Chapter 500
Lilith raised her head.
That single eye of hers—the same eye, the one that never changed, the one that never blinked—now stared directly at the Nothingness with a gaze that could no longer be called rebellion, because rebellion still acknowledged the authority it opposed. This was something else. This was a declaration. This was a decision matured over thousands of years, throughout the hunts, throughout the deaths, throughout the silence of the Nothingness that had never once become salvation.
"If You refuse to take responsibility for the deaths of our five sisters," she spoke, and behind her, eight voices echoed in perfect harmony—not as echoes, but as reinforcement, as an oath spoken by nine different throats flowing within the same breath.
"For the death of Bes, whose laughter I still hear every few hours within the depths of my mind—for the death of Enlil, whose question was never answered—for the death of Lamashtu, who died in a place without flowers—for the death of Ahura Mazda, who spoke like a philosopher yet never managed to finish his final sentence—for the death of Mictlantecuhtli, the quietest, the most mysterious, the hardest to understand, whose death was felt the most because she never managed to say anything before vanishing..."
She inhaled—a breath that felt like inhaling shards of glass, a breath enough to remind her that she still existed, that she could still choose, that she could still do something other than wait.
"Then we shall kill You, the Nothingness."
The sky—if it could still be called a sky—cracked soundlessly as Lilith HaRish'a raised her hand, and from those fractures, a darkness older than darkness itself began to drip like ink rejecting the laws of gravity.
Her black hair shimmering with dark violet expanded slowly, not because of wind, but because a will suppressed for far too long had finally been released.
Behind her eyes, five echoes pulsed—Bes' laughter, Enlil's questions, the silence of Mictlantecuhtli—all merging into a single unstable heartbeat.
"If death is a gift," she whispered, her voice thin yet sharp, "then let us become the hands that deliver that gift back to You."
With a single motion, the mirror-like shards surrounding her shattered into thousands of fragments, and every shard carried pieces of consciousness—Bes laughing at the edge of every blade, Lamashtu longing for flowers within every glimmer—storming toward the Nonexistent One in a rain of reflections that cut not flesh, but the very meaning of existence itself.
Asherah stepped immediately afterward, her emerald-orange hair pulsing like the roots of a world burning from within, and the ground—or whatever remained of the concept of ground—responded with cracks spreading like gigantic veins.
From every fracture grew something that was neither plant nor energy, but memories of life forced into becoming weapons.
"I do not need Your permission to create," she said flatly, her eyes reflecting a green light far too deep to merely be called a color.
Those roots coiled around the reality surrounding the Nothingness, and within them, Enlil's voice whispered endlessly—a question never completed, now transformed into pressure attempting to force an answer from something that had never answered.
Every coil was not merely a restraint, but a demand of existence itself.
Why, why, why—until space itself began trembling, forced to question its own nature.
Mammon and Ashmedai moved almost simultaneously, like two sides of the same void.
Mammon's dark copper hair blazed like greedy molten metal, and every step she took transformed the surrounding space into something that could be "owned"—the concept of possession forced upon emptiness itself.
"Everything that exists… can become mine," she murmured softly.
She reached toward the Nothingness, and for a brief moment, the concept of ownership attached itself to the entity—an anomaly that caused its existence to tremble.
On the other side, Ashmedai—with her bleak gray hair—opened something even more horrifying.
A void devouring light, sound, even intention itself.
"Then… I shall erase Your desire to exist," she whispered quietly.
From behind those shadows, the soul of Ahura Mazda spoke in fractured pieces of logic, twisting cause and effect until their attacks no longer possessed direction, only results—results in the form of destruction that had already "occurred" before the attacks themselves were even unleashed.
Baal-Zevul, Chemosh, and Apollyon formed a line that was neither straight nor curved—a formation rejecting definition itself.
Baal-Zevul's brownish-blue hair shimmered like a rotting sky, and she opened her mouth only slightly.
"Listen," she said.
That sound was not sound, but a plague—an echo carrying fragments of Bes' laughter, spreading like disease through the structure of the Nonexistent One's existence, attempting to "infect" something that should have been incapable of infection.
Chemosh followed with her dense charcoal-gray aura, condensing destruction into a form that could be touched.
"I will make the end… become heavy," she said.
She compressed space itself until every possibility collapsed into a single point, while Apollyon—with her dark silver hair—became the executioner.
"And I shall finish it," she whispered.
Her attack was not an explosion, nor a slash, but a clean erasure—like a sentence crossed out from the manuscript of reality, leaving behind a hole not even acknowledged as loss.
Rahab and Apophis became the final horrors.
Rahab's grayish-blue hair flowed like a sea without a surface, and from within her, immeasurable pressure began crushing all directions at once.
"Drown," she said briefly.
And for the first time, the Nothingness appeared to be "pulled" into something—not physically, but conceptually, as though its existence were being forced to possess depth.
Within that pressure, Mictlantecuhtli manifested as absolute silence—a death that made no sound, no movement, yet remained certain.
Apophis stepped last, her hair colored like the poison of withered leaves trembling like something both alive and dying, and from her body seeped a destruction that was not dramatic—rather, it was far too subtle.
"I will not destroy You," she spoke softly.
"I will make You rot."
And from behind her consciousness, Lamashtu whispered gently about flowers that never bloomed, about life that should have existed but was never given the chance—and those whispers seeped into the attack, transforming it into existential decay, where something slowly lost its reason to remain itself.
Amidst all of it, the Nonexistent One remained standing—or something resembling standing—without any comprehensible form, without any readable reaction.
Yet for the first time, there was a pause.
"… Interesting," it murmured softly, almost like a whisper to itself.
The Nothingness did not move.
It did not evade, did not block, did not do anything creatures usually did when attacked. It simply remained there—or floated, or existed, because verbs for existence had never been precise enough to describe an entity such as itself—amidst a storm of attacks that should have been enough to collapse at least three Multiversal Pathways simultaneously.
Lilith's mirror-shards carrying fragments of her sisters' consciousness, Asherah's roots of life-memory coiling around reality, Mammon's concept of ownership forcing itself upon emptiness, Ashmedai's void devouring intention itself, Baal-Zevul's plague-like echoes, Chemosh's pressure of destruction, Apollyon's erasure, Rahab's concept of depth, and Apophis' existential decay—all of them assaulted the entity from nine different directions, nine angles leaving no openings, nine methods of ending something that should never have possessed an ending.
Yet when the imaginary dust began to settle—when those attacks reached their target, exploded, absorbed, destroyed, decayed, and performed everything they had been designed to do—the Nothingness still remained.
It still stood in the exact same place, with the exact same posture, with the exact same indifference.
"Hmm," it spoke, and its voice sounded like someone opening a refrigerator in a kitchen far too silent, discovering that no food was missing despite forgetting to lock it the night before.
Then, with a movement that could not even be called movement—because it did not raise a hand, did not move a finger, did not alter its position in the slightest—all of the attacks shattered.
Not destroyed, not blocked, not reflected, but ignored in such an absolute way that, for several moments, the nine women before it could only remain silent, watching their creation—the creation forged from thousands of years of rage, from grief they had never allowed themselves to mourn, from a decision that could never be undone—collapse like a sandcastle swept away by waves that never even realized it existed.
To be continued….