And at Inifinity's End, Change spoke.

  These were its words.

  "Weep not for heroes. Curse them."

  from thus?

  - story, start - ?

  And I opened my eyes and beheld the blood on my hands. Around me, around me, they all fought, and what they fought was a war. Screams of anger, and of pain echoed across the battlefield as the stars danced madly in the heavens above and the Elder Gods fell towards the dead earth. The ground was parched, and cracked, and burnt, the remnants of life long since withered and turned brown, and at this moment there was no hope left.

  No. Hope was long and far away. We had lost. And we had lost everything. Stumbling to my feet, I looked around the chaos of the battlefield, until my eyes locked on those of one man. His eyes calm, clinical, disinterested, his countenance calm. Here was someone who didn't fear for his life.

  My own expression was half-crazed, but I felt the same. We were of a kind, and that changed everything. Reaching into the back of my mind, I connected with the Principle of Ontology, fell into an echo of the Wúxiào Wǔshù, and gestured.

  Come. Let us end this.

  He nodded, and fell into no stance. Instead, around him, everything simply unraveled, as the seams of existence were unmade. I narrowed my eyes, then charged.

  There was no interval between the beginning and the end. In one moment, I had crossed two miles and opened up with my first blow, a shattering resonance that would break the reality of his soul. He stepped out of the moment that defined his death and flowed around the worldlines defining my victory, falling back into the world where he survived. I pursued, but he was ready, had prepared a trap, a hidden fist glowing with the fury of a green sun. Accepting the blow as it was offered, I stepped through it and let it echo through nothing and out of my back. As the coruscating fury of a titan's rage decimated the armies surrounding us, I dodged his second conventionally, lunged forward through the lacuna of his pace, and had my mind fall into a certain pattern as my hand made contact with his body, and my spirit brushed against his souls.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Void Architecture. World Eater.

  The un-not surrounding the man crumpled, and shattered into pieces, and his eyes widened as he understood what I had done, confidence replaced with horror. The effect spread, and he turned to flee. In the next moment, he no longer was. Even if he had used a truer method of escape, it wouldn't have been enough.

  Nothing would have.

  This multiverse was doomed.

  As what I had done extended, and continued, ramifying as it grew outwards, the local physics failed, its axioms disrupted and coming undone. I watched from the inside, as men, women, and children fell apart. I watched as the old gods fell. I watched as the event horizon of reality extended throughout everything, and the bubble of math that defined this plurality fell, and descended into One.

  And then it was over.

  Another Samsara Breaker had died.

  And I, once again, and as always, was alone.

  Beneath me, separated by what was only a conceptual distance, something like a star flickered. A singularity. The terminus of the axiomatic branch that had formed the world I had destroyed.

  I stepped down, to it, and let my mind fall into a pattern more.

  Antithesis: World Eater.

  It was the negative image of the first, arranged so all the prismatic concepts that coloured the reality of the death of a multiverse cancelled each other out, to a certain and uniform grey.

  And the singularity exploded, unravelling out into a glorious and complete system of the world.

  I stared at it from the outside, and almost took a step towards it before I stopped myself, and slowly turned away.

  My arrival and everything that I had done had been unwritten. So had the actions - and final life - of the other Breaker.

  It was over.

  This was no longer my home.

  "Goodbye," I whispered, hugging myself as I walked away. "Goodbye."

  I don't remember how long it took.

  But eventually, after I had walked too far, my body and soul ceased to be valid propositions, and everything collapsed as I died, and once again fell into a new world.

  it would never end

  It would never, ever, end.

  Why could that thought still make me smile?

  Sha Nagba Imuru

  Wúxiào Wǔshù

  A Supernatural Martial Art originating from The Fourteen. Founded on the Principle of Ontology. Katas enable users to manipulate gaps. Four styles, each with an increasing degree of enlightenment as to the nature of the Principle of Ontology. Grandmasters are capable of creating absences that compete with plenums for the definition of "reality". This technique is, strictly speaking, a method of induction for the Supernal Art relating to Ontology. That it is functional in and of itself is a testament to the skill of it's maker: Leng.

  Void Architecture

  The method of creating fundamental patterns that are axiomatically correct over all facets of the Omniverse; the power of absolute truth. World Eater is a construct that inserts contradictory terms into the Axiom set instantiating a given Multiverse, causing an irrevocable, cascading destruction of that Multiverse. Antithesis: World Eater creates conceptual negative space around the initial construct. Both are generic: rather that World Earter being an Axiom that killed that specific Multiverse, World Eater is a construct that produces such an Axiom for the Multiverse that is is instantiated within.

  Universe

  A piece of a multiverse, a complete world. Usually finite in size.

  Multiverse

  A set of all possible universes. The multiverse contains a universe for every possible outcome encoded in its Laws. These Laws define the operation of physics. Usually finite in size, but incomprehensibly vast by human standards. Some Multiverses contain smaller multiverses, some contain infinitely deep hierarchies of them. Each multiverse forms a node on the Axiomatic Tree of the Tenth of The Fourteen.

  Omniverse

  A set of all possible Multiverses. "A" because the structure (if any) linking those multiverse could, in theory, vary. In the context of this story, each Multiverse is a different set of Laws. This is not in terms of physical constants. A Multiverse containing a world where the Big Bang happened differently such that Hydrogen is the only possible atom (all others being radioactive) would still be our home Multiverse. Each Multiverse has fundamentally different Laws, and it is not uncommon for one set of Laws to be incompatible with the other. The nature of these Laws are set by their Axioms, and so, just like a Multiverse contains all possible outcomes allowed by Laws, the Omniverse contains all possible (that is, non contradictory) Axiomatic Configurations. The Omniverse of our tale catalogs infinity by beginning with the simplest Axiom. From it, it branches out, the omniverse branches out along all possible Axiomatic Paths, each node between Axioms containing a Multiverse which contains a universe in turn.

  To try to illustrate the level of abstraction Axioms operate at, it is perfectly valid for a multiverse to exist where numbers like pi and e have other values, or simply do not exist.

  The size of the Omniverse is not finite. The lower bound is ?1? multiverses. There is no upper bound.

  Axiom

  A "recieved truth". In the maths, you can ask if 2+2 = 4, and either you or a mathematician can sit down and tell you that it does, and explain why. But all explanations have to stop somewhere. The stopping point is an Axiom (or a set of them), and what the mathematician proves to you is that if the Axiom/Axioms is/are true, then 2 + 2 = 4. It's important to note that axioms are statements that are true, not true statements. For example, is we say that an axiom of algebra is that "a + b = b + a", we can also say that an axiom of algebra is that it is false that a + b = b + a, or in pure symbols, a + b ≠ b + a. There are also certain forms of logic that admit of more or less than the two truth values (true ad false) of everyday logic. For example, the Omniverse of the story begins with unary logic, which only permits truth. Eventually, it creates axioms that allow types of logic with more than one kind of truth, and then multiverses are permitted to branch in ways that are not permitted based on just the presence or absence of axioms, but also the truth values of the statements. (Although the term "truth value" implies a degree of comprehension that isn't present in the system.)