Divine Manifestation
The moment Marduk unfurled his wings, the gods watching the battle from afar felt the air itself change.
All of them save Inanna and Enki froze under the crushing pressure, unable even to draw breath.
It was a presence of an entirely different order.
Among them, only Enlil grasped the situation with perfect clarity.
"Everyone, run! Right now!!"
Enki's shout rang out in desperate urgency — closer to a scream than a cry of warning.
He had never imagined Marduk would resort even to that, and the realization left him genuinely shaken.
Inanna, too, understood on pure instinct that something terrible was about to unfold.
"Sunya!!"
Stay still and you die.
Even with that premonition clawing at her, she ran toward him instead. The distance between them was vast, and she knew full well there was nothing she could do — yet the very fact that she tried to reach him meant Inanna had already lost her reason.
"Mother!!"
"What are you doing, Mom? Why all of a sudden?"
"You lunatic! Come back, Inanna!! It's already too la—"
None of the voices trying to stop her reached her ears.
Fortunately, in that same instant, a colossal hand descended from above and covered every god standing there.
"This is…"
"Sunya did this. But why…?"
Inanna frowned in confusion — then understood at once why he had wrapped them in that enormous hand.
A storm began to hammer the place where they stood.
—KAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGA!!!!!!!!
This was no ordinary storm. Whether it even belonged in the category of wind was open to question.
Blades of air, surging in numbers that bordered on the infinite, scoured everything clean. They sliced and shredded until nothing remained recognizable as form — everything except the gods sheltered inside Sunya's hand.
The radius of destruction, measured in the units future humans would one day invent, stretched for hundreds of kilometers. And the annihilating winds did not pause for even a moment. They raged on and on, as if determined to tear the world itself apart.
"What in the world is happening?"
Kalam asked Enki. Most of the gods present had no idea what they were witnessing.
"…Marduk's authority. Sharp wind, pushing wind, pulling wind, and whirling wind — four kinds combined into one vast net."
"A net? You're calling this a net?"
"The nets I know don't look anything like this."
Enki's explanation only deepened the surrounding confusion. Through the gaps between the giant fingers, they could see the massive clouds charged with An's authority shattering into fragments and dissolving into nothing. Even now, countless invisible blades hammered relentlessly against the hand Sunya had formed. No one needed to take a direct hit to understand the truth: step outside, and even a god would be reduced to dust.
And yet he called it a mere net.
Then what, exactly, was this net meant to catch?
"A net for something truly enormous. Something that ordinary common sense cannot stop — something so vast that nothing short of this can hold it in place."
"…What are you even talking about?"
Inanna scowled. Enki's deliberately vague tone grated on her. Yet for all that, she was far calmer now than she had been moments earlier, when she had been ready to charge straight into the storm.
"A second ago you looked ready to bolt out there. Now you're suddenly fine?"
"The situation changed."
She gave the hand enclosing them a light, casual pat.
"…I see. I understand what you mean."
Enki sighed and pressed a hand to his forehead.
"Your husband really is a monster, isn't he."
When a god dies, their authority dies with them. If Sunya had fallen, the colossal hand shielding them should have vanished. Yet time continued to pass and the power remained — which meant its wielder was still alive.
Sunya had not died.
And given how long the "net" kept thrashing without pause, he seemed to be holding his own remarkably well.
Are there other monsters outside this world who can rival Marduk?
The odds were not high — but if they were, what were he and the rest of them supposed to do? It was a question Enki had been turning over ever since he learned Sunya had come from beyond Kienkingir, and he still had no clear answer. Even putting out the fire in front of him was nearly more than he could manage, and the god of wisdom's fretting only grew deeper.
It was like being planed down — wood and stone scraped away stroke by stroke.
Invisible blades crashed against him without end, and even Sunya's formidable body began to come apart. Skin peeled. Muscle was carved free. Bone ground down. The assault came from every direction at once; even the Mind's Eye could find no path of escape. In this situation, the principles of martial emptiness were worthless. What good was knowing the trajectory of an attack if you could not dodge it?
If he simply endured, he would be annihilated without even a corpse left behind.
But Marduk had no intention of ending things so blandly.
A bow appeared in Marduk's hands. He drew the empty string and took aim at Sunya, who was being whittled away in real time. What he loosed was no physical arrow, but an arrow of wind — seven winds gathered into a single shaft.
Blood-soaked, Sunya looked up at the arrow leveled at him. It warped space in a spiral and shone in every color of the spectrum; from where he stood, it looked like a miniature galaxy.
It was excessive for killing a single god.
In truth, this was the same arrow Marduk had used to slay Tiamat. Tiamat had been a being of higher dimension and greater scale than any god — a small universe wearing the shape of a living creature. To kill something like that, one needed the power to rip spacetime itself apart.
It could not be dodged. It could not be blocked. This was not merely a matter of wide area. It was a certain hit that inverted cause and effect — process and result collapsed into one. A miracle of a higher order even than the authorities of the gods, which already stood outside ordinary law.
The only answer was to cancel it with an attack of the same dimension. The technique took time to complete, but Sunya could not move, so that was no obstacle at all.
"Divine Manifestation, was it?"
Still unable to so much as twitch, Sunya spoke. That he could form coherent words while every scrap of skin was being flayed and his muscles torn free was astonishing in itself.
"I have to admit — I'm impressed."
"Yeah? Not a bad feeling."
Marduk thought he was about to hear praise. What came next was nothing he expected.
"You're the first person besides me I've ever seen do that."
With those words, the vast domain of wind-blades was blasted away.
Then, behind Sunya's back, a form of pure white light rose into being.
It was a white wheel with eight spokes.
Anyone familiar with Buddhism might have looked upon it and thought of the Dharma Wheel. The shape was different, yet Marduk knew at once, by pure instinct, that Sunya's wheel served a role much like his own wings.
That white wheel was Sunya's divinity given visual form.
And one who manifested their divinity became far stronger than before — recovery included. Flayed skin and shredded muscle regenerated in an instant, and Sunya returned to his original form. At the same time, the presence pouring off him was more than enough to put Marduk on edge.
"It's not over yet!"
Marduk spread the net once more. Storm-blades carved into Sunya without rest — but all they managed was to slow his advance. They were nowhere near as destructive as before.
Sunya took a step forward even as the blades cut him.
"Paramita."
At his call, starlight bloomed before him. He reached into it and drew out a single blade — a long, single-edged sword of a form never seen before. One glance was enough to know it was dangerous.
One quiet footfall at a time, Sunya walked toward Marduk, murmuring under his breath.
Like a lion unstartled by any sound,
Like the wind that no net can catch,
Like a lotus unstained by the mud,
Wander alone like the horn of a rhinoceros.
"It's useless. You're already too late!!"
The arrow was complete.
Even a Sunya who had achieved Divine Manifestation could not stop an arrow that tore spacetime. A strange exhilaration tugged the corner of Marduk's mouth upward. In the midst of danger and precarious balance, a peculiar sense of fulfillment swelled inside him.
"Genesis."
The instant Sunya spoke, Marduk released the string.
And in the same breath, Sunya swung his sword to meet it.
A whirling galaxy and a single streak of comet collided.
Blinding light swallowed the world.
With that, victory and defeat were decided.