(Marvel, DC, images, manhuas, and every anime that will be mentioned and used in this story are not mine. They all belong to their respective owners. The main character "Karito/Adriel Josue Valdez" and the story are mine)
Lillia POV
The Placidium had learned to breathe. At least, that's what we told ourselves when the red ceilings sighed and the ribs of the old halls flexed like tidewater.
We sat in a pocket Karma held open—four tatami's worth of clean footing inside a pavilion that used to have wisteria and now had membranes that clicked when the wind touched them. Her beads were laid in the old pattern, except the beads were pebbles we'd boiled in salt and prayer. My lantern's bell rested against my wrist, quiet. Shen had posted himself at the mouth of the pocket where a corridor narrowed into a throat.
No one else was coming. No one else had been coming for a long time.
"Roll call," Shen said. He always said it like a ritual could still decide the day. "Lillia."
I raised my hand. "Here."
"Karma."
"We hold," Karma said, and the circle steadied by a finger's width. "Shen."
"Present," he answered, and then, because he sometimes remembered to be kind, "Food."
He unfolded a strip of dried lotus root from cloth that still smelled like smoke. We ate it as if it were festival sweet and not something that had forgotten how to be crisp months ago.
"You should talk," Karma said after the first chew, gentle as steam. "We haven't, since the last... since the river." She glanced to the corridor, asked the air for privacy, then—softly to me—"You first, if you want. May I borrow your fire, Lillia? Just the warmth of it. Not the petals."
I nodded. "You can have the warmth." I kept the petals tight in my hands. If you scatter petals, the red likes to count them and make maps.
Karma breathed, and the damp in the pocket retreated enough for our shoulders to unknot.
"Tell us about him again," she said, and her voice made the request a shared blanket instead of a theft. "The human. It helps to remember a rule that worked."
Shen's gaze dipped—the kind of bow he used for grief, not respect. "Minute limit," he said. "Sixty. Then we check walls."
"Okay." I tucked my knees up. The new skin of the pavilion flexed, then pretended it hadn't. "His name was Karito. He smelled like paper and a door you're allowed to use. Mother Tree was... wrong. A rift opened and a red hunter came through—armor like lacquer; a tail with a club. I tried to make it sleep, the way we do, but my magic came back with splinters in it. It laughed at me."
My lips felt dry. I named the feeling dry, not afraid. Afraid is a word the red likes to taste.
"He caught it by the mouth with one hand," I said, and my voice remembered to be soft. "He said, 'Are you okay?' like we were at market. Then he lifted its head like a lid and poured lightning in. The sky turned into a bruise and then back again. He asked if I was hurt. He... he made the rules behave."
Karma smiled with her eyes. "We remember. Thank you."
Shen: "Outcome. Dark: eliminated. Collateral: minimal. Follow-up: contact?"
"He stayed a night," I said. The petals crowded my throat; I kept them behind my teeth. "I made tea. I turned human-shaped to be polite. I tripped. He caught the cup without looking. He told me to be careful. I tried to peek into his... into his petals while he slept—" I shot Karma a guilty look "—and he told me no. Then he apologized for saying no too sharply. He promised to come back." I hooked my smallest finger around the lantern handle in the old gesture. "He promised."
Shen's jaw worked once. "Promise: unfulfilled. Probability of survival: low."
Karma didn't contradict him. "We light what we have," she said instead, the way she says a mantra you can carry in your mouth. "And we keep it dry."
"Do you think he's dead?" I asked, because some petals bruise if you don't say them. "I know he is. A year is a long time to be not here."
Karma hesitated. "We... do not know. We only know that the Red King—this Goblin—took our roads and invited himself into our rooms. We know that we haven't seen the human since the day the sky learned to ring."
Shen added it like a line item: "Enemy hierarchy. Leader: Red Goblin. Method: symbiote swarm; terraforming. Hives at the Placidium, Epool River, Zhyun. Patterns: pulses at dusk; surges on threes."
We all winced at threes. Even saying the number in a row made the pavilion skin twitch. I tapped my bell twice and left a missing third to make the world breathe on my count.
"Petals," Karma said gently, bringing me back. "Yours, Lillia. Not the red ones."
"I only ever saw Karito kill one," I said, quieter. "The big things—when we strike, it's like weather to them. I don't understand why. We tried to save the twins at the river. We got three children and a fisherman instead. The rest... the red wore their reflections and waved goodbye for them."
Shen didn't correct me. He is careful, now, about which truths he polishes. "We save the ones we can," he said. "We count them." He ticked totals on his thumb knuckle. "Seven moved last night. Noise down to the west. Karma's circle held. Lillia's lantern stayed quiet. No losses."
He doesn't say today unless he's sure the day will let him.
Karma looked at the throat of the corridor, lips thinning. "The symbiote tide thickened at the First Lands gate," she said. "We should plan for another rise at moon's half. Shen?"
"Tunnels," he said. "Three viable. One compromised by... teeth." He didn't look at the arch that used to be wisteria and now had bead-teeth. "We can use the roofs." He paused. "If they still think we won't."
I made my shoulders pretend to be brave. "I'll run point," I offered. "My hooves... my feet don't make noise when I don't want them to. And the red likes me. It lets me pass when I say please."
"Because you say please," Karma said, and touched the beads as if her fingers could lower their pulse. "We accept. We go together."
Shen: "We don't split."
We let the quiet sit, the way you let tea steep: not too long. I broke it with the smallest petal.
"I keep not calling... what I do... dreams," I said. "They're petals. Dreams are soft. The red would like to own the word soft. It does, to so many things. It doesn't get this."
Karma nodded. "It does not," she said, borrowing only as much certainty as she could return. "We keep that word dry, together."
We ate the last of the lotus and examined our hands like we might find better ones soon. The membrane above us shivered. The pocket held.
"Say it," Shen told me, abrupt but not unkind. He's learned that my body shakes less if I pour the story out in small bowls. "End of last week. The river."
"There was a surge," I said. "Red as sunset over lacquer. It spoke without a voice. We ran. We didn't run fast enough. The teacher with the peach-stone necklace asked me if it would hurt. I said 'not for long' and hated the way my mouth learned that sentence. The red wore her husband's face and waved." I forced my lips up in a smile that felt like a cut. "He had good manners, the red."
Shen's fingers closed once against his thigh. "We killed an Archvile,*" he said like an apology offered to balance a bad scale. "It stayed dead for thirty counts. Then it learned to be a wall."
"We're not supposed to be able to," I whispered. "Kill them. But Karito did. I saw. He poured lightning in like a rule. If he—" The petal bruised again. "If he were here—"
Karma placed two fingers to my temple, not touching. "May I amplify your warmth?" she asked. "Just for a breath."
"Yes," I said, because she always asked. The circle warmed enough for my teeth to unclench.
"We hold," she said again. "We three. That is not small."
"Small keeps the day," Shen said. He let the corner of his mouth move half a millimeter. For him, that's a joke.
I smiled, actual this time. "Maybe the red will trip on our small."
"It trips on precision," he said. "We can be precise."
A whisper ran down the corridor like a brush dragged through wet lacquer. The membrane above us flexed, then smoothed. We all flinched and pretended we hadn't. Shen's hand didn't go to his sword because swords are for stories that still agree to be cut. He went to the list he keeps in his head instead. "Routes. Supplies. Counts. Sleep in shifts."
"Talk," Karma said, softer. "We keep talking. That is also food."
"Then—talk," I said, because I like food. "Karma, tell me again about the woman with the broken sandal who scolded the symbiote hive for dripping on temple steps."
"She did," Karma said, the ghost of a laugh in her throat. "We held the circle while she lectured a wall. 'You will not track in here,' she told it. 'Show respect.' The red paused. It... stopped dripping."
"It listened," Shen said, surprised all over again by the usefulness of scolding.
"It remembered being a wall," Karma corrected. "We reminded it how."
"Oh," I said. "That feels like a petal I can water."
We fell quiet on purpose and let the quiet be sleep's cousin. No one slept. The red doesn't love that word either.
