"Yeah that's right, father is dead!" Gunserr announced to Cydal in the emptiness of hallways
"That's why you and Null exist. He's gone from this mortal plane. But he made you and null as his new body and soul, a perfect vessel for his return."
He smirked, holding Cydal's entrails like a prize.
"You were never meant to be anything else. There's no destiny or free will for you, you are coded to make his return a reality. You're just a container. And if you refuse to accept that… then I'll make sure his will is fulfilled through me."
Gunserr took a bite from the warm and fresh intestines he pulled out of Cydal's stomach, slurping slowly and savoring them.
"Oh and I can borrow these, right? You'll grow them back, won't you? Even with your pathetic human shell, you don't die, you regenerate. You don't need Null to patch this up, do you?"
He chewed lazily, eyes half-lidded.
"I hate it, you know? The way he always praised you and said you were everything a demon should be, able to betray your kind, your own father, the Creator. Just to serve your own twisted betrayal, that's what makes him proud of you."
Gunserr's face twitched, a hint of fury bleeding through the grin.
"But it's naive! You can't stop the Creator or his system, your body is already nurturing Null, you're growing him until he's ripe enough to be absorbed by the creator. And time's running out for you. You only have six days, no?"
He stepped back, arms out, laughing wildly.
"And the truth is? The Creator didn't ask me to kill you, he didn't need to because I wasn't sent by him. I was made by him, just like you. I'm his kin too. But to him, I was a failure and too human since I didn't grow a second soul like null, he won't even acknowledge my existence."
His eyes glistened with a twisted mix of hatred and hope.
"But if I rip Null from you... if I become the vessel for him... he'll see me. He'll laugh again, but this time with pride, because in the end father loves competition and growth by strength and victory."
His laughter became manic, echoing through the blood-soaked chamber like something out of a nightmare.
"Ah there it is," Gunserr said, voice gleeful. "You grew your stomach back. It was a little slow, though."
He pointed at Cydal's torso. Cydal tore off the remains of his tattered shirt and looked down. Where smooth flesh once was, now stretched a strange, scaled patch of skin it was green-dotted, reptilian, pulsing faintly with mana. It was another mark of Null. Another reminder of what he carried inside.
Gunserr straightened, still grinning.
"We're both back to full strength, huh? So, want to compete for Null?" His smile twisted. He leaned down, arms drooping like a beast preparing to pounce. "Winner keeps him."
"Null?" Cydal muttered, brows furrowed.
No answer.
Instead, a chilling, layered laughter rang out low at first, then rising to a piercing echo that made the walls tremble.
"I won't help you," Null said, "Why don't you fight him... and win me?"
"If you do," Null continued mockingly, "then I might help you kill him."
"No," Cydal said coldly. "I won't ask for help. I know he's stronger than me, there's a high chance he'll win. I'm counting on it. I want him to defeat me… and devour you."
His eyes never left Gunserr. "So what I'm asking is this: don't interfere."
Null cackled louder, his voice now splitting into echoes that cracked through the soul itself.
"What are you scheming now? You really are a fool."
There's something off about Gunserr's body," Cydal said to Null. "He says he's a hybrid like us, but his structure, it's different. Almost... too human."
Cydal didn't answer further. His stance shifted, his shoulders squared, fists clenched, black energy rippling around him like a storm. With one step forward, he vanished, reappearing mid-air, his fist aimed at Gunserr's skull.
The punch shattered the hallway behind them, air breaking apart like shards of glass, stone exploding in every direction.
But Gunserr didn't flinch.
The impact landed but it was like punching a black star. Gunserr stood there, unmoved, his body absorbing the force like a vacuum; it didn't even scratch.
His grin only widened.
Cydal's breathing slowed, but he didn't stop. The mark of Null on his stomach pulsed faintly, syncing with his heartbeat. Dark purple mana lit up his veins, crawling toward his fist and legs like ink drawn by magnetism. The air shimmered, not from heat, but from instability. Molecules around him trembled, uncertain whether to hold form or collapse into chaos. Cydal was playing and messing with the very existence of reality through Null's limbs.
Gunserr tilted his head, amused. "What now? Trying something flashy before I end you? It's useless. My body absorbs everything unless you erase me, or my ability. Without Null's full strength, you can't win."
Cydal gave no answer.
Instead, he stepped forward.
The moment his foot touched the ground, the stone beneath fractured like sugar glass. Not from pressure but from conversion. Atoms twisted on contact, stone unraveling into flickering, ash-like dust. His fist warped space, distorting at the edges as if it existed in two timelines at once. Every molecule screamed with Null's hunger.
Gunserr's smile faltered just for a blink.
Cydal vanished.
Then reappeared an inch from his face.
The punch landed like divine judgment.
Gunserr's body jerked violently, and the world around them recoiled. Blood burst from his eyes, ears, and nose as if gravity had failed inside his skull. But the real impact was worse.
