From the hollow aftermath of fractured space, Nyx emerged.
He was not summoned. He was not born.
He was released.
The shattering of Mars was not the beginning it was the result. The consequence of unraveling a chain meant to hold something older than creation. Something primal.
Nyx, the Sleeper Beyond Light, had once been locked in a folded pocket dimension, a sealed world floating between timelines. Time did not flow there. Nothing aged, nothing changed. It was a cage made by those who feared what even gods refused to name.
The Arch-Demon's distortion his reality breaking power had been the key. A scream loud enough to echo across realms, vibrating the foundation of that cage until it cracked.
And Nyx… walked free.
He did not arrive. He was suddenly there.
One blink, and the stars themselves stuttered.
Another, and the pocket dimension was gone.
Not collapsed.
Not destroyed.
Erased.
As if it had never been.
The moment Nyx breathed into realspace, Mars detonated behind him.
Nyx didn't cause it. He simply allowed it to happen. His existence permitted destruction. His presence made reality pliable, like old paper soaked in blood and heat.
He was not a being.
He was a permission.
"This world is overripe..." Nyx whispered, his voice not echoing but directly inserting itself into the minds of those who still had thoughts.
"Time to begin... again."
His body wasn't physical. It was a negative silhouette, like the absence of a figure. You could see stars through him but twisted, wrong, misaligned. His eyes were twin spirals, always spinning inward, always pulling.
And as he began his descent to Earth, everything changed.
In the war rooms, monitors fizzled. Satellites fell silent. Signals were jammed not by hacking, but by non-existence. Where Nyx passed, data unraveled. Memories were corrupted retroactively soldiers forgot people who never died, only to suddenly remember them all at once.
"Sir… I think we're already dead," whispered a general, tears running down his face.
"I think… I think he's unmaking us from the future backwards."
And deep underground, in the facility where the immortal girl was still held, alarms rang violently. Her tank cracked. Her eyes opened.
She felt Nyx.
She felt the opposite of life.
For the first time since her regeneration activated, her body hesitated.
In the broken cities, refugees screamed as the skies looped. Birds flew backwards. Rain fell in cubes. Gravity tilted sideways.
The Arch-Demon stood atop a floating slab of earth, staring into the cosmic abyss as Nyx approached.
"So… you're what I unleashed."
"You are what comes after."
"Then let's see if the last sin of mankind can silence the first."
They launched at each other not in a clash of fists, but of concepts.
Time bent. Space inverted. And Earth became the arena for a war that should never exist.