When the pocket softened, we stood together, practiced the walk that didn't wake the teeth. Shen checked the circle's edges with the same care he used to shave; Karma gathered the beads in a bowl that used to be a prayer drum; I looped my bell on my wrist and made it promise to stay a bell.
"Four things we can see," I said when we reached the threshold. "Three we can touch. Two we can hear. One we can taste—"
"Not the red," they said with me.
We didn't say hope. We put it in our pockets where it's warmer.
Outside, the Placidium breathed. We walked anyway.
The halls were intestines now—old cedar bones wrapped in a red sheen that flexed to its own pulse. Banners had become veils with veins; paper walls remembered how to be skin. We threaded the narrow places Shen trusted, where the symbiote had grown thin and bored of attention, and we did not look long at the places where it bulged like a held breath. The red citizens moved below us in slow schools—bare feet, bright eyes smudged wrong, tendrils learning the shapes of sleeves. They did not look up unless the chorus told them to.
Karma touched two fingers to the nearest arch and asked the wood for permission; the wood pretended it remembered what that meant. "We'll keep to the roofline," she murmured. "May I borrow a little steadiness?"
"Yes," I said. "Not the petals."
"Not the petals," she agreed, and the tremor under my hooves—feet—eased by a hair.
We didn't talk for three breaths. On the fourth, Shen gave us the gift he gives instead of comfort. "Accounts," he said. Which meant: say the names out loud where the red can't keep them.
"Kennen," Karma began, voice low. "With me, at the Temple of the Jagged Path. We held a circle while the walls tried to learn teeth. He laughed at it. He always laughed. We moved three families through a gap. The tide rose. He threw his shuriken into the mouth of a gate to close it and smiled like a boy when it worked. Then the gate learned to be a mouth again and..." She set the end of the sentence down like hot metal. "We pulled him back. We didn't pull him far enough."
Shen's hand tightened once, the way it does when grief chooses the exact place to land. "Yasuo," he said. "Western ridge. He kept the wind honest for a week beyond what any man owes the wind. Drank once. Promised not to again. Kept it. The red learned his brother's face and bowed before it struck. He laughed at that, too." A thin breath. "We burned the blade after. Wuju holds memory. We didn't want it held that way."
I curled my fingers around the lantern's handle until my knuckles felt like stones in a river. "Irelia," I offered, because someone had to. "Down by the Placidium steps, when the first tide found its voice. She put the blades into a shape I don't have a word for—it felt like home as a pattern—and the wave broke wrong. She sang the children forward with it. The red wore the shape of an old general and saluted. She smiled back and said, 'Not today.' It lied. We—" I swallowed the petal and finished. "We didn't get to say goodbye. The blades fell go quiet by themselves when she did."
Karma slipped her prayer beads from hand to hand; the pebbles clicked like rain against a paper roof. "Akali," she said softly, and I did not tell her not to. "She kept the shadows clever until they learned to be cages. We found the arc of her mask on the river stones. We carried it back to a dry place."
"Master Yi," Shen added. "South road. Taught until the last student refused to run. Then he ran with him." His mouth flattened. "We did not find the pupil. That counts as a win."
"Wukong," I said, because sometimes saying a name is light. "He yelled at the red until it flinched. It flinched! Then it learned his teacher's voice and told him to stand still. He laughed again and did not. He broke the bridge so children at the far end would have to be brave instead of obedient." My throat remembered how to close. "We did not get to him in time either."
Karma's gaze went to the far roofs, where prayer flags once made a garden in the sky and now hung like tongues. "Zed," she said after a long walk of silence. "His shadows swallowed a hive for us. He did not come back. We"—she chose the words as if they had weight—"hold his absence accountable to mercy."
We kept walking, because walking is the kind of truth you can repeat until it forgives you. Beneath us, a courtyard had become a lung, inflating and deflating on a red seven-count that made my teeth itch. The citizens filed across it with the same step and the same turn at the corner, a prayer wheel without words. Every thirtieth person blinked in unison; I didn't watch to see what their eyes did when they opened.
"Who were you with, after he left?" Karma asked me gently. She never said Karito's name; she did not want to call anything that might be listening.
"Everyone," I said, and tried for a laugh, soft and small enough not to attract attention. "Which means no one for long. First the old women at the water ladder. We made soup until the soup learned to climb back into the pot. Then I went to the school with the shoeless teacher who made the red be quiet by scolding it into remembering the rules about dripping on temple floors." I smiled for real that time. "I was with Irelia for a day, and it was the best day." My smile folded. "Then the day ended." I breathed. "I tried to make the symbiote sleep. It didn't. It... copied my lullaby and sang it at the children so they would stop running."
Shen glanced sidelong. "You stopped it," he said. Not question. Inventory.
"I out-stubborned it for nine steps," I said. "It learned a new voice on the tenth."
"And you came to us," Karma said, no triumph in it. "We held."
Shen's count clicked under his breath. "Holdings: three. Paths: two. Food: low." He glanced at a stair whose risers had grown suckers. "We go roof to roof."
We did. The roofs had become dunes, red gloss over tile. Our footprints filled behind us if we stepped heavy, so we stepped light. The Placidium's heart was a boil of hives and spines—the symbiote had eaten the open square and raised a lace of bridges in its own pattern, all of it gently swaying as if the city had learned to breathe water.
Sometimes the red remembered it had been a place for music and let a note through. We heard someone humming under the floor. We did not look for them. You do not pull people from a mouth unless you are certain the teeth are elsewhere.
Karma paused at a ridge and raised two fingers. "Listen," she said. "We hold quiet."
The quiet we held had a taste: iron and rain and something like cedar sap under heat. It was different from the red's sweetness, which is always a little rotten. This was... clean.
Shen squinted into the haze above the First Lands gate. "Object," he said. "Skyline. High. Fast."
A streak crossed the bruised middle air and left it cleaner behind it. Flame—not red, not the Goblin's glossy lacquer; this burned like a kiln with its door open—drew a line from cloud to horizon. The Placidium answered like an organism: every tendril leaning, every membrane taut, every citizen jerking their heads as if a parent had called. The chorus didn't sing. It screamed.
"What is that?" I asked, even though my hooves—feet—already wanted to run toward it and away from it at the same time.
Karma's eyes thinned to slits, not suspicion—calculation. "Not theirs," she said, low. "We hold... we hold breath."
"Impact vector," Shen said, and pointed with his chin like he was giving orders to the horizon. "Gate. Over the Epool, if it keeps its angle."
The red climbed to meet it. From the big hive at the Placidium's crown something uncoiled—wide as the old arena and longer, scaled in lacquer and tendon. A dragon, if you agreed to define dragon as anything that made the air bow. It surged on a tendon-lash straight at the streak, mouth opening like a tunnel.
"The dragon," I whispered, heart doing bad math. Its silhouette was everything I loved about the old stories and none of what made them kind. "It's—"
"Wrong," Shen said, and that was all he gave the word.
The comet did not veer. It flared brighter, then tighter—white at the core, orange at the lips. The dragon tore red from the air to armor itself and struck.
For a heartbeat, sky and sky wrote each other a new rule. Then the rule broke. The comet spun, caught, corrected, faltered, and finally let gravity have it. It came down a valley's width from the gate with a sound that shook membrane-skin loose from beams and made the red citizens slap their own faces in unison. Dust kicked up like surf; tiles jumped like schools of fish.
We braced; Karma's circle cinched without being seen. The shock came late—tamped down by something that knew how to land and didn't care to do it politely.
We were very still after that.
The red wasn't.
The Placidium screamed again, all at once. Every hive, every tendril, every citizen with a consonant left in them. The sound had edges. It turned corners.
"Not ours," Karma said again, and her smile was a thing with teeth. "We hold to not ours."
"Movement," Shen said. His voice was narrower now, the way it gets when he gets hopeful and refuses to admit it. "All units. Converging on the valley. They... they are afraid."
Down-valley, something answered the dragon with light. Not the Goblin's lacquer-fire—this was the kind of flame that remembers cooking rice and lighting grave incense, ancient and immediate at once. It flared, then narrowed into lines that cut. One. Two. Three. The dragon's head jerked sideways as if someone had insulted it in a language it couldn't parse. A crack rolled back up to us as the sound caught up to the idea.
