Chương 25: 24: The One They Call W-9

The sky was injured. The region had crawled with demons, if demons was even the correct word. Possessive spirits was closer. They infested animals and insects, swelling them into grotesque parodies of themselves. Wolves became towering nightmares of teeth and impossible muscle. Bears grew large enough to flatten cities. Beetles and ants rose to the size of skyscrapers, their bodies glistening with energies that did not belong in reality. Humanity fought back. Bullets. Tanks. Missiles. Nuclear fire. Many died.

Many of the creatures walked out untouched. The stronger the spirit, the stronger the horror it created. Some could split planets apart with a casual gesture. Some radiated such concentrated malice that entire continents died merely from their presence. Nuclear warheads disappeared into their mouths like snacks. Countries vanished beneath them. They would have depopulated entire worlds if Crook had not been there. To her left, Crook was clad in a plain dark-cobalt Magpie suit. A helmet with oversized green lenses.

She sat atop what appeared to be a mountain until closer inspection revealed the truth. It was a monument of corpses. Millions upon millions of dead impossibilities piled into a grotesque peak, each one powerful enough to devastate worlds, all slain by a single woman, if she could be called that at all. Without ceremony, Crook removed her helmet. Pure white hair spilled free, cascading all the way to her knees, luminous against the poisoned sky.

Beneath it was smooth albino skin and deep violet eyes, while her face remained utterly devoid of emotion. She regarded mountains of dead monsters with the same indifference another person might spare a passing rainstorm. Korhess had studied her for years, searching for the hidden secret everyone assumed must exist. A magical core. Apis emissions. Conceptual power. Some divine blessing. There was nothing. No impossible energy source concealed beneath the suit.

For decades Korhess refused to accept the conclusion, because everyone had something. Crook had none. Yet she sat atop a mountain of corpses numbering in the millions. The realization haunted Korhess more than any monster ever had. Crook was simply so catastrophically skilled that entire civilizations mistook mastery for a superpower. And she had killed them all herself, not because she wanted to stop the war, but because she wanted there to be something left when it ended.

It was then that Korhess saw the streak.... The battlefield stretched beneath a sky stained with smoke and impossible colors. The air reeked of blood, ozone, burning earth, and ruptured spirits. Screams rolled across the landscape in endless waves. Demons the size of cities stalked the horizon while smaller monstrosities flooded valleys and forests below. A golden streak cut through the chaos. At first Korhess couldn't see it. Demons simply split apart. SHHKK. Halves tumbled from the sky.

A titan-sized wolf lost its head. A serpent longer than a mountain range unraveled into sections. Entire swarms came apart in glittering sprays of impossible flesh. Korhess narrowed her eyes and forced Apis deeper into her perception. The present refused to cooperate, so she looked backward instead, tracing lingering echoes through the recent past. Only then did she understand. The golden trails weren't moving. They were already there. Tails.

Miles away, enormous luminous appendages carved through battlefields with impossible precision, severing entire formations of demons faster than causality could explain. Distance meant nothing to them. Space seemed optional. Following those impossible lines, Korhess finally found their owner. A girl. Beautiful and terrifying. Her skin was the color of caramel. Blazing golden irises burned within eyes far too old for her apparent age.

Long curly black hair spilled to her waist, interrupted only by a striking patch of white above the right side of her forehead. She looked perhaps thirteen years old, but nothing about her carried the innocence of youth. Lean muscle showed beneath a black jumpsuit. She wore no shoes. Black claws tipped both hands and feet. Sharp fangs flashed when she growled. Behind her flowed eight golden tails. They were long, flat ribbons of luminous gold ending in sharp rectangular tips.

They drifted around her independently, weaving through the air with eerie intelligence. Predators orbiting a greater predator. W-9. Korhess remembered the designation immediately. An Antarctic experiment. One of Isolde Vex's creations. Rumors followed her. Golden flashes on distant battlefields. Entire armies reduced to ash. Calamities found sliced apart before anyone realized a fight had begun. Most stories were impossible. Looking at her now, Korhess suspected the stories had been conservative.

The legends spoke of Winter Haze dismantling armies. They neglected details. The casualness. The girl tore through lesser demons like a child wandering through tall grass. Heads came free with wet pops. Bodies folded apart. She flipped through swarms, landed lightly atop shoulders, then ripped those shoulders free as she passed. Strange blood - violet, emerald, gold, colors with no business existing inside living things - splashed across ruined stone. She never slowed. One demon reached for her.

