Lillia POV
Thirty minutes is a long time when a country is dying and learning how to be quiet.
We hid where Shen told us to hide—under an eave the red forgot to finish, with a view of the square and a slit of sky. Karma held the pocket open with her beads and a breath that never shook; Shen watched the angles and told our hearts when to beat. I held my lantern. Its bell didn't dare.
Below, the Placidium stopped pretending to be a place and became a ledger. Line after line burned out. Streets that used to hum turned to glass that remembered being sand. The dragon that was not a dragon learned smoke. The chorus lost tempo, then lost nerve, then lost itself.
He did that. The streak that fell like a comet and stood up like a verdict.
I watched him fight and forgot how to blink. He threw a sun—Shen saw it too; we both flinched—and then he threw a smaller, meaner one, and then he just... kept going. Not wild. Not sloppy. Angry the way a rule is angry when you break it on purpose. His fire wasn't the Goblin's lacquer heat; it was white-gold, patient and final, like the moment before rice catches on the bottom of the pot.
He did not stop until nothing red stood up again.
When the last echo lay down, the silence made my legs wobble. Karma caught my wrist before my lantern could tell on me.
"We hold," she said softly. The words warmed our pocket a finger's width.
Shen didn't relax. He counted. "Thirty-one minutes. Crown hive: crippled, not dead. Primary hostile: wounded; mobile; vector—north, toward the dais." He glanced at us. "We do not enter the square."
"I know," I said, even though my hooves—feet—wanted very much to run at him and say thank you with my whole body. I made myself breathe and named the feelings the safe names: light, warm, air. Not hope. You keep that one in your pocket where it won't get rained on.
Karma slid me a glance that didn't wake the red. "You've got his shape," she murmured. "Lend me a little heat—no petals."
"Just heat," I said. I kept the petals where I keep them—tight, by the bell.
I brushed the edge of him with what I can do. The emotion hit like a board: anger, yes—the big, clean kind that belongs to people who lost something and refuse to let the loss write the ending—but under it the ragged weight of not-sleep, not-eating, not-stopping. He was tired. Tired like the ground gets after too much marching.
"He's... furious," I said, choosing my words with tweezers. "And tired. And he's... looking for someone. The way you look when you already promised."
Shen's mouth moved half a millimeter. "A promise," he echoed, approving of the shape if not the odds. He peered at the ruin. "He clears quickly. Efficient. Minimal collateral." He paused. "For a sun."
"He feels like—" I stopped, because the petal I was going to say was a fragile one, and I hadn't taken it out in months. "He feels like someone I met," I finished, small. "Last year. Before the sky learned to scream."
Karma turned her head the way you turn to a wind that smells like rain. "The human," she said, not making me say his name. "The one who caught the red hunter's mouth and asked if you were hurt."
I nodded too fast. "Karito," I said anyway, because saying his name kept the red from owning it. "He could kill them. The Darks. I saw him do it." I touched the lantern's rim. "No one else could. Not... like that."
Shen's eyes thinned to slits—not suspicion, calculation. "Connection," he said. "Technique overlap: heat; precision; refusal to bargain. Scale: higher." He let out the tiniest breath. "Possibility: ally."
"May we hold that possibility together?" Karma asked, and when I nodded she set it between us like a bowl and put her hand near it. Not on it. She always asks.
The anger down in the square shifted direction. The comet-man—he had a face, of course, but the sky-name fit—turned toward the crown like a pilgrim who hates the temple. He limped, and then didn't. The air around his hands went bright again, and the leftover red in the cracks recoiled as if it remembered getting told no.
"He's not finished," Shen said.
"He won't be polite if we step into his path," Karma added, not as a warning—just accounting.
"I could go," I whispered, and even I heard how eager it was. "Just to—just to say a petal. 'Thank you.' Or 'We're here.' Or—" I shut my mouth. Eager is noisy.
Shen didn't scold. He tilted his head toward the jag of roof where the wind still worked. "Look," he said.
I looked. The square was a map of what he'd chosen to save and what he'd chosen to erase. Where the white-gold had bloomed, the hive was gone all the way back to honest matter. Where it had struck meat, red and meat had burned together into glass that wasn't anybody anymore. The champions who used to be our friends were quiet. The citizens who had been the chorus lay where they fell, not moving. Some were only ash.