"Who is it?" I asked, half prayer. "Do we know them?"
"We don't," Shen said. "We will."
Explosions thumped, spaced like careful footsteps. Each one made the red membrane around us flinch like a horse learning a saddle. The citizens below stopped moving in prayer-wheel patterns and began to run without knowing where they were running to. Tendrils retracted from doorframes; bridges pulled tight like bowstrings; the big hive at the Placidium's crown lost its lazy sway and grew spines.
"Invader," Karma said, tasting the word to see if it was kindness or doom. "Not theirs. Not ours. Maybe help. Maybe harm. We... do not decide yet."
"I'll go look," I said, already leaning toward the nearest roof-gap. The dragon roared—a noise like a temple drum drowned in tar—and a second shock rolled the tiles under my feet.
Shen's hand caught my sleeve. "No heroics," he said. "We stay three. We move together." A beat. "We don't split." And then, the rarest currency, a dry joke: "If that falls on us, we won't have to plan dinner."
I huffed a laugh that was also a sob. "I'm making dinner," I said, because small promises matter. "If we meet them and they're kind, I'm... I'm making two."
Far away, something yelled at the sky like it had been keeping its anger for a day that needed it and had finally found one. The yell turned into the kind of light that moves. The dragon learned to be smoke in one place and came apart in stringy sheets.
The Placidium screamed a third time. The number tried to make my breath catch. I made it miss. "Three," I said under my breath, then left enough silence before, "two," and another silence before, "three."
Karma nodded, hearing the gap. "We keep our count," she said. "We hold."
We went roof to roof, toward the valley where the comet had fallen and the red had remembered how to fear. The citizens ran in the other direction. For once, we were not the ones going against the flow alone.
Whatever had fallen was not happy. That sounded like a good start.
Ace POV
Noxus grit still in my teeth. Juggernaut's aftershocks in every tendon. Doesn't matter.
I burn anyway.
The world ahead stops pretending to be a world and shows me what the message warned me about. Ionia used to be green and careful—rivers braided with prayer flags, trees that knew how to listen. Now it looks like somebody skinned Klyntar and papered a country with it. Veins cross mountains. City spines flex. Whole valleys shine wet, breathing on a count I don't like.
And it stinks. Sweet like rot in a summer market, copper under the tongue, a plastic note like a cheap mask melting.
"Red Goblin," I growl to the horizon. "He's on sight, if I see him."
I keep my cosmic flames sleeping. Keep Speed Force on its charger. No starfire, no lightning—just what I was born with and stole from a fruit: heat, direction, stubbornness. Columns of flame bite the air and I arrow along them, faster than I have any right to on base kit alone. The countryside glides under me in a bad morph: terraces turned to red steps with tendrils; shrines swallowed with only the bell-strikers left like ribs.
Movement.
Not afar. On me.
The "fields" lift. They were never fields—membrane sheets hiding teeth. Tendrils the width of oaks snap up, bristling with hooks, hunting ankles and throat. Future Sight tips the world five seconds shallow and paints the lash-lines in white. I kick my vector thirty degrees and blow a trench of blue-orange down the middle. The first two lash through it, crisp, drop. The third learns and whips from the ash side. Cute.
"Not today."
I let Armament blossom in my knuckles—Ryuo, not the showy shell—pressure that flowers just under skin, no weight wasted. Higan, fifteen shots in a blink: pinholes become fist-sized steam blooms as the internal heat hits. One tendon whips past, smoking; another shivers and sloughs into inert tar.
The sky gets a new problem.
I thought I was seeing symbiote dragons in the distance. Wrong angle. One of them is already here, head-on, wings webbed in red lattice, scales lacquered like a parade mask. Eyes wrong—no pupils, just glossy hungry. It closes a mile like it's bored.
"Fine," I say. "Come here."
I roll and meet it with a Hiken that would shear a warship. Knuckles forward, forearm a barrel, everything I hate flowing out of me in one clean line. It punches straight into the throat. The dragon eats it. The flame disappears under the gloss like a match sinking into oil. A second later, the entire neck bulges, then keeps coming.
Right. Dark-boosted symbiotes don't respect rules that make my life easier.
"Okay."
The ground tentacles time their second swing with the dragon's shadow. I thread the first two, torch the third, and then the world decides I don't get to be clever—I get hit. The dragon commits to a tackle, and the membrane hills leap to help. We meet like an angry god and an old cathedral. We go down.
Impact. Everything makes the sound a furnace door makes when you slam it wrong. Heat booms out of me on reflex and turns a football field of wet red into glass in a heartbeat. Doesn't matter. The mass keeps coming. We crater the outer Placidium hard enough to flip tiles on roofs a kilometer away. Dust. Roar. Red rain.
I'm up before the echo finishes. The dragon is, too. It shakes itself like a dog, more tendrils unspooling from the ribs, mouth splitting wider than anatomy allows. The ground tries to finish what the air started—spikes, lassos, a clever little scythe that would have taken a mortal man's calves. I cook it away without looking.
Rage finds me clean.
Chrona's message—timed, erased—still burns where a necklace should sit. She trusted me with a location and a prayer. I can almost see the crown of the Placidium from here, slicked in red, close. They took Peter. They hurt him and laughed while he bled. Over my dead body they keep him.
"You want a war?" I snarl at the country. "Congratulations. You got me."
I don't hesitate. Everyone I see is red and wrong. There's no pulse here I recognize as human. The Observation net says "chorus" instead of "crowd." Their intentions come through on one cable, not a thousand. That's not a city. That's a hive.
So I kill.
Conqueror's opens like a storm in my chest and I keep it on a low roar, a willfield held just shy of sky-crack. The air hardens around me; lesser bodies buckle without my eyes having to meet them. It's mercy only because it keeps them from interfering for a minute before I decide if the parasite is peelable. It isn't. The Dark stain rides their nerves like it owns rent. I don't pull; I burn.
The dragon lunges again, jaw yawning to a tunnel. I step into the future that lands me behind its palate and let Ryuo slide off my wrist into its soft places. Pressure, not push. A surgeon's flare. The gloss ripples wrong, tries to heal, can't find purchase. I follow with a point-blank Enkai, smaller than I want—base flame, not the other one—and pack it into the cavity my Haki just opened. The head tries to hold a scream. The back of the skull pops instead. It sags in the harness of its own tendons, twitching.
The ground decides to wear it as a hat. Tendrils spear the carcass, learning what killed it even as they digest it. They don't get time.
I clap my palms once—Dai Enkai, compressed—and drop a ring of fire so hot the air peels. I cap it with Armament to force the heat in and down. A clean orange wall rises, then sinks, scouring the first wave of red off the tiles. The membrane blisters and tries to retreat through itself. It can't. The ring kisses the stone and leaves a black gutter where tendrils used to be.
"Cauterize your corridors," I mutter. "Lesson one."
Swarm.
They come in types. Winged citizens that wear the air like a cape and knife their way down; grounded packs that run like wolves; globs that skip like stones and stick if you let them. Observation threads three seconds into twelve vectors and plays them back at once. I'm in a narrow alley and wide courtyard and temple roof in the same second, watching future-me die in each—snared, pierced, drowned. I pick the fourth path: over.
Hard plates of Armament click into being under my soles and I sprint up a staircase made of my stubbornness. The swarm misses by being accurate. They slam into the place I would have been if I respected gravity. I don't.
Conqueror's pulse, small and fast—one heartbeat—and a hundred red eyes flinch shut. I'm already moving. Higan, again, but different: not a scatter, a line. I stitch a seam across the midair mob and Ryuo rides the bullets, tiny detonations blooming inside their cores. Things fall apart like wet papier-mâché.
The street tries to be a throat again. I refuse. "Not food," I tell it, and make the fire believe me. A narrow lance of Entei drills a vent through the gullet-forming stone, all the way down to the old sewer. Steam erupts; the throat collapses on itself, choking. I jump the last laugh of it and land on a roof that gives under my feet like a drumskin. Armament plates, three in a row, hold me long enough to hop.
