The paramounts, the three most powerful Immortals in all Reality stared awestruck from the fifty-fifth aspect doorway into the face of absolute nothingness... Oblivion. Each knew that despite their countless ages of absolute Authority, they were now confronted by something so much greater than themselves that there was no path to safety concerning it.

The only thing each of the three truly knew was that if they didn’t do something... anything, and in relatively short order, all probability calculations confirmed that Oblivion’s continued advance was the terminal end of... well, everything...

Oblivion was not darkness, not light, not the crushing gravity of a singularity that mortals made such great noises about.

It’s just a rotting, Ka-less gray mire that devours any underlying aggregate without discrimination and leaves behind it only absence...

Zenyak Marztanak, the Penultimate Combatant, flared his nostrils at his powerlessness before Oblivion and considered the very little bit he did know about it.

Everything that makes contact with it faces absolute and complete annihilation, regardless of whether it is physical, spiritual, mortal Essence, or even Immortal Ka... All substrates are impotent against Oblivion’s procession.

All Immortals who touched it had succumbed instantly. No residual remainder of their Ka was even detectable.

Unfortunately, this fact has been proven on several occasions despite their concerted efforts for over 200,000 Ka Nexus cycles. Any Immortal who had come into contact with the entity had found their strength inadequate to withstand the obliteration that awaited any who had penetrated even a portion of their energy through it. This was true regardless of using their Immortal Ka forms or physical matter avatars.

A further complication and perhaps even more frustrating was the fact that none of their disciplines of perception had been able to pierce Oblivion’s gray surface or quantify its properties. Was it alive? Was it growing? Was it angry?

Is it a massive dog turd from the dream of Angkasa that awaits all Immortals when we have finished our cultivation and Ascend to the great unknown beyond? If an Ascended Immortal ever came back Zenyak would be sure to ask... As it's never happened to my knowledge, I imagine that such a thing is going to be a wait…

Zenyak rubbed his physical Avatar’s face with an open hand to refocus back on the present.

The only real information we have gleaned in the past 200,000 Ka Nexus cycles is the rate at which Oblivion consumes normal iterations. Something we have barely been able to effect…

His next thought Zenyak shared in frustration with the other two paramounts. “We’ve hardly even slowed it down. And the cost to accomplish even that is on the edge of insanity!”

Neither Chiteki, the Prime Motivator nor the entity known only as the Principal Master responded to the obvious truth.

Zenyak cast a sideways glance at them with his avatar but didn’t blame them. It had taken the implosion of a wide swath of entire complete iterational cuboids back into primordial singularities to curb Oblivion’s pace of advancement a meager 14 percent since it had first been encountered. The complete resetting of twenty-seven complete realities per cuboid, multiplied by hundreds of thousands of cuboids that stretched from the fifty-eighth aspect doorway to where they now stood at–the fifty-fifth.

Still, the only solace is that so far, Oblivion has had very little impact on mortal life and Immortal existence.

Zenyak rubbed his eyes and nodded slightly to himself as he attempted to keep things in perspective. Very few Immortals knew or even cared to know that the iterations of Reality frequented by sapient beings was generally limited to the iterational cuboids of the first thirty-five aspect doorways. Those started and branched off from the designated ‘ground zero’, his own Polar Neutral Iteration.

The reason for the lack of emergence of mortal life and the concurrent existence of Immortals beyond the thirty-fifth aspect doorway was due to the fact that the iterations that far away were only abstract substrates. They possessed too few dimensional vectors to support mortal life in any variety. Lacking mortal life, these iterations had never given rise to Immortal existences as a place of origin. They also had very little to attract any Immortals for a short visit let alone to set up permanent residence.

Imploding these iterations down to oblong and hyperdense singularities slightly less than two meters in diameter had created a metaphysical fire line. It has become a barrier the three Paramounts had hoped would slow Oblivion down and allow their subordinates to find a way to gather some information for a better next step. It had cost enormous reserves of energy from each of the three that they had held in reserve in order to leave the Immortal realms and push on toward Ascension–the mysterious beyond.

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They had each made the sacrifice, millions of Ka Nexus cycles of accumulated cultivation of their Immortal Ka. Now they were all unable to push to Ascension until it had been replaced. Each of the three had considered it a small price to pay to protect all that existed from dissolution. Luckily for them, it seemed to have worked. The three-aspect-doorway thick layer of condensed universes had been slightly harder to digest. The original spread between iterational cuboids was assessed at one per 2,500 Ka nexus rotations... And approximately one aspect doorway per 65,000 Ka nexus rotations. After their implosion tactic, this had stretched to 2,850 and 74,100, respectively.

