This world was so grand and so great, and yet this world was so small and so terrible.
This world had many absurd notions, wild like a fire untamed, a sea beyond mind.
In this world so wild and chaotic, I was here, waiting to see the world truly great.
And this world so truly great was within me.
Madikai could not fathom such a thing. He looked at the event and could not reject it.
How might one reject something they cannot even acknowledge? This was the power of love.
"Absurd, you're an absurd man, how might you even continue in such a state?"
Darkness wrapped around my blade. "I am no longer myself, I am the world."
Flames wrapped around his blade. "Then I shall reject the world once more."
My thoughts repeated themselves, reflected again and again, causing my body to be filled with rejection.
Yet even then, I understood the nature of this contradiction.
This world was both a rational world and a world that was not rational at all.
A complex world formed of contradictions, and yet it aimed to impose rules and laws that demanded everything conform.
These very laws forced things not to be what they naturally were.
And in this moment, the law of noncontradiction was what bound Madikai.
He could not contradict his rejection.
He could not reject what he had already rejected. Logic ruled him without mercy.
If something was already in the process of being rejected, it could not be rejected again, because doing so would reverse the act and nullify the rejection entirely.
To reject a thing fully, he would need to reject it an endless number of times, an infinite continuity of denial, which no moment in existence could hold.
Thus, he could only reject something once while it was in that state.
This was the first limit.
The second limit was bound to knowledge itself. He could not reject what he did not recognize.
And recognition, in his case, meant understanding at least the design or fundamental nature of the thing in question.
If I could create a spell that had never been conceived, imagined, recorded.
Or even brushed against by any mind in this world, then he could not reject it.
He could not reject something that had no conceptual form for him to grasp.
However, his ability existed in a dualistic nature.
To reject something absolutely, he would need to reject both its essence and its opposite simultaneously.
This duality could not be revealed.
It could not be expressed. It could not even be acknowledged by time or space.
For his ability transcended both.
Thus, any counter had to remain concealed even from the fabric of reality itself.
And finally, the ability I created could not harm him. Anything that might harm him directly would trigger his absolute rejection, ignoring all limits entirely.
To strike him, I first needed something that could not be understood, could not be categorized, could not be identified as danger.
Only then could it slip through.
As for me, I continued to stand only because my state was one of rejection as well.
In the eyes of this world, I was already dead. And because I was dead, the laws of the living could not bind me.
Kivana had granted me this, the ability to continue fighting while dead.
The power of love.
However, because of the nature of Madikai's ability, he could truly reject all things.
This was not to say he could reject anything.
Everything he rejected had to be limited to what he could acknowledge. What existed beyond his understanding lived outside his reach.
These things which were not, and things which were not known, were beyond the grasp of rejection.
This was because he could not comprehend what he was attempting to erase.
As long as he had no idea what I was, he could not reject what was fully me.
And how could he ever realize whether his rejection had worked?
As long as I refused to reveal the truth, he could not know. That ignorance protected me more than any armor ever could.
This was the extent of my safety. For if I attempted to attack his mind directly, I would go mad.
His consciousness was a labyrinth of endless refusal, a maze built from contradictions he refused to acknowledge.
And striking his Regalia would be nothing but suicide made real. I could not risk being consumed by the Trinity of Self.
Thus, I would have to do the impossible.
I would have to create the unthinkable.
It could be said that his ability was not an active system at all but an eternal one, a ceaseless circle that rejected everything it returned to.
And obviously, if such a limit existed, there would be ways to bypass it.
Madikai was a smart man.
He would understand an illogical attack.
He would understand an attack that did not exist.
Even the void would not deceive him long enough.
So my mind churned, tangled between the creeping distortions of his ability and the compulsive instinct in my fingers as they reached for any possibility.
Fate offered me nothing. Every thread slipped through my grasp.
For it seemed his ability transcended even the concept of fate itself.
I took a different approach, shaping my next thought into a thought that claimed to reject myself.
In that moment, as my thoughts were rejected, he finally slipped. His lips twitched, and my blade pierced his chest.
It was only a momentary gain, a fleeting breach in his impossible defense.
He would never make the same mistake again, and yet in that single heartbeat I gained a chance.
His Regalia would drive any who dared to acknowledge it fully into madness, and because of that I had to acknowledge the laws it operated under.
I isolated the area completely, reducing the battlefield to absolute nothingness to prevent the world itself from being torn apart.
I then pushed us away.
We were no longer within the world.
Instead, we were cast into the Void between the hierarchies.
This was the Void that encompassed all totality within its vast, absent expanse.
As such, there were no laws, and his Regalia began to work miracles.
Not only did it reject my thoughts, my actions, and my future, but it rejected the past as well.
And in this place which lacked Time entirely, how else could that rejection manifest?
He rejected all things except the version of me that existed in the present moment.
I used that narrow opening to finally call upon my Regalia.
This was the ability that Kivana called the Slave. I let go of everything. All thoughts. All will. All motion.
I entered a state that lacked all potential.
Madikai rejected this instantly, and once more, his lips twitched.
I gained all potentials at once, and in that instant I cast them all upon him. It was an event that by its very nature defied logic.
Because the world was such a binding place, all things within it remained limited.
However, it did not regulate those outside itself.
As long as you were beyond the world's reach, such limits were irrelevant.
This was the unrestricted might of my power, and with that, the Void began to cry.
Madikai rejected all those meaningless attacks effortlessly, only to see my eyes begin to twirl.
In that moment, the Slave activated once more, and what emerged was not an attack.
It was nothing, and it was also everything.
It was a paradoxical strike that both existed and did not exist. Such a thing could only be described as insanity.
Only beings within the Depths could muster such a phenomenon.
This was the spell shown to me by a Great Old One.
Madikai could not be prepared, and though his ability acted and he rejected it, this pure and nonexistent thing continued forward.
What was revealed to be my heart struck him.
Instantly, we were torn back into the world.
My power flickered, shuddering, the immense force of that attack draining more from me than I could sustain.
I could no longer maintain such a power, and the shackles of limitation returned with merciless clarity.
I fell to my knees as Madikai stumbled forward. He tripped and propped his blade beneath himself.
He looked down at me and scoffed. "You did all that, simply to show me your love?"
I looked up. "I realized midway I would definitely not beat such a powerful ability, I did the best I could."
He laughed. "You're a madman, and coming from me, that is surely a compliment."