Arc 0: Timeless Flame (Part 1)

With creation, comes destruction. In a Universe full of darkness where it is easier to destroy than to create, there was an imperceivably little blue speck called Earth where matter started to construct itself in a way that gave it the capacity to think. Bacteria, insects, fish, animals, humans… A spectrum of consciousness. Most were guided by their instinct, which could be no different than the laws of science, while some lived with philosophy. Humans started to ask themselves about their existence and why it came to be, but nobody was able to find an answer that could satisfy everyone. Thus, this conflict between humans carried on through millennia of history. Some desperately clung to hope, some accepted the absurdity of their situation, but nobody came to put an end to this cycle of destruction. Nobody was able to make a utopia where creation eclipses everything else through absolute peace. It felt like the world was destined to be destroyed soon after its creation. Every living thing was destined to die. Every physical thing was destined to be eradicated. The Universe was destined to be reduced to a void. A red glow peeked through the thin gap of the nearly closed door.

∗ ∗ ∗

Shattered glass. That’s what Soulgon woke up to despite having no shards anywhere near him or on his bed. It was as if Soulgon smashed into a glass plane without either of them moving. He sat up in his bed and contemplated the shining Sun through the window. Why was it feeding us? What was its purpose for giving us light and energy? Why aren’t we in the same position as the other planets? Why isn’t it too hot or too cold? What is the origin of the anthropic nature of Earth’s position relative to the Sun? But Soulgon refrained from going too far in a deep rabbit hole of his own mind and abruptly stood up to take on another day. He wore his thick black rectangular-framed glasses, took a second to look around him and was shocked to see that he wasn’t in the room he slept in yesterday. The bed was different, the window was in front of him instead of beside him and the walls were painted white instead of dark green. Finding this strange, Soulgon took it upon himself to check out where he was. He opened the door with cautious stealth and found a pretty long hallway with stairs leading to a lower floor. He took a few steps and hunched over the railing separating the hallway from the open staircase.

“ⵙⵓⵔⵄⴰ! (Sora!)” shouted Soulgon, “ⴰⵏⴷⴰ ⵏⴻⵍⵍⴰ? (Where are we?)”

A few seconds later, a tall man with curly black hair, thick eyebrows and a thick beard and wearing black sunglasses and a silky old gold thawb that hung to his ankles appeared and looked up towards Soulgon.

“من أنت؟ (Who are you?)” the man said in Arabic.

Soulgon, surprised by the use of that language in Pitcairn Islands of all places, hesitated to answer and stuttered before speaking.

“حسناً، اه، اسمي سولغون تايمز. يبدو أنني لم يكن من المفترض أن أكون هنا، لكن صدقني، أنا مرتبك تماماً مثلك. لذا، هل لي أن أسألك أين نحن؟ (Well, uh, my name is Soulgon Times. It seems I wasn't supposed to be here, but believe me, I'm just as confused as you are. So, may I ask where we are?)”

“نحن في محطة وقود، (We’re in a gas station,)” the man said plainly.

“محطة وقود؟ (A gas station?)”

There was no gas station in Pitcairn Islands. From that point on, Soulgon started to panic a little, wondering where the hell he was. He politely asked the man to accompany him to the exit, to which he agreed. They walked out of the staircase and headed over to a metal door with Arabic text on the top of it. The man opened it and Soulgon was shocked to see a convenience store full of multiple products like milk, nuts and samosas in plastic bags. As they walked past the aisles, Soulgon was looking at the door and windows. They were shining white, so much so that Soulgon couldn’t see what was on the other side. He looked upon the entrance with serious eyes and opened the door, ringing the shop-bell. A wave of heat hit Soulgon in the face, making him temporarily close his eyes until… the vastness and emptiness of a desert unfolded before his eyes as the ringing of the bell faded just as quickly as his equanimity. This must be a dream right? No. This is definitely a nightmare. Soulgon’s eyes lost all of their seriousness and his jaw dropped at the sight of the unreachable horizon. This doesn’t make any sense, he thought, why would I be in a desert when I was on an island yesterday?

“هل لي أن أسأل في أي بلد نحن؟ (May I ask what country we are in?)” Soulgon hesitatingly asked the man who accompanied him.

“نحن في المملكة العربية السعودية، (We are in Saudi Arabia,)” responded the man, visibly intrigued by Soulgon’s lack of composure.

Soulgon was truly lost and his mind wasn’t able to take in the situation. He was so disoriented that he started to wobble on his feet, ready to fall on his back before the man helped him and asked him if he was alright.

∗ ∗ ∗

Later that day, the man, out of empathy, took Soulgon in and gave him water to drink. The latter was thankful and they introduced themselves.

“أعتذر عن التأخير في تقديم نفسي، اسمي أبو رؤوف عاطف بن رحيم الحنان، ولكن يمكنكم مناداتي بـ «عاطف الحنان»، (Pardon me for the late introduction, but my name is Abou Raouf Atif ibn Rahim Al-Hanan, although you can call me Atif Al-Hanan,)” courteously said Atif.

