CHAPTER 34 — RESTLESS RAGE
Abbie Kadra walked away from what had once called itself R9.
The forest breathed in broken rhythms behind her. Charred trunks leaned like drunk prophets. The earth smoked. Sap bled from ruptured bark and hardened in the air like amber tears. Above her head, the small duck of the System flickered into being—round, patient, watching.
She swallowed the mana drive.
It slid down her throat like a shard of cold lightning and dissolved somewhere beneath her ribs.
"Hey," she muttered, not turning back. "How many points does the wireback give me?"
The duck blinked once.
Err. None. The participant known as R9 has not been vanquished.
Her step halted.
"What?"
The word barely escaped her before the world screamed.
Power surged behind her—a rouge unwanted resurrection. One of fire and wind. A power that somehow breathed new life in this cursed forest before it was a battlefield.
Abbie turned.
Horror is too small a word.
The broken heap of metal and vine that had been R9 trembled. The plants around him—those she had reduced to ash, to pulp, to memory—shuddered, then rose. Vines recoiled like serpents called from sleep. Roots cracked the earth open with wet sounds. Leaves unfolded from nothing. It was not growth.
It was refusal.
The forest refused her victory.
Green tendrils wrapped the droidman's shattered limbs. Sap ran through ruptured plating. Moss filled bullet-holes. Twisted branches stitched together sundered circuits. His metallic spine straightened with a metallic hymn.
Abbie braced her stance. Her breath came ragged. She tried to reignite her overcharge—the violent furnace she had forced beyond its limits earlier—but the flame guttered weakly within her. Her ether reserves were a drained ocean, salt-stained and empty.
Vines swirled around R9 in widening spirals, luminous and reverent.
He stood.
Metal healed.
Optics flared gold.
"Tell me, Abbie Kadra," he said, voice layered with static and rustling leaves, "have you ever heard of what Fractures are?"
She spat blood to the side.
"Higher forms of magecraft," he continued, stepping forward as bark fused into his armor, "wielded only by members of Terran races. Gifts carved into the blueprint of existence. We do not merely bend ether. We command its deeper grammar."
His foot crushed a charred branch. From its splinters, green erupted.
"Droidmen are among them," he said. "Blessed with the Fracture known as Cress."
The name rang like a bell struck in a cathedral of steel.
"A power that places together plant and machine into divine union. Not harmony. Dominion."
"What are you going on about, clanker!" Abbie roared, forcing ether through exhausted veins.
His head tilted.
"I know you are from a lesser house," he said calmly. "Your name betrays it. Your understanding of ether is… sufficient. But you do not know my power. And before I crush you with it, I want you to understand it."
The flora around him began to glow.
They grew violently—feral, ecstatic. Branches split and multiplied. Roots tunneled and coiled. Flowers burst open only to rot mid-bloom. The forest convulsed around him like a body discovering a second heart.
Abbie strained.
Her overcharge flickered.
R9 raised a hand.
"Bloom."
The word was soft.
The effect was not.
Everything living around him surged to its absolute zenith—and then withered.
In a single breath.
Leaves crisped into dust. Bark cracked and shrank. Flowers shriveled into black scars. The entire riot of growth collapsed inward, drained, devoured, siphoned into him.
And Abbie—
—froze.
Golden energy wrapped around her limbs like celestial shackles. Ether solidified into chains. Her muscles refused her. Her lungs tightened.
A beam formed in R9's palm.
It dwarfed her earlier attacks. It hummed like a newborn star. It burned with the stolen life of the forest and the cold precision of machine calculation.
It came.
Light swallowed the battlefield.
For a moment there was only white—absolute, annihilating white—then thunder.
The blast tore a canyon through ancient trees. The earth split. Air itself seemed to peel back from the violence.
When the ash settled, when smoke lowered like a curtain after a tragedy—
R9 stood alone.
Dried, burning plants fell around him as if in celebration. Petals of cinder drifted through the air like black snow.
His systems flickered.
Using Bloom would leave him unable to use Cress for a prolonged period of time. The Fracture demanded tribute. He felt the strain in every servo. Every joint buzzed with exhaustion.
But it did not matter.
He had won.
Abbie had spent nearly everything in their earlier clash. Her overcharge was spent. Her reserves drained.
This victory was his.
He shook excess power from his fists. The golden aura faded to embers.
He had more than a week left to survive this war.
He would endure.
He turned.
And hell broke loose.
A radiant red aura ignited behind him.
It was not light.
It was wrath made visible.
R9's processors spiked.
"No—"
Abbie rose from the crater like a curse that refused exorcism.
