Darkness Angel tilted his head.
"Quite bold of you," he mused, voice as calm as the abyss. "This form of yours."
The domain shifted.
No..
It obeyed.
A whisper of his will, a command that was not spoken, and the flickering darkness began to shift.
The white struggled. The ash recoiled.
And then, in an instant...
The void won.
It surged, swallowing the light, pulling everything into its endless, devouring abyss.
Darkness Angel raised a hand.
The world, the neverending domain trembled.
And from the darkness, so dark that nothing could be seen....
Blades.
They did not appear. They did not materialize.
They had always been there.
Infinite, stretching beyond the concept of space, beyond time, beyond even the domain itself.
And then...
Arrows.
Not formed. Not summoned.
Only revealed.
Darker than void.
Endless.
A thousand? A million? Numbers lost their meaning. There were only weapons.
Darkness Angel’s fingers twitched.
A whisper of motion.
The air cracked.
He smiled.
"Just die."
The blades fell.
The arrows descended.
A storm of death.
An execution written into the very fabric of existence itself.
The Wanderer Who Laughs didn’t move, didn’t flinch, he only smiled, raising his hands.
Not to shield himself.
Not to fight.
His fingers spread, his arms lifted as if welcoming something unseen...
As if embracing the emptiness.
The chaos.
His voice, when it came, was soft. Amused.
"Wouldn’t it be wonderful…"
A pause.
A heartbeat.
A whisper of inevitability.
"…if they all disappeared?"
And then..
He clapped.
A soundless impact.
Not a shockwave. Not destruction.
Something worse.
Nothing.
The moment his hands met...
The weapons ceased.
Not shattered.
Not dodged.
Not erased.
They simply ceased.
Blades that had never missed. Arrows that had never been avoided. An infinity of death, now nothing.
Not even the darkness could reclaim them.
Not even the domain remembered them.
They were gone.
Darkness Angel’s smile faltered.
His eyes flickered.
His breath, unnecessary as it was, felt stilled.
"…Impossible."
The words left him unbidden.
And yet..
The Wanderer Who Laughs stood there.
Unharmed.
Unmoved.
His smile, ever growing wider.
And in that moment..
The dark domain changed.
No, it flipped.
An unfathomable shift, not of space, not of time, but of something deeper. The black abyss, once endless, once absolute, reversed. The darkness did not recede. It did not flee.
It was replaced.
A stark, ashen white swallowed everything. Not a color. Not a light. A presence, vast and incomprehensible. The domain itself struggled to define what it was.
And in that moment..
Darkness Angel felt it.
The first thing was fire.
Not flames. Not heat.
Raw. Unrelenting. Agony.
It did not burn his flesh. It did not pierce his body. No wound, no affliction, no visible scar.
And yet...
Everything hurt.
His wings. His hands. His thoughts. His very being.
A pain not meant to be felt. A torment not meant to exist. A suffering without form, without meaning, yet it clawed through every part of him, carving something out of his existence.
His vision blurred.
His mind faltered.
The dark ring above his head flickered, unstable, the ashen glow in his eyes dimmed.
The domain convulsed.
It, too, was suffering.
The ground beneath him, if such a thing still existed, trembled, cracked, screamed in a soundless voice. The very essence of this place had been forced to understand pain.
And then...
His legs buckled.
His balance wavered.
He did not fall.
Not yet.
But the weight..
The pressure...
The pain....
And then... A step..
A single, quiet, deliberate step.
The Wanderer Who Laughs moved.
Not fast. Not slow. Not in any way that felt human.
A slow, steady pace, inevitable. Each movement was like a thread unraveling something unseen, his presence turning the ashen domain into something that should not be.
Darkness Angel’s body refused to obey.
His fingers curled, not of his own will but from the sheer, overwhelming agony. His wings twitched, unsteady, struggling to remain aloft.
Another step.
Another.
The Wanderer Who Laughs came closer.
That same smile.
Never fading. Never wavering.
A grin carved into his face, stretching just slightly beyond what should be natural, his deeper-than-yellow eyes gleaming, as if savoring something delightful.
He stopped.
Towering. Looming.
Watching.
Then, softly..
"Tell me…"
His voice was light. Amused. Gentle in a way that did not fit.
The space between words stretched, as if he were savoring each sound before letting it slip into the world.
"What do you feel?"
Darkness Angel could not answer.
His throat, his lips, his voice... all refused to move.
But The Wanderer Who Laughs continued, unbothered.
"Pain?"
The word curled around the space between them, seeping into the cracks of the broken domain.
"Desperation?"
A pause before another calm step as a smile crawled on his face wider...
"Fear?"
The agony did not stop.
It did not fade.
It worsened.
Something in Darkness Angel’s form wavered, his void-light garment shifting as his fingers trembled.
"Torment?"
And then, a silence.
Long. Stretched.
A pause too deliberate, too perfect, as if the world itself had leaned closer to listen.
Then, softly... He spoke..
"…Or an unrelenting agony?"
The domain shuddered.
The answer was clear.
The very air twisted, something unseen... something ancient, coiling around itself as if struggling to remain whole.
Darkness Angel’s body gave out.
He fell from above, his knees hitting the ground.
The impact sent a ripple through the domain, an unnatural distortion, a fracture in something once thought unbreakable.
His hands pressed into the white surface beneath him, fingers digging in, trembling, his body barely his own.
He tried to rise.
He commanded his limbs to move.
But they refused.
A force greater than his will, greater than his existence, held him there.
And above him..
The Wanderer Who Laughs watched.
Expression unchanged.
Grin ever-present.
His deeper-than-yellow eyes gleamed with something unreadable, something ancient, something not human.
His head tilted, just slightly.
Then..
A whisper.
"Shall we continue?"
And in that moment...
A chill. An unfathomable chill
Something foreign. Something unknown.
Something that had never...should never hat touched Darkness Angel’s spine.
Fear.