The Martial Unity

When Ria saw her father fight, she saw a side of him that she had never seen before. Her entire life, he had been the strongest and beyond approach. She had never ever seen him fight, truly fight, from the moment she was born.

Perhaps the sole exception was when she felt the specter of his Water in his battle against the virus, the laminars, and the nebulars, but she was so young, and it was so long ago that it may as well have not happened. She only remembered it because that event had been the trigger for the discoveries of her Martial Path.

But this was the first time that she had truly beheld him fighting properly and truly with all of his power.

She understood that she was looking at something new.

And she cherished the opportunity.

She pressed herself against one of the windows in her private quarters aboard the Blood Arc spaceship, which allowed her to see the battle between her father and the Divine Mother. She witnessed how the two extraordinary beings could effortlessly bend reality itself to their will.

Their attacks had consequences upon the entire world, opening the entire star system.

Her vision and her senses weren't good enough to get a good look at their exact actions, but she was powerful enough to understand the general flow of the battle.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!

She watched her father being flung into the red dwarf star of the star system by the Divine Mother, anxiety filling her heart at the sight of the tremendous solar flare that the attack gave rise to.

For a few moments, nothing happened.

She simply watched the red dwarf star quiver where it was as solar flares emerged from its disrupted body.

A strange sensation emerged in her heart.

A single voice reverberated in her mind.

'I'm sorry, Ria.'

Her amber eyes widened.

'Allow your father to be a little selfish just this one time.'

She could hear his voice.

In her heart.

Then, she watched the battle shift.

It became a battle unlike anything she had ever seen in her entire life. She understood enough to understand that her father leveraged the power of the red dwarf star and the solar flares that erupted from it. She didn't know how he did it, but he changed them to make them resemble more the directioned and targeted spew of fire from a flamethrower than how solar flares normally worked.

She could feel the nature of causality changing. She had developed greater familiarity with the causality of the universe as a Martial Master. It was what allowed her to punch so far above her weight class.

Yet, when she studied the absurd and almost fantastical battle between the Transcendents, she felt lost.

Reality simply didn't function the way she thought it would.

It destroyed her understanding of the world.

Her father altered the rules of reality to leverage the power of a red dwarf star against the Divine Mother.

And it worked well, from what Ria could tell.

It forced the Divine Mother to defend, using her own webs and her power. The powerful plasma of the solar flares doused her over and over, causing bright flashes that would blind the eye of any lesser being.

And yet, she watched as her father fought back, using the star that the Divine Mother had thrown him into against her.

But the homoarachnoid Transcendent was not nearly as weak to overcome.

Pure horror emerged in Ria's heart as she watched the homoarcahnoid gesture towards the star with her hand, making a crushing motion that crushed the entire star into a smaller and smaller, more compact heavenly body.

The same star that her father was at the very epicenter of.

The solar flares grew more and more intense.

The star grew smaller and smaller.

It grew brighter and brighter.

It changed color from red to white to blue.

And, eventually, it exploded.

In a catastrophic explosion.

One brighter than the entire galaxy.

If not for the fact that the Blood Arc had gotten far enough away to the point where the red dwarf stars of the binary star system were like grains of sand, she wasn't sure that they could have survived.

RUMBLE!!!!!!!

The very fabric of space and time roared as a mighty explosion consumed the entire star system at a rapid pace. The sheer amount of energy involved beggared the imagination of each and every single pathwalker who bore witness to it.

Supernovae were among the most intense phenomena to occur anywhere in the entire universe. The sheer ferocity of these events rewrote solar and star systems with a tremendous amount of power.

It made every single pathwalker feel extremely small.

Yes, they were powerful enough to destroy cities, countries, tectonic plates; they could weave together high principles to produce great results; they were faster than sound and lightning, turning them into nothing more than invisible flashes in the eyes of ordinary men.

And yet, before such grandiose finality, they were nothing more than helpless insects. None of them, not even the strongest among them, would be able to survive the extravagant death of a star.

Even as Ria averted her eyes to avoid getting blinded by the brightest phenomenon in the universe, a surge of euphoria flushed her mind and body.

The faintest of epiphanies swept her.

"Death is causality."

Everything had an end.

And all causality was eventually funneled to the end.

Every event was the end and the beginning.

Such was the nature of death.

When the explosion finally reached them, their energy shields held, even if turbulently.

RUMBLE

The fleet carrier shook.

If not for the dilution that occurred at that distance, they would not have been able to survive so smoothly.

There were no doubt other adventurer spaceships that hadn't made it in time, who had undoubtedly been dead. At that point, it wasn't just about power any longer; their life-sustaining exosuits would not be able to survive such an environment, making death all but inevitable.

RUMBLE...

The fabric of space and time quivered lightly before slowly settling down as the fleet carrier stabilized.

Ria immediately turned back towards the window as her eyes widened at what she saw.

Where there was a star was darkness.

An empty patch of space.

So empty that even the stars in the background seemed to be absent when she looked into it.

Around the edges of the empty space, the light of the distant stars and galaxies warped.

As if there was a giant glass lens in space.

Her amber eyes widened with horror as she finally understood what she was looking at.

"A black hole...!"