In the deep reaches of space, where reality bends and the boundaries between dimensions blur, a hunter was drinking his rum and gazing at the infinite void, hoping something would stare back. Gruff, nihilistic, and renowned as one of the most dangerous beings in the omniverse, he was no stranger to the horrors lurking in the rift. Known simply as the *Mnyama*, he was one of the few capable of hunting the unthinkable—the Mortifers, creatures born from the Rift itself, a region made of a negative and anti-matter beyond all sentient realms.
The Hunter had seen it all, but Romulus-15 was different. The once proud planet, home to the Romanians, a war-driven, scientifically advanced society, was now enveloped in miasma, a deathly haze that ate away at existence itself. The Romanians had faced threats before, even the Narbas—a species that had mastered temporal manipulation. But against the Mortifers, even their desperate act of collapsing 52 stars to turn their system into a giant black hole had failed. The Mortifers didn't follow the rules of physics, time, or anything else. They just *destroyed*.
As his ship descended into the miasma, the Hunter's AI companion, FIERCE, alerted him to incoming movement. "They know we're here," she said, her voice tense. Moments later, a black whip of miasma struck the ship, reducing its shields by 25% in an instant. Before the second hit, the Hunter ejected, watching as the ship simply vanished into nothing. "Told you it wouldn't hold," FIERCE remarked, with a hint of dry sarcasm.
"Hmmm," the hunter grunted, pulling his rifle close. His sensors, powered by a combination of frequency and mirror tech, flickered to life, allowing him to pierce through the thick miasma. The suit's negative shield, a piece of tech that mimicked the Mortifers' properties, would hold for two hours—enough time to get the job done.
The first sight of the Mortifer froze the air around him. Towering over 700 meters, the entity twisted in ways that defied logic, its form a constantly shifting nightmare. The space around the Hunter warped as it made its move. The AI warned, "It's trying to break through the mental shields." FIERCE's voice quivered. "I can block it all, but not for the entire fight. These things are beyond monsters or devils and the things they did; entire universes snuffed out by just one of things; it's absorbed the collective consciousness of sextillions of beings." The A. I even recognized some of the consciousness: "Are those the PSiocks?" She looks in horror as, on the mental plane, she sees the once proud universe full of extremely powerful psionic beings, beings capable of dissecting other universes with their psionic talents on a subatomic level, and that's at their weakest. The A.I. remembers back to when the Hunter had to kill one. Modo was his name—a devilish man that left his universe to take over another, and as powerful as he was when he stepped foot into another universe, he had every living thing under his control. Too bad the tech hunter has is immune to all forms of psychological attacks, tampering, and infiltrating. Modo's reign was short-lived; it took the Hunter all but two hours to kill him. His shields were walked through like paper, and moving at the speed of thought is too slow to fight someone like the Hunter.
"Shut up and focus," the hunter barked, ducking as the space around him reached out, trying to pull him into nothingness. The miasma itself was alive, warping the laws of the universe. The Hunter zigzagged through the dark tendrils at blinding speeds, boosted by his tech. Time fractured around him—seconds elongated, then collapsed—but his mirror tech reflected the temporal distortions, keeping him stable.
A shot rang out, a beam of frequency disrupting the Mortifer's form, though it only served to agitate the entity further. Every strike the Hunter made seemed to be absorbed, reconstituted, and reborn into something worse. Walls of miasma, denser than any natural force, formed around him, but with a focused shot, he broke through them.
"Shields won't hold," FIERCE's voice crackled. "Not forever."
"I don't need forever," the Hunter growled. His fingers tightened around his rifle as he pushed his suit's systems to the limit. His frequency tech pulsed with energy, every shot designed to attack the very *concept* of the Mortifer, bypassing the unthinkable defenses. The AI reversed time flows around the Hunter, keeping the warping space from crushing him, but the heat from the miasma was rising—temperatures beyond what any star could produce.
"Shields at 80%," FIERCE reported.
The Mortifer unleashed a barrage of darkness, beams that stole entropy from the very space they touched. With a series of impossible dodges, the Hunter weaved through the attack. He was approaching transcendental speeds, the friction of reality itself gnawing at his shields. "Shields will degrade 2% faster at these speeds," FIERCE warned.
"Don't care," the Hunter spat. With a final burst of speed, he vanished from the entity's perception. The Mortifer, confused, flailed blindly. Space and time shattered under its attacks; one stray shot even escaped Romulus-15's orbit, eroding stars and planets in its path just by passing through their gravitational pull. But before it could reach another living world, the destructive force simply vanished.
"Show off," the hunter muttered.
He reappeared behind the Mortifer, rifle aimed at what his organization called the "heart," though such a thing didn't truly exist. It was more like a frequency core—a point that has to be created using a mix of frequency tech and mirror tech. The frequency will allow small damage to the being able to form a counterfrequency to it; even nothing has a frequency. Mirror tech, while used for shields, simply can reflect any attack and mitigate a larger portion of attacks that would erase beings and can also copy the opponent's properties. With that copying, the Hunter can combine the two technologies to make two things: origin frequency or an overload shot. By turing his suit to maximum, the Hunter can gain the collective concept and laws of the Omniverse converted into an attack. With this, it forces the once terrifying Mortifer, who doesn't know any concept outside of what seems to be destroyed, to abide by the laws and concepts of our universe. After a couple of hits, the Mortifer-hazy body started to look physical, and it did something it thought it could never do: feel pain. With a single pull of the trigger, he fired, the bullet resonating with the combined power of all concepts, laws, and frequencies from countless dimensions.
The Mortifer howled, a soundless scream that tore at the fabric of space. Its form destabilized, collapsing in on itself as the miasma surrounding what was a planet began to evaporate. The Hunter watched, unphased, as the entire mass of Romulus-15—a planet 20 times the size of Earth's sun—was reduced to nothing but a spec of dust, which he collected in his hand.
FIERCE's voice softened. "You... okay?"
The hunter stared at the emptiness, his expression unreadable beneath his helmet. "Does it really matter if I am?"
Floating in the void of space, he activated his communications. "Hunter reporting in. Target neutralized. Damage level: extinction. No remnants of negative matter or the rift left. Area is clear."
"Copy that, Hunter. Prepare to return home."
With a final look at the void where Romulus-15 once stood, the Hunter vanished into nothingness, leaving the nightmare behind—for now.