My declaration hangs in the air, a holy decree spoken in blood, and the unyielding certainty of my own madness. The words seem to echo and linger in the air as if the world itself is responding to my claim, my words roll over the roar of the fires, demanding the universe itself to stop and bear witness.
And for a second, it does.
The physical world seems to hold its breath. The three Petals freeze. But they are Elites and powerful ones at that. Their shock is a fleeting, momentary thing. They quickly recover their body postures, shifting out of the recoiling defensive stances my outburst had forced them into. The pristine-masked teleporter lowers her hands, her shoulders tensing as she prepares to manipulate the spatial fabric around us.
But it is Teleb who draws my focus.
His singular blue eye, gleaming through the jagged fracture of his obsidian mask, is not filled with fear. It is alight with something that I recognize in the same Inquisitors I hate. Joy. It is the twisted, euphoric joy of a predator who has finally found a monster capable of matching his own catastrophic appetite.
On the ground near his boots, the pink-eyed Petal finally stops burning. The dark, ethereal red flames of my Wolfs metaphysical form flicker and die out in the physical world, leaving her a smoking, twitching heap. She is unconscious, her pristine white tunic scorched, her mind and body thoroughly pulverized by the psychic backlash of trespassing in my Soul Sea.
I smile and It is a terrible, cold expression.
I lower my gaze to the weapon in my hand. I grasp the hilt of Teleb's living sword tighter, and the moment my skin fully connects with the grip, my spiritual senses violently overlap with the metal.
The psychic resonance is immediate and suffocating. I can sense the soul trapped within the steel. I can feel the faint, desperate echoes of the woman it used to be. For a fraction of a microsecond, a fractured montage of a stolen life bleeds into my mind: the smell of baking bread, the warmth of a hearth fire, the rough calluses of a farmer's hands, the sound of a child laughing. It is a quiet, mundane life that was violently interrupted.
But overwriting that existence, pressing down on it like a suffocating blanket like the shadow of an eclipse swallowing the day is Teleb's will.
His Mark of power is a virus that has infected the very atomic structure of the woman's sould and body. It has stripped away her humanity, forged her body into nothing but a weapon and violently overwrote her consciousness into something unrecognizable as human. All that is left of her original identity has been hollowed out. In its place, there is only a trinity of absolute suffering: crippling fear, bottomless anguish, and a deep, burning, impotent hate directed at her creator and the world around her.
She is a battery of pure, concentrated trauma.
And my Fearmonger mark loves it.
The moment I recognize the emotional state of the living blade, my Mark latches onto it like a starving leech. I can feel the sword vibrating in my grip, weeping in agony, but I do not offer it pity. I offer it purpose. I drink the blade's suffering. The fear and hate embedded in the steel travel up into me in rushing currents of raw, kinetic energy, feeding my realized Fearmonger ability. Feeding my bloodlust.
I can feel myself getting stronger once more. The crippling, bone-deep exhaustion of being repeatedly pulverized and reconstructed begins to evaporate. The lactic acid burning in my muscles is flushed away by a tidal wave of fresh, augmented adrenaline. The dull, throbbing ache of my recently healed eyes erased, replaced by the humming, electric vitality of absolute power.
I step forward, lowering my center of gravity, ready to try my luck once more.
But before my boots can crack the stone and launch me forward, a noise stops me dead in my tracks.
It is a sonic boom, but it is entirely different from the ones created by our supersonic impacts. This sound is unusually large. It is not sharp and cracking; it is a deep, foundational bass note that vibrates through the soles of my boots. It is the sound of the earth itself groaning in mortal agony.
My heightened senses pivot, reaching out past the immediate threat of the Elites. I hear something else beneath the fading echo of the boom.
The sound of rock cracking.
Not just a few stones. It is a massive, cascading roar of geological failure. Millions of tons of solid shale and granite grinding together, snapping, and sliding.
My violet eyes dart up toward the canyon walls. I look up at the towering, jagged spine of the mountain that the city of Baelin was miraculously built into.
My eyes widen in absolute shock.
The mountain is being eviscerated.
High above the canyon rim, massive, jagged fault lines are appearing in the rock face, glowing with a faint, kinetic distortion. Gigantic slabs of the mountain chunks of stone the size of entire city blocks are actively shearing away from the main peak. The bedrock is not just falling; it is being violently pushed outward by an immense, calculated pressure.
My brain instantly conjures a name.
Lopez.
Helix. While I have been down here fighting a battle of attrition against the Midnight Rose leadership, the rest of my squad has been fighting their own battles I assume against the other Petals. Lopez it seems has found the structural weak points of the canyon itself. He is packing pure kinetic energy into the deep fault lines of the mountain.
I realize, with a cold, terrifying clarity, what this means.
Helix has deemed the city gone.
Colonel Caldera, has looked at the Federation garrison, the complicit civilians, the lobotomized population, and the entrenched terrorist cell, and they have made the final tactical call. There is no saving Baelin. There is no liberating it.
