The flap lifted—
And the world turned white.
A flashbang cracked through the air, blinding heat and pressure shredding the silence. Charles reacted faster than thought, throwing a kinetic shell across his skin just as concussive force ripped through the operations tent. Canvas tore, poles snapped, consoles sparked and flipped. He rolled, crashing against a table, vision ringing with light.
Gregory hit the dirt beside him, mid-shift—skin slick with pseudo-armor, eyes flaring reptilian.
"Contact!" Charles barked, even as his left ear throbbed with blood.
Three.
They were already inside.
Not running. Not shouting.
Walking.
The first wore a black visor that wrapped his face like a reflective band. No armor. No weapon. Just a coat that moved like it remembered fire. His hands glowed, not with energy, but with the distortion of space pulling inward—like gravity resented being near him.
The second was taller. Pale. Head shaved. His coat hung open, revealing bare arms marked with shifting red symbols—living ink, moving on its own, curling up to his throat. He moved with total stillness, like his presence had been carved, not born.
The third was a woman—barefoot, no visible implants, hair bound in a single cord that drifted even without wind. Her eyes bled gold, and she walked like a statue in a dream, detached from all consequence.
Gregory swore in a language that hadn't been spoken in two centuries.
"On me," Charles said, voice flat.
He stepped forward, cloak flaring, hand near his thigh—his revolver stayed holstered. Not yet. Not unless he had to.
Visor spoke first. "Charles."
The voice was flat and wrong. Synthetic but not modulated—like it wasn't a voice at all, just a series of approximations tuned for fear.
"You're not cleared for forward presence," Charles replied. "This is a secured op zone."
"You've been reclassified," said the pale one. "Static threats must be neutralized."
Gregory shifted again—his body narrowed, limbs lengthening. The edges of his outline rippled, blurring at the joints. His face lost definition.
"This is happening?" he asked Charles quietly.
"Yes."
The woman blinked.
The air moved.
Charles threw himself back an instant before the tent collapsed inward. Something cut through it—no light, no flame. Just a force that erased matter in a clean diagonal slice. The world tore sideways. A support strut pinwheeled into the earth. Fire bloomed in its absence.
Gregory shifted forward like liquid, wrapping into a coiling beast with segmented armor across his spine, his arms now thick with plated muscle. He went for the woman first—fast, brutal, no hesitation. A wide swing that carried the weight of steel and fire behind it.
She didn't dodge.
She breathed.
The impact stopped six inches from her skull—caught by nothing.
Gregory snarled, rerouted the limb, twisted it into a blade mid-motion, and stabbed.
She raised a hand.
Not to block.
To allow.
The blade sank into her palm, hissed against flesh, and didn't bleed.
Instead, the wound collapsed inward—pulling the blade with it. Gregory screamed, pulling back, but the matter around his limb had already started unraveling, like she was deconstructing him molecule by molecule.
Charles moved. His mimicry activated automatically—reading Greg's transformations and folding them into his own frame. But his precision was tighter, cleaner—he didn't just shift what, but why—repurposing structure, enhancing flow.
He dropped low and drew.
The revolver's shot wasn't loud. It was final.
He fired at the pale one—center mass, mid-step.
The impact snapped the figure back, but he didn't fall. The bullet struck, cracked the chest plate beneath the skin, stayed there, and then—vaporized into smoke.
Glyphs lit along his arms. The air rippled in a perfect sphere.
Then everything in twenty meters exploded outward.
Barracks shattered. Soldiers screamed—drawn into the blast wave, limbs snapped like twigs. The generators flipped. Metal tore from concrete. One man was bisected mid-run by a fuel canister launched sideways.
Charles was thrown, spun, hit a wall.
Dust rained.
Gregory reformed, mangled limb still twitching, but operational. "They're not Union standard!"
"No," Charles growled, wiping blood from his mouth. "They're above Union."
He stood, cloak in tatters, bones creaking.
The three advanced again.
This wasn't a mission anymore.
This was a purge.
Gregory shifted full combat form—eight-limbed, serpentine motion, cloaked in a hide of adaptive texture that shifted color with each second. He launched forward, slamming into the glyph-marked man.
The contact shook the ground.
Their battle became a blur—Gregory clawing through layers of warded skin, only to be thrown in bursts of gravity-null.
Charles moved left, targeting the visor man. Mimicking him was harder—his field distortion had no surface vector. But the moment Charles stepped within range, he felt it—his bones compressing, skin pulling, heart misfiring.