Winter caught its head, twisted, and kept walking while the body collapsed behind her. Then she started juggling. Six severed heads bounced lazily between her hands as she strolled forward. When boredom finally found her, she tossed them skyward. The tails moved. Korhess never actually saw the strikes. The heads became dust. Then powder. Then something even finer. Microscopic fragments scattered across the battlefield before gravity could decide where they belonged. Winter yawned. And kept walking.

Korhess wondered if the stories had omitted details not because they were exaggerated. But because nobody had believed them. — Crook still sat atop her mountain of corpses, violet eyes fixed on the distant battlefield as the golden streak carved through aberrations like sunlight through mist.

"Winter Haze," she had said softly, as though reciting a parable rather than discussing a living weapon.

"The child designated W-9." Her gaze never left the horizon. Several miles away, Korhess's ears twitched and rotated toward her voice, effortlessly plucking the words from the chaos of battle.

"Listening from afar again, little fawn?" Crook murmured. Korhess immediately pretended she wasn't.

"I bested her once." The statement carried no pride. It sounded more like an observation about the weather.

"If fate is cruel, she shall arrive for you first." The poisoned wind stirred her knee-length white hair.

"In that moment, hold nothing back. Spend every hidden card. Offer the world the finest version of yourself." Crook folded her hands in her lap.

"For if Winter Haze chooses you as her opening note, and you hesitate to answer with your entire song, you might as well kneel and dig your own grave before the music reaches you." A golden flash split the distant sky.

"Most predators kill because they're stronger than you. Winter Haze kills because she arrives before the difference can matter." Far in the distance Golden aura poured from W-9's body like liquid sunlight. The heat radiating from her presence felt comparable to a star, yet it burned only what she wished. Thousands of miles away, anything she selected turned instantly to ash. Entire armies disappeared. Demons evaporated. Even the mountain of corpses beneath Crook dissolved into drifting cinders. Korhess staggered.

Her Apis immediately dispersed the heat threatening her position, but the ground beneath her hooves liquefied into glowing slag. That shocked her more than anything else. Ordinary heat had ceased to matter years ago. This wasn't solar energy. It was a concept wearing heat's face. The distance between them remained vast, but Korhess quickly concluded W-9 was coming here. She raised a hand. FWOOOM. A sphere of green-gold flame launched skyward and burst within the cloud layer separating them.

Fire began to rain across the battlefield. She fed Apis into the phenomenon until the downpour became self-sustaining, endless sheets of flame descending at relativistic speeds. Miles disappeared beneath the bombardment. W-9 reached the edge of the inferno. Paused. And then the strangest thing happened. She took a step forward. Korhess, whose perception had long rendered light sluggish as a snail, still saw only a blur.

The girl threaded through the downpour unharmed, dodging individual raindrops of conceptual fire as though each path had been shown to her beforehand. Shock rippled through Korhess. She fed more Apis into the phenomenon. The rain accelerated. A million times faster. A billion. The endless storm became a solid curtain of green-gold light, entire regions submerged in a continuous scream of descending fire. W-9 blurred. One afterimage became ten. Ten became hundreds.

Golden silhouettes flowed through the inferno in overlapping layers, each weaving between individual drops with impossible precision. Korhess could no longer tell which body was real. The rain intensified further. The afterimages only multiplied. Korhess felt a cold sensation creep up her spine, she staggered back a step, then steadied herself. Calm returned to her features as she raised her guard, whatever this creature was, panic would not improve the situation.

W-9 crossed the remaining distance and exploded forward on all fours. Then, halfway there, she simply wasn't. Korhess's eyes widened. The girl appeared upside down above her, twirling lazily through the air as though gravity had become optional. One golden tail swept beneath her. Tap. She landed on the rectangular tip of a single tail no wider than a hand, balancing effortlessly atop it. Another spin. She dropped to the ground, crossed her legs, and stared up at Korhess.

"What the hell are you?" Korhess blinked.

"Pardon?"

"Another experiment?" Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. Korhess drew herself upright.

"Indeed." One hand settled against her chest.

"I am the first blossom within a forgotten grove. The root from which many lesser branches emerged. Korh'ess Ala'ban'ti. The First Antler." W-9's eyes slowly glazed over, she leaned back. Pretended to snore.

"Mimimimimi." Korhess's eye twitched. W-9 opened one eye.

"Holy yap." Then she sprang to her feet. Korhess frowned.

"How remarkably discourteous. Have you no manners at all?" W-9 dropped into a stance.

"Man, shut your bitch ass up, bro." Korhess closed her eyes for a moment.

"The garden of language has suffered a catastrophic blight." She reached for the future, preparing to borrow an attack from moments ahead and place it in the past. W-9's golden eyes widened, as though she had seen the thought before Korhess finished having it. She flipped forward instantly.

