As Venus approached the unstable Metatron, she punched through its chest and got a hold of the energy that lay inside it.
A surging wave of unknown energy started getting absorbed by Venus' hand without her consent. She couldn't quite understand why this was happening, nor she could understand what kind of energy it really was.
"This is...!!!"
At the same time, the unstable Metatron released a shiny bursting explosion, destroying everything in its path and causing the entire metaworld to go blank and sending ripples that traveled all the way to the outside of the Exosphere.
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"...Where...Where am I?"
Venus now found herself in a place completely blank. Was she having a vision? A dream? She couldn't quite decipher. But before she had any time to think about it, a wave of knowledge invaded her mind. A nigh-infinite collective of information about the cosmos and the underlying principles of creation now were bursting forth through her endless mental layers.
She did know what this place was. She was probably not even actually in a place. It was a revealing dream or vision. But she wanted to go through all of it.
And so she did. By willing it, she started to reach and wander through everything and anything successfully. And as she did, the contents and information of what constituted each piece of all creation laid out to her as if she was reading a book with images.
At the same time this happened, the scenario around her changed drastically, reformulating in accordance with each piece of knowledge she gathered and fully understood. The first iteration of the cosmos. The Lost World. The youkais manifested from human negativity. Hell. Material Substrate. Exosphere. Dataspace. Femto Realm...
But there was more. She wanted to know more.
As she kept ascending, she came across a boundless void. So immense and vast that no amount of complex language would be able to decipher it.
But this was only the tip of the iceberg. This void, which many called the Abysm, was larger than it seemed. Indeed, Venus had only stepped through the first floor of this darkness. As she ascended further, she realized how scary this entire place was.
Endless floors and layers of darkness stretched out. Endless darkness beyond all thought and non-thought, space and non-space, time and non-time.
Ineffable structures burst through in quick succession, and at length, Venus felt that these were realms of greater existential logic than anything else she had seen.
She found bizarre landscapes of alien architecture, vast expanses of black holes of numerous shapes and sizes, structures that lacked geometry and coordinates, and oceans of terrifying, tentacled beasts.
Each floor was more complex and more abstract than its predecessor. Numerous creatures of nigh-incomprehensibility could be found here, of which descriptions would fail to grasp. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that merely looking at one of these creatures would cause a being to cease to exist.
Were they guardians of the Abysm? She didn't know, and there wasn't much point in trying to know. Compared to the other places that were revealed to her, this one strangely lacked information.
But there was still more to explore. More to find. More to understand.
After getting past the limitless layers of voidness, she understood.
The source of all.
The essence from which everything and nothing came to be.
"The Tao..."
"Stop right there." Said a mysterious voice. "I think that's enough."
Venus could hear the voice of an unknown entity. From the way it spoke, it seemed to be human...No, all humans ceased to be since the Big Crunch.
But before she could think of anything else...
"This might be just a projection of yours, but your place isn't here yet."
As the man spoke, he raised his hand and snapped his fingers.
"!!!"
Suddenly, Venus was instantly dragged down. Pulled with a force that she couldn't understand. She passed through all the previously mentioned structures and places with a speed that she couldn't keep up, and the force was too strong to let her even move. It was as if all her traveling progress was being reverted. This process kept going until she eventually blacked out.
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Before she noticed, she suddenly woke up and was in the same spot and moment as before. The Exosphere, with Metatron right in front of her. Its body was regenerating from the previous explosion.
Venus was feeling an immense headache from the previous event that left her perplexed. She still remembered it all.
Metatron, now fully reformed, prepared to attack once more. It created infinite clones of itself and charged in Venus' direction at quick speeds. Each clone was just as powerful as the original and could do everything the original could.
"I don't have time for this."
Venus raised her hand.
It was all that she needed to do.
"!!!"
Metatron could not compute what was happening. That's because even that couldn't be done. Metatron and its clones completely stopped in place. They weren't moving and weren't thinking. Time had stopped...No, it was a bit different. They have been induced into a state of complete stagnation that goes beyond simple temporal mechanics. Space, time, laws, rules, principles, conception...all of it stopped in place for Metatron's existence.
Now that Venus had seen the Tao, she could see everything with other eyes, and do things she previously couldn't. She saw the truth. The primordial essence. But that was all. She did not have the opportunity to directly touch or interact with the real deal, only an insignificant portion of it from an insignificant mechanical existence. This made her craving worse. She had to fully grasp it and make it hers.
"I will discover your secrets."
Venus said as she closed her hand and ignored the enemies in front of her.
Immediately after, all Metatrons instantly disintegrated into sub-quantic particles. If anything was still "alive", it was banished to the Femto Realm, and wouldn't be able to come back.
With the wanderers and accursed gone, she regrouped the ethernals and the triumvirate, while fixing the damage caused to the Exosphere.
The war was over.
This war, that is.
As Venus tried to formulate all her plans in her mind, she noticed something. Something has noticed her. Not in this plane of existence, but somewhere else. She just felt it. It was likely instinct, but it was enough to tell her of incoming danger. It was still too far away. It would probably take days to happen, but she knew it would happen.
The wanderers have been defeated. But there was still one enemy left, which she had briefly forgotten.
The previous explosion made by Metatron was not a simple explosion. It contained properties and a portion of the Tao, something that a certain species is very well aware of in its readings. A species that once were able to harness a portion of the primordial essence to increase its potential. An old enemy who Venus knew very well.
"The Hex Pattern..."
Penumbra and Walkure approached Venus, who seemed to be looking at the skies.
"What's wrong, your majesty?"
"We won this war, but the main conflict is still not over. The patterns still live, and will soon focus on us. Until that happens. We sharpen ourselves."
"Understood.", The two children say in conjunction.
Venus ponders for a minute before deciding on what to do.
"I shall visit a certain place."