Global Gods : Skill-Resonance Awakened

Chapter 387: The First Hero and The Final Lord

The darkness of the Negation Domain was no longer a silent void; it had become a battlefield where the fundamental laws of existence were being ground into dust.

Sunny stood at the epicenter, his hands wreathed in a cold, brilliant fire. This was not the blue glow of mana. It was the raw, concentrated essence of Faith, the spiritual byproduct of countless souls crying out for a savior.

As the formless Beyonder coalesced into a humanoid shape before him, the sheer scale of the entity became apparent.

Its fingers were longer than Sunny was tall, tipped with obsidian talons that seemed to drink the very light he emitted. It didn't roar; it simply moved with the inevitable weight of an ending.

The strike came with the speed of a collapsing star. A massive, shadowy hand descended, aimed directly at Sunny's core with enough physical force to shatter a universe.

But Sunny was no longer the panicked mortal he had been moments ago. Through his mastery of the control over faith, a skill honed through millions of years within the River of Time, In the span of a heartbeat, he wove the golden threads of Faith into a thick shield.

The impact was cataclysmic. The Beyonder's claws slammed into the barrier, and the sound of the collision was a scream.

"What is the point of a quintillion prayers if I cannot shield a single life?" Sunny hissed, his teeth gritted against the soul-crushing pressure.

He watched with wide eyes as the faith of his shield dissolved. The Beyonder wasn't just hitting him; it was digesting the energy of his shield.

The golden fire was being sucked into the entity's void-like skin at a rate that made Sunny's heart skip a beat.

"It feeds on the laws and energy," Sunny realized, his mind racing. "And my Faith is the most pure energy in this darkness."

He immediately pivoted his strategy. Instead of a single, thick barrier, he began to manifest thousands of paper-thin Shields, stacked like the scales of a dragon. Each layer was designed to be sacrificial.

When the Beyonder's strike hit, it would consume one layer and lose its momentum for a fraction of a millisecond before hitting the next.

It was an endless loop of destruction and construction, a frantic race where Sunny used his faith to buy seconds of survival.

Strike after strike rained down. The darkness rippled with every blow, the golden sparks of dying Faith illuminating the faceless head of the Beyonder.

Sunny's body, though bolstered by the Nihilium bloodline, was beginning to groan under the sheer physical displacement.

'At this rate, the Faith will run dry before the Negation breaks,' he thought, his muscles screaming. 'And if I fall, the billions of Old Gods I felt earlier will truly rot into nothingness. I am the only light left in this graveyard.'

It is a well-known law of the multiverse that extreme pressure yields only two results: a thing either shatters into dust, or it hardens into a diamond.

Sunny was currently being forged in the most brutal crucible in existence. Deprived of his talents, stripped of his mana, and facing an entity from a race that could kill a Void Emperor, he was being forced to rely on the raw strength of his body.

He was no longer a God leaning on his talents; he was a King standing on his own two feet.

Outside the expanding sphere of the Negation Domain, a different kind of shadow lingered.

Deimos, the Lord of Discord, drifted at the boundary, his red eyes narrowed in predatory curiosity. He could taste the lingering scent of Sunny's aura, a trail of violet starlight that led straight into the inside of the sphere.

"My instincts are... Calm," Deimos whispered to himself, his voice a merciless rasp. "In billions of years of fighting Gods and toppling their Heavens, my intuition has never failed me. If Cosmos entered this dark, then there is a treasure inside worth the risk."

Trusting his gut, the same fatal error Sunny had made, the Lord of Discord plunged into the darkness.

The transition was instantaneous. Deimos felt the laws of the Demonic Realm snap like dry twigs. The Discord he usually commanded, the chaos he wove into a weapon, was suddenly muffled, as if he had been submerged in thick, freezing oil.

"What is this insolence?" he growled, reaching out to touch the darkness.

Every movement felt like he was wading through waist-deep lead. The negation slammed into his demonic divinity, trying to revert him to a base lifeform.

But Deimos was an apex predator of a different caliber. Having fed on the sins and discord of two bubbles for eons, his physical vessel was a fortress of dense, demonic strength. The toll was heavy, but he did not buckle.

Still, the loss of his talents left him feeling exposed. For the first time in an epoch, the Lord of Discord felt a prickle of unease. He was a shark in a tank of ink.

