The town smelled like bread and smoke and the simple peace of people who had survived something terrible. Lamps glowed in windows. Children chased each other between carts. Kazuki and Seraphina sat on a low stone wall outside a tavern, tending small bruises and trading lazy grins. For a while the world was ordinary.
A thin chime threaded the night — a sound only Seraphina heard: the system ping.
AUREX NYX: Alert — foreign signature detected. Priority: unknown reality. Source: summoning vector initiating.
AUREX NYX: Threat: intentional manipulation of causal topology. Recommendation: engage?
Seraphina blinked. The Aurex ribbon of gold smoke curled from her palm, faceted eye floating like a careful insect.
SERAPHINA (amused): "Another party? What's the dress code?"
AUREX NYX: A single mind is summoning a survival-verse — predators, engineered ecosystems, forced trials. Intent: sadistic. Host suggestion: assimilation of creation protocols?
Her smile sharpened. She tapped the ribbon; the system's voice turned softer, hungry and polite.
SERAPHINA: "Yes."
AUREX NYX: Acknowledged. Module: Creation — INSTALLING.
AUREX NYX: New skill acquired: — Absolute Creation. Parameters: infinite scaling, cosmology forge, law-authoring, mana nexus control.
AUREX NYX: Do you wish to instantiate a sample cosmology?
She did. She wanted to see what the new key could open.
She closed her eyes. From Seraphina's palm the gold-black smoke braided, uncoiling like a painter's brush across the sky. Little seeds — concepts — dropped into the void: spin, gravity, breath, hunger. Dust gathered. A galaxy condensed like a bead on a string. Planets spun into orbit, oceans heaved, mountains rose. Aurex Nyx narrated in a low, velvet count:
AUREX NYX: Seed: archive. Law-set: variable. Cosmology: layered-multiverse. Mana lattice: emergent. Render: initializing.
Millions of universes bloomed around that seed — entire multiverses folding like origami. Seraphina laughed, delighted and cold at once, watching galaxies twine through the gold-smoke fingers of her command.
SERAPHINA (soft): "Yours is cute. Mine's better."
AUREX NYX: Catalog: sample multiverse created. Echoes: stored. Talent anchor: stable.
Far away, in a pocket of stitched reality, the sadist who'd been watching others play at survival felt a tug. He had called worlds into being for sport — a river full of twenty-to-thirty-foot crocodiles, forests dense with giant non-poisonous snakes, savannas crowded with hungry predators; islands of hunger where strangers were shoved to survive or be eaten. He had been patient. He had given himself the name the onlookers called him not by choice but by rumor: the Puppeteer of Hollows.
When the Puppeteer reached for his show, the system recorded his attempt like a whisper on the glass.
AUREX NYX: Low-Reality summoning detected. Source: Puppeteer of Hollows. Intent: abductive exhibition. Flag: malignant.
AUREX NYX: Offer: you may copy his baseline creation matrices. Accept?
Seraphina's grin widened — a predator noticing the taste of a different prey.
SERAPHINA: "Copy everything. Let's see what he's been hoarding."
The system spilled the Puppeteer's matrices into her Echo Vault. She drank shapes and rules: how he sewed beasts from thought, how he wove environment as theater, how he tied time to the teeth of predators so every bite echoed in the victim's past. She turned those scraps in her palm, polished them, and refolded them into new sigils.
AUREX NYX: Assimilation: complete. Concord forged: 'Hollow's Loom'. New unlock: Creation—Authority Tier.
AUREX NYX: Side effect: the Puppeteer has now triggered a direct summoning. He does not know you can be copied. You will be pulled into his domain.
AUREX NYX: Recommend: caution. Recommend: optional cloaking. Recommend: pick a toy.
SERAPHINA (carefree): "Bring me the river."
The river came like a memory of drowning — water too dark to see the bottom, black water buzzing with the dull, patient heat of teeth. Crocodiles the size of small houses slid in and out of eddies. Snapping jaws opened and closed like trap-doors. Trees hung heavy with serpents that looped like ropes. Predators watched from ridges: yellow eyes, slow tails, patience.
A puppetmaster's stage, designed specifically so nobody could leave.
SPLASH — the summoning landed Seraphina against the riverbank. The Puppeteer had wanted actors who would claw and kill to live. He had wanted to watch the raw arithmetic of survival across countless lives at once.
He hovered above a ring of his creations — a dark silhouette with eyes like green lamps. He was smaller than many gods, but his reach was wide: an architect of worse things.