"Peak," I warn myself. "Don't peacock." The urge to rip the sky open is right there. I force it down. Save the cosmic. Save the lightning. Red Goblin is a coward with traps; I'm not showing him my biggest answer until he asks the question in my face.
The hive learns. It remembers the ring I burned and grows around it—arches of meat that can flex to spit. Little artillery mounds bulge, pupils dilate, and a hail of barbed pearls lances up at me. Future Sight queues a dozen dodges and I don't like any of them. I cut the choices to two and make the air help.
I pull heat out of a column I lit two blocks back and thread it here along a line only I see. The stream rides my will like wire, bends at the corner of a shrine, slides under a broken gate, and erupts between me and the volley. The pearls pass through a sheet of air that is suddenly Sahara and disintegrate mid-flight into raining flakes. Hot snow.
I grin despite myself. "Still got it."
A heavier shadow crosses me. Another dragon—not alone this time. Two, three, and a brood of lesser shapes waddling through the sky like jellyfish with armor. Their throats glow—the tell that a chorus is charging their spit with someone else's breath. I watch the futures where I dodge and take shrapnel, where I tank and lose time, where I clip a wing and get a tail through the ribs for my trouble. I take the one where I cheat.
"Come on," I tell my body. "Once."
I let Conqueror's coat my fists. Not the full hymn. A verse. Will crawls up my arms like a storm remembering where to break. The air crisps. The dragons feel it and hiccup; that's all the window I need. I drop, invert, and drive a Hiken straight up the spine of the lead beast while the coating is live. The flame rides the will; the will rides the flame; the world tears like cloth somewhere above us. The dragon's jaw forgets how to stay attached. It falls in two polite pieces.
The brood panics. The sky fills with bad decisions. I spend three seconds taking gifts:
—Two wings stitched shut with micro-Ryuo and a twist of heat so they crash themselves.
—A mouth wedged open with an Armament plate then filled with Enkai like stuffing a pipe.
—A jellyfish-thing wrapped in a ring of my Conqueror's and slammed into a wall that was trying to be bone and remembers it's clay.
Bodies hit streets that aren't streets. The hive reallocates resources. Good. I make them spend.
The cost finds me anyway. Stamina drops in notches, not a slide. Juggernaut left bruises in places Haki can't armor. The long fight in Noxus lingers in my wrists and ankles, ghosts that make my angles a degree off if I let them. I don't. I take the pain and teach it not to argue.
A wave of citizens arrives—not the shambling kind. Trained. Ionian stance buried under red lacquer. Swords that learned Wuju; hands that remember prana. The symbiote wears their habits like a trophy and times the rush to a three-count I hate. The number tries to drill in my ears—
No.
I cut the beat on purpose: three—(silence)—two—(silence)—three. Conqueror's hum agrees with me; the tide trips on the missing steps. I dive.
This isn't a parry fight. This is subtraction. I push Observation narrow, laser the killing intents, and erase them as they peak:
—A lunge turns into a shoulder-check as my Haki plate appears where a knee wanted to be.
—A sweep meant for my ankles meets a heel that's more will than bone; I drive Ryuo into the sword arm and shatter it from inside without touching the blade.
—A high feint becomes ash as a Higan round with a core of pressure pops inside the ribcage.
They fall. I don't check faces. They don't have them anymore.
Tendrils try to flank. I answer with a furnace-breathing Sabaody trick—heat the air until it rises in a column, starve the ground of oxygen, let the red choke on its own appetite. The living street sags, exhausted, and stops pretending to be clever for ten breaths. I take the corridor it gives me and run it toward the Placidium.
"Chrona," I say into the wind because it helps my chest not crack. "I heard you."
The hive hears my direction and hates it. The roofs ahead ripple, swell, and a cathedral-sized bulge lifts into a cannon. The mouth opens. You could drive a ship into it and lose the ship.
No cosmic. Not yet. Fine.
I plant my feet on a plate only I can see and build a column the old way. Entei, layered—not stacked—like bricks, each with a different pressure, each with a job. I cap the stack with Armament until my knuckles burn cold. Conqueror's traces the seam down the middle and says break here.
"Jigoku..."
The cannon exhales.
"...Entei."
I throw a sun the size of a cartwheel and make it a drill. It bites the breath, bites the throat, bites the belly of the thing until it's wearing the fire and the fire is wearing it. The cannon tries to recoil. I don't let it. The column pushes through the spine and out the far side in a geyser that paints the next street orange-black. The bulge collapses into slush and keeps melting.
I breathe once. Twice. Don't look back.
Something hits my blind side hard enough to knock the taste out of my mouth. I see it a microsecond before it happens and still take it—fatigue tax. A whip coded with a voice—Red Goblin's, almost familiar—wraps my waist and yanks. I skid, leave trenches in tile. The whip hauls me toward a maw that was a gate. The teeth are prayer plaques now, lacquered with hunger. Cute.
"Get off!"
Conqueror's to the spine, Armament to the edge, fire to the surface—three-layer punch, short as a blink. The whip snaps into confetti. I tumble, choose the ground I land on by making it, and ride the slide into a lower court that too many people died in to still be holy.
The symbiote tries to borrow the memory of incense and weaponize it. I laugh without humor. "You can wear a temple," I tell it, "and still not be forgiven."
I put my palm to the floor. Ryuo pours into stone like heat into cloth and blooms along the old grout lines. The pattern of the courtyard—someone's geometry lesson—lights up in dull orange. When the red tries to surge, the pattern resists like a stubborn old man with a broom. It doesn't stop the tide. It slows it, and slow is what I need.
A siren sound rolls across the district—organic, not mechanical, and tuned to turn vertebrates into mistakes. It vibrates in my teeth. The number three hides in it on purpose, clicking like a metronome you can't find to smash. Fine. I don't smash. I drown it.
"Shut up."
I push a Conqueror's wave out on my breath, low-frequency and ugly, the kind that punches water in a cistern until it calms. The siren warbles, loses its footing, and cracks into a human scream for a fraction of a second—someone still in there, or the hive learning to mock. Either way, it shuts up.
I'm moving again before quiet finishes landing. The Placidium's inner ring is ahead, a red crown grafted onto old bones. Every tendon in the city is leaning toward me now, pulled like laundry in a storm toward the drain. Good. I want them here. I want Red Goblin's eyes on me. I want him to bring his worst to this courtyard and learn that worst is a word with two owners.
A rain begins—thin black needles that blossom into crawling when they hit. I light them in the air with a fan of Higan, tilt the fan with Observation so it meets what they're going to be instead of what they are. Char dust falls like bad snow. I step through it and don't slip.
They throw more dragons. Fine. They throw a centipede made of people. I cut it into punctuation marks. They make the ground forget gravity and try to fold me into a pocket. I hard-plate a ramp and take the pocket as a shortcut.
I keep killing. No hesitation. No apology. The only apology I owe is to Peter, and I'll make it by dragging him out breathing.
A wall on my left splits open to reveal a nested mouth with something like a woman's voice behind it. It doesn't speak words. It breathes a feeling: stay. Conqueror's laughs out of me like thunder at a picnic. "Wrong verb," I tell it, and punch through. The mouth panics, slams shut on my forearm, and meets Armament instead of flesh. I wrench free, leave teeth on the ground.
I skid to a halt on the threshold of the inner ring because the hive finally does something smart—it opens a path. Clean stones. No red. Bells hung in the old places. Lanterns lit with the right kind of flame. If I didn't know better, I'd believe it.
Future Sight shows five versions of me walking into that lie and never walking out.
"Good try," I say, and lay fire across the invitation like paint. The lanterns keep burning and show their fangs.
I'm tired. I let myself say it once so I don't say it later when it matters. All three Haki tracks hum at a sustainable burn; the fruit keeps pace; the old wounds from Noxus complain like weather. I ignore them. Pain is a tax I can pay.
I stick two fingers in my pocket where the past should keep a chain warm and find nothing but a promise.
"Chrona," I tell the red crown. "I'm close... just a little more and I'll save Peter."
