Chapter 161: Tianzuns Attack (1)
The colosseum stood at the edge of nothing.
Sixty thousand people leaned over their rails and stared down into the barren dark where a stage had been, and not one of them could say what they were looking at. The ground was gone. The craters were gone. The two fighters were gone. There was only the vast, silent emptiness, and the single question turning through every mind at once.
Where did they go?
Some pointed. Some covered their mouths. In the stands, a man who had paid a fortune for a front-row seat leaned so far over the rail that his neighbors grabbed his belt. Nobody had an answer. The two greatest unknowns in the tournament had stepped off the edge of the world in front of the entire planet, and the world had simply closed over them without a ripple.
[Opalion: are they DEAD? did she kill them both??]
[Marypaz13: bring the stage back bring the stage back bring the stage BACK]
[Decato: two hundred million people staring at a black screen praying. what a day]
Nicholas frowned at the rail, his one good eye scanning the void below. For a moment, even he was skeptical of his own senses, half convinced the two of them had simply been erased along with everything else.
’No. She wouldn’t kill him. And a god doesn’t die because the floor left.’ He exhaled slowly. ’I’m not going to trust my eyes on this one.’
He reached inward, past the ache of his ribs and the drained warmth of his reserves, and opened the Third Eye.
The world changed.
Where the crowd saw barren darkness, where even the cameras found only a rectangle of black, the borrowed sight tore the veil away, and Nicholas saw through the cracks in space itself.
And what he saw stole the breath out of him.
Vixen had not erased the arena. She had collapsed it.
The entire region of space where the stage had stood was folding in on itself, over and over, a churning vortex of shredded reality where every direction fed into every other, a grinder built out of the fabric of the world. Space tore, healed, and tore again a thousand times a second, and anything caught inside that region would be pulled apart along seams too small and too numerous to survive.
’Such immense control,’ Nicholas thought, genuine amazement rising through the exhaustion as he watched the impossible machine turn.
Because it was not chaos. That was the part that struck him hardest.
She had measured it. The collapse did not spread. It stopped at a precise boundary, held there by her will, so the shredding vortex devoured the stage and nothing beyond it, sparing the stands, the crowd, the barrier, the whole of the arena around it. Inside that same storm she had woven a shell of folded space around her own body, a shield holding the grinder off her skin by a hand’s width, and with the rest of her focus she was steering the entire collapse, a woman standing at the center of an apocalypse and conducting it like an orchestra.
Nicholas let the copy settle into his slots, felt the shape of the technique, and did the math on what it would cost.
{Copy: Spatial Collapse}
His jaw tightened.
To reproduce even a fraction of that, to hold a shredder of that scale and shape it with that precision, would cost more Charm Points than he currently owned. Not close. Even flush, even at the height of the Mercury payout, his reserves would run dry before the vortex fully formed.
’A skill that empties me just to switch on. And she’s holding it open like she’s stretching before a run.’
He studied the churning region through the Third Eye, and a cold certainty settled in.
In the face of a spatial shredder of that caliber, death was not a question. It was not a possibility to be weighed or a danger to be endured. It was a simple mechanical fact. The moment anything entered that region, it ended. There was no version of walking through that. There was no body strong enough, no armor thick enough, no speed fast enough. Reality itself had been turned into a blade with no flat side.
’To use something like this in a tournament,’ Nicholas thought, a flicker of dark amusement crossing his mind despite everything. ’I told her to do her best. I think she took it a little too far.’
Then his gaze widened, and the amusement died.
Because through the Third Eye, at the heart of the churning vortex, in the one place in the world where existence itself was being ground into nothing...
Tianzun was walking.
The monk strolled through the spatial shredder with his hands folded into his sleeves, and space and time bent around his body as he moved, parting before each step and closing behind it. Everything inside that region was meant to be destroyed. That was the entire truth of the place. And yet this one human walked through it as though crossing a garden, calm and unhurried, the grinder of reality simply declining to touch him.
Not even his robes were scraped by the spatial energy rupturing on every side.
The saffron cloth swayed with his steps, whole and undisturbed, in the center of a storm that would have unmade a mountain.
"...Impossible," Vixen whispered.
In that moment, everything she thought she knew about the world slipped quietly away from her. She had reached past her own limits. She had awakened a second time and lived. She had built the single most absolute technique of her life and aimed the whole of it at one man, and that man was walking toward her through the impossible as if she had done nothing at all.
Standing before Tianzun, nothing made sense to her anymore.
The monk emerged from the dying vortex, the collapse folding shut behind him, and the world quietly returned. Stone flowed back beneath his feet. The ruined stage reassembled out of the dark. The barren emptiness knitted itself closed, and the colosseum reappeared around them, whole and roaring back into existence, as sixty thousand people gasped at the return of a world they hadn’t understood was gone.
Tianzun still wore that same calm smile as he looked at Vixen.
She stood across from him, drained, shaking, her second awakening spent, her greatest work broken around her like everything else that had been thrown at him this endless day.
"Three," Tianzun said gently.
And then, for the first time in the entire tournament, for the first time in three undefeated years, the monk drew his hands from his sleeves and lowered his weight into a stance.
"Now it’s my turn."