“No, no. No! No! No!” Senyak yelled to himself as he appeared at the last known location of Sadie, the Ka dominion.

A large pile of wrecked automobiles littered the street and sidewalks, several having crashed into nearby buildings before coming to a rest.

“Combi! Locate the chaos agent’s Ka signature.” Then, he spoke to Damni as he cast a worried glance around the destruction. “I don’t know how he got out of the Ka dominion. Perhaps it was this massive transport accident that caused her death?”

Damni looked around at the destruction. “There is a complete absence of mortal remains. No bodies, no blood, nothing alive or dead. This was no mortal accident.” Damni’s telescoping neck extended her ovoid head a full meter above Sen’s, and she spun in a slow 360-degree rotation to confirm her assessment. “... and it’s Automobiles, honey... automobiles...”

After taking in her surroundings, she looked directly at Sen “... It is more likely that this accident occurred after his release from the Ka dominion. As for how he got out? There are expensive ways he could have facilitated her death. But regardless... without a doubt, the Chaotic has activated the Essence Array. You can feel the wild Essence flooding this area.”

Sen nodded. It made sense. Any release of Essence that left so much residue behind would have destroyed any mortal soul tethers in the area. Sen sighed. Was there any despicable thing this chaos agent wouldn’t do?

Sen’s Combi chimed and reported something difficult to believe.

“Immortal Ka signature located seventy-five meters to your right.”

Senyak and Damni turned with incredulous looks on their faces. He was right there!

A black-haired cultivator with thick, closely trimmed facial hair, garbed in long, dark, and loose-fitting robes. His eyes flashed with intensity where he cast them, and right now, he was smashing a mortal’s face into the ground next to a flipped transport. Is that Joshua Elias Tanner? Senyak didn’t know why the chaos agent was still present or how he had apprehended Joshua. But he did know questions were for later. The chaos agent had finally made his first mistake, and Senyak would capitalize on it.

Signaling Damni to stay back, Sen moved in.

Physical combat was relatively new to Senyak...Something he had barely dabbled in. To most Immortals, who generally considered it pointless. Physical means, no matter how potent, couldn’t destroy Ka. There weren’t many non-physical means to destroy it either, hence the term Immortal. But here, in a material realm, physical combat held validity. Because of this, Senyak had studied it for the last five hundred years just for this event. Rolling his shoulders and loosening his neck, Senyak activated his acceleration strike.

Channeling Ka from his Immortal core, Senyak increased his physical avatar’s overall mass, almost instantaneously reaching a density equal to that of an atomic nucleus. The same density that the heart of a neutron star reached just before forming a singularity. Simultaneously, he launched himself forward by opening a focused micro-gate from the center of the local star.

“The sun... yes, Damni...” Senyak muttered, his eyes fixed on the chaos agent.

At once, the force of the sun’s nuclear fusion, turning 600 million tons of hydrogen to helium per second, accelerated his body to a significant fraction of the speed of light in less than two nanoseconds.

Sen sighed to himself. This attack really lacked oomph. But confined as they were to this physical iteration, along with the limits of the Penta Protocol about collateral damage, It’s the best I can do.

Surprisingly, over the time Sen had been required to spend in this iteration, he had found that sometimes just plain hitting things was quite cathartic. Moving at 2500 meters per second, Sen was sure that hitting the Chaotic was going to feel pretty good!

While it was technically accurate that even in physical matter iterations, battling Immortals could abandon their physical avatar for their Immortal Ka form. If the chaos agent did that this physical attack would have no effect on him. Ka was eternal and couldn’t be affected by physical attacks. But if he chose that, the Actor would be at the mercy of Senyak in his Immortal form.

If only he were that foolish! Sen found himself salivating at the thought.

Sadly, Sen was certain the chaos agent was not interested in facing a fourth-tier combat specialist in his Immortal form.

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In the long nanoseconds it took Sen to close in, he couldn’t keep a smile from growing on his lips.

Transcendence! This is going to feel good!

Until it wasn’t–

Pivoting as fast as Sen, the Chaotic spun his avatar to face the approaching Immortal with a leveled glare and spread his arms in a Yin and Yang conformation. The motion revealed a space of infinite yellow-white brightness that snapped open like a sail in a strong wind. Countless emerald and sapphire bolts of lightning streaked across the vast spaces of the newly opened dimension. It’s really quite picturesque... was the last thought that passed through Sen’s mind as the emission of thermal radiation reached Sen. Instantly incinerating his Kāṣāya, top knot, eyebrows, and pubic hair along with slagging the asphalt he was flying over into bubbling black magma.

