Chương 16: The Red State

Butter was already shaking. She knew it too. Another wave of yetis charged. Mountains followed. Molten lances crossed the sky. Her teeth clenched.

"FERMATA!" A field erupted outward, engulfing everything within a hundred meters. Then she poured more power into it. Boulders hurtling toward her entered the field and withered into dust. Molten lances aged into ash before they could reach her. Yetis fought against the effect, muscles straining as centuries crashed over them in seconds. Butter forced it harder. One collapsed. Then five. Twenty. Dozens of yetis aged apart simultaneously. Fur rotted. Flesh withered. Bones collapsed.

Entire bodies unraveled into drifting clouds of ancient dust. When the field finally faded, only a handful remained. One burst forward. Its acceleration exploded past reason, climbing multiple billions of times beyond light in an instant. The replicas had continued compacting throughout the battle, their bodies growing denser and denser until they carried the equivalent mass and durability of entire solar systems folded into living flesh. Reserves: 0. 3% Butter tried to dodge. Her Gloom stuttered. Nothing happened.

She was out of juice. She barely managed to swing her prosthetic leg. The charging yeti was knocked into oblivion, but another was already above her, both arms raised. KRAAA-THOOOOOOM. The blow landed on the crown of her head and drove her straight through the planet. The microscopic Syndicate drone followed. Continents, oceans, mantle layers, and molten cores blurred past as Butter became a living projectile.

Its telemetry struggled to keep up, eventually estimating the world at hundreds of millions of kilometers in diameter. Then she burst from the far side. What emerged barely resembled a victor. Butter tumbled through open space, battered and broken, her neck hanging at an impossible angle. Chunks of flesh were missing from her shoulders and torso. One eye was swollen shut. Blood drifted around her in crimson clouds as she wheezed in agony, unable to move. Reserves: 0% Her chest heaved.

"Haaah... haaah..." For several seconds she simply knelt there, breathing. Then her shoulders began to shake. A tear rolled down her cheek. Another followed. Butter lifted a trembling hand and wiped at her face. More tears immediately replaced the ones she'd cleared away. She rubbed at her eyes again, fingers unsteady, smearing blood and tears together across her skin. She sat there in the void, battered and ruined, trying and failing to stop crying.

"I can't do this anymore…" The words came out broken. Her hand drifted to the side of her head. She winced the instant her fingers touched it. Part of her skull was gone. Beneath it, exposed brain tissue pulsed weakly in the vacuum. Butter jerked her hand away with a sharp gasp, fresh tears spilling down her face. The Gloom around her was barely visible now. The vast radiance that had once rewritten reality had dwindled to a faint flicker clinging stubbornly to her skin. Just enough to keep her breathing.

Just enough to keep her alive. Butter folded in on herself.

"Lucien…" Her voice cracked.

"Lucien, help…" Another sob escaped her.

"Lucien, please help me…" The respite lasted less than a moment. The remaining yetis crossed the planet and returned. They descended upon her. An arm seized each shoulder. RRRRRIP. Butter screamed as both arms were torn free. She couldn't even lift her head. Violet. Red. Violet. Red. Then the lights on her prosthetic leg finally surrendered to crimson. FWOOOOOOOM. Gloom erupted from her body like a supernova.

Radiance flooded the void, and the surrounding yetis dissolved instantly, their forms erased by the expanding wave of impossible power. The Talons' telemetry spiked. Reserves: 25. 0% The reserve had returned. But something was different. During the entire battle, Butter had managed the Gloom herself. Every dodge, every strike, every impossible survival had required conscious expenditure. Crude by necessity. Effective, but wasteful. Now the prosthetic had taken over. The distinction was staggering.

It was the difference between solving calculus by hand and handing the problem to a supercomputer. Microscopic amounts of Gloom were spent with perfect precision. Nothing wasted. Nothing overcommitted. Every impossible outcome purchased for the absolute minimum cost. The reserve hadn't actually increased. Yet the Talons watched the efficiency curve climb and reached the same conclusion: Functionally, that 25% behaved like a pseudo 100%....

