The psychic flashback—a torrent of **Wrath's** red rage, **Pride's** golden disdain, and **Greed's** silvered schemes—shattered, its echoes violently replaced by the screaming present. The transition was nauseating, like being yanked from a deep, troubled sleep into a waking nightmare. The monstrous fragment of **Envy**, a towering silhouette of shifting **purple** malice, stood where the memory had been, and it did not roar. It simply *moved*, a paradox of silent, impossible speed.
High above, inside the humming cockpit of the JDA helicopter, Maestress Biondh observed through the enhanced viewfinder, her face a mask of carved stone. Her initial assessment, logged calmly in her mind moments ago, was already obsolete. *Target: large-scale hostile entity. Primary threat: raw destructive power.* Wrong. This thing's speed was an obscenity against physics. It was a lesson in terror, a reminder that the Sins did not play by any rules she understood.
On the ground, Folly's training kicked in a split-second too late. The moment the entity had fully materialized, her artist's eye, trained to capture the essence of a threat in milliseconds, had tried to impose order on the chaos. *The height, approximately fifteen feet. The shoulders, asymmetrical, flickering with stolen images—a coveted car, a scorned face. The light… it drinks the light.* Her hand, moving on pure instinct, flew to her canvas. The specialized stylus glowed with urgent blue energy. But the monster was a blur in her peripheral vision before her conscious mind could even register the movement. It wasn't that it crossed the distance; it was as if the space between them had simply ceased to exist.
One moment she was preparing her long-range attack, the next, the world was eclipsed by a wall of shadow and **purple** energy. The entity stood over her, its presence sucking the warmth from the air. There was no theatrical wind-up, no growl of warning. A fist—a mass of solidified envy the size of a small boulder—shot forward with the brutal, efficient speed of a piston. It connected with her torso with a sound that was less an impact and more a sudden, terrible cessation of sound, followed immediately by the sickening, crunching failure of her reinforced body armor and the ribs beneath.
The force lifted her off her feet, a ragdoll thrown by a god. Her breath was obliterated from her lungs, her vision a streaking blur of dusty sky and spinning ground. She cartwheeled through the air before crashing through the outer wall of a nearby clay-brick house. The structure exploded inward in a cloud of dust, splintered wood, and shattered clay blocks. Her body vanished into the dark, crumbling interior.
The monster's actions were chillingly precise. Even as Folly was hurled away, one of its large, shadowy hands snapped out with unnatural dexterity, snatching the falling canvas and stylus from the air like plucking a fly from its flight path. Then, with deliberate slowness, it turned its hollow, light-devouring gaze towards Ose.
Ose had already grounded himself, his muscular frame a bastion of stability. His staff was held forward in a two-handed grip, a familiar and comforting weight. The flat, circular prisms on each end began to glow with his signature **green** energy—the color of stagnation, of Sloth. It was a power that didn't destroy, but *unmade*, extinguishing psychic energy back into the void. He was ready to nullify whatever attack came next.
But no attack came.
Instead, the solid oak staff in his hands… *flickered*. It was a visual glitch, a momentary tear in reality. One second he felt the familiar grain of the wood, the cool metal of the prisms. The next, his hands clenched on nothingness. The staff was gone. Not broken, not knocked away. *Erased*. His eyes widened, the first true shock he'd felt in years breaking through his normally impassive demeanor. His mind raced, scrambling for logic where none existed. This wasn't a beast; it was a tactician with an arsenal of unnatural abilities.
From the doorway of Prey's curios shop, the true Envy, wearing Will's face like a ill-fitting suit, threw her head back and laughed. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated glee, sharp and cruel against the silence that followed the violence.
"YES! I *told* you, Biondh!" she shrieked towards the hovering helicopter, her voice cutting through the rotor wash. "I told you your precious student was going to regret it! Your children are broken toys!"
Inside the helicopter, Biondh remained statue-still, but her mind was a supercomputer processing the catastrophe. She had seen the crucial detail everyone else missed. The moment before Ose's staff vanished, the monster had glanced down at the canvas it had stolen. At the incomplete, hastily sketched drawing Folly had started. The drawing was of the monster itself, but in the corner, she had outlined Ose, his stance clear, his staff pointed forward.
*It didn't steal the weapon,* Biondh realized with a jolt of ice-cold dread freezing her veins. *It erased the drawing of the weapon from the canvas, and reality obeyed.* The object, tied to its depiction by Folly's psychic gift, was unmade.
"Yes! It's just as you thought, Biondh!" Envy's voice suddenly slithered directly into her mind, a psychic intrusion that felt like violation. The Sin was no longer shouting; she was whispering in the privacy of Biondh's own skull. "It liked the weapon, and it stole it! Quite the artistic critic, isn't it?"
Biondh's iron composure broke for a microsecond. A faint tremor in her hand, a slight widening of her eyes. The thought was a silent, involuntary scream in her head: *He can read minds?*
Envy's psychic voice answered her immediately, laced with mocking pity. "*Yes, girl. Every pure Psyche can do that. Your thoughts are just noisy little whispers to us. Your strategies, your fears… it's all a boring, open book.*"
On the ground, the situation was critical. Ose stood defenseless, his primary tool gone, facing a monster that could warp reality and read his every defensive thought. From the wreckage of the house, a low, pained groan echoed. Folly stirred, pushing herself up from a expanding pool of her own blood. She had been unconscious for only a few minutes, but the collateral damage was horrific. The section of the wall she'd been thrown through had collapsed inward, crushing the interior. The faint, dust-choked cries from the family inside had been silenced. They were not enhanced. They were just people. Now, they were dead, anonymous casualties in a war they never knew existed.
Folly would have been among them if a last-millisecond instinct hadn't flared—a desperate, full-body reinforcement of psychic energy that had cocooned her vital organs. It had saved her life, but at a tremendous cost. Her energy reserves were critically low, every breath a sharp, grating agony. She was alive, but battered, her weapon stolen, and the fight had been decisively taken from her before it had even truly begun.
The Envy fragment, holding Folly's canvas like a gruesome trophy, took a ground-shaking step towards the disarmed Ose. It seemed to be studying him, reading the flood of tactical calculations and rising concern in his mind. Envy's laughter, both aloud and psychic, was a constant, maddening taunt.
The first round of the battle was over. Biondh's best cadets were neutralized in seconds. The studying was over. The Maestress of the JDA, her own mind now a vulnerable battlefield, knew with cold certainty that her turn had come.