“يسعدني أن ألتقي بك يا سيد عاطف، (It’s a pleasure to meet you Mr. Atif,)” responded Soulgon, “اسمي سولغون تايمز، وأعتذر عن التسبب في هذه المشكلة لكم، لكن أرجوكم صدقوني أنني لم يكن من المفترض أن أكون هنا على الإطلاق. في الحقيقة، كان من المفترض أن أكون في الطرف الآخر من العالم. أنا حقاً لا أعرف ماذا... (My name is Soulgon Times and I’m sorry I caused you this trouble, but please believe me that I wasn’t supposed to be here at all. As a matter of fact, I should’ve been on the opposite side of the world. I really don’t know wha-.)”

He was abruptly interrupted by the sound of the ringing shop-bell, signaling a new arrival in this isolated gas station. Soulgon looked over to the door and saw a tall individual with black pants and a dark blue high collar jacket that extended outwards from the bottom into thick cloth stripes with bronze chains hanging from each of them. Although the most striking physical trait was their flaming blue head—as in, their head was on unabating fire, blue fire at that… Nothing could be seen through that flame except a glowing white hole on the left side of where their face was supposed to be. This person walked up to Atif and asked in a weird distorted genderless voice that made it impossible for Soulgon to deduce if they were a man or a woman:

“May I ask where the utility aisle is?”

Judging by the look on Atif’s face, Soulgon knew that he not only didn’t understand what they said, but also that their appearance was too salient for him to provide a regular reply.

“قال الشخص: «هل لي أن أسأل أين يقع قسم الأدوات المنزلية؟» (They said: “May I ask where the utility aisle is?”)” translated Soulgon to Atif.

“حسناً، إنه في الصف قبل الأخير من هنا، (Oh, well it’s at the penultimate row from here,)” replied Atif to both Soulgon and the unknown customer by pointing to the end of the convenience store.

“It’s at the next-to-last row from here,” interpreted Soulgon to the person.

Without saying a word, they left them after hearing where the utility aisle was and came back immediately with a knife that they put on the checkout counter. They rummaged through their pockets to pull out some riyals, but dropped a couple of coins on the ground, making a reverberating metallic noise that filled in the emptiness of the desert of sounds that was the gas station. Soulgon, out of the kindness of his heart, bent over to pick up the coins and give it to the possessor, but right as he was about to touch the coins, a swift movement from the flaming headed person’s foot painfully landed on Soulgon’s hand with great force. The stomp was so ferocious that Soulgon let out an abrupt scream, thinking his hand was actually broken.

“He-!”

Suddenly, looking straight at the flaming head, Soulgon felt a sudden wave of intense energy hit him seemingly from all sides. Everything was shaking relative to him and a saturated blue hue filled the whole room including the people there. All the edges and borders that defined the shapes of the physical things surrounding Soulgon, whether it be the tiles, the counter, the knife or the silhouettes themselves, were outlined into convulsive white lineations as if reality itself turned into a long-lasting impact frame. Soulgon was petrified, panic-struck, absolutely terrified. He sensed a powerful aura coming out of the flaming head that gripped the very depths of his soul. It was an indescribable feeling.

“Get your filthy hands away from my coins you vermin!” menacingly shouted the flaming head as they were rubbing the end of their foot into Soulgon’s hand by oscillating their ankle.

Still keeping their foot on Soulgon’s hand, they bent over to pick up the coins before releasing their grasp on his hand. The aura swiftly disappeared and they put the coins on the counter before taking the knife and heading for the exit. As Soulgon stayed kneeling on the ground, terrified to move even a single muscle, the flaming head was mockingly tossing back and forth the knife they bought in the air as they made their way to the door. Somehow, they were able to open the door, which wasn’t automatic, without touching it at all. After they left, Soulgon nervously got up while Atif was disappointingly shaking his head and letting out a deep sigh.

“لماذا سمحت له بإهانتك بهذه الطريقة؟ (Why did you let them disrespect you like that?)” asked Atif to break the ice.

Soulgon just pathetically looked away, as if ashamed of his reasonable inaction against someone with a literal flaming blue head. He slowly got up and had to put his whole back into lifting himself up with his hands on the floor. Alright this is definitely a dream, he thought, so everything is under my control! I won’t let this filthy bastard insult me like that in my own mind! Then, taking all the courage he had in this ethereal world, he leapt out into the door almost tumbling over and slamming his face on the glass and he opened the door to go out in the open desert and find his blue target. But before he even set out to look for them, Soulgon looked down and abruptly braked himself by shoving his heels into the terminal ground. After one or two meters, the ground stopped existing and below it was a bird’s-eye view of the Arabian desert. The sky itself was getting left in the dust as the numerous clouds fell down with incredible speeds. The strip of land he was on was launched skywards and was going faster and faster. Soulgon’s abrupt running left him imbalanced and he was tiptoeing across the edge on one foot, windmilling his arms to keep his center of gravity below his feet and fixed into the ground. Despite his efforts, he lost his ground and was about to fall when Atif grabbed him by the back of his collar and flung him back onto the ground.

“ما الذي يحدث بحق الله؟ (What in God’s name is happening?)” shouted Atif while he was looking down off the edge as if he didn’t just save someone’s life a few seconds ago.

