The Dimensional Gap creaked.
Without Trihexa's apocalyptic thrashing ripping through it, the vast emptiness finally began to settle—but "settling" only meant the wounds were visible now.
Hairline fractures ran through the void like spiderwebs etched into glass. Whole regions of that formless "sky" were buckled or warped, as if someone had twisted reality with both hands and hadn't bothered to straighten it afterward. Remnants of unleashed curses, broken authorities, and shredded laws floated like dust motes, each one powerful enough to erase a country if it ever reached a proper world.
Ren Ming stood in the middle of it all, calm as if he'd just stepped out of a mild spar instead of a Trinity-level slaughter.
He looked around slowly.
"…This stage is about done," he murmured.
His voice didn't rise. It didn't have to. His Heaven hummed behind him, twelve Fate Palaces hanging high above like a ring of worlds—each one vast, each one bleeding faint streams of Dao light into the ruined Gap.
The battle's aftershocks still rolled through the place in waves. Space flickered, twisted, then stitched itself back together with a pained shudder. The Dimensional Gap had been shaken before by Great Red's whims, by the occasional clash of gods.
Nothing like this.
Ren could feel instability everywhere—fault-lines spreading under his feet, cracks leading to places no one here had names for.
Among all those fractures, only one road really mattered to him.
But before that, his gaze went to the dragon still limp in the distance.
Great Red.
The Apocalypse Dragon's colossal body floated amid the cracks like a dying star. Scales were torn away in sheets. Great rents showed glimpses of raw dream-stuff underneath, leaking out in slow, bleeding spirals of light. The dragon's authority—its conceptual "Dream of Reality"—hung in tatters around it, shredded and pinned down under Ren's Heaven.
The Dragon of Dragons, slain in one future by a Fierce God from another world… now lying half-ruined, still alive only because Ren allowed it.
Ren watched him for a moment, eyes unreadable.
"The only reason you're alive is because you're useful," he said at last. "I'll deal with you in a moment."
It wasn't a promise.
It was a sentence postponed.
Beside him, a massive black form shivered.
Ophis' dragon body—Endless Serpent, Ouroboros of Infinity—quivered like something that had just been dunked into ice water. Her authority, Infinity itself, recoiled in on itself, stinging where Ren's Dao had grabbed, redirected, weaponized it.
Ren loosened his hold on her.
Dao lines that had been wrapped around her concept uncoiled, easing their restraining grip. Infinity tried to snap back like a burned hand.
He didn't let it.
He guided it instead—compressed it, shaped it, smoothed its wild edge. His Dao moved like invisible fingers across a living equation, folding it, taming it, teaching Infinity how to sit again instead of thrashing.
Black scales rippled.
Unlike Great Red, Ophis' form didn't simply collapse. It… folded inward. The enormous dragon seemed to invert around a point, its bulk condensing, shrinking, compressing existence itself.
In a few quiet breaths, the endless serpent became something small.
Bare feet touched not-quite-ground. Loose black dress fluttered in a wind that didn't exist. Long black hair fell straight down her back.
The familiar Ophis—the form the Kuoh group knew—stood where the dragon had been.
She wobbled.
Ren stepped forward without thinking and caught her by the shoulders.
Up close, the change in her was obvious.
Ophis didn't look "pale" in any human sense. Her face was the same expressionless doll-like mask as always. But her concept—Infinity—felt shaken. Its endless flatness now had ripples in it, faint disturbances from the way he'd dragged it through combat, made it bleed and bend.
For the first time, Infinity wore the air of someone who had been very thoroughly hit.
Ren smiled down at her, slow and gentle.
"Told you I'd make it obvious how bad an idea it is to use you," he said quietly. "Sorry I had to use you a little in the process."
Her snake-like eyes, dark and flat yet fathomless, searched his face.
"…It hurt," she said again. "I do not like that."
Her fingers twitched, as if remembering sensations they had no words for.
"But… I could feel," she went on, haltingly. "I could… understand more. The noise… changed."
Ren huffed a soft laugh.
"Yeah," he said. "That's called living."
He turned his head, chin tilting toward a far-off point in the broken sky.
