Chương 139: 138: Cosmos II

Butter continued forward, her prosthetic leg primed to strike. Sylvia knew better than to rely entirely on her literary abilities against Butter. Melody had made Butter extraordinarily resistant to conceptual interference. The concepts still worked, but Butter could brute-force her way through them like a battering ram smashing against a locked door. Sylvia did not attempt to evade the incoming kick. She simply stepped aside in narrative. The moment stuttered and folded.

The impact became a story that had begun but never reached its conclusion, while Sylvia blurred between intervals, occupying the spaces between moments instead of existing within them. Butter followed anyway. Instant to instant. Correction to correction. Her body did not chase Sylvia so much as arrive where Sylvia was going to be.

Her strikes unfolded in clusters, appearing at angles that had not existed a heartbeat earlier, each impact aimed toward the place Sylvia would occupy rather than the place she occupied now. Sylvia smiled. Her tentacles lashed out behind Butter, yet when Butter turned, Sylvia was already behind her without ever having crossed the distance between them. Her fingers brushed Butter's shoulder. The music inside Butter's mind screamed. Flutes. Harps. A rising, tearing pitch of warning. She twisted. CRACK!

The strike did not travel toward her. It appeared inside her movement, a discontinuity written directly into her ribs. Butter skidded across the salt, her boots carving trenches through the crystalline ground as the force of the impact sheared an entire continent from the planet. The broken landmass drifted into space like an enormous island torn from the world. Sylvia raised one hand. Dark wood nunchaku snapped into existence, humming with something deeper than sound. Butter's heart stuttered. Harmony.

It was still with Sylvia after all this time. Butter backflipped, creating distance, but it did not matter. Harmony was dangerous because of its auto-correct movement, and Sylvia had pumped the weapon full of Apis until its ability to correct its trajectory had become almost impossible to evade. The air tightened. The next swing ignored space entirely. WHRR - KRAK - THOOM!

A million strikes appeared simultaneously, copied across every possible angle of approach as countless fragments of motion collapsed into a single storm of inevitability. Butter moved. Twirl. Slip. Spin. Fold. Moth Step fractured her position and rewrote her placement in the middle of thought. She was not dodging the strikes anymore. She was editing their destinations. FWOOM! The salt plains disappeared wherever she had been. KRRSH!

Crystalline ground vaporized beneath attacks that cut through it with impossible precision. One strike skimmed past her cheek without touching her, yet the heat of it was enough to make the horizon behind her cease to exist. She did not allow a single strike to land. She could not. Harmony did not attack from the outside. It arrived within. The storm finally ended. Silence returned. Butter landed in a low stance, her breathing controlled, her eyes fixed forward. A thousand Sylvias stood across the salt desert.

Each possessed multiple arms and writhing cobalt tentacles. Each one was suspended in a different motion, each one real enough to kill her, yet each one subtly wrong in a way that made the entire battlefield resemble a gallery of possible outcomes. Butter exhaled.

"Fermata." The field bloomed. Time thickened around the thousand Sylvias. Their movements slowed, their bodies aging forward as each frame dragged behind the next. It did not matter. Fermata inverted. Time reversed. The existence of each copy became a denial of its own origin. The nearest Sylvia flickered. POP. Gone. Another. POP. Another, then another, then another. Sylvia laughed.

"You're using the trick I taught you, aren't you?" The illusions collapsed one by one, erased not through destruction but through the removal of the moment in which they had ever been imagined. They returned to the instant before their existence had been established. The real Sylvia screamed. A tentacle tore into the ground and hooked deep beneath the salt crust. RRRRAAAK!

An enormous slab of terrain, nearly the size of a city, ripped free and was hurled upward before descending toward Butter like a falling continent. Butter did not move.

"Fermata." The mass aged. Stone cracked. Salt yellowed. Its structure weakened and collapsed until the enormous landmass became dust, then finer particles, and finally nothing capable of maintaining a shape. It fell around Butter in a whisper. Sylvia was already there. The nunchaku swung. Butter stepped inside the attack. They were too close for distance to matter and too close for dream logic to provide a safe escape.

Their bodies collided in rapid succession, fist meeting wrist, elbow meeting jaw, knee striking ribs. FWACK- THUD - CRACK! Sylvia's movements snapped between frames, skipping the intervals between them and striking from futures that had not happened yet. Butter answered with absolutes. Impact. Immediate. Final. A nunchaku arc bent space around her. Butter slipped inside it and drove her fist forward. Sylvia twisted, causing time to misalign around the strike, and their foreheads collided. KRRK!