He mimicked just enough—matched the gravitational bend, twisted it sideways, and redirected.
Suddenly, the visor man's force turned on itself—his step collapsed, his leg hyperextended.
Charles closed in, elbow first, smashing into the mask.
It cracked.
But the man didn't fall. Instead, the air between them crushed.
Charles was hurled backward, skidding across dirt and blood.
He didn't rise immediately.
The woman floated now, ten feet above ground. Soldiers below were vaporized by the proximity—skin blackened, organs boiling.
Gregory howled and threw a chunk of concrete, transforming it mid-flight into a net of carbon barbs.
The net struck her—
And disappeared.
She didn't even look at it.
Gregory turned, bleeding from too many places. "We need a real plan!"
"No," Charles said, standing again.
"We need a miracle."
He holstered the revolver.
He mimicked again—but this time, he didn't copy the enemy.
He copied every soldier who had died in the last three minutes.
The desperation. The panic. The rage.
He weaponized loss.
He stepped into the storm, cloak gone, mask still in his hand.
The visor man lunged.
Charles raised the mask to his face.
And time froze.
No sound. No motion.
The air bent inward, then released—like the world had hiccuped.
Charles stood exactly where he had been, mask fused to his face now, eyes bleeding silver from the sockets. Around him, the battlefield resumed—but subtly changed. A blur in the fabric of space remained where he'd stepped. Every particle around him moved slightly out of sync with causality.
Gregory felt it first—his senses scattered across six spectra. The pattern of Charles' presence no longer matched anything human. Not Union. Not mimic. Not even living.
The visor angel struck.
Faster now. A blur of gravitational lashes followed each motion, distorting the terrain around him. Metal buckled. Fire ran sideways. The wind reversed.
Charles walked into it.
His arm rose just in time to absorb a hammering strike of inverted pressure—not block, absorb—his skin bent but didn't tear. He twisted his wrist. Bones aligned with borrowed structure from a dozen dead men who had carried recoil-control implants. His fist moved once—
—and caved in the visor man's jaw.
The angel flew backward like a ragdoll, impacting a troop transport hard enough to set off its stored munitions. The detonation blinded the left flank.
Still not dead.
But staggered.
Charles turned as the pale glyph-marked one surged forward, summoning a column of inverted geometry from thin air—red light forming impossible, recursive triangles that spun like turbines.
Gregory, now fully serpentine, coiled and launched.
He wrapped around the pale one's legs, pulling the glyph-walker off-balance just as the spell-geometry unleashed its energy. The beam sliced through the air—and missed Charles by centimeters.
Instead, it leveled an entire comms tower behind him, splitting it neatly down the middle.
Gregory shouted, "His symbols—shatter 'em!"
Charles didn't answer. He mimicked them instead.
The marks burned across his neck, now pulsing red as the information was translated into his bioelectric system. The glyphs didn't stick to him—they obeyed him. Charles stepped sideways, lifted both hands, and mimicked the same spell—but inverted.
His triangle spun backward.
The pale one realized too late.
The counterspell detonated, not out but inward, shredding his internal organs, imploding his spine in a perfect spiral. He vomited glyphs as he fell, twitching.
Charles couldn't breathe.
The cold in the air wasn't just physical—it gnawed at the space between cells, breaking molecular cohesion like rot through fruit. His vision stuttered as nerve impulses misfired. He dropped to one knee, tasting blood. Not from a wound. From his own body's internal collapse. Regeneration kept him on the edge, always just enough to survive—but the stress was beginning to outpace the rhythm of recovery. He felt tissues knitting only to be torn again by the rising entropy field.
Then he heard Greg's voice—warped through strained comms, raw with urgency.
"She's not casting, Charles. This is her body—her core's broadcasting something deeper than glyphs. It's not a technique. It's who she is."
Charles's fingers twitched. He blinked the haze from his eyes. Then he saw it:
The soldiers—the ones who had been stationed here—hadn't fought. They hadn't had the chance. Their bodies lay around the camp in silent collapse. No wounds. No signs of kinetic trauma. Just stillness.
The angel above—she—wasn't killing.
She was accelerating the end.
Entropy as expression. As identity.
Greg's voice again. "Do something. You're better at this than me. I can't hold form for long in this state—this cold's not just physics, it's cutting through my shifts."
Charles stood.
Barely.
