was a cathedral of sound made stone. Stalactites and stalagmites were frozen musical notes. The walls hummed with the ancient, beautiful, heartbreaking melody of creation. To even stand here was to feel profound, joyous sorrow.
They worked for two days, preparing. Indra carved spacetime anchors into the living rock at 108 points, each a nexus of impossibly complex equations. Rias grew seeds of her ultimate Sonic-Wood, fertilizing them with the pure, unadulterated harmonics of the Geode itself, creating a wood that sang the Song of Existence.
The air grew cold. The light dimmed. The beautiful hum of the Geode began to warp, pulled toward the entrance.
It was here.
The Planet Devourer entered.
Words failed. It was not a shape, but a process made visible. A ripple of un-creation. A walking event horizon. It had a form roughly draconic, but one sketched by erasing the background. Its passage made the glorious Geode seem like a vivid painting, and it was the colorless solvent washing over it.
It moved toward the heart of the Geode, where the First Note was encased in crystal. The process of consumption began. The frozen music flowed into the void. The silent sterility spread.
Indra: Now.
He slammed his hands together. "Grand Spacetime Lock: Cosmological Panopticon!"
The 108 anchors blazed. Reality itself folded. The entire Geode, and the Devourer within it, was spliced out of the Gourmet World. They existed now in a perfect, self-contained bubble universe, a featureless white sphere a mile in diameter. The connection to the main world was a single, stabilized portal behind Indra.
Inside the Panopticon, the Devourer paused. Its meal was interrupted. It turned its non-gaze upon the foreign law of this new place.
Rias: She soared into the air at the center of the bubble, her Banshee Bat Gourmet Demon manifesting fully behind her, a colossal specter of soundwaves. She drew breath, and when she sang, it was not a voice, but the Voice of Creation.
"Ragnarök Requiem: Cage of the Unbroken Tale!"
From the seeds she had planted in the very fabric of the Panopticon, forests erupted. Not just wood. Forests of solidified legend, of adamant myth, of irrefutable fact. Trees of roaring epic, vines of delicate haiku, flowers of unwavering historical truth. They grew in a complex, four-dimensional lattice, filling the bubble with a deafening, glorious symphony of THINGS THAT ARE.
The Song of Existence clashed with the Devourer's Null-Song.
The silent beast recoiled. For the first time, it seemed to act, not just process. It lashed out, a limb of erasure smashing against a trunk of "The First Sunrise." The tree shuddered, a few leaves turning to glass, but it held. The concept was too strong, too fundamental.
It tried to open its dimensional maw. But Indra's law here was absolute. "In this universe, no fractures may exist," he intoned, blood trickling from his nose. The maw failed to form.
The Devourer was trapped. The ultimate consumer was caged within a story too rich, too dense, too real to consume. It thrashed, null-waves pulsing, but each pulse was absorbed, diffused, and harmonized by Rias's ever-growing, ever-singing forest. The glassy patches on the trees healed over with new bark, singing even louder.
The strain was astronomical. Indra felt his chakra and will being drained at a catastrophic rate. Rias's body glowed with effort, her own life-force fueling the endless song of the cage.
Indra: "It's adapting! It's trying to consume the concept of the cage itself!"
Rias: Her voice was raw, yet transcendent. "Then we give it a story it can't swallow! Our story!"
She looked at him, and in that glance was everything: their journey, their love, their defiance of fate. She wove it into the song. The forest began to depict them: a tree shaped like Indra's Susanoo, a vine tracing Rias's smile, flowers that bloomed with the sound of their laughter in the Distortion World.
The Devourer hesitated. This narrative was… unfamiliar. Complex. Illogical. It was a story of two souls from another world, rewriting destiny. It was not a clean, primal myth. It was a messy, beautiful, sovereign epic. It choked on it.
Indra: Seizing the moment, he poured every ounce of his remaining power into the Panopticon. "Lock! Final Decree! This universe is sealed! Its contents shall remain in perpetual, dynamic equilibrium!"
The white walls of the bubble turned to iridescent crystal. The portal to the Gourmet World shrunk to the size of a marble.
Rias: With a final, soaring note, she sealed the Cage. The forest solidified into a beautiful, immortal sculpture of song and wood, forever singing the Devourer into stasis at its heart.
Silence.
The Geode in the real world was silent, half-consumed, but stable. The creeping void had stopped.
Floating in the air of the ravaged cave was a single, perfect, iridescent crystal marble. Inside, a miniature universe could be glimpsed: a tiny, beautiful forest singing silently around a coiled, sleeping shadow.
Exhausted, they fell to the ground, breathing in ragged gasps. They had done it.
________________________________________
Days later, the IGO response team, led by a stunned Komatsu and a battalion of the world's strongest hunters, arrived at the coordinates. They found Indra and Rias, resting against a regenerating wall of the Geode. And they found the marble.
Komatsu, with specialized equipment, scanned it. The readout flashed, then settled.
Komatsu: Tears streamed down his face. "CL… contained. Threat level… neutralized. Capture… successful." He looked at the exhausted, smiling couple. "You… you captured a walking extinction event. You made history. No… you made legend."
The news exploded across the Gourmet World. The "Planet Devourer" was no longer a Bingo Book entry of dread. It was a captured trophy. The hunters responsible? A mysterious pair from a hidden culture, already whispered about as the ones who trained under the Four Kings.
[ Discovery #1049: 'Contained Null-Entity Ecosystem' – Study of the dynamic equilibrium inside the Capture Marble shows the Sonic-Wood forest is evolving, developing new harmonies to continuously pacify the Devourer. A self-sustaining, conceptual predator-prey model. ]
[ Discovery #1050: 'Genesis Marble' – The physical container for the Panopticon. Possesses properties of both space-time crystal and solidified musical theory. Potential applications for portable habitats, universe-scale computing, or… ultimate sealing artifacts. ]
As they recuperated under the awed gazes of the IGO, a message from the Beast Kings arrived, carried by a breeze.
Heracles: "The correction is made. The world's appetite breathes easier. You have hunted not for meat, but for meaning. You are ready. The Acropolis of Feasts awaits its newest, and perhaps most unusual, sovereigns."
Indra held the Genesis Marble up to the light, the tiny, singing forest spinning within. Rias leaned against him, her voice a soft, tired hum.
Indra: "A law, and a song. That's all it took."
Rias: "That's everything it took, my love. Now… let's go see what's for dinner at the top of the world."
End of Chapter – 66.