The shrill voices in my communicator were the only thing that pulled me back to reality.
"Suki! Answer me, kid!" Gordon shouted, his voice nearly drowned out by the continuous thunder of the surface cannons in the background.
A moment later, Candice's ragged breathing filled the channel.
"Havelyn, hold the mess hall. I'm going up."
"How are you going to get up there?" the harpy shot back, sounding frantic.
"The passage collapsed!"
Static hissed in my ear before another voice cut through the interference, cold and focused.
"Candice, forget the room," Tsukumo said. His chest tightened again at the promise he had made to Kânia.
"I'm going after him."
Only then did I manage to open my eyes.
I was hundreds of meters above Gron-Tarh, suspended for a fraction of a second at the peak of my ascent.
The storm churned violently around me, broken by successive flashes of lightning and the hulls of ships battling among the clouds.
The enormous wound stretched across my chest from my left shoulder to my right ribs.
Rain lashed my exposed flesh, burning like pure acid, while the blood streaming down my abdomen soaked my clothes and broke into droplets that floated around me before falling onto the prison.
Yashin's blow had caught me full force.
I couldn't even understand how my body was still in one piece.
My fingers remained locked around the sword's hilt, though I could barely feel them.
Every attempt to draw a deeper breath pulled at my skin, opening the cut a little wider.
Then gravity began pulling me back down.
"Tsukumo, answer me," Candice insisted over the radio.
"Where are you?"
"Heading back."
"No," I murmured, my hoarse voice lost in the wind.
No one seemed to hear me.
With an agonizing effort, I brought my trembling hand to the communicator, smearing its side red, and pressed the button.
"I said NO!"
Every voice fell silent at once.
For several long seconds, there was only static, thunder, and my own ragged, wet breathing.
"Everyone has a mission," I continued, swallowing hard to clear my throat.
"Gordon, keep the war going on the surface. Candice, get to Rubens. Tsukumo, find Yashin's room."
"Suki, I can barely sense your energy." Candice's voice caught slightly, losing its unshakable professional composure.
"You won't..."
"And my mission is to buy time."
The free fall began.
The wind dragged me down violently, and the colossal structure of Gron-Tarh grew rapidly before my eyes.
"I'm going to fight Yashin and hold him off."
I pulled my hand away from the communicator and clamped it over my mangled chest.
The Strength Transformation awakened.
Pulsing red and blue lines lit up beneath my skin, starting at my fingertips and climbing my arms before spreading across my neck, torso, and legs.
The red burned like metal fresh from a forge; the blue coursed through my muscles with the numbing cold of the void.
The technique didn't heal the wound, but it acted like an internal tourniquet, compressing everything at once.
My muscles contracted violently, pressing torn skin back against flesh and slowing the bleeding to a thick stream.
The pain was still there, sharper than ever, but it no longer ruled my body.
White vapor began escaping through the openings in my clothes, evaporating the raindrops before they could even touch me.
I adjusted my grip on the sword with my left hand and twisted my torso during the fall, aiming the blade straight at the prison below.
"If you want to come up here..." I growled, narrowing my eyes as I searched for Yashin through the flashes of the storm.
"Then come."
In answer, darkness began spilling from the crater in the prison's surface.
It wasn't smoke; it was a dense column of shadow rising through the rain, untouched by wind or light.
Two black blades emerged from the darkness first, followed by the slender figure of the Warden himself.
His long black hair whipped around his hidden face, while both monstrous daggers pointed skyward.
Pointed at me.
I descended, concentrating all the weight and brutality of the Strength Transformation into the tip of my sword, while Yashin rose with his blades crossed above his head, ready to meet me.
The first clash blew the heart of the storm apart.
When my sword met his black blades, the sky exploded.
A red and blue flash swept through the clouds, driving the rain outward in every direction and forming a perfect pocket of vacuum around us.
The shock wave tore through the storm in a ring of pressure that expanded for kilometers.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gron-Tarh's tallest towers shudder violently, armored glass shatter into dust, and smaller ships lose their stability and get hurled away.
At the epicenter of the explosion, Yashin and I remained utterly motionless, our three weapons locked in a stalemate of raw strength.
My left arm shook uncontrollably.
Even with the technique amplifying my muscles, I felt the vibration of the impact crush my wrist, travel up through my elbow, and batter my shoulder.