Sen tried to halt his forward progress, but he was already airborne and had no leverage. He passed through the portal, unable to stop his momentum, dragging air with his fingers as the black edges of the portal closed. Uncountable bolts of blue and green lightning from the primordial plasma began striking him with rapid frequency until there was a spherical corona of electric discharges arrayed around and coursing through and around Sen’s physical body. His avatar’s external edges were blackening into cinders and blasting off increasingly larger chunks from the nonstop barrage of electromagnetic strikes. The continual polarization and repolarization was seriously interfering with the neuronal transmission of the physical brain Sen was forced to function with when inhabiting such an Avatar. Sen spun, looking for a way out, but his thoughts were getting sluggish, and his limited physical senses perceived nothing but a searing white glare that was starting to melt his eyes.

Translocate back to earth! Sen called on his Ka to get him the heck out of this mess ... and was translocated an unknown distance deeper into the never-ending glare of his current dimension!? Again, again, and again he commanded to translocate back to Damni, Joshua, the Chaotic ... with the same result. Each time the gap between his commands and the relocation to a different area of the yellow-white hell he was in took longer.

The arms and legs of his avatar had been completely radiated into solid blacked lumps of their carbon base. Sen commanded his Immortal Ka to regrow them ... Slowly, they reformed and started to immediately blacken again into unmoving useless rods of burnt-out cinders–

“Ok ... That’s enough of this.” The Chaotic's voice was heard over the constant static filling Sen’s world, and an arm reached out and pulled him back to land face down on the still-cooling surface of the street he had just left. A strong hand slammed down on the back of his neck, and something pierced through and lodged itself in his top cervical vertebra and began to ... dissolve and spread out?!

“... That’s a pocket dimension accessed near the supermassive black hole Sagittarius-A in the center of this galaxy ... it is large enough to have trapped the echoes of force and a fair amount of hydrogen plasma from the detonation of the primordial singularity that formed this iteration ... but too small to have formed any meaningful physical constructs. So, it just kind of keeps banging away!” The Chaotic informed Sen with a smile in his voice. “The forces are primitive but quite powerful… They do a number on even Immortal physical avatars, don’t they?”

Sen looked up at the grinning bearded face of the Chaotic with still rolling eyes from his disorientation. “You can’t beat me in a fight! No matter how many games you play.” He pulsed Ka through his meridians and reformed his avatar out of the charred husk it had become. Slightly disoriented but physically recovered, Sen sprang up to his feet and advanced on the Chaotic in a fighting stance on steadily strengthening legs.

“Whoa, whoa! Still have some fight left I see—” The tall Chaos Agent again quickly backed up and started circling away from Sen’s advancing form with a confident grin. He raised his hands, implying he had no desire for physical conflict.

The Chaotic raised his brows and chuckled at Sen’s statement as he continued to circle away from Sen’s much more cautious approach. “... True Senyak ... Very true ...” Then he stopped circling away and stood tall in front of Sen shaking his head. “... But I don’t have to fight you to defeat you. Haven’t you learned that yet?” A deep, mocking belly laugh erupted from him as he pointed an accusing index finger at Sen. “... You still don’t understand that do you–”

Sen launched at the actor with a lunge punch connecting with his chin designed to separate his head from his shoulders and finished in a side stance to bring another hand strike or a roundhouse swing from his right leg–

Sen’s hand passed directly through the Chaotic’s face, shattering the projection into evaporating motes of Ka that diminished as they drifted up in black and glistening particles to rejoin the metaverse.

“Wha ?!?” He wasn’t a simulacrum... my Combi would have informed me!?! Combi location of the Chaos Agent?!

Mental static”–attempting to comp–” The Combi’s signal failed. It was still present, and Sen could feel it entwining his Ka and mentation. But somehow ... It couldn’t be accessed!

The Chaos Agent reappeared before the befuddled Sen. In fact, he reappeared in dozens of ridiculing and jeering forms, all laughing and pointing at their own motivations. Sen spun around to take them all, unable to keep the look of nervous concern from his face.

One stepped forward and waved the others to silence. “... Sen, these are all Ka supported after image reflections generated with an understanding of mortal level Time Space Attunement ...” He held his open hands up to himself and the dozens of others all around. “... We’re no threat to you. A mere temporal illusion, so to speak– But your Combi would have informed you of the limelight if you were still able to access it ...” He leaned at Sen and pointed an index finger at his chest. “You’re not connected to it anymore, are you?” The knowing look of taunting superiority indicated the Actor already knew the answer.

The tall dark Chaotic put one foot back and leaned forward with his clenched fists rolling in a wheel in front of him. “Well, let’s have at it, Sen! One of us is bound to be real. You’ll get to me eventually. Hahahaha.”