But as the three looked on from the on from their vantage from the fifty-fifth aspect doorway, they could see Oblivion's gray goop even now finishing the last row of the solidified cuboids. The great sacrifice had amounted to no more than buying a small amount of time.

We haven’t even come close to stopping it.

Not being finished stating the obvious. Zenyak raised a hand and spoke what they all had been thinking, “Trench digging... that’s what we have been reduced to.”

The Prime Motivator, having stared into nothingness for long enough, took his verbal bait and turned to Zenyak with a jovial tone, “Regretting not Ascending into the Great Unknown before this was found? I know I am!” His youthful face broke with a genuine chuckle.

Zenyak turned his strong and wizened avatar’s countenance to the fourteen-year-old looking avatar preferred by the Chiteki, the Primary Motivator, who had become his friend over the last hundreds of million Ka nexus rotations. The youth currently floated in a lotus position upside down and rotating so fast that all that could be seen of him was a blurring inverted tetrahedron of Ka and his faced-up palms sitting on his knees.

“Grow up, Chiteki!” Zenyak chided, chuckling with his friend.

Then, after a moment, seriousness returned to Chiteki's voice, and he continued.

“We currently have the power reserves to do it again. . . but if we don’t get any better results, either slowing it more or attaining some information about any possible weakness… in 200,028 Ka Nexus rotations we’ll be left with our final option–” Chiteki puffed his juvenile cheeks and made the sound of an explosion as he splayed his fingers and separated them for the same visual effect.

Simultaneous detonation of our cultivations… Zenyak grimaced, and for his friends’ sake, he hoped things wouldn’t come to that eventuality... But all three were united and willing, if necessary, as the probability engines they had used predicted that the joint detonation of their cultivations as near as possible to Oblivion had a theoretical chance of quintessential disruption of its matrix. Even the staunchest individuals faced with such things had to consider their possible end… and what steps needed to be taken if such a thing was to occur. Oblivion’s presence was the very reason Zenyak had been moved to reevaluate his legacy… and found all but Senyak wanting. Oblivion was also the reason why there would be no holding back in Zenyak’s guiding his last Heir’s reacquisition of Transcendence… properly.

“That is a pretty slender reed to hang our last hopes on Chi…” Zenyak summed up his old counter argument of risking everything on an ‘unconfirmed possibility.’ But he trailed off not having any other ideas of how to stop Oblivion after the 200,000 rotations they had bought with their power.

The Principal Master, the third member of the Paramounts, stoic as always, ignored both of their antics and proceeded to the matter at hand. Extending his Intention, he began the desiccation once again of entire cuboidal clusters of iterations.

“...Are we ready to restart the implosion protocol? You were right that it will buy more time that I hope we use more wi—MOVE!”

A scaled lash shot from the center of Oblivion’s gray mass and swept across the ranks of Immortals arrayed before it. None were spared. Not the Masters in the service to the Principal Master. Not the Seraph who served the Prime Motivator Chiteki. Nor did any of the combat-focused followers of Zenyak, the Penultimate Combatant, do any better. All were instantly annihilated as the pseudopodia extension crashed through them, ending their existences as it headed toward the three leaders.

Zenyak, always the fastest in combat, erected his Ka core shield and stood before the other two as they opened a Reality portal back toward safety, several dozen aspect doorways away.

The thick, grey limb struck Zenyak’s shield and partially penetrated his bulwark—a barrier that had for time immemorial been unscathed to all forces. The Penultimate Combatant’s knees buckled, and he roared through clenched teeth in defiance as his meridians began draining Ka like water poured into sand. The translucent silver-white of his bulwark flared into full opacity trying to match Oblivion’s force… but Zenyak was losing! This was no contest. He wasn’t even going to be able to last the brief nano-gyra it would take his two companions to get the doorway open.

As a last-ditch effort, Zenyak opened his Immortal Ka core and converted oceans of Immortal Essence to keep the shield between his friends and the complete end that Oblivion’s tentacle promised.

The only thought that raged through Zenyak’s thinking as his spirit began to fade. I must keep this shield up! If we end here and now, there is no hope for the multiverse as a whole! All of Reality will be destroyed!

Reality’s deep blue hues sprang into swirling fullness as the aspect doorway opened behind the three Paramounts.

As if Oblivion could tell they were escaping, the force of the lash’s attack intensified. Driving Zenyak fully to his knees, his vision narrowing.

From a distance, he heard the principal master's alarmed voice yelling, “Chiteki! Grab him! His core meridians are rupturing from the strain!”

Then all was the swirling blue of the Way.