The reality-wielder tried to vanish.
For one flaring heartbeat his hands folded the air and reached for a pocket of teleportation — a last-second exit. The world hiccupped like a held breath. Nothing answered. His teleportation gripped into nothing, as if some ledger had crossed out his name.
Fear broke his face into a raw animal shape. He bolted — but the arena had already decided its course.
WIND AIR BLOW.
Seraphina was already there.
Not teleported, not summoned — moved. In the same instant the fleeing man's knee was a fist of black-and-gold against his face. The impact landed with the precision of a hammer and the inevitability of a closing book.
KRAK — a clean, terrible sound of impact. Blood arced from his mouth. He sailed backwards, ragdolling across the void like a discarded puppet.
Before he could find his feet, Seraphina had drafted a geometry of punishment: vertical walls of compressed black-and-gold ether, walls that slid into motion and slammed him from side to side. He hit one; the force launched him into another. Again. Again.
THUD — BAM — THUD.
He went silent except for the sound of his own breath, ragged and thin. When he tried to speak a single syllable it unstitched into incoherent noise.
"All the people you killed," Seraphina said, voice flat and measured. "Here's what you get."
She opened her palm. A ripple of energy ran behind him — a blunt, expanding shock that hammered the air and pushed him forward.
WHOOM — SHRAP — CHBOOM.
She caught him mid-flight. With both hands she locked him and lifted: a grappler's artist. She spun, and the world folded — a thousand little reboots of momentum. Time itself seemed to hesitate as she slammed him front and back and front and back, over and over — a loop of impact that read like infinity.
THUD — THUD — THUD — THUD.
He did not die. He had poured the better half of his reserves into durability and clung to the filament of survival like a drowning man to driftwood. When the onslaught finally stilled, he lay there, bled-out and shape-bent, bones aching like broken columns. He tasted metal; his breath came in sharp notes.
Seraphina's face did not harden. She put a fingertip to his chest and cued the ledger.
AUREX NYX: Host: intervention available. Option: heal — or finalize. Host choice?
SERAPHINA (quiet): "Heal."
A wash of gold-black warmth wrapped him. Flesh knit back into place; he inhaled as if emerging from deep water. Life surged and the posture of his limbs smoothed — but not the will within his eyes. He sat up, furious and furious in a shallow voice: "I'm not done."
The old, practiced bravado. He tried to stand.
Seraphina moved like a shadow with teeth.
She stepped forward and — with a human cruelty that was almost playful — delivered a blow between his legs. He flinched, a choking, surprised sound; the momentary humiliation knocked him sideways. A ridiculous, human sound left him and the absurdity cut the theatre for everyone watching.
He spun up again, frantic now. Seraphina's next move was a ballet of violence: a midair kick that caught his stomach, a strike that folded breath and made him cough up a blot of red.
SPAK — PFFT — WHOOM.
He arced up, the force of the kick sending him skyward. Seraphina did not follow slowly — she was a storm in motion. She leapt, and in a motion practiced as breath she drove a knee into the small of his back as he spun.
CRACK — the line in his spine protested sharply; rotation broke into a sick arc. Pain exploded across his face and he went sailing, black void folding beneath him into a shallow crater.
Seraphina dropped to one knee as he fell. She watched him tumble, every muscle and thought a ragged scramble. He tried to push off the ground — a desperate, animal reflex — but she was already on him. Two hands locked across his torso like clamps of iron.
She hauled him up and delivered a series of strikes the way a master pianist might play a furious, old song. Fist. Hook. Uppercut. Each one measured to unmake a rhythm he'd been relying on all his life: the rhythm of offense, of taking, of hurting with impunity.
POUND — SHING — BAM.
He spat, staggered, tried to lift his arm to block. She wound a compact, devastating boxing combo: left-right-left, the third like a judicial hammer, the fourth a finishing bell that removed his balance and the last a palm strike that flung him into the air once more.
He rose like a bell with a cracked rim, then fell. Where he landed, the ground shivered.
She did not gloat. She did not raise the sword to dispatch, to erase, to preen. She boxed him into truth — bodily, loud, undeniable. Punch after punch, knee after knee, dominance measured and relentless. His breath broke into shallow notes. His arms failed to raise. Even his stubborn durability hummed out like an overdriven engine.
SERAPHINA (soft but hard): "Tell them you're sorry."
He could not make the sound hold. His throat worked; the words would not form. He could only cough and clench, a primitive human knot.
She slowed, hands stilling mid-punch. The finish was clinical, not cruel: a final cross that brushed his jaw and unspooled the last of his momentum. He went limp like a marionette whose strings had been quietly snipped.
THUMP — HUSH.
Seraphina let him fall. He lay there breathing, not dead, not exactly whole. He had been humiliated into silence — given back to himself with every edge filed down. The town's river kept time in tiny, indifferent ripples. The Puppeteer watched from the shade of his ruined designs, face a map of small, private defeat.
Kazuki rose from where he had lounged, pushed his sunglasses up, and gave a slow, low clap. "Clean," he said. Nothing in his voice praised the violence; it simply appreciated the craftsmanship of the end.
AUREX NYX: Record: Puppeteer subject — status: neutralized. Recommendation: containment and archive.
SERAPHINA (breathing even): "Take him. Don't let him bother anyone else with holes for gods."
They left him bound in a tidy coil of gold-black sigils — alive, broken, willful but no longer a threat. Seraphina's hands were steady; the ledger hummed its quiet, administrative songs. The scene was savage, but not monstrous. There was no spectacle in the finality — only ledger work done clean.
WIND AIR BLOW.
She cracked her knuckles and walked away with the rough, private smile of someone who'd given a lesson and then gone home. The man behind them made a small, embarrassed sound as he tried to scramble, and the echo of his attempt dissolved into the hum of Aurex Nyx filing another chapter.