Chương 141: 140: Cosmos IV

A roar suddenly tore through the silence. Oblivion's Maw. The creature had finally finished consuming the black hole, the last echoes of its monstrous crunches still carrying through the void. Its jaws opened, and a torrent of oblivion erupted toward Sylvia. The agony stopped. Butter collapsed, gasping instinctively despite the planet having no oxygen.

She struck the ground hard and lay there for several seconds, trembling as she stared into the unfamiliar sky while Oblivion's Maw and Sylvia clashed in the distance. Her spine shuddered as the fracture began to close with a sickening crack, the vertebrae dragging themselves back into alignment while damaged nerves reconnected in bursts of pain that refused to fade.

Her organs twisted once more, slowly and reluctantly unfolding until they settled into something that resembled their proper arrangement, while deep within her abdomen the rupture sealed and torn tissue knitted itself back together under immense pressure. Her body held. Barely. Blood still slipped from her nose in thin streams as her vision flickered and her overloaded brain struggled to process what was happening.

Her nervous system remained damaged, still burning with residual pain, and healing had restored the structure without erasing the trauma. The pain stayed. Crescendo did not answer. The flood was gone. The refund had been denied. Fraud had ended, leaving her with nothing except what remained. Finite. Thirteen percent. Her breath hitched, shallow and uneven as she fought to keep her Gloom under control. Don't pass out. She gagged, dragging herself onto one elbow.

The million Harmony strikes had taken something from her that Gloom could not simply repair. Her body could heal. Her mind could not. Every near miss had left something behind, a thousand tiny reminders of what it felt like to be unable to escape. She had spent so long reacting to Sylvia's attacks that she had forgotten what it meant to fight deliberately. Butter wiped the moisture from her eyes. She had to finish this. She was her father's daughter.

He would never surrender simply because the fight became impossible. And even though she hated admitting how much of her stubbornness came from her mother, she could not imagine either of them accepting defeat. Butter looked toward Sylvia. She finally understood. She had been trying to overpower her. That was the mistake. Sylvia was too powerful, too adaptable, too deeply protected by the Nonagon. Every direct exchange gave her another opportunity to recover, reinterpret, or counter.

Butter did not need to overpower her. She needed to get through. Find the gaps. Slip between the attacks. Strike where Sylvia could not prepare for it. Butter slowly pushed herself upright.

"Yes…" Her voice was barely audible.

"That's what I'll do." Butter stepped in. Oblivion's Maw already had Sylvia's attention. A claw tore through the air as Sylvia swung Harmony over her shoulder and brought one nunchaku down upon it. The impact drove the creature sideways, but its hide absorbed the force without yielding. All of Sylvia's eyes remained fixed upon the Maw as it lurched through space along impossible trajectories, tearing miles of terrain apart with every exchange. Attacks erased state-sized sections of the planet.

Each collision sent tremors through the crust. Butter watched. She studied the rhythm of Sylvia's movements, the intervals between her attacks, the way her tentacles constantly repositioned themselves to guard her blind spots. Sylvia was powerful enough to make brute force meaningless, but every movement still followed a pattern. Then Sylvia spoke a new word.

"Epizeuxis." A beam erupted from her palm. It was not a single attack. It was repetition given form. The beam struck, ended, and struck again in the same instant, each repetition following the last without interval, without decay, without an endpoint. One became two, two became four, and the sequence continued into infinity. Oblivion's Maw opened its jaws. The beam entered. The bottomless creature began to fill. Sylvia smiled.

She watched as the endless repetition poured into the Maw until its enormous belly swelled against its own impossible limits.

"Finally," Sylvia said, laughing breathlessly.

"You have a bottom." She raised another hand.

"You cannot consume infinity, can you?" The Maw convulsed. Sylvia's smile widened.

"I finally defeated you." The creature's jaws opened. Sylvia's expression changed. Oblivion's Maw fired. The entire accumulated beam erupted from its mouth in reverse, an endless torrent of repeating destruction compressed into a single blast. Sylvia lunged upward. The attack tore past her, punched through the atmosphere, and continued beyond the planet before detonating somewhere in the distant darkness. BOOOOOOOOOOM. Butter was already moving.

She began walking toward Sylvia before the woman could recover or conceive another solution. Sylvia's possibilities were practically limitless, and giving her even a moment to think was dangerous. One step. Butter turned. Her body began to spin. Round and round. The movement was familiar, something she had created long before Gloom had given names to everything she could do. A Shaolin Whirlwind Split, born from instinct rather than music. Perhaps that was why she had never fully understood it. Now she did.