Atif realized that somehow, the clump of earth that included the gas station was moving upwards at a gradually accelerating speed in a specific way that made both Atif and Soulgon unable to feel the g-force of their ascent. To Atif’s eyes, this was definitely a planned maneuver. Without a second thought, the latter jumped off the ledge with class and Soulgon, caught off guard, clumsily ran to the edge to try and save Atif knowing very well that he was out of reach.

“عاطف! (Atif!)”

His voice was lost in the wind and he was left alone in the sky. The land he was on wouldn’t seem to slow down, but its increasing speed worried Soulgon, who concluded that he would soon be in outer space at this rate. Still thinking it was a dream and hoping to God that Atif knew what he was doing by bringing a parachute just in case all of this nonsense was real at the same time, Soulgon leapt across the ledge and instantly regretted it when he felt an actual force bringing him down as if falling was never a concept. Weirdly, that force was more instantaneous and brutal than the sensation of free fall we would normally feel from jumping. Atif was right below him, falling slowly as Soulgon’s body flew downwards across his field of view. Surprised, Atif dived down incredibly fast to Soulgon’s side and banally asked:

“ألا تعرف كيف تطير؟ (Don’t you know how to fly?)”

“حسناً، هذا هو حلمي الواعي الأول، لذا فأنا لست بارعاً فيه، (Well, this is my first lucid dream, so I’m not very experienced at it,)” said Soulgon with the straightest look on his face.

“ماذا...؟ لا، لا، اسمع! هذا ليس حلماً. إذا كنت لا تعرف كيف تطير، فلن تتمكن فعلياً من تحمل السقوط من تلك الارتفاعات، بافتراض أنك لا تمتلك القدرة على تحمل ذلك، حيث إن عدم قدرتك على الطيران تتوافق مع هذا الافتراض، مما يعني أنك ستموت. (Wha-? No, no, listen! This isn’t a dream. If you don’t know how to fly, you will actually not be able to withstand the fall from that high assuming you don’t have the durability for it since your inability to fly would be complementary to this assumption, meaning you will die.)”

“حسناً، أنا لا أعرف كيف أطير. أعتقد أنني سأموت اليوم، (Well, I don’t know how to fly. Guess I’m dying today,)” responded Soulgon, still convinced that none of this was real.

“يبدو أنك لا تأخذني على محمل الجد، لذا سأنتظرك هناك في الأسفل و سأمسك بك إذا لم تتمكن من الطيران في اللحظة الأخيرة من سقوطك، (You don’t seem to be taking me seriously, so I’ll be waiting for you down there and I’ll catch you if you aren’t able to fly at the very end of your fall,)” settled Atif before swiftly disappearing into a deep wind burst shockwave that sucked in Soulgon after he was deafened by the sonic boom of his departure.

Soulgon, still not knowing how to fly, dived in towards the ground to see how much control he had over his body while in the air, when suddenly, his right arm gets flung upwards and makes his whole body spin into the region of the sky that made his arm get knocked back up. Soulgon looked around and realized that the clouds were falling down again, but his fall weirdly didn’t stop. Or at least, that’s what he felt. He watched the ground weirdly warp away from him at a very fast pace, but his confusion didn’t have time to set in as Soulgon felt an intense strain on his right shoulder. His arm was paralyzed. He tried to move it. It wouldn’t budge. He squeezed his muscles around his deltoid. It wouldn’t budge. He hit his arm with his left fist. It wobbled around. The pain was real. This wasn’t a dream. He screamed at the top of his lungs, but only a low-pitched muffled cry came out of it. He wiggled around in pain holding his shoulder tightly in a fetal tuck. He closed his eyes shut to try to diverge his mind from the atrocious shoulder pain to the pressure of his eyelids. He gasped for air, but none came in. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was a blurry Mach line between a bright sky blue hue at the bottom of his field of view meeting a deep dark blue void at the top. There were no clouds to be seen. Soulgon opened his eyes a little bit more and was horrified to see that the gradient of colors he wasn’t able to discern a few seconds ago was the curvature of the Earth from an altitude high enough to guess that he was at the top of the troposphere. He felt an actual sense of asphyxiation, something that wouldn’t happen in a dream. Knowing that death is now imminent, Soulgon did what he knew best. He calmed his mind of any panic. His father had taught him how to calm down when in a dangerous situation, dragging him underwater, putting him under pressure, even choking him almost to death or stretching his arms out far enough to painfully indicate to Soulgon that they were about to break. Firstly, Soulgon looked down and analyzed the factors regarding his ascent. The warping space below him, the sensation of falling down despite his contrary situation, the way neither him nor Atif was able to realize that they were launched up. He figured it out. He wasn’t moving up, rather the space around him was. That would explain everything, thanks to his knowledge of general relativity. Therefore, a region of expanding space was sitting between the ground and the gas station and funny enough, Soulgon was in that region, right below the floating gas station. That’s why his right arm got flung first; it was separated from his entire body. His arm was the first thing to enter that region of expanding space. Additionally, judging by the circular shape of the piece of land that was attached to the gas station, Soulgon deduced that the region of expanding space he was in must have been cylindrical. That meant that he was not to allow a partial exit of any body part from the delimited space as it would be severed from the rest of his body through its fall opposite to the upwards velocity of the rest of his body parts. Wasting no time, Soulgon dives horizontally near the boundary he crossed that got his right arm paralyzed and curves his body according to the lateral face of the supposed cylindrical shape of the expanding space. He crossed it with a pretty high speed and felt an intense force bringing down his frontal body before he entirely made it out of the region, glancing at the gas station slowly leaving his view as it launched skywards. Without a breath of air in his lungs, Soulgon slowly blacked out hoping that Atif was going to catch him like he said he would. After what seemed like an instant, Soulgon woke up to water splashing his face. He was on the sandy ground, his head resting on a rock and Atif in front of him with the water bottle that the latter gave him after he learned that he was in Saudi Arabia.

