Julius dropped to one knee.
For a moment, the warzone fell silent—only the faint shimmer of heat in the air, only the slow drift of scorched petals in the courtyard breeze. Then a low crackling started from within him, like kindling catching fire. Flesh twisted. Muscle tore and rewove itself in thick, coiled knots. His single horn split at the base and lengthened, curling upward like a blackened scythe. The skin around it mottled and hardened, the sheen of molten stone beneath. His silhouette was no longer merely human—it rippled with the raw, wrong geometry of the Blight.
He rose, his grin jagged and wild.
"I'm not done. Not yet." The words hissed through his teeth, warped by the furnace in his chest. He rolled his shoulders with a sound like grinding ore. "I will spare you, Gabriel. And soon… you too will bow to my strength."
Gabriel's gaze lingered, calm yet sharpened, like a man watching a clock tick down.
"You mistake survival for mercy," he said quietly. "And strength… for inevitability."
His right hand moved to his side—not hurried, not ceremonial. He simply reached beneath his cloak and drew the weapon that had slept there all this time.
The sword left its sheath in silence.
It was pure gold, yet not reflective—its surface drank the light instead of casting it. White threads ran through the blade like veins of marble, pulsing faintly, as if it contained its own heartbeat. Around it, the air shifted—not from heat or force, but from the weight of meaning.
Julius took a step back before he could stop himself. "That's—"
"The measure of all things," Gabriel said.
The moment the tip aligned with Julius, the world flexed. The golden edge didn't simply cut the air—it rewrote it. The cracks in the courtyard mended beneath his feet; the scattered dust froze mid-fall; the warping heat dissipated in a breath.
Julius snarled and fired a spiral of heat vision straight at him.
The blade moved once.
Not a block. Not a deflection. The beam… unraveled. Its light peeled apart into strands and dissolved, as if its moment of existing had been edited out of reality.
Julius blinked hard. "What—"
"You burn because you believe fire is your answer," Gabriel said, stepping forward. The gold in the blade brightened, white veins coursing faster. "But answers are only permitted if they are true."
Julius roared and charged, heat distorting the courtyard into a living mirage.
Gabriel stepped through it. Not around—through. The mirage collapsed into clarity wherever the sword passed, the Authority laced into its edge forcing reality to obey the shape he declared. A single swing carved a perfect line in the ground—not by cutting stone, but by deciding that the stone should never have been whole there in the first place.
Julius struck. Their clash didn't create sparks; it created echoes. Each impact was mirrored a fraction of a second later, as if the moment itself was playing twice.
Gabriel slid the blade along Julius' arm, and time on that limb slowed to a crawl—skin burning at a pace too slow to be useful, nullifying the heat for precious seconds.
But Julius adapted, blasting point-blank with raw thermal force. The courtyard shattered under the wave. Gabriel vanished, reappearing on a pillar that hadn't existed a heartbeat ago—Authority and steel having conjured it from the concept of what had been there once.
The gold blade gleamed brighter, its white veins now blazing like molten light.
"Your world burns too easily," Gabriel said, his voice low and resonant. "Perhaps it's time I rewrote the script."
And with that, he descended—each strike not merely an attack, but a revision of reality itself.
The battlefield began to shift.
Not shift — buckle.
The debris didn't just lift; it spiraled upward in intricate, unnatural arcs, as if obeying a geometry alien to the land it came from. Cracked towers unmoored from their foundations and floated sideways, their stones reassembling into meaningless shapes midair. Trees tore their roots from the soil, bark splitting into shimmering filaments that bled mana instead of sap. The very color of the world flickered, sky flashing between the pale blue of day and a deep, bruised violet.
From the heart of it, sound warped. The roar of destruction dulled into the quiet hiss of distorted air, as if reality's speaker had been torn.
Julius' eyes darted across the warping horizon, then locked on Gabriel.
"What are you doing now?" His voice was sharp, too loud against the muted air.
Gabriel's grin was subtle, but his eyes had that steady, judging weight.
"This isn't me. This is you." He stepped forward, Lex Caelorum humming faintly at his side. "With your wormhole ripping the weave of the world, mana is no longer a stream—it's a riptide. When enough is pulled at once…" He gestured to the impossible architecture around them. "Reality… forgets itself. I theorized. You proved it."
He lowered his voice, almost conversational. "That's why I came."
Julius twisted his hand. The ground beneath Gabriel peeled upward in jagged slabs, wrapping around his legs like the teeth of some earthen predator.
"So now you think you can run?" Julius spat.
Gabriel tilted his head, calm even as the stone tightened.
"No. If necessary, I'll leave my life here. Sacrifice is a concept you've never met—though I imagine you wouldn't like the handshake."
The gold blade flashed once before sinking into the earth. The air pressure shifted. Around him, the dirt and stone unfastened from the ground and rose skyward in slow, graceful spirals.