A floating pane of reality hung there like a mirror—the viewing window that showed the Dimensional Gap to everyone watching from Kuoh and beyond. On its surface, another Ophis—her fragment—sat curled like a cat, watching with the same emotionless face, eyes a shade more uncertain than before.
He lifted his brows slightly.
"You want to try it properly?" he asked the Ophis in front of him. "Come back with me. Eat snacks. Fight over TV remotes with dragons and devils. Get annoyed when people steal your spot on the couch. It's not silence…" His smile curved, lazy and warm. "…but it's not so bad."
Silence fell.
Not just in the Gap.
Across the viewing fields—the platforms in Heaven, the circles in the Underworld, the halls of the Norse and Shinto and Hindu factions—people stared, breath caught.
On the Kuoh viewing platform, Rias' heart slammed against her ribs.
Asia clasped her hands without realizing it, holding her breath.
Koneko's ears strained forward, tail curling tight.
Even Sona, who had been pushing her glasses up and taking everything in with clinical focus, felt her throat tighten.
With Heaven's group, Gabriel's already-soft expression gentled by another impossible degree.
Ophis blinked, once.
"…You will let me stay in the Dimensional Gap sometimes?" she asked. "I still… like the silence."
Ren nodded without hesitation.
"I'll build you a better version," he said. "One that isn't a target painted on your back."
Her small hands tightened, imperceptibly at first, in the fabric of his sleeves.
"…I will go," she said quietly. "I will… come home with you."
Home.
The single word dropped into the already overloaded hearts on the viewing platform like a final stone into an overflowing basin.
Rias' eyes stung suddenly.
Asia's lower lip trembled.
Akeno's fingers dug into the arm of the couch she sat on, lightning skittering faintly at her fingertips even as her eyes softened.
Even Gabriel's wings rustled faintly, as if reacting to the word itself.
Ren's smile deepened, edges soft.
"Good girl," he said, voice gentle.
He didn't hug her—Ophis didn't really do hugs yet—but his aura unfurled, wrapping around her like a warm, weighted cloak. Infinity, still shivering under her skin, steadied under the pressure of his Dao.
Around them, the Dimensional Gap groaned again.
The cracks spread farther, spiderwebbing through the void, some of them glowing, some dark and hungry.
Ren watched them for a heartbeat, Ophis' slight weight still resting against his side, the aftertaste of their battle thrumming through his bones. Trihexa's sealed presence, split and locked away in the depths of his Twelve Heavens, pulsed faintly in the far background of his awareness, like a caged storm.
"…Yeah," he murmured. "You're done."
He wasn't talking to Trihexa anymore.
He lifted his hand.
The Gap answered.
High above, the twelve Fate Palaces shifted.
From the outside, they were twelve titanic structures hanging in a ring around him—some like blazing cities, some like ancient kingdoms, some like swirling seas of stars. From the inside, each was a complete world, a layer of his own Heaven. Together, twelve palaces formed the full "Heavens," the culmination of an Ancient Saint's last chance to open Fate Palaces and forge a personal cosmos.
They moved along axes no one else here could see, sliding through dimensions, aligning like gears.
Dao essence spilled from them in slow, spiraling streams, threads of light descending into the broken cracks beneath his feet.
The streams didn't fall randomly.
They sank into specific fractures—roads carved through the Gap by different hands, different systems, different worlds.
One in particular pulsed with an ugly, gnawing resonance.
A wound in reality. A tunnel dug from the far side. A road gnawed out, not by the Biblical God, not by any god of this world, but by something entirely foreign.
ExE's path.
The signature of mechanical gods and ruined spirits, of Evie and Etoulde locked in endless war, coiled inside that fracture like rust in bone. Malice pressed against it, cold and systematic—a universe that had already eaten its own inhabitants and was looking, patiently, for the next meal.
Ren's eyes went cold.
"That's enough out of you," he said mildly.
His Universal Travel art unfolded.
Not outward, like a teleportation spell.
Sideways.
He reached into the logic of that path—the fundamental rules that defined it.
In this world's grammar, that road was a sentence: "Traffic allowed from ExE to this universe." Permission flags. Coordinates. Priority routes.
