The smell of burned flesh filled the crystalline air of the Garden of Breaths.
At the center of Seven's chest, Barachiel's incandescent rune was still sizzling.
A red-hot branding that had just placed his very soul under lockdown.
The sensation of internal mutilation was absolute.
The link connecting him to the souls of Eryndor—that familiar and terrifying well of power—was now nothing more than a wall of silence.
Barachiel straightened up with feline grace, dusted off his pants with the back of his hand, and looked down at him from his full height.
His azure and gold eyes gleamed with a joyous cruelty.
— Now, get up. Let's see what you're really worth when you don't have your toys.
A gust of gray ether swept through the garden.
Gabriel had just appeared between them, his usually melancholic gaze suddenly hardened.
The ashes of the sacred ground swirled around his elegant silhouette.
— That is enough, Barachiel, Gabriel decreed, his voice heavy with a quiet but absolute authority. His ether core is unstable. If you force him to fight without his usual anchor, you risk fracturing his meridians.
Barachiel crossed his arms behind his head, entirely unimpressed.
— If he breaks that easily, Gaby, it means he was already dead.
Gabriel took another step, extending a protective arm.
— I won't let you…
— Leave it.
Seven's voice was gravelly, broken, but it stopped the gray Archangel dead in his tracks.
Seven leaned on his trembling hands.
His joints cracked as he forced himself to stand.
Every movement radiated a blinding pain from his chest, as if shards of glass were circulating through his veins.
He spat a clot of blood onto the immaculate marble and raised ice-blue eyes toward the Archangel of Lightning.
— Stay out of this, Gabriel, Seven murmured.
Gabriel held his gaze for a moment, reading within it an inflexible, almost suicidal determination.
The Archangel sighed.
He slowly backed away toward the edge of the garden, his fists clenched.
He knew Barachiel.
This wasn't an execution; it was a lesson.
But a lesson dispensed by Lightning rarely left any survivors.
Seven took a breath.
Without the souls to saturate the space, his personal ether felt strangely light.
He focused this pure energy, forcing the flow into his numb limbs.
Threads of onyx erupted from his forearms, coiling into dense chains of shadows.
The air around him vibrated with raw murderous intent.
He exploded forward.
The ground cracked beneath his momentum.
In a fraction of a second, he closed the distance.
His first strike was an ether-charged knee aimed at Barachiel's liver, followed by an upward whip of his onyx chain to cut off any retreat.
A sharp crack tore through the air.
Seven struck empty space.
The Archangel was suddenly on his right flank, his hands still in his pockets.
— Your center of gravity is too high, Barachiel commented casually.
A heel slammed into Seven's floating ribs.
The kinetic shock knocked the wind out of him, and he was launched horizontally, skipping across the sacred ground like a stone before crashing down.
He was back on his feet in a flash.
Pain radiated through his side, but he ignored it.
He adjusted his stance, anchoring himself deeper into the ground.
If brute force and speed weren't enough, he needed to densify his attacks.
He projected four chains simultaneously, aiming for the Archangel's blind spots.
Barachiel barely moved.
He simply raised a hand, deflecting each onyx tip with his fingertips, using movements of terrifying economy.
— You strike to kill, kid. That's good, Barachiel analyzed, dodging a shadow blade with a mere tilt of his neck. But you're telegraphing your intentions. You look exactly where your chain is going to hit. It's sloppy.
Seven gritted his teeth.
He feinted.
His eyes locked onto the Archangel's left collarbone, but his chain shot toward the right ankle.
Barachiel caught the chain in mid-air, stopping it dead.
— Better, the Primordial smiled. But the tension in your shoulder gave you away. You rely too much on your aura to do the work for you. Your body doesn't know how to lie.
With a simple yank on the chain, Barachiel threw Seven off balance, pulling the boy toward him before delivering a palm strike squarely to his solar plexus.
Seven spat blood, skidding backward over several meters.
From the edge of the garden, Gabriel let out a ragged breath.
The brutality of the exchange repulsed him.
The gray angel could see Seven's meridians fracturing under the impacts, but he also saw something else: Barachiel wasn't finishing him off.
He was educating him by force, tearing away the necromancer's bad reflexes one blow at a time.
