The sky split.
The Watcher's presence no longer cloaked itself in distortion. It unfolded like a nightmare—jagged geometry, fractal wings of smoke and glass, a form that wasn't meant to exist in three dimensions. Every breath of the world seemed to warp under its weight.
Ships screamed across the heavens, Devilukean cannons firing in synchronized bursts. But each shot simply bent, redirected into nothingness before it could touch the creature. Their firepower was irrelevant.
I stepped forward, separating from Lala's hold. My body shed its human form in ripples, liquid armor flowing outward until my true mass pulsed under the sun.
"This isn't for them," I said quietly. "This is for me."
The Watcher tilted its fractured head. It had no eyes, but I felt them—millions of unseen gazes boring into me, dissecting me, weighing me like a specimen in a jar.
And then it attacked.
A soundless wave, pure vibration, tore through the atmosphere. Windows shattered, towers cracked. My core screamed in recognition.
[Weakness Detected: Ultrasound/Vibrations.]
The force rattled every thread of me. For a heartbeat, my form flickered. I dropped to one knee, claws gouging the marble floor of the balcony.
"Scourge!" Lala's voice was raw, desperate. Haruna's panic flared through the hivemind. Yami's instincts sharpened to killing intent.
But this wasn't their fight.
I roared back, forcing the Adaptive Physiology into overdrive. My body twisted, black tendrils hardening into armored ridges, absorbing and reshaping the frequencies. Pain ignited through every nerve—but with it came change.
I launched upward. The world blurred.
Claws met fractal flesh. The Watcher's body shattered like glass, reforming instantly. A dozen limbs lashed out, stabbing with razor edges of crystallized sound. I caught two, crushed them, but four more impaled through my chest and shoulders.
Agony seared me—then melted into resolve. I wrapped my tendrils around the invading shards and pulled them deeper into myself.
"Your tricks…" I snarled, blood and ichor dripping into the void. "…become my strength."
The system pulsed in recognition.
[Immunity Threshold Approaching: Vibration/Ultrasound.]
The Watcher hesitated. Just for a fraction of a second. Enough.
I surged forward, expanding into a storm of tendrils, wrapping its vast form, crushing, binding, consuming. My hunger roared, primal and absolute, until the skies themselves seemed to dim.
But the Watcher didn't die.
It whispered.
Not in words, but in thought. A message carved directly into my mind.
You are not the first. You will not be the last.
The shape shattered, scattering into fragments of light. The Watcher dissolved, leaving only silence, wreckage, and the taste of unfinished war.
I hovered in the broken sky, breathing raggedly through a form that was already mending.
Below, the army cheered in disbelief. Lala's tears fell like rain.
But I knew better.
This wasn't victory.
It was an invitation.