The salt beneath them shattered. They separated. They clashed again. Sylvia's smile returned.

"Submit…" Butter's fist broke through time and struck her before the word could leave her mouth. THOOM. The blow did not merely hurt. It struck the concept of Sylvia's sanity itself. Sylvia screamed. For one full second, delirium seized her mind. Reality twisted around her perception, thoughts collapsing into contradictions as her own senses became unreliable. Her literary abilities reacted instantly. Irony reversed the contradiction. Paradox corrected the impossible. Oxymoron reconciled the opposing states.

Metaphor rebuilt the damaged meaning. Hyperbole restored the magnitude of what had been disrupted. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. The delirium disappeared. But the damage had already been done. The punch had landed in the past, leaving Sylvia with one full second of insanity before her literary abilities corrected it. The correction erased the immediate effect, but it could not erase what she had already experienced....

A windowless room appeared around her, fluorescent lights humming overhead while footsteps passed beyond a door that never opened. She was strapped to a bed, wrists raw from wounds that had healed only to be torn open again. A calm voice spoke to her with the quiet certainty that she would cooperate because she was already broken. The needle descended. It never stopped. Every blink brought it closer. Every attempt to move left her already too late, a single injection stretching across days, weeks, years.

Eventually, anticipating the needle became worse than the pain itself. The room became a hallway. Doors lined both sides, each one closed. Someone was crying behind one of them, and Sylvia knew the voice. She ran toward it, but the hallway lengthened until the crying stopped. When she opened the nearest door, there was nothing inside. A door creaked open behind her. The crying began again. The hallway contracted around her.

The walls pressed inward, leaving barely enough room to breathe, and something warm shifted beneath her palms when she tried to push them away. Sylvia looked down. Her hands were wet. The scene became a mirror. Sylvia stood before it, whole and unharmed, and for one brief moment she felt relief. Her reflection smiled. Sylvia did not. The reflection raised its hand. Sylvia remained still. It leaned closer to the glass, its eyes too wide and its expression too knowing.

"This is you when you stop pretending." The mirror cracked inward. The reflection stepped through. Sylvia tried to retreat, but her own hands closed around her throat, squeezing just enough to recreate helplessness without granting her the mercy of death. The scene changed again. Darkness swallowed everything. There was no body, no shape, no sensation except awareness. Sylvia could not move because there was nowhere to move. She could not breathe because there was no breath.

Time became meaningless, leaving only the certainty that she had been there for an eternity and would remain there longer. A single thought surfaced. This is forever. The darkness became a field. Grass moved beneath a bright sky, and for one precious moment there was peace. Figures stood across the field, people she knew, but their faces were empty. Sylvia ran toward them and seized one by the shoulders. The body collapsed in her hands.

There was no bone beneath the skin, no blood, no organs, only emptiness, as though the person had always been hollow. Sylvia looked down at her own hands. Fine cracks spread across them. She understood. She was hollow too. The field folded inward, and every nightmare returned simultaneously. The room, the hallway, the mirror, the darkness, the field, the needle, the crying, the hands around her throat, all of it arrived without sequence until past and present became indistinguishable. That was the cruelty of it.

She felt everything. Every second stacked upon every other, every fear and wound arriving without sequence or mercy. Sylvia staggered as the impossible weight passed through her mind at once. Her hands shook. The memory disappeared, but its imprint remained, buried beneath thought and instinct, leaving flinches without causes and the terrible knowledge that something inside her had endured what she could no longer fully remember. She no longer knew what was real. She only knew that something inside her had changed.

Butter's next punch was already coming. Arpeggio. The strike would have ended Sylvia, reducing her to another memory, but Sylvia warped away a fraction of a second before impact. A tentacle caught Butter across the ribs instead, folding Sylvia's body into light as she slipped between atoms and into the impossible spaces where the Nonagon stored things that should not exist. She disappeared. The blow staggered Butter hard enough to send a tremor through the surrounding galaxy.

Melody absorbed most of the impact, but Arpeggio remained active, and Butter's momentum carried her forward. Her fist struck the ground. FWOOOM - KRAAAK - THRUM! The salt desert fractured beneath her. Cracks raced across the crystalline surface in perfect geometric patterns as the crust buckled, split, and collapsed. KRRRRSHHH! The horizon broke apart. The atmosphere ignited as burning layers of air peeled away from the planet, while the shockwave raced outward and tore the surface down toward its molten interior.