Butter rose slowly into the air as bone reformed, muscle rewove, blood vanished from her skin, and her neck straightened with a wet series of cracks. Wounds sealed. Flesh restored itself. Tears dried. Then her eyes opened. The pink was gone. Only black remained. Wide. Unblinking. The pupils had dilated until there was almost nothing else, leaving her with the vacant stare of a doll that had suddenly learned how to move. The Syndicate probe drifted backward. It possessed no fear centers.

No instinct for self-preservation. Yet its positioning thrusters fired anyway. One meter. Two. Three. As though some buried heuristic had reached the same conclusion a living creature would. Distance. Create distance. Butter didn't react. She simply floated there in absolute silence, black eyes fixed on nothing and everything at once. The thing floating there was not the girl from before. It was free.... Crescendo had reset. Butter had returned to baseline. A surviving yeti lunged anyway, fist cocked back.

Butter looked at it. Her finger flicked. TIK. The creature crossed the planet, the star system, and the galaxy before the motion had fully completed, reduced to a shrinking white speck racing into the dark. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. Butter remained floating in silence, black eyes staring into the void. Up until that point, Butter's absurd feats had a visible explanation: Crescendo. Every impossible strike was backed by a multiplier that had climbed into nonsense.

The horror wasn't the flick. The horror was that the flick came after Crescendo ended. Explanation unavailable. The ground exploded beneath her as she launched high into the sky. Far below, the survivors scrambled across the continent. Higher. Higher. Until she hung above the battlefield, bloodied and trembling. She folded both hands together. Light gathered between her palms. The beam struck the horizon instantly. SKRRRRRAAAAAAAMMMM. The beam crossed the continent and erased it from the map.

Land, mountains, oceans, and swarming monsters were carved from existence in a single sweeping line. When the light faded, a crater thousands of miles across and miles deep occupied the space where the continent had once existed. The plain lay silent, scarred by craters and frost. Then the remains moved. White fur drifted across the wasteland. Multiplying. Reforming. The swarm rebuilt itself with horrifying efficiency. One body became many. Many became hundreds. Five hundred. Always five hundred.

Butter floated motionless above the ruined continent, black eyes fixed on the creatures below. The surviving yetis split apart again, replacing every loss almost instantly. New bodies slammed onto the landscape, larger than before, denser than before. The Gloom writhed around her. Then she spoke. The sound barely resembled a voice. It was like shattered ceramic scraping together beneath deep water.

"Vel'kra... tir'uun." The Talons' translation systems immediately activated. PERSUADE... RELEASE. Then the voice came again.

"Keth'ra. Tir'uun. Chraa'tek." The probe's linguistic engine hesitated before producing an interpretation. GROW. RELEASE. SURPASS. The creatures obeyed their nature. Ice spread across their bodies. New horns emerged. Their musculature compacted further. The temperature plummeted. The new generation emerged different. Jagged formations of ice pushed through fur and flesh. Crystalline spikes crowned shoulders and backs. Pale mist poured from their mouths with every breath.

Snow began falling almost immediately, spreading outward in a glittering storm. Within moments the battlefield had transformed into a frozen dreamscape. White snow drifted through the air, settling across black volcanic glass and shattered mountains. It was strangely beautiful beneath the fractured moonlight.... Butter made no move to stop them. If anything, she appeared to be encouraging it. The black eyes never blinked. The Gloom thickened around her, spreading across the battlefield in invisible waves.

Reality itself began to bend. Then she spoke again.

"Tir'uun. Tir'uun. Vel'kra'tir'uun." RELEASE. RELEASE. BECOME MORE. At first, the Talons assumed she was speaking to the swarm. She wasn't. She was speaking to reality. The Gloom persuaded the world around the yetis to stop resisting. Every biological limit they reached simply moved further away. Every time they approached the strongest version of themselves, reality was convinced to permit a stronger one. She was forcing their evolution. Pushing the swarm toward the absolute strongest forms reality could tolerate.

The Talons watched the numbers climb. Then climb again. Then continue climbing long after their models predicted saturation. Their movements lost all traces of animal savagery. Every motion economical. One passed a distant mountain and casually brushed it with a claw. The entire peak disappeared. Instead of dispersing the energy, it compressed the effect into a razor-thin line. The probe's analysis struggled to explain it. The creatures were no longer merely generating force.