The hive hears the name without knowing its meaning and answers by pulling everything that's left into one shape—spines, mouths, wings, the memory of a dragon that forgot to die. A wave.
I roll my shoulders. Keep the cosmos asleep. Keep the lightning for the snake behind the throne.
"Take it easy," I tell myself. "Keep going."
I plant my feet, crack my neck, and meet a country with only what it thinks it understands about me: flame, will, and an extremely bad mood.
The wave comes down the avenue like a bad decision that learned calligraphy—beautiful and awful at once.
I don't back up.
Kenbunshoku pushes the world a handspan into tomorrow. The composite surf breaks into frames: the first rank of "citizens" carried as teeth, the second rank as tendons, the third as wet artillery sacs ready to spit. Four flyers hidden in the spray, timing their dives to the metronome I refuse to hear. A ground pulse under it all—heartbeat of the city trying to trip my ankles.
I breathe once and strip the picture for parts.
"Channel. Cull. Choke."
I slam my palms to the stones and draw a circle with Enkai, not big—a courtyard's worth. Armament rides the rim, a thin black ring to keep the heat honest. The temperature gradient collapses the air; wind rushes inward to feed the fire. The wave hits the low-pressure wall and parts the way water does when it remembers rivers. It splits around me into two red currents. I give those currents banks: two quick lines of fire that harden to glass where they touch, making trenches the hive has to climb.
The front teeth hit the circle and melt, cheap sugar on a skillet. Behind them, the tendon-rank tries to grip the hot stone and finds no purchase. They writhe; I step forward.
"Hiken."
I don't throw the fist long; I keep it a short bolt, compressed and mean, Conqueror's just brushed along the edge so the heat remembers it has a job. It punches a tunnel through the wave at chest height, and bodies I don't call people anymore fold around it and fall in halves.
The flyers dive on the third beat that doesn't land. I'm already there. Ryuo blooms off my forearms like a quiet flower; I swat without touching, internal pressure popping symbiote cores midair. Two drop in silence; the third flutters aside with half a wing and eats Higan—fifteen shots in one heartbeat—until it stops resembling anything you'd draw.
The ground tries the trip again. It's smarter now; it sends the pulse on an off-count. I answer with a vacuum pocket—steal the air from a square meter under my left foot and let the wave stumble into nothing. Tendrils overshoot; I cut them on the draw with a knife-edge of Armament, no flourish, no time wasted.
They spit.
Sacs burst in a volley, black pearls that change their mind about being liquid two meters from my face. Future Sight paints blossom points on the air—here, here, here. I don't dodge. I heat the blossoms before they exist. The pearls detonate into sooty rain and the shock wave slaps my hair, nothing more.
I keep moving. That's the trick. Not letting the hive decide the pace.
"Crossfire."
I rake two Hiken at 45º through the left current, a scissor that meets in the middle of the stream. Armament rides the fire and makes it bite deeper than flame ought to; Conqueror's hums low so the ones behind feel the will and flinch. The scissor closes; the stream gutters; the trench bank goes silent for three steps.
A shadow falls. Bigger than dragon—bulk like a shrine turned inside out and taught to fly. I don't humor it. "Not yours."
I clap once. Dai Enkai, low yield, lots of pressure. The clap throws a column up like a geyser and catches the belly of the thing mid-dive. It bellows and keeps coming because Dark physics like to argue. I give it a second argument: Ryuo threaded up the heartline, precise as a stitch through cloth. The big shape forgets to be heavy and slams sideways into a building that isn't a building. The facade tears like rind; the thing disintegrates into not-parts.
The chorus hates me. Good.
It answers with fog.
The air whitens—microscopic filaments, a symbiote aerosol that wants lungs. The Observation future where I breathe them has me on my knees in six seconds while the hive pours itself through my nose. Pass.
I burn the air clean. Not with heat—too expensive—not with Conqueror's—too loud—but with patience. I raise the temperature five degrees across a hundred-meter fan, just enough to lift the fog before it coheres. The filaments spiral harmlessly up and out, caught by the updraft I cook into being. I add a scent: scorched plastic and orange peels. It's petty. It's mine.
They send real people next. Trained bodies in wrong lacquer, moving like Ionian forms remembered by a bad teacher. The hive is learning that I cut crowds easier than I duel. It tries me on fair terms, hoping I'll waste pride on technique.
I don't. I waste them.
A sword whispers for my throat. I meet it with an open palm that never touches steel and break the wielder's wrist from inside. A spear stacks for my ribs; I tilt an inch and let it go past, grab it with Conqueror's like a rude magnet and shove the will back down the shaft into the soldier's joints. He locks. He tips. He doesn't get up.
One with good footwork—old man, hips honest even under the red—slashes to make space. I give it to him: three inches, enough to set him up, enough to honor the ghost. Then I end him because ghosts don't outweigh Chrona's voice in my head asking me to hurry.
I keep the aura low. No sky cracks; no wasted thunder. A steady pressure wave rolls off me, a hurricane tied short around my waist. Lesser infected blink out on the edge of it and fold, twitching. It buys me seconds; I spend them on the ones who can still stand.
"Enkai—tiled."
I drop nine small suns in a pattern across the court—Go board shape, threes and fives—then kick each with Armament to pop them in sequence, not all at once. Blast, gap, blast. The wave stutters and can't find the rhythm to re-form. I walk the gaps and turn anything moving into not-moving.
The city gets clever again. It tries to copy me.
Heat rises in a grid under the stones—my own pattern, thrown back at me with red handwriting. The old grout lines I lit with Ryuo glow—the hive hunting my nerves. The floor will explode in three, two—
"Wrong count."
I pulse Conqueror's right on the "one" they were saving and break their timing. The grid pops out of order; the blasts cancel half themselves in cross-pressure. I ride the shock without fighting it, soften my joints, surf the stupid. When the air finishes punching me, I'm already a building and a half closer to the inner ring.
They throw a centaur-thing made of six men and a moose. Fine. I throw a wall.
Entei arcs up from my palm into a dome, thin, bright, loud. The centaur hits it, sticks, tries to ooze through the heat and discovers that heat can hold shape if you tell it long enough that it can. It does anyway, a little. I let it. When it's halfway, I collapse the dome and the moose screams as its idea gets cut in two.
I'm burning calories I don't have to spare. I rotate my toolkit: ten seconds on Observation high to conserve Armament; ten seconds swapping—let Armament shell my forearms while Kenbunshoku shrinks to a bubble; ten seconds no Conqueror's to let my will rest, then a quick pulse to keep the gnats fainting.
It's ugly and it works.
The living street opens a slit to swallow me whole. I throw a firebar across the throat to jam it and harden the bar with Haki until it's a staff. The slit gnashes, can't close, shakes itself apart at the hinge. I step over the tantrum, aggravation buzz in my teeth.
"Where are you, Goblin?" I ask the red. "Hiding or gloating?"
The chorus replies with something I was half-expecting: a choir of borrowed voices. Laughter. Pleading. A child's "Papa?" that's not any child I've ever met. It wants a flinch. I pay with a blink and no more.
"Nice try. Not my first war."
I peel the left current with a vee of fire and drive the vee into a cul-de-sac that used to be a tea shop. The hive follows because the hive is greedy. I slam the vee closed and make a kiln. Armament caps it. The screams inside are not real enough to stop me from letting it burn until the noises stop.
They answer with numbers. Fine. I answer with math the way I like it: subtraction on a timer.
"Higan—stitch."
I thread bullets across faces that aren't faces, each round a hot needle with a Ryuo burr. Everything it touches comes apart clean. A red monk leaps from a lintel with a blade that hums like Wuju; I clap his sword between two plates of Armament and let the heat cook the temper out of it. He looks shocked. I don't fix it for him. Hiken, short. He stops mattering.
A flyer with a mouth like a door eats half my sleeve and a chunk of Armament with it. My skin under is already blackened from the Juggernaut. It hurts. Good. I catalog the hurt; it belongs to me, not them. I shove a hand inside its palate and unload Ryuo like a mine. Its head opens like a flower and then decides not to be anything.
The wave tries a new geometry: spirals. Elegant. It wants me to track the wrong place and die artistic.