"Staccato." The name felt right. Her rotation accelerated. She understood the efficiency immediately. Staccato, Melody, Cadenza, and Arpeggio could theoretically be layered into a single execution technique, each principle feeding the next until the resulting strike became instantaneous and nearly impossible to defend against. Properly combined, the technique could cut through even an infinite sequence, leaving nothing for reconstruction to restore. She could not use the complete combination.

Solfege was beyond what her damaged body could sustain. Two principles would have to be enough. She chose Staccato and Melody. Gloom flooded both arms. Staccato gave the slash speed and discontinuity. Melody gave it substance, persuading the invisible edge to become something capable of cutting Sylvia herself. Butter knew Sylvia could still answer it with Palindrome, Metaphor, Paradox, Hyperbole, or one of the countless principles hidden within her Narrative Authority.

Beating Sylvia outright remained nearly impossible. Yet Sylvia had not killed her. That was the opening. Butter spun. Her arm snapped outward. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. A slash screamed through the void. Sylvia's tentacle struck its flat side and knocked it away before the edge could reach her. The attack spiraled harmlessly into the darkness. Butter spun again. Another Staccato. Another. Another.

The slashes crossed the battlefield faster than light, their trajectories appearing almost simultaneously. Sylvia batted each one aside with her tentacles, deliberately striking the flat surfaces rather than risking contact with the edges. Butter kept advancing. Oblivion's Maw roared behind her, forcing Sylvia to divide her attention. Melody's bandages loosened around Butter's waist and slid down her body, wrapping around her thighs and calves.

They tightened, reinforcing her movements and stabilizing her damaged nerves. Closer. Another slash. Another tentacle. Closer. Sylvia finally glanced toward her.

"You really think you can—" Butter did not answer. She swung. Her prosthetic leg ignited. The slash carried the same stop-motion principle embedded within the prosthetic, an attack that did not travel through the interval between beginning and impact. The moment Butter committed to the kick, the strike was already there. Every eye on Sylvia's body snapped toward her.

"Ellipsis." A gap opened. For a Planck instant, the moment containing the kick ceased to exist. Sylvia slipped her head through the missing interval. Butter's slash followed. The edge cut through the Ellipsis itself. Sylvia twisted violently. The attack missed her head by inches. Her tentacle-like hair did not. An enormous sheet of it fell away, severed cleanly from her scalp. Thick, dark blood sprayed across the salt. Sylvia froze. Her hand slowly rose to the ruined side of her head. Her fingers came away wet.

She stared at them. Then her face went utterly still.

"You…" Butter was already spinning again. Her eyes remained fixed upon Sylvia. She had found an opening. And she intended to exploit it. A strange stillness settled over Slyvia. There was another ability, something she had never considered using because she had never needed to. The laws of tenses. Sylvia's hand drifted toward her abdomen, and the eye within her navel opened. Its iris divided into four distinct sections, each representing a temporal relation through which an event could be anchored to existence.

Past. Present. Future. Conditional. Sylvia stared at Butter. The answer had been there all along. She did not need to destroy what Butter had created. She only needed to change how long Butter had been sustaining it. Her lips parted.

"Past." The word carried no force. It did not need any. The navel eye turned. Reality shuddered. Sylvia focused upon the connection between Butter and Oblivion's Maw.

"You have been maintaining it…" The iris rotated again.

"… for twenty-four hours." The effect was instantaneous. Butter's Gloom reserves crashed to zero. There was no gradual depletion. The accumulated cost of maintaining Oblivion's Maw for an entire day was imposed upon her body in a single instant, and blood erupted from her nose as her organs struggled beneath the sudden burden. She gasped and dropped the Aria. Oblivion's Maw flickered. The colossal wyvern looked toward Butter as its form began to destabilize.

Butter tried desperately to hold it together, her trembling hands reaching toward the creature.

"No…" Her voice barely escaped her throat. The Maw dissolved. Its enormous wings collapsed into darkness, its star-filled body breaking apart into fragments of black light before the entire creature was pulled back into the Aria. Silence followed. Butter crumpled to her knees, catching herself with both hands as blood ran freely from her nose. Her entire body shook beneath the backlash, every muscle tightening as though her nervous system had been overloaded. She struggled for breath.

