EVE POV
"Adam, it's not working!" I screamed over the roar of the atmospheric pressure. "She's not just a siphon anymore—she's a black hole!"
Adam's ligation, his attempt to force the stolen life back into the victims, was failing. Or rather, it was succeeding in the worst way possible. The Nun wasn't just a vessel; she was a catalyst. The moment the Golden Impulse hit her system, she didn't pop like a balloon. She grew. She was eating the very purity of my brother's light, stripping the 'holy' out of it and using the raw energy to fuel a biological nightmare that was currently expanding to fill the entire sanctuary.
Her body was no longer remotely humanoid. The black robes had fused with her skin, becoming a thick, leathery hide that looked like charred kelp. Her height had doubled, then tripled. Her shoulders were now broad enough to scrape the stone pillars of the nave, and the "blood" weeping from her blindfold had turned into a torrential waterfall of violet sludge that flooded the floor.
"I am... the return!" the thing shrieked. Her voice was no longer a chime; it was a choir of a thousand drowning souls. "The sun... is just... another... fuel!"
She swung a massive, mutated arm—a limb the size of a redwood tree, covered in pulsing eyes and jagged bone spurs. Adam had to break his concentration to displace, flickering ten feet to the left as the altar behind him was pulverized into dust.
"Eve, get them out of here!" Adam commanded, his voice strained. His white shirt was finally starting to show signs of the fight, the collar scorched and the sleeves frayed. "She's bypassing my stabilization! The more I hit her, the more mass she gains!"
"I'm not leaving you with this... this overgrown weed!" I spat.
I turned to June and Brandt. The girl with the teal hair was staring up at the Nun with a face that had gone beyond terror into a kind of catatonic shock. Brandt was barely conscious, leaning heavily against a cracked pew.
"Stay behind me and don't breathe the purple mist!" I yelled at them, though my eyes were fixed on the monster.
The Nun's blindfold finally snapped. Beneath it, there were no eyes—just two gaping, vertical gashes that leaked absolute violet void. From those gashes, hundreds of thin, needle-like tendrils erupted, lashing out at the rafters. She wasn't just sipping from the "Elite Seven" anymore; she was eating the rafters themselves. The stone, the wood, the very history of the church was being assimilated into her bulk.
She was becoming a mountain of meat and violet light.
"You like mass?" I hissed, my Black Impulse coiling around my arms like twin serpents. "Fine. Let's see how much weight you can carry."
I didn't strike her chest this time. I went for the foundation. I dropped to one knee and slammed both palms into the stone floor. I didn't release a blast; I created a gravitational sink.
"Sink," I whispered.
A sphere of absolute vacuum opened up directly beneath the Nun's massive, mutated feet. The floor didn't just break—it disintegrated. The gravity in a ten-foot radius spiked to a thousand times the norm. The Nun's colossal weight, combined with my localized gravity well, forced her down. Her legs—if you could still call them that—shattered under the pressure of her own growing mass.
She let out a sound that wasn't a scream, but a seismic groan. She began to sink into the floor, the marble devouring her as I dragged her toward the center of the earth.
"Now, Adam!" I yelled, my teeth gritting against the strain. My nose was starting to bleed. Holding a singularity of this size, even for a few seconds, was like trying to hold a starving wolf by the ears. "Hit her with a focused beam! Don't flare! Drill her!"
Adam understood instantly. He didn't waste energy on a halo or a pulse. He raised his right hand, his fingers forming a diamond shape. At the center of the diamond, a point of Golden Impulse ignited—a speck of light so bright it turned the entire church into a world of white and shadow.
A needle-thin beam of pure, concentrated solar energy lanced out. It wasn't meant to incinerate; it was meant to pierce. It hit the Nun directly in the center of her weeping, eyeless face.
The beam drilled through her, coming out the back of her head and boring a hole into the floor behind her.
But as the light passed through her, the wound didn't stay open. The violet void inside her reached out and clutched the beam. She started to pull the Golden Impulse into herself, her body bloating further, the leathery hide stretching until it was translucent. I could see the stolen blood of Becky and the 'prodigies' swirling inside her like a dark nebula.
"She's... adapting... to the vacuum," I gasped, the floor beneath my hands starting to glow red-hot from the friction of the gravity well.
The Nun's massive hand, now the size of a car, slammed down on the floor next to me, the shockwave nearly breaking my concentration. She was dragging herself out of the hole I'd made. She was getting stronger. The more we gave her, the more she became. Every attack was just a new set of instructions for her DNA to rewrite itself.
"I am... the deep!" she roared, and a wave of violet pressure erupted from her, throwing me and Adam back.
I skidded across the floor, my heels carving grooves into the stone. I came to a stop in front of June, who had finally found her voice.
"Becky!" June screamed, pointing at the rafters.
I looked up. The Nun's expansion was reaching the ceiling. The cocoons were being merged into her leathery hide. If she grew another five feet, Becky wouldn't be a prisoner anymore—she'd be a part of the Nun's nervous system.
"Adam, we can't play it safe!" I shouted, standing up and wiping the blood from my lip. "The 'mice' are going to be absorbed!"