He could still feel the remnants of the first glyph angel—its strange geometric resonance still embedded in the air like heat from a long-cooled flame. And below it, the fallen soldiers—their lives still faintly pulsing, flickers of heat and memory in the haze.
He reached. Not physically—but deeper.
Their essence was still in the world. And Charles's gift wasn't simple mimicry. He didn't steal powers. He reflected what lived near him. The very echo of a presence was enough.
He let the pain in. Let their deaths become weight. And through it, their strengths—their last defenses, their final instincts, the shapes their cores had once held—began to imprint.
Not all of it fit. His body twisted as it absorbed too much too quickly. Bones protested. His lungs buckled under incompatible rhythms of regeneration. One soldier had channeled light into sinew. Another had built barriers from pressure gradients. Each had shaped their core differently. And Charles let them all in.
He was drowning in borrowed survival.
The entropy tightened.
Then—he moved.
Not away from her. Toward.
The angel reacted. For the first time, her eyes narrowed—recognition without understanding. Charles wasn't mirroring her. He was answering with a chorus.
She tried to collapse space around him, her core flaring. The land responded—grass turning to ash, stones fracturing under their own weight. But Charles stepped through it. Heatless flame scorched his back. His flesh peeled—and regrew in the same breath. Because a dozen dead cores beat inside him now, and not one of them had quit.
He reached her.
Didn't strike.
He simply released the imprint.
A storm of borrowed instincts burst from him like a pressure wave. It wasn't energy—it was form. Dozens of natural regenerative harmonics exploding outward, each incompatible with her entropy field. Each one pushing back.
The angel staggered midair, light stuttering around her in prismatic pulses. Her balance broke. The purity of her decay was polluted by too many rhythms she couldn't suppress all at once.
She fell.
Greg was waiting.
Shifted again, this time into a six-limbed stalker-beast from the bones of ancient memory. Not just muscle, but purpose—a hunter evolved to track and pierce core tissue through armor and light.
He struck low, coiling behind her as she hit the ground, then drove a talon through her side, feeling the soft flex of cartilage split, then the jolt of resistance.
Her scream didn't echo—it bled, sound unraveling into raw psychic pressure as her regenerative field surged, trying to preserve her.
But Greg had touched it. Her core. A thing alive, natural, singular. And he'd pierced more than just body—he'd scratched the perimeter of something sacred.
She convulsed. Not dead.
But her rhythm faltered. Her decay field dropped.
The silence broke.
Charles collapsed to his knees, shaking, steam rising from his skin.
Greg limped back, breathing heavy. "That one's not staying down for long."
Charles nodded. "I didn't plan to kill her."
"Then what the hell was the plan?"
He turned toward the third figure, still untouched. Still watching.
"Simple," Charles said. "Keep her from helping him."
Because the last angel hadn't moved.
Not once.
But now?
He began to walk.
The third angel descended without theatrics—no burst of radiance, no sonic boom, no warping of the terrain. He simply walked, as if the air around him accepted his presence as inevitable. He stepped past the scorched camp perimeter, past the fragmented ruins of the command bunker, through the shattered bones of the dead. Not a single corpse stirred. Not even residual core pulses remained—those had been extinguished by the entropy field of his sister.
Charles watched him approach. He hadn't yet mimicked this one. The angel was veiled in something subtler than power. It wasn't concealment. It was containment.
Greg, still in partial shift, let out a dry exhale.
"Great. One of those."
Charles didn't look away. "Define it."
"Can't. He's got folds in his body that shouldn't exist in three-space. He's either naturally entangled, or he's compressing dimensional vectors into his own physiology."
"Which means?"
Greg's form rippled, glitching between quadruped and human. "Means he's not gonna punch us. He's gonna rewrite where our organs think they are."
Charles grit his teeth. Mimicry was like tuning an instrument—if he couldn't feel the core frequency, he couldn't adapt. And this one wasn't broadcasting anything. No emotional bleed. No identity resonance. Just a hum of presence, subtle and final, like the moment before a bone cracks.
Then the angel spoke.
"I felt that," he said, his voice quiet, distant—not cold, but absolute. "When you forced entropy into discord. You don't understand what you did. But she felt it."
He turned his head—slow, deliberate—toward the fallen angel still writhing against the pull of her broken field. A web of regeneration held her in place, threads of flesh reweaving in tight, unnatural spirals. Her core still pulsed. Dimmer now, but burning with hatred.
"She's part of me," the angel continued. "That pain echoes in me now. And so will yours."
