"We won! We actually won!"
"Dreamless is down!"
"Rover, confirmed safe!"
The crowd on the hillside erupted. They'd done it. They had defeated a Calamity Class Tacet Discord created by Ovathrax, the Threnodian of War. Every eye turned toward the massive Zaokong cannon looming behind them, gazes burning with something close to worship.
Every soldier in the Midnight Rangers knew the Zaokong was their final card, their strongest. Legend held it could level an entire city in a single shot, yet no one had ever seen it fire.
Now they had. And the only coherent response was screaming.
A single blast had been enough to fell a Calamity Class.
"Since when does Jinzhou have a weapon like that?!"
"Hm? Anyone else think the design looks weirdly similar to some of the Black Shores' tech? I mean, even they don't know where half their black-box systems came from, and this Zaokong runs on something that feels... related..."
"Who cares?! Point is, we won!"
Everyone was certain Dreamless had been Ovathrax's final gambit, and now the creature lay broken by the Zaokong and Rover's combined efforts.
No one doubted the Tacetite cannon's power. It could probably shoot a star out of the sky. A Calamity Class that took a direct hit was either dead or so thoroughly ruined it might as well be. Either way, Dreamless was finished.
Or so even Rover believed.
Then the sky screamed.
A crushing pressure slammed down on them all. The Threnodian moon overhead warped into what looked like a vast purple eye, and it glared at the broken body of Dreamless with raw, furious intent.
Dreamless shrieked. A sound like tearing metal, shrill enough to split eardrums. The Calamity Class that had already played her defeat cutscene lurched upright again.
Not under her own power. Threads of silver light descended from the Threnodian moon, latching onto her wrists and ankles, hauling her up like a marionette jerked back to its feet.
"No... no!"
Rover drew her blade and charged without hesitation.
And cursed herself for forgetting. He had warned her. Rover had written it plainly in his notes: one of Ovathrax's Authorities was the ability to resurrect Tacet Discords.
Not through the Retroact Rain, not by summoning echoes of the past.
This was infinite revival of its own created weapons. To the Threnodian, Dreamless was no different from her own Emerald of Genesis: a tool that could be restored no matter how many times it shattered.
"Recharge the Zaokong! I'll hold her off!"
Her shout rang across the battlefield. Infinite revival or not, given how much energy Ovathrax had burned in this war, it couldn't have many resurrections left. They'd popped the champagne at halftime, sure, but the game wasn't lost yet.
Then Dreamless activated her ultimate.
"Destroy... all... Havoc... Civilization...!"
Those eerie purple wings flared wide, doubling in span. But Dreamless didn't attack. Instead, beneath the Threnodian moon, she began to dance.
An unnatural, mesmerizing dance.
Exquisite to the point of horror. Like a devout priestess of some apocalyptic cult, performing for the dark god she worshipped. And the instant her dance began, every bird in the sky dropped dead.
A storm of dark violet spiraled outward from her body.
"That's Havoc energy!"
"The range... the range is insane!"
Abby's voice cracked with panic. With every movement of Dreamless' body, the Authority of Havoc shaped itself into a colossal violet tornado. It devoured everything in its path and annihilated it utterly: people, Tacet Discords, Echoes, the fabric of the world itself.
Where the storm passed, nothing remained.
And its radius was large enough to swallow the entirety of Norfall Barrens.
"Oh, come on. You've got to be kidding me. That thing could wipe out a tenth of Jinzhou's entire territory!"
Rover's eye twitched. She'd seen area-of-effect attacks before, but there were limits. You didn't nuke the whole map. You didn't fire a world-boss ultimate across an entire region.
Yet this was Dreamless' true strongest attack.
"If this keeps going, everyone dies!"
Her gaze shot toward the hillside. The storm's range was so vast that running was pointless. Nowhere to go.
Well, one option existed. She could teleport everyone into her pocket dimension. But if no one stopped Dreamless, that tenth of Jinzhou would simply cease to exist.
She clenched her jaw and poured everything into her Authority over time, trying to interrupt that apocalyptic dance, a whirling dervish of annihilation.
Then she felt it.
The Tacet Mark on the back of her hand blazed. Light pulsed through it in rapid waves, and in the span of a heartbeat, the power coursing through her multiplied a hundredfold.
"Is this...?!"
"Leave the rest to me."
A voice she knew so well it nearly broke her. Her pupils went wide. Every wire-taut nerve in her body released at once, and a smile spread across her face before she could stop it.
Because she saw them. Luminous blue butterflies carrying a dark silhouette, and with him came the cry of a dragon, shattering through the despair like a blade through glass. The purple-stained sky...
...tore open.
Clouds parted. Light poured through.
"Bear witness to the light at the end of all things!"
"Let this be the death knell of the nightmare!"
Rover and Jinhsi, Twin Resonators of the Triple Resonance, raised their right hands toward Dreamless. Their fingers closed into fists.
And time stopped across the whole of Norfall Barrens.
Despair froze mid-stride, unable to advance a single inch further.
The countdown to death ground to a halt.
"Your time returns to zero."
A dragon of cyan light materialized at his side, woven from pure Resonance energy, its shape echoing the Sentinel Jué herself. The dragon's jaws opened, and golden lightning erupted forth like divine judgment, slamming into Dreamless.
The blast shook the earth.
The maiden of annihilation, still locked in her world-ending dance, plummeted from her stage in the sky. And Dreamless realized, with something close to horror, that this single strike had hit harder than the Zaokong.
On the hillside, despair was already a fading memory. Yangyang and the others stared, slack-jawed, at the scene before them.
Rover stood atop the head of Jué's dragon alongside Jinhsi. Spirals of cyan light coiled around them both, and the golden dragon horns above their heads shone like crowns. When he raised his hand and swept it to the side...
...the rain stopped.
The Retroact Rain. The rain that had brought this endless war.
Gone, as if someone had pressed pause.
Raindrops hung suspended in the air. The dark clouds ceased their churning.
In that moment, the world chose silence before him.
"Abby, now's your chance."
"Oh! Right, on it!"
Snapping to attention at the prompt, Abby scrambled to Dreamless' fallen form and opened wide, devouring the Calamity Class' Frequency with everything it had.
Dreamless screamed again, a wail stripped raw. But even as she thrashed, both Rovers felt something new flowing into them.
Purple light flickered in both their eyes. On his left shoulder blade, a single wing of dark violet erupted into being. And on her right, its mirror image unfurled.
The Authority of Havoc.
Got it.