Cameraman Never Dies-Chapter 276: Dude, can we talk this through?

The space Tenebris had occupied remained empty in a way Judge could not look at for too long. It was not a gap. It was not an absence. It was a wound reality refused to acknowledge. The air flowed through it, light passed through it, and yet something fundamental was missing, as if the world had briefly forgotten how to account for what had been there.

Judge stood hunched, breath ragged, the aftertaste of nihility still crawling through his veins. His heart still collected ether like a vacuum cleaner, but it was there present unlike his previous state.

The man stood across from him, a cane resting lightly against the ground, gaze steady. The false terrains he had created earlier dissolved one by one, peeling away like discarded drafts of reality. What remained was bare earth and open air, deceptively simple, almost polite.

Then Tenebris stepped forward, and the world shifted unnaturally with him.

Judge felt it immediately. Neither an attack, nor pressure, but a subtle wrongness. Distance warped. The ground slanted just enough to throw balance off. Judge adjusted by instinct, boots scraping as gravity tilted sideways for a breath and then snapped back.

Tenebris raised his cane.

The ground behind Judge folded upward decisively, sealing off the space he had occupied a moment earlier. Judge spun, ether flaring to his fingertips, and erased the rising mass before it could complete itself. The earth did not crumble. It ceased, leaving smooth, untouched ground where motion had been moments ago.

The backlash hit him like a punch to the chest.

Judge staggered, vision dimming at the edges, and Tenebris was already moving again. A second layer of terrain slid into place, invisible until it wasn't. Judge's next step landed on solid ground that had not existed before, and the sudden resistance twisted his knee, forcing him to drop low.

A strike followed.

Not from Tenebris directly, but from the earth. A ridge of stone surged sideways, catching Judge in the shoulder and throwing him across the clearing. He rolled, barely managing to disperse the follow-up impact by erasing part of the ground beneath him, turning a lethal collision into a bone-jarring skid. He pushed himself up, clenching his teeth. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

He felt his ether burn hotter now, reacting to danger, and he was eager. But Judge forced it down, breathing through the strain. He could not afford to spray it wildly. He had to focus; he had one mother who gave her life for his. There would be no second chance.

Tenebris closed the distance.

The space between them shortened unnaturally, compressing as if the world had decided they should be closer. Judge lashed out with a controlled pulse of ether, carving a thin line through the air aimed not at Tenebris, but at the principle underpinning the distortion.

And the compression collapsed.

Tenebris slid to a halt inches from the edge of the erased space, boots never touching the boundary that no longer existed. For the first time, his movement came to a pause. It was not out of surprise, but to readjust his approach.

But Judge didn't give him time.

He lunged forward, hand outstretched, focusing on a single point. Ether surged to form principles; it was raw and imprecise, ripping through a section of overlapping realities Tenebris had prepared in advance. Layers peeled away, one after another, until the remaining world snapped violently back into singularity.

The recoil flung both of them apart.

Judge hit the ground hard, breath knocked from his lungs. Tenebris absorbed the force with a shift of footing, the terrain beneath him subtly reshaping to soften the impact. Even so, faint cracks spread out from where he stood, a quiet testament to the force he had just allowed to pass through.

The fight escalated.

Tenebris stopped testing. The battlefield fractured into controlled chaos. Hills rose and fell. Distances lied. Pathways looped back on themselves. Judge sprinted, slid, leapt, his movements dictated as much by instinct as by conscious thought. Every second demanded a decision: erase, endure, or reposition.

He erased sparingly.

Too sparingly infact, as if he was afraid.

A false sky dropped overhead, crushing downward with the weight of a collapsing world. Judge thrust both hands up, his ether flaring in a wide arc, already erasing. The sky vanished, but the effort ripped a groan from his throat. Blood trickled from his nose, dark against pale skin.

Tenebris advanced through the settling dust, unhurried.

A lattice of stone spears erupted around Judge, angled inward. He erased two, twisted between three more, and felt the last graze his side, tearing fabric and skin alike. Pain sharpened his focus.

Judge stumbled, then forced himself upright.

He learned.

Not cleanly or safely. But with every exchange, his control of the principle of nihility tightened by fractions. He stopped aiming at shapes and started targeting rules. Instead of erasing attacks, he erased the concepts that made them. Instead of destroying terrain, he erased the moment it tried to become authoritative.

Tenebris started to notice this quickly.

The terrain grew subtler. Attacks came from angles Judge couldn't see, from realities that only became real at the moment of impact. Judge countered by narrowing his erasures further, slicing away the exact hinge points Tenebris relied on.

The ground split.

Judge fell.

Mid-fall, gravity inverted. He slammed upward instead, barely erasing the surface he was about to collide with. The sudden nullification left him spinning, disoriented, and Tenebris struck from a slight backlash.

A simple step placed Judge exactly where a false plane solidified. The impact cracked ribs. Judge choked on air, vision flashing white. He dragged nihility inward, not outward, erasing the contact itself and tearing free at the cost of another surge of backlash.

He hit the ground on one knee, shaking.

Tenebris stood a short distance away, posture unchanged.

Judge forced himself to stand; he might not win, but if everything failed, he would at least try to escape inside his studio.

"My... what have we here?" He heard a voice, a familiar one that he never expected here.