The Primordial Record

Chapter 2196  You Think Pain Matters To Me?

Eos looked at this blinding form of Enoch, and he laughed inside him, although the feeling of disgust inside his heart was incredibly profound.

End had no idea what true light meant, not even after it had been consuming it for all these eternities. The only means it had been using to interpret Existence was the Origin of Enoch, and now that it was gone, it was proving to Eos that it was complete, and Eos saw right through this creature and its hollow shell.

“Yes, you are beautiful,” Eos said, and then he smiled, “But you would be more beautiful when you are no more.”

Inside his heart, Eos sent his will to all of Origin, to all the names of the dead that were gone but not forgotten from the dawn of time, and he told them, ‘I am your avatar, the one who carries all your hope, give me your dreams, and I shall keep them safe. Watch over me as I fight this battle, and be with me, as we conquer all our enemies.’

He straightened, and although the gesture he made could hardly be seen, one of Enoch’s widespread hands suddenly separated from his shoulder with a sound like a mountain being torn in half.

Black ichor erupted from the wound, and it was alive as it screamed and writhed in the void, trying to crawl back to the stump. Its screams did not last for long as it was rapidly dying, as each drop of the dying ichor screamed in a different frequency, each frequency a different death rattle from a different dead Existence.

Enoch staggered.

“You—” he began.

Eos did not waste his time trying to appease the vanity of Enoch as he had entered a state of battle, and in this state, it was one where he either perished, or Enoch did.

All ten thousand Ancient Origin poured into his blade, and it blazed with a radiance that shone light across countless infinities of the void, and it shamed the radiance of the form that Enoch had taken.

“This light…” Enoch gasped, a moment before a billion light-years of screaming radiance that was the Destroyer drove into Enoch’s chest.

The blade went in just below the sternum, and it came out the other side with chunks of something that might have been organs, realities, or the compressed remains of a billion dead universes. Enoch’s body arched backward, his featureless face splitting open in a wound as he howled.

Every clash of Origin and End was like the clash between matter and antimatter, and that meant that Eos was extinguishing End with his blade, but the same thing was happening to him as well, the only difference was that he was not screaming.

Ichor sprayed from the wound and splashed across Eos’s face, and this ichor that was the purest source of End began to eat through his face and the light of his crown, and for a moment, his true form was visible beneath his skin, resembling a vast web of scars and healing wounds, the remnants of a hundred million years of war.

Since the battle started, Eos had not gotten time to rest or heal, and he was fighting with everything he had, making breakthroughs and pushing into new realms without holding back, and it was costing him…yet, he didn’t stop.

He twisted the blade, causing Enoch’s chest cavity to crack open. Ribs that were not ribs, but corrupted timelines that had been fused into bone, and possibilities that had been compressed into cartilage, snapped under the pressure. The sound was wet and final. And even though Eos had become battle-hardened after countless years of war, it was sounds like this that would haunt him for all eternity, but this was his burden to bear.

“You think this hurts?” Enoch snarled as he turned his face towards Eos, “You think pain matters to me? I have been unmade a thousand times. I have been erased from Existence. Your little blade is a…”

Eos pulled the blade upward.

It carved through Enoch’s chest like a hot knife through snow, as it cut through whatever passed for organs in a body that had been forged from the death of a hundred Existences. The blade emerged at Enoch’s collarbone, and the wound it left behind was a chasm that split Enoch’s torso from sternum to shoulder.

Ichor poured out in waves. Enoch’s body began to collapse under its own weight, the blinding white form he took flickering like a bulb that was about to go out. Eos stepped back, and he was breathing hard. His crown was dimming, the ten thousand lights flickering like candles in a storm. His arm, the one that had wielded the blade, was blackened to the elbow, the ichor eating through his skin, his muscle, and bone, and he didn’t look at it.

He was already forming the next weapon from his Destroyer. While this weapon was singular in its purpose, the addition of Origin Behemoths into it only multiplied its lethality and gave it a malleability that the weapon lacked.

The Destroyer shrieked in what could either be pain or pleasure as its form took the shape of a bow, whose curve was of frozen moments, with a string of causality, and an arrow that had not yet been fired but had already struck.

Eos pulled back his hand, and he drew. The moment he did this, all the memories of every archer that had ever lived from the beginning of Existence until this moment flowed into him.

It was as if countless phantoms appeared around him, holding different bows, from those made of wood to metal, and they sank into his body.

Eos was not fighting alone; he was fighting with all of Origin… all of Existence, both living and dead.

The arrow that formed on the string was the culmination of every arrow ever fired or will ever be fired, every projectile… and wrapping around it was the sheer Will of Eos that wanted to erase the enemies in front of him to nothing.

Eos held his breath and released.

The arrow did not fly through space but through Enoch. It entered his chest and exited his back, and where it passed, it left behind an absence. This was the absence of the first of anything.

Enoch’s greatest pride had been shattered, and he screamed alongside End. It was a humanlike scream, and for a moment, Eos paused.