Episode 4: Comedy and Combat
The Archivist's words still echoed in their heads as the crew emerged from the subway tunnels into the gray morning light. Run or fight a god. Easy choice when running meant leaving the city — and everyone they cared about — to the Pillar's mercy.
"We need supplies and a new safehouse," Peter grunted, leading them through the overgrown rail yard. "And I need a fucking drink."
Kevin walked in silence, the Mythical Matrix's circuits glowing faintly under his hoodie. The destructive power inside him felt… restless. Hungrier since the fight with Seraphine. Wyatt stuck close, pipe still in hand, while Nathan covered their rear with subtle illusions.
They didn't make it far.
A strange, sweet scent drifted on the wind — crisp, sugary, with an undercurrent of rot. Then came the sound: a soft, wet crunching, like someone biting into fresh fruit over and over.
From behind a rusted train car stepped a figure that made even Peter pause.
She had the body of a woman — athletic, curvaceous, clad in a tattered red-and-green tactical outfit that looked like it had been grown rather than sewn. But where her head should have been was a massive, glossy red apple, easily the size of a basketball. A carved, jagged smile stretched across its surface, and two glowing green seeds served as eyes. A single leaf sprouted from the stem on top, twitching like an antenna.
"Applehead," Nathan whispered. "I've heard rumors. She's one of the independent Wrathborn. Completely insane. Loves playing games with fresh Glimmers."
Applehead tilted her oversized apple head, the carved smile widening with a sickening crunch as new fissures appeared. Juice dripped from the corners of her mouth.
"Mmm… fresh Rampager," she said in a sweet, girlish voice that didn't match her monstrous appearance. "The Pillar put out a big bounty on your shiny circuits. But I don't work for them. I just want to play."
She raised one delicate hand. Suddenly, dozens of oversized apples materialized in the air around her, each one pulsing with Glimmer energy. They exploded forward like living grenades.
Kevin reacted on instinct. He thrust both hands out and unleashed a destructive wave. Most of the apples detonated mid-air in sticky bursts of juice and pulp, but a few got through. One slammed into Wyatt's shoulder, exploding on impact and sending him flying into a pile of scrap metal.
"Wyatt!" Kevin roared.
Peter charged, Iron Tyrant form fully active. "I hate fucking fruit salad!" He smashed through a barrage of apples, but Applehead laughed and clapped her hands. The ground beneath Peter turned into a slick, sticky apple puree trap. He slipped, and she followed up with a spinning kick that sent a concentrated blast of fermented cider straight into his chest, knocking him back.
Nathan wove illusions rapidly — creating multiple Kevins and Peters to confuse her. But Applehead's glowing seed-eyes seemed to see through them. She plucked one of the illusory Peters and bit into it. The illusion screamed as she chewed.
"Delicious lies," she giggled. "But I prefer real terror."
Kevin sprinted forward, white-blue energy blazing. He was getting better at controlling the Rampager mantle. Each step left cracks in the concrete. He leaped and brought a glowing fist down toward her apple head.
Applehead's body moved with unnatural flexibility. She bent backward like a contortionist, dodging the punch, then countered by growing razor-sharp apple seeds from her fingertips and slashing across Kevin's torso. The cuts burned like acid.
"You're strong, little Rampager," she purred, circling him. "But you're still scared. I can taste it in the air. The Pillar wants to eat your power. I just want to watch you rot from the inside."
She opened her massive mouth wider than should have been possible and unleashed a torrent of pressurized apple mash mixed with corrosive enzymes. Kevin crossed his arms and poured destructive force into a shield. The collision created a sticky, hissing explosion that covered the entire area in sweet-smelling sludge.
While Kevin was distracted, Applehead turned toward the recovering Wyatt. She extended her arm, and a long vine-like apple stem shot out, wrapping around Wyatt's throat and lifting him off the ground.
"Such a tasty little sidekick," she cooed.