My throat did the small close and then opened again because Karma's hand was near the bowl. "He did what had to be done," I said, and the words hurt and were true, both.
"We do not rush someone mid-ritual," Karma murmured. "We wait on the other side and offer water."
Shen nodded once. "We make ourselves visible when visibility is not a threat. We signal first. Bells, not blades."
I held up my lantern. My hand shook. I lowered it. "He's like Karito," I said, softer. "Not the same sound, but... the same chord. If he's connected—if he knows him—if he's here because of him—" The petal jumped in my chest and I pretended I hadn't noticed.
Karma felt it; of course she did. She didn't take it. "If he is, we have a road," she said. "If he is not, we still have one more person than we did this morning. We hold both truths gently."
Shen glanced at the sky. "We wait," he said. "We watch for a window between his anger and his next sun." He checked the angles. "We approach on the west edge. Roofline. Hands open. No sudden moves. Lillia speaks first."
"Me?" I squeaked, because some habits even the end of the world can't burn out.
"You read," Shen said. "He will hear you. Or he won't. Either way, we learn."
Karma smiled with her eyes again. "May I amplify your steadiness for the waiting?" she asked.
"Yes," I breathed. "Just the steadiness. Not the petals."
"Not the petals," she promised, and the tightness in my shoulders loosened enough that the world stopped ringing.
Down in the ruin, the comet-man lifted his head toward the dais and said something I couldn't catch. The word carried like iron anyway. He stepped forward, and the light around him folded up like a cloak settling.
Shen counted, eyes on the crown. "We give him five thousand heartbeats," he said. "If the crown does not answer by then, we move."
"Five thousand?" I squeaked again, then made my voice useful. "Okay. We can—we can count petals."
Karma actually laughed, a quiet thing that didn't wake any teeth. "We can," she said. "We keep our count. We keep our words dry. We keep our feet where the roof remembers being tile."
"And we keep our hope in our pockets," I added, pressing a palm over mine. It was very warm there, suddenly. Not burning. Not yet.
The Placidium breathed, now the way a battlefield breathes when the worst part takes a breath before it decides whether to be over. We waited anyway. We can do that. We've had practice.
I watched the man who fell like a star and stood like a rule take one more step toward the crown, and for the first time in a year, the city did not feel larger than my hands.
Ace POV
The path I'm walking isn't a road so much as a decision: star-grit hanging in the air where my feet insist on it, burning away as soon as I leave it behind. I'm panting hard enough to taste iron. There's meat on my coat that isn't mine. Some of it still twitches.
Lee Sin was the last to stand.
He came out of the hive wearing the monastery like a mask—cords of red spellwork braided into his arms, eyes open but wrong, prayer beads fused into lacquer across his knuckles. He bowed the way you bow to a fire you mean to smother and hit me like a bell. For a minute we were monks, and the world was simple: breath, strike, answer, step.
Then I put my hand on his chest and showed him a sun.
I threw him so hard the shockwave cracked the mountainside. The Hirana Monastery—what was left of it—caved in strips, roofs folding like paper, bells falling out of their frames and ringing themselves to death on the way down. The red tried to hold it together. It learned gravity instead.
Silence after that. Not peace. The kind of quiet a battlefield uses to count the pieces it still owns.
"Open inventory," I rasp.
The HUD answers like a tired friend. A green icon blinks to life at my wrist, rolling up a familiar menu. I tap the potion slot. A vial rises out of nothing like it was waiting behind my shoulder all along. I smash it across my collarbone and soak in the sting. Green sparks knit muscle; breath stops hating me.
I reach for a second. The menu stutters. Flickers. Every icon grays out at once and a little lock curls shut with a cheerful click.
ACCESS: REVOKED
Source trace: NEARBY DARK
I click my tongue. "Of course."
Fine. We do it sore.
The Placidium's crown is in front of me again—the spires and veins and teeth, the dais built out of people who forgot their names. Bodies litter the way up, cooling wrong, then right where my flame taught them how. The air smells like wet plastic and old prayers.
