The air solidified abruptly, freezing the red rain of Éryndor mid-fall. At the heart of the collapsed sanctuary, Barachiel's clear laughter dominated the roar of the thunder. His wings crackled with azure lightning, sweeping away the marble dust. Opposite him, space bubbled beneath Beltharion's heat and fractured under Azariel's distortions. The synergy between the two demonic generals, both in Chao Mode, followed an inexorable rhythm. Azariel twisted dimensions, creating invisible rifts around the archangel. From these tears burst Beltharion's fists, covered in blackened magma.
Barachiel ducked a flaming hook with a feline twist, but a breach opened in his blind spot. Beltharion's knee slammed into his ribs. The impact split the air. Thrown backward, the archangel recovered with disconcerting fluidity. He did not retaliate immediately. Blocking one of Azariel's space blades with his lightning chains, he absorbed a fresh wave of volcanic heat surging from the ground.
It was a mortal ballet, but Barachiel was not yet trying to destroy: he was analyzing. Every parry, every calculated retreat allowed him to decipher the frequency of their intersecting attacks. Believing they held the upper hand, the two demons fused their domains. Beltharion's magma was amplified by Azariel's mirrors, trapping Barachiel within an incandescent sphere of destruction, cutting off any escape.
Suspended at the center of this spatial furnace, Barachiel ceased his evasions. A carnivorous smile stretched his lips. He had understood their rhythm.
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. He recalled that precise moment in the Garden of Breaths, facing Seven. Pure light was not always enough to pierce dense darkness; sometimes, one had to devour them. The archangel opened his hand wide. The azure lightning dancing across his skin abruptly turned to deep black, crackling with the acrid scent of ozone.
— Arcane: Vorago Tonitrus!
The maelström of black electricity burst from his palm. It did not push back the sphere of magma and spatial blades: it wrapped around it, crushing the demonic Aether and devouring it from within with a strident howl. The generals' combined attack was swallowed whole. Before either demon could react, Barachiel rose, revealing the true extent of his power in Overdrive. Golden and blue electricity tore through the corrupted firmament.
Azariel frantically attempted to distort space to flee, while Beltharion erected a final, dense rampart of magma. A pitiful defense.
— Regnum Fulminis... Fulgur Excidium!
Lightning struck the arena. Beltharion and Azariel were swallowed by the pillar of concentrated light, their flesh and ethereal cores sublimated in an instant, reduced to wandering particles before even touching the ground. Barachiel had never been in danger.
This same thunderous discharge streaked the skies all the way to the western flank of the city, bathing the ruins in a stroboscopic glow. Liah took advantage of this blinding flash, which forced Abezethibou to recoil, to hurl herself at him.
Leaning against a broken wall, Nicole spat clots of black blood. Her vision doubled, blurred by exhaustion and the wounds scoring her thorax, but she could not tear her eyes away from the spectacle. Around Liah, reality did not merely vibrate: it obeyed. The amethyst and silver of her spectral armor sliced through the fog of ash.
The cracked ground beneath the young girl's footing lit up briefly, revealing a network of glyphs. Before retreating into the shadows, Nicole had not merely instilled her toxins into the Scourge's flesh; she had carved these harmonic anchors into the concrete. Liah was now using them to channel environmental Aether, forcing open her Arcanum Caelestis while maintaining millimetric control.
Nicole let out a raspy laugh that wrenched a grimace from her. That brat is an absolute lunatic...
Liah had only six minutes and thirty-seven seconds in this Symphonia Valkyria state — the exact biological limit before the frequency resonance dislocated her own meridians. Six minutes and thirty-seven seconds to kill a God.
Liah's amethyst daggers were no longer mere blades. They vibrated at such a high frequency that they blurred the air. In a chain of lethal fluidity, she slipped beneath the demon's guard. Her first strike severed the tendon of the monster's right ankle. Black blood spurted, boiling under the sonic friction. Abezethibou roared and tried to impale her, but Liah pivoted, using centrifugal force to drive her second dagger deep into the demon's forearm. The blade did not merely cut tough flesh; the resonance propagated into the bone, shattering it from within with a sinister crack.
Abezethibou staggered back, his body lacerated by wounds that refused to close. The pain became unbearable. Cornered, the Scourge unleashed his rage. His Chao Mode was no longer enough. Drawing upon the reserves of inverted Aether he had patiently accumulated, he absorbed the energy of the souls reaped during the symphony of shadows, finally finding the catalyst for his evolution.
His flesh began to melt and bubble like tar. His bones fractured, piercing his skin in spurts of viscous blood to form a mutating ebony exoskeleton. His six halos crashed against his back, fusing with his vertebrae in a sickening sound of organic suction, giving birth to immense veils of raw muscle and pulsing darkness. His jaw dislocated, spewing a putrid miasma. He had just crossed the forbidden threshold of the infernal hierarchy. He had become a Blaspheme.