Adam stood up, his gaze flicking to Becky, then to the 'prodigies' who were now nothing but shriveled husks. His golden aura was vibrating, a low-frequency hum that made the air shimmer.
"She adapts to what we give her," Adam said, his voice eerily calm. "She's a mirror. She reflects our energy back as mass."
"So what? We stop hitting her?"
"No," Adam said, his eyes meeting mine. "We give her everything. But we give it to her at the same time. The Nothing and the All. She can't adapt to a paradox, Eve."
I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the Nun's violet mist. We had never done a combined release outside of the containment tubes. The Old Man had warned us that if our signatures crossed without the dampeners, the resulting resonance could erase a city.
"Father will kill us," I said, a dangerous, jagged smile spreading across my face.
"He'll have to find us first," Adam replied.
I stepped up beside him. The Nun was now a towering mass of violet flesh and eyes, her mouth a jagged rift in the center of her chest that was inhaling the very atmosphere. She looked like a god of the deep, a titan of the Rift.
I raised my left hand, the Black Impulse swirling into a dense, screaming orb of anti-matter. Adam raised his right, the Golden Impulse igniting into a miniature sun.
"June! Brandt! Get down!" I roared.
The two humans dived behind the ruins of a stone pillar.
"On three," Adam said.
The Nun sensed it. The violet void in her face pulsed with a sudden, frantic fear. She tried to lash out with a thousand vines at once, her body shifting, trying to find a form that could survive what was coming.
"One."
The Black Impulse in my hand started to hum, a sound that felt like the end of the world.
"Two."
The Golden Impulse in Adam's hand turned the church into a white-hot furnace.
"Three!"
We didn't fire two separate beams. We stepped toward each other, our shoulders touching, and let our energies collide.
The result wasn't a beam. It was a spear of gray, oscillating reality—a mixture of the vacuum and the light. It was a frequency that shouldn't exist in this dimension. It was the "Impulse of the Horizon."
The spear hit the Nun's chest.
For a heartbeat, there was no sound. No explosion. No scream.
The Nun's massive body simply... stopped. The eyes on her skin froze. The violet light turned gray. The leathery hide began to flake away like ash in a wind. She wasn't being burned, and she wasn't being crushed. She was being unwritten.
The "paradox" hit her system, and her adaptation engine went into a feedback loop. She tried to become dark, but the light was already there. She tried to become light, but the vacuum was already eating it. She was trying to solve an equation that had no answer.
"No..." she gurgled, her voice a dying echo. "The deep... cannot... be... empty..."
"The deep is just a place you haven't seen the bottom of yet," I whispered.
The gray spear expanded, consuming her entire bulk. In a flash of silent, blinding pressure, the Nun vanished. There was no gore, no blood, no dust. She was simply removed from the room.
The shockwave hit a second later, blowing the roof off the church and sending a pillar of gray light into the night sky that must have been visible from three districts away.
Silence returned to the church.
The vines in the rafters had withered instantly, turning into dry, brittle husks. The cocoons began to fall, descending slowly as the energy that held them evaporated.
I slumped against a pillar, my chest heaving, my energy reserves flagging. Adam wasn't much better; he was leaning on his knees, his golden eyes dim and flickering.
"Did... did we do it?" June's voice came from behind the pillar.
She scrambled out, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. One of the cocoons hit the floor with a soft thud just a few feet away. June didn't hesitate. she ran to it, her fingers frantically tearing at the brittle, gray webbing.
"Becky! Becky, please!"
I watched as the teal-haired girl pulled her friend from the shell. Becky was pale, her breathing shallow, but as the golden warmth from Adam's lingering resonance hit her, her eyes flickered.
"June?" Becky croaked, her voice barely a whisper.
"I'm here! I'm here, you idiot! I told you I'd find you!" June was sobbing now, clutching Becky to her chest, her aquamarine bun a total disaster.
I looked at Adam. He was watching them, a strange, soft expression on his face. He looked down at his hands—the hands that had just helped unwrite a god—and then back at the girl in the teal hoodie.
"We need to go," I said, my voice low. "The Sentinels will be here in minutes. That flare was too big."
"I know," Adam said.
He walked over to June and Becky. He didn't say anything; he just reached out and touched Becky's forehead. A final, gentle pulse of Gold traveled into her, stabilizing her heart and flushing the last of the violet poison from her system.
June looked up at him, her eyes wide with a mixture of awe, fear, and something that looked a lot like worship. "You... you really are an angel."
Adam flushed—a deep, human red that started at his neck and hit his ears. He looked at me, desperate for a way out.
"He's a dork, June," I said, grabbing Adam's arm and pulling him toward the exit. "But he's our dork. Get your friend to a hospital. Don't tell them about the gray light."
"Wait!" June called out as we reached the charred remains of the doorway. "What's your name? I can't just call you 'Goldie' forever!"
Adam paused. He looked back at her, the moonlight catching the faint, lingering glow in his eyes.
"Adam," he said. "And she's Eve."
"Adam and Eve," June whispered, her eyes widening. "Like... like the beginning."
"No," I said, looking back at the shriveled husks of the 'prodigies' dangling in the dark. "Like the end of the old world."
We vanished into the mist before the first sirens could reach the block.