Butter stared at the destruction for only an instant before the crust split open beneath her. SKRAAAK! The planet's molten core appeared. THUM. THUM. The force reached it. The core collapsed inward before erupting outward, and the planet lost its cohesion all at once. Crust, mantle, atmosphere, and molten heart tore apart in a single catastrophic failure. BOOOOOM! The world ceased to exist. Glowing fragments scattered through the void, trailing light that would continue traveling long after the battle ended.

Where the planet had been, only an enormous absence remained, as though the universe itself had forgotten what belonged there. — Butter stood at its center with her fist still extended. Her breathing was ragged. Oblivion's Maw rushed toward her, spreading its enormous body around her as a shield while consuming the backlash that threatened to tear Melody apart. Pink lines blazed across Butter's body as the accumulated force reverberated through her nervous system. Her spine tightened.

Signals misfired through her nerves like exposed wires. Too much. Her vision stuttered. Her fingers twitched. Pain climbed through her arms as though someone were dragging a bow across exposed nerves. She ignored it. Crescendo. The power surged. Fraud. The drain disappeared. Her Gloom refilled before the loss could matter, flooding her reserves with immediate replenishment. The pain remained. That was the problem. Her power could replenish itself, but her body could not.

Every increase still tore through her nervous system, accumulating damage that Gloom could not simply erase. Her spine felt as though it might split beneath the strain, and pain and movement began to blur into the same sensation. She could keep going. For a little while. Her jaw tightened. She moved again. It had to end now. The damage inflicted upon Sylvia was already catastrophic.

Anyone else would have been erased, yet Sylvia had consumed so much Apis that her body was still metabolizing an absurd reserve of power. Even attacks capable of destroying her body could not keep her down. Butter had already stripped away the equivalent of an entire universe's worth of Apis from her. Sylvia was still alive. The ability to eradicate universes had become almost trivial to something like Sylvia.

Unless Oblivion's Maw consumed her completely, or Butter resorted to Glissando, Katherine would keep returning. Slyvia's Apis would eventually run dry. Butter's body would fail long before that. That was the real battle. Butter could overpower Sylvia. She had already proven that. The question was whether she could destroy Sylvia before her own body finally gave out.... Butter did not move. Not yet.

She hung in the void atop Oblivion's Maw, the wreckage of the destroyed world drifting around her in slow, silent orbits. Gloom pulsed around her in soft violet waves, thin enough to wrap around her lungs and provide what space refused to give. Each breath came through it, artificial and borrowed, yet sufficient. She looked down at her hands. They were trembling. She could still feel Sway stalling Custard somewhere far behind them. He could keep intercepting and delaying it, but he was never built for killing.

Eventually, even he would tire, and Butter could not afford to wait for that moment. She had to end this quickly. Her reserves began to climb again, slowly at first. Butter closed her eyes and breathed, forcing herself into meditation until the pain became distant enough to tolerate. As Gloom flooded her nerves, it wrapped around the damaged pathways like a cast around a broken bone, stabilizing what it could while leaving the underlying damage untouched. The pain remained, but it became bearable.

She had made a promise to Nathan Hall. She had to win. Butter opened her eyes. Oblivion's Maw carried her through the darkness as they searched for Sylvia. Along the way, the creature grew hungry. A black hole drifted nearby, its event horizon swallowing everything around it, and the Maw turned toward it before plunging its jaws into the singularity and consuming the entire thing.

Butter felt the connection between them loosen as the creature fed without drawing upon her Gloom, and she stepped away, leaving it behind for the moment. She stepped. Space corrected. A flicker passed through reality, followed by a sudden displacement. Butter tracked Sylvia's energy, faint but still burning somewhere across the darkness like a thread pulled taut through the void. Each step brought that distant presence closer, sharper, more tangible. She stepped again. The distance collapsed. Again. Closer.

Her movement was no longer motion. It was editing. A sequence of still frames stitched together across reality, each one placing her exactly where she needed to be next. She did not travel between locations or cross the intervening space. She simply arrived, one position after another, like stop-motion imposed upon the fabric of the universe. The stars did not blur around her. They changed positions. Distances snapped shut.

