The anti-matter tentacle didn’t just break the sky. It infected it!

The colossal shifting mass of geometry slithered through the jagged wound in the Celestial Court. As it did, it bled a thick grayish smoke.

It wasn’t a poison or a curse.

Arthur’s system instantly analyzed it and flashed red warnings across his retinas.

[System Analysis]

↳ Hazard Detected: Paradox Miasma.

↳ Properties: Anti-Logic, Reality Warping, Conceptual Erasure.

Where the Paradox smoke touched the pristine golden architecture of the Ebon Empire, the buildings didn’t crumble or melt.

They simply ceased to make sense.

A towering crystal spire twisted into a flat two-dimensional line before folding inward and vanishing entirely.

"Die, abomination!" Sylvia Thorne shrieked. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

The Arch-Mage didn’t wait for orders. She thrust her hands forward and unleashed a massive localized blizzard of Absolute Zero magic aimed directly at the descending tentacle.

Beside her, Morwenna roared. She hurled a compressed sphere of True Abyss meant to consume the cosmic horror.

"Sizzle! Squelch!"

Arthur’s eyes widened in shock.

Sylvia’s perfect god-tier ice didn’t freeze the tentacle. The moment her magic made contact with the Paradox miasma, the ice turned into burning rotting sludge.

Morwenna’s abyssal sphere struck the anti-matter flesh and simply bounced off.

It transformed into a flock of harmless screaming birds that quickly dissolved into ash.

"Argh!" Sylvia gasped.

She stumbled backward as a backlash of anti-logic traveled up her magical tether. It burned her meridians severely.

"Stand down!" Arthur barked. His voice echoed with Absolute Authority.

He blurred forward and grabbed both Sylvia and Morwenna. He physically hurled them behind the safety of his throne.

"Your magic belongs to this universe! That thing doesn’t obey our physics!"

Arthur turned his attention back to the colossal tentacle. The system interface in his mind was screaming while frantically trying to process the data.

[System Notice]

↳ Host Grand Sovereign power is classified as Bubble Energy by Outer Gods.

↳ Standard magical laws are ineffective.

↳ To utilize the 1,000,000x System Multiplier, Host must bind a viable target native to the Primordial Chaos.

’So I can’t cheat yet,’ Arthur muttered inwardly. His dark eyes narrowed. ’Fine.

Let’s do this the hard way.’

He didn’t cast a spell. He didn’t invoke the laws of Space, Time, or Karma.

If the magic of this universe was useless against the Outer Gods, he would rely on the one thing that was entirely his own.

His Dimensional Breaker Physique flared to life!

His muscles bulged against the sleek dark plating of the Absolute Monarch armor.

His veins glowed with dense absurd kinetic energy.

He wasn’t a mage right now. He was a slab of indestructible and physically impossible meat!

"Boom!"

Arthur detonated the floor beneath him. He launched himself into the sky like a kinetic missile.

He didn’t fly with mana. He jumped with pure terrifying leg strength.

The tentacle whipped toward him. It moved with a jerky stuttering motion that completely messed with his depth perception.

It lashed out and aimed to swat the mortal anomaly out of the air.

"Crack!"

Arthur didn’t dodge. He brought his left forearm up and took the blow directly against his armor.

The kinetic impact was apocalyptic! It sent a shockwave that cleared the clouds for a hundred miles.

The Paradox miasma hissed. It desperately tried to unwrite the existence of his arm.

But the Dimensional Breaker Physique was a forged anomaly. It stubbornly and violently rejected the anti-logic.

Arthur gritted his teeth. His bones groaned under the absurd weight, but he held his ground in mid-air.

"You’re in my house, you overgrown squid," Arthur snarled.

He pulled his right arm back. The Ebonheart Sword didn’t glow with magical runes.

Arthur simply poured every ounce of his raw physical strength into the blade. He treated the divine weapon like a giant and very sharp club.

"Shaaaank!"

Arthur swung the blade with the force of a collapsing planet.

The pitch-black sword ripped through the anti-matter flesh. The tentacle didn’t resist at all.

Without the crutch of magical suppression, the sheer undeniable physics of a very heavy object moving very fast cleaved the cosmic horror clean in two!

A horrific screeching sound that rattled Arthur’s teeth erupted from the severed appendage.

A deluge of thick glowing blue ichor sprayed across Arthur’s armor. It sizzled harmlessly against his defenses.

The main body of the tentacle violently recoiled. It whipped back through the jagged tear in the sky like a beaten dog retreating to its kennel.

Arthur didn’t chase it.

He let gravity pull him back down. He landed heavily on the command balcony with a resounding thud.

In his left hand, he held the severed writhing tip of the anti-matter tentacle.

It was rapidly dissolving as the Paradox energy failed without its host.

Before it could entirely vanish, Arthur’s heavy fingers dug into the rotting flesh. He ripped out a small pulsing multi-faceted organ that looked like a bruised gemstone.

[System Notification]

↳ Item Acquired: Paradox Gland.

↳ Description: A sensory organ of an Outer God Scout.

↳ Contains trace amounts of Primordial Chaos laws.

Arthur exhaled a long heavy breath. He tossed the grotesque gland into his spatial ring.

He looked up at the sky. The tear was slowly sealing itself, but the illusion of absolute safety was permanently broken.

"Emperor," Lyra whispered. She stepped up beside him with her violet eyes wide with terror as she stared at the fading rift. "What was that? Our attacks... they didn’t even register."

"Market research," Arthur said coldly. He rolled his bruised shoulder.

"We’re not the entire ocean, Lyra. We’re just a tiny fragile bubble floating in a very dark and very hostile sea."

He turned to his four Queens. They were shaken. Their divine pride was rattled by the realization that their absolute power meant nothing outside their own borders.

Arthur didn’t offer them comforting lies. He offered them ambition.

"The system reset," Arthur smirked. A terrifying manic light danced in his pitch black eyes.

"We hit the ceiling here, but the ceiling was just the floor of the next dimension."

He gazed at his women and slapped his chest with confidence.

"We’re going to fix the ship. We’re going to sail out of this bubble. And we are going to butcher the Gods who think we’re just livestock."