Rage exploded inside Kevin. The Mythical Matrix flared brighter than ever. Time seemed to slow as the Rampager mantle took over. He blurred forward, grabbed the vine, and shattered it with raw kinetic force. Then he drove his fist straight into Applehead's apple face.
The impact was devastating.
Her head cracked loudly. Juice and pulp sprayed everywhere. Applehead screamed — a high-pitched, childish wail — as she was sent crashing through two train cars. She staggered up, one side of her apple head caved in, green seeds flickering weakly.
"You… broke my favorite part…" she hissed, voice distorting. More apples began forming around her in a defensive swarm.
Peter, now free, grabbed a chunk of rebar and hurled it like a spear. It impaled her through the shoulder, pinning her momentarily to a metal wall.
Nathan hit her with a targeted Mind Labyrinth illusion — forcing her to experience her own head being slowly eaten away by worms from the inside.
Applehead convulsed, laughing and screaming at the same time. "This was fun! Let's play again soon, Rampager!"
With a final wet crunch, she dissolved her own body into a swirling mass of apple pulp and escaped down a storm drain, leaving behind a trail of sweet-smelling rot.
The crew stood panting in the wreckage.
Kevin helped Wyatt up. "You okay?"
"Yeah… just really hate apples now."
Peter wiped pulp from his face. "She's not dead. Freaks like her never stay down easy. But she bought us time."
Nathan stared at the storm drain. "She wasn't a Pillar scout. She's playing her own game. And she seemed… interested in Kevin specifically."
Later that night, in a new abandoned warehouse safehouse, the Archivist's warning weighed heavier.
Kevin sat alone on the roof, circuits glowing softly as he stared at the distant city lights. The Rampager mantle whispered in his mind — power, destruction, hunger.
Footsteps approached. It was Wyatt.
"We've got your back, Kev. No matter how weird this gets."
Kevin nodded, but deep down he felt the truth: Applehead was only the beginning. More monsters — fruit-headed and otherwise — would come. And the White-Blue Heart Pillar was still out there, waiting.
---
**New York City, a rooftop above Afterglow**
Elise found him waiting on the fire escape three nights later, exactly where he said he'd be, which should have been her first warning that Nick Parklands didn't do anything without a reason.
"You said drinks," she said, climbing over the rail. "This isn't a bar."
"Change of plans." Nick was sitting on the ledge, forearms on his knees, and something about his stillness had gone wrong since the club — colder, more deliberate, like a man rehearsing an apology before he'd done the thing that needed one.
"Nick." She read his face before she read the knife in his hand, and by then it was already too late to run. "Nick, what—"
"You've got maybe two years before the Pillar's scouts feel what I felt in that club," he said, standing, voice flat and terrible. "Two years before something worse than me decides your gift's worth harvesting instead of nurturing. Untrained. Unbonded. A voice that strong with no shard to anchor it just burns the throat out from the inside eventually. I've seen it happen. I've *watched* it happen."
"So you're going to *stab* me?" Her back hit the rail. There was nowhere else to go.
"There's a shard under this building. Been sleeping in the water table for eleven years, waiting for a death close enough to wake it." Nick's eyes weren't quite his own color anymore — something layered underneath, afterlife-worn. "I need you close enough to dying that it notices you. Not far enough that it doesn't bring you back."
"You don't get to decide that for me—"
"I'm not asking." And the terrible thing was, his voice cracked on it, just slightly, like this cost him more than it looked. "I'm sorry, Elise. I really am."
He moved fast — faster than a man built like him should — and the blade went into her side, up under the ribs, precise, a wound he'd clearly measured before he ever climbed up here. Elise screamed and swung a fist that connected with his jaw hard enough to snap his head sideways, and Nick took it, didn't even try to block, just let her hit him as her legs gave out and the world went white-gray at the edges.
"Fight it," he said, catching her before she hit the ground, lowering her down onto cold concrete with a gentleness that didn't match anything else about the last thirty seconds. "Fight the dark, Elise. Don't go all the way in. Just get close enough to knock."