My bones creaked in protest.
The gash in my chest spilled hot blood again.
On the other side of our locked weapons, Yashin didn't seem to be making any effort at all. His head, hidden beneath his hair, tilted slightly to one side.
"You can still fight," he observed, his voice devoid of surprise.
I gave him a tight smile, tasting metal against my teeth.
"Disappointed?"
His answer came as a slight curve, a dark smile forming beneath the veil of hair.
"Curious."
He wrenched the daggers apart, and the sudden release of pressure sent us shooting in opposite directions.
I plummeted, spinning out of control, tore through a bank of thick clouds, and found myself hurtling straight at the side of a metal tower.
Using the momentum of my fall, I drove my boots into the structure and bent my knees to absorb the impact.
The entire tower groaned and pitched backward under my weight.
With a growl, I pushed off with my legs and launched myself back into the air like a cannon shot, leaving the structure to collapse into rubble behind me.
Yashin, however, had disappeared into the shadow cast by a cloud.
My rising attack struck nothing but air.
A fraction of a second later, the darkness just beneath my own arm split like fabric.
A black dagger shot out of it, straight for my jugular.
Acting on pure instinct, I jerked my head back.
The blade missed my neck, but scraped across my cheek, opening a ragged cut all the way to the base of my ear.
Without losing momentum, I spun in the air and delivered a blind horizontal slash.
Yashin blocked with one of his daggers, but the colossal momentum of my sword drove him through the storm.
He punched through a black cloud, leaving a spiraling tunnel behind him, and vanished among the lightning.
When he reappeared, he was already above me. Both daggers came down together like a guillotine.
I had no choice but to hold my sword crosswise above my head.
The second clash catapulted me toward the prison.
I fell like a meteor.
I struck a communications antenna on the way down, snapping the structure's base in half, and kept falling through a shower of loose steel plates, severed cables, and electrical sparks.
Seconds before my body could slam into the lower platform, I twisted my torso and drove my sword into the solid metal floor.
Steel shrieked deafeningly as the blade carved a groove dozens of meters long, the friction slowing my plummet.
I finally stopped, trembling, a few steps from the edge of the abyss.
I dropped to my knees on the shattered metal, coughing up pools of dark blood.
Above me, floating on a shapeless mass of shadows, Yashin watched with predatory patience as the clouds slowly closed around us.
Panting, I leaned my weight on the sword's hilt.
The channel on my communicator was still open, and through it, the war reached me.
The hiss of static was cut short by a roar that made my eardrum vibrate.
It was Gordon.
"THE KID'S STILL FIGHTING! AND YOU'RE JUST GOING TO STAND THERE?!"
The answering roar from the hangar shook the transmission, the brutal cry of a resistance that refused to die.
Rifle fire and the sound of twisting metal flooded the frequency again.
I smiled, blood running down my chin.
A moment later, the radio picked up Candice's clipped voice in the background, giving Havelyn rapid orders to organize the barricades and get the wounded out, followed by the frantic sound of her fingers hammering the terminal's keyboard.
She wasn't coming up.
She was putting her trust in me.
At the edge of my awareness, through the soles of my boots pressed against the prison's metal, I felt a subtle vibration, a dense, rhythmic pulse coming from deep within Sector Two.
Tsukumo.
He was using his gravity and strength underground, trying to break into the room.
And far away, on an isolated platform, I caught flashes of explosions and the green streak of a spear sweeping through the air.
Sahger and the Four Beasts.
He wasn't going to give an inch.
They kept moving forward because I was still standing.
I groaned through my teeth, wrenched my sword from the metal floor, and forced my unsteady legs to straighten.
The immense power of the Strength Transformation still boiled beneath my skin, but the luminous lines were now flickering erratically, struggling to keep the wound in my chest clamped shut.
The gash throbbed.
If my concentration broke and the technique faded, the entire cut would gape open like a mouth.
Slowly, defying gravity, Yashin descended onto the wrecked platform a few meters away.
His shadow spilled down and touched the metal floor before the soles of his shoes met the surface.
"You smell of Lavinsk... What are you doing so far from home?"
"A friend of mine might be locked up here."
"Might?"
"It's a theory."
Yashin gave a low laugh.
"You crossed galaxies and attacked Gron-Tarh over a theory?"