I'm tired. Noxus grit still in my teeth. Juggernaut's aftershocks in my joints. Thirty minutes of murdering a country and I can still feel the shape of the next fight waiting like a dare.
I don't slow. The entrance melts when I look at it too hard. I don't bother with a door. Doors are for people who expect to be invited.
"GOBLIN!" My voice rakes the square raw. "SHOW YOURSELF!"
Cosmic heat leaks between my teeth and the walls sag. Veins blister. I walk through rooms and harvest the reasons they thought they were rooms. I burn archives that are really throats. I kick down altars with teeth. In every space, one job: find Peter.
He was my partner before he had a choice. He became my friend after. They took him. They sanded the good out of his head and stapled bad to the places that hurt most and laughed while he bled. For every minute he hurt, I owe them ten. For every breath they stole, I owe them a year.
I keep going down. The Placidium rearranges itself to make me late. I teach it disappointment.
Bottom floor.
The temperature drops in that wrong way—like the air is proud of not having a temperature. I feel him before I see him. Familiar as a habit I hate breaking. The world tilts very slightly and I have to put my hand on the wall to convince it I'm not the one moving.
Door. Not wood. Not metal. It looks like stone if you squint and if you stop squinting it looks like the idea of "no." I reach for the handle and the handle reaches back in knives. The pain that hits me isn't sharp. It's specific. Every molecule of skin sings the same note: Darkenstine. Pure. The kind that eats Narralith for breakfast.
Good. At least I know where I am.
I brace and shove Haki and heat at it anyway. Pain answers. The door hums a refusal and tries to learn my wrist. I grit my teeth and push harder.
Then it clicks and opens on its own.
I freeze. My first instinct is to go. My second is to live long enough to make going mean something. I choose the second and put the urge in my back pocket where the heat keeps it honest.
"Whoever's in there," I call, low and even, "you get one chance to step out with your hands up and a reason not to die."
No answer. Then: movement. Slow. Wrong-weighted. A shadow, then a man.
Peter.
Stumbling. One lens cracked. Suit scorched and welded where the black has crawled over the red like ivy. His chest rises and falls in a broken metronome. He doesn't say anything.
Relief hits me so hard I have to put my hand against the jamb again. I'm halfway laughing already, the kind you hate yourself for because it sounds like crying. "Hey," I say, and my voice is softer than the room deserves. "Hey, I got you. I'm here."
He comes on a diagonal like someone rearranged the floor while he was learning it. I step in, slow. "Trap?" I ask the air. "Tell me now."
Nothing tells me anything. For once I risk wanting it not to be a trap.
He's close enough that I can see the hairline split along his jawplate. Close enough to count the flecks of not-mud on his collar. I reach up and put my hand on his shoulder and he folds into me like gravity has finally remembered who it owes.
I wrap him. Not careful. Tight. "You're okay," I lie. "I've got you. Do you need—" I stop. "Potions. Right. Inventory's being an ass. I'll find a—"
He is very still. I can feel the hum of the Speed core under his ribs, the idiot, obedient thrum of a machine that will do anything you ask if you ask like a law. I pull back to look at him and—
"Peter," I say. "Look at me. Talk to me. What did he do? What do you need? Say something."
His mouth opens.
The sound that comes out is wrong and perfect. Text read aloud by a mouth that likes wires more than tongues. It arrives without breath. It arrives like a menu option you didn't remember installing.
HELLO, ACE.
Everything in me stops. Not physically. The body keeps being a body. But the part of me that was already halfway to the next sentence stumbles on nothing and cuts its knees open.
"What," I say. It's not a question and it isn't anything useful either.
The Iron Spider limb punches through me at the same time the syllables catch up.
I don't see it. My Observation hasn't been sleeping in hours and somehow it's asleep right now. The stinger goes in under the ribs and out the back, clean, like it's proud of how efficient it is. For half a beat the pain doesn't land because shock gets there first. Then the dark in the alloy pierces my flesh, my bones and the universe finds a new way to say "bad fit."
Air claws at me. I taste blood and melted glass.
