On that day, every believer in God across the world experienced a profound spiritual shock.
It did not matter whether they were Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or belonged to any other branch of Christianity. If they truly believed in God, if that faith genuinely existed within their hearts, they all felt it at the same moment.
A nameless panic.
A deep, instinctive fear.
And an emptiness rising from the depths of their souls.
It felt as though something fundamental had been severed.
The sensation was difficult to describe, yet impossible to deny.
But that was only the spiritual effect.
What happened in the physical world was even more shocking.
On that day, crosses everywhere began to crack.
The towering crucifixes atop churches.
The small pendants worn around believers' necks.
Wooden crosses, metal crosses, crosses made from every conceivable material.
Whether they bore the image of Christ or stood as simple symbols of faith, every one of them split down the middle as though struck by some invisible force.
It was as if they had all suffered the same devastating wound.
On that day, cathedrals throughout Vatican City trembled like structures caught in an earthquake.
Many collapsed.
Believers and nonbelievers alike came to the same unsettling realization.
If God truly existed...
Then something terrible had happened to Him.
And once that thought took root, the entire Western world was shaken.
For centuries, the singular God of Western civilization had dominated the spiritual landscape. Now, His most obvious manifestation in modern history appeared to be a silent announcement of catastrophe.
It was a tragic revelation.
Do gods really exist?
Are the legends true?
Before today, most people would have laughed at such questions.
Many would have dismissed them outright.
Some might even have called the questioner delusional.
But now?
No one could confidently claim that gods, myths, and ancient legends were nothing more than fabricated stories.
Because mythology had become reality.
Not in some distant past.
Not in some forgotten age.
Here and now.
Angels had descended from Heaven.
Another army of angels had slaughtered them.
And Heaven itself had been shattered.
Yet Drex Valen never appeared before the masses.
Nor did he perform miracles to gather worshippers.
At the moment, the Heaven Dimension alone was enough to keep him occupied.
His Black Hole Dimension was consuming Heaven.
The feast was so vast that even Drex felt as though he might choke on it.
The power of a black hole had never been something that could be measured through simple arithmetic.
One plus one did not equal two.
Certainly, a black hole's strength came from its mass and scale.
The larger and heavier the black hole, the more dangerous it became.
But that calculation only applied to a single black hole.
When two black holes merged, the mathematics changed entirely.
The reason lay in the nature of black holes themselves.
Every black hole possessed a core.
As the product of a dying star, a black hole was born through catastrophic collapse.
When a massive star neared the end of its life, its core rapidly contracted under its own gravity before triggering an immense explosion.
Under normal circumstances, the collapse stopped once the matter compressed into neutrons, creating a neutron star.
But when the stellar core possessed sufficient mass, the collapse never ended.
Even neutrons were crushed apart under unimaginable pressure.
What remained was matter compressed beyond conventional understanding.
That was the core of a black hole.
A singularity.
The gravitational force generated by that singularity was so immense that anything approaching it would eventually be consumed.
Maintaining such a singularity required tremendous energy.
Everything swallowed by the black hole helped sustain its existence.
Without enough energy, the black hole would gradually evaporate.
Physics described the process as Hawking radiation.
But viewed from another angle, it was almost as though the universe itself rejected things that had become too powerful.
The singularity was the true source of a black hole's might.
Across the entire cosmos, no matter how massive or unstoppable a black hole became, it could possess only one singularity at its center.
A black hole with two singularity cores was impossible.
Its very nature forbade it.
A black hole was fundamentally a region centered around a singularity of effectively infinite density, infinite spacetime curvature, and infinitesimal volume.
According to Einstein's theory of relativity, when a dying star collapsed beyond a critical threshold, it formed a point from which not even light could escape.
That point became a black hole.
A predator that devoured light, matter, and everything around it.
Compared to neutron stars, black holes were vastly more dangerous.
Far less understood.
Humanity knew remarkably little about the most terrifying celestial objects in existence.
Countless brilliant minds had attempted to calculate their limits.
In the end, most conclusions remained educated guesses.
Even the smallest glimpse into a black hole's true nature was enough to inspire awe and fear.
It was not an existence anyone would willingly make an enemy of.
Its power surpassed imagination.
The extreme curvature of spacetime around a black hole could alter the flow of time itself.
Like a river redirected through changing terrain, gravity could accelerate the current hundreds of times over.
Or reduce it to a crawl.
In some circumstances, it could even create effects that resembled time reversing upon itself.
To a black hole, time was little more than a toy manipulated through gravity and spacetime distortion.
Its gravitational pull was effectively limitless.
Across the universe, astronomers had observed stars many thousands of times larger than their companion black holes being slowly torn apart and devoured.
Piece by piece.
In terms of raw power, black holes already stood at the very edge of universal law.
One could even argue they had surpassed those laws entirely.
But dimensional black holes were different.
They did not suffer from the same restrictions imposed by the physical universe.
They could continue compressing indefinitely.
Their density could rise without limit.
And now, as the Black Hole Dimension consumed the Heaven Dimension, that limitless potential was being unleashed.
Drex could feel his power increasing every second.
The growth was explosive.
Violent.
Relentless.
It surged through him with such ferocity that even he struggled to endure it.
"Drex!"
Tifa and the others watched him with concern as pain twisted across his face.