“،شكرًا (Thanks,)” said Soulgon in a tired voice as he got up.

Through his nearly closed eyelids, Soulgon saw a silhouette with a blue glow coming out of its head far away into the flat desert. His energy surged back, he tensed up in anger and he locked his sight on his target. Soulgon was determined to teach a lesson to this light blue friction match. He ran towards them, rather it would be more accurate to say that his legs ran towards them, since they abruptly boosted his whole body forwards at near the speed of sound, leaving a big cloud of sand behind them. His upper body didn’t follow his lower body’s momentum and he started floating over the running sanding belt that was the ground while leaning back to the point where he almost completed a full flip. Unfortunately for him though, he came back to the ground which his head ricocheted off of, his body spinning back the other way before planting his face right into the ground and carving a long trench in the sand like a snowplough while his body continued moving forward and bending into the letter “C”. He finally came to a stop right in front of the blucifer—that is definitely a fitting name, it’s just too perfect!—who looked down upon the injured with disdain and pity. Soulgon got swiftly back up on his feet and took off his glasses to shake the sand off of them and wipe his face off with his only working hand holding his eyewear.

“My, my… Such a pathetic arrival has never been seen by the likes of me,” mouthed the blucifer in a snobbish voice.

“I don’t care what you think. I came here to beat you to a pulp.”

“The use of such strong words makes you seem so much weaker than what you already are.”

Triggered, Soulgon threw a left hook, but it didn’t reach them. The punch just slowly stopped in its tracks despite all the muscle power Soulgon put into pushing his arm forward. It was weird because he felt like there were no barriers stopping his punch. He felt his fist going through space even though it appeared to stop right in front of the blucifer. He tried something else and attempted to roundhouse kick them to the head, but that also failed, his foot unable to cross the space between it and the blue flame. There had to be a weak point and the obvious blue fire surprisingly wasn’t the answer. With Soulgon’s foot still near their head, the blucifer gripped his leg and dragged him towards them before punching him square in the face, knocking his glasses off into the open air. Soulgon, bleeding from the mouth from that powerful punch, was ready to strike back until he felt a warm feeling in his upper abdomen. He looked down to see a yellow beam of light piercing him in the solar plexus. That light ray continued its diagonally downward-sloping trajectory into the sand, sizzling it. Funny enough, when Soulgon looked back to see where the light that pierced his solar plexus was coming from, he saw that it came from the Sun itself. Actually, the Sun’s light was refracted off of the lenses of Soulgon’s glasses that were still in the air after the blucifer’s punch. What now? thought Soulgon. First expanding space, now my own glasses that I wore and took care of for 18 years turning against me? The burning feeling inside his guts grew hotter and hotter until a flame ignited and engulfed his solar hole. In almost an instant, that fire grew to the point of consuming Soulgon’s whole body in flames that were flowing into a horizontal slipstream. His glasses stopped refracting that beam of light and disintegrated into tiny shards of black glass that materialized into a long and sharp black flyssa. The blade flung towards the flames and instinctively, Soulgon, from within the depths of the blaze, lifted his left arm up and grabbed the handle of his flyssa. He swung his sword forth and a gust of wind completely dissipated the fire surrounding Soulgon. The blucifer seemed rather unfazed, not that we could see their facial expression. After that cool maneuver, Soulgon got back to his senses and started wondering how he was able to do all of this without thinking at all, gazing at his new weapon.

“Are you just going to stand there like a dummy or are you going to use that weapon?” mockingly asked the blucifer.

