Elijah was a silver-white blur against the devastation, a living engine of precision and force. Noctura was her shadow, a whirlwind of phasing violet and abyssal black, her scythe carving arcs of un-light through the ruin-strewn street.
CLANG.
Elijah’s gloved fist met the scythe’s handle—not a block, but an interception. Crimson energy flared around her knuckles, a contained detonation of kinetic force that made the void-metal weapon scream in protest.
SHRIIII!
The blade slid free. Noctura spun, a dancer’s pirouette that flowed into a decapitating sweep.
Elijah ducked. The void-kissed edge whispered past her ear, close enough to leave a trail of goosebumps on her skin. She didn’t counter. She simply shifted her weight, Flow State Breathing a silent, perfect engine, her Compass Sense painting the world in lines of intent and killing pressure.
KRANG!
Another parry. This time the blade grazed her forearm. A line of crimson welled—then vanished. The flesh knitted itself back together with an unnatural seamlessness, her Recovery Acceleration erasing the wound before Noctura’s eyes had even registered the hit.
A growl of frustration, low and guttural, escaped Noctura’s lips. It was the only sound she’d made in ten minutes of this beautiful, infuriating dance.
“Tsk.” The Netherblight’s lips peeled back from her teeth in a snarl. “It’s like trying to cut water. You won’t even hold still long enough to bleed properly.”
Elijah’s smile was a sunrise of terrifying warmth. “Why would I? You haven’t earned it yet.”
She lunged.
But Noctura froze. Her head snapped upward, her shifting eyes—one violet, one abyssal black—fixed on a point in the bruised and bleeding sky.
A light.
It wasn't the ambient chaos of the ongoing battles. This was something new. A spear of electric cyan wrapped in a sheath of cyclone-force wind, twisting through the air like a vertical tornado. It moved with the lethal, singular purpose of a torpedo seeking its mark.
For the first time since their fight began, Noctura’s expression of delighted chaos faltered. It was replaced by something else. Recognition. And something that looked terrifyingly like relief.
A slow, genuine smile spread across her face.
With a whisper of displaced air, she dashed backward, scythe held defensively, putting a hundred feet of shattered asphalt between them.
Elijah skidded to a halt, her body a coiled spring of destructive potential. The red teardrop tattoo near her eye seemed to pulse with her own frustration.
“What’s the matter!?” she called out, her voice a sing-song taunt that dripped with theatrical disappointment. “Can’t handle fighting me? Don’t give up, I was just having so much fuuuuun~” She punctuated the sentence with a slow, deliberate stretch, a predator feigning boredom.
Noctura’s smile widened, her wings of living shadow unfurling slightly. “I don’t need to fight you.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder, toward the descending cyan comet.
“He will.”
Elijah followed her gaze. Her Compass Sense flared, a klaxon of warning screaming in her mind. She saw a shape within the vortex of wind and light. A figure. Male. Young. The pressure he radiated was immense—not the crackling energy of a speedster or the cold void of a Netherblight, but the dense, crushing weight of reality itself being compressed into a single point.
Her eyes widened. Her mind raced. But before she could even process the data, before her body could execute the perfect dodge her training demanded—
BOOOOOOOOM!
The world dissolved into pain.
It wasn't a punch. It was a physical manifestation of a physics concept that had no name. A fist, wrapped in an aura of deep purple energy, connected with her chest. The force wasn’t just kinetic; it was absolute. For a single, horrifying instant, Elijah felt the energy she stockpiled, the very current of her breathing, reversed.
The air in her lungs detonated. A strangled gasp, a spray of blood.
The world tilted. She was airborne, a ragdoll thrown by a god, the city a meaningless blur of light and shadow. In the microsecond before her body smashed through the first building, her mind, ever the analyst, captured one perfect, crystalline image of her attacker.
A young man. No older than seventeen. His messy, dark brown hair was a chaotic halo around a face of quiet, introspective intensity.
