Cosmic Ruler - Chapter 577

Chapter 577: Arena XVI

For every scream of denial, a thousand names echoed back.

The Pact stood together.

And Aiden, wielding the Language of Remembering, declared what the void had tried to bury:

“We are not the forgotten. We are the story that continues.”

The Listener, silent now, remained.

A presence beyond presence.

A promise.

And then it whispered one final truth into Aiden’s soul.

“There is one more to hear you still. The Last to Forget. The One Who Erases Because It Must.”

Aiden felt the words etch into him.

The final enemy.

Not a god.

Not a being.

But the last truth of the void.

The End That Cannot Be Denied.

The One Who Must Be Convinced… or overcome.

He turned to the Pact.

“There’s still one more story we have to write.”

Myne grinned, blood on her blade.

Aria began to hum.

Nexus whispered a name not yet born.

And the sky above them cracked again.

Not in fear.

But in anticipation.

The stars were gone.

Not in the way they faded behind clouds or dimmed with distance, but truly gone. Empty patches of sky stared back where once galaxies bloomed like fireflowers across the dark. Even the constellations that had guided ancient civilizations—erased. Forgotten.

Aiden stood on the threshold of the Hollow Span, the last surviving tether between memory and oblivion. His cloak, no longer torn but woven with silver inscriptions of names once lost, fluttered in the breathless stillness of unreality.

Behind him, the remnants of the Blank Sky Pact gathered—those who remembered what it meant to exist even when all else had been denied. Some bore cracked timelines across their skin, like shattered glass; others had no faces, only flickers of identity clinging to form through will alone.

But they stood. They remained.

And that mattered.

The Language of Remembering burned softly in Aiden’s mind. Not like fire or light, but like presence—a weight that could not be moved, a word that could not be silenced. Every syllable etched into his spirit was a monument. A defiance.

“The One Who Erases is moving,” said Myne.

Her voice came quiet, but sharp. Like the last note of a melody you knew would never be played again. She stood beside Aiden, one hand resting on the hilt of her blade—Retrospect, a sword that only cut things that had been.

Aiden didn’t reply at first. He watched the emptiness ahead—the place where space fell away into anti-being. Beyond it, the One waited. It did not come with armies or sound. It was not a shadow or a god.

It was the absence of everything that could remember being a god.

“The Pact is ready,” whispered Nexus, stepping from behind a veil of unrealized time. He wore a crown of orphaned moments—memories no longer claimed by any history. “But they’re afraid. They know this is different.”

Aiden nodded once. “It is. This one isn’t trying to kill us. Not even to unmake us. It wants to silence the concept of remembrance itself. Not just names or stories… but the ability to even want to hold on.”

Silence.

Even the echo of silence.

Then—

“It remembers one thing,” said Aiden softly, almost to himself.

Myne blinked. “What?”

“The One Who Erases. There is one thing it can’t forget.”

He raised his hand. On his palm burned the sigil given by the First Listener—the oldest survivor of the pre-conceptual. The mark was simple: a spiral, turning endlessly inward.

“A name,” Aiden said.

The Pact stirred.

Aiden stepped forward. The Hollow Span shimmered, its bridge of ghostlight stretching across what no longer was. Every step he took left behind a faint memory—a footprint that glowed, then faded, but did not vanish.

And the void recoiled.

Even without shape, even without voice, the One Who Erases could feel the tremor.

Something was coming.

Not power.

Not resistance.

But remembrance.

Across the fractured edge of reality, in a realm that had no name because it had never been granted one, the One stirred. It did not sleep. It had never dreamed.

But it could sense.

The Language. The Pact. The spiral that turned inward.

These were wrong.

They should not have survived.

They did not make sense.

The One did not scream. It did not rage. Those were the responses of things still ruled by context. Instead, it reached out with a silence so pure, it nullified the concept of opposition.

The Hollow Span quivered.

Time hesitated.

And the first of the Pact began to vanish.

Not die.

Not be destroyed.

But forget themselves.

Aiden stopped.

“Myne,” he said quietly.

She was already drawing Retrospect. “They’re being Un-Called.”

He nodded. “Then we call them again.”

He raised both hands, and the Language of Remembering flared—not just from his lips, but from his existence. He spoke himself into being.

“I am Aiden.”

And the world shook.

“I remember the sun that burned over a forgotten sky.”

Reality flickered, just once, like a flame nearly drowned.

“I remember names whispered beneath unmade moons.”

The Hollow Span brightened. Myne stepped beside him, her voice rising with his.

“I am Myne,” she intoned, blade slicing through unreality. “I remember the song my mother sang before she vanished.”

One by one, the Pact answered.

Nexus. The Chrono-Skald. The Whisperer of Ends.

And others.

Even those who had forgotten their own names found themselves called again—restored not by power, but by the sheer audacity of being remembered.

The One reeled.

In the deepest corners of unthought, it recoiled from the impossible.

It had existed to erase.

But here stood a defiance it could not silence.

A song sung not in words, but in persistence.

The battle did not begin with a clash of swords or a blast of force.

It began with a memory.

A child’s drawing found in the ruins of a collapsed dream.

A story told around a fire that no longer burned.

A name whispered at the edge of forgetting.

And Aiden stood at the center, spiral pulsing in his palm, eyes closed, voice steady.

“You cannot erase what refuses to forget itself.”

Then he opened his eyes.

And the last war began.