"Nice try, goat-woman." WHAM! Both palms slammed over Korhess's ears. Golden energy reverberated through her skull, through the very mechanisms that let her perceive causality. Korhess's teeth clenched hard enough to creak.

"Deer." The correction escaped through gritted teeth. Korhess staggered, focus shattering. The future blurred into static, she couldn't think clearly enough to place an attack. Instinct took over. She spun into a devastating kick. WHUMP! Her hoof blurred toward the girl's skull. W-9 slapped it aside. One clawed hand casually redirected the hoof, treating a continent-breaking blow like an inconvenient branch hanging across a trail. The shockwave remained. KRRRRAAASH!

A wedge of destruction erupted outward from the path of her leg, mountains disintegrating, forests atomizing, and entire stretches of landscape simply ceasing to exist beneath the compressed violence. The battlefield trembled beneath the passage of a strike that could have flattened nations. Claws were already descending toward Korhess's face. Green-gold flames erupted point-blank. FWOOOSH! W-9 handsprung backward through the explosion, landing lightly several dozen meters away. Those claws frightened Korhess.

She could feel the meaning behind them. Death. The wounds they opened promised permanence. Any injury inflicted by them felt destined never to heal. They clashed again. Korhess unleashed every ounce of skill she possessed. W-9 flowed through it all like smoke. She dodged as though she had already witnessed every attack yesterday. Angles that shouldn't exist became avenues of approach. Momentum became suggestion. Distance became decoration. Korhess reached for the future.

Apis unfolded her perception across the next several seconds, the familiar branching lattice of possibilities blooming before her mind. Against any other opponent, it would have revealed a finite collection of outcomes. Against W-9, it revealed infinity. Korhess's pupils contracted. Every attack, dodge and position already existed. W-9 was simultaneously leaping left, right, forward, backward, above, below. Clawing. Kicking. Retreating. Advancing. Standing still. Circling.

Attacking from angles that had not yet been invented. Every future she examined split into more futures before she could finish observing the first. The predictive web collapsed into an endless golden storm. Yet Korhess continued. Green-gold flames blazed across her hands as she accelerated herself with Apis, crossing distances before shockwaves could form. She only needed one hit. One touch. Winter Haze avoided them all.

Korhess watched a flaming palm pass through the space where the girl should have been and finally understood. Instinct. Feline instinct elevated into something monstrous. W-9's body was already moving before danger arrived. Before danger existed. The girl wasn't even fighting her yet. Korhess exhaled slowly. Then she attacked. Her fists blurred into a series of grasping strikes, each motion resembling someone seizing fistfuls of invisible fabric.

Apis flooded her palms, dream-energy twisting around her fingers in luminous currents. The power was terrifyingly selective. She could tear a soul from a body and leave the flesh standing. Rip destiny loose while leaving memory untouched. Excise essence, identity, possibility, or seize everything at once and drag it free. The first strike shot forward. Winter wasn't there. She jerked upward so abruptly it looked involuntary, body reacting before thought could form. Korhess's hand closed on empty air.

Winter landed upside down atop Korhess's extended fist. Balanced on a single finger. Korhess's eyes narrowed. Another strike came instantly. So fast gravity hadn't even reclaimed Winter yet. At the same moment a hoof snapped upward, carrying enough force to cave in a mountain range along with the promise of turning the girl's skull into mist. Winter's tails exploded outward. Korhess was prepared this time. She launched herself backward, hooves flashing. One tail was knocked aside. Then another. Then a third.

Each impact rang like artillery. For an instant she almost seemed to be climbing them, kicking from tail to tail as they lashed through the air around her. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. She crossed the barrage and landed lightly on the ground. Hooves clicking once. Dust rolled outward. Across from her, Winter settled onto her feet as well, ears twitching lazily. For a brief moment neither moved. Korhess exhaled. FWOOOOOM! Green-gold fire erupted outward. A mile of battlefield vanished beneath conceptual flames in an instant.

Earth, air, demons, mountains - everything disappeared into the inferno. It should have caught her. W-9 wasn't there. Korhess's ears twitched. She looked left. Right. Above. Nothing.

"Get lost, goat-bitch." W-9 growled the words and spun. A kick caught Korhess squarely in the face. KRAAACK! Her emerald rings tore free from her fingers, warping and melting as they spun away. The shockwave stripped her clothing from her body in an instant, fabric vaporizing into drifting ash. Then the world disappeared. Korhess tore through a mountain sideways, stone vaporizing around her as she punched through layer after layer of granite. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Entire peaks burst apart in her wake.