Charles didn't wait.
He moved, trying to preempt whatever expression of force this angel would deliver. He fired through the distance, laced in borrowed reflexes—half a dozen core harmonics still alive in his body, driving limbs beyond human limits.
The angel didn't flinch.
Instead, he stepped forward one inch—and Charles vanished.
Not exploded. Not erased.
Simply gone.
Greg's mind whiplashed. For a full three seconds, he couldn't see Charles. Not visually—not perceptually. The space where Charles had been felt folded, like a page creased inside out and layered between breaths. Then—
Charles reappeared—midair, contorted, screaming. Blood jetted from every orifice. Veins ruptured. His spine twisted unnaturally as if something had tried to rethread him around a pivot point in his own anatomy.
Greg lunged, caught him, shifted form again—this time into a hollow-framed mantis-beast with elongated limbs and inner muscular coils designed for tension absorption. He pulled Charles out of the twisted space, snapping air like stretched canvas.
"Charles—he bent time around you," Greg hissed. "You didn't move. He moved you. Through possibilities you weren't meant to occupy."
Charles couldn't speak. His core flickered. Regeneration poured into motion—stem cells overclocked, tissue reknitting along quantum tears, memories piecing back into cognitive structure. But it was barely holding.
The angel didn't move further.
"I didn't destroy him," the angel said. "I let him feel one percent of what I contain."
Greg stood between them now.
Shifted again.
No beast form this time. Just himself—human.
But the air thickened around him. Not visibly. Not chemically. But spiritually.
He dropped his stance, let his body hang loose—but in his mind, he reconfigured a dozen alternate selves. Each one slightly different—bone density shifts, muscle memory pivots, internal circulatory patterning. He didn't shapeshift. He diverged. And in that divergence, he readied every counter his mind could conceive.
Because he knew the truth: the third angel wasn't just powerful.
He was singular.
And singular beings did not compromise.
"Then let's make this fun," Greg said—and smiled.
The angel blinked.
Greg exploded forward.
His foot hit the ground—and five versions of him erupted simultaneously. Not illusions. Not speed. Displacement divergence—he'd split every potential of his step and let them all happen.
The angel did react this time.
One hand rose—open palm, fingers splayed.
Each Greg-variant struck from different vectors—two from above, one from below, one through air displacement via oxygen threading, and one from nowhere—invisible until the last nanosecond.
And yet—
One gesture stopped them all.
A pulse.
No sound. Just a flash of internal inversion.
The Gregs collapsed, converging instantly. He was thrown backward into the ground, a crater forming beneath him. His chest shattered. Not externally. Inverted. The bones curved inward—like gravity had reversed inside his ribcage.
He coughed blood. Laughed once.
Then changed again.
This time slowly.
Not into a beast.
But into something new.
"Charles," Greg hissed. "Need you upright. Need your mimicry tuned. Because if he keeps spatial authority, we're dead."
Charles, still kneeling, eyes bloodshot, forced his core to keep stable. It wasn't a matter of healing now. It was about syncing.
He reached outward again.
This time—not to the dead.
But to Greg.
Because Greg wasn't shapeshifting anymore. He was becoming a composite—a shifting architecture of offensive biology, layered across dimensional anchors. Something more than adaptive. Something reactive.
And Charles, finally, could feel it.
That resonance.
That core.
Shaped not by inheritance, but by will.
Charles stood.
Eyes burning.
The mimicry ignited—
—and the second phase of the battle began.
The battlefield was no longer recognizable as the forward command zone of Fort Verno. What had once been organized staging grounds and high-density barracks had become a crater-laced necropolis, scattered with flickering core remnants and dismembered tech-wreckage. The ground itself pulsed—warped from the lingering echoes of angelic manipulation, suffused with discontinuities and microscopic reality fractures. Time jittered at the edges of visibility.
Charles stepped forward slowly, blood crusted along his arms, his back cracked from where his core had surged too fast for his body to handle. But now, he understood. Greg's biology wasn't just physical—it was conceptual. His forms adapted not to environment, but to the idea of threat. That was the resonance Charles had failed to find earlier.
He locked onto it now. Not Greg's abilities, but the logic beneath them.
Mimicry adapted not to raw traits, but to systems. And the system Greg embodied was evolution through pressure.
The third angel narrowed his eyes.
"You're learning," he said softly. "But that doesn't change your fate."
Charles didn't answer. He didn't need to.