The battlefield began to shift.
Not shift — come apart.
The debris didn't just rise; it spiraled into elegant, alien patterns as if sculpted by an invisible architect. Towering structures sheared themselves from their foundations and floated sideways, their stones rearranging into nonsensical latticework. Trees tore free, their roots dangling like veins ripped from the earth, bark peeling into translucent ribbons that bled mana instead of sap.
The air itself looked wrong. Colors bled from objects, blues turning to bruised violet, reds to an impossible shade of black-gold. The sky flickered like a faulty lantern, alternating between bright noon and the dying light of dusk in irregular beats.
Somewhere deep in the distortion, sound warped—roars and crashes stretched into a slow, low hiss, as though reality had forgotten how noise was supposed to work.
Julius' eyes swept the chaos before settling on Gabriel.
"What are you doing now?"
Gabriel's expression didn't waver, but his grip on the gold-and-white hilt of Lex Caelorum tightened.
"This isn't me," he said. "It's you. The mana disturbance from your wormhole has broken the weave of the world. When enough is drawn at once…" He gestured to the grotesque ballet of floating wreckage and inverted space. "…reality collapses into anomalies. I theorized. You proved it."
A bitter smile. "That's why I came."
Julius sneered and twisted his hand. The ground under Gabriel peeled upward in jagged slabs, locking around his legs like stone shackles.
"So now you think you can run?"
Gabriel tilted his head.
"No. If necessary, I'll leave my life here. Sacrifice is a concept you've never shaken hands with."
Lex Caelorum bit into the ground. The sword hummed—a deep, pure note—and the air pressure dropped. The earth and stone splintered apart, drifting upward in spirals. Debris rose in a slow, almost serene dance, forming a storm of stone above them.
Julius leapt from shard to shard, horn glowing blindingly.
Then, halfway through his approach—he burst.
It wasn't a release of mana. It was detonation. A shockwave of raw, unshaped spell-thread ignited around him, shearing the air with invisible blades. His heat vision fired without command, lancing wildly into the warped landscape. The anomaly fed on it, pulling fragments of the attacks sideways into new shapes—a beam would split into rings, rings into swarms of molten dust, dust into unnatural clouds that rained back down in slow, burning spirals.
Gabriel swung. Lex Caelorum erased the first volley from existence—
—but the next arrived before the rewrite finished, then another, and another.
Every stroke was a surgical act of denial. A strike across the air to nullify a beam. A twist to return a flying slab of stone to the dust it was hours ago. But gaps appeared in the defense. A molten arc grazed Gabriel's shoulder, bone flashing white beneath blackened flesh. Another blow slashed across his ribs, carving deep.
Julius saw the falter and dove in.
The clash was chaos in motion. Julius' strikes came in unpredictable surges, strength spiking so violently it cracked the floating stone beneath his feet. Lex Caelorum met each attack with double-echo strikes, reality ringing twice for every impact.
But Julius was relentless.
A final, staggering blow tore the sword from Gabriel's hands. Lex Caelorum spun through the air, embedding itself in a floating boulder far above.
Julius roared in triumph—until Gabriel moved.
With no sword to channel his Authority, he improvised. He stepped into Julius' guard, palm glowing white-gold, and rewrote a piece of him.
The glow wasn't light—it was correction. For an instant, Gabriel's hand phased through Julius' chest, grasping something deeper than flesh. When he pulled back, Julius screamed—a raw, unbroken sound of pain. His horn's light flickered and dimmed, the surge of mana around him collapsing like a dying star.
Where Gabriel had touched, a deep, jagged scar burned into Julius' chest—one that would never heal clean. And deep within him, a section of his mana channels had been erased, severing part of his strength forever.
Julius staggered back, clutching his chest. His breathing was ragged, his horn's brilliance reduced to a dim, angry glow.
But Gabriel was worse. His movements slowed, his body leaking blood in steady rivulets. With a last desperate leap, he reclaimed Lex Caelorum and drove it into the ground—not to fight, but to create a path.
The air split into a clean, golden fissure, space momentarily rewritten into a straight corridor of stability cutting through the anomaly.
Without a word, Gabriel stepped into it.
By the time Julius could give chase, the fissure sealed, leaving only drifting motes of golden light.
Gabriel emerged from the other side of the golden fissure, just outside the perimeter of a military camp. His boots dragged furrows in the dirt as he stumbled forward, every step costing more than the last. Blood soaked through his clothes, dripping steadily onto the ground. He collapsed to his knees, gasping.
With the last of his will, he clawed his fingers into the earth and pulled himself forward. The dirt ground beneath his nails. His breathing became ragged, each pull weaker than the one before. Darkness narrowed his vision until nothing remained.
He fell still.