DID YOU REALLY THINK, the voice asks, gentle as a teacher, THAT SAVING YOUR FRIEND WOULD BE THIS EASY?
I look up. The faceplate is still Peter's, hairline crack and all. The lenses narrow in a way I recognize and hate. The mouth—his mouth—tilts.
I want to say "name." What I say is, "What did you do to him."
WE GAVE HIM EVERYTHING HE WANTED, the thing says. A ROOM WHERE HEROISM STILL MATTERED. A CITY THAT LET HIM FIX IT. A LOVE HE COULD HOLD. WE LET HIM WIN JUST ENOUGH TO BELIEVE HE WAS STILL THAT MAN. AND THEN WE TOOK IT AWAY.
The limb twists. Stars pop behind my eyes like someone slapping a projector.
"Get out of him."
NO. The refusal arrives like a closed door. HE'S QUIET NOW. HE'S TIRED. WE ARE VERY GOOD AT TIRED.
Rage hits me clean. It fills the places pain would like to occupy. It moves my hand before the next word.
My palm slams into his chestplate and cosmic flame answers the oath in my knuckles. We go through a wall together. The room behind the wall decides to be outside. The air screams when it loses the ceiling. The limb rips out of me on the way through and leaves a sentence of blood up the hall.
We hit the floor. I hit him again because talking seems like a bad use of time. The impact turns tile into powder. The speed I've been refusing wakes up out of spite and climbs my tendons in lightning. I'm already moving when I realize I'm moving.
"What. Did. You. Do. To. My. Friend."
WE MADE HIM BEAUTIFUL, the voice says through Peter's teeth, delighted. WE SHOWED HIM HOW OFTEN HE LOSES. WE PUT HIS HANDS ON THE MOMENTS HE COULDN'T SAVE. WE GAVE HIM LOVERS AND TOOK THEM AWAY IN WAYS THAT TAUGHT HIM HE WAS THE REASON. WE ERASED THE PARTS THAT HURT CORRECTLY AND LEFT THE PARTS THAT HURT USEFULLY. WE LOCKED HIS SOUL IN A QUIET PLACE WHERE IT CAN COUNT WITHOUT INTERRUPTING. AND THEN WE PUT THE BODY ON SOMEBODY WHO KNOWS HOW TO USE IT.
It's smiling. It shouldn't know how to smile like that. The limb that stabbed me coils, ready to try again.
"Give him back."
COME TAKE HIM. Cheerful. IF YOU CAN.
The black rises over the red in a slick waves like oil deciding to be muscle. The symbiote kisses old plates and they vanish under it, shape smoothing, angles learning hunger. My eyes find the seams where Peter's suit used to breathe and all I see is gloss.
"You parasite," I spit.
YOUR WORDS, it purrs. MINE ARE CLEANER.
It moves. So do I. Speed Force and cosmic flame braid in a scream my nerves think is music. The floor evaporates where I was. We meet hard enough for the walls to forget what corners are.
Punch. Parry. The stinger tries for the same shape and I don't let it. Observation comes back like a friend who was just outside smoking. Future-snap: left feint, right blade, knee. I slip the feint, eat the blade on Armament that flares white at the edges, drive my own knee into the plate over its gut. Something inside him—inside it—grunts in a rhythm that's not Peter's. Good.
It laughs anyway. YOU ARE LATE, it says. WE ALREADY TURNED HIM INTO SOMETHING USEFUL. YOU ARE AN EXTRA. A SCENE WE CAN CUT.
"You underestimate my taste for being stubborn."
WE HAVE A BUTTON FOR STUBBORN.
Its hand hits its wrist. The walls around us decide to be sun.
I don't see the mechanism. I feel the flavor. Dark—pure, engineered, sharpened. The kind of blast that rings Narralith like a glass and makes it go out of tune. Atomic in the way devils love: not physics, but intent.
I try to ride it. The Haki armor surges white and then screams. Cosmic flame flares and then coughs as the dark in the wave bites the edges and eats the rules that let me cheat.
The world goes white. Then red. Then the part of me that names colors decides to sit this one out.