Blood spread warm and fast under her hands. Her vision tunneled. Somewhere far below, the wound-note of her own death started ringing out across the water table like a bell, and something ancient in the flooded dark under the building lifted its head.
*There. There, finally, something worth answering.*
The shard didn't rise gently. It *erupted* — a geyser of light blue radiance tearing up through concrete and pipe and eleven years of silt, punching a hole clean through the alley floor below and blasting upward in a column that turned the whole rooftop white-hot at the edges.
It found Elise dying on the ground and it didn't ask permission. It poured into the wound Nick had made, cauterizing it shut from the inside, and Elise's back arched off the concrete on a scream that came out as *sound made physical* — a shockwave of pure sonic force that shattered every window on three sides of the alley and sent Nick skidding backward into the rail.
When she opened her eyes they were glowing faint blue-white, and her voice, when it came, carried a resonance that hadn't been there an hour ago.
"You *stabbed* me."
"Yeah." Nick got up slow, one hand pressed to a rib that felt cracked from the blast. "How do you feel?"
Elise flexed her hand, and a note came out of her throat unbidden — no words, just raw tone — and the rooftop door thirty feet away buckled inward like it had been hit by a truck.
"Furious," she said. "And also—" She stared at her own glowing palms. "—*incredible.* What did you *do* to me?"
"Gave you a shard before something worse did." Nick straightened, wincing. "You're going to hate me for a while. That's fair. But you're alive, you're bonded, and now you've got a fighting chance instead of a countdown."
Elise crossed the rooftop in three furious strides and hit him — a straight right hand wrapped in enough sonic force to crack his cheekbone and lift him clean off his feet — and Nick went down hard, rolled once, and lay there laughing through a mouthful of blood.
"There it is," he wheezed. "Control that anger, sweetheart. It's the best gift you've got now."
"I am going to make your afterlife *miserable*, Nick Parklands."
"Baby," Nick said, spitting blood, grinning up at the sky, "you have no idea how many realms have already tried."
---
**Tokyo, three weeks later — Kurogane Academy lake**
The insult came in fast, clipped Japanese, and Ignis only understood about half of it — but he understood the tone perfectly, understood the way Ito's mouth curled around the syllables like he was flicking ash off a cigarette.
"What'd you just call me?"
Ito didn't even look up from the water. "You wouldn't understand it even if I translated. It requires context you don't have. Context like *patience*, or *self-control*, or *not setting fire to the cafeteria because someone took your seat*."
"That was an accident."
"You're an accident, Lau." Ito finally turned, and there was something sharper in his boredom today, something that had been building for three weeks of shared classes and shared silence. "Loud, messy, always one bad mood away from burning something down. I've been waiting to see how long it takes before you actually hurt someone."
Heat cracked audibly along Ignis's knuckles. "Say that again."
"You're an accident," Ito repeated, slow, deliberate, in perfect English this time, so there could be no excuse for misunderstanding it. "Everyone here knows it. Even the teachers whisper about it. The boy who fell out of the sky on fire and hasn't stopped burning since."
Ignis threw the first punch already lit, flame wrapping his fist like a gauntlet, and Ito simply — stopped it. Not blocked. *Stopped.* The air around Ignis's arm went dead-still, heat draining out of the strike like water through a cracked cup, and Ito caught the dead fist an inch from his face with two fingers, almost lazy.
"Entropy always wins," he said. "I told you that already."
Ignis roared and threw everything he had — fire in both fists, wide arcs of flame meant to overwhelm, not aim — and Ito danced through it with maddening economy, freezing each burst mid-bloom, letting momentum die in the air a foot from his skin, again and again, until Ignis was breathing hard and furious and hadn't landed a single real hit.
"Done?" Ito asked.
"Not even close."
They fought another two minutes before a teacher's whistle cracked across the courtyard and dragged them apart, both suspended for a week, both marched off in opposite directions still glaring.
---
Six days later — the last day of suspension — Ito decided, with the same maddening nonchalance he did everything, that he wanted to swim.
"Lake's off-limits during suspension," Ignis said, arms crossed on the bank, watching him strip off his shirt like the rule didn't apply to people who found rules boring.