"Sylvia…" The name escaped as little more than a sob. Sylvia descended until her bare feet touched the ground. She no longer looked toward the Aria. She had stopped trying to overpower Butter's creations because the creatures were absolute, Oblivion's Maw was absolute, and the Aria itself was dangerous. Butter was not. A cobalt tentacle slipped around Butter's waist and lifted her gently from the ground. Butter flinched weakly, but she was too exhausted to resist.

Sylvia drew her close, and Butter's white hair hung messily around her face, soaked with tears and blood, her bunny-ear beanie nowhere to be seen. Surrender seemed certain until Butter's hand twitched. Moth Step. Butter flickered from her grasp and reappeared several meters away before surging forward again. Sylvia's expression tightened.

"Still?" Butter answered by moving. She had no Gloom left to spare, yet she forced one last technique through her body anyway, her fist tearing across the barriers between space, time, logic, and causality. The backlash reached her before the attack did. KRAK. Bones fractured beneath her own power. Melody screamed across her body, wrapping around the breaks and forcing the shattered pieces back into alignment before they could collapse completely.

Butter staggered, her arm hanging uselessly for a moment before Melody cinched it into place. The attack reached Sylvia. Her conceptual defenses broke. Sylvia screamed as her form split apart, fragments of her body scattering through the void while a mouth opened across one of her palms. Before she could fully disperse, she invoked a tense.

"It never happened." Reality corrected itself. Sylvia returned whole, but the correction consumed an enormous quantity of Apis. Butter had nearly destroyed herself simply to force Sylvia to spend power, and now she could barely remain standing. For several seconds, neither moved. Salt drifted through the silence. Butter stood hunched over, blood dripping from her fingertips. Her vision was hazy, her body numb in places, and every breath sent another pulse of pain through her ribs.

Her jaw hung slightly crooked from the earlier blow, making speech difficult. She remembered Nathan. She remembered the promise. Slowly, she straightened.

"I still... hafta... stop you." Sylvia stared at her. Something in her expression softened.

"You still think you can?" Butter stepped forward. One foot. Then another. Her prosthetic leg began to glow violet. Sylvia sighed.

"Sugarbear, look at yourself." Her voice carried genuine pity now.

"You can barely stand. You're shaking. Your Gloom is gone, your body is failing, and you can hardly see me. Why are you still doing this?" Butter raised her fist. Sylvia's pity hardened into frustration.

"Why?" Butter's lips moved around her broken jaw.

"Prom... ised." The tentacles erupted. They seized her prosthetic leg and whipped her across the salt flats. Butter struck the ground, bounced, and tore through hundreds of metres of crystalline terrain before Sylvia yanked her back and slammed her down again. BOOOOOOM! Her jaw cracked further beneath the impact. Sylvia caught her with another tentacle and held her suspended.

"Stop fighting me!" Butter hung limp for a moment, blood dripping from her mouth.

"Stay down," Sylvia whispered.

"Please." Butter's fingers twitched. Melody tightened. Her bones shifted back into place with a series of sharp cracks as she forced herself upright. Sylvia stared.

"You're killing yourself."

"I... know." The answer was barely intelligible. Butter's prosthetic leg began glowing again. Sylvia's expression fell.

"You would rather die than let me have you?" Butter's remaining eye struggled to focus on her. A faint sound escaped her broken jaw.

"Mmh." Sylvia went completely still. The rage disappeared, replaced by something wounded and almost childlike. Then her expression hardened.

"You ungrateful little thing." Her tentacles multiplied. Butter moved. A tendril swept from the left. She ducked. Another descended from above, and she twisted beneath it. A third caught her across the chest before Melody could fully brace her. CRACK. Butter flew backward. A cobalt beam followed. She raised her prosthetic leg on instinct. FWOOM! The beam tore through her defenses and carved across her torso, sending her crashing onto the salt. She rolled to a stop, blood spilling from her mouth.

Melody tightened around her ribs. She inhaled. Pain exploded through her chest. She inhaled again. Her fingers dug into the salt. She pushed herself upright. Sylvia watched in silence. Butter swayed on her feet, half blind, blood running from her face and torso, a broken bone protruding through Melody near her abdomen. Her jaw hung crooked, and her entire body trembled so violently that she could barely remain upright. Sylvia's voice softened.

"Enough." Butter raised her fist.

"Please." Butter took another step.

"You cannot win." Another step.

"You are going to die." Butter kept coming. Sylvia's tentacles rose around her. Butter's prosthetic leg flared violet. Sylvia looked at her with something approaching grief.

"You are doing all of this for a promise?" Butter's eye remained fixed on her. She could barely see. She could barely breathe. She could barely speak. Yet she nodded. Sylvia closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the pity was gone.