And his eyes.
God, his eyes.
Deep, burning amber, glowing with the weight of a thousand suns, each one a universe of stockpiled force.
Then, impact.
The skyscraper behind her didn’t just break. It disintegrated. Steel, concrete, and glass atomized as her body, carrying the impossible momentum of that single strike, became a cannonball of pure destruction.
She slammed through the next building, and the next, each impact a fresh symphony of shattering reality. And then, darkness.
[CUT TO:]
Qua’s feet touched the ground with impossible silence. The whirlwind of cyan energy that had been his descent vector dissipated into the ruined air, leaving only the scent of thunderstorms and compressed space. He stood beside Noctura, his gaze fixed on the mountain of rubble where Elijah had vanished. He rolled his shoulders, a simple, human gesture that seemed absurdly out of place amid the cosmic violence.
Noctura let her scythe dissolve into a wisp of smoke. She wiped a line of invisible dust from her shoulder, her posture relaxing for the first time since the fight began. “Took you long enough,” she said, her voice laced with a mixture of annoyance and real relief.
“My bad,” Qua said, his voice quiet but resonant, each word carrying the weight of his power. “I had to check out the battlefield. See what was happening. See what she could do.” His amber eyes, still glowing with residual energy, never left the devastation.
As if summoned by his attention, the rubble exploded outward.
BOOM!
Elijah walked out of the dust cloud. Her burgundy vest was shredded, her white shirt torn, but the wounds beneath were already closing. Her silvery-white hair was dusted with concrete, but her red eyes were blazing with an unholy light. They weren’t angry. They weren’t afraid.
They were ecstatic.
Her gaze locked onto Qua, her Compass Sense analyzing him, dissecting him, tasting the sheer, immense fighting spirit that radiated from him in waves.
“Ah,” she breathed, and her smile was a terrible, beautiful thing. “You must be the person this Netherblight was talking about. And~” Her eyes narrowed, crimson irises glowing. “Your fighting spirit is immense. Not only that. You use kinetic energy just like me~”
Qua didn’t look away. His focus was so absolute it was a physical force. “Junko,” he said, his voice calm but his intent a razor’s edge. “I think you’ll be needed to help out the Apostle of Kairyū and the silver-haired one. Go to them. Leave her to me.”
Noctura nodded, her expression firm. She didn’t argue. She didn’t question. When Qua spoke with that tone, it wasn’t a suggestion. It was a law of nature.
WHOMP!
Her wings of living shadow erupted from her back in a spray of quickly-healed viscera. With a single, powerful flap, she launched herself into the sky, a black comet ascending into the bruised twilight.
Elijah watched her go, a flicker of genuine disappointment on her face. “Sad. I was having fun fighting her.” Then her gaze returned to Qua, and the fire in her red eyes intensified. She slowly, deliberately, cracked her knuckles, the sound echoing in the sudden silence.
“But now,” she purred, “it’s just me and you~”
Qua clenched his fist. He sank into a low fighting stance, his body a coiled spring of potential energy.
Her ability is focused on precision. Surgical strikes. Absolute control. My Authority… my Authority is chaos. Raw force. Overwhelming power. To match her, I don’t need to be more precise. I just need to be more. So what I’ll need for this is…
Deep purple energy, the color of a dying star’s heart, began to crackle around him. It didn't just radiate; it consumed, pulling in ambient kinetic energy, the echoes of the distant battle, the fear of the city itself.
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His voice, when he spoke, was no longer just his own. It was layered, resonant, ancient.
“Authority of Stockpiling Forces: 50%... Hypernova Form.”
Elijah’s smile became a rictus of pure, unadulterated joy. Her Compass Sense screamed, every nerve fiber singing with the sheer, beautiful pressure emanating from Qua. The accumulation of energy, the raw, unrefined potential—it was the most delicious thing she had ever felt.