Seven wiped his mouth.
His vision analyzed the space with desperate acuity.
He couldn't compete in technique.
He couldn't compete in raw power.
The Primordial's heart rate hadn't accelerated by a single beat.
He had to read the terrain, anticipate the trajectories.
*I am nothing against him in a pure duel,* Seven realized. *All this violence... it just slides right off him.*
This realization did not bring despair, but a glacial lucidity.
Instead of aiming for the Archangel, Seven violently slammed his chain into a broken column.
The rubble exploded, creating a dense smokescreen of dust.
Barachiel smiled, amused by the tactic, and took a step to the side to exit the blind spot.
But Seven had anticipated this step.
That was exactly where he was waiting for him.
A second onyx chain, hidden at ground level beneath the dust, snapped taut around the Archangel's ankle.
Barachiel didn't fall, but his momentum was stopped dead for a fraction of a millisecond.
The Archangel's eyes widened.
A tiny instant of surprise.
It was the only opening he was going to get.
His meridians were screaming in pain. Just one attack. He wouldn't get a second one.
Seven planted his feet.
He compressed the entirety of his remaining ether, draining his reserves down to the very last drop.
A blinding heat flooded the space.
A beam of pure light, sharp and absolute, ignited in the palm of his hand.
— Arcane: Mors Luminis!
The beam struck through the air with a high-pitched hiss.
The attack was millimeter-perfect, channeling all of the angel's energy toward the heart of the immobilized Archangel.
Faced with the light bearing down on him, Barachiel made no attempt to break free.
His face lit up with an ecstatic joy.
A feral laugh, crackling with electricity, escaped his lips.
— YES! the Primordial roared.
He opened his hand wide toward the beam.
The azure lightning running across his skin brutally shifted to a deep black.
The air reeked of superheated ozone.
— Arcane: Vorago Tonitrus!
A maelstrom of black electricity erupted from his palm.
It wasn't a shield. It was a jaw.
The dark lightning collided with Seven's Mors Luminis, but instead of exploding, it coiled around the pure light.
It crushed it, smothered it, and literally devoured it from the inside out with a piercing shriek.
In the blink of an eye, Seven's ultimate attack was annihilated.
Leaving behind nothing but a trail of acrid smoke rising into the sky of Eden.
Seven fell heavily to his knees.
He couldn't move a single muscle.
His lungs were burning.
He stared at the cracked marble, out of breath, crushed by the abyss that separated their existences.
He had played his only card, the best one he had, and Barachiel had swallowed it whole.
The sharp clack of the Archangel's boots approached.
Barachiel crouched down in front of him.
Electricity still danced in his blond hair.
His azure eyes sparkled with pure adrenaline.
He placed a hand on the angel's shoulder.
— You're weak, Barachiel informed him, a smile splitting his face.
Seven clenched his fists, swallowing back the taste of blood.
The Primordial's smile softened.
— But managing to force me to use the Vorago with a simple terrain trick... you've got potential, kid. Grow up, and I swear to you that one day... you'll be among the strongest.
Barachiel gave him a half-smile.
— Keep this up... and I might even end up using both hands.
The Archangel of Lightning stood back up, the electricity dying out on his skin.
And he disappeared in a silent flash, leaving the air vibrating in his wake.
Almost immediately, Gabriel was at Seven's side.
The gray Archangel, usually so impassive, was losing his composure.
His hands trembled slightly, radiating an immaculate healing ether as he urgently tended to the black angel's battered flesh.
His worry was palpable, betrayed by the anxious crease lining his forehead.
Seven, however, remained disconcertingly calm.
His glassy gaze drifted toward the sky.
Was it because Barachiel's words had deeply moved him?
Or rather because he had been so violently pulverized that his nervous system was refusing to process even an ounce of additional pain?
Probably a bit of both.
Gabriel's soft, curative light enveloped him, contrasting with the brutality of the preceding minutes.
But Seven's consciousness was already fraying.
His eyelids grew heavy, weighing like lead.
Just before the world definitively tipped into a mute darkness, a final thought, fleeting and anchored in his present, crossed his hazy mind.
*Kael…*
Then, nothing.