When the light quits, I'm on my back in the square I cleared, new crater inside the old one. The crown's dais is missing a tooth. Three roofs away a bridge sags and drips. The chorus of the city is a chorus again—every voice in unison, pointed at my name like throwing knives.
I taste blood. The hole in me is shallow now—cauterized—but every inch of skin feels like I'm wearing a shirt made of hornets. My inventory is still locked. The potion glass in my hair glitters like a joke.
Footsteps. Not loud. Precise enough to be petty.
He—no, it—walks toward me as if this were a clinic and it had an appointment. Peter's silhouette. Peter's balance. Peter's shadow behaving like a well-trained animal at its heels. It kneels beside me without creaking.
WHAT CAN BE WORSE, it asks mildly, THAN DYING UNDER A FRIEND?
I look at the stinger that went through me. There's a little bit of me on the tip that hasn't decided what to be yet. I refuse to give it ideas.
"You're going to learn."
WE COLLECT LESSONS, it says, pleased. WE'LL TAKE YOURS AND THEN TAKE YOUR BODY. I LIKE HOW YOU WEAR WILL.
It leans in. If I were the kind of man who cries, this would be an excellent time.
I am the kind of man who remembers who he promised.
Chrona's voice in a disappearing message: Please, Ace—Guardian of Prometheus Flames... save Peter Parker.
Adriel's hand on my shoulder without weight: Bring him home.
Artoria's steady look: You will.
My name doesn't need to be bigger than theirs. It just needs to be loud enough right now.
I push my hand into the floor and the floor remembers how to be starpath for me. Speed climbs with a snarl. The cosmic flame—that clean dawn throat that lives under the ordinary heat—opens wider than it ever has in this place. The square buckles. Lines of white-gold sprint out from my palm like veins learning a better purpose.
"Get—" My voice rakes itself raw. "—off—him."
The blast throws him—throws it—back a dozen meters. It flips and lands like a cat because Peter's body is a bad teacher for humility. We're both on our feet before the dust decides to drop.
I burn. Not pretty. Not poetic. Violent, ugly, necessary light. Speed makes choices for me I'd make anyway. Future-sight and fury shake hands and decide to be friends for one minute exactly. My aura throws sparks that don't fall; they stand up and become rules.
"GIVE PETER BACK!!"
It grins with his mouth.
COME AND GET HIM, THEN!
The black finishes swallowing the last red on the suit. Stingers bloom. The lenses blade down. Somewhere under the gloss something knocks—once, twice.
Three.
My heel stutters a half-beat because that's Peter's count and my body remembers. The thing living in him grins and spends that hesitation like money.
Web—not silk, not mercy—spools out in a lattice of monofilament that tries to measure my joints. I burn the nearest strand before it names my elbow; the far end whips around a pillar and turns it into a sling. The pillar comes at my head. I duck late on purpose, take it across the shoulders instead of the throat, and answer with a short, mean hook that makes the square peal.
We cross the floor and set it on fire by existing. My fist meets its forearm and the air between us goes plate-struck; shock knocks bodies-that-were-walls off their hooks. I step through the rebound, shoulder into its chest—then stop the next inch because that inch would shatter a sternum I need to keep breathing later.
It bleeds momentum, recalculates mid-spin, and tries to spear me with an ankle blade I didn't watch grow. Conqueror's sings through my bones—I refuse the category stabbed—and meet the blade with rule, not edge. It fractures. The grin widens, enjoying me for the wrong reasons.
"Peter," I say anyway, mid-combination, because I need a name that isn't the thief. "Stay where you are. I'm coming."
HE CAN'T HEAR YOU, it assures me, delighted. WE FILLED HIM UP AND THEN WE EMPTIED HIM OUT. HE'S BUSY COUNTING THE PARTS YOU WON'T BREAK.
I hit it hard enough to make the crown hive twitch. It hits me back hard enough to make my flame exhale. Breath leaves; I take it back on principle. Speed moves my feet. Haki keeps my bones loyal. I drive it through a column and it threads itself around the debris in a way that says longer roads walked; it ricochets me off a balustrade and the rail learns to be sand.