“Now that’s what I want to see!!!” she roared, her voice no longer diplomatic, no longer seductive, but the full-throated cry of a warrior who had finally found nirvana.
She planted her feet, the broken concrete groaning under the force. She took one deep, perfect breath. The world seemed to hold its own.
“LET’S DO THIS!!!!”
There was no negotiation. No posturing. The declaration of Hypernova Form was the only prelude needed.
Qua was already in motion.
He didn't run; he erased the distance. The 50% output wasn't just a number—it was a law of physics being rewritten in real-time. The air around him screamed as it was compressed into a superheated plasma, the ground cracking under the sheer gravitational pressure of his approach.
Deep purple lightning, the color of a bruised void, coiled around his arm. It wasn't just energy; it was a miniature, wrathful nebula, condensing all the kinetic force he had stockpiled into the singularity of his clenched fist.
“Colossal Fist.”
The name was a whisper in his own mind, a label for the absolute destruction he was about to unleash. He threw the punch.
Elijah’s Compass Sense didn't just warn her; it shrieked, a psychic siren that painted a single, horrifying point of impact in her mind’s eye. Her body, a flawless instrument of combat honed by Destructive Current Breathing, moved before she had even formed a conscious thought. She twisted, a single, perfect pivot designed to let the blow shear past her.
It was the correct move. A perfect dodge for a perfect attack.
But Qua’s attack wasn't perfect. It was chaos.
The epicenter of the punch, the point of absolute annihilation, missed her head by a scant millimeter. But the shockwave, the concussive shell of distorted space-time that surrounded the blow, did not.
It hit her.
The left side of her face ceased to exist.
There was no sound of a crack or a break. There was only the wet, percussive thump of bone, flesh, and sinew being instantaneously atomized. Her lower jaw was gone, turned to a red mist and vaporized tissue. The force of the impact ripped through her skull, shattering her cheekbone and orbital socket. For a single, grotesque moment, the inside of her mouth and throat were exposed to the open air—a mangled ruin of dangling gums, stray teeth clinging to ragged strips of flesh, and the glistening, severed root of her tongue.
The shockwave continued its journey, a tsunami of pure force. The ground behind Elijah buckled and split open in a series of yawning fissures. The wrecked skeletons of buildings a block away, which had survived the earlier carnage, were unmade, collapsing into clouds of dust and shrapnel.
[CUT TO]:
Elijah was sliding backward, her feet carving trenches into the asphalt. Her head was thrown back, and a torrent of blood, bone fragments, and half-chewed teeth sprayed from the gaping cavity where her jaw had been. The wound was a nightmare canvas of exposed muscle and splintered bone.
And then, it began to fix itself.
The body horror of the injury was eclipsed only by the grotesque miracle of her recovery.
Tendons, like bloody, living snakes, slithered across the void, knitting themselves together. Shattered bone fragments pulled themselves from the surrounding tissue and began to fuse, a sickening, grinding sound accompanying their unnatural union. New teeth erupted from a freshly formed gum line with the speed of sprouting thorns. Finally, skin, pale and opalescent, crawled up her neck and over the freshly reconstructed architecture of her face like a tide of living porcelain.
The red teardrop tattoo reformed itself by her eye.
Less than three seconds had passed.
Her jaw clicked into place. She worked it once, twice, and then a laugh, loud and utterly ecstatic, ripped from her throat.
“AH! YOU’RE EVEN STRONGER THAN I IMAGINED!”
Qua hung in the air a hundred feet away, the afterimage of his punch just now fading. His expression was cold, his amber eyes burning with the contained fire of a collapsing star.
“And you’re more fragile than I thought.”
He wasn’t there anymore. He was simply… behind her. No sound, no blur of motion. His Danger Sense had become precognition; his movement, a violation of causality.
He spun in mid-air, a bladed heel wreathed in purple energy slamming into her ribs.
CRACK.