Not even a second later, Soulgon disappeared from his spot into a wind burst and appeared right in front of the blucifer with the flyssa ready to slash them from their left waist to their right collarbone. The blucifer didn’t move in the slightest until the flyssa was able to cross their invisible barrier. Impossible, they thought to themselves while Soulgon gloatingly grinned at them. To the latter’s disappointment, the blade went right through the blucifer’s body without a single opposing force felt on the blade indicating whether or not he cut his target. Before he was able to make out that they phased through the slash, the blucifer back kicked him in the stomach and made him slide back about five meters. Soulgon, lifting his head up after the blow, saw the blucifer pulling out the knife they bought from the gas station and gripping it by the blade before fluidly winding up their throw and winging it with extreme speed and precision as to have the tip of the blade pointing towards Soulgon. The swift novice of swordsmanship dodged the knife by dashing to the right and saw it disappear into thin air right before it reached his initial point. Again not leaving him time to think, the lighter appeared behind him, turning his back to him, and back kicked him back to where the knife was thrown at. They slitheringly dashed towards Soulgon and gripped the air around his lower left abdomen until the knife that disappeared reappeared with its handle in the blucifer’s gripping hand and its blade deep in Soulgon’s lower left abdomen. The sharp stabbing noise mixed with the sharp stabbing pain left Soulgon in disbelief. This hurts, he thought, really bad. The blucifer was about to drag their knife through his entire abdomen until unexpectedly, Soulgon disappeared out of the way, dropping his sword in the process. He subconsciously teleported only a meter away from the knife and the blucifer was ready to strike again. With his right arm paralyzed, Soulgon quickly grabs his flyssa with his left hand in a reverse grip to block the incoming knife attack. With both adversaries in a blade lock, Soulgon tried to think of his next move, but he was interrupted again when the blucifer unexpectedly released their grip on the knife with the initial compression force from the blade lock causing it to backflip downwards and under the flyssa. The knife, now past Soulgon’s sword, continued flipping with its blade passing through the blucifer’s phasing hand before the latter gripped it again when it made a full flip, ready to strike an open target. Soulgon thought he was done for until he saw a black shard hovering into the incoming knife. Right before the tip of the blade was about to pierce Soulgon, the knife shattered into a glowing white fracture in the middle of its blade before the top of it broke into multiple pieces. Regardless, the sharpness of the broken blade still pierced through his superior mediastinum. The cut was shallow enough to not damage any internal organs or major arteries and veins. Soulgon quickly got out of the way and stayed near the blucifer, learning from his mistakes to not always be on the defensive. Therefore, he swung his sword towards their flaming head and they ducked in a drop stance instead of phasing through it like they normally would, clearly indicating that their head was a weak point. Soulgon’s only current way of attacking them was to attack their head with his flyssa since that was the only thing he could use that was able to pass their invisible barrier. He thought about analyzing the mechanics involved in the blucifer’s ability to phase through things, but the friction match flash-stepped in front of him with a cocked fist bathing in blue flames. What came out of this was a powerful uppercut to the chin that sent Soulgon flying through the sky back to where he was at the top of the troposphere. Soulgon felt exhausted as if that punch had a life-draining aspect to it. It was as if that uppercut, with the pain it induced, activated Soulgon’s nervous system to feel his stab wound even more. All of this was happening in almost an instant. Not letting him fly out into outer space, the blucifer appeared behind him and sledgehammered him back down to Earth with even more speed than the uppercut. The impact of Soulgon’s body on the ground was devastating and it made a pretty large explosion. He laid there in the middle of the crater and looked up towards the Sun. Its light was flickering at the edge of its circumference until a silhouette was visible. The blucifer was ready to smash Soulgon’s head in. Despite his imminent death, Soulgon didn’t have the energy to move away from the attack fast enough. So in desperation, he lifted his arm up in a blocking stance, ready to take the hit. However, the little black shard came hovering in front of him again, but this time, it implanted itself into his forearm. Immediately, his arm got enveloped in a fully opaque glowing white membrane almost as if his body was part of an unfinished portrait on a white canvas. Coming at full speed, the blucifer superman punched him through the glowing forearm, which didn’t move an inch. Shortly after, the area of impact on the glowing membrane grew in light and the entirety of the protective shield fractured into light shards sending the blucifer flying away as if they were hit by a shockwave. Their arced trajectory finished in a brutal landing on the hard cratering sand. They got up almost immediately and emerged from the dust cloud to strike Soulgon. The latter lifted his sword up and lit it on fire. They struck a couple of times, the blucifer deflecting Soulgon’s kicks and the latter aiming for the head with his flyssa. However, Soulgon noticed something weird. The blucifer seemed to always teleport around and know his every move, as if they were able to predict them. He also felt a weird and unexplainable inner shift every time the blucifer teleported, which lead him to believe that another ability was involved apart from the power to expand space. At one point, the blucifer teleported again, but a new wound appeared on their left shoulder without Soulgon attacking them despite having planned to strike that exact spot. He figured that their ability’s role was to correct some mistakes they’ve done in order to have the upper hand and was about to figure it out until he felt a pushing