Elian Laurent's bones screamed under ten times the force of Earth's gravity. The air in the Rust Market felt as dense as wet asphalt, crushing his lungs until he had to swallow blood from burst capillaries at the back of his throat. Yet, just as his vision began to dim, a silver distortion exploded beside him.
TRING!
Caelus's harp strings were plucked with an unpoetic brutality. A probability bubble swept over Elian, refracting the gravitational pressure around them. The air suddenly distorted, shattering the purple neon lights of the Rust Market into a flawed rainbow spectrum.
Kaelen, the Eliminator, stared at Caelus from behind his blue visor. "Spatial probability manipulation? A filthy busker like you shouldn't have access to that equation."
Kaelen raised his tuning fork. He realized a basic calculation: maintaining 10\text{g} pressure over a wide area while parrying probability anomalies was a waste of his Axiom's "bandwidth." Kaelen twisted the tuning fork.
Instantly, the crushing gravity vanished, returning to a normal 1\text{g}.
For an ordinary human, such an extreme transition would leave their muscles limp. But for Elian, whose calcium density and muscle fibers had just been forced to harden by Aria's Bio-Axiom to withstand 10\text{g}, the loss of that burden turned him into a giant catapult.
Elian felt as light as cotton. His biological momentum exploded.
In the blink of an eye, Elian's boots shattered the iron plating beneath him, launching his body forward at a speed that broke the limits of human inertia.
"Move, Conductor!" Elian roared.
Caelus responded with a tense, wild laugh. His fingers danced over the strings. As Kaelen tried to repel Elian with a swing of his gravity staff, Caelus manipulated the probability of traction on the iron floor. Kaelen's boots suddenly lost all friction, causing him to slide two centimeters—a fatal error in close-quarters combat.
The Null Perspective in Elian's eyes flared bright. He didn't attack blindly. He read the vector of Kaelen's staff, dodging by tilting his head just millimeters from death, letting the gravitational energy sweep through empty air.
"Footing!" Elian cried out as he leapt into the open air.
Caelus plucked a staccato note. The probability of air molecule density beneath Elian's feet was compressed to 100\%. Elian stepped on the empty air as if kicking a concrete wall, unnaturally shifting his attack direction mid-air. He lunged from Kaelen's blind spot, gripping a piece of jagged pipe, aiming it directly at the Auditor's jugular. On the other side, Caelus released a wave of distortion that locked Kaelen's knees to the floor.
A mathematical victory was within reach.
However, Kaelen did not panic. Just as the sharp tip of Elian's pipe was an inch from his neck, the silver tuning fork in Kaelen's hand emitted a blinding blue flash. Time seemed to slow, crawling like a drip of oil. The clanging hammers of the Rust Market fell silent.
Kaelen stared at Elian and Caelus, who were frozen mid-air. His visor glowed intensely, radiating absolute authority.
"I will show you, trash..." Kaelen's voice echoed without a source, "...the difference between us."
BZZZTTT!
"Axiom Domain: Variable Vacuum."
A blue wave swept through reality. The squalid environment of the Rust Market, the smell of sulfur, and the neon lights were erased instantly. Elian was hurled back, landing on an incredibly smooth surface.
When Elian opened his eyes, he found himself inside an endless white geometric space, filled with flickering blue grid lines. There was no outside sound. The room was suffocating, not from a lack of oxygen, but from a lack of randomness.
"Damn it!" Caelus stood up, his harp glowing dimly. The poet stared at the slowly rotating grid ceiling. "This isn't a pure Domain, Elian! Look at his visor and tuning fork! He doesn't have the brain capacity for this; he's borrowing computing power from his tools! It's a Pseudo-Domain!"
"Enough to erase bugs like you," Kaelen stood in the center of the room, his gravity staff connected to the blue grid beneath his feet. "Inside the Variable Vacuum, all external probabilities are suppressed to zero. Only my normative gravity is absolute."
Kaelen flipped his hand.
Instantly, "down" was no longer at Elian's feet. The wall to Elian's right suddenly became the floor. Elian's body slammed hard against the vertical grid. His ribs screamed; the breath was knocked out of his lungs.
The close-quarters struggle exploded in dimensional chaos.
Kaelen lunged. He shifted gravity every second. This was no longer mere magic; it was a brutal, dizzying physical bout. Elian tried to punch Kaelen upward, but mid-strike, Kaelen inverted gravity by 180^\circ. The ceiling became the floor. Elian fell freely toward Kaelen, and the punch that was meant to go up transformed into a meteor strike falling straight onto Kaelen's chin from below.