The sound of her entire ribcage shattering was like a bundle of dry sticks being snapped over a knee. She coughed, a thick, arterial spray of blood erupting from her newly-formed mouth, and went flying.
She was a silver-and-crimson meteor, ragdolling sideways, smashing through the glass and steel facade of a central Tokyo train station. The concourse was filled with the few dozen terrified civilians who had been too slow or too unlucky to escape.
Her impact was absolute. The innocent people in her path didn’t even have time to scream. They were simply erased, turned into a fine red mist and scattered organic matter as her body, carrying the kinetic force of Qua’s kick, plowed through them.
She skidded to a halt in a gruesome spray of her own blood and the remains of others, leaving a deep trench in the polished marble floor. The surviving civilians stared, their faces masks of frozen, uncomprehending terror.
Elijah pushed herself to her feet, her ribs already snapping back into place.
Damn… he really does pack a punch. That wasn’t just force. It was… weight. The weight of an entire world. And his fighting spirit… it’s almost like he’s not even fighting me. It’s almost like every… single… strike…
Her blood-soaked lips curled into a slow, dawning smile of profound understanding.
He’s fighting himself. Every time he uses that Authority, it’s a war against his own soul. He’s not trying to kill me. He's trying to survive himself
She rolled her shoulders, a fresh wave of exhilaration washing over her. “So, if I want to win, I’ll just have to–”
He was there. Standing twenty feet away, his amber eyes locked onto her, radiating a pressure that made the air feel thick as syrup.
But this time, she was faster.
She took a single, massive, all-consuming breath. Her entire torso swelled as she channeled the kinetic energy of her own regeneration, of the terrified heartbeats around her, of the very air itself, into her fist.
“Destructive Current Breathing: Pressure Wave!”
She didn’t punch at him. She swung her fist in a horizontal arc through the open air. A shimmering, invisible blade of pure, destructive force erupted from her knuckles. It wasn't an explosion; it was a perfect, clean line of annihilation. The wave shot across the concourse, bisecting everything in its path with surgical neatness. Support pillars, information booths, and the remaining screaming civilians were all sliced in half, their upper bodies sliding to the floor in a cascade of viscera.
A primal scream erupted in Qua’s mind—his Danger Sense warning him of absolute erasure. He didn't just dodge. He ducked under the wave while simultaneously side-stepping its trajectory, the force of the displacement creating a vacuum that pulled tiles from the floor. The Pressure Wave continued, carving a perfectly straight, ten-foot-high line of destruction through the entire station and out the other side, where it sliced the top half off a distant skyscraper.
Qua crouched low, his hands touching the ground. All the stockpiled energy, the raw, chaotic force of his Hypernova Form, flooded into his legs.
“Kinetic Shift.”
He wasn’t just fueling his muscles. He was manipulating the very concept of velocity within his own limbs, aiming them like a cannon. He pointed them at her. The energy he pushed into his legs, combined with the conceptual re-routing of his own momentum, gave him a single, perfect launch vector.
The result was a speed that had no business existing in atmosphere. Mach 6.
Elijah’s Compass blared, a desperate, silent scream: DODGE!
She threw herself to the side an instant before he would have materialized inside her. He shot past, a phantom of purple light and sonic booms that shattered every remaining pane of glass for a square mile.
She had dodged his body.
But that’s when his palm, extended in his flight path, shot open. A deep purple tendril, a serpent of solidified void, lashed out from his hand. It was a physical manifestation of his Shadow Whips, and it wrapped around her waist with the unbreakable grip of a singularity.
Qua was already a thousand feet away and still accelerating. He tapped his legs again mid-flight, this time manipulating the velocity to push him straight up, combining the thrust with his Float ability to kill his forward momentum.
He kicked the air, spinning himself around to face her. With a predatory grin, he fisted the void-tendril, and with a single, brutal heave, he didn't just pull her.
He swung her.
She was an anchor on the end of a god’s line. He smashed her through the soaring, cathedral-like ceiling of the train station, and with the momentum of a planet being thrown from orbit, slung her into the steel-and-glass heart of the skyscraper beyond.