"So is fighting a classmate in the courtyard. And yet." Ito waded in without ceremony, entropy mantle keeping the cold off his skin in slow, deliberate waves. "You can stand there and glare at me from dry land. It's very in character."
Ignis didn't answer. He couldn't — his throat had already gone tight the second Ito's feet left the shallow shelf and the water closed dark green over his shoulders, because Ignis Lau did not go near water past his knees, not since he was nine years old on a boat with his uncle and watched the surface turn red and never learned the word for what he saw down there until English gave him one: *shark.*
He stayed on the bank. Told himself the tightness in his chest was just anger.
Then, four minutes later, Ito stopped swimming casual laps and started screaming.
It wasn't a performance. Ignis knew immediately, the way you know weather is about to turn — something in the pitch of it, raw and involuntary, cutting off in gulps as the current dragged Ito under and brought him up choking and pulled him under again.
"ITO!"
Ignis's legs took two full strides into the shallows before his body simply refused to go further, the old terror locking every muscle solid, uncle's hand slipping out of his, red water, a shape moving fast underneath — and he stood there screaming Ito's name at the water like sound alone could pull him out, hating himself with every fiber of his burning skin while the surface swallowed Ito whole and went still.
*Do something. DO something.*
He couldn't move. The fire in him had no idea how to fight something that didn't burn.
Below the surface, in the black-green cold, Ito's lungs filled and his vision starred out white, and something old and patient at the bottom of the lake — a shard that had been resting there since long before the Academy was built — felt his wound-note ring out and rose to meet it.
It didn't rush. Entropy never did. It simply found the dying boy, wrapped around the last spark of him, and *slowed the drowning down* long enough to rebuild what it found into something new.
The water around Ito's body began to glow — faint, light blue, spreading outward from his chest in slow expanding rings, and every drop within twenty feet suddenly seemed to lean toward him, drawn like iron filings to a magnet.
Ignis saw the glow through the surface and felt something in his chest crack open between hope and horror.
Then Ito came up out of the lake like the water itself had thrown him — a full six feet into the air, wrapped in a coiling helix of glowing blue current that moved with him, cradled him, deposited him gently onto the grass at Ignis's feet without so much as a splash out of place, the whole lake's surface eerily calm behind him like it had simply decided to behave.
Ito lay there coughing water, eyes glowing faint blue-white, current still curling lazily around his forearms like it hadn't decided to let go of him yet.
Ignis stared down at him, chest heaving, terror curdling fast into something meaner.
"Now you're like me, loser."
He snapped his fingers. Fire burst from his palm in a lazy, contemptuous arc, close enough to singe the wet hair by Ito's ear.
Ito's glowing eyes found his, and for the first time since they'd met, all the boredom was gone.
"You," he said, voice rough from lake water, "are going to regret that."
He surged up off the grass, current whipping off his skin in a spray that hissed against Ignis's fire on contact, and the two of them collided in the courtyard grass in a fight that had nothing left of sparring in it — fire meeting water meeting entropy, the ground scorched and flooded and frozen in patches within a single minute, three separate teachers sprinting across the quad shouting names that neither boy heard over the roar of their own new, furious power.
By the time staff pulled them apart, half the courtyard was a wrecked mess of steam and mud, and the headmaster didn't even bother with a hearing.
---
Both sets of parents sat across the small office two days later, and Ito's mother and father delivered the news in the same flat, resigned tone people use when they've clearly had this conversation about their son before.
"There's a program," his father said. "A country called Willowbrook. Its capital, East Hollow. They take students whose Glimmers are... difficult to place elsewhere."
Ito didn't argue. He never argued — that had always been the unsettling part.
"Fine," he said, glancing once across the room at Ignis, who sat glaring at the floor with his stepmother's hand hovering uselessly near his shoulder.
"I'll go to East Hollow."
A slow, humorless smile crossed his face.
"Apparently I've got unfinished business there anyway."
---
End Of Episode 4