She hit another mountain. Then the ground. SKRRRRRRRRRRRRRCH! The impact gouged a canyon hundreds of kilometers long. Korhess bounced. The continent shattered beneath her trajectory. Forests erupted into clouds of splinters. Rivers exploded into steam. Cities became expanding rings of debris before she even registered they had existed. When she finally stopped, a smoking trench stretched from horizon to horizon behind her. For a moment she simply lay there. Stunned.

She staggered upright, immediately covering her chest with her hands. Below the waist, dense brown fur spared her some dignity, and Apis was already at work, threads of green-gold light weaving new clothes across her body. Then her eyes widened. Golden tails were already upon her. They sliced through distance, space, and time. Her conceptual invulnerability prevented penetration, but momentum still existed. The first tail struck. The second hit before the first finished.

The third arrived from somewhere that technically hadn't happened yet. THOOOOOOM. Each impact piled onto the last until reality itself seemed determined to launch her off the planet. She was blasted across a continent. The landscape detonated around her. Every impact stole more momentum. Every impact was catastrophic. BOOM! SKRAAAASH! BOOM! The earth folded beneath her like wet paper.

Miles of terrain vanished beneath the expanding wall of force, the earth folding upward in molten sheets as the atmosphere detonated into a roaring vacuum. The horizon split. Clouds shredded. She finally slammed through a coastal mountain range, skipped across an ocean hard enough to split the sea to its floor, then ricocheted back onto land. THOOOOM! Only her absurd durability kept her anchored to existence. She staggered upright once more.

Apis flowed across her body, reforming her clothes in shimmering threads while molten fragments of emerald and gold drew themselves back together around her fingers, her rings restoring themselves as though the damage had never occurred. She watched the horizon for a moment, ears flicking. Then she muttered under her breath,"How insulting." One hand adjusted her scarf.

"I'm a deer." Korhess paused, lifting an arm and discreetly sniffing beneath it. Her expression tightened.

"Not a goat." A slim bottle appeared from within her freshly reformed clothing. She gave herself several quick sprays across her neck, wrists, and scarf, a faint floral fragrance immediately replacing the scent of smoke and molten stone.... When she finally returned, another sight froze her in place. Crook and W-9 stood facing one another in the distance. The tails lashed forward. Crook dodged every single one.

Korhess's utter disbelief, she moved through gaps that didn't exist, slipping between moments smaller than zero. W-9 surged forward while her tails expanded outward, wrapping around the entire planet dozens of times in an instant as though physically holding the world together.

"DIE!" Her punch landed. KRRRRAAAAAA- BOOOOOM! The impact detonated across the battlefield. Mountains flattened, the atmosphere rippled outward in visible rings, and the Earth convulsed beneath the force. A planet-wide earthquake raced through the crust. Continents trembled. Oceans recoiled. Tectonic plates groaned under impossible strain. Then Korhess saw the tails. Her breath caught. They weren't merely anchoring the planet. They encircled everything.

Immense golden tails coiled around the Earth, the Moon, and the vast architecture of the Solar System itself, threading through the void like restraints wrapped around reality. The tremor surged into them. WHOOOOOOOM. Mars shuddered. Jupiter's storms distorted. Saturn's rings rippled. The vibration raced outward through lengths so vast they rendered interplanetary distance meaningless. For a single impossible moment, the entire Solar System shook. And at the center of it all... Nothing moved.

Dust swallowed the battlefield. When it cleared, Korhesss stared in horror. Crook stood exactly where she had been, expression unchanged, white hair flowing calmly in the wind. W-9's world-shattering strike rested against her raised pinky finger while her other hand remained casually behind her back.

"I refuse," Crook said. Nothing else moved. Then Crook's hand shifted. A one-inch punch. WHUMP. The strike landed where W-9 had been standing. Space disappeared. That section of reality simply ceased to exist, leaving only emptiness as air rushed inward to fill the absence. Yet W-9 was already visible in the far distance, bounding away on all fours. The colossal tails that had encircled the Earth and threaded through the Solar System began to withdraw. The impossible lengths folded inward.

Millions of kilometers collapsed into thousands. Thousands into hundreds. The vast coils slipped through space like silk being drawn through a needle, shrinking with effortless disregard for scale. Planets were released. Orbital paths untangled. The lingering tremors faded from the heavens. Korhess stood frozen, watching the exchange with the silent awe of a child realizing the toys she treasured were not weapons at all. Compared to them, she still had a very long way to go. Then she lost sight of Crook.

