Bell's shoulders went slack, his posture loosening, wounds on his back knitting together in moments.
Haah... I won't be forced to use [Ittou Rasetsu] now. Save it for Freya if she tries anything later.
Olivas opened his mouth, and his stance broke. A block of sound was already in his face, nose and lips crushing in slow-motion.
Even Bell didn't feel it. One moment there was nothing there, the next it was impacting Olivas' face without warning. The only reason he knew it existed at all was that the golden strings in that area were dissolving in the shape of a square.
The creature jerked his crossed arms up, an impact wrenching him off ground and launching him through two alleys behind.
Alfia's hand slid up from his shoulder to close around his nearly tattered collar, fingers tight and white-knuckled.
Bell felt a chill race down his back, like someone had pressed ice along the back of his neck.
"Fight and learn. Or don't. Just remember that Meteria will be disappointed if you don't," she said, glancing sideways at him.
Lips twitching, he really wanted to ask. Disappointed? Mom or you?
Before he could, Alfia took a step forward, dragging him with her, a whisper slipping from her lips.
"[Ittou Shura]."
Her hair lifted on its own, and dust exploded outward in a hundred-foot radius, tiles cracking under her first step, ground sinking beneath her second, stone crumbling to powder and mixing with soil on the third.
Olivas walked out of the debris of a felled tower two streets over, fingers yanking his broken nose back in place.
"... Ataraxia."
That word from Alfia made Bell's breath hitch. "W-wait—"
She didn't listen.
"—Fuck."
The world went sideways. Ground rose vertically, sky flipped down, both collapsing into parallel lines, and they were falling between them, plummeting through a narrowing corridor.
Everything in his periphery shrank to a single point of focus. Olivas became a floating particle of dust in the distance. His eyes had barely begun to dilate when that particle filled his entire vision, and the shockwave of their arrival erupted against his back.
Bell's body broke free off Alfia's hold, launching forehead-first toward the creature's chest.
Space had barely begun to fold, a wall of creased geometry rising between him and Olivas' gut, when a slender hand pressed into it.
Black sparks erupted. A transparent membrane of [Silentium Eden] shimmered along Alfia's palm, and the sound of shattering glass exploded outward.
All three of their shadows flickered, smoothing from their distorted forms.
The creature's eyes constricted, both arms rising, teeth clenching, legs bracing—
Skull on sternum.
Bell and Olivas flung backward, crashing through a straight line of stalls. Wood splinters detonated against the creature's back, ceramic and cutlery shattering around them in cascading cracks, curtains of debris erupting on either flank.
Arms crushing the creature's ribs, Bell's spine bent upward, legs rising, tracing a forward crescent through the air, ankles locking around Olivas' neck.
And flip.
Spine snapping like a snake, he was sitting on the creature's shoulders, legs folded tight around his neck.
Olivas's hands clawed upward at his thighs from below.
Bell moved first. Open-palmed slaps exploded against both of the creature's ears. A wave of compressed pressure entered the ear canals and struck his eardrums, rupturing them.
His sense of balance ceased to exist.
The creature dropped because his brain no longer knew which direction was down. He fell back, hit a wooden wall, and slid down it, back dragging a trench through the planks.
Bell didn't let go.
His thighs tightened around Olivas' throat, arm springing back, steam rolling off his forearm.
At the same time, a vertical column of force punctured through the wooden wall, a black boot falling on the creature's skull.
Alfia.
Splinters hung suspended in air around her foot, frozen in the shockwave of her entry.
Olivas was pinned. Bell on his front, Alfia's leg through the architecture behind him, the creature sandwiched between.
But his fingers moved.
Three of them. Index, middle, ring. They pressed against the ground beneath them all.
Space folded. Not outside. Inside Olivas' own body.
The creature's whole being collapsed inward, shoulders folding into his chest, ribs overlapping, skull compressing until it was half its size. His entire mass restructured, cramming itself into a vertical line barely thicker than a blade. From there, he slipped between Bell's locked ankles and Alfia's descending boot like a kite flying away.
After travelling hundreds of meters, he unfolded.
His body reassembled, joints cracking back into position, spine straightening with grinding pops, root-armour flaking away entirely. Yet he was still standing.
Barely.
His knees buckled, caught and held. One hand found a lamppost, fingers denting its metal. Green blood dripped from his jaw, pooling at his feet.
A suppressed sob resounded from somewhere, and Olivas swept his eyes around.
They moved past the ruined street, beyond those shattered stalls and crumbled walls, through the dust still settling from his departure, landing on a building two lots to his right.
It had three stories with a stone foundation and whitewashed walls. A wooden sign hung above the entrance, its paint peeling, letters too faded to read from this distance. A small garden was spread beside it, fenced by iron posts, cabbages and turnips growing in neat rows.
An orphanage.
Olivas' broken jaw shifted, his face trying to twist, lips moving in a vague shape. A smile.
His arm rose, slowly and deliberately. Fingers straightening, their edges forward.
He swiped.
The air between his hand and the building split. A crescent blade of pure atmospheric pressure crossed forty yards, and the orphanage divided along a clean, vertical line. That cut ran from rooftop to foundation, through mortar and brick, severing iron bed frames and quilts stitched by caring hands.
Both halves of the building slid apart, gravity taking hold, the structure peeling away in two parts down the middle, left half tilting away, right half holding for a single second more before it followed.
Its interior was exposed.
A long dormitory. Rows of small beds with thin mattresses and thinner blankets. At its end, a woman in a black habit stood with her arms spread wide, seven children huddled behind her.
The youngest couldn't have been older than four. The oldest, maybe ten. Their faces were white, the kind that came from every drop of blood draining simultaneously. None of them screamed, fear too absolute for sound.
