Cameraman Never Dies-Chapter 265: A Very Tired Author And His Ancestral Pal

Judge felt it before he understood it. A pressure — dense and suffocating, wrong-rolled up from the rune Tenebris had carved into the earth. It wasn't just a sense of danger. It was finality. Something meant to end everything within its reach.

His breath stalled, and his fingers tightened around the quill.

The rune glowed faintly, threads of light tracing their way along its impossible patterns, waking symbol after symbol like a chain of falling dominoes. If this was activated, he would still survive it, hopefully, but Satan wouldn't. Nothing inside the circle would. Except maybe Tenebris, since he cast it.

Judge snapped his mind into motion.

Satan moves quickly!

He wrote, intentionally putting an exclamation mark at the end to emphasize the urgency.

The body of Satan, mindless but responsive to Judge's will, lurched forward instantly. Judge's own ether shifted as Satan pulled on the new, barely mastered, principle of nihility. The air warped. His vision flickered. The world seemed to waver between existence and something thinner.

He thrust his hand out, and nothing happened. Literally.

Nothing met the ripple head-on. And they vanished.

Not destroyed. Not shattered. Erased.

Lines that had been carved into the earth only heartbeats earlier dissolved into blank soil. The glow was snuffed out mid-surge. Half a dozen destructive symbols winked out at once, severing the amplification web Tenebris had built with such precision.

But it wasn't clean. The backlash hit the ground with a cracking roar. The circle buckled. Dust shot upward in a wave. Satan staggered, the principle gnawing at his bones like it wasn't meant to live inside a person yet.

Tenebris slowly lowered his cane. His expression did not change.

"I see," he murmured. "You truly did inherit something troublesome."

Judge couldn't tell whether it was aimed at Satan or him, but he still liked to believe his presence hadn't been found yet.

Tenebris lifted his free hand. Space twisted.

The ground curled upward, reshaping itself into jagged spears that lunged for Satan.

He flung his body backward, barely missing the first volley as his body twisted unnaturally, escaping the rpedicamen and charging ahead, his broken form reattaching itsel...

The quill flickered mid stroke; he couldn't heal Satan as he had intended.

Tenebris moved with the calm of someone brushing dust from a sleeve. He stepped aside, and a false reality shimmered into place — a flicker of empty space where Satan's charge passed clean through, buying Tenebris the angle he wanted. A second reality folded open beside the first. Satan stumbled, suddenly finding ground under him vanished as he fell down to the sky below.

Two worlds overlapping.

Judge's heartbeat spiked, partially from fear and partially from excitement. He somehow found the fight enjoyable. Thinking quickly, he resumed writing.

Satan creates a portal below him toward Tenebris.

Satan tried, and a portal appeared, but Tenebris flicked a finger. Gravity twisted sideways. Satan slammed into a newly formed wall with a sound like splitting metal.

Judge reacted instinctively, dragging the principle of nihility into his grip again.

Satan's hand sliced the air. A fake spear that does as much damage as a real spear descended toward him. It vanished mid-fall.

Tenebris' eyebrow rose — not in shock, but mild interest.

"You don't understand what you're wielding," he said. "That makes it dangerous for you more than me."

Judge didn't have the luxury of answering. Partially because he was not on the battlefield, mainly because making Satan speak was starting to become a chore.

The ground beneath him buckled, erupting upward. He leapt back and quickly regained his posture, throwing himself at Tenebris with raw force.

Tenebris didn't meet the charge. He rewrote the space between them.

Satan hit nothing — then everything — as multiple overlapping terrains slammed together for a moment before snapping apart. The confusion alone nearly tore the body into chunks.

Judge gritted his teeth and scribbled fast.

He couldn't write it at first, because he had no idea what kind of attack it was to use the principle of nihility on it. Instead, he erased everything around Satan.

The world steadied.

And Tenebris stepped forward. He moved faster, more sharply.

He raised his cane, and entire structures of false geography layered themselves around Judge. Hills. Pathways. Sharp drops. Walls. All illusions at first… then suddenly real.

Judge still wanted to mock the use of a cane for theatrics, but unfortunately, he had other things to worry about — and he was not Gereon.

He tried another usage for nihility. Satan shot forward with velocity, using the wind's help. He extended his hand to reach for Tenebris

For a moment, Satan reached him. But a swing of unnatural strength cracked against Tenebris' guard, forcing the old man to slide half a step.

That was all. A half step.

Tenebris raised two fingers. And Reality folded.

Satan was caught in the fold, his limbs twisting in directions they were never meant to go.

Judge really had to one-up his understanding of nihility, because he had a really complicated idea. His breathing had grown shallow. He felt the principle eating at his mind, clawing at his thoughts, demanding more psych as he exhausted himself. His hands shook.

But with unrelenting resolve, he transferred the principle toward Satan. Instantly, the whole world collapsed, and the folding was gone. And the world was calm again. Tenebris's cane had vanished.

Satan lay on the floor, his limbs twisted beyond humanly possible.

Tenebris watched him with that maddening calm, as though teaching a student to walk in a straight line.

"Why do you fight with such a tattered body?" he asked. "You must know you can never win."

Judge didn't know what he meant. But he wanted to try something else; he might even wipe this threat.

Slowly, cold air spread from Satan's body. Even the bleeding had stopped, and blood started to freeze. Ice had spread through his entire body, acting as a skeleton he could control.

Tenebris was surprised at this; he wanted to stop this man and put an end to his pain. But he could not simply erase this person as he could have when he was still a god.

His powers were too weak to be at that level. And he knew he could never get his powers back again. The law of perception had been assimilated with the world; only a speck could be controlled.

Satan lunged again. Tenebris lifted his hand. Another false world blossomed open.

Judge didn't have time to erase it.

Satan was swallowed whole by the new terrain — an empty cliff face that offered no footing, no sky, no hope of balance. He plummeted, slamming into the base of the false world with a crack that sounded final.

He didn't get up.

Judge's stomach twisted as he reached out with his will, trying to force Satan to move. Respond. Do anything. But his quill refused to write that future. He couldn't.

"This is the limit of that body," Tenebris said softly. "Please stop bringing yourself more pain, even if it's the loyalty that drives you."

Judge clenched his jaw.

The rune Tenebris had created earlier clicked together in his memory. The amplifying symbols. The destructive ones. The absolute finality of their arrangement. He understood now.

Satan wasn't meant to escape the fight. Satan wasn't meant to live through it.

And Judge had one option left.

He reached deeper into nihility, his psyche reaching the point of melting his brain. The world bent around him as if trying to recoil from his presence.

Judge could not move Satan, but he could still use principles through him as long as he had enough psyche. He made Satan use another principle.

The creature twitched. The principle was hard to use; Judge now knew he had only grasped a sliver of this vast principle of nihility.

Satan's body dissolved — in a silent, inevitable unmaking.

The edges of him went first, then the center, then everything in between, until the space where he'd once been was simply empty.

Gone, just like that. The surrounding ether rushed to fill in the void.

The quiet that followed felt impossibly large.

Tenebris lowered his gaze as he slowly fell to the ground.

A moment passed... then another.

He slowly got back up, but there was a change in his facial expression.

"Damn it," He cursed, "Exerting such force just to fight a fraction of the Princeps