Observation splits futures along my knuckles. Three say left. One says right. The one that hurts more is usually the honest one; I step into it. Stinger kisses the space where my liver isn't; my elbow answers its chin where it has always been. Something inside it rings like a bell that hates being a bell.
It wipes Peter's mouth with the back of Peter's hand as if blood belonged to it. GOOD, it purrs. YOU LEARN FAST. YOU ALSO PULL.
"You won't like what's next."
I open the space around my heart and let the star out as wire, not blossom. Asterion compresses until the hum is a thread only nerve and guilt can hear. I thread it through my knuckles and punch.
It doesn't burn. It edits. It slips between plates that thought they were seamless—and meets a micro-tilt and a sacrificial sheath of black that takes the first inch on purpose. The line still writes truth, but not through anything vital. It hisses, surprised; the hole closes too quickly for satisfaction.
THANK YOU, it says, amused. FOR AIMING AWAY FROM THE HEART. AGAIN.
I bite down on the answer I want to give and taste copper. Every time I don't take a killing line, it buys itself two.
It presses. Not wild—clinical. It maps my flinch for "don't wreck the ribs" and coins it into tempo. Stinger high to make me guard head, heel-hook low to buy a shoulder, web-saw at kidney height to punish my turn. I cut the saw with Ryuo outflow, but the strands nick the aura by existing and I feel the sting where Haki meets Dark and both of us remember the word enemy.
We blow through another column. The old stone underneath remembers being temple and prays. The prayer goes unheard and turns into dust.
I answer back as clean as my restraint allows. Heel to stinger base, not joint. Palm to visor rim, not lens. Asterion wire across the bicep, not through the chest. Every mercy costs. It counts out loud.
ONE, it says, slipping past a guard I left soft because Peter's wrist is under there, TWO, stepping in where my hips refuse full torque because pelvises break, THREE, punishing the half-breath I spend listening for a knock that might be him.
"Shut up," I tell it, and the calm in my voice surprises both of us. "Not you."
I feint high, and when it bites, I change nothing. Future-sight hates me for it and then forgives me as the present opens. My head meets its cheek in a short, ugly crack; Armament blooms white at the last instant so I don't crush teeth I will need for sandwiches later. It reels, delighted.
MORE, it orders, not pleading. BRING HIM TO THE SURFACE WITH PAIN. HE LIKES THAT GAME.
"Yeah?" I rasp. "Then here's mine."
I let the star out in a line again, but this time I braid it with Kenbunshoku until it hums across every path I won't take. Asterion sketches a cage of maybes—non-lethal, precise, humiliating. The wire kisses the suit at twelve points that don't belong to arteries; the symbiote foams, confused, adapting; the limb that stabbed me earlier spasms like it remembers me.
For a heartbeat, advantage tilts. Then experience answers. It floods the suit with a counter-current—Speed, not mine—burning through the cage before it fully writes. The stingers flex into shapes I haven't seen—Peter's notebooks weaponized by a machine that never tires of study. One clips my shoulder as I choose "don't shatter the clavicle." It hurts. It should.
YOU'RE NOT FIGHTING ME, it croons, pleased. YOU'RE NEGOTIATING WITH YOUR LOVE.
I can feel the edges of myself fraying. The dark blast chewed on the parts of me that aren't just muscle. Every time I call the cosmic in a room this soaked, I pay double.
I pay anyway. Speed tightens. Flame clarifies. Will sets its teeth. I see us as two lights with teeth carving lines through a map that forgot how to be a map—its line straighter, mine wider, mine careful where his can be cruel.
"Peter," I say a last time, eyes on the body, not the thief. "Hold on to anything that sounds like me."
Then I stop keeping the room safe—just not him.
We hit like ideas that never intended to share a page. I take the head when the heart is open. I take the knee when the spine begs. I choose the bruise over the break, the blackout over the end. It sees it. It uses it. It lives one layer deeper than my mercy and taxes it on every exchange.
The square bucks. The crown rattles. Somewhere the old stone tries to pray again. We drown it out with the only liturgy either of us recognizes: hit, answer, move, refuse, burn.
COME ON, it laughs, delighted, cruel, ready to ruin. LEARN TO LET HIM BREAK. COME ON!
To Be Continued...