Her body was torn. Skin split. Blood ran in dark rivulets down her arms. One eye swollen. One shoulder dislocated.
She laughed.
The sound scraped the sky.
Red ether poured from her like a storm ripped from a dying sun. It crackled, unstable, feral. This was not overcharge.
This was something else.
"Fuck," R9 cursed aloud.
The aura intensified. The air warped. Even the ashes recoiled from her presence.
R9 braced himself.
"Well then," he shouted, forcing power into trembling limbs, "let's fucking go!"
Abbie moved.
She did not cross the distance.
She erased it.
One heartbeat she stood in the crater. The next she slammed into him like a falling comet, driving him backward into a fallen tree with bone-breaking force.
Metal screamed.
The trunk exploded into splinters.
R9 howled as she mounted him, fists descending in a merciless rain. Each blow dented alloy. Each strike rang like a hammer on a war-god's shield.
His faceplate cracked.
Circuits sparked.
"I can't stop," Abbie hissed between blows. "The only way I stop is by completely annihilating you."
Her eyes burned red.
Not metaphorically.
Actually burned.
She shoved off him and leapt back, raising her hands to the sky.
Ether gathered.
Not clean. Not controlled.
A vortex of violent red light spiraled between her palms, condensing into a sphere that shone like a fallen sun. It pulsed, erratic, hungry. The air around it twisted. Gravity trembled.
R9 staggered to his feet.
Systems critical.
Energy reserves: near depletion.
Fracture offline.
He looked at the forming sphere.
Then at her.
"It would seem," he said quietly, transforming his left arm into a long, serrated blade, "I will have to do the same."
He lunged.
The blade drove through her abdomen.
Metal pierced flesh.
Abbie screamed.
But she did not stop.
The sphere grew.
Ether howled around them. The forest flattened from pressure alone. Clouds above churned violently.
R9 felt resistance in her body—felt bone grind against metal—but he pushed deeper. With what little power remained in his core, he generated an explosive charge within the blade embedded inside her.
He locked optics with her.
There was madness there.
And something almost grateful.
He triggered it.
The explosion tore through her insides.
Blood and flame erupted outward—
—and in that same instant—
Abbie released the sun.
The red sphere collapsed inward for a fraction of a second.
Then expanded.
Not like a blast.
Like an ending.
Light consumed everything.
Ancient trees—older than nations—were flattened. Roots were ripped from the earth. Stone melted. The island convulsed as if struck by a god's fist.
The shockwave rolled across Wister. Participants miles away staggered. Birds fell from the sky. The ocean recoiled from the shore.
Screams echoed.
Metal screamed.
Flesh screamed.
The world screamed.
Then—
Silence.
Smoke swirled over a landscape erased.
A crater marked the place where forest once stood.
At its center—
Abbie lay alone.
R9 was gone.
No fragments large enough to name.
No circuitry recognizable.
Annihilated.
She coughed, blood spilling from cracked lips.
Her abdomen smoked. The wound where the blade had pierced her was a ruin of torn muscle and blackened ether-burn. Bones showed white through red.
Yet she lived.
The red aura still flickered around her, restless, refusing to fade.
She rolled onto her back and stared at the sky.
It looked wrong.
As if the explosion had cracked something beyond trees and stone. As if the heavens themselves had felt it.
Her body trembled.
Not from weakness.
From something boiling within.
A restless rage.
It had carried her past depletion. Past pain. Past logic. It had burned through limits she did not know she possessed.
It whispered now.
More.
She laughed.
The sound was broken, raw, hysterical—and triumphant.
Third day on Wister.
And she was still here.
Still breathing.
Still killing.
The duck flickered into existence above her.
Participant R9 has been vanquished. Points awarded.
She didn't ask how many.
She didn't care.
The forest around her was no longer a forest. It was a graveyard of ancient giants. Smoke drifted in mourning spirals. The wind carried the scent of sap and scorched metal.
Somewhere in the distance, other participants would have seen the red flash. Would have felt the tremor.
They would come.
Good.
Abbie pushed herself upright with shaking arms.
Blood dripped from her fingertips.
Her shadow stretched long and monstrous across the ruined earth.
The restless rage did not subside.
It settled deeper.
Rooted.
The war was not a game.
It was not points.
It was not survival.
It was revelation.
And something inside her had just been revealed.
She tilted her head back and laughed again—so loud it bounced off the empty horizon.
"Come," she whispered to the island.
The darkened land did not answer.
But it listened.
And somewhere beneath the cracked soil, beneath the ashes of Bloom and the memory of Cress, something stirred in response.
The third day on Wister ended not with peace—
—but with a promise of greater ruin to come.