The Elders, realizing they were facing an immediate existential threat, dropped all pretense of superiority.

They breathed for a single, ragged moment, as if the world itself had paused to take in the horror and decide which side to choose. The Supreme Elders were paused in the air like carved monuments of authority, their features hard as stone.

Vahn, in his Ultimate Void Dragon form, snorted coldly.

Darius stepped forward without ceremony. He was the eldest among them, his projection shaped with the strict geometry of command. His voice rolled out like thunder and scripture at once.

"You insulted us by surviving, boy. Now obey. Surrender the Saintess and return what you stole."

Vahn's reply was like a demonic growl,

"I will not kneel to men who hide behind righteous pretense."

"Humph, you will not learn like this, boy."

Finished saying, Darius lifted his hand and channeled his Heaven Grade Art: World-Cleansing Light

Humm!

Divine Judgment unfolded like a cathedral in the sky. Rivers of pure, concentrated light braided into a massive spear of law that threatened to pierce reality itself. The spear hummed with the certainty of finality; it carried the weight of verdicts passed over centuries. It descended with the inevitability of fate.

The spear vanished into the maw of the Black Hole Core as if swallowed by hunger. Darius's expression flickered from arrogance to disbelief. The core did not merely absorb. It consumed and translated. The Divine Judgment unspooled, its golden threads rewoven into a silence that wrapped Vahn like armor.

An elder to Darius's left hissed and retaliated with her own Heaven Grade Art, Starbound Excision. She flung a lattice of crystallized starlight that carved through air and memory. Each shard that struck a thing unmade it, reducing structure to concept. The lattice struck where it wanted to; roofs became definitions, and the street under Vahn's feet winked out like a candle.

Vahn tilted his dragon head. He did not concentrate the way a normal dragon would. He moved as if an old motion, like a memory more than a decision, guided him. He swung his massive claw tearing through the sky.

The Void Claw cut through the Starbound Excision as if it were silk. The shards dissolved into a dark fog and were fed to the Black Hole Core. The lattice lost cohesion and fell apart from the inside.

Another elder, face carved by frost and patience, called on Law of Severance. Invisible chains, forged of jurisdiction and oath, snaked outward to bind and denature.

They coiled around Vahn's Dragon form as if to strip him of will and status.

For a heartbeat his hill sized legs buckled under obligation. But the chains unraveled at the touch of the void. The very concept of being bound fractured.

Vahn's claws brushed the nearest chain and it evaporated like ice struck by a black sun.

"You think your projections held the power to stop me?" Vahn growled. "Then you're very wrong."

The elders answered with another set of Heaven Grade Arts. The silver-haired matron, Selene, unleashed Radiant Chainbind, an array of holy sigils that coalesced into a net of sanctified light. A second elder, voice like grinding mountains, invoked Celestial Prism Cascade.

Humm.

A torrent of refracted law and light cascaded downward, each beam programmed to cut motifs of void from existence.

Vahn breathed in. The void in him hummed in resonance with everything that would become nothing. He extended both paws at once and let the air between them fracture into a great, curving slash.

The colossal Claw Swipe did not slice by force. It carved by absence. Space bent away from the path of the swipe, taking the Radiant Chainbind and Celestial Prism Cascade with it. The sigils unravelled, their holy geometry losing definition as the void ate the space that gave them meaning. The cascade fractured into motes of light that were quickly swallowed by the Black Hole Core.

Projection-forms, even Heaven Grade, were built upon consensus: the sanctified agreement of an order that those shapes had power. Void did not negotiate with consensus. It erased the premise. It devoured the frame those arts needed to exist.

"Die, you scourge!"

An elder bellowed and wove a technique with a ceremonial flourish. Sunseal Purge manifested as a column of purifying sun that promised to burn every corruption until only the pure remained. The column struck the ground with a sound like a struck bell.

Vahn's eyes, deep and empty as a collapsed star, tracked its fall. He stepped into the outer edge of the column and smiled something without mercy. The sun did not scorch him. It thinned. Where its light should have clarified, it dissolved into neat, falling dust. The column crumbled inward like a shell.

"You will learn," Vahn said aloud, though his voice did not need to carry. "You will learn that there are forces older than sanctuaries and older than courts. Your arts are exquisite tools for a lesser world."

Darius pulled his projection back enough to force a calm. He was not a fool. He had witnessed power before, and his chest tightened with the old dread of men who have the privilege of belief but not the certainty of survival. He drew a last, desperate art from his arsenal: Judgment of the Voidless Throne. It was designed to anchor an enemy's soul to a phantom court and strip them of their bloodline until nothing remained.

This one struck true into the edges of Vahn's consciousness. For a flicker everything inside him became a set of accusations and a tribunal. Memories tried to organize into testimony. Pain sharpened into cross examination.

"Void is not argument," Vahn thought. "It is the absence that allows argument to form."

He let the tribunal close and then opened his palm. There was no blast, no flash. Just the soft, terrible grinding of existence being unstitched. The Claw Swipe moved like a parent separating two animals. It touched the tribunal and the court unraveled as if its pages were made of dried leaves.

Puff!

The projection that held the art quivered, then tore apart.

What remained of each elder was a projection tasting of original fear. The last of their confidence had been shattered.

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