Chapter 285: The Nightmare From Elsewhere (3)

"I am Death," the Empress said, her smile holding a beauty that, to Melvin in that moment, far outweighed any dread it might have carried.

"De...ath?" Melvin repeated, as his withering seemingly stopped, and he was not seeking clarity, but as if he had just uncovered a precious secret.

It had been years since Akasha last spoke to him about Death, yet the idea had stayed rooted in his mind.

To Melvin, Death stood alongside his sword and his dream of turning the Kingdom of Blackwood into a mighty Empire.

All of it came from one intoxicating thought—the chance to wield its power, the power of Death itself, to bring his family back.

’Master... he called himself Lord Dream...’ Melvin mused, as something suddenly became terrifyingly clear.

He had seen with his own eyes what Akasha could do through the power of Dreams, and remembered him claiming he could do anything with it.

And Melvin himself was the God of Eternal Winters—if he could summon winter with a mere thought...

Then the Empress before him was not someone to be taken lightly.

In the next moment, he instinctively became defensive; his shoulders tensed as he remained kneeling, his hand climbing again for the Dreamer’s Mask as he tried once more to adjust it properly.

Seeing the motion, the Empress smiled as she bent close enough for her long black hair to slide past his cheek, and her pale fingers closed on the mask.

She lifted it from his head with the unhurried ease of someone taking an ornament from a table.

"Hmm, Divine Ranked?" she murmured, turning the mask over in her hands, feeling its weight as the garden’s dim light traced lazily across its surface.

"This is pretty impressive... well, for this little piece of existence, anyway."

Her gaze flicked back to Melvin, a knowing glint in her eyes.

"Melvin... that’s why you’re special," she said, her smile lingering without falter.

Melvin’s empty fingers froze midair as he reached for the mask, the motion halted like a paused frame.

He cast a lingering glance at her, his eyes searching for something unspoken, before letting out a long, weary sigh.

"What do you want from me?" he asked, his voice low and edged with fatigue.

The Empress’s smile only deepened as she tossed the mask upward with two fingers, and a thin rift opened above her hand, swallowed the mask whole, and sealed again as if nothing had happened at all.

"Relax," She said as she looked down at him. "I don’t want to kill you. I want to be friends."

----

Melvin’s situation didn’t seem as dire as he had begun to believe.

Outside, the vast blue-and-black expanse, the Smiling Court stretched for light-years, drifting through the void.

However, in this moment... Every world, corridor, and distant bastion lay sealed beneath ice so perfect that the entire realm seemed like a jewel caught in an eternal picture.

And... Akasha appeared about a light-year from that structure as if he had stepped out of nowhere, hands in his pockets, abyss-black eyes fixed on the distant ice-held empire.

For a long while he did nothing except stand in the blue-and-black dark with his eyes fixed on that distant stronghold, almost as if he was picturing something that didn’t yet exist in the waking world.

"My Luna," he murmured, the first words to leave his lips since the slaughter of billions of Masked Humans.

"You once told me I should have a galaxy under my control before I set out, didn’t you?"

He spoke as though she stood beside him, even knowing she could hear him from anywhere in existence.

The words were more for his own sake than hers.

Whether Luna had urged him to hold sway over a single galaxy or an entire galaxy cluster no longer made a difference.

Not with the way he felt in this moment.

Because what he had in mind was far greater—quite literally.

He slipped his hands from his pockets and stretched his arms wide, the gesture almost like an offering to the empire spread out before him.

Slowly, his form began to dissolve, breaking apart into shimmering particles of white, purple, and gray that lingered in the emptiness, forming a slow, shifting constellation in his shape.

Each speck of light drifted away, growing fainter, until there was nothing at all left where he had once stood.

HUMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!

In the very next moment, the entire star system erupted in a surge of Divinity that Divinity’s frozen empire shuddered as if its held breath had finally broken, and the surge did not stop with that system.

One by one, entire star systems were swept up in the same burst of Divinity before Divinity started to fall apart.

BOOOOOM!!!!!

BOOOOOOM!!!!!!

Stars that had been steady for eras lurched out of their orbits and collided, their fire merging into a single screaming sheet that covered neighboring worlds whole.

Whole belts of stone, once orderly, became storms of burning gravel that scoured what was left of the surfaces and then kept moving until there was nothing left to scour.

As the surgDivinityinity grew, galaxies that had spun in the same slow orbit for longer than most languages had existed began to shift.

The cores that once bound those galaxies together flared brightly, then collapsed inward, pulling light down with them.

Only then did Divinityinity reach Divinitypeak, and Akasha emerged once more.

But this time, his appearance was nothing like the form he usually took, for in this moment... he wasn’t drawing on some innate power or wielding an outrageous concept.

No, he had revealed his true self.

This was the genuine form of the Lesser Infinite Dream Unus. For races capable of transformation, no special ability or unique trait was necessary—only the sheer will to bring it into being.

He rose outside a world already coming to pieces, so vast that the breaking world sat in the hollow of his palms like a ball a child might close his hands around.

His long purple-and-white hair streamed down his back, caught in the wild winds of destruction.

His luminous brown skin radiated a subtle inner glow, standing out against the shifting white, purple, and gray light of his Divinity.

A divinity-lacking eye looked down on cities that were already opening like wounds, and a purple infinity symbol sat under his left eye on a face that held no expression at all.

Long pointed ears and the faint gleam of fangs marked the rest of that stillness.

To anyone who knew Akasha, this form would seem like an enlarged version of himself—and they wouldn’t be wrong.

But for the Unus race, no single form could truly define them.

More often than not, their real appearances were abstract symbols representing the kind of Unus they were.

Akasha, on the other hand, was the Infinite Dream Unus—someone who could take on and become anything he could, well, dream.

In that moment, as Akasha’s form appeared around a single world,....

Another version of him emerged outside a star system, then a galaxy, and so on, until an immense manifestation of himself loomed beyond every world, every star system, and every layer of cosmology....

Until he was standing outside the universe itself.

Each one held the shattered remnants of reality, as if preparing to clap—and wherever those hands hovered, the universe kept fracturing, inching toward a sound that had yet to be born.