"Pretty," I tell it. "Die ugly."
I drop a ring of Enkai and reverse the spin. Hot wind catches the spiral and unwinds it into a straight line of target practice. I practice. Higan, Hiken, sweep, step, Ryuo pop—my legs know the ladder and climb it.
The inner ring shows again—closer, crueler. The crown of the Placidium is a throbbing heart you could park a ship on. Every tendril in the district is leaning toward it, feeding it. This is the sink. This is the drain. Everything that wants me dead is pouring through that one place to get at me now.
Good. Centralize your mistake.
A scream skims the tiles, pitched to taste like a memory I don't have time to indulge. Three clicks hide in it. I break the beat again—leave the silence where the command expects a step—and the world hates me for it. I grin and take the circle at a run.
"Keep going," I remind myself. "Just a few thousands or so to go... I don't even know anymore."
I shoulder a flyer out of the air with Armament and hurricane the lesser off my ankles with a Conqueror's cough. I spike temperature at my back to burn the hands that want to pull me down. I punch a hole through a meat-wall that had the audacity to decorate itself with old prayer slips. The slips catch and flash and are gone. The wall learns to be a wall again by being ash.
The wave falters. Not stopped—this place is fed by an ocean—but staggered. The hive adjusts. It sends a new sound—the low note that lives under the city and keeps the red in time. It means "hold him."
I mean "no."
I fuel my next Hiken with anger I've been saving since Noxus and shape it narrow enough to count as a needle. It sews a seam across the avenue and everything crossing the seam decides to be two things instead of one.
Smoke. Heat haze. A lovely rain of black that hisses out when it meets the glass gutters I carved earlier. The banks of my makeshift canal hold. The current has fewer teeth.
I taste copper and salt and the old metal note you get when a ship's hull sings against ice. My hands shake once. I let them. I breathe and drop the shake in the fire where I drop everything I can't carry.
The hive pulls back a hair, confused by losing at a thing it invented. It'll fix that confusion in a heartbeat. I have exactly that long to buy more space.
"Final for this pass," I tell my legs, and they agree like good soldiers. "Make it count."
I jump. The inner ring's wall rears up, slick as a whale's back. I lay Armament plates under my soles—three, then five, then seven—to keep the count mine and not theirs. I run up the red stone like it's stairs I built, Kenbunshoku dragging the future down into my ribs where I can use it.
At the lip, something big and barbed tries to take my head. I duck, leave it arguing the space behind me, and throw a last, petty Higan over my shoulder without looking. The impact tells me I was right.
I land inside the crown in a world that stinks like victory turned rotten. The heart of the Placidium pulses, fed by a thousand cables of red, and the chorus changes key. It sounds like laughter.
"Phase one complete," I say to no one and Chrona at once, and roll my shoulders while the next wave builds. "You're not stopping me with meat."
The hive hears me and decides to stop being meat.
It starts to think.
It stops being a flood and starts being a plan.
The hive lifts faces out of itself—blades and wind and shadow wearing people I used to know by rumor—and marches them at me like an answer key.
Irelia first: her fan is ribs now, each edge lacquer-slick, preaching geometry as it cuts. The air behind it comes off in square chunks.
Yasuo with a saw instead of a breeze—pressure sharpened until it bites. Zed peeling out of my own shadow, pupils like wet nails. Kennen crawling lightning that clings. Yi flickering four futures deep and smiling where he hasn't arrived yet. Wukong twining a staff out of spine and tendon; it grows hands to grip me. Ahri's tails shine with mucus and silk and her "charm" is not perfume; it's a protocol trying to borrow my lungs.
Behind them the citizens come like tide—archers whose arrows grow hooks midflight, monks that used to be men, cranes with faces that learned regret and forgot it, and the ground reaching up to help.
"Fine," I rasp, and that's me lying to myself.
Haki threads snap tight around bone and nerve. Observation pulls the next half-second forward by its hair—just enough. Armament plates my forearms, not as a slab but braided Ryuo rope; Conqueror's leaks the way anger does when breath can't hold it.
I take the first fan on the braid. Push in. The lacquer hum stutters; the edge skews. Yasuo's saw punishes me for the correction—cuts a ribbon of black off my right bicep, heat flooding the gap to chase the blood back into me. I hiss. He smiles like he meant to do it exactly that way.
Zed's knives come from outcomes I don't like. I pulse a small, mean burst of will—no theatrics, just get out—and the worst futures die. Two blades still kiss through the noise and scrape my ribs where Juggernaut already signed his name. The suit remembers pain and tries to give me the old breath. I don't take it.
Kennen drops a shuriken that isn't; it unfurls midair into a barbed net and wants joints. Armament hardens, Ryuo domes inward, pops the filaments off. Barbs stay. They itch like lies.
Yi appears where I'm going to be and edits the path of his blade mid-stroke. I catch a flick of his intent and he still gets tendon with the tip. Heat, Haki, move—the joint holds. He blinks through me and leaves a thin red complaint along my side.
Wukong lands the staff through the city's help. The impact goes church-bell through my ribs. I catch most of it, not all. Something cracks. My world narrows to a white line for half a beat. The fire grabs the line and eats it before it can write itself into my breath.
Ahri speaks, sugar in the sore of a busted tooth.
Not words. A cadence. It touches the place I count from and tries to take ownership. My lungs wait for permission they never needed. I swear out loud just to hear a human noise, and the protocol slides off, irritated. One tail slips past and drinks heat out of my shoulder blade. My right hand goes slow. I rip the barb and cauterize the wound in one motion that tastes like copper.
"Don't you dare slow down," I tell my fingers. They almost listen.
The citizens pile. Hands hook. Prayer beads remember they can be nooses. The ground shapes a square under me with teeth on every edge. I harden air into a step, kick down, and shatter the jaw. It grows a new one to be agreeable.
The ring tightens.
Kenbunshoku shows me seven answers. I pick the eighth because stubborn sometimes passes for genius. Higan sings through the bars Irelia wrote; a few needles detonate inside the lacquer and make it writhe like a bad thought. She doesn't bleed. The red heals into a sharper shape just to be petty.
Yasuo crosses me with an X that wants my head and my hips both. I dive into it—dumb bravado turned policy—and let it spend itself against braided Haki. The edges scream as they chew; my jaw pins itself to my face; my lower back lights like it's writing a letter I don't want to read. I come out smoking and the city tries to clap.
The symbiote square opens again, smug. This time it makes stairs in the teeth to invite me. I don't decline. I run up the jaw, take Kennen off his perch with a clap-sized Dai Enkai that makes him hiccup lightning and forget his name. He remembers fast. Everything here does.
"I'm coming, Peter," I spit, and the way the name tastes tells me how angry I am. "Hold. Please."
The hive hears please and laughs in a voice that sounds like everyone I've disappointed.
More weight. More thinking. The dead champions adjust to me like they've been sparring with my ghost for months. Irelia's cage learns to move in thirds, timed to the tick I've been using to live. Yasuo's saw changes grain. Zed's shadow stands in my stance and cuts where I would. Kennen's arcs chase the nerves the barbs woke. Yi is patient where pride would have made him greedy. Wukong's staff grows roots and the roots grow hands.
And the citizens don't stop.
Arrows with hooks. Hooks with teeth. Teeth with hooks. Tendrils trying to be ropes that remember knots. A monk in red lacquer walks up to my fire and scolds it with a gesture that makes it try to lower itself. I want to laugh. I don't have the air.
"Chrona," I say without breath, and I don't remember if the last word I said to her was a promise or a lie.
Another cut. Another thud. Another ugly decision.
Observation blurs. Too much noise. Futures stack; my head threatens to split trying to read them. I force it down to this step, this breath, this hit. Armament tightens to the shape of my hands and no bigger. Conqueror's rolls out mean and low. Not a banner. A growl.
Citizens drop. The second rank staggers. The third climbs over the second because the chorus orders brave. I take three long steps into the space I bought, Higan stitching a zipper through the wet where bodies are pretending to be one thing. Hiken deletes a mouth. An Aurashift—just a taste—makes the torrents slow like they lost faith for a heartbeat.