"A theory's enough to make me come for someone I care about, you worm."
My joints cracked as I tightened my grip on the weapon.
"Even if there's only the slightest chance she's here, I'll tear your whole prison apart from the inside out until I find her."
Yashin's hidden smile widened.
"Then keep looking."
The shadow pooled beneath his feet boiled and spread across the platform like living oil.
In the blink of an eye, dozens of long, misshapen arms of darkness erupted from the floor around me.
Each held a sharp replica of his daggers, and all of them lunged at once.
I pivoted on my heel.
My sword blocked the first blade with a piercing clang, slid along the second to shove it aside, then swept back in a vicious arc that severed three shadow arms in a single stroke.
But the attack was a swarm.
Arms twisted up from below, aimed for my back, and slipped through the loose floor plates.
My technique gave me no lightness, only raw power.
Fighting in this form was like moving lead underwater; every minute dodge had to come from the twist of my hips and the violent exertion of my muscles under extreme compression.
There was no elegance to it, only the raw instinct to survive.
A dagger pierced my thigh.
Another shot along my flank and tore a chunk of skin from my abdomen.
I snarled and ignored both.
Instead of retreating, I threw my weight forward, charging through the storm of blades as they tore into me and driving straight at his real body.
Caught within my reach, Yashin quickly crossed his arms, bringing both daggers in front of his chest.
My sword crashed against them with devastating force.
I screamed and drove forward with everything I had left.
The dense metal of the platform began to buckle and sink beneath our boots.
The red and blue veins along my arm blazed almost white, driving the pressure behind my blade higher and higher until the surrounding shadows dissolved into thin smoke under the sheer force of the air.
And then, for the first time in the fight, Yashin was pushed back.
I gasped, my face twisted with effort as I broke into breathless laughter.
In one fluid motion, unaffected by the force of my attack, one of his enormous hands released its dagger and slipped into the narrow gap between our locked weapons. His long, icy fingers closed around my entire face, crushing my jaw.
"Stubborn boy."
With a simple twist of his wrist and shoulder, he hurled me into open air.
I flew like a rag doll and slammed head-on into the adjacent tower.
The colossal structure buckled and shattered around the impact, flinging heavy sheets of twisted steel, torn cables, and showers of sparks that vanished into the night storm like dead meteors.
I tore through the structure in an uncontrolled fall, crashing onto my back on a sloping metal ramp; my body bounced three times in agonizing jolts before coming to rest, motionless in the center of a crater of mangled steel.
More blood spilled out, foaming at the corners of my mouth.
For countless seconds, pain cut every connection in my body. My legs refused to obey; my breathing was shallow, feeble.
Above me, strolling without any hurry along a path of his own darkness through the clouds, Yashin retrieved his lost dagger and glanced casually down.
"Is that it?" His ghostly voice drifted down, cold, with the wind and rain.
As I lay at the bottom of the crater, my soot-stained index finger gave its first twitch.
My hand had never loosened its grip on the sword.
Within my shattered body, the Strength Transformation flared back to life in one last desperate breath, blazing ice blue, cutting through the blood with fiery red.
A thick blast of steam boiled out of the enormous wound in my chest as, with a roar lodged in my throat, I drove the blade into the ramp and used it as a lever.
I drew one knee under me, trembling, my boots scraping against the steel.
I brought up the other.
And, hunched over, I lifted my bloodied face to the clouds, staring into the dark abyss of his eyes.
"Not even close."
I funneled my last impossible reserve of strength into the muscles of my thighs and calves.
The basin of the crater caved in completely under the pressure building beneath my feet.
And I exploded upward.
The force of the launch was so devastating that the entire massive platform finally collapsed into ruins, plunging down Gron-Tarh's bottomless shaft.
I shot back into the sky wrapped in a hurricane of red and blue energy, my sword aimed in blind fury straight at Yashin's chest.
He didn't try to move or retreat.
He simply spread his long arms to the storm, then crossed his two black blades to meet me head-on.
The third clash lit up the entire sky, flooding every corner of the prison with blinding light.
A massive white flash split the thick veil of clouds in two.
The storm's lightning bowed in fear, circling and roaring hysterically around the epicenter where our three weapons pressed together in the vacuum, tearing gravity in half.
Hell had finally thrown open its great gates above Gron-Tarh.