They were controlling it with absolute precision, capable of compressing enough energy to devastate a world into a target no larger than a rib. Five hundred figures spread through the falling snow. They surrounded Butter from every direction, floating in the frozen sky. A perfect sphere of predators. The evolution had gone far beyond biology. Far beyond reason. The Talons watched the readings climb until their models simply gave up.

By every estimate, each individual creature now possessed enough raw power to exterminate a universe single-handedly. And there were five hundred of them. Snow drifted between the monsters. At the center of the sphere, Butter floated silently, black eyes unblinking. One moved. The feed glitched. Static consumed several frames. When the image returned, dozens of yetis were falling. Twitching. Broken. Their bodies no longer regenerated. Their adaptive growth had ceased.

The hive-like synchronization linking the swarm together had been severed. The probe never captured the strikes. Analysis later concluded that Butter had disabled them through precise pressure-point attacks delivered faster than the recording systems could observe. Catastrophic neural disruption. Every strike had landed on a location that disabled regeneration, severed synergistic links, disrupted adaptive processes, and shut down abilities entirely. Permanently. The affected creatures would never evolve again.

Butter smiled. The grin stretched far too wide across her face, wrong in a way the human mind immediately rejected. The crippled universe-killers convulsed helplessly around her, and the thing wearing Butter's face seemed to take genuine pleasure in their anguish. The probe filtered the audio. What emerged was horrific. The strikes had ruptured nerves, flooded lungs and cranial cavities with fluid, and broken bones inward through vital organs. Not enough to kill them. Just enough to leave them trapped in agony.

Wet wheezing filled the feed. Some tried to scream. Nothing came out. Butter's grin widened.... The surviving yetis adapted instantly. Hundreds of jaws opened. Snowflakes froze in place. Frost raced across the landscape. Space itself seemed to crystallize. Then torrents of absolute zero erupted toward the motionless figure standing in the sky. Then the Gloom flared. The feed distorted instantly. Static bled across the image. Colors inverted. The probe's sensors screamed as reality itself became unreadable.

Visuals collapsed into flickering noise. The audio remained. Something was moving. Then came the screams. Not Butter's. The yetis'. A chorus of animal terror echoed through the static. The sounds grew distant, frantic. They were running. Running from her. Wet sounds followed. SCRUNCH. KRRRCH. RRRIP. Bone breaking. Flesh tearing. Entire bodies being reduced to something unrecognizable. The screaming intensified. Then stopped. A final explosion thundered through the feed. KRAAAAA-BOOOOM. Silence.

Several seconds later, the visuals returned. The planet, moons and yetis were gone. Only debris drifted through the void. Fresh blood floated everywhere. Not Butter's. Chunks of flesh, shattered horns, torn organs, and mangled remains drifted among fragments of planets and moons. Something horrific had happened during the blackout. One yeti still lived. It drifted in the distance, impaled upon a spear of condensed Gloom.

The weapon entered beneath its jaw and exited through the top of its skull, pinning its ruined body in place. Both arms were gone. Both legs had been severed. The stumps twitched weakly, trailing ribbons of frozen blood into the void. Somehow, it was still alive. Its mouth opened and closed around the shaft protruding through it. Wet, broken sounds escaped. Pleading noises. Begging noises. The Talons' translators found no words within them. None were necessary. At the center of it all floated Butter.

Her clothes were stained crimson. Blood coated her face. Black eyes stared into the darkness. The probe filmed for barely a second before she turned and looked directly at it. The drone's logs showed no movement. One frame she was thousands of kilometers away. The next she was already there. Two fingers closed around the probe. Butter examined it quietly. For a moment, distorted audio bled through the feed.

"... Kra'ke'un..." Then a soft, breathy laugh. Butter smiled. Blood-stained teeth showed beneath that grin. Fresh crimson streaked her lips, and tufts of white fur clung to her face, caught between her teeth and tangled in her hair. The Talons noticed something else. Space around her wasn't stable. Distances stretched and contracted without pattern. Time drifted unevenly. Sensor readings arrived before the events that generated them.