Ren grabbed that sentence and began to rewrite it.
Old Biblical seals stirred—traces of the system the God of the Bible had left behind. World-linking rules meant for controlled connections between Heaven, Earth, and the Underworld twisted under his fingers as he repurposed them. Infinity's borderless echo, still wrapped around his Dao from Ophis' authority, tightened into a leash, binding distances that didn't exist.
The memory of Trihexa's irreversible destruction, of power that did not "wound" but "erase," wrote itself in as punctuation.
His Dao sealed the concept with a single word.
Closed.
The crack shrieked without sound.
For a moment, the tunnel fought back.
From the far side, ExE's malice surged. The distant authority of Evie Etoulde's gods—cold, precise, utterly ruthless—reached for the breach. Mechanical hatred, divine algorithms that had already exterminated the life of their own world, clawed at the edges like metal fingers on glass.
Ren's Heaven pressed harder.
The Twelve Heavens leaned in, their combined weight bearing down. Fate Palaces glowed, their Dao inscriptions burning like verdicts.
The road didn't explode.
It didn't shatter into pieces.
It simply… ceased to be.
Coordinates unhooked. Rules that had been "true" became "false." The idea that one could walk from ExE to this world along that particular path was erased from the structure of reality. No rubble. No debris. Just a quiet, absolute collapse of possibility.
Ren exhaled through his nose.
"Annoying neighbors," he said lightly. "You're getting evicted later. For now, stay behind your own door."
Even now, with his Twelve Heavens thrumming and his aura pressing down on gods and dragons, Ren wasn't stupid enough to think ExE had stopped being a problem.
He remembered very clearly: one of those so-called Evil Gods had killed Great Red in another future, beheading the Dragon of Dreams as if it were nothing more than a warm-up. And that one hadn't even been the strongest among them.
More than their raw power, their abilities were troublesome—mechanical, layered, tricky in ways that would be annoying to untangle unless he had complete, overwhelming force to back his Dao.
So he let the path fall quiet and left it there.
He would deal with them when he had true absolute power.
Ophis' small hand tightened the slightest bit more in his sleeve, as if she'd felt the silent clash.
While the Gap was still settling, Ren let his senses stretch.
Not just along the familiar mythological strata—Heaven's shining planes, the Underworld's dark seas, the yokai realms' twisted forests—but further. Past the edges of the Biblical God's old system, where his rules frayed and ended. Past the torn places where ExE's influence had tried to dig through.
Out into the big, dark ocean between universes.
His new Heaven thrummed.
Lines of possibility lit up before him, thin and bright. To his senses, they looked like a luminous subway map drawn across a starless void—countless threads, some thick, some faint, some frayed, each one a road linking worlds.
Most of them were faint things—half-built roads, distant cosmologies whose signatures didn't connect to anything in this universe's mythologies. Strange laws, alien heavens, unknown hells.
One particular thread made his lips curve.
Not because it was strong.
Because it felt familiar.
A direction where the grand dao flowed thick and ancient. Where cultivation wasn't a curiosity, but the spine of existence itself. Where an ordinary-seeming boy had once taken hold of a mysterious Magical Cube and, step by step, suppressed the Thirty-Three Heavens.
Ren's eyes half-lidded.
"Oh," he murmured. "You're out there."
He didn't push.
He traced that thread gently, marking it. A coordinate written into his Heaven's wall. A path rolled up and tucked behind his heart for later.
"Later," he told it quietly. "When things are calmer."
He wasn't surprised other universes he knew of were truly out there. This world was already riddled with them: ExE's mechanical war-planet, outer gods lingering in the void, parallel dimensions and after-worlds.
His own journey had started because some ancient monster—Ancient Ming—had reached into his original universe from the outside and grabbed his universe like a toy.
If that could happen once, it could happen again.
As for other universes besides ExE sensing this one… he wasn't completely worried yet. He understood the backlash very well. If a universe stronger than ExE decided to look closely at Draconic Deus and didn't like what it saw…
Things could go very badly, very fast.
At the same time, the idea of sealing this place off forever, cutting it off from everything else just to keep it "safe," rubbed him the wrong way.
