Global Gods : Skill-Resonance Awakened

Chapter 382: The Clash in The Darkness

In the infinite stretch of the silent void, Sunny hovered like a specter of violet starlight, his consciousness partially tethered to the rhythmic pulse of the sub-realm universe within him.

He watched the shifting gears of Anohara's empire with the detached approval of a master craftsman observing a self winding clock.

"The second phase begins when the foundation of the universe of gods becomes absolute," Sunny whispered to the vacuum. "Once ninety five percent of those fifty billion worlds march to a single beat, the cage must open."

He relayed the directive to the Overseer, his soul clone tasked with the internal administration of his inner world.

The plan was a masterstroke of forced evolution. Currently, the sub-realm was a greenhouse; protected, isolated, and safe. But safety was the mother of stagnation.

Once the unification and the Cosmic Empire became absolute and crime was reduced to a statistical anomaly, the growth of the lifeforms would plateau.

To prevent this, Sunny intended to physically manifest the sub-realm into the Multiverse of Gods.

It would no longer be a hidden pocket of space but a physical neighbor to the ancient, high-tier civilizations he had already conquered.

The collision of Anohara's unified technological and Magical might with the raw, magical traditionalism and the technology that has been evolving since millions to billions of years in the older universes would ignite a new era of friction.

It wouldn't just be a war of territory, but a war of concepts; a competition of magical theory and technological ingenuity that would span millions of years.

Sunny shook his head, a faint smile touching his lips. While the Demigods and Thea could manage the internal logistics of this grand social experiment; the external task, the hunger for the outer world, remained his alone.

Suddenly, the hair on the back of Sunny's neck stood up. It wasn't a physical sensation, but a ripple in the conceptual fabric of his aura.

Someone, or something, was peering at him from a distance that defied conventional measurement.

With a light, melodic chuckle, Sunny snapped his fingers.

In an instant, his Invisibility and Aura Concealment talents surged to their absolute peak.

To any observer, it would appear as though a star had simply blinked out of existence. His presence dissolved entirely, leaving behind nothing but the cold, indifferent vacuum.

"Brazen," Sunny murmured, his eyes scanning the distant darkness. "To try and trace my cordinates.... heh. You'll have to be faster than a shadow to catch me."

Without a moment's delay, he initiated a Void Step. He didn't just move; he flickered, vanishing from the part of the void and reappearing millions of light-years away in the direction of a sprawling, unnatural darkness.

His Divine Eyes flared, attempting to pierce the gloom ahead, but for the first time since his ascension, the light failed him. The darkness ahead wasn't just an absence of light; it was an active negation of it.

"This darkness... it feels obnoxious," Sunny whispered. It felt hungry, heavy, and ancient. His divine intuition, now enhanced by the bloodline of the Royal Nihilum clan, hummed with a frantic warning.

The reincarnations of the Old Gods, the beings who had ruled before the multiverses were even a thought, were somewhere inside that obsidian veil.

He watched the boundary for a moment. The darkness wasn't stationary. It was a gargantuan sphere, expanding at a rate that would swallow the nearest multiverses within a few decades. It was a cosmic infection, eating the light of the bubble.

"If I don't stop this, it will eat my harvest before I can even salt it," Sunny said, his eyes flashing with a mix of protective instinct and cold fury.

With another Void Step, Sunny dove headfirst into the sphere.

Inside, reality simply ceased to make sense.

Sunny spun around, looking for the exit, for the distant, comforting glitter of the multiverses he had just left.

But there was nothing. No multiverses, no nebulae of multiverses, no spatial ley lines. He felt like an ant standing in the center of an infinite room of black velvet.

Then, the first shock hit him. His Invisibility and Aura Concealment talents, which had never failed him, flickered and died.

His body began to glow with its natural Cosmic radiance, making him a beacon of light in the absolute dark.

"Is this a Domain?" Sunny wondered, his hand instinctively reaching towards his mask as if afraid it will also disappear just like his invisibility.