Entire regions of vacuum folded away from her position as though reality itself preferred to be elsewhere. Far in the distance, stars began disappearing. One after another. They simply collapsed. Planets followed. Moons. Asteroid fields. Objects separated by light-years of empty space were destroying themselves for no identifiable reason. The probe's analysis attempted to classify the phenomenon and failed repeatedly. Fear was a biological response. These objects possessed no minds.

Yet the observed behavior matched the definition with disturbing accuracy. The universe was retreating from her in panic. Matter was choosing nonexistence over proximity. The recording cut off. The Talons initially assumed she had destroyed the probe. Analysis disagreed. The final telemetry showed no impact. No external damage whatsoever. The device had simply stopped functioning. Every system aboard the probe had shut down simultaneously despite remaining physically intact. Power cells were full.

Hardware was operational. Diagnostic routines reported no faults before terminating alongside everything else. The conclusion was impossible. Machines did not make choices. Yet the logs showed the same pattern the Talons had observed elsewhere. Faced with the thing that had once been Butter, even inanimate objects were beginning to exhibit behavior that resembled fear. — In the silent chamber, the Talons stood motionless, their logic circuits struggling to process what they had witnessed.

They had seen what her magic could do to gods. They had also seen Crescendo. A technique that turned prolonged combat into mathematical suicide. Curiously, the Red State had already begun to fade from memory. Details blurred. Sequences unraveled. Conclusions remained, but the thing itself slipped away whenever they tried to examine it. Whether the Gloom had obscured it or Apis had forcibly discarded the data because it generated impossible results, none could determine. No one lingered on the mystery.

Their focus had already shifted. Deprive Butter of every ability. Leave her with nothing. The analysis, tactical projections, and threat assessments unfolded in less than an instant. Millions of calculations raced through interconnected minds, a complete battlefield model assembled before a human neuron could finish firing. The chamber was mapped. It stretched for kilometers beneath the fortress, a colossal cathedral of theft lined with thousands upon thousands of glowing pods.

Endless rows disappeared into the distance, their blue light merging into a luminous horizon. Along the far left side of the structure, reinforced glass partitions protected slowly shifting banks of harvested batteries, amber cells stacked in vast quantities like a treasury of stolen souls. Butter stood near the center of the chamber's long axis. Between her and the batteries lay open ground. Deliberately open ground.

The floor here had been reinforced to withstand industrial accidents, containment breaches, and experimental catastrophes. The surrounding walls, support columns, and observation galleries carried the same treatment. Collateral damage was acceptable. Maximum force was acceptable. Everything had been built to survive it. A single error registered near the pod fields. A girl. Hidden behind one of the capsules. An escaped dreamer. The observation was logged and discarded. Irrelevant. Butter was the obstacle.

The flaw was not her power, but its source. The Gloom answered to a single immutable constant: Butter's stubbornness. No chemical could suppress it. No neural inhibitor could erase it. Reality itself listened because she refused to stop asking. Even constants had limits. Their HUDs identified one. A Metaphysical Suppression Field keyed to her signature would impose a local law: NO MAGIC. It would not sever the connection. It would merely place a barrier in the way. Estimated breach time: 1. 2 seconds.

In relativistic combat, that was an eternity. The Talon on the right moved. A yellow disc dropped from his wrist and clicked softly against the floor. Silence followed. Harmony's hum died. Melody's pink glow faded from her bandages. The Gloom flickered out of her veins. The law had been written. Even with the Gloom active, the Talons could still wound her. Apis classified its influence as a myth - a fairy tale masquerading as a law of reality. The Gloom dismissed Apis as nonsense before the argument could begin.

Neither side was willing to concede. The endless debate had proven costly enough. They weren't interested in having it again. Butter's shoulders sagged slightly as the familiar whisper of impossible futures fell silent. All that remained was her body: roughly eight thousand times stronger than a peak human, fast enough to cross continents in moments, armed with a nervous system forged by endless war and instincts sharpened by constant survival.

Under normal circumstances, that was enough strength to toss around objects weighing thousands of tons. Right now, it was barely enough. Her spine was a column of fresh fractures. Half her face remained half-knitted together. Muscles hung together through pain, willpower, and sheer refusal to quit. She was a weapon built from steel and stubbornness. And at this moment, both were cracked.