The Herald stepped forward light bending wrong around it
Its form kept changing glitching between thousands of possible futures
Sometimes it was a shadow sometimes it was fire sometimes it was a face Aya almost recognized but couldn't place
The tower peak warped with each step stone turning to glass then to water then back to code
Aya raised Rewrite Edge but it trembled in her hand
Even the weapon felt uncertain here
Reiss stood beside her blood leaking from his eyes
I'm gonna hate this fight
The Herald moved without moving
Suddenly in front of them
It slashed
Not a blade
A rewrite
Aya's leg blinked out
Just gone
No pain
Just absence
She screamed and forced her shard to rollback the deletion in real time
Her leg returned barely stable
Reiss swung his hookblade upward but the Herald caught it midair and changed the laws around it
The weapon became mist
Then iron
Then nothing
Reiss let it go and punched with raw rollback energy hitting the Herald in the face
It staggered
Reality bent inward
Aya blinked and saw the tower upside down
Then sideways
Then inside her mind
The Herald whispered
You fight for a version of the world that no longer exists
Aya shouted
Then we'll carve a new one from your corpse
She leapt
Blade clashed with shifting limbs
Each strike wrote new physics
Time dilated then snapped back
She moved faster than thought but slower than pain
Reiss backed her up warping the field with rollback pulses making windows of stability
The Herald began to crack
Small lines across its body
Fragments of code bleeding out
Aya saw her chance
She drove Rewrite Edge straight through the glitch in its core
The Herald let out a silent scream
Its form exploded into particles that didn't obey gravity
Then silence
The tower calmed
The sky blinked back into shape
Reiss collapsed to one knee breathing hard
What even was that
Aya didn't answer
Because her shard was glowing
Zerach had seen
And now
He was watching