Thud!
Kaelen's head snapped back, but he countered by slamming his staff into Elian's gut.
Blood seeped from Elian's lips. The pain was visceral, terrifyingly human. Every time gravity shifted, Elian's internal organs felt as if they were being pulled from their nerve roots. His joints began to glitch, emitting a horrific grinding sound. Elian's breath came out like a broken whistle. Caelus used his harp frame to parry Kaelen's kick coming from a horizontal 90^\circ angle, cracking the poet's arm.
They were battered, beaten down by laws of physics played with at whim.
"He's too stable..." Elian coughed. His blood dripped, but instead of falling, the droplets floated horizontally due to the chaotic gravity.
His brain, flooded with adrenaline and system glitches, forced a desperate, insane thought. This Pseudo-Domain was a closed system. A perfect calculation. A system bounded by the memory of the tuning fork.
What happens if a closed system is forced to process an infinite value?
"Caelus!" Elian screamed, his left eye turning a cold gray. "Gather all your remaining probability into a single focal point! Now!"
Caelus understood. Enduring the pain in his arm, the poet played a brutal Presto Agitato tempo. His fingers bled as he plucked the strings, forcing all remaining probability bubbles to compress and press against Kaelen's chest like a giant invisible vice.
Kaelen was momentarily pinned, his visor flickering red as it tried to calculate the anomalous load suddenly centered on him.
Taking advantage of the sudden gravitational chaos, Elian surged forward. He ignored his torn thigh and shoulder muscles. He used no weapon. His left hand was clenched tight, shrouded in the pitch-black distortion of his lethal Null Strike energy.
He charged straight through the gravitational pressure, slamming his fist directly into Kaelen's chest.
"Division by Zero," Elian whispered inches from the Auditor's face.
Mathematical logic met absolute void. Inside the closed system of the Pseudo-Domain, already burdened by Caelus's probability, Elian's Null Strike introduced the variable Infinity.
An Overflow occurred.
The circuits on Kaelen's tuning fork crackled loudly, releasing blue sparks. The Axiom equations within the space failed to process the contradiction. Kaelen's visor shrieked a system overload alarm. If Kaelen didn't release his Domain immediately, his own bio-system would explode from within.
Kaelen's eyes widened, forced to cut the flow.
PRRAAAANGGGG!
The white geometric space shattered like a glass mirror of reality struck by a sledgehammer.
The sound of dimensional glass breaking echoed, then faded into a deafening silence.
The reality of the Rust Market slammed them back. The tension in the room dropped drastically. Time seemed to move slower. Rust dust from the ruined ceiling drifted down, dancing under the dying flicker of purple neon lamps.
A high-pitched ringing filled Elian's ears. His breath was heavy and raspy. Hah... hah...
In front of them, Kaelen stumbled back a few steps, his white boots dragging through the mud. The Sector 2 man dropped to one knee. His blue visor had shattered into fragments, revealing his downward-cast face. A warm drop of fluid fell from his chin, landing on the iron floor.
It was fresh blood. Blood from the nose and the corner of the Eliminator's lips.
His sensors and tuning fork were charred and smoking, undergoing a forced cooldown. For the first time, the elite Auditor had been wounded by the "trash" of the Lower Sector.
Elian was in no better condition. His left hand was severely blistered, the skin blackened and emitting smoke and the smell of burnt flesh. His body convulsed, and he vomited a mouthful of black hydrocarbon oil—a sign that his physical limits had surpassed organic tolerance. He would have collapsed if Caelus hadn't caught him.
"We've woken the lion," Caelus panted, blood dripping from knuckles shredded by harp strings. "Come on. Time to retire from this show."
Taking advantage of Kaelen's system reboot, Caelus supported Elian, dragging the boy's body away. They vanished into the dark shadows of the slaughterhouse alleys, leaping into a massive final waste chute that led straight to the Main Pump Station.
Amidst the debris, Kaelen rose slowly. He didn't scream in rage. With a thumb encased in a white glove, he wiped the blood from his lip. He stared at the pink stain on his glove with a cold, clinical obsession.
"A bug that can wound the system..." Kaelen whispered, a faint, terrifying smile appearing on his lips. "You've moved up, Elian Laurent. You are now a Priority Anomaly."