Silence hung for a heartbeat — the kind of silence that tasted like old thunder. The Puppeteer's body lay broken, bound, archived. The battlefield floated like a stage in a dark theater, stars pinpricked to the edges. That calm lasted until the puppet's chest convulsed.
Something in him refused closure.
He convulsed again, and then he pulled. The last of his shameless defiance poured into a single, obscene decision: if he could not live as one, he would become all. Every animal, every horror, every thing he had birthed to cull and amuse — every crocodile snap, every lion's pounce, every constricting coil of serpentine hunger — fused in a drunken, collapsing carnival of power. Flesh and rune braided into something obscene and gigantic.
Sound arrived like a drum. A wet, monstrous ROAR that was more pressure than sound.
AUREX NYX: Warning. Host: alert. Signature: emergent. Threat level: OVERDRIVE (UNKNOWN → CATASTROPHIC). Recommend: disengage or extreme containment.
Seraphina blinked, flip of the wrist, amused.
SERAPHINA (flat): "Again? Seriously? I was in the middle of a nap."
Kazuki, farther out on his orbit of chips and sunglasses, tilted his head. "This thing or the sequel?" he asked, voice bored but curious. He stayed where he was — still the spectator by habit.
The mutant heaved. Scales spat light, fur merged into armored hide, jaws multiplied into rows. A hundred limbs argued for dominance and lost. It ran on too many legs toward Seraphina like a collapsing hurricane of teeth and claws.
The ground shuddered. Black fractures spidered outward from the mutant's passage. The air tasted of ozone and broken oaths.
MUTANT: a howl that was crowd and machine. "I will eat — I will be — I will END—"
Seraphina slid a hand into her pocket and walked forward. Not fast. Deliberate. Oddly domestic—like a person strolling to sip coffee while a storm trained itself on the horizon.
WHOOM — WIND AIR BLOW.
The mutant charged with everything it had. It was a catastrophic animal: crocodile jaws snapping, bear shoulders heaving, serpentine coils whipping, lion maws opening in chorus. It was an engine of predation turned into a single, unstoppable vector.
It hit the field with a sound like a mountain caving.
CHBOOM — KRAAAK.
For a second the world saw only the monster and the woman. Then Seraphina planted her foot.
She slammed her leg against the void-ground. The impact was surgical — a black-gold spike driven into a seam of nothing. The surface around her screamed and split.
SHKK — RIIIP — THUD.
The void under the mutant unstitched. The ground fractured into plates; black energy lashed upward like a thousand hands. The mutant tried to keep running and felt the world become a trap. Its momentum choked on the seam. Something ancient and hungry in the void reached a finger and took it.
A low, animal wail became a human scream. The mutant's balance failed. It stumbled and fell into the spread of snapping nothing.
SPLINTER — WHOOM.
For a breath it hung on the lip of the abyss; a dozen arms clawed and jerked, trying to reclaim a foothold. Seraphina pushed off the seam and hovered, weightless and small against the black yawning below.
The mutant lashed, beating wings torn between crocodile bulk and malformed dragon-membrane. It tried to fly — demon wings unfurled in a ragged, mismatched span — and for a second it seemed maybe it could claw its way out.
AUREX NYX: Subroutine: Void-Fetch engaged. Ancillary entities: detected. Neutrality: lost. Host action: advisory — caution — nonphysical attachments present.
The sky ruptured.
From the dark throat of the void, something else answered. Not animal. Not even properly creature. It was a long, reaching thing — an entity made of absence, woven from the leftover rules of erased realities. Long, spindled fingers of shadow wrapped like nets. They latched onto the mutant's wings and shredded the attempt to climb.
GURR — WRAITH-SNAP.
The mutant screamed in a way that buckled meaning. It was being dragged back down, not by gravity but by a refusal: the void would not let this shape pass. There was a hand — an impossible hand — and it grabbed, and then it threw.
The mutant tumbled, struck void rock, rolled, fell through a seam and crashed deeper.
THUD — RIIIP — SILENCE.
For a breath there was nothing — no roar, no sound, only the echo of falling things. Then the mutant's voice, small and panic-raw: "Help meeeee!!"
It grabbed at air. The void entity tightened. It threw again. Deeper. The scream dwindled into a long, hollow note and then ended like a switch cut.
Seraphina watched. Her expression was thin with a smile that could be a smirk. She took a breath and pocketed the nuisance like a hand reaching into a coat for loose change.
SERAPHINA: "Goodbye."
AUREX NYX: Event: Abyssal retrieval confirmed. Subject: unknown residuals — flagged for archive. Host: integrity stable. Recommend: temporal quarantine.
Her Aurex ribbon curled, pleased. The world had shivered. The ledger had logged another strange sentence. Seraphina felt the satisfaction of a clean fold.
The battlefield had bruises but no new scars. The void's mouth closed like an eyelid. The air conformed. Stars winked back to their old indifferent positions as if embarrassed.
Seraphina flicked a speck of nothing from her sleeve.
SERAPHINA (dry): "Boring. I'll go find a better puzzle."
She vanished.
WHOOSH — SLICE — HUSH.
Aurex Nyx blinked its golden eye, cataloged, sealed, and then sighed in the only way a protocol can sigh — a soft chiming confirmation.
AUREX NYX: Record: Overdrive subject — terminated by void retrieval. Host: status — ready. Suggest: restoration interval.
Kazuki, drifting in orbit with his chips and sunglasses, popped a chip into his mouth and exhaled.
KAZUKI (murmur): "Not bad for after-dinner entertainment."
The cosmos settled like a room after a loud argument. The ledger had changed. So had Seraphina.
Somewhere, the puppet's ruined intent echoed in a space between things — a whisper that might, one day, grow teeth. For now it was only a footnote. For now the two of them were gone — a woman and a ledger, moving on to whatever unread page came next.
WHOOM — WIND AIR BLOW.