Ren Ming could reinforce walls. He could patch holes. He could bar dangerous doors.
But to decide, alone, that this entire universe would never touch another—that no one here would ever walk the wider sea of worlds—that was too close to those gods who sat above and moved lives like game pieces.
Even if he could do it right now, the thought tasted wrong.
Of course, that didn't mean he'd throw the doors wide tomorrow and tell everyone to go sightseeing.
When everyone in this verse reached levels of strength that could frighten the Nine Worlds—when "Super Devil" and "Chief God" were just starting points instead of end goals—then he'd be much more open to letting curious people go poke other universes.
For now, the Dimensional Gap's forced stability would be enough to keep this universe hidden, with his Heaven constantly reinforcing that veil.
He let his awareness withdraw.
The big ocean of universes dimmed. The battered emptiness of the Dimensional Gap came back into focus.
So did the bodies.
Ophis' hair brushed his knuckles as he lifted a hand and lightly patted her head.
She blinked up at him, still in her human form, small and pale, bare feet resting on not-quite-ground. Infinity still trembled under her skin, but his Dao wrapped around her like a weighted blanket, anchoring her to this moment.
"Take a breather," he said softly. "You worked hard, even if you didn't mean to."
"…I only moved a little," she said.
Her voice was as flat as ever, but the edges were rougher now, like a song played through a slightly damaged speaker. More human.
Ren's smile widened.
"For you?" he said. "That's a lot."
He turned his head.
Great Red still twitched in the middle distance, massive body torn, leaking half-formed dreams and remnants of the Apocalypse Dragon's authority into the air. That authority bucked and snarled under the weight of Ren's Heaven, refusing to submit even in this battered state.
Ren's lip curled.
His Heaven pressed down harder.
The oppressive weight grew. Conceptual chains wrapped around Great Red, pinning not just flesh but meaning. Movement was restricted further. Power that had once been able to threaten worlds was now caged inside a single, trembling body.
"I'm only going to say this once," Ren said, voice gone cold. "Beings like you can be useful, but at the same time hopeless."
His eyes narrowed, the easy warmth gone, replaced by something far older and sharper.
"So here's how this will go. If you ever decide your pride can't take this thrashing and you start acting cute?" His tone didn't rise, but the air seemed to darken around the words. "I'll erase you. Completely. No rebirth, no lingering dream."
He lifted his hand.
A Dao seal formed over his palm—a small, intricate mark that looked almost harmless, lines of light folding in on themselves like a compressed formation diagram.
It dropped.
The seal sank into Great Red's vast body without resistance, embedding itself into the dragon's core, right where its authority was thickest.
Ren dusted his hand off lazily.
"That's in case you get any bright ideas," he said. "If you think it's wise to start shit with me again? That seal will make you regret existing before I come finish the job. Immense pain, complete paralysis, you stuck there until I show up to delete you. Got it?"
Great Red's colossal form shuddered.
Whether it was pain, fear, or pure rage, even Ren didn't bother to check.
He snorted and turned away, utterly unconcerned whether the Dragon of Dragons had truly heard and understood every word.
The seal would explain the rest.
His gaze moved on.
Brahma, Vishnu, and what remained of Shiva floated not far off, amid cracked void and shredded divine light.
Their bodies were in bad shape. Brahma's four faces were bruised and bloodied, two of them barely able to open their eyes. Vishnu's divine armor was cracked, the calm, composed aura around him flickering like a candle in a storm. Shiva's form was still knitting itself back together at the chest, pieces of godly flesh reassembling around a hole that had been where his heart should be.
Their god-seats—those abstract thrones of faith and authority they sat on in their own pantheon—were fractured, hairline cracks running through concepts like "creation," "preservation," and "destruction."
But they were not gone.
Not like Aten.
Not like Ares.
Not like Set.
Not like the ones he'd erased, concept and all.
For now.
Ren lifted his hand again.
Three more Dao seals blossomed into existence—each one small, coin-sized, hovering above his fingertips. Their designs differed subtly, tailored to the gods they were aimed at, but all radiated the same implacable warning.
They spun once.
Found their targets.
Shot forward.
