An explosion of untold magnitude exploded outwards above the river of time.
And just like that, in an instant. Valerio Augustine was no more, having completed a full cycle of life, from stardust to life and from life to stardust. He had been a source of reverence and fear for all of existence. His titles had been enough to halt his enemies' hearts. Yet, he had met his end at his own hands, and in the Time Plane of all places.
***
10 milliseconds before the explosion. Time Plane
'The manoeuvre this time is too high in scale. We can't afford letting them figure it out.' Valerio thought back to Wind.
A sigh resounded in his mind.
'He'll need energy. An obscene amount of it.'
The Void twisted in protest but soon yielded to its master's will. Reality itself groaned as a funnel manifested beside T, its maw gaping wide to devour the infinite void and spit out raw, seething power. Val calmly watched as the void cannibalised itself—an act of cosmic heresy as the void disregarded its own innate nature.
'If only that was enough.'
His soul burned neon green, a supernova contained within flesh. Every boundary he'd ever set, every limit he'd respected, shattered as he wrenched more from himself, more than should have been possible. The strain sent fissures spider-webbing through his soul. He couldn't guarantee it, but he was damn sure he could help increase T's odds.
A laugh echoed through his head as he considered his circumstances. A flare of Spiritual Lu condensed into a perfect sphere. A second pulse sent arrays erupting across his pocket dimension's sky, their sigils bleeding emerald light.
'You bastard,' Valerio thought, grinning through the pain. 'Not even letting me die a glorious death.'
'If you pull off a second miracle after this, I'll haunt you through every fucking timeline.'
And so with a bittersweet unwillingness yet unyielding will, all of the actions he'd incepted began to reach completion.
And the cascading dominoes began their descent.
BANG
The neon tendrils fused with T's atoms—rewriting, reforging. His body became a lattice of searing green equations, every particle screaming as it was torn from one reality and hammered into another.
BANG
The funnel screamed. It vomited a supernova's worth of energy into T's core, but the laws of physics didn't break–instead obeying Val's commands.
BANG
Val's arrays flared one final time, setting off another set of reactions in his core for when T succeeded.
"Sorry, love."
The words came as a whisper in the void–a final thought wrapped in warmth and regret. Val's mind drifted to her, his one and only, his wife, the anchor of a thousand half-remembered dreams, as a solemn smile graced his face one last time.
"I'll find you in the next life."
"No harm done if you forget this one, right?"
His soul smiled—not in triumph, but in something deeper. The kind of peace that comes only at the end of a life lived without compromise nor regret.
He had given everything. Fought, failed, loved, lost—but always on his own terms. He bent for no one. He did not care for approval, nor did he fear judgment. His victories were his own, and so were his mistakes. And he regretted none of it.
He had lived fully. Fiercely. Held nothing back. He had never betrayed himself, and never yielded his spirit—not for comfort, not for vanity. Few understood him. Fewer still were allowed close. But those he held dear, he held with unshakable loyalty.
And now, as the world fell silent, there was no fear. Only stillness. Only truth.
This was futility's grace—not surrender, not despair, but the quiet power of a man who gave everything, of one who lived according to their principles, such a man lost nothing of himself, and left nothing undone.
Such was the gift of futility's grace.
Such was its beauty.
And with that, he exhaled—finally allowing himself to let go.
His soul ignited.
No more desperate gambits. No more impossible odds.
Just stillness.
The kind that stretched past time. Past self.
And in that quiet, as the last ember of his soul faded, there was no pain.
Only silence.
***
Reality shook as true nothingness was created within Reality, without space nor time. Wind, hit by the explosion, flew out so fast that he almost returned to his own realm, far enough away from T for his plan B.
And that left T in the time Plane… silence resounding across the time plane except for the remnant echoes of Val's laughter as he sat alone.
But then the echoes were joined by another laughter. "HAHAHAHAHA…"
"What a fucking madman." T's laughter resounded as loud as Val's across the time Plane as he allowed himself a moment to linger on the absurdity of it all, lips curling into a grin as Val's explosion of life force slowly died down.
In the silence that followed, a small marble—a perfect sphere of iridescent blues, greens, blacks, and whites—shot toward him from the remnants of Valerio's explosive demise. T's fingers snapped out in reflex, catching it without hesitation, his smirk widening even further. The sphere emitted a hum as its colours brightened for an instant before settling down; not anyone could hold such a thing.
"You better make it count then," he repeated with mock seriousness, twirling the marble between his fingers like a casual trinket. "Who does he think he is?" T murmured, his voice dripping with amusement, not even a trace of remorse nor grief on his features.
"Of course I will," T murmured under his breath as his head hung low, his composure becoming one of utmost seriousness, with all traces of humanity and emotion disappearing from his visage. The conviction in his voice cut through the silence.
The energy around him began to crackle as T stretched his remaining arm, his expression becoming as deathly still as the previous composure he had had with Val disappeared like it never existed. His body began to tremble as the immense power within him surged, crackling through his veins with an intensity that felt like a storm contained in the very marrow of his bones. His skin started to glow—a soft, golden radiance at first, like the first light of dawn breaking over a darkened horizon. Then, the glow intensified, as if the very essence of his being was being pulled apart by an invisible force.
His body, already battered and broken, seemed to liquefy, the golden light creeping up his skin as it melted away. Flesh turned to light, muscles and bone disintegrating into particles of brilliant gold that swirled around him like a thousand sparks in the wind.
'Can't even let me have my moment without stealing some of the glory,' he internally murmured, his visage giving way to a final grin, gleaming with a manic, almost carefree energy.
The heavenly orchestra reached its crescendo.
As his form melted away, T's thoughts flickered, his mind running on overdrive. "Younger me…" he mused, his grin not fading in the slightest. "If all goes to plan, you better give that crazy motherfucker some real hell." But then, a shadow of something unreadable crept into his tone. "Though if it really works… when I pull this off… you won't be you anymore, will you?"
His gaze lowered to the only thing Val had left behind. "And if you will be who I estimate you to be…then you definitely won't get along with Val."
A final thought lingered in his mind. "But I suppose it is what it is, what does it matter anymore?"
….
And just like that, T ceased to exist. No dramatic flare, no cataclysmic end. Simply gone—erased from the world, without a single trace.
Yet the moment his body was nothing but dissipating energy, three distinct cores emerged from the remains of his being. They shimmered in midair—Val's one radiating with blues, greens, blacks, and whites, and another 2 that seemed to have joined it, one pulsing with light blue, red, and green, and the last one glowing with brown, blue, black, and a dark nebula purple.
They hovered in place for a moment before descending toward a distinct black streak cutting through the Time Plane's river, the current pulling them with relentless force. And yet, despite the river's attempts to keep them at bay, the cores moved against the current, slowly slipping into the depths of the darkened flow of time, a subtle disruption causing the current to shift ever so slightly.
All that remained in the time plane was the fading echo of the last laughter of the two friends– faint, but stubbornly clinging to existence–as two cores and a white blob drifted toward their inevitable destination.