In the lower outskirts of Libertatis, chaos reigned. Pegaluves scattered in every direction, some diving behind shattered homes and trees stripped bare by the winds of war, others simply taking to the sky, fleeing carnage that defied all reason.
Above the crumbling cityscape, Cryo soared, wings spread wide, eyes narrowed with fury. His brief moment of clarity broke apart when not one but three entire houses came hurtling toward him with the force and accuracy of ballistic missiles.
"Cryo, watch out!!"
Lecia's voice rang out from below. With a sweep of her arms she called gravity itself into her hands, halting the flying structures in midair. The relief lasted only a moment.
A larger house, torn from its foundations like a weed pulled from soil, screamed through the air and slammed into her. Her body flung backward, ricocheting off the ground with brutal force, each bounce carrying her farther into the distance.
"Lecia!!" Cryo's heart seized in his chest. "C'mon—you can't die now!!" He was already diving after her.
Fate had other plans.
Another building barreled toward him. He met it head-on, arms braced, catching it with a thunderous impact—and as he steadied its weight, he saw two pegaluves huddled inside, terrified, trembling against each other.
"Are you insane?!" He roared toward the source of it. "There are people in these buildings! Aren't you supposed to protect them?"
He lowered the house gently to the ground, and the shaken pegaluves scrambled out, fleeing toward whatever safety they could find.
High above, a dark figure loomed.
Lopo.
"Creatures below the flying city are not worthy of our presence!" His voice carried over the wreckage like a decree. "We are the law—and they will obey it."
Without remorse, he tore another house from the earth. Inside it, three pegaluve children screamed, trapped in the wooden prison of it, unable to do anything but scream.
Cryo surged forward to intercept—but Lecia blurred past him like a comet, bursting through the window mid-flight and scooping the children clear an instant before the house could crush her against the ground.
Her face was streaked with blood, her eyes burning with something well past anger.
"Ice bird. We're going to kill this bastard. I don't want to hear a single excuse."
Cryo hovered beside her, his voice dropping low and cold. "They're the ones who dropped the humans... and the boy."
Her eyes locked on his.
"There were human catapults," he went on, grim. "Set up above—no pegaluves nearby. There was a sign. Dead or Alive."
Silence hung between them.
Then came the rage and more of it than Cryo had ever felt off her before. Her power surged like a star folding in on itself, and he flinched away from it on instinct.
"You're dead." The words cracked the air. "Killing my husband's people..." Her body began to glow, force pouring off her in waves that bent the light around her. "YOU'RE FUCKING DEAD!!"
The sky above the city darkened, bruising into deep purple.
"By Nyxara's weight, goddess of gravity's darkest might,
I call forth the void's crushing descent into night.
Let spacetime writhe, and all that stands be torn—
Before my will, let gravity's fury be born!"
She clapped her hands together. Reality screamed.
The outer city twisted into oblivion—buildings, streets, even distant mountaintops caught and dragged in the tidal pull of her spell.
"GRAVITY RIB!"
Lopo was slammed out of the sky like a gnat beneath a hammer, and the ground beneath him warped under the sheer pressure of her fury.
....................................................
Elsewhere in the collapsing city, Qyioza dropped from above like a broken meteor, landing in the middle of his duel with Lisare. She touched down beside him, wings trembling from overexertion.
"What did you do...?" she whispered, watching him writhe.
Before she could act, the same crushing force found her too, driving her into the ground hard enough to split a crater beneath her.
"Dop... dop..." Her voice trembled, eyes darting.
High above, Achlys watched the chaos unfold. "Lecia... what's happening down there?" he muttered, half to himself.
He turned toward Qyioza and Lisare and saw them both struggling, pinned by the same helpless weight.
Bellona's voice stirred in his mind. "Hey, brat. You planning on using all of my energy just to stand there and watch?"
"Sorry, sorry—" He staggered forward, dragging Lisare up out of the pit though she collapsed again almost instantly.
"Dop longet sisi..." she murmured, before fainting entirely.
Achlys turned back to Qyioza.
"New law! Reverse gravity!" Qyioza's body flared violet, the decree etching itself across the sky like scripture.
"Shit—" Achlys's eyes went wide as Qyioza shot upward, taking flight. "First Order, Horizon!!" He unsheathed his sword and leapt after him, hurling attack after attack—most missing, but the ones that landed tore through old laws like paper.
"Get back here, damn law-changer!"
"STOP IT! I NEED MY LAWS!!" Qyioza snarled and drove a brutal punch into him, sending him crashing back down into the city. The ground buckled beneath the impact. The whole island began to tilt.
"YOU MORON! YOU DESTROYED THE LAW OF BALANCE!!"
Ice pillars erupted beneath the floating island, locking it back in place before it could fall. Qyioza turned to flee—and found Crevial.