One sank into Brahma's chest, right between two of his hearts. Another lodged itself in the center of Vishnu's brow, at the seat of calm understanding. The last disappeared into the empty space in Shiva's chest, just as torn flesh and divine light finished re-knitting around it.
All three gods stiffened.
Their divinity trembled, not from physical pain, but from sudden, crushing awareness. It felt, to them, like someone had taken the sky they were used to standing under and ripped it open, showing them something higher, colder, and utterly unconcerned with their status.
Brahma's four faces paled.
Vishnu's composed expression fractured for the first time, a hairline crack of pure unease appearing in his eyes.
Shiva—ever the most straightforward of the three—let out a sharp, involuntary breath.
Ren regarded them like a man checking whether his laundry was properly folded.
"You're still breathing," he said. "That's not because you deserve it."
His voice didn't gain any particular edge. If anything, it grew quieter.
"It's because you're more useful standing upright than as ash."
He let that sink in for a heartbeat.
"And let's be clear," he continued. "Just like I told that big red oaf—if any of you decide that 'balance' means targeting me, or anything connected to me, those seals will show you a kind of pain you didn't know existed."
His eyes were lazy, almost bored.
"That's my mercy," he went on. "You'll live. You'll just wish you didn't. Don't test it. So, play nice with the other factions."
Silence stretched.
Brahma swallowed, all four pairs of hands rising without conscious thought to clasp over his heart—as if he could physically hold down the seal lodged inside.
"…We understand," he said hoarsely.
Vishnu inclined his head, dignity bent but not entirely broken.
Shiva exhaled once, a rough, wordless acknowledgement that somehow carried more sincerity than any oath.
Ren nodded like they'd just agreed to help him move furniture on the weekend.
"Good talk."
He twisted his hand.
Space shivered in front of him.
A half-formed rift yawned open and spat out a figure, armor scuffed, blade still humming with lingering divine authority.
Susanoo hit the not-ground in a crouch, skidding slightly, eyes wide.
"What—?"
Ren looked down at him.
"Get lost," he said.
The words were calm.
The force behind them wasn't.
Susanoo's lips peeled back.
War-god instinct howled. Pride, fury, the urge to swing his blade just to see what would happen—it all flared up in that instant. He was one of the most violent gods of his pantheon. Being spoken to like that should've drawn blood.
Then his gaze flicked upward.
To the twelve Fate Palaces, hanging in a slow, silent ring overhead, each one radiating a pressure that made the concept of "Heavenly Dragon-class" feel small.
To the absence where Trihexa's rampaging bulk had been—gone, not just sealed as he'd heard in rumors, but subdued by this one man and locked away in a Heaven of his own making.
To Great Red's ruined form.
To the way the Hindu Trinity, gods he recognized as peers, watched Ren with the expressions of people staring at a second universe descending on their heads.
Whatever Susanoo had been about to say died in his throat.
Ren's smile turned sharp.
"You really thought about joining in this little stunt, huh?" he said, almost amused. "The only reason you're not paste right now is because Amaterasu is a divine maiden and I like her a lot."
His eyes lost all warmth.
"But hear this: try anything with me or my wives and you don't get a second warning. I'll simply erase you. Completely. Got it?"
Susanoo's jaw worked.
"…Tch."
He straightened in a blur and vanished along the fading Shinto channels, retreating like a man who'd just realized he was standing on the edge of a cliff in the dark.
Ren let him go without a second glance.
There were still others to deal with.
Farther off, the remnants of the Hero Faction clustered in a broken heap.
Cao Cao lay half-sprawled, the True Longinus gone from his hand, limbs crushed in too many places to count. Bones jutted at wrong angles under his skin. His aura, once sharp and arrogant, was a thin, flickering line.
Jeanne's armor was in tatters, divine protection shattered. Her hair, once braided and neat, hung loose and dusty around a face lined with exhaustion and stubborn resolve.
Heracles' monstrous muscles trembled, his regenerative ability straining against the suffocating weight of Ren's Heaven. Every time torn flesh tried to regrow, Dao suppression stifled it.
