PART II

THEN (6 Months Previously)

Looking down on the grey green world from orbit, Zachias surveyed his most recent conquest. He stood on a fractal platform of Qi in the void of space with his arms crossed over his chest.

He remembered a time long past, when he had needed armies and powerful allies to subjugate a world. Now, they just surrendered as soon as he showed them his power.

Zachias turned away and considered his next acquisition. He looked to the section of the Cosmos that was largely unexplored and chose a place from which to begin his search. Summoning his True Willpower, Zachias folded the space between himself and his destination. He used his will to create a tear in space, and traveled an unimaginable distance with a single step.

Exiting the tear in space and creating a new platform to stand on, he began to expand his senses across this galaxy to find a world worth his effort.

He did not bother to hide his presence. Zachias was an apex predator on the scale of the universe and he knew it. There were very few beings alive who could threaten him.

He found a world that was full of life about two thirds away from the center of the galaxy in one of the spiral arms. Unfortunately, there was almost no Qi on this planet at all. He turned his back to the world, looking for a more valuable prospect.

When his senses expanded again in this new direction, Zachias felt something that he had not felt for so long, it was almost completely foreign to him.

He felt danger.

His shining silver eyes immediately snapped up to locate the source of this feeling. Zachias used his Chakra to send a wave through his spirit to warm up his Qi in preparation for a fight.

When his eyes finally found the threat that his instincts had warned him about, his blood felt like it had frozen in his veins.

There, several thousand kilometers away in the void, a tall, handsome human with cropped white hair approached. He had a tight white beard, and one piercing blue eye on the left side of his face. His right eye was covered by a patch.

The cloak wrapped around his shoulders looked like it was made out of a starry night sky, and underneath, Zachias could see that he was wearing a suit of black heavenly armor.

In his right hand, the man held a beautiful spear with a flat silver head. There was an extraordinarily complex fractal pattern engraved into the edges of the blade. The majestic weapon was so obviously powerful, so real, it was surrounded by an aura that crackled with horrifying energy.

As the man approached, it almost seemed to Zachias as if he was standing still and the Universe was moving around him as though afraid to get in this man’s way. In his piercing blue eye, Zachias saw an ancient intelligence that held not one single grain of mercy.

Their eyes met, and Zachias felt real fear for the first time in epochs. He manifested his Qi into a fractal barrier that surrounded him in a gigantic glowing blue sphere that was thousands of kilometers in diameter. Just looking at the scripts that formed the shining protective sphere would blind lesser beings.

This barrier could protect Zachias from an endless meteor shower without ever sustaining a single scratch. It could stop even a hypernova in its tracks or the barrage of a class five warship.

The man simply held his majestic spear out as he flew forward and the blue barrier was pierced without even slowing him down.

Zachias manifested his Celestial Kingdom for many kilometers in every direction from his core. Within that sphere of influence, he became reality's only author. The laws of the universe were his to decide inside his domain.

The first thing he did, was to manipulate the nature of his manifested Qi. It became a force of absolute destruction that he wove into a technique so powerful, it could theoretically wipe out an entire galaxy.

The technique took the form of a massive black dragon that coiled around Zachias like a snake preparing to strike. He pushed his hand out and the dragon struck at the human, consuming everything in its path, literally.

This technique was called the Annihilation Dragon, and it consumed not just matter, but space and time as well. Anything that touched the technique became fuel to make it bigger and more powerful. If he didn't dismiss it, the dragon would continue to feed and grow, destroying everything until there was nothing left in this galaxy to consume, at which point it would collapse if it found nothing more to sustain it.

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It was Zachias’ most powerful technique and he had only ever used it if he was backed into a corner. This time, his enemy was so dangerous that he felt compelled to pull it out in the beginning. The black dragon flew through the space between them and ate the cloaked and armored human, who never even tried to dodge.

Hoping that the threat was past, Zachias allowed the black dragon to continue to devour everything and grow larger. As the lifelike destructive technique soared through the void, the blue-skinned warrior felt a spike of danger just before a giant spear emerged from the back of the coiling dragon.

The black armored human emerged from the hole left by the spear and to Zachias’ horror, his most powerful technique fell apart from the damage.