He moved—and this time, the air didn't shift in panic. It followed.
He blurred forward with perfect acceleration—speed synced to Greg's recoil-optimized ligaments. Strikes fired off from joints held in tension-release like a coiled spring. Not martial arts—adaptive biology. Every blow tested a different vector of resistance. Temperature. Elasticity. Feedback rate.
The angel blocked the first two easily. But the third—
He staggered.
A half-step.
Charles had struck with something Greg never used in his own combat: mimicked neural desynchronization. The angle of the blow, paired with the subtle distortion in pulse timing, disrupted the angel's internal event flow. His movements stuttered.
Greg pounced.
He emerged from behind a collapsed rig-tower in a form unlike anything yet seen—flesh slicked in liquid magnetism, spine elongating upward and backward into a conical dispersal node. This wasn't for offense.
It was resonant targeting.
"Push him again!" Greg yelled—and Charles obliged.
He struck the angel again—harder this time. A perfect knee-pivot into the ribs, reinforced with tension echoing from Greg's earlier forms.
The angel flinched.
And Greg fired.
The pulse wasn't visible. It wasn't even sound.
It was core-encoded noise—a scream with no frequency, only meaning. It tore through the angel's internal arrangement—not to injure, but to disrupt symmetry. An angel's form was more than flesh—it was poetry. Harmony. The underlying structure of their cores depended on consistency of truth.
Greg had just fired anti-truth.
The angel recoiled—his arm distorting, elongating, retracting involuntarily. For the first time, his composure fractured. He stepped back, coughing violet fluid, the veins along his temples flickering.
Charles struck again—fist to jaw, then pivoted into a leg sweep. The angel bent sideways, then twisted back upright with a snarl, hurling Charles away with a burst of rotational shear-field. Earth tore in a perfect spiral.
Charles crashed into a ruined wall, his bones groaning audibly.
But the mimicry held. He was healing already. The passive regeneration sustained him—until the core itself fractured, he wouldn't die.
The angel—now bleeding, body partially refracted in angular streaks—turned to Greg.
"You violate structure itself," he said, voice deeper now. A reverb laced it. His true tone. "You use biology as a lie. A shifting vessel of denial."
Greg smiled, panting.
"Damn right."
The angel's body began to fold. Not collapse. Not shrink.
Fold.
As if he were rearranging his own chronology. Bones bent along memory-scars. Wings retracted, then burst outward again in new orientations—spirals of luminescent blades, not feather or skin. Behind his eyes, constellations shimmered.
"I speak in vectors," he said. "I am continuity."
And then he moved.
This was no longer combat.
This was force. A vector given form.
He struck both Greg and Charles at once—each in separate locations, with a motion that only looked like one gesture.
Greg was launched into the sky—back warping, core shuddering. Blood vented from the mouth.
Charles was pinned to the ground—every molecule of his body made still. Not paralyzed. Simply fixed in four-space.
The angel hovered above them now, no longer walking.
"You should not have hurt her," he whispered.
Behind him, the second angel—the entropy-emitter—still writhed, healing slowly. Her field had begun to warp again, though dimmer. No longer destructive. But present.
Greg fell, slammed down in a heap.
Charles's vision blurred. His regeneration still triggered—internal organs reforming, capillaries reconnecting. But the healing felt slower. Not because his core was failing—because the angel was pressing time itself into restriction.
He had to adapt.
And in that desperate moment—Charles finally reached.
Not for Greg.
Not for the entropy angel.
But for the third one.
He had been avoiding it. That veil of containment. The abstract structure around the angel's essence.
But now—
He tore through it.
Just for a second.
And the pain was exquisite.
His mind burned, screamed, wanted to die. But in that split instant—
He understood.
He couldn't mimic the angel's full structure. Not yet. But he could steal a piece.
A single function.
Continuity.
He let it flow.
And the next moment—Charles wasn't where he'd fallen. He wasn't even in the same instant.
He appeared behind the angel—body flickering between frames.
And for one moment—
He struck with a blow composed of a hundred realities.
Fist met spine.
And the angel broke.
The impact wasn't loud.
There was no thunderclap, no divine backlash, no explosive display of catastrophic force.
Just a sharp crack, clean and quiet—the kind of sound that carried certainty. A statement, not a question. The kind of sound that made even surviving angels hesitate for a heartbeat.