The ring closes anyway.
Irelia from the left, above, below. Yasuo's saw tight as wire. Zed inside my ribs. Kennen arcing toward the base of my skull. Yi choosing the future where he takes my knee. Wukong's length picked up by the city and turned into a lever. The ground shaping a trap it knows I'll step into because it watched me solve it twice already.
"Move," I tell my body, and it moves. Not fast enough.
The wire kisses my cheekbone; black chips off Armament, skin goes wet and hot and I clamp down. A knife slides shallow under a rib. My left knee gives a little yelp as Yi makes it his problem. The staff clips my hip; bells ring in the bones. The trap takes my right ankle for half a heartbeat; I blow the tooth that had me and feel another tooth take its place.
I push breath into a place that forgot it could expand. Everything tastes like metal. Every muscle files a complaint. The fire wants food; the Haki wants quiet; I have neither.
"Let me through," I snarl at a country, and it answers by being cleverer.
The dragon that knocked me out of the sky remembers it had a job. It tears a roof off the square I'm trying to cross, avalanches lacquered tile and tendon at my head, and snaps its jaws in the empty air where I'm going to be. I don't give it that future. I fold Dai Enkai small—no spectacle, all intent—and step sideways through my own blast. The dragon eats the wrong heat and rethinks for a second. The second costs me blood I can't afford.
"Red Goblin!" I scream at the hive, at the sky, at the man who put this costume on a nation. "Come down here and get burned!"
He doesn't. Cowards with good plans never do.
I drop three more citizens who might have been bakers yesterday. I try not to look at their hands.
My world narrows to Chrona's timed message—five seconds to read, ten thousand to live inside; Peter half a step behind a door I can't see; a chain on a neck I don't own. The Placidium's crown pulses, close enough to hurt my teeth. The hive senses what I want and builds walls out of people and memory and cleverness.
I feel myself losing.
Not dying. Losing. There's a difference, and it tastes worse.
The fire inside me claws for the latch I've kept shut since Juggernaut. The white-gold that isn't born of fruit pounds its fist on the door. The second speed—a gift, a debt—hums like a hive of its own in my bones, eager, impartial, dangerous. I keep both hands on both locks because I swore I would, because the last fight emptied me to the screws and I don't have a third miracle in me if I burn everything now and still have to meet the thing that owns this place.
"Not yet," I grind out. "Not yet. Not—yet."
A tendril darts past my shoulder for my throat. I catch it with braided Armament and rip it like rope. Yasuo moves where my eyes used to be. I feel him and fail to be there anyway. Cut number twelve opens under the old one; heat hisses; I make the steam say I don't bleed for free.
"Peter," I say to the noise. "If you can hear me— I'm coming. I swear to you, I'm actually—"
The dragon answers for him with a roar that sounds like a temple drum drowned in tar. It dives. The champions time their next patterns to its shadow. The city holds its breath so their cadence lands clean.
I breathe anyway. Ugly and human and mine.
"Chrona," I whisper to a desk on a sea I've never seen. "I'm trying."
Another hook. Another saw. Another square full of teeth. Another future that says lie down and let it be someone else's turn.
I stop counting the right way and count the wrong way on purpose—break the hive's tick, break mine. One-two—pause—one. My feet hate it. My hands love it. The ring stumbles, very slightly, at the missing beat. It's not victory. It's a breath.
I take it, and with it, the lock on the deeper thing shifts under my palm.
No speeches. No names. No titles.
I pull the heat I left in the glass gutters, the embers sulking in red stone, the insult off every blade that nicked me. Haki tightens until it sings. Observation pins the world to the table so my power doesn't tear it by accident. Conqueror's stops being a growl and becomes a sentence.
"Out of my way," I tell a country that learned arrogance from a clown.
And for the first time since I hit this ground, the flame that isn't fruit licks the edges of my breath.
The lock under my palm gives.
Not the second speed. Not the lightning Peter stuffed behind my ribs for a worse day. The other door. The one I've avoided since I earned the title I didn't ask for.
Heat leaves "heat" behind.
White-gold climbs my lungs like dawn through a furnace throat. It threads into Haki where it belongs—no slab, no flare—braids with Armament until the black turns radiant at the seams, hums inside Conqueror's until the pressure stops being a snarl and becomes a law. The air around my hands grains up like old film. The ground forgets it was brave.
Cosmic flame.
I exhale and the hive recoils like an animal that knows a collar when it feels one.
"Move," I tell it again, and this time the word carries teeth.
The next tendril that lunges for my neck doesn't char. It simplifies. Red gloss turns dull, dull turns ash, ash turns a line in the wind. The hook behind it never existed enough to fall.
I step.
Hiken, but wrong—no, better. The cannon-limb is a sun-cut, not orange, not yellow, a color your eyes call white to keep pride intact. It punches the dragon in the mouth while it's still forming the roar. The flame keeps going after anatomy runs out, draws a clean hall through rib and false lung and sac of oil that tried to be fireproof. It exits between plates that thought they were armor and weren't. The dragon's head forgets to be attached. It remembers to be smoke.
Irelia's cage learns new math. Her lacquer-ribs refract my fire into hard angles and the angles try to send it back. Cosmic answers don't go back. They explain. I put my hand on one bar, Haki braided tight, and the flame doesn't melt—it teaches. The rib understands that it was once sand, and before that starlight, and before that a thought that wanted to be structure. It chooses the earlier thought. The cage collapses into glitter that doesn't fall.
Yasuo brings the saw across with perfect posture. The air in front of him shivers into a board of force. I meet it with Ryuo that carries solar wind inside it, and the board turns to glass in my hand. It sings. He tries to cut the song. The glass-song breaks his blade like a stage prop. He laughs anyway, because some habits even Darks can't corrupt, and then the laugh stops because the point of my elbow—Haki, will, starfire—meets his sternum and sends the symbiote wearing him backward through three bad ideas and a wall.
Zed peels up out of my shadow again, knife already in the place a future said my kidney would be. Future Sight swallows the next beat and shows me a different hallway—one where I step into him, not away. I do. Cosmic Armament isn't black anymore; it's a corona along my forearm that flares when his blade touches and erases the edge before it erases the metal. He stares at the handle that's still in his fist and then at me, offended on principle. I take his shadow by the throat and burn its hollow first. The body follows the decision.
Kennen's net dives again. Lightning doesn't crawl; it hunts. My flame uplifts into a small sun just big enough for the net to want it more than me. It dives into the brightness like a moth that never learned. The sun inhales. The arcs go quiet, obedient as sleeping snakes.
Yi does the smart thing and stops trying to be fast. He tries to be inevitable. Four futures unfold, and in three of them my knee is his trophy. I pick the one where I don't have a knee to steal because I don't put it there. My step writes a different sentence—short, ugly, true. Conqueror's wraps my fist in a rule and the rule lands on the bridge of his nose with a noise that never pretends to be holy. The red in him flickers like it remembers training. Then it stops remembering anything at all.
Wukong spins the long root grown from a dead tree and the city helps by becoming hinge and fulcrum. I love him for the effort even now. I don't have time to love. I drive through the sweep, not against it, let it kiss the Armament at my hip, give it a meal, and then I burn the memory out of the staff so it doesn't know how to be hard for a second. My knee—still mine—finds his jaw on the way up. The sky shows up where his eyes were.
Ahri's protocol tries again, slicker, whispering an instruction at my breath: exhale when I say. It doesn't touch my lungs this time. The cosmic carries grammar of its own—older than seduction, newer than surrender. Her tail brushes the edge of the aura and comes away honest, nothing on it left to lie with. She hisses. Tails writhe. I give her a bow I don't mean, then erase the one tail trying to be brave.
The citizens keep coming. Hooks. Teeth. Songs. The songs are the worst. Whole streets harmonize like temple boys learning a sutra wrong. Their mouths open on the same syllable and the syllable wants inside. I answer with a Hidaruma that isn't a bonfire so much as judgment: I lay beads of stars across their chorus and make them rest. Bodies drop. The symbiote peels off them in quiet strips and tries to run to walls. I burn the strips, not the skin beneath. Choices are a currency. I pay the rate I can live with, even if I don't know anyone left to live with it.