As the man approached the edge of his Celestial Kingdom, Zachias prepared to erase the human’s existence. He didn't expect it to be easy, but within this manifested sphere, his will determined reality. It should be possible to wipe away even someone as powerful as this human.

The armored man stopped just outside of Zachias' domain and stared at the light blue-skinned warrior without fear. The one-eyed man held his beautiful spear out in front of him casually. Then, he bent his knees and leapt to Zachias with so much physical power, he crossed the kilometers between them faster than the speed of light. Reality itself seemed to bend around the man as if it could not bear to stand in his way.

Zachias tried to create a fold in space in front of the man that would take him to the other side of the Universe into the middle of a supermassive star, but the human’s spear pierced through that portal just like it had everything else. He attempted to destroy reality around the human and erase him entirely, but even that working failed as it too was punctured by the silver spear tip.

That confirmed it for Zachias. The weapon that the human was wielding was clearly a Reality Armament. It was the highest form of artifact in the universe. A mythological tool that was so incredibly powerful, it worked beyond the level of reality itself. This spear was an absolute tool of the concept of piercing. It never missed because it didn't just move through flesh or space or even time.

It pierced straight through reality itself.

Anything touched by that spear was doomed to be removed from existence. Although Zachias could technically erase physical objects from reality with his Celestial Kingdom, there was an enormous difference in power to this spear.

Zachias could remove anything within his manifested Kingdom, but as soon as he released his workings, the natural reality would begin to reassert itself immediately. On the other hand, when this spear pierced through reality, the damage it left behind was permanent. It became a part of the natural reality.

The only way to stop a weapon like this was with another artifact on the same level, and there were so few to be found. It was said that only the highest beings in the universe could wield them. Zachias had seen much of the Cosmos in his travels, and even he had only heard tell of a few. The Monkey King's staff, the hammer of Thor, and the Allfather's spear, Gungnir.

"Odin" Zachias said out loud as the god of war perforated his chest with his legendary weapon.

Neither his chest plate of white heavenly armor nor his extraordinarily durable body offered the spear any resistance at all. Zachias could do nothing but watch in powerless horror as his heart was pierced.

The god of war looked unrepentantly into Zachias' silver eyes as he removed the spear from his chest. Odin released the weapon’s handle with his right hand and lined up a palm strike.

He smashed his palm into Zachias' chest with strength that defied the laws of nature. The shockwave from the palm strike would demolish all nearby heavenly bodies. Even the local stars would be ripped apart by just the after effect of the strike, snuffed out like candles in the wind.

Zachias was blasted away by the blow, and he flew backwards across the galaxy faster than the speed of light. He was flying far too fast to even attempt to stop.

Instead, he focused on his chest wound. He tried to replace the damaged flesh with Qi, then he attempted to speed up his own natural healing. He even tried to use his Celestial Kingdom to rewind the time around his chest to before he was injured, but the spear had pierced through reality on such a fundamental level, that he lacked the ability to repair it.

Zachias was dying.

He lost consciousness for an unknown amount of time before he was raised from his forced slumber by the sound of his entry into an atmosphere. He had been caught in a gravity well, and the friction of his fall through the air was creating enough heat to start a fire. It certainly was not hot enough to cause any damage to Zachias' flesh, but the fall was the least of his problems.

As he crashed into the ground, Zachias tried to sense the world around him without moving his head. By this point, his body was going numb. He could sense that he had landed on a world teeming with life, but held very little ambient Qi.

Of course, it was the world that he had turned his back to earlier. When he felt something touch his chest, Zachias opened his eyes to find a human kneeling over his prone figure pressing a cloth shirt onto his wound.

He was a man who stood under two meters with olive skin and straight dark hair that fell just past his ears. He looked down on Zachias with panic in his bright green eyes. Zachias could sense that this human was extremely weak. It was hardly a surprise. On a world with so little Qi, it was likely that there was not a single being alive who had even discovered the path of ascension.

Zachias gathered every bit of Daofire and willpower that he had left and focused all of it on his mind's eye. He needed to ensure that he would leave a fully sentient Inheritance when he died. He looked at the human with pity in his silver eyes and even tried to apologize with his last breath.

In his final moment, Zachias thought of nothing but vengeance against Odin.