The space between them didn't explode.
It imploded.
A void cracked into being and reality buckled.
Atoms lost cohesion. In a one-meter sphere around the strike, the laws of existence forgot themselves. Matter peeled apart like overripe fruit direction, form and mass was gone.
A flash of violet light bloomed like a newborn star screaming into life.
The resulting shockwave hurled Gunserr through five walls. Not through them but with them. Each one disintegrated behind him, sucked into the unraveling wake like paper in a black hole.
Then the void collapsed silently.
Cydal lowered his arm. Steam coiled from it. His forearm was blistered, skin peeling not from heat, but from exposure to unstructured space. The price of touching instability null chuckled inside him.
"You're learning to use my body without permission… I guess that's alright. But that's not even close to what I'm capable of. Do better!"
But beneath the rubble laughter came.
Muffled. Warped. Wrong!
Gunserr stood again. Bent, cracked, bleeding from every hole in his face, but smiling.
Still smiling.
His bones protruded in places, skin half-hanging off his jaw, but he stretched his limbs like waking from a nap. The veins around his heart glowed a grotesque yellow-red. He was still alive. Still whole in the ways that mattered.
Then his head snapped upright, neck crunching audibly—
Gunserr's laughter morphed into a cracked howl, echoing through the mangled corridor. His body jittered, warping from point to point in flashes of impossible speed, Cydal's eyes barely kept up.
Then, impact!
Gunserr's fist blurred forward, a battering ram of raw force. Cydal ducked low, sliding beneath it just as the punch obliterated the corridor wall, stone turning to molten shrapnel.
Cydal countered with a rising knee.
But Gunserr caught it mid-air and twisted it like wringing cloth.
Cydal's left eye, its x-ray vision shimmering, watched his own bones shatter inside his leg. He gritted his teeth, strangling back the scream, just as Gunserr whipped him sideways into a shattered support beam.
Crack!
The wall splintered.
But Cydal didn't stay down.
Mid-air, he twisted, one leg limp and grabbed a jagged shard of debris. Null's unstable current surged through it. The rubble vibrated, then sparked into something volatile and sharp.
Just as Gunserr warped in to finish him—
Cydal stabbed backward.
The makeshift spear pierced Gunserr's chest but the creature only wheezed a laugh, cracked teeth exposed in a wide grin. He pulled the shard deeper into himself to get closer to Cydal and locked him in one place.
Then, his own rib extended. It burst out from his side like a blade, aiming straight for Cydal's heart and impaled his chest
Cydal, grimacing through the pain, retracted his fingers, clawed them and dug deep where the sharp rubble entered. Gunserr screamed, but before he could retreat, Cydal slammed a fist into his face, and shattered the protruding bone.
He ripped it out and tossed it to the ground where it landed with a metallic clang.
Then Cydal flipped.
Spinning overhead, he hooked his legs around Gunserr's throat, twisted mid-air, and moonsault him face-first into the ground.
Whack!!
The floor caved in like burning paper, folding inward from the center. Gunserr's body twitched beneath the pressure.
But even face-down in the dirt he laughed.
"Break my body all you want... I'm already beyond human limits. My ability Flesh Architecture rebuilds me too, not just walls."
His broken frame snapped back into form. Skin reknitted. Bones reformed. His limbs flexed with unnatural smoothness.
Then a raw pulse burst from his body, it was bile-colored, sickly green and yellow. Gravity flipped. The ceiling curved downward like a collapsing lung.
Cydal kicked off the wall, narrowly dodging the crash.
Gunserr rose again, growing taller. Limbs elongated. Blood mixed with mana, his chest glowing faintly something monstrous pulsing beneath the skin, like a red star made of muscle and hate.
Cydal landed hard, crouched, dust falling like ash.
Null whispered in his mind:
"You won't survive this as a human. Let me out, just one moment and I'll end him!"
Cydal clenched his jaw.
"No... not yet. He's burning through energy. He'll starve soon. I just need to wait."
Null scoffed.
"Can you survive that long? You're barely held together. I don't care who wins, just remember: I need a body to live. Keeping you alive doesn't mean keeping you whole."
Cydal surged forward this time, with both fists raised. Reality shivered around him. One step and the debris floated like stars in a void.
He drove both fists at Gunserr's core
And Gunserr welcomed them.
His ribcage split like a grin.
Cydal's fists plunged into teeth.
Gunserr had turned his insides into a devouring engine.
It began to eat Cydal's arms.
Purple veins lit across Cydal's skin like lightning. Gritting his teeth, he unleashed a burst of Null, detonating a miniature implosion inside Gunserr's body.
KRAK–BOOM.
Gunserr howled not in pain, but in ecstasy.
His body blasted backward, half of it disintegrating mid-air, torn apart by the imploding force. He hit the far wall hard, skin vaporized, rib bones glowing under raw muscle.