The shockwave of his awakening pushed Liah back several meters. The monster did not grant her a moment to breathe. With a ferocious beat of his muscular veils, he lunged at her, his ebony claws cleaving the air with crushing heaviness. Liah parried in extremis by crossing her daggers, but the impact cracked the bones in her forearms.
— Heresy: Bite of the Abyss.
The putrid miasma exhaled by Abezethibou condensed into dozens of black fangs erupting from the devastated ground. Liah dodged in a frenzied spin, slicing through the shadows trying to impale her, but a dark blade ricocheted and deeply gashed her flank. The demon swept the space with the back of his deformed claw.
— Heresy: Macabre Dissonance.
A corrupted frequency wave struck the young girl full-force, threatening to rupture her meridians. Liah coughed up a spray of blood. Atmospheric pressure collapsed around her, painfully compressing her organs. She knew a prolonged physical clash against this abomination would spell immediate death. There was no longer any room for half-measures. She concentrated every particle of Aether from her environment, saturating her circuits to the breaking point. Her daggers evaporated to leave room for pure vibrational energy extending across her back. Liah raised her hands toward the roaring Blaspheme.
— Arcane: Requiem Resonantia!
There was no luminous explosion. Only an unnatural, suffocating silence. The frequency emitted by Liah canceled out the sound of reality itself. The cataclysmic shockwave struck Abezethibou. The vibration dislocated matter, pulverizing the ground over a wide radius. The Blaspheme's monstrous flesh began to decompose at the molecular level, stripped away layer by layer by this destructive symphony.
Liah collapsed, her knees violently striking the concrete, coughing up a pool of blood, her meridians half-charred. When the dust cloud settled, her heart skipped a beat.
The Blaspheme was still standing. But he was nothing more than a ruined carcass. Half of his exoskeleton had been vaporized, and his ethereal core beat bare, frantically exposed to the open air. His new regeneration actively fought against the cellular damage. With a heavy step, Abezethibou raised a deformed claw to cut down the exhausted girl.
But the claw stopped dead, an inch from Liah's face.
Suddenly, the monster's eyes widened. A milky film covered his irises while his pupils contracted to extremes. The demon abruptly dropped his prey, who collapsed to the ground, coughing violently enough to tear her lungs.
Abezethibou brought his claws to his own face, shaken by grotesque spasms. No word could pass his dislocated throat; only raspy, muffled death rattles escaped. His legs gave out. His massive body was seized by violent convulsions, his own muscles contracting with such fury that they broke his bones beneath his skin. Black and greenish smoke billowed from his pores as his freshly regenerated flesh melted into an incandescent jelly.
Amidst the rubble, a broken, bitter laugh rose.
— Finally kicking in, huh? panted Nicole, leaning against the wall to push herself painfully upright.
She wiped the blood flowing from her nose and fixed her cold gaze on the blind creature collapsing to its knees.
— This venom devours inverted Aether... And the more your organism injects to regenerate, the faster the poison multiplies. By forcing your evolution into a Blaspheme and releasing all that energy to heal yourself, you pulled the trigger yourself.
Abezethibou attempted a final movement, but his throat was nothing more than organic mush. The demon collapsed into the dust of Éryndor, consumed from within by his own divine power until his heart finally stopped beating. Liah let her head fall back against the ground, breathing shallowly, watching the Scourge's motionless carcass.
A heavy silence finally wrapped around this side of the city, punctuated only by Liah's ragged breathing and the sound of Nicole's boots.
Yet that brief calm was short-lived. From the central dome, where Barachiel had just annihilated the generals, a dull detonation tore through what remained of the sky. The red dome shattered into deafening chaos. An overwhelming surge of howling souls poured into the atmosphere, forming a spectral tide so dense it blotted out the light. The realm of the dead had just opened over Éryndor.
Floating above the ruined cathedral, electricity slowly dying on his skin, Barachiel contemplated this apocalyptic tableau. His warrior's smile vanished, and his azure eyes narrowed. A glacial shiver, unfeelt for centuries, raced down his spine.
— Seven... murmured the archangel, his voice lost in the spiritual tempest.
Seven stood motionless.
His once-dark hair was now an immaculate silver, drifting gently through the magic-saturated air. His eyes, once so expressive, now gleamed with an unfathomable lapis-lazuli hue, utterly devoid of hesitation. In his right hand rested, with absolute authority, a long scythe of ebony and spectral light, its blade grazing the ground.
Even the air around him seemed to reject the very laws of the world.
Liah's fight was over. But the true war had just begun.