Georg coughed blood quietly, magic circles flickering and dying around his fingers, the refined, calculated calm in his eyes rattled but not completely gone.
Others—Curse specialists, swordsmen, martial artists—lay broken nearby, all of them breathing, all of them still clinging to consciousness like it was an enemy to be strangled.
Ren walked toward them.
Ophis kept pace at his side, her bare feet never quite touching the fabricated "ground." Infinity lingered around her like a faint distortion of air, now partially draped under his Heaven.
No one moved to stop him.
Even the gods looked away.
He stopped a few steps from Cao Cao and looked down.
"Still conscious?" he asked.
One of Cao Cao's eyes cracked open.
It was bloodshot, fever-bright—and awake.
"…Barely," he rasped.
Ren nodded once.
"Good," he said. "You fought like idiots."
He said it without malice, just flat assessment.
"But not like cowards. There's a difference."
He flicked his fingers.
Several smaller seals rose from his palm, each one simpler than the ones he'd driven into dragons and gods. They spun lazily, then shot out, curving through the air with perfect precision.
They sank into the Hero Faction one by one.
Jeanne shuddered, her teeth clenching.
Georg sucked in a sharp breath.
Heracles groaned, a sound halfway between a growl and a curse.
"These are the cheap versions," Ren said conversationally. "Not as vicious as the divine set. But if you try something cute against my people, they'll still make you wish for death. Just…" His smile tilted. "…more locally."
Jeanne's lips pressed into a thin line.
"…Why leave us alive at all?" Georg managed, voice rough. "After everything… we… did…"
Ren's smile didn't fade, but his eyes sharpened.
"Because I don't give a damn about your past," he said. "I care about something else."
He swept his gaze over them.
"Your will is interesting. Stubborn. Focused. You're the kind of idiots who see a Beast like that"—his thumb jerked lazily in the direction of where Trihexa used to be—"and still run toward it instead of away."
He shrugged.
"The world doesn't have many people like that. In my world, some of you could've competed for Heaven's Will, depending on the era."
His eyes settled on Cao Cao again.
"And you," he added. "You've been leaning on that spear so long you forgot there was a person attached to it."
Cao Cao let out a broken laugh that turned into a cough halfway through.
"You're… saying… I relied on a weapon too much?" he asked, voice thin.
"I'm saying it was your crutch," Ren replied. "True Longinus is a good tool. But you treated it like your spine."
He tilted his head.
"Next time you want to climb, try using your own legs. Consider this a little test. If you can live through this helpless state, I'll give you some pointers. If not…"
He lifted his shoulders in an easy shrug.
"That's on you."
Before any of them could respond, his Heaven flared under his feet.
The Dimensional Gap folded around the Hero Faction like a hand closing. Space pinched, twisted, then flipped.
"Bye-bye," Ren said.
Reality snapped.
Cao Cao, Jeanne, Georg, Heracles, and the others vanished, dropped neatly back into their base in the human world—bodies shattered, fate hanging by a thread, new seals humming quietly inside them like silent brands.
The Dimensional Gap groaned one last time.
Cracks began to still. The thrashing storm that had torn through it earlier settled into a heavy, exhausted quiet.
Ren lifted his head and looked up at the twelve Fate Palaces.
His Twelve Heavens turned slowly, worlds within worlds, their light now steady instead of blazing. Far within, pieces of Trihexa raged endlessly against the cages he'd built, their fury muffled and redirected into strengthening his Heaven.
Then he looked down at Ophis.
She stared back, expression unchanged, yet somehow… less empty than before.
"Alright," he said quietly. "Stage is cleaned."
His gaze flicked toward the distant, floating window where everyone watched.
"Time for the audience."
He reached out.
The universe moved.
One step carried him and Ophis out of the wrecked void, along a freshly carved path only he could see. They slipped through the remnants of the Biblical system, brushed past Heaven's borders, skipped like a stone across stabilized ley lines and reinforced barriers.
Then, all at once, the weight of the Dimensional Gap vanished.
Stone met their feet.
Sound rushed in—the held breath of thousands of beings, the quiet rustle of wings and clothes, the faint hum of magic circles.
They stepped out onto solid ground.
The viewing platform.