The silence that followed Zeru's fall was suffocating.
Dust drifted through the shattered throne chamber like ash from a burnt world.
Riku stood alone in the center, silver light dimming around him—the final flickers of his Triad Divine Avatar form pulsing low.
Akuma Kurogane descended from the throne at last.
Each step he took bent the floor beneath him, not with force—but with existence. As if reality itself struggled to carry the weight of who he was.
No pressure. No essence release. Just presence.
Pure, overwhelming, unchallenged presence.
Riku's gaze sharpened.
He exhaled, long and slow.
Then raised his right hand.
The shift was instant.
From within his body, the Cosmic Array unfurled—a lattice of rotating, multicolored glyphs spiraling behind him like galaxies in motion. The stars flickered in his pupils, and veins of light ran across his skin in fractal formations that defied earthly geometry.
Time bent around him.
The Celestial Nexus had returned.
The Fourth Divine Avatar.
Akuma simply watched.
His lips curled, amused.
"I wondered when you'd stop holding back," he said, voice echoing without distortion. "Celestial Nexus... the evolution of existence itself. The avatar of balance and boundlessness."
Riku said nothing.
His body hovered an inch above the ground—no wings, no aura flare. Just harmony. Power beyond mortal measure, compressed into stillness.
Akuma rolled his shoulders once.
"But let me make something clear."
He lifted his hand slowly, and the ceiling above them fractured—not from essence, but from the sheer command he had over the domain they stood in.
"I don't need stages. I don't need transformation."
A single pulse escaped his body.
The entire continent felt it.
Beasts howled. Oceans trembled.
Mountains cracked.
"I am already my fullest form," he continued. "I am the end of roads, the weight that swallows gods, and the reason the sky stays up."
He took a single step forward, and the entire throne room—already shattered—descended into a deeper, unseen void realm of Akuma's making. Black-red skies stretched above them. Stone spires hovered like dead titans in the air. The throne remained floating in the background, untouched.
Riku raised his eyes.
Akuma raised his hand.
And without a word—
They moved.
Akuma was the first to strike. A palm—simple, elegant.
Riku raised his forearm to block.
BOOM.
The shockwave turned the void realm inside out, bending light, collapsing gravity for three seconds before stabilizing. Riku skidded back across the floating stone, feet glowing blue from the backlash.
Then he vanished—reappearing behind Akuma with a spinning kick.
Akuma blocked it with his elbow.
A ripple of null essence—black with white cracks—echoed from the point of contact and disintegrated the nearby spires.
Neither spoke.
They moved again.
A flash of starlight.
A rush of shadows.
Fists collided.
The void howled.
Akuma smiled—something ancient, something terrifying. "I see now why they feared you. Why they named you Deity."
Riku's eyes glowed with constellations. "And I see why no one's dethroned you."
They clashed again, faster this time. Every strike folded space, every dodge re-wrote physics.
Each movement was a question.
Each counter was an answer.
But the battle…
Was only beginning.