"Then I will break the promise with you." Butter staggered forward, swinging blindly like a drunkard, unable to see and with part of her brain damaged, yet she kept throwing punches. Every step hurt, every breath threatened to tear something else apart, and every movement brought her closer to collapse, but she continued because she was no longer fighting because she believed she could survive. She was fighting because stopping meant breaking her word, and Butter would rather destroy her own body than do that.

Sylvia simply floated before her, watching as the last of her wounds finished healing. Butter had inflicted irreversible damage. She had burned through universes worth of Apis stored within Sylvia's body, destroying reserves that should have been enough to sustain entire realities. Without the hundred million dreams Sylvia had harvested, she would have died a hundred times over. Butter was not losing because she lacked the power to hurt Sylvia.

She was trying to melt an iceberg with a candle, and somehow she had already melted a massive portion of it. The problem was that Sylvia had an ocean beneath the ice. A hundred million dreams were not a trivial reserve. The Apis could no longer fit inside Sylvia's physical form alone, so the excess had been backed up into the very concept of her existence, an astronomical reserve that her body could draw upon whenever reality demanded more of her than flesh could contain. Sylvia knew this. Butter knew it too.

Still, she kept fighting.

"By the one who bore the lamb…" Sylvia's voice barely existed. Butter swung again. Sylvia caught her arm. Butter struggled weakly, but Sylvia gathered her into her arms with desperate gentleness, holding her as though enough tenderness could somehow undo everything she had done. One hand moved carefully against Butter's abdomen, pushing the protruding bone back beneath the damaged flesh.

"I'm sorry, Sugarbear. I didn't mean to hurt you." Her fingers trembled as they brushed the ruined side of Butter's face.

"I'm not the enemy." Butter's eyes barely focused. Her body sagged against Sylvia's. Sylvia believed the struggle was over. She was wrong. A hand moved. Butter's remaining arm snapped upward, her fingers striking Sylvia's body in rapid succession, jabbing at pressure points that did not exist and searching for weaknesses her damaged mind could barely identify. Instinct guided every movement. Her fingers found something anyway. The Nonagon stuttered.

Sylvia gasped as pain erupted through her body, the artifact's authority collapsing around each point Butter had struck.

"How…" Sylvia seized Butter's wrist. CRACK. She snapped the arm. Butter screamed. Sylvia immediately pulled her close again, horrified by her own reaction.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry." Her tentacles wrapped around Butter protectively, cradling her against her chest while Butter's broken body trembled. Butter still tried to move. Sylvia closed her eyes.

"Present." The word settled over Butter like a sentence. Her exhaustion became immediate and absolute.

"You're tired," Sylvia whispered. It became a fact. Butter's shoulders slumped. Her eyelids grew heavy, and the last of her strength began slipping away. Sylvia stared at her for several seconds, expecting resistance that no longer came.

"Now I have you all to myself." Her tentacles tightened around Butter.

"You will never escape me, Sugarbear." She pressed her cheek against Butter's hair.

"You're mine." Butter's lips trembled.

"I hate you…" Sylvia kissed her forehead.

"I know." She held her tighter. Then Butter suddenly gasped. Her chest jerked against Sylvia's. Once. Twice. Her mouth opened, but no breath came. Sylvia frowned. Butter tried again, desperately dragging air into lungs that found nothing they could use. Her fingers curled weakly against Sylvia's chest as panic flickered across her exhausted face. Sylvia went still.

"Your Gloom…" She understood. Butter's reserves had been empty for some time. Without Gloom, she had no means of sustaining herself in an environment that could no longer support her. Sylvia looked at her more closely.

"You've been holding your breath?" Butter's eyes widened. Sylvia stared at her in disbelief.

"All this time?" Butter gave a weak, desperate gasp. Sylvia's expression softened.

"Oh, Sugarbear…" She raised one hand.

"Facsimile." Reality changed. The atmosphere around them became breathable again, the barren planet receiving an artificial composition suitable for human lungs. Oxygen flowed into Butter's lungs almost immediately. Butter inhaled sharply. Air. Real air. She coughed, then dragged another breath into herself, her body greedily accepting what it had been denied. Sylvia smiled.

"There." Her fingers brushed through Butter's blood-matted hair.

"See?" She leaned closer, her voice almost tender.

"You need me to breathe." Butter stared at her through exhausted eyes. Sylvia held her securely against her chest.

"You need me for everything now." Her smile deepened.

"And I will never let you forget it."