The sky was now streaked with violet hues.
The Silver Surfer's eyes narrowed. What had started as curiosity had shifted to irritation.
This human was not what he seemed.
Soren was watching him like a surgeon studying a specimen.
The Surfer's pride wouldn't tolerate it.
He tilted forward slightly. Energy surged from the cosmic board beneath him, silver light pooling like liquid fire, rippling across his limbs.
He raised a hand.
BAOMM
A brilliant silver shockwave roared toward Soren, tearing through the air with impossible velocity. Snow and ice vaporized.
This was a force tuned to disassemble matter itself, able to unravel complex structures into atomic foam.
It could shatter bunkers, leveled cities, reduced titans to stardust.
The instant the wave neared Soren, it vanished.
It simply ceased to be, as though reality forgot it existed.
A ripple in the air betrayed a sliver-thin fracture in space, pulsing like a blade's edge. The wave had been swallowed whole, redirected by Soren's will into some distant void.
Soren cloak swayed softly, untouched by the attack.
"Hm."
"Elegant shape, good composition. Shame it went nowhere."
His eyes flicked to the surfboard beneath the Silver Surfer's feet.
"Interesting. You pull directly from the board, don't you? That power... it's not yours."
"It's on loan."
The words hit like barbs. The Surfer tensed.
"I've seen borrowed strength before." Soren continued, hands still clasped behind his back.
"But I've also seen what happens when it's taken away."
The Silver Surfer's expression remained unreadable, but the twitch in his jaw betrayed the rising anger. His entire body shimmered with cosmic energy.
In a blur of silver~
He moved.
The Surfer became a streak of light, a meteor ricocheting through the confined air, slamming into the invisible barriers of the space cage Soren had erected.
Every impact echoed with reality bending with each collision.
WHAM!
CRACK!
BOOM!
He zipped across every angle of the cage in fractions of a second, hoping to break the construct through brute speed and relentless pressure.
For a moment, the barriers quivered, their edges glowing with strain.
Soren's brow furrowed slightly. "A+ indeed."
"You're faster than I expected."
But he made no move to counter.
Instead, he raised a single finger.
Beneath his feet, the space sigils etched into the snow, a complex web of glowing glyphs, flared with brilliance.
The cage responded.
The barriers pulsed and contracted inward, slicing the space between points into tighter and tighter folds. Each time the Surfer darted forward, he found less room, less momentum.
The cage of space continued to constrict like the jaws of a leviathan, folding in with quiet, inescapable menace.
For the first time in centuries, uncertainty flickered across the Surfers eyes.
He had faced the destruction of suns. He had felt the breath of black holes. But never had a mortal, not even a sorcerer… done this.
Outside the cage, Soren stood with the composure of a man who already knew the outcome.
"You've seen enough."
"You're outmatched. I'll give you one last chance, give me the surfboard."
"…"
"Once I deal with the Planet Devourer, maybe I'll let you crawl away with your life."
The Silver Surfer remained silent.
His body shimmered, and then liquefied. In a blink, he became a silver stream, flowing across the curved wall of the cage, searching for even a hairline fracture in the spatial weave.
But there were none.
Soren raised a hand.
"You still don't get it."
Reality twisted around his fingers, space folded like silk, and the cage collapsed inward, a vice of pure dimensional pressure.
The silver liquid screamed without a voice, rippling with chaotic pulses as it was squeezed into a tight, writhing mass.
A half-choked cry came out.
Soren did not let up.
He held the compression for a moment longer than was merciful, then slowly let the pressure ease.
The cage expanded slightly, just enough for the silver mass to reconstitute itself into something resembling humanoid form.
The Surfer emerged again, knees bent, body dimmed like a tarnished mirror.
He was breathing heavily, and his once-pristine form now flickered with fractures of cosmic light, like a sculpture threatening to shatter.
"You brought Galactus to my planet."
"The fact that I haven't turned you to dust is more generosity than you deserve."
The Silver Surfer met his gaze, defiant, but weary.
"You can't defeat him." He said at last. His voice was low, strained, as if the words had to crawl past pain to escape.
"Galactus is no force of nature. He is nature. Hunger given shape. You... are one man."
"And you're just a dog on a leash." Soren shot back.
"Don't project your leash onto me."
He turned his palm outward, and the cage pulsed again, as if tightening with the rhythm of his temper.
A minute of animal abuse later…
Then, from the crumpled form of the Surfer.
He bowed his head slightly.
He had weighed his choices. The human had him.
The pain wasn't the worst part, it was the truth: he didn't want to serve anymore.
"Are you really going to fight the Devourer?" The Surfer asked, quietly.
There was something almost childlike in the question… as if hope were a distant language, long forgotten.
"I didn't start this war." Soren said. "You brought him to my door."
"Now I'll finish it."
The Silver Surfer's lips pressed into a tight line. Slowly, he floated downward.
His feet touched the frozen ground for the first time since the battle began. Then, after a long pause, he stepped off the board.
The moment he released it, a shudder ran through him, as if some integral part of his being had been unlatched.
The cosmic board hovered weightlessly in the air, suspended by nothing. Soren reached out with a flick of his wrist, and it snapped to his side, trembling with silent, reluctant power.
He placed one foot on it.
The board pulsed under him.
And in that instant, a flood of information rushed into his mind. Equations of motion, gravitational balances, solar surfing trajectories…
Soren's eyes widened slightly.
He now knew.
How to Surf.
꧁𓊈𒆜༺⚜༻𒆜𓊉꧂
PhantomDream