force behind him, getting him closer to the blucifer. The latter readied up their leg to strike Soulgon in the face with a roundhouse kick, but something unexpected happened. Soulgon disappeared right before he got hit. At least from the blucifer’s point of view, that’s what happened. From Soulgon’s perspective, he phased through the blucifer and everything surrounding him had their colors inverted. The bright blue sky became a dark orange abyss and the fluffy white clouds became ominous black nimbi. The blucifer’s head turned into a dark orange blaze and the white glow on the left side of the flame became black. Their pants became white, their jacket, beige, and their chains became glowing blue. The blucifer didn’t seem to know that Soulgon was right behind them and the latter laid there on the floor, not having a clue about what the hell was happening in this weird lucid dream until he looked behind him. He saw himself appear again out of nowhere, seemingly according to the blucifer’s will, but a few seconds ago, the clouds having been shifted back slightly, before he phased through the blucifer, who rushed in to attack him sooner than they did last time. To their surprise, their punch phased right through Soulgon and he disappeared again, leaving them to look around anxiously for Soulgon’s next planned attack, or should I say, his previous planned attack. That’s right, Soulgon figured it out. The blucifer’s other ability… is time travel. Soulgon was able to deduce that the blucifer was trying to go back a couple of seconds in the past to prevent him from disappearing, despite having failed for some reason, after witnessing his past self and the past world with its past clouds perform the same actions they already did. The blucifer simply moved to a different point in time in order to change the outcome of the battle in their favor. It would explain why they were able to predict all of Soulgon’s next moves and why they had new injuries after some teleportations. It was because they lived through what would’ve eventually happened before they had the intention to change it. The same thing happened for the knife they threw but in reverse because they made it travel a couple of seconds in the future where they would know to lure Soulgon in the initial position of the knife. We can also apply the same logic for the blucifer’s ability to phase through attacks. A simple explanation would be that they transport the body parts that are going to get hit a short moment away in the future when the attack isn’t there anymore to deal damage as long as the attack is brief so as not to cause problems with losing blood flow or biological tissue linking problems. That’s why they have to stay still every time they chronally phase through Soulgon’s attacks. They have to make sure the body parts don’t teleport away from their body. Since they can’t afford missing head parts, their head becomes a weak point. The only problem with this ability is all the paradoxes linked to its use. Wouldn’t the blucifer go back in time to a past version of themselves? If they changed the outcome of an interaction, wouldn’t their reason to go back in time vanish? The creation of new timelines after each temporal modification would make sense, but it wouldn’t solve the paradox of having two blucifers in the same timeline. The only explanation would be that the timeline automatically determines that it can’t have two of the same soul in its existence, thus erasing the past version of the soul. Saying that the blucifer’s future consciousness gets transferred to their past self wouldn’t make sense as the future injuries wouldn’t be on their body and they wouldn’t be able to teleport around different points in space. From the reader’s point of view, this science lesson is probably hard to wrap their minds around, but from Soulgon’s perspective, all of this reflection happened in an instant in the intelligent brain of his. Soon after this realization, the world around him reverted back to its original colors and the blucifer seemed to have noticed his presence now. They didn’t waste a single second and sprinted towards Soulgon, winding up a strikingly flaming kick to the face, sending Soulgon flying through the Arabian Desert that was whisking by at kaleidoscopic speeds. Soon after, the sandy color of the floor turned into a deep blue, indicating that Soulgon was now over the Persian Gulf. He bounced off the waters like a skipping stone and plunged inside, slowly sinking into the abyss. He opened his eyelids slightly, squinting at the pain the salt water was inflicting on his eyes and he saw a blurry white glowing solar sphere through the deep blue waters of the Gulf. Suddenly, Soulgon’s lightness disappeared as he felt his body rising out of the water, but he didn’t move at all. Instead, the water around him got repulsed away into a gaping circular crater, all types of fish and aquatic creatures flopping in mid-air. Soulgon looked down to see the whitish gray sandy floor deprived of water with drooping seaweed planted on all its surface. He looked up to see the blucifer standing over him in the air, their arm extended with their palm open over the parting of the Gulf. Soulgon saw the distorted silhouette of the blucifer in front of the Sun get farther and farther away until he felt a crushing force behind his back. He had been pushed back all the way to the sea floor by their space expansion ability. The blucifer came in, cocking back a devastating fist and was ready to bash his head in, pushing Soulgon to yet again get into a single arm block stance, but they disappeared right before hitting him. Now, any other person would’ve dropped their guard at such an irregular occurrence, but Soulgon knew exactly what he needed to do. He immediately curled his legs up and moved his hand on the floor right above his shoulder, then he performed a perfectly vertical kick-up into what would’ve been thin air if the blucifer hadn’t reappeared back where they were with their flaming head right into Soulgon’s powerful legs. The blucifer played yet another trick of their of time travelling a second in the future, but they got unexpectedly outsmarted by Soulgon, who now knew the secrets of their abilities. The impact from the blow knocked them back far enough for Soulgon to follow up the kick-up with an upside-down spinning roundhouse