"Crevial!" He stretched a hand toward her.
What she saw froze her soul. Qyioza was smiling—an eerie, twisted thing that could give nightmares to demons.
"Crevial! I need you!" His voice hissed like something not entirely human.
She tried to run. He seized her by the head and flung her off the edge, then leapt after her without a moment's hesitation.
"Achlys! Please help me!!"
Achlys's mark burned bright—then flickered, darkening to black. Lines crept across his body like vines of ink.
He collapsed. Powerless.
"Achlys won't help you..." Qyioza's voice whispered as he fell after her. "But I will, Crevial..."
Those were the last words Achlys heard before the darkness swallowed him whole.
....................................................
Bellona stood atop a jagged blade embedded in the earth, watching the flaming point of Qyioza's descent shrink in the distance.
"You pushed yourself too far," she said softly, her gaze never leaving the sky. "Your emotions are taking over you..."
She turned to where Achlys lay unconscious, eyes glassy. "And now you've fainted again. Chasing power you can't yet hold. You need more training, Achlys."
He stirred. "What... what will happen to me now?"
"Your body will lose control. And the Order will consume you." She said it plainly, the way one states a fact of weather. "Don't resist it... or you'll lose yourself forever."
"Second Order... Cataract..." he mumbled.
She stepped back. Three swords rose around her, and three more burst up from the ground beneath her feet.
"When you awaken," she said, "don't look at your friend."
His eyes shot open. "You don't mean—"
But she was already gone.
He gritted his teeth, trembling. "Damn you, Bellona..."
Outside, in the waking world, the city was breaking apart.
Homes collapsed. The rock beneath the floating island cracked and drifted from its own weight.
Achlys opened his eyes.
Lisare stood before him, weapons drawn, facing a version of him that no longer answered to anything he recognized.
"DEATH... BLOOD! BLOOD! MORE BLOOD!" The voices tore out of his own mouth.
Lisare readied her swallow-blade, reforged now with dual edges—one scarred, the other pristine.
"Dop Dop!" She leveled it at him.
His markings flickered violently between white and black, the black creeping further across his skin with every pulse. His eyes had begun to bleed. His grip on the sword was iron.
"BLOOD! SECOND ORDER! CATARACT!!" he howled, swinging with monstrous force.
Lisare blocked. The pressure behind it didn't let up for an instant.
The city began to fall faster, driven by the momentum of the spell tearing through it. Streets shattered underfoot.
"DEATH! CURSES! BLOOD! ORDER!!" The voices grew louder, drowning whatever was left of him.
Somewhere beneath the noise, trapped in his own body, Achlys whispered, Please... stop... I don't want this...
Lisare clenched her teeth and mustered every ounce of strength left in her. With a final push she deflected the blow into the ground, cracking the earth wide open.
"Sisi!!" she gasped.
The city split in half beneath them.
She didn't hesitate. She seized him by the collar and hurled him clear of the crumbling ground, leaping after him with the last of her strength.
"You should give up!! Blood, blood!!" he howled mid-flight, his voice guttural, twisted by whatever had claimed him.
He crashed violently into the debris-littered streets below, his body folding on impact. A sickening crunch rolled through him—ribs cracking, blood spraying from his mouth. "Grahhh!!"
Lisare landed atop him in a blur, eyes wild, fists like iron. "Longet Sisi!!" She drove blow after blow toward him, cracking stone where they missed.
He moved on sheer, savage instinct. The corruption surged through his limbs, and he twisted and evaded her onslaught with unnatural speed.
"BLOOD!!" Every dodge came more feral than the last.
Then—with a flicker of his leg—he vanished in a burst of mist, reappearing midair and spinning into a kick aimed straight for her ribs.
Lisare, seasoned enough to read the shape of the attack before it landed, shifted and drove her elbow into his solar plexus.
"Grahh!!" He reeled, coughing—but the pain only seemed to feed the madness clawing through what remained of him.
"B-Blood! BLOOD!!"
An explosion of dark mana erupted from within him. The black markings snaked rapidly across his body like roots of ink, and his muscles bulged unnaturally, bones cracking and realigning under the weight of it. Pain no longer registered on his face. Whatever controlled him had discarded every limit and turned his flesh into a weapon of madness.
He launched forward. "BLOOD!!"
Lisare barely raised her guard in time. His fist slammed into her like a battering ram, and she flew backward into the ruins of a once-beautiful manor, splinters and dust exploding outward around her.
He followed. He descended on her like a storm—fists like iron, feet like hammers, blow after relentless blow finding home.
She could barely move. Blood dripped from her mouth, her vision blurring. Her leg had twisted grotesquely beneath her.
"Sisi... dop..." she whispered, voice quivering.
He approached, slow and terrible, his footsteps echoing through the broken city.
