The world was a shriek. Not a sound that traveled through the air, but a fundamental screaming of a soul being burned as fuel. Zane was no longer a man; he was a furnace, and the Berserker Module was a flaw in his design, a crack that vented pure, unrestrained agony into the world. He met the charge not with his own power, but with the Warden's. The [Kinetic Rebound Armor] bloomed over his skin, a liquid-mercury sheen of impossible physics. Zane's fist, wreathed in the red-black energy of the Berserker Module, slammed into his chest.
The impact was not a blow. It was a heresy.
Kael felt the chaotic, screaming energy of the module wash over his own, carefully balanced synthesis. It wasn't just kinetic force. It was pain. It was rage. It was the agony of a Frame being burned alive. The harmonious hum of his own power stuttered, the Hound and the Tortoise recoiling from the raw, septic touch of the corrupted Aethel. He was thrown back, not by the force, but by the sheer wrongness of it. He skidded across the hard-packed clay, the armor holding but his own soul feeling scoured, tainted.
He looked up, and he saw the flaw.
Zane's movements were impossibly fast, impossibly strong, but they were clumsy. He was a child swinging a sun. The power was not his. He was not guiding it. He was a passenger, a screaming, furious passenger in a machine he could not steer. The Berserker Module was not an enhancement. It was a parasite that had eaten its host and was now wearing his skin.
Zane roared in triumph, raising his arms to deliver a final, crushing blow. In that moment of arrogant triumph, he was a perfect echo of the man he had been in the tomb of the Glass Weaver. A fool about to be consumed by a power he had craved but fundamentally misunderstood.
And Kael, the quiet technician, the boy who had become an architect of impossible things, saw the schematic. He saw the overloaded circuits, the catastrophic feedback loop waiting for a trigger. Zane wasn't the weapon. The module was. And it was aimed at both of them.
Kael didn't get up. He didn't try to meet the blow. He planted a hand on the ground, and as Zane brought his fists down in a final, world-breaking arc, Kael stomped. Not to dodge. Not to attack.
He initiated a system crash. The brutal, one-on-one duel had begun.
The ground erupted. Not in a wide, messy explosion, but a clean, focused pillar of kinetic force. Kael didn't evade; he rode the wave, a ghost on a shockwave, the [Shockwave Step] a tool of impossible repositioning. He was no longer just a fighter. He was a violation of physics. Zane's crushing blow missed, his fists pulverizing the spot Kael had occupied a nanosecond before. The wasted energy sent a tremor through the canyon floor.
"You can't run forever, scavenger!" Zane bellowed, his voice distorted, layered with the high-pitched whine of his overloaded Frame.
Kael landed softly, twenty yards away. He didn't answer. He was running a diagnostic, his mind a whirlwind of cold, clean logic. The Stalker in his soul, the ghost of pure physics, was his only ally now. It saw Zane not as a man, but as a failing system. Overclocked. Inefficient. Prone to catastrophic heat buildup.
The duel was one of attrition, but not of strength. It was a duel of philosophies. Zane was a hammer, believing that enough force could solve any problem. He was the embodiment of the old Houses, of a world built on the principle of overwhelming power. He charged again, a meteor of raw, unrefined Aethel, leaving a trench in the hard-packed earth.
Kael was no longer a nail. He was a technician. He understood that every system, no matter how powerful, had a breaking point. And the Berserker Module wasn't just a powerful system; it was a suicidal one.
He didn't meet the charge. He danced. He used his [Shockwave Step] in short, controlled bursts, not as an attack, but as a method of propulsion. A stomp sent him ten feet to the left, another blasted him into a backward arc. He was a gnat, a flicker, an irritating, impossible-to-hit variable in Zane's simple equation of violence. Each of Zane's thunderous attacks met empty air, each wasted blow sending a fresh wave of agony through his own ravaged Frame. The red light of the module on his spine pulsed brighter, angrier.
"Fight me!" Zane screamed, the human desperation bleeding through the monstrous power. "Stop skittering like the coward you are!"
This was the opening. Not a physical one, but a psychological one. The Stalker's logic was cold. The operator is compromised. His emotional state is degrading his tactical efficiency. Exploit it.
"This isn't your power, Zane," Kael said, his voice quiet but carried on the comms with chilling clarity. "It's wearing you. It's a parasite, and you're the last meal it will ever have."
The words struck a nerve deeper than any spear. Zane's roar of fury was a tangible thing, a wave of heat and hate. He stopped his clumsy charges and stood his ground. He raised his hands, and the Berserker Module answered his rage. The air around him shimmered, warped, coalescing into a sphere of raw, chaotic energy. It wasn't a technique. It was a tantrum. A final, all-or-nothing gamble.
Kael felt the shift. This wasn't kinetic force. This was something else. A wave of pure, disruptive Aethel, the kind that had fried Zane's Frame in the first place. His [Kinetic Rebound Armor] was designed for physical impact. This would bypass it entirely.
He had one tool left. One he had only just invented. The sonic ghost.
He didn't channel the Hound or the Scuttler. He reached for the two newest, strangest ghosts in his menagerie. The deep, architectural resonance of the Bell-Warden. The silent, conceptual wrongness of the Stalker. He didn't try to merge them. He did what he had done in the transport. He sent the song down the silent channel.
He projected the [Phantom Resonance].
It wasn't a sound. It was an idea. An instruction. He aimed it not at Zane, but at the module. It wasn't a physical attack. It was a piece of malicious code. He found the screaming frequency of the module's feedback loop and introduced a new, competing vibration. A single, pure, quiet note of absolute order into a system of pure chaos.
For a moment, nothing happened. Zane's sphere of destructive energy grew, a miniature, dying star in the heart of the canyon.
Then, the module on his back flickered.
The high-pitched shriek of Zane's Frame stuttered. The sphere of energy wavered, its perfect form destabilizing. Zane's eyes, which had been blazing with borrowed power, widened in confusion. He was a pilot feeling his engine seize at terminal velocity.
The two competing frequencies—the module's own agonized scream and the clean, impossible note of Kael's resonance—created a catastrophic feedback loop. It was the system crash Kael had been looking for.
Zane was no longer fighting Kael. He was fighting himself. He was fighting the very god he had chained to his soul. The duel of ideologies was over. The technician had just crashed the brute's operating system. And now, all that was left was the burnout.