And still—
He was smiling.
As his body began reforming again, bigger, stronger his spine snapped into a longer neck, his shoulders widened, and two more arms erupted from his sides.
But Cydal's body hadn't healed. He could stand now sure, he was no longer broken, but his bones were fractured. His movements were lumpy, sluggish, worn down.
He was waiting. Waiting for Gunserr to burn through his energy and lose control. But something was wrong, Gunserr hadn't slowed down at all. There wasn't even time to question why.
The air trembled, then Gunserr's fist buried into his gut like a cannonball. Cydal folded forward, but Gunserr caught him by the head, keeping him in place.
"Look carefully," Gunserr chuckled darkly. "You're wondering why I'm not tired yet, right?"
He yanked Cydal's head lower revealing beneath the cracked floor dozens of dungeon monsters packed inside: Grimhounds. Wispods. Grivarns. Horrors of every kind.
"I hate their taste, it makes my stomach loose," he sneered. "But they're full of energy. So I hunt them and save them as my emergency rations."
He laughed, louder, spit flying into Cydal's bloodied face. "You thought you had a chance? Pathetic. You were meant to lose this fight."
Gunserr twisted, tearing at Cydal's green limbs that were Null's. Flesh split, legs snapped free. Cydal screamed and so did Null within him.
"SHUT UP!!" Gunserr slammed his fist into Cydal's face. He slammed him again and again. "Shut it, shut it, shut it!!"
Cydal's teeth cracked from his punches heavier than a few tons, his jaw dislocated. Bone split.
"Null is mine!" Gunserr howled. "I'll steal him from you. I'm a child of the Creator too! A half-demon! But because I didn't grow a second soul like Null, he tossed me away and never looked back at me!!"
His voice turned feral, pupils dilated in mania.
"I was never human! I was always starving! Growing sick and scrawny. No matter how much I ate, no matter what I did, it wasn't enough! And then I heard the voice. The screen. It told me to unleash myself, be me."
He grinned, wide and broken.
"So I did, I became me and I ate the woman who raised me and it felt amazing! I loved blood and flesh."
Blood dripped from his lips.
"I did everything the system wanted. I killed, I ate everything and became what he wanted. I knew if I killed his favorite son and took his soul, I'd become part of something bigger. That's why I'll end you!"
Cydal couldn't respond. Blood poured from his mangled mouth, his limbs shattered. But his eyes... were calm. As always.
Gunserr snarled and tore open Cydal's chest.
Two hearts beat inside. One was a normal human heart and one was black and veiny, barely pulsing. A smaller one was fused to it like a parasite.
Gunserr's eyes lit up, he loved the beautiful sight of Null's heart. "There you are, Null." He said with an excited smooth voice.
Then he reached for it.
"I'll give you my body," he whispered. "You'll be free..."
Black energy surged into his arm the instant his fingers touched it. He was absorbing Null finally.
At first, he smiled. Then, he started sweating.
His veins blackened. His blood rotted and his skin started turning black and bubbled up like mushrooms and fungus, then it started exploding!
"No…! This—this isn't right!" Gunserr tried to pull back. "My body is perfect for Null!"
But it wasn't.
Cydal, face was ruined, but smiled through the agony.
Gunserr's skin peeled like burnt bark. His flesh turned to dust, crumbling as his screams dissolved into dry, rattling coughs.
"I was born from him! I'm a half-demon too! I should be designed to take nu—!"
His voice vanished and his body turned to Ash.
But before it could settle, a whisper echoed from the dust:
"This isn't over. There are more like me! One of our siblings is stronger than both of us. Even Null chained to your body can't stop him. He will kill you both to spite our father."
Then, silence.
Cydal's screen immediately flickered to life. Congratulating him.
[You level up!]
[You level up!]
[You level up!]
[STATUS WINDOW]
Name: Cydal
Level: 28
Class: Vessel of Duality (Player)
Rank: A
Species: Half-Human / Half-Demon (Warkhorr)
Age: 17 years, 359 days
Affiliation: Jagger Town (Disputed)
Threat Rating: S-Grade (Volatile)
HP: 5,600 / 5,600
MP: 8,200 / 8,200
Strength: 440
Agility: 360
Speed: 410
Endurance: 520
Perception: 470
Intelligence: 660
Control (Power Mastery): 590 (Fluctuates)
Note: Power Mastery reflects Cydal's unstable control over Null, his second soul. While he can channel immense power through Null's abilities, he rarely gains full cooperation. Control drops during emotional distress or fatigue.
Corruption Index: 92%
Warning: Null maintains partial control over Cydal's body, including his left eye, internal organs (stomach), and all four limbs. Continuous mental resistance is required to prevent full takeover.
Regeneration: High (Warkhor Recovery Protocol Active)
Regeneration is powered by Null's essence. Overuse may strengthen Null's influence.
To be continued