He tried to conjure a simple spell of illumination, a spark of mana to push back the gloom.

The golden light flared for a fraction of a second before it was snuffed out, not by a counter-spell, but by the environment itself. The mana simply dissipated into the darkness as if it had never been gathered.

"My spells are being unmade... and even my passive talents are being reverted?" Sunny whispered, his voice sounding thin in the oppressive silence.

He tried his Divine Eyes once more, pushing his power to the limit.

The violet light in his pupils surged, but the darkness remained absolute. "I suppose even my divine eyes has its limits," he sighed, a cold weight settling in his stomach. "And I have just touched it."

He began to wander aimlessly, his feet treading on nothingness. He tried to sense the aura of the Old Gods, but the darkness acted as a universal silencer.

He was a predator who had walked into a trap where his primary senses were useless.

Far across the void, within the obsidian heart of the Demonic Capital, Deimos, the Lord of Discord, stood over a trembling figure.

The tracker, a high-tier Demon God specialized in long-range aura scouting, was a pathetic sight. Blood leaked from his nose and eyes, and his scales were scorched from the strain of peering into forbidden places or people.

"Be quick," Deimos hissed, his voice a low, vibrating promise of pain. "What is taking so long? You are a Demon God of the Hunt, yet you fumble like a blind mortal."

"Lord..." the tracker wheezed, his voice cracking. "I... I found him. I traced his aura for a moment, but he sensed me. He vanished. I am sacrificing my very essence to find the trail again, but it's as if he has stepped out of reality itself."

The demon god's eyes rolled back into his head, and he collapsed, his life-force flickering like a candle in a gale.

"Tch. Weakling," Deimos spat. He reached into his robes and pulled out a strip of black paper etched with silver runes, a Soul-Binding Script. He slapped it onto the forehead of the unconscious tracker.

The demon god's eyes snapped open. They were no longer the fearful eyes of a servant; they were blank, milky orbs, devoid of soul but filled with a hollow, mechanical intelligence.

"Tell me," Deimos commanded the puppet. "Give me his last coordinates. In which direction was he phasing?"

"Master," the lifeless voice droned. "The target was positioned sixty five million light-years North of the Multiverse of Treasures. He was facing a Deep Dark sphere. This darkness isn't registered in the maps, it seems to have suddenly appeared out of nothing...."

"The Multiverse of Treasures?" Deimos's eyes glowed with a feral, red light. "The rat was plucking my gardens right under my nose."

His hatred for Lom was a living thing, a burning fire in his gut. He had initially ordered the tracker to find Lom, but the Lom's innate talent for concealment was absolute; even the tracker's soul-sacrifice had yielded only a wall. But Cosmos? He didn't possess such passive talents. He hadn't been hiding his presence until the very last second.

"So, he goes North," Deimos whispered, a cruel smile spreading across his face. "He thinks this darkness will hide him. He doesn't realize that in the void, I am the echo that never dies."

Deimos removed the script, leaving the tracker to rot on the floor, and vanished in a burst of black lightning. His goal was simple: catch the Sovereign, enslave his soul, and use him to bait the thief.

Back in the hidden dimension of the Pearl of Calamity, Lom sat on his throne, watching the shifting map of the bubble. He saw the Darkness of the black dot closing in towards the light of the violet dot.

"Heh. I don't even need to lift a finger," Lom smirked, his fingers drumming against the armrest.

He knew Deimos was hunting. He knew the Lord of Discord would be able to track the traces of a being like Sunny far easier than he could track a being like himself, who possessed talent for hiding away from any sight.

"Deimos is hungry for revenge," Lom mused, zooming in on the dark spot on his map, the same expanding sphere Sunny had just entered. "He is heading straight for Cosmos. And the location of their clash... well, it's the one place where even a Demon Lord's law starts to fray."

Lom leaned back, his eyes glittering with a dark, expectant joy. "Go on, Deimos. Go play with the Sovereign in the dark. I'll be here to pick up the pieces of whoever is left."