kick that was balanced by his arm acting as a spinning base on the sandy floor, fast enough to not let the blucifer activate his space expanding barrier. That last attack sent the blucifer flying so far that they ended up plunging into the watery borders of their homemade arena. Soulgon followed them by dashing right into the water and preparing to attack with his flyssa. The blucifer, seeing through the water, was able to dodge the incoming blow by curving their waist inwards, but Soulgon had planned for that because he coated his sword in flames that extinguished into streams of hot bubbles heading for the blucifer’s face, temporarily blinding them. Soulgon was ready to strike again, but they blindly expelled all the water surrounding them, creating another crater in the sea. Fortunately, Soulgon wasn’t pushed back for some reason and he swung his sword towards the blucifer’s left flank, but after some time, the white glow on the blue fire was dim enough, after having been extinguished by the bubbles, to act as an eye slightly open enough to see the incoming attack. At first, the blucifer’s body phased through the slash again, but unexpectedly, Soulgon stopped his sword’s trajectory right when it reached the heart and he was able to see a moving hole inside their body that rapidly zoomed through their chest and disappeared after attaining their right shoulder. A sharp stab noise. Soulgon did it. His flyssa was able to penetrate their heart. They are done for. What happened was that the blucifer expected Soulgon’s slash to continue through their entire body like it always did, but he took advantage of their ignorance about his knowledge of their time traveling powers to stop his sword mid-way where their heart was and let them continue moving their chronophasing hole away from their heart, leaving it unprotected and physically there to be stabbed by Soulgon’s sword. Blood dripped from the flyssa and it streamed down the blucifer’s jacket. The latter spit up a large amount of blood onto Soulgon’s hand and they tried to use their left arm to deflect the sword away, but Soulgon didn’t let that happen and he twisted the flyssa in their chest, painfully stopping them in their tracks. The distorted screams of the blucifer disturbed Soulgon, despite knowing it was finally the end of his lucid nightmare. Thinking it was over, Soulgon released the grip on his sword and let his hand rest a bit until a projectile came flying from under the sword, zooming by the flyssa and continuing upwards above the blucifer’s head, where it stopped its trajectory. Soulgon saw the blucifer finally noticing the existence of that thing that was above their head this whole time since they arrived in the water and raising their right arm to grab it, a small glass object the shape of a dodecahedron that was emitting a blue and periwinkle glow from the center, almost as if it had a chromatic aspect to it. They distortedly chuckled before shoving the dodecahedron inside the hole where their heart once was. What followed was Soulgon seeing a bright blue flash of light coming from the dodecahedron that was on their chest, engulfing the blucifer’s body in an flashily electric aura. Out of precaution, Soulgon pulled his sword out and moved back slightly to get out of the brightness. He realized that the role of that weird thing in their chest, sitting freely and staying inactive since the blucifer first came through the gas station door, was to be used as an awakening device. Soulgon, who learned from the mistakes of all the anime main characters who let the villains transform, subconsciously dashed towards the blucifer to kill them with his flyssa instantly. However, when the slash connected and sliced all the way through their neck, he first felt all his limbs suddenly relaxed again, against his will, and he then saw that he wasn’t right in front of the decapitated blucifer, but rather a few steps away from them with the blue flash of light engulfing the blucifer in their awakening aura again. Soulgon, who was a little bit discombobulated, went in to punch them with his left hand holding his sword instead, forgetting about the space expanding barrier, which stopped him right in his tracks. Soulgon was able to get a glimpse at the area where the blucifer stored the dodecahedron and saw that the hole next to it was closed up with half of the dodecahedron lodged inside their chest, forming glowing blue cracks imprinted on the jacket that were surrounding the glass object. The blood was missing. It was as if they were brand new. Soulgon got kicked in the ribs so hard that he arched into the shape of a croissant before he got flung to the ground. Soulgon, looking back up, saw the blucifer flying away from him at a very fast pace, indicating that they were fleeing. He wasn’t about to let that happen and so he took his flyssa and threw it in their direction like a frisbee that, surprisingly, reached them and sliced them in half from the waist down. But again, as soon as Soulgon was able to distinguish the separation between the two halves of the body, he was brought back to his initial state: limbs relaxed and standing in front of the blucifer’s awakening again. It seemed like every time he tried to kill them, Soulgon got brought back to this moment, but with his memories from all the times he tried to kill them. This time, he was the one who was time travelling against his own will. Unlike last time, Soulgon wasn’t able to figure out the nature of this weird phenomenon, meaning he was at a much bigger disadvantage. All the brainstorming that allowed him to know about the blucifer’s time travel suddenly vanished when he was faced with this situation for some reason. Soulgon tried to kill them one more time, just to confirm his theory and he was indeed brought back to the same moment in the same state. He was truly lost. He dropped the sword, letting it fall to the ground. He thought about letting them escape, watching the blucifer flee again, but he came back to his senses and thought about it long and hard. The implications of his ability to time travel could prove to be problematic for the rest of the world. This kind of power is dangerous when it’s in the hands of any individual, let alone a flaming headed person. Soulgon had to stand up against this offence to the order created by the natural course of events.

