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The sky above what remained of Stellara Prime shimmered with opposing auras—one golden, one divine. Tenzin hovered in midair, his form wreathed in the luminous golden energy of Nirvana's Embrace, its ethereal light pulsing with a faint, otherworldly hum. Facing him across the devastated cityscape was Queen Lila, her celestial radiance emanating in waves of brilliant white light.
Between them, fragments of the once-magnificent capital hung suspended in the air—buildings, streets, and monuments frozen in a strange equilibrium where destruction and preservation battled for dominance. Tenzin's catastrophic Sǐwáng technique continued to pull the world apart, while Lila's divine protective power struggled to hold it together. The resulting stalemate created an eerie stillness, as if time itself hesitated to choose a side.
Queen Lila moved first.
With a burst of divine speed, she propelled herself directly at Tenzin, her fist glowing with celestial energy as she aimed for his chest. The blow connected—or should have. Instead, her hand passed harmlessly through his body, as if striking a mirage.
I'm sure I hit him, Lila thought, her eyes widening slightly. Has he transcended to a state where physical attacks can't harm him?
Before she could recalibrate her strategy, Tenzin raised his palm. A pulse of golden energy erupted from his hand, striking Lila with tremendous force. The impact sent her hurtling backward through the air, her divine form trailing light as she was propelled across the broken skyline.
Stabilizing herself, Lila drew her hands together, channeling ancient power between her palms. The air around her hands began to warp and shimmer as she summoned the Light of Creation—primordial energy capable of creating or destroying matter at will. The attack charged more rapidly than mortal eyes could perceive, building to blinding intensity in mere microseconds.
"This ends now," she declared, her voice resonating with authority.
Queen Lila thrust both hands forward, unleashing twin beams of pure creation energy. The light moved at impossible speed—many times faster than light itself—cutting across reality toward Tenzin with unstoppable force.
To her shock, Tenzin's body blurred as he evaded each beam with fluid, impossible movements. In his Nirvana's Embrace form, his ethereal body shifted between planes of existence, making him nearly untouchable. The divine beams passed harmlessly through the space where he had been moments before, striking distant mountains and reducing them to nothing.
Then Tenzin vanished completely.
Lila's senses screamed warning, but too late. A devastating impact struck her from behind, the force so precisely delivered she immediately recognized Tenzin's presence. He had used Celestial Step to instantly reposition.
His speed is impossible, Lila thought as pain radiated through her body. Even for a master of his caliber.
What Queen Lila couldn't see was that Tenzin had struck her with an amplified version of Infinite Fist—landing not one thousand but one million punches in a single strike, each one carrying the power of the cosmos itself. The attack was so fast that reality itself struggled to register the damage.
The impact sent Lila plummeting downward, her body carving a crater into what remained of Stellara Prime's central district. The shockwave from her landing rippled outward, cracking the already-fractured ground. As her body impacted, her Heaven's Aegis barrier flickered and failed, leaving the planet vulnerable to Tenzin's Sǐwáng once more. Immediately, chunks of land began to rise skyward as the destructive technique resumed its work.
Deep in the impact crater, Queen Lila stirred. Dust and debris cascaded from her form as she rose unsteadily to her feet. Something felt wrong. Though standing, her body continued to experience phantom impacts—the sensation of a million punches still reverberating through her being, damaging her on levels beyond the physical.
"Fascinating technique," she murmured, raising a glowing hand to the center of her chest where the first impact had landed.
Her palm illuminated with divine light as she activated Sacred Timeflow. Rather than manipulating the world around her, Lila focused the time-altering energy inward. The flow of time within her body reversed, wounds closing and damage unraveling. Like watching a clock turn backward, the bruising and trauma from Tenzin's attack faded away until her form was whole once more.
Back in the sky, Tenzin hovered serenely, his golden aura pulsing as he maintained Nirvana's Embrace: Sǐwáng. His attention was fixed on the destruction spreading across Stellara Prime when the first pillar of light caught him by surprise.
A massive column of celestial energy erupted from below, moving at blinding speed directly toward him. Then another. And another. Dozens of divine light pillars pierced upward through the atmosphere—Queen Lila's Divine Wrath now fully unleashed.
These were no ordinary attacks. Each pillar carried judgment from higher realms, capable of piercing dimensions and burning through any matter they touched. A single direct hit would be devastating, even to one in Tenzin's transcendent state.
He moved with extraordinary precision, using an amplified version of Celestial Step to teleport between safe positions, staying mere moments ahead of annihilation. The pillars of light carved paths of destruction through the sky, obliterating clouds and atmosphere where they passed.
Tenzin's movements became a blur of golden light, appearing and disappearing across the battlefield. But in his focus on avoiding the divine pillars, he made a critical error—he failed to track Queen Lila herself.
As he materialized from his latest Celestial Step, he found Lila waiting for him, her hand already raised. The space around her palm warped with otherworldly power, reality itself bending to her will. This was no ordinary attack but something capable of erasing him entirely from existence.
Tenzin's eyes widened in recognition of the danger, but before Lila could strike, a dark blur sliced through the air between them. A shadowy figure appeared, wrapped in power so dense it seemed to devour light, and snatched Tenzin away, carrying him higher into the atmosphere.
Queen Lila strained to hear what the shadow figure was saying to Tenzin, but they were too distant. Their silhouettes remained visible for only moments before both figures vanished completely—not merely moving away, but disappearing from the planet itself.
Lila expanded her senses to their limit, searching for any trace of their presence, but found nothing. It was as if they had never existed.
Without Tenzin to maintain it, the Sǐwáng technique collapsed. The suspended destruction it had been orchestrating completed all at once. Across Stellara Prime, everything that had been lifted skyward came crashing down with catastrophic force. Buildings collapsed upon buildings, landmasses slammed into oceans, and the very crust of the planet buckled under the stress.
Queen Lila descended slowly to land atop a mountain of rubble—all that remained of the grand hall where she had once been coronated. The silence was profound and terrible.
"I can't sense their presence anymore," she whispered to herself, scanning the devastation that stretched to the horizon in every direction. "Did they leave? And who was that figure? Their power was... extreme."
The battlefield had fallen silent. Tenzin's attack had accomplished its grim purpose. Stellara Prime lay in ruins, its once-shining cities reduced to rubble and dust. Even the bodies of the First Generation Sentients lay buried beneath the collapsed infrastructure, crushed by the very devastation they had helped create.
Queen Lila closed her eyes briefly. Her Sacred Timeflow ability, while powerful, could only manipulate time on a small scale—not enough to undo planetary devastation. And Heaven's Aegis could only defend against and reverse ongoing attacks, not those already completed.
The reality settled upon her with crushing weight. All of her Elders, the civilians of Stellara Prime, and the brave warriors who had fought alongside her—all gone. The planet that had been the jewel of the Seventh Universe was a shattered husk.
Queen Lila stood alone amid the ruins of her world, the last survivor of what had once been a shining civilization.
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