Elijah was a goddess unmade, a crimson and silver comet arcing through a sky that no longer knew its own name. The force of Qua’s throw had sent her beyond the battlefield, beyond the city's dying light, and into the roiling heart of the storm clouds above. Debris and shattered glass rained around her, a slow-motion ballet of destruction that she was utterly, blissfully indifferent to.
For a moment, there was only the roar of the wind and the echo of shattered reality.
Her red eyes, blazing with the thrill of a perfect fight, shifted upward.
And the universe held its breath.
The sky was tearing.
It wasn't a crack. It wasn't a storm. It was a wound. A geometric, impossible laceration in the fabric of existence, stretching from horizon to horizon. Through the wound, she saw… something else
Not a void. Not darkness. But a place of such perfect, sterile light that it made the sun seem like a guttering candle. White, gold, and celestial blue bled through the tear—not as colors, but as concepts. It was the architecture of divinity, the infrastructure of a realm built from pure, unyielding law.
Spires of crystallized thought pierced through the clouds, their surfaces etched with equations that described the birth and death of galaxies. Crystalline roadways, paved with the light of a thousand captured stars, began to overlay the familiar grid of Tokyo’s streets. Great, geometric continents of shimmering gold and silver began to blot out the familiar constellations, their coastlines a perfect, fractal geometry that hurt the human mind to behold.
Celestial Aetheris was arriving.
Elijah’s broken body, her shattered ribs, her pulped organs—all of it was forgotten. This was it. The culmination of everything the Cabal had worked for, everything she had fought for. The world of flawed, chaotic, beautifully imperfect mortals was about to be overwritten by the glorious, absolute certainty of the divine.
A laugh, wild and ecstatic, ripped from her throat. It was the sound of a zealot witnessing the second coming.
“MISTRESS BLARE! SHE’S STARTING THE MERGER! HA! HAHAHAHA! YES! YEEEEESSSS!”
Her cry was a prayer of victory, an exultant scream of triumph hurled at the heavens.
As if in answer, a new tear, smaller but more intense, ripped open directly above the center of Tokyo. This one was different. It didn’t reveal the impossible architecture of the Aetheris. It was a perfect, blinding whiteness. An emptiness so complete, so absolute, that it felt like staring into the source code of creation itself. It was the gateway. The path. The final door.
Far below, from a playground that had become the epicenter of the new world, two figures watched the sky burn.
Brutus, the Archbishop of Pride, threw her head back, her golden eyes blazing with a triumph so absolute it made the very ground around her bloom with impossible, perfect flowers. The divine energy radiating from her was a tidal wave, washing over the few mortals still conscious, filling them with a rapture so profound their minds began to fray at the edges.
“DO YOU SEE?!” Her voice wasn't a shout; it was a decree, a judgment that echoed across the dying city. “DO YOU FINALLY SEE, YOU ARROGANT LITTLE MORTALS?! THIS IS PERFECTION! THIS IS ORDER! THIS IS THE END OF YOUR FILTHY, MEANINGLESS FREEDOM! YOU WILL FALL TO YOUR KNEES! YOU WILL WORSHIP! YOU. WILL. LEARN. YOUR. PLACE!”
Beside her, Blare stood as a silent counterpoint to her divine fury. Her single eye, a vortex of violet and deep space, tracked the unfolding merger not with emotion, but with the cool satisfaction of a scientist watching a successful experiment. The pillars, the anchors of this new reality, were responding. Even the ones still under construction, even the ones being fought over by gods and demons in the streets below, began to hum with a harmonic resonance that made the entire planet tremble.
The merger was no longer a plan. It was an inevitability.
The symphony of creation and destruction reached its crescendo.
And from the blinding white tear in the sky… something began to emerge.
To be counted….
Wraithbound is an original series by Figures, The Architect.
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