The third angel crumpled forward, spine partially disjointed, core resonance flickering wildly—like a flame with no air left to breathe. The elegant geometric bindings laced through his wings spasmed, fractured, then collapsed into fading strands of celestial logic.
Charles stood behind him, arm still extended from the strike, his face impassive. Blood slid in long rivulets from his brow, painting one side of his face like a dying mask. His coat was half-burnt, his ribs cracked from the earlier assault, one shoulder slightly lower than the other. None of it mattered.
His eyes locked onto the angel's stumbling form.
Cold.
Unrelenting.
Empty of doubt.
"You don't get to speak in absolutes," Charles said quietly, stepping forward as the angel staggered, clutching his own failing form. "Not when you bleed like the rest of us."
The angel turned, mouth opened to speak—to justify, to curse, to pray—but Charles had already moved.
There was no flourish, no excessive force. Just another strike—clean, precise—like chiseling marble from a flawed sculpture.
The angel collapsed, fully now. His core, visible now through the ruptured membrane of his sternum, flickered like a dying star.
Greg limped up from the side, shifting forms with every unstable step, his body still adjusting to the prior trauma.
"You could've warned me," Greg muttered, half-laughing through blood.
Charles didn't look at him. He was focused—calculating. Not just watching the angel fall, but listening to the silence that followed.
Greg wiped his mouth.
"Thought you were done back there."
Charles rolled his neck, resetting his shoulder with an audible crack.
"I was. Then he made a mistake."
Greg blinked.
"Which one?"
Charles turned slowly to look at him. "He underestimated me."
Behind them, the remnants of Fort Verno continued to fall into ruin. What hadn't been scorched by angelic entropy had been carved open by high-velocity combat vectors, torn apart by residual kinetic loops, or collapsed under unstable gravitational shears. Bodies of Union soldiers lay in ruined trenches and collapsed buildings, their cores long extinguished. The air reeked of ozone and fractured divinity.
The second angel—the entropy-caster—watched them from afar. Her regeneration was nearly complete. Her form, though slumped, was stabilizing.
Greg noticed her shift.
"She's coming back," he muttered.
Charles didn't respond.
Greg squinted. "You good to go again?"
Charles took a step forward. His foot cracked through scorched earth, his healing accelerating again, shoulder resetting further as his mimicked regenerative traits kicked into higher precision.
His voice was calm.
"I'm not going to fight her."
Greg paused. "What?"
Charles kept walking, each footstep like a countdown. His posture was loose, unhurried, but every line of his body screamed focus.
"I'm going to end her."
The second angel rose. Her entropy field bloomed again—this time erratic, less precise. She was angry. Unstable.
"You think one fluke gives you leverage over divinity?" she hissed. Her voice layered across dimensions—every syllable laced with probability decay and emotional inversion. "You're nothing but—"
Charles blurred.
No warning. No preparation. No drawn stance.
Just motion.
He appeared in front of her mid-sentence—one hand already inside her entropy veil. Not resisting. Not blocking.
Just ignoring it.
Greg's eyes widened. He wasn't using a counter-field. He wasn't adapting around the entropy pattern.
He was nulling it entirely.
The angel staggered. "W-what—?"
Charles looked into her eyes. No rage. No gloating.
Just the weight of inevitability.
"I've seen what real monsters look like," he said softly. "You're just noise."
And then he drove his hand into her chest.
The entropy field imploded.
It didn't explode outward. It collapsed—a silent collapse of structure. Her scream didn't reach the air.
Her body convulsed—twice—before her core shattered, not from raw force, but from incompatibility. Charles had injected an impossibility into her pattern—a contradiction she could not reconcile.
And like that—she ceased to exist.
Charles stood there a moment longer, breathing quietly.
Greg finally caught up, his new form twitching with filamentous stress-layers. "Jesus."
"She was weaker than she thought," Charles murmured.
"No. She wasn't," Greg replied. "You're just worse."
Charles stared at him. "Don't mention this to Scar. We'll say they were weak. Low leveled."
"Eh... why?"
"Just do as I say."
"Fine."
As the last echoes of collapse faded, Charles exhaled slowly—steam rising from his skin where remnants of divine architecture still tried to cling.
He turned from the dissipating entropy, eyes scanning the fractured skyline of Fort Verno. No more movement. No more sigils in the ash. Just silence—wide and consuming. Greg stood beside him now, gaze distant, both of them framed by ruin and stillness. Above them, the sky began to crack—not with thunder, but with quiet light—lines of impossible geometry threading outward like veins through glass.