The first strike came without mercy.
Seraphiel Vaelora did not announce herself.She did not warn.She did not hesitate.
The moment her wings snapped open, the air itself collapsed inward, crushed by an authority that once kept the cosmology sane.
Nyxara Eirene barely had time to react.
A blade of condensed heaven—pure, blinding, sharpened philosophy given shape—came down toward her head. Nyxara raised her hand instinctively, emerald light exploding outward as telekinetic pressure hardened into an invisible wall.
Impact.
The shockwave tore through the hall of the Celestial Castle, shattering pillars that had once symbolized balance. Sakura petals disintegrated mid-fall, erased before they could even touch the ground.
Seraphiel laughed.
"Balance is a lie," she said, her voice echoing with layered harmonics, as if multiple doctrines were speaking through her at once. "Philosophy is obedience dressed as virtue."
She attacked again.
This time faster.
Heavenly chains burst from her wings, each one engraved with axioms of faith, slashing, piercing, binding. Nyxara twisted her body unnaturally, telekinesis bending space around her like liquid glass. The chains missed by centimeters, ripping through the background of reality instead—tearing holes where meaning simply fell out.
Nyxara countered.
She clenched her fist.
The entire castle corridor folded, gravity reversing, direction losing relevance. Seraphiel was hurled backward, smashing through three layers of divine architecture—yet she emerged unscathed, wings stabilizing her mid-air.
Her smile widened.
"Good," Seraphiel said. "You still remember how to fight."
Nyxara's eyes trembled.
"…You were the heart of this cosmology," Nyxara said, panic seeping into her voice despite herself. "You were the one who kept the philosophies aligned. The mediator. The anchor."
Seraphiel's expression flickered—just for a fraction of a moment.
Then it hardened.
"That Seraphiel is gone."
She surged forward again, this time with brutality, not elegance. No symbolism. No restraint. Each blow carried the force of a collapsing belief system. Nyxara blocked, redirected, countered—telekinesis snapping Seraphiel's strikes away, bending vectors, redirecting momentum into nothingness.
They clashed.
Again.
Again.
Neither gaining ground.
Their collision warped the environment—light dimmed, then inverted. The castle interior lost coherence, walls dissolving into floating debris: thrones, scriptures, shattered halos, broken crowns—all spinning without gravity or purpose.
The space around them became a void cluttered with relics, a graveyard of discarded meaning.
Seraphiel lunged, screaming:
"FAITH IS A CAGE!"
Nyxara screamed back as she parried:
"NO—IT WAS A CHOICE!"
They struck simultaneously.
The collision erased color.
For a moment, everything became absence.
Nyxara staggered.
Her breathing hitched.
"…What happened to you?" she demanded, voice shaking—not from fear, but rage and grief intertwined.
Seraphiel hovered silently.
Then she spoke.
"I was eaten."
Nyxara froze.
"…What?"
Seraphiel's wings folded slowly, her light flickering.
"When you left," Seraphiel continued, voice eerily calm, "the cosmology began to decay. The gods argued. The philosophies conflicted. And something… noticed."
She raised her hand. Black cracks crawled along her arm—not wounds, but foreign inscriptions, crawling ideas that did not belong.
"It fed on unresolved meaning," Seraphiel said. "On doubt. On contradiction."
Nyxara's eyes widened.
"…You let it in."
Seraphiel smiled—broken, wrong.
"I didn't let it in," she whispered. "I couldn't stop it."
Nyxara's emerald aura exploded.
Rage finally overtook restraint.
"You were supposed to wake them up!" Nyxara shouted. "You were the one person who could have stopped this!"
She attacked.
Not defensively.
Not cautiously.
Brutally.
Telekinetic force slammed into Seraphiel from all directions at once—crushing, twisting, compressing. Seraphiel screamed as her form distorted, wings fracturing into shards of light.
For the first time—
Seraphiel Vaelora was overwhelmed.
Nyxara advanced, eyes blazing.
"This cosmology still has a chance," Nyxara snarled. "And I won't let you be the one to finish it!"
She clenched her fist.
The void around them collapsed inward, debris spiraling into a singularity of pressure centered on Seraphiel's body.
Seraphiel laughed through the pain.
"Oh, Nyxara…" she said softly.
Her body began to change.
Not explode.
Not transform cleanly.
It slipped.
Her form blurred, identity destabilizing. Wings became concepts. Face split into overlapping expressions—angel, demon, scholar, tyrant, child—each appearing and vanishing in rapid succession.
Nyxara recoiled.
"What are you doing?!"
Seraphiel's voice fractured—multiple tones speaking at once.
"I no longer belong to one self," she said. "The thing inside me learned how to wear gods."
Her shape stretched—expanding beyond angelic proportions. Extra arms formed, then dissolved. Symbols of countless belief systems flickered across her skin, incompatible, overlapping, screaming.
Nyxara tried to seize her again—
—but the telekinesis slipped.
There was nothing stable to grab.
Seraphiel's form stabilized suddenly.
Calm.
Centered.
Blue skin.
Four arms.
A serene smile that did not belong in this void.
Nyxara's breath caught in her throat.
"…No," she whispered.
Seraphiel Vaelora hovered before her—
now wearing the form of Krishna.
A divine archetype stolen and hollowed out.
Seraphiel smiled gently, eyes glowing with something ancient and wrong.
"Let us see," she said softly,"whether your will can survive meaning itself."