Darkness. Not black... Deeper. A color that shouldn't exist.
Jack floats in fetal position. His body is torn, one arm missing, lips trembling, not from fear, but from what he sees inside himself. Not the outside world. Not the 99th floor.
This world is within. An endless, rotting mindscape. Skies that flicker like broken film. Laughter that sounds like glass cracking.
Mountains made of his screaming memories, rivers of blood that reverse time, flowing upward, only to rain down again as ash.
Children laughing. His own voice... but twisted.
Everything is him. Thousands of versions of himself, all dead, all dying, all watching.
Some whisper. Some sob. Some just stare, mouths wide open, eyes gone, faces blank. Then, he speaks. But not to them. Not to us. Not even to the world.
He speaks to the void inside. And it listens.
"Emptiness devours... silence screams..."
The ground beneath him breaks into teeth. Hundreds. All human. All his. They gnash together, chewing his past. His laugh. His smile. Iris's voice. Jasmine's warmth. All gone.
"Void-born shadows... darkness dreams."
A tree of bodies grows in the distance. Each branch is a life he could have lived. All are rotting. One still twitches.
"Infinite oblivion, I invoke."
The sky rips in half like paper.
Behind it? Not stars. Not space. Just a face massive, faceless, and smiling.
"Eternal emptiness... my soul's cloak."
He opens his eyes. They're not his anymore. There's no pupil. No iris. Only a spiral. A screaming spiral.
"Shattered mindscape... fragmented thought."
His thoughts leak out of his ears like smoke.
They crawl down his chest.
"I surrender... to the void's dark plot."
He smiles. But it's not a smile. It's a crack. A physical break across his face, splitting it in half. Yet he doesn't bleed.
"In the abyss of nothing..."
He stands. But there's no floor.
No gravity. Only pain. And acceptance.
"...I am free."
"To succumb to the emptiness... that's me."
The light returns, dim and colorless. The camera slowly rises from the cracked obsidian floor. Jack floats.
Not standing, floating. Arms relaxed, legs crossed in a meditative pose. His body, once mangled, is now unscathed. No bruises. No dirt.
His black outfit flows like smoke and silk, unbothered by gravity. Too perfect. Too still. His snow-white hair glows faintly under the broken sky, fluttering as if reality itself was trembling around him.
His eyes open slowly, not wide, but precisely. Controlled. Purposeful.
Purple-black... but deeper now. A shade not meant to exist. The kind of color that makes the heart skip. Not glowing, but... watching you back.
Jack. Standing. Smiling.
The Being, a predator of impossible speed and absolute power, has already begun walking away, until something shifts.
It freezes mid-step.
The camera cuts to a wide shot. Jack hasn't moved. But the world around him is warping, cracking, spinning, as if even the environment can't comprehend his presence anymore.
The Being turns. No aura buildup. No flash. No scream. Just movement.
A blur of perfection. It dashes forward, and like a needle through silk, its clawed hand tears into Jack's chest with a sickening..... SHKEESH. The sound echoes. Faint. Wet. Wrong.
Its arm is buried deep, halfway through his back. But Jack doesn't scream. He doesn't even look down. He simply turns his head... and smiles.
That same terrifying, knowing, wrong smile.
The camera zooms in slowly on Jack's expressionless face, eyes wide open, lifeless... until... Snap.
His grin returns. Not just a smirk... the old Jack. The cocky, mocking, "I own this realm grin".
He leans slightly forward, blood dripping from the hole in his chest, and chuckles. "I thought you were fast..." his voice low and teasing, laced with amusement. "...Oh right, you are... just stupid." The camera cuts to the
Being, who looks down, and for the first time, hesitates. Its clawed hand... isn't in Jack. It's in itself. Right through its own torso.
Reality glitches for a half-second. Jack had become a spatial illusion. A mirror? A portal?
No, something worse. Before the Being can pull its arm out, Jack's body melts like smoke, disappearing completely.
A voice echoes from above calm, cocky, borderline disrespectful. "That was just a little illusion of me."
Jack's laughter rolls in like static through the atmosphere. "I distorted space and threw it back at you, idiot." The camera pans up, Jack's sitting.
On space. Literally cross-legged, floating in midair like he's on an invisible couch, arms resting behind his head, smirking.
Then he slowly floats downward, landing on the broken ground with exaggerated boredom. "Let's make it a fair fight," he says, beginning to roll his neck, "I'll fi... "
BOOM.
The Being is gone. No buildup. Just movement. Faster than the air itself. It lunges, its blade-like limbs aimed to slice Jack in half.
SLICE. The cut passes through air. Jack stands behind it, untouched, arms extended like he's stretching. "Tch. Rude."
He doesn't look back. He doesn't need to.
"You didn't let me finish..." His eyes flash, purple-black lightning cracking in the air. "...I'll fight you with your specialty."
The Being twitches. But before it can move, Jack is everywhere. Circling the Being at speeds the screen can't even process. Wind is exploding outward. The environment is being shredded. Time feels unstable.
Then, silence. Both the Being's arms slowly lower... THUD.
The Being regenerates fast, too fast...
But then... Its head slides off. Slowly. Cleanly. Its body collapses a beat later. Jack? Still standing in his last pose. Or... had he ever moved?. He sighs, long and drawn out.
"Huuuuuh." One hand in his pocket.
The other behind his head. "So boring." He walks away, stepping calmly into the collapsing space, the entire realm ripping apart behind him.
"Why'd I even kill it so fast?" he mutters with a yawn.
The war chamber was silent, the kind of silence that presses against your ears. Dim blue lights pulsed around the war table, displaying only static.
All tracking systems... blank. Not scrambled. Not offline. Just... empty. Cain exhaled sharply, breaking the tension.
"He's gone. No trace. Not even residual aura. Our systems can't perceive him anymore." Ren muttered, eyebrows furrowed: "No... it's not that he's hiding. It's like reality itself can't remember him."
Then came a voice from the far end of the room, steady, ancient, worn by the weight of cosmic decisions
"Call Khrah." All heads turned. The speaker was Eran, the senior councilor. His face was pale.
"We have no other path. Jack is no longer bound by our dimensional rules. Only Khrah can stand on equal ground."
Murmurs erupted.
"Khrah?"
"He hasn't interfered in million of years." "He's the One Between Worlds... he chooses when to act."
Eran spoke again, louder:
"We request, not command. And pray he answers."
Iris had been silent the whole time, arms folded, gaze fixed on nothing. When the council settled, all eyes naturally turned to her. She didn't look at them. Her voice was quiet, but heavy with meaning: "Seal him." They hesitated. She continued, still not lifting her head: "Don't kill him."
Eran looked confused. "You saw what he did. He's not..."
She finally looked up, eyes sharp but dimmed with something deeper:
"He's not just what he is now. He's what he was... and what he might still be." A pause. Her voice softened, almost too quiet to hear: "If even a part of him is still in there... I won't abandon it."