They are bringing the entire mountain down upon it. They are going to attempt to bury the Midnight Rose, the Federation soldiers, and every man, woman, and child in this canyon under a billion tons of rubble. It is an act of total, uncompromising eradication. Capturing Teleb has gone out the window.
I snarl, the sound vibrating in my chest.
I look back at the Petals. They have also stopped. They are looking up at the collapsing sky, tracking the massive chunks of stone that are beginning their terrifying descent into the gorge. They seem to recognize the exact same reality that I have just processed.
This fight is ending in a stalemate. Not because we lack the will to kill each other, but because the arena is currently being deleted from existence.
Teleb turns his gaze back down to me. The canyon around us is filled with the deafening roar of the falling mountain, the screaming of the dying city, and the shrieking of the wind, but the space between us feels eerily quiet.
He takes a deliberate step forward. He does not raise a hand to attack. Instead, he folds his arms, places his right hand over his chest, and bows at the waist.
It is a gesture of profound, aristocratic respect, completely at odds with the apocalyptic destruction raining down around us.
"You can keep that sword," Teleb calls out, his voice projecting clearly over the din of the collapsing canyon. "It is my gift to you young Awakened."
He straightens up, his single blue eye locking onto mine with absolute, chilling certainty.
"One day, we shall meet again," he promises "And I will forge you a real one."
I sneer at him, my grip on the living sword tightening until the metal groans. The voices in my head are screaming at me to lunge, to kill him before the rocks crash down. But I force it down. I control it.
The cold, calculating fragment of Ayato Daath reasserts dominance over the mark of power. I know I need to leave this platform. I need to move as fast as physically possible before thousands of pounds of terminal-velocity rock come crashing down upon mee. The Regenerator is powerful, but if my body is flattened beneath a mountain and buried under a mile of stone, there is no coming back. I will be trapped in the dark forever, healing and crushing in an eternal loop.
I hold my ground, keeping my sword lowered in a show of boredom, watching them.
Teleb gracefully reaches down and picks up the unconscious, smoking form of the pink-eyed Petal. He slings her over his broad, armored shoulder with effortless ease. The pristine-masked teleporter steps in close, pressing her hand against Teleb's arm, preparing the spatial fold.
Before the fabric of reality can bend around them, Teleb raises his free hand. He offers a slow, deliberate wave of farewell.
"Goodbye for now, Ayato Daath," he says, his voice devoid of malice, sounding almost like a fond instructor bidding a student farwell.
And then, his tone shifts. The warmth vanishes, replaced by the chilling, fanatical devotion of a zealot reciting holy scripture.
"Obedience out of love for the person of the hierarch," he recites, the words echoing hauntingly. "Obedience out of loyalty to the office of the hierarch."
Then, with a sharp, concussive pop and a violent inversion of space that makes my ears pop, they are gone.
The air rushes in to fill the vacuum they left behind. I am alone on the platform.
The silence of their departure lasts for only a fraction of a second before it is completely swallowed by the apocalyptic roar of the dying mountain. I tilt my head back, looking up at the sky. It is no longer a ribbon of blue. It is a ceiling of falling, jagged stone, accelerating toward the city below.
The air is choked with dust, choking my lungs and turning the greyscale world into a murky, terrifying fog. I look down at the sword in my hand, feeling the hum of the trapped woman's agony against my palm. Teleb's gift. A twisted trophy for surviving the impossible.
I spin on my heel, my boots kicking up the pulverized stone of the platform. My eyes dart across the cratered ruins until I spot her.
Imara.
She is still lying exactly where she fell, a crumpled, broken heap of limbs near the edge of the abyss. Her dark skin is coated in a thick layer of grey ash. I can barely see the rise and fall of her chest.
Leave her, the voices whisper, a unified, hissing chorus. She is dead weight.
I grit my teeth, the muscles in my jaw popping. I don't know why I hesitate. Perhaps it is the knowledge that she is just a pawn in this grand, geopolitical abattoir, and letting her die here feels like a waste. She could be useful to me.
I break into a sprint.
The physical augmentation of the Fearmonger propels me forward, turning me into a blur of motion. I cross the platform in a heartbeat, skidding to a halt beside her unconscious body. A massive slab of stone, the size of a carriage, smashes into a nearby bridge, obliterating the wooden structure and sending splinters the size of javelins raining down around us.
The mountain is falling.
I sheathe the living sword, the metal crying out in my mind as it slides into the leather scabbard. I reach down, and haul Imara's limp body over my shoulder. She is heavy, but with the marks burning in my blood, she feels like nothing more than a sack of potatoes.
I look around the dying city, mapping the safest trajectory through the collapsing architecture and platforms. The sky is falling, the ground is crumbling, and the city of Baelin is taking its final breath.
"Time to go," I whisper to the roaring wind.
I bend my knees, funneling the absolute limits of my kinetic output into my legs, and launch myself into the falling debris, racing the apocalypse to the edge of the world.