Entire stretches of emptiness were skipped as though they had never existed, leaving only the moments that mattered. Step. Another arrival. Step. Closer. Her eyes remained fixed upon that distant burn of energy. Sylvia. Still running. Still alive. Butter followed.... Sylvia appeared light-years away, her form flickering as her hands trembled. She stared into the void where Butter had been, where the solar system had existed only moments ago, where a billion years of existence had become nothing more than a memory.

Fragments bled through her thoughts in jagged flashes. Hands that were not hers. Years that had never happened. Hunger. Loss. Pain without an origin. The memories destabilized her, making her movements stutter and her cobalt light waver as the perfect continuity of the Nonagon fractured into something hesitant. She was confused. Agitated. Afraid. The realization struck her like a crack through glass. She was not supposed to feel this. Emotion was inefficiency. Emotion was error.

It was a weakness she had supposedly discarded when she became something greater than human. Yet her hands trembled harder. Her breath came shallow and uneven despite having no need to breathe, while thoughts that did not belong to her tangled with memories she could not place. A century of suffering had been compressed into a single instant, yet the sensation refused to disappear.

She stared into the void where the solar system had been, searching for certainty and finding only noise, pressure, and the terrible unfamiliar weight of feeling. Butter had already found her. Her pink eyes were wide, her face pale, yet she stood upon the void as though it were solid ground, utterly unconcerned with the laws insisting that she should have died alongside the planet. Sylvia raised both hands.

Cobalt light erupted from her palms in enormous sheets of expurgation, each blast powerful enough to turn the emptiness between stars into a furnace.

"Butter, wait. I—""Enough talking." Butter's voice was quiet, exhausted, and absolute. She lowered her gaze for a moment, then lifted her prosthetic leg. The black alloy blazed with violent violet light. Gloom surged through its frame, flooding every seam until the limb radiated with enough pressure to distort the void around it. The prosthetic hummed beneath her weight as she settled into her stance, her remaining fist tightening. Sylvia stared at her for a moment. The trembling stopped.

Her expression became eerily calm.

"Very well, then." The cobalt light in her palms intensified. Butter was already gone. FWOOM. Left. FWOOM. Right. Another beam formed, only for Butter to appear behind it before the attack had finished taking shape. She appeared ahead of another, then above it, then somewhere else entirely, moving through Moth Step after Moth Step with such precision that it seemed less like evasion and more like revision.

She was rewriting the space between herself and Sylvia with every movement, erasing the positions where the attacks expected her to be and inserting herself somewhere else before reality could object. She did not move toward Sylvia. Direction implied a path, and Butter no longer needed one. She simply arrived. Sylvia's eyes sharpened. Space folded inward. A correction. A lock. The region surrounding Butter's arm, from shoulder to fingertip, became a single fixed coordinate, declared immovable by Sylvia's authority.

Butter felt the wrongness immediately. A note screamed through Melody. She twisted. Too late. The beam was already there, collapsing toward the point where her body had been forbidden to leave. It should have struck her head. Instinct saved her. Butter moved at the last possible instant, but the lock caught her arm instead, pinning it in place as the beam raced toward her. There was no time to escape. So she chose. CRK. Her remaining hand flashed across her body in one brutal motion. Skin parted. Muscle tore.

Bone severed. Her arm remained trapped within Sylvia's spatial lock, still reaching toward her opponent, still hers, but no longer attached. FWOOOM. The beam consumed it. Butter appeared ten meters away, staggering through the void with blood trailing from her shoulder in a thin red arc. The severed limb was gone, erased so completely that even its memory had been denied. She looked at the wound once. Only once. Her remaining hand hung at her side, wet with her own blood. She had done it herself.

Something stirred within the ruined shoulder. Gloom pulsed softly beneath the flesh, and threads of energy reached outward, tentative at first, then increasingly deliberate. Fibers formed. Bone followed like pale roots forcing their way through soil. Muscle knitted around the growing structure, nerves reconnecting as skin slowly spread across the new limb. It did not return instantly. It grew. Slowly. Naturally. Butter watched Sylvia instead. Her pink eyes never left her. She did not flinch from the pain.

She did not look down again. Losing an arm had already become nothing more than another expense in a battle where every second carried a greater price. Sylvia stared at her. Butter stared back. There was no fear in her expression. Only exhaustion, blood, grief, and the absolute refusal to stop. She raised her remaining fist.

"Again."