PUPPETEER (slick, pleased): "Welcome, stranger. You're just in time."
AUREX NYX: Host: in foreign domain. Lattice distortion: high. Threat: Puppeteer — manipulative causal filaments engaged.
Seraphina blinked water from her lashes, smelled the salt and teeth and fear. Boredom flickered like a moth.
SERAPHINA (flat): "Cute river. Poor zipper on the breeding program."
The Puppeteer smiled — a snake of sound. With a motion like untying a ribbon, he sent black tentacles sprawling through the river. They wound under fish, under crocodile, slid up and seized — billions of hapless things — then he crushed them in a show of snapping geometry. Explosions blossomed where the tentacles squeezed: water boiling, life unstitched in microscopic screams.
CHBOOM — CHBOOM — CHBOOM.
He wanted panic to be his chorus. He wanted despair. He wanted to watch the tapestry rip.
Then the Puppeteer peered upward — a new pulse in his web. Across the stitched sky, a ragged seam shimmered with gold and black. His eyes, green and wide with proprietary outrage, narrowed. He reached for it.
And that was the moment everything collapsed into a single, obscene clarity: the seam was a looking-glass with a face behind it, and the face behind it was Seraphina's.
In the same breath she moved faster than metaphors could keep up. The gold-black aura that always hinted at her deeper shape condensed into knife-clear focus. She was a streak of black and gold and teeth and bone and then — hands. Her hand closed on the Puppeteer's head like a vice.
No weapon. No blade. Just a grip.
SERAPHINA (soft and amused): "You should stop picking on small things."
She smashed his head into the ragged void-wall of his own making. The void fleshed like tar, then like glass, then like a thousand mirrors that did not reflect. The Puppeteer's skull hit it with the force of telescopes colliding.
CLASH.
The void-wall did not break in a normal way. It recoiled as if insulted — it was not flesh nor stone nor law. It was the boundary between "it is" and "it might be." The Puppeteer's face squished against it and then rebounded like a slug from a drum. He tumbled back into the air, shimmering.
He revives quickly — that was the point of his cruel economy. He laughed through the pain.
PUPPETEER (shrieking with delight): "You— you are not bound. How— you are—!"
AUREX NYX: Host reaction: kinetic capture — successful. Puppeteer registers confusion: 'non-physical parameters'.
SERAPHINA (calm): "Causality doesn't touch me. You learned that the hard way."
The Puppeteer's fingers became instruments; he curled one in a tiny, intimate sign. His fingertip uncannily elongates into a fine blade of gold light, then twists until it formed a glinting cross — a plus sign floating between his hands like a rune-lamp. It shimmered, sharp and absurd.
PUPPETEER (hissing): "You are not even physical. I'll cut you into rules."
He lunged the plus-sign forward — a geometry meant to cage; a symbol meant to bind essence to law. The cross blinked and aimed for Seraphina's throat.
Seraphina's grin widened. Without weapons. Without drama. She stepped into the Gold-Plus with a soundless footwork, and broke it.
CLASH.
The cross snapped like a twig; tiny fragments of sigil smashed and hung in the air before dissolving into Aurex Nyx's filigree. The Puppeteer staggered, his neat instruments of causality turned to confetti.
SERAPHINA (low, excited): "I'm not a rule to be clipped."
PUPPETEER (rattled): "How are you—? You shouldn't be able to—"
SERAPHINA (eyes narrowing): "I told you. Boring show. Guess you picked the wrong girl to summon."
She cracked her knuckles slowly — the motion insignificant and menacing. The gold-black aura curled like a smile around her hands. Around them, the river watched with empty, toothy patience.
AUREX NYX: Host status: Overdrive ready. Combat configuration: Muay Thai + System augmentations locked. Advisory: opponent: metaphysical manipulator — caution advised.
Kazuki's voice, suddenly audible across the seam like a radio: "Don't go easy."
SERAPHINA (to Kazuki, grinning sideways): "I wasn't planning to."
She bounced on the balls of her feet. Not a bow, not a sword. She stepped into a Muay Thai stance — hands up, weight centered, eyes glittering like newly forged coins.
wind air blow.
The Puppeteer gathered himself — green eyes burning with a malice born of centuries of watching others die — and pulled a deeper string. Dark tentacles rebloomed, a thousand more, the river erupting with living, grasping geometry. Crocodiles surged, teeth like furnaces. The wilderness of his design lunged.
Seraphina smiled, a predator at the mouth of a new hunt.
SERAPHINA (quiet, fierce): "Punching bag time."
CLASH — CHBOOM.