The nun's lips moved. A prayer, or a plea.
Bell couldn't hear.
But what he could hear was his own heartbeat.
Thump.
Olivas took a step toward them.
Then another.
Thump. Thump.
His gait was wrong, left leg dragging, knee refusing to bend properly, foot scraping a line through the debris even as those wounds knit together, visible to the naked eye.
Alfia's finger was already pointed at his silhouette, but she lowered it. Her sound would kill everyone through collateral damage.
The creature continued to move toward the children.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Olivas turned his head, looking back at him and Alfia, still standing in the ruined alley hundreds of meters away.
That broken smile widened.
He mouthed words toward them.
Come closer, and they die.
Stay there, and they die anyway.
THUMP.
Bell's eyes shifted from Olivas to those children. One girl among them looked the same age as Wiene, and she had wrapped her arms around herself the same way that little girl did.
He took a deep breath.
Something from deep within him awoke and settled over any hesitation he might've had, pressing it down.
A question. Asked by a voice that sounded serious for once, with the kind of warmth that had existed once, lived beside him.
"Bell. When you look at someone who's about to die, and you know you can save them, but it'll cost you later..."
His grandfather had paused, for accuracy, like he was choosing his next words deliberately.
"...what do you see?"
He'd been seven. He'd said a person. Grandfather had smiled. Sad, and proud, and something else he only understood now.
"Try again. When you're older. Try again."
He was not seven now.
The girl's eyes found his across the distance. Wide and wet, pupils blown so wide with terror that the white around them had vanished. Her lips moved. One word.
Help.
Bell's breath left him. All of it. Every ounce expelled in a single, controlled exhale that emptied him completely.
The heartbeat in his chest, it slowed.
What do you see?
Himself. Small and white-haired. Arms wrapped around his own body, alone in a village he'd long left behind, waiting for a grandfather who hadn't come home yet, terrified of everything dark.
He saw himself.
And he answered.
"[Ittou Rasetsu]."
The sky. It started from there. Gray swept from horizon to horizon, the sun losing its light, a gray sphere hanging on a grayer canvas. Its rays were still falling, still reaching him, when they warped just before landing on his cheek, spreading across it in a smear of ash.
He was already moving, and the air where he'd stood detonated downward. Tiles cratered, a perfect ring of pulverized stone expanding outward from the point his feet had left, stretching for meters.
The world shattered next.
His vision fractured into overlapping frames, each one capturing a different view of reality. In one frame, the orphanage was still far, a building all gray. In the next, it was close enough to count its bricks. In another, Olivas' side filled the entire frame, ridges of his spine visible through torn skin.
The frames stacked and collapsed, different pictures of reality layered on top of each other, and Bell existed in all of them simultaneously.
"Bell-chi!"
He caught it in his peripheral. Along the buildings to his left, a Xenos with scales and claws kept pace, racing horizontally from building to building, scimitar leaving a trail of sparks behind.
Lyd.
Then, feathers screamed down from above, blasting ahead of him and clearing any debris in his path.
He glanced up.
A harpy flapped her wings overhead, a rain of feathers falling from above, carving a straight path to Olivas.
"Honestly, Bell Cranel. You better get me something from the surface later, or I'm not helping again."
Ray.
A shadow fell over all three of them.
Stone wings beat the air, each downstroke flattening dust in uneven crescents on nearby rooftops.
A Gargoyle surged with them.
Gros.
And on his back, a snake tail settled between his shoulders, hands gripping his left wing—
A Lamia with green scales, grinning into the wind with absolute confidence.
Laura.
"Yahoooo!"
She tugged on Gros' wing mid-flight with too much enthusiasm.
Next, the ground quaked behind Olivas, and a whole building blasted outward. Two enormous silhouettes tore out from the dust, rushing side by side.
Four, the Fomoire Xenos, club resting on his shoulder. Beside him, something taller, chains clinking, a wheel mounted above its skull, each step leaving craters in its wake.
Four glanced sideways. His free hand came up, rubbing the top of his head.
"Oi. Which Xenos are you?"
The Divine General didn't reply. Its grin only widened, body leaning forward. The wheel above it an inch from turning fully.
Bell's vision was nearly grayed out by now.
Finally, to his right—
She was already there.
As though the path to Olivas was something she'd simply decided to walk beside him. White hair streamed behind her like a banner, feet touching tiles and leaving them in the same instant, blocks of sound detonating behind each step.
She glanced sideways. Her eyes found his through the overlapping frames.
Alfia.
Bell swept his gaze around once.
Lyd.
Ray.
Gros.
Laura.
Four.
Divine General.
Alfia.
He turned his face forward, eyes landing on Olivas, whose body had gone rigid, legs trembling on their own.
Bell's vision was gone.
His other senses were soon to follow.
Ash wouldn't flake away later.
What do you see?
He couldn't see anything.
I see... all of us.
...
..
.
***
[Silentium Eden]: A passive field of magic negation that Alfia generally keeps active at all times, cloaking her body like armor. Any magic that touches it, spells and enchantments, gets cancelled on contact. It costs her a constant drain to sustain, and dropping it frees up her full offensive output at the cost of that protection.
Here, she already had it turned off before, and turned it one during the clash, even cancelling spatial folding because its a magic at the end of the day.
...
[Author's Thoughts]
And Olivas is getting ganked on like Ares, even the spirit won't save him now. You better run bro, oh I forgot you can't, they've got you covered from ahead and behind. Better grab your thighs and bolt sideways when there is still time, later there won't be any.
My instincts were telling me that something was wrong in this and lo and behold, I nearly fumbled with the Zeus memory on my first write. It should be better now.
Have a wonderful day, everyone!