The ground decides to be clever again. It shapes a plaza-length mirror under my feet and hopes I gift myself my own flame. The cosmic sees itself and refuses to eat brother. I set Perihelion around my ankles—an orbiting ring that keeps other people's gravity from getting ideas—and let the ground exhaust itself admiring me.
"Peter," I say between hits, between breaths, between every bad decision I make into a good enough one. "I'm not late. I'm here."
The ring tightens, then rips.
Maybe they thought I was saving it for the end. I kind of was.
I plant my heel, pull a line up out of the scorched gutter I left when I fell, and raise Entei—not the bright ball of arrogance I used to throw when I wanted to scare a navy, but a star-seed. White-gold, dense, quiet. I name it Asterion because sometimes poetry helps me not scream. Conqueror's infuses the core until the air around it says please without meaning to. Haki shapes a path. Kenbunshoku holds it steady in futures that want to jostle.
"Eat," I tell it, and it goes.
It doesn't boom. It arrives. Where the wave of symbiote meets it, the wave stops being wave, stops being many and tries to be one and then remembers it never had to be any. Holes open in the crowd the size of small courtyards. The edges don't burn—too slow. They resolve. Citizens drop free of their coats and blink at me like newborns that remember taxes. Some stand. Some don't. I keep moving so I don't have to decide which ones to be proud of.
The dragon tries pride again. It dives with more armor, more mouths, more story. I meet it with Hiken: Corona—a spear of light that hums like a singing bowl when it passes bone. It goes in under the false jaw and writes a straight line down the spine. The head keeps going because the body believes it's still attached. Then the belief ends. The dragon becomes a red curtain and then becomes weather. The weather leaves.
"On sight," I remind the man who isn't here yet.
The dead champions keep trying to be clever. Good. I like having to work.
Irelia redraws the cage with thinner edges, numbers stacked on numbers, shifts it in time with the tick that got under my skin. I break the tick again on purpose—one-two—pause—one—and throw Higan on the off-beat. The needles land in the math where she didn't put guards and the whole diagram erases itself to avoid embarrassment.
Yasuo crafts a new saw out of pure intent, no metal, just bad air. My fist meets it with Supreme CoA and the intent loses confidence. He staggers like somebody told him a secret about himself he didn't like. I don't have time to feel sorry. My shoulder finds his clavicle. The red falls off him in ribbons that try to save face by slithering. I light the apology and step past.
Zed returns with knives that found new edges in places words shouldn't fit. He throws around my Haki and the edges arrive where they had no right to. I roll my wrist, let Armament open to Ryuo flow—outward, not wall—invite the knives through the space I choose, and they come out the palm of my hand without touching anything I love. He watches the trick with something like appreciation and fades wrong. I burn the outline he leaves so he stops being opinion.
Kennen shrinks to a lightning-dot and tries to be small enough to live inside a reflex. It's a good idea. I respect it. I close my hand and the sun in my palm does too. The dot stops being argument and becomes warmth.
Yi, patient even dead, tries again for inevitability. I give him inevitability back, heavier. Gomu Gomu—no, wrong script—Enkai compressed to a surgical line, Conqueror's humming, future-sight steering the point. The strike lands where his stance says "center," not where his armor pretends it is. The red hisses. The swordsman bows without meaning to and dissolves with something like relief. He never wanted to be this.
Wukong comes laughing because it's the only way he knows to enter a room. His staff meets my forearm and for a heartbeat the impact is the old kind: wood, flesh, sweat. Then the staff tries to grow a mouth. I char the potential before it gets lips and flick a Hidaruma spark into his hair because I can't help myself. He swats it an instant too late and grins at me through the pain. "Missed you, too," I grunt, and take him off his feet before the red can turn his grin into something else.
Ahri's tails—seven now, because the hive is petty about symmetry—whirl a shape meant to write over mine. I look at her and let Conqueror's speak in a voice I reserve for liars. It says: no. The tails drop, baffled, and I take three and leave four because some mercy is strategic.
The citizens falter. Not because I frighten them—fear is cheap here—but because the chorus loses tempo when the dragon dies and the champions stop being good examples.
I press. Cosmic Haki sings at my knuckles; the song says forward. Higan is a zipper. Hiken is a spine. Dai Enkai is a bell you only ring when you want the rest of the city to shut up and listen. I keep it small; I keep it mean. Every step costs me something I can name. Every gain buys me one more rooftop toward the Placidium's crown.
The hive tries sickness. The air goes sweet—rot and sugar and a memory of incense that belonged to someone better. It wants my flame to care. The cosmic doesn't. It doesn't purify; it clarifies. The sweetness parts in sheets that leave the floor sticky and nothing living caught in it.
"Chrona," I mutter, because talking to her helps me not throw the whole sun and be done, "I'm keeping your secret. I'm coming to collect."
I'm bleeding. Not much. Enough. The cosmic cauterizes, but pain gets its tax before the seal lands. Observation wobbles under the weight of so many futures trying to look important. I narrow it to a corridor a man could walk and not get lost. My breath hangs together because the flame holds it like a spine from the inside.
The Placidium shows itself the way a throat shows when it's done pretending to be a smile. Spires like knives. Veins like banners. A crown hive with a hole in it where my first shot went—too small. I aim to make a bigger one.
The ground rolls a welcome at me—a carpet of red that learns stairs, learns hands, learns names. It tries mine and chokes. I walk its welcome into glass until it stops thinking it can impress me.
Something laughs from the crown. Not Nyarla—different flavor of smug. Red Goblin, probably—proud of his interior decorating.
"Stay smug," I tell the sky. "I'm collecting."
More weight drops out of side streets. Bigger forms. The hive gives up on the idea of "citizen" and goes full beast. A boar with temple charms still tangled in its tusks. A koi the size of a tram, scales lacquered, mouth full of wrong teeth. A crane that forgot grace and learned artillery. They come at angles meant to force me to guard the wrong thing.
I don't guard. I own.
Perihelion Guard spins around my hips—three rings of low, lethal orbit, Conqueror's threaded through them so anything that tries to use them as purchase gets told off. The boar hits the outer ring and forgets it had a head. The koi opens to swallow the second—its belly becomes sky. I reach into the sky and pull the ring back like a coin out of a hat, shove it down the crane's throat, and clap. The echo is ugly. I let it be.
I keep walking. The path behind me cools wrong, then right. Red tries to reassert. The cosmic makes it start over and the start is too far back to matter.
I crest the last roof before the square beneath the crown and see what they've done with the place. Bridges like veins. Balconies with teeth. A dais grown out of people who forgot their names. On it, a throne that wants to be laughed at and feared at the same time. No clown yet. Just his taste.
"I'm going to kill him," I say again, quiet now, almost tender, like a promise to someone I don't intend to forgive.
The chorus finds a last reserve. It throws every voice, every tendril, every leftover champion trick, every citizen with a pulse into the square between me and that crown. A red ocean. Waves in time with a tick that wants to be mine.
I step to the edge and let the flame climb my shoulders like a cloak.
No speeches. No tactics anyone here needs to learn from. Just pressure and light and the decision you make when you remember who you're for.
"Out," I tell the ocean, and pour Asterion forward with both hands.
The star doesn't explode. It blooms. Petal by petal, white-gold unfolding into structure the red can't mimic because it requires consent. Where it touches, symbiote peels from skin like a bad shirt. Where it meets only hive, hive goes thin, then honest, then gone. The wave breaks around it, tries to learn, fails, tries to slither, gets tired.
The square clears enough to see the dais.
Something on the crown shivers—annoyance with a brain. A voice I haven't heard yet smiles with too many teeth.
Good. I've got enough left to be impolite.
"Peter," I say, because I don't know if he can hear me but I need him to hear anyway. "I told her I'd bring you home."
I take one more step—just one—and the white-gold wraps my fist again the way a friend takes your hand when you're about to do something stupid and makes it noble.
"Goblin," I call up to the crown, and every Haki thread in me hums the same ugly chord. "HE'S GOING TO DIE!"
To Be Continued...