However, Deimos's arrival had an unintended side effect. The Domain of Negation was a finite system; its power was currently focused entirely on suppressing Sunny and the Beyonder's primary target.

When a second entity of Deimos's strength entered the sphere, the Domain was forced to reallocate its resources.

The Negation had to divide its claws. Half of its power remained on Sunny, but the other half surged toward Deimos to suppress his demonic laws.

Inside the battle zone, Sunny suddenly felt a massive weight lift from his shoulders. The pressure on his soul thinned. The invisible chains that had been binding his talents didn't break, but they went slack.

"The pressure... it's diverting?" Sunny gasped.

He looked toward the horizon of the dark. His Divine Eyes, though still suppressed, could sense a massive, black-red energy signature entering the domain.

At the same time, the Beyonder paused. Its faceless head tilted, its senses detecting a new, pungent flavor of divinity in its territory.

The entity's eyes, two pits of burning, baleful red... flashed with a sudden, mindless hunger.

It looked at Sunny, then at the distant arrival of Deimos. It seemed to decide that the newcomer was a more nutritious meal for the moment. With a shrieking, metallic sound, the Beyonder vanished into the dark, flying toward Deimos with the speed of a nightmare.

"Eh? Who is this hidden benefactor of mine?" Sunny let out a dry chuckle, wiping a streak of golden blood from his lip. "Whoever they are, they just bought the most expensive time in history."

Just as he spoke, his body glowed with a familiar, radiant heat. The Second of Stability had returned, likely triggered by the Domain's distraction.

Sunny didn't hesitate. He burned through a few quadrillion Faith points, stretching the fabric of the moment. For Sunny, the world froze.

He activated his Divine eyes and the darkness became transparent. He saw everything. He saw the trillions of miles of the sphere. He saw the billions of Old Gods, their souls flickering like dying embers. And then, he saw his benefactor.

"Wait... Deimos?" Sunny blinked in shock. "The Lord of Discord is my guardian angel? Truly, Fate has a twisted sense of humor."

He saw the Beyonder closing in on the Demon Lord, who was still struggling to adjust to the physical toll of the Negation.

Deimos was powerful, but he didn't have Faith. He wouldn't be able to form the shields Sunny had used. He would be torn apart in seconds.

Sunny looked toward the exit. He could run. He could save his life and vanish into somewhere safe, leaving Deimos to be the scapegoat. It was the logical thing to do.

"But I don't think I'll be given a second chance to save these Gods," Sunny whispered.

His morals, forged in a life that valued loyalty over pure logic, won out. He turned his gaze back to the billions of fallen deities.

Sunny poured a staggering amount of his faith into the vacuum. A golden mist began to fill the Negation Domain, drenching every fallen God in a droplet of pure, life-sustaining Faith, which was enough to awaken the particle of law inside them.

Then, he reached out with his soul.

Like a cosmic vacuum, the portals began to manifest beside every God he had healed.

Within a few minutes of time, millions of Old Gods were swept into the safety of inner world. He channeled a message to the Overseer, "Prepare the medical Gods. The old Gods have returned. Use the Faith reserves to keep them stable."

As the last of the nearby Gods vanished into his soul-space, Sunny looked toward the epicenter of the coming clash. The Beyonder was moments away from Deimos.

"I have what I came for," Sunny muttered, his violet eyes glowing with a complex emotion. He could leave now. He could let his enemy die in the dark.

But then he remembered the Demon Lords' pride. If Deimos died here, the Demonic Realm would fall into a chaos that would eventually spill over into Sunny's expansion points. More importantly, he still wanted to know why Deimos was here.

"Should I run away... or should I help my friend?"

Sunny tightened his hands. He felt the talent-link beginning to flicker; the Domain was finally adapting to both of them. He had seconds left before he became mortal again.

"Heh. A Sovereign doesn't owe debts to demons," Sunny said, his body blurring as he initiated a Void Step not toward the exit, but toward the Beyonder's back. "But I do enjoy a good brawl in the dark."

The violet starlight and the black-red demonic aura were about to collide with the Nothingness. And in the heart of the Negation, the First Hero and the Final Lord prepared to stand side-by-side.