“Hey!” shouted Soulgon.

The blucifer stopped, turned around and looked at Soulgon.

“What is it?” they calmly said despite the higher tone they had to take to speak over the distance.

Soulgon, surprised by this sudden cooperation, answered in a straightforward way:

“Well, I thought about the fact that I’m fighting a person that I know nothing about. We haven’t engaged in a decently long dialogue at all and we haven’t introduced each other, yet here we are fighting to the death in this current moment… Heck I don’t even know your name. Quite frankly, I forgot the reason as to why I am fighting you right now. I think it was a grudge for humiliating me like that at the gas station and for having tried to send me and Atif into space to suffocate, but I haven’t discussed this situation at all… I just charged in immediately. I succumbed to my subconscious inner thoughts who were screaming at me that you were a terrible person that had to be dealt with. My current state of mind is completely alien to me and I don’t understand why I tried to kill you. Something in my brain just guided me to think of you as a wrongdoer. I think the reasoning behind my desire to kill you was wrong. I don’t understand what I’m doing… Now, this may seem like I’m trying to reason things out because I’m at a disadvantage and I am, but-”

“Now is not the time for this!” screamed the blucifer.

“Time? Time is probably irrelevant to someone like you who can change when now is! Despite feeling confused and ashamed of myself for targeting you previously without any logically justifiable motive, I know deep down that I can’t let you use that power any longer. It’s just wrong. Even if you’re using it to prevent the end of the world, as humans we were born to be sealed by fate and I will not let you defy it. I don’t know where you came from, or rather when you came from, but it is my inner duty to put an end to your reign over time”

After a silence that felt eternally long, the blucifer clenched his fist out of frustration.

“You don’t understand anything!” he yelled, “I wish I could change when now is… I feel powerless even with these abilities. So don’t you dare give me a life lesson as if you knew everything about me! What if I am doing it for the greater good, huh? I don’t know at all! What if I am doing it to-”

A spark flickered and a devastatingly sharp electrical crackle was omnidirectionally overheard. Its presence was strongly felt by both Soulgon and the blucifer and they would’ve thought they were voltmeters detecting an electric potential exceeding way over 1,5 gigavolts. The spark projected itself into various thunderbolts, seemingly forming dark abyssal cracks emitting a dim red glow on its outlines in the very fabric of reality. They quickly dissipated into nothingness and left an eerie calm before the inevitable storm that was to come. Shattered glass. That’s what Soulgon and the blucifer woke up to. They weren’t asleep, just enraptured by the sheer energy that was felt after that spark. This time, the shattered glass was there, but now how anyone would expect it to be. Literal glowing whitish blue cracks were etched into the sky, the ground, the expanse of the Persian Gulf. It seemed like glass fracturing into crazed shards of different sections of reality and those radial fissures all led to a single point of impact: the dodecahedron in the blucifer’s heart. All of this happened in almost an instant.

“I’m sorry… but I have to kill you,” whispered the blucifer in a calm and slightly sad voice.

Soulgon felt true fear for the first time, a fear of imminent death. He flew away without any warning and prayed to God he could bypass all these reality warping cracks. The broken pieces of space grew larger and larger in size and the cracks were getting farther apart from each other until they unexpectedly extended out further into space faster than Soulgon trying to escape them as they started tightening their grasp on these reality shards. Soulgon looked behind him to see the blucifer chasing him from behind, gaining on him at a very fast pace. Before letting them reach him, Soulgon teleported to his flyssa where he previously stabbed the blucifer in the heart and the cracks disappeared from his field of view completely. He looked behind him to see the blucifer far away with a big spherical shattered space-time orb surrounding them from all sides. They were the center of that portable broken piece of reality. Soulgon took his sword and flew out of the water arena to get as far away from the blucifer as possible. He didn’t look back. He kept going, his instinct ready to travel through infinite space to get out of this situation. Unfortunately for him, that space kept expanding and he made no progress through the Earth’s atmosphere. He didn’t move up from the sea level. Soulgon saw the glowing cracks and the water arena rise up in his field of view and the blucifer, standing still with their hands in their pockets, sliding by his right side. They removed their right hand from their pocket and opened their palm towards Soulgon, ready to grab him by the neck to choke him to death. Soulgon’s attributes felt buffed and he took advantage of that by slicing through the blucifer from the right side of their rib cage to their right ear so fast that the blucifer would never be able to detect his intention to attack in order to chronophase through the slash. All we saw was the blucifer’s body splitting into two cleanly cut parts before Soulgon was back a few seconds ago, right after he teleported to his flyssa. The blucifer was behind him again. Soulgon tried the same thing: running away into the sky, but he didn’t take his sword this time. He flew up faster, but still ended up being brought back to the blucifer by the expanding space, but this time, they were a little bit higher from the water since Soulgon flew out a farther distance than the last time loop. This was perfect. The blucifer tried to grab Soulgon by the neck again, but a tiny black shard came hovering between their hand and Soulgon’s neck before implanting itself into the blucifer’s palm. The latter cracked into glowing white fissures spreading across its entire surface like it was made of dried clay. They let out a disturbingly distorted scream of pain before realizing their entire hand was broken off, leaving a blinding white glow at the base of their wrist. The blucifer looked up from their hand and saw Soulgon, bending his knees forward in a fighting stance while his right arm was paralyzed on one side and his left arm was in a beckoning stance on the other. He started glowing orange and an irradiating corona grew larger and brighter around him until he became but just a dark silhouette. That light went out to engulf him entirely and the blucifer just now realized that that light was fire coming from Soulgon. They tried to expand the space between them and the flames, but this somehow didn’t work, catching them off guard. They were able to barely dodge the beam of fire and they looked towards Soulgon, still eclipsed by the girth and brightness of their fire beam. Everything went smoothly, until suddenly… Soulgon came out from the blaze of his extended fire beam behind the blucifer, with his flyssa ready to stab them. Leaving them no time to react, Soulgon’s sword thrust itself through the air and stabbed the blucifer in the heart, piercing right through the dodecahedron. No time loops this time. Soulgon felt an inner vibration go through his sword even though it didn’t seem to be moving. Blood dripped from the blucifer’s back and spewed out of the dodecahedron. The glowing cracks etched on the blucifer’s jacket and surrounding the dodecahedron faded away. The dim glow emitted by the dodecahedron turned off. The dodecahedron was cracked internally and externally.

“But… how?” said the blucifer with a dying voice.

“Sorry… I would love to give you an explanation, but I have to go or else I’m going to fracture into a million shards like you,” responded Soulgon.

To be continued…