The Hand of Zero

It was as if someone had pressed the pause button on heaven and earth. Netero slowly spread his palms apart, and darkness began to spin between them like a silent vortex. The air around them was dragged inward. Dust and sand spiraled upward, while broken rocks, tiles, and snapped timbers were wrenched from the ground with sharp scraping noises. Starlight was swallowed whole, the clouds vanished completely, and only a pitch-black maw expanded high in the sky.

Meruem planted himself directly in its path, fists clenched tight, shoulders and back bulging. The darkness tugged at his body, and blood seeped from cracks across his shoulder plates and ribs. The air beneath his feet seemed to collapse. He drove the backs of his feet deeper into that downward pull and forcibly steadied his center of gravity. The armor plates on his back trembled faintly, giving off a low metallic rasp.

Netero suddenly brought his palms together. In the next instant, the silence was torn apart, and heaven and earth exploded in unison. The darkness between his palms flipped into white light, like a waterfall dropping straight down. Compressed to its absolute limit, it poured down without warning. The white light pierced the sky, and wherever it passed, the air tore like cloth, its edges curling into thin lines.

The white light crashed head-on into the King. Meruem's figure was swallowed up, his outline sinking within the radiance. The impact spread in all directions from the King as its center. The air above twisted, forming visible ripples as though it had been pressed flat. The ground caved in, and the ruins of the palace were crushed into a deep, dark disk before shattering completely in the next instant and plunging into the widening pit. The streets collapsed along several cracks at once,