"BLOOD! I WANT BLOOD!!" His voice rolled out over the ruins like a bell tolling doom.
Lisare gritted her teeth.
"D-Dop... si-sisi..." She forced herself upward through sheer will alone, and vanished into the sky on a desperate beat of her wings.
....................................................
The skies split as Cryo surged upward, a streak of blue fire trailing off his wings. Below him, the ruins of Libertatis groaned in despair. His eyes stayed locked on a single figure—Lopo, the self-righteous tyrant whose arrogance had lit the fuse on all of this.
"Lopo!" His voice cut through the wind like steel. "You're finished."
"No! I won't die here!" Desperation finally cracked through Lopo's voice. He turned to flee, wings straining to keep pace as the power Qyioza had lent him began to falter.
Cryo's body shimmered with deadly frost. A ring of glacial energy gathered around him, then shattered into hundreds of razor spears of ice.
He flicked his wrist. They launched.
Lopo screamed, deflecting a few with wild gusts of wind—but the barrage was relentless. One caught his shoulder. Another pierced his thigh. A third stabbed clean through his wing, and he spiraled downward.
Cryo dropped after him like a comet, slamming into him midair and driving him into a floating stone fragment hard enough to crack it in half.
"YOU THROW HOMES AT CHILDREN?!" Punch after punch landed like thunder. "YOU CALL YOURSELF LAW?!"
He beat him without mercy—each strike a judgment, an execution delayed only by the need to make him feel every second of it.
"Dop SISI!!"
Lisare crashed between them, bloodied and limping, throwing up a shimmering barrier of mana a half-second before Cryo's final blow could crush Lopo's skull.
"What are you doing?!" Cryo growled, his fist trembling inches from Lopo's face. He wanted to end it. Erase him.
Then Achlys appeared behind her, drawn by the noise—except it wasn't quite Achlys anymore. His presence stretched over the ground like a shadow at the edge of oblivion.
Lisare stumbled, barely standing, her leg bent wrong beneath her. Cryo noticed instantly.
"Your leg..." He dropped to one knee without hesitation and pressed a frost-wreathed hand to her shin. A soothing mist wrapped the break, locking the bone in place in a shell of ice.
"It's only temporary," he said. "But it'll hold."
She met his eyes, grateful, and nodded once.
Achlys stepped forward. Or rather, something wearing Achlys's body did.
The black lines had overtaken nearly all of him now. His eyes bled freely. His breath came in ragged, hissing bursts. The sword in his hand trembled—not with fear, but eagerness.
"Lisare..." he tried to say.
The voices spoke over him instead. "BLOOD. BLOOD. WANT. BLOOD."
Cryo stepped in front of her. "You're not him. Not anymore."
Lisare reached behind her, hand glowing, and drew it.
Life Binder.
The weapon shimmered with light both serene and wild, its twin blades pulsing with a strange green-gold aura that seemed to defy everything happening around it. The moment it cleared its sheath, the air itself went still.
"Sisi longet," she whispered.
Cryo and Lisare moved as one. He led with a blast of frost, freezing the ground beneath Achlys and forcing him to jump. She followed with a horizontal slash, Life Binder's edge searing through the air. He parried it—but the weapon sapped something from him as it connected, a flicker of the corruption dimming for just a moment.
"NO!" the voices howled.
He retaliated with a geyser of cursed water torn up from beneath their feet—
"CATARACT!!"
—and Cryo shot upward to dodge it while Lisare, caught mid-lunge, was thrown back. He swooped in and caught her before she could hit the rubble below.
"...Longet," she muttered.
Together they dove back down.
Achlys tried to hold them off, but they gave him no room. Cryo shattered his guard with an icebound flurry while Lisare struck from behind, Life Binder trailing threads of light that disrupted the markings crawling along his skin. Strike after strike, blow after blow, they wore him down.
"BLOOD!! I NEED BLOOD!!" His voice was no longer his own.
With one final coordinated move, Cryo froze his legs solid, trapping him in place. Lisare leapt, spinning midair as her blade caught the light.
"LIFE JUDGMENT!!"
Life Binder struck his chest and purged the dark mana in a violent burst. The black marks recoiled across his body, shrinking, retreating. He let out a piercing cry—not of rage this time, but of anguish.
He collapsed.
High above, Lecia stirred.
Broken, bruised, her body barely answering to her—her spirit fought to rise anyway. She watched her husband, twisted by forces beyond his own control, brought down at last by the very people who called him friend. Her heart screamed even as her limbs refused to move.
"Achlys..." she whispered. Tears ran freely down her cheeks. "Please... come back to me."
Her fingers twitched. Barely.
She had nothing left to give—but she prayed to Nyxara, to the gods, to fate itself.
Please. Don't let this be the end.