Bell stood, his fingers hooking the heel of his left boot. A sharp tug wrenched it free.
Olivas crossed his arms over his chest, leaning forward slightly, brows arching and posture relaxed.
Bell's fingers found his right boot next, yanking it free. The moment his bare soles hit ground, his shoulders drew back a fraction wider, lead foot sliding forward into a familiar stance.
Crimson fire bled from his eyes. It rolled down his cheeks like molten embers, coiled around his throat, and spread in branching trails across his shoulders and down his arms. Those flames gathered, spiraling between his palms.
Cinders fused into a solid shield in his right hand. In his left, a blade of condensed flame hissed into existence.
It didn't matter.
Olivas stomped.
Thirty yards folded between them. The ground creased like origami paper, and Olivas' knee was already inside his guard. Root armor slammed into his abdomen, forcing a gasp from his lungs.
Even then, his shield was moving, its edge cutting through air, adjusting by a fraction. A second spatial impact arrived, crashing into Aspis and deflecting sideways. It carved a trench beside him, tiles, soil, and pipes erupting in a line that stretched two streets over.
Bell launched backward, the balls of his feet digging into tiles, momentum shedding from his shoulders in steam.
He snapped his legs like levers, chest plunging forward, heels still driving backward, body going diagonal to the floor. Knees bent, spine a ramp, a spring compressed and loaded for something catastrophic.
Bell exploded.
Heels driving through tiles, muscles firing, torso thrusting forward. A kinetic chain rose from stone beneath his bare feet, traveling through his calves, thighs, and core, lancing upward through his back.
Aspis punched.
Rim-first into Olivas' chin.
Space between them was still folded. He could see the district behind Olivas' shoulder crushed close, buildings leaning inward, their edges pointing at him, their shadows wrong.
Olivas' hand moved without thought. Space between them unfolded, and he was meters away, scorching winds from the shield ruffling his hair, chin caving inward by centimeters.
He rolled his jaw. A thin crack ran across it, green blood seeping through.
Olivas narrowed his eyes, looking past Bell.
Bell felt it in his feet first, all the tiles around him vibrating and displacing. Space behind him moved, and the distance between his spine and a building at his back stopped existing.
He didn't have time to turn.
His back hit a wall, or a wall hit his back. Brick and mortar exploded against his spine with the full weight of forty feet of compressed architecture behind it. Cracks rang out from him, his tunic disintegrating on contact.
That wall broke.
Bell went through. But another spatial impact detonated in the opposite direction, wrenching his body forward, limbs still half a second behind, the building around him erupting in a shower of concrete and dust.
He pitched through the debris, straight toward Olivas. The creature's arm was already cocked back, fist aimed at his face. The lampposts between them bowed inward like reeds caught in a current that wasn't there, and space shifted, folding to inches.
The street creased along its full length, buildings on either side leaning inward, left toward him, right toward him, a corridor of bricks closing over arching lampposts.
Olivas' punch traveled zero distance.
Aspis met it.
Bell's ears stopped ringing for one full second, and a dome of pure force blasted outward, uprooting few buildings from their foundations and hurling them upward and away, a cloud of tiles expanding from them in concentric circles.
The creature didn't reset.
His fist stayed against the shield, pressing deeper. His lips moved, addressing air inches beside him, where space had gone still, as though something were standing there.
"Let me have this. Just a little more." Olivas' voice cracked upward, then plunged down, then cracked upward again. "I know what it costs, and I don't care."
Those words were accompanied by eyes half-closed, reverent, as if he'd forgotten Bell was even there.
Something in the air shivered, pleased, or something that wanted to look pleased.
Then everything behind Bell folded. The entire street at his back compressed inward, buildings, stalls, lampposts, and Bell felt it as a wall of molded geometry pressing between his shoulder blades, shoving him forward into Aspis, into Olivas.
At the same time, space ahead folded.
The street in front compressed too, both directions collapsing inward simultaneously, Bell caught in the middle. Everything behind shrinking, everything ahead shrinking, his body crushed between two creases in paper.
Bell's eyes shot wide open.
Two folds. At once. He'd never—
Aspis cracked. A fracture raced across it from edge to edge.
Space pushed, and more cracks branched across its face with a screech.
Cinders scattered like embers in a gale. The shield's rim warped inward, its body fracturing with each shove. Bell's arm trembled beneath it, wrist twisting, elbow buckling. The flame-blade in his left hand wavered, its light thinning.
Blood dripped from Olivas' nostrils, thick and sizzling, trailing down his upper lip. His eyes were filled with the same blood, ears leaking, gums gone dark, green pooling between his teeth. Each inhale seemed to cost him something.
Ash. At his shins. His root-leg armor was flaking away, and beneath it, so was he.
Bell closed his eyes, and his breastplate compressed first, ribs creaking, all while his spine bent forward on its own from behind.
His crimson fire went out. The flame-blade dissolved. Aspis finally crumbled, cinders sliding from his arm.
The exact posture of someone who had given up.
But Olivas' expression twisted.
Because Bell's lips tugged upward, widening into a small smile.
Sound arrived before any shape did.
A block of it, solid and edged, already occupying the air around Olivas without crossing any distance, originating at point-blank range.
Olivas' head snapped toward it, blood-slick eyes going wide, his grip on space faltering for the first time.
That sound hit him square in the chest. He left ground without a sound of his own, spine curling around impact, body punched backward through the corridor of bricks. Buildings that had been leaning inward snapped back, all at once, brick and mortar groaning as distance unfolded to normal again.
Olivas skipped once through the ruined street, twice, and came to a halt fifty meters away, smoke rising off his front where that sound had struck.
Bell felt the crushing pressure lift from his body, and his knees buckled. But he didn't fall.
A hand had caught his shoulder.
Two heterochromatic eyes gazed at him, and that hand slid across his back, keeping him steady.
Alfia was here.
And her brows were furrowed, slightly, imperceptibly, but there.
"Aunt, I—"
Her finger closed his mouth before he could continue.
The sound of multiple buildings crumbling echoed from Alfia's side. Bell glanced in that direction.
Architecture five streets away was still tearing outward, a trench still opening, its path leading straight toward where she stood. It would take five seconds to reach them, chasing her path.
Alfia didn't care, already looking ahead.
Olivas had bent into a guard, arms locked in an X, leg armor still flaking away.
"You had your fun. You begged for it, didn't you? 'Let me have this.'"
Alfia's eyes narrowed.
"Now it's spent. So is my patience."
...
..
.
***
[Satanas Verion] = Blocks of sound. Basically the only weakness of spatial folding is if the attack does not travel through space at all and originates at Olivas' location, then he'll be hit not doubt. Though there are other weaknesses but those get too technical so I went with this simple one.
And a clarification for others too. Olivas' ability is indeed spatial folding but only one fold at a time, and each uses a tremendous amount of stamina, otherwise he would've abused the hell out of it and flung Bell from one end of Orario to the other.
...
[Authors Thoughts]
Honestly, this chapter was short, but the amount of processing power it took to imagine and explain how space would look while folding in simple terms was on another level. I mean I had images in my mind about how it might look, everything leaning toward Bell like diagonal lines, but actually writing it in words was something else.
Anyway, have a fantastic day!