She was expelled from the dimension as easily as one flicks a speck of dust off a surface.
The last thing she saw, before everything dissolved into a flash of white light, were the three Abyss Gods, still suspended, still trapped.
And desperate, so much so that they didn’t think twice before choosing a drastic option.
Because they, unlike her, knew exactly what it meant to face a power like that with no way out.
They knew it all too well.
And how could they not? After all, some time ago, when they’d first attacked this world, they had ended up in a similar situation.
Back then, choosing that same drastic option would have carried serious risks, but at least they would have been free. They hadn’t chosen it, they’d considered it beneath them, and that decision had cost them dearly, since the consequence had been getting sealed here for an unknown span of time.
A choice they had regretted every single day spent in that prison, an endless stretch of time, far beyond what even beings of their nature should have had to endure.
This time, they wouldn’t make the same mistake.
Their bodies began to glow. First a faint light, then brighter and brighter, as they started to shake, to vibrate with a violence beyond any natural law they knew.
And then...
BOOOOOM!
The explosion released enough energy to, under normal conditions, erase every form of life within a radius of tens of thousands of kilometers in a single devastating instant. But that energy never got the chance to fully expand.
The black sphere intercepted it halfway, swallowing it the very moment it was released, like a ravenous mouth devouring even destruction itself.
But the explosion had still done its job.
For a handful of seconds, perhaps less, perhaps only an infinitesimal fraction of time, the spatial restraints imprisoning the three gods cracked. Enough for them to seize the chance.
Their bodies, already doomed by the explosion itself, disintegrated into a flash of light and ash. But their souls, the pure essence of what remained of them, shot upward, aimed like arrows at the still-open cracks in the sky above.
The last, desperate gateway to the Abyss.
For a moment, it seemed like they would make it.
But just as the three souls reached the edge of the cracks, at the very moment freedom seemed within their grasp, something seized them.
It wasn’t physical. It wasn’t something they could see, nor something they could fight. It was simply... a grip.
The fleeting joy that had flashed through them vanished in an instant, replaced by panic.
Then, the two souls closest to the breach made their choice.
Without the slightest hesitation, they abandoned the third soul, the one left slightly farther behind. A cold, calculated sacrifice to buy themselves the precious moment they needed to break free from that invisible grasp.
Without hesitation, the two unleashed a wave of energy from their souls, striking the third directly and breaking the small grip that was keeping her from being pulled away.
The being that had once been a massive tree, now reduced to little more than a shapeless feminine soul trapped in that invisible hold, writhed, fighting with every last shred of strength against the pull dragging her back.
Her sight fixed on the two allies who had sacrificed her to escape, rage boiling in her soul.
"You two... how dare you—" Furious, the soul decided to go for an even more desperate option than before: she chose to detonate herself, to erase herself, to take those two traitors down with her.
Seeing this, the two souls trembled and fled all the more fiercely.
If they were caught in it, they would be finished, and they knew it.
But the tree’s soul didn’t stop, she unleashed the void energy condensing her very soul, ready to release it all at once, meaning to swallow everyone and everything.
But just as she was about to do it, she noticed something, something that shook her deeply.
"This... what is happening?"
All the void energy she had, the energy she was about to unleash, seemed to start dispersing, or rather, being pulled out of her, as if something external had decided to target her specifically.
The soul of the Abyss God that had once been a tall, powerful tree watched in horror as her energy drained away at an absurd speed.
"No, this isn’t possible, this shouldn’t be possible", the panic was audible in her voice as she tried to reclaim her void energy, without success.
And soon she had no time left to do anything else, because the black sphere, which had absorbed reality over the last few seconds, had already grown even larger, at least twice its previous size, the surrounding dimension now more than half gone, and what remained already breaking apart into disintegrating pieces.
Watching this, the tree’s soul could only look on in resignation as her own soul, no longer able to resist the sphere’s pull, was swallowed too, and shortly after, so was the rest of the dimension.
What remained behind was a space completely white, devoid of anythingl this had been the container of the dimension that had preserved a trace of the past across entire cycles, but now it had been erased.
The sphere remained still for a moment, trembling violently, before distorting and then exploding.
An explosion that was anything but normal, so explosive that even the space that had contained the dimension shattered at that instant, the walls of space made of energy breaking and scattering, leaving behind nothing but the dark void of space, covered in scattered light.
But that wasn’t what drew the most attention.
No, what did was a mass of dark violet energy, enormous, larger than the sun of this solar system itself, no longer visible from anywhere else.
The only thing visible was that massive presence, and on the other side, a planet covered by such a mass that it looked as though it had already devoured it, but looking closer, the mass never managed to push beyond a certain limit, only able to engulf the planet while waiting for its defenses to collapse, letting it in and completing its task.