Korhess's eyes snapped toward W-9 and widened. Crook was already there. One hand held several golden tails in an iron grip while her body flowed between W-9's strikes with effortless precision. Claws, kicks, tails, and shockwaves tore through the air. None touched her. Crook planted her feet. Flicked her wrist. W-9 became a golden streak, hurled skyward with such force the atmosphere detonated behind her. Clouds split apart. A burning line carved through the heavens as she shot straight toward the sun.

Crook watched her ascent, her back still turned to Korhess as white hair drifted in the poisoned wind.

"Storms reveal little while they are still deciding whether to rain," she said softly.

"If you wish to understand a beast, do not provoke its temper. Awaken its hunger. Anger exhausts itself. Hunger endures." Far above, the shrinking golden star reversed course. Crook continued, as though discussing the weather.

"Winter Haze carries a wilderness within her. A beautiful and terrible thing. One does not cherish a contest by meeting such a creature half-awake. One waits for the moment the last restraint snaps and the monster remembers it was never meant to be a person." The descending star brightened.

"I would rather face the whole forest than a single leaf pretending not to be attached." The atmosphere ignited. W-9 was coming back. Korhess watched the descending star for a moment before glancing toward Crook.

"A curious inquiry, if thou would indulge it." You could expand the exchange like this while keeping it concise: Crook said nothing.

"Why is she so vulgar?" Crook's violet eyes shifted slightly.

"Tell me, Korhess. Do you know why she is called W-9?" The question caught her off guard. Korhess frowned. She herself had been A-1. The First Antler. Yet somehow she had never questioned why Winter Haze carried a nine. Crook looked back toward the burning star descending from the heavens.

"Because there were eight others." Silence followed.

"They perished." The wind stirred her white hair.

"Winter was born a mutant child. A little feline-girl. The Syndicate spent nine years teaching her pain. Mutilation. Reconstruction. More mutilation. Again and again." Korhess's ears lowered slightly.

"Each iteration was dosed with fragments of divinity. Bast. Sekhmet. Enough to strengthen the vessel. Not enough to survive." Crook's expression remained unchanged.

"The first eight failed." The burning star overhead grew brighter.

"The ninth did not." Korhess went still. W-9. The designation suddenly felt different. A casualty report. Eight dead children preceding the one that survived. Her stomach tightened. The vulgarity. The impatience. The feral mannerisms. The constant aggression. Korhess had mistaken them for flaws. They were scars.

"Nine..." she whispered. Crook's gaze followed the descending light.

"That child possesses a frightening capacity for destruction. The only reason the world still exists around her is an equally frightening need to do good." Her voice softened slightly.

"Without it, she'd be a genocidal maniac wearing the shape of a little girl." The atmosphere screamed.

"If you knew what Winter Haze carries inside her, crude language would be the least of your concerns." Before W-9 could arrive, Crook took a single step and disappeared again. A sonic boom rolled across the horizon as the two figures met high above the planet, colliding somewhere between sky and space. Korhess blinked. Then blinked again. Her ears twitched.

"... One moment." She suddenly shook her head. Winter Haze had just returned from the Sun. Returned. Had she crossed the void on foot? Run through space itself? How had she survived the journey? The velocity? The impact? And perhaps more importantly... How had Crook sent her there with a flick of the wrist? Korhess stared upward as the battle resumed. Those questions lingered long after the war ended, feeding the same obsession that already consumed her. Skill. There had to be an answer hidden somewhere within it.

That had been twenty years ago. Since then, she had trained until muscles tore, bones cracked, and exhaustion brought her to the edge of death more times than she could count. She had refined Asherah's Waltz, devoured Apis, and honed her craft with obsessive devotion. Her skill had skyrocketed. The uncertain hybrid who once watched in awe from afar no longer existed. The memory dissolved. The screams of the Sin War faded. The poisoned sky vanished. Crook and W-9 receded into the past.

Korhess found herself standing in the chamber once more, facing Butter across the fractured floor. She had never been defeated again. For three decades, Korhess consumed exactly twenty-five Apis prisms. Each one possessed enough resistance that overwhelming it required the energy to vaporize a planet. Most came after the humiliation of Winter Haze, when obsession drove her beyond every previous limit. The effects compounded. Each prism multiplied the influence of the last tenfold.

By the end, her growth had long since escaped meaningful mathematics. In raw force, she could lift galaxies. Physical attacks had become meaningless to her. Only conceptual attacks carrying enough weight to erase galaxies could break through her defenses and draw blood. Strength had always been her certainty. Then she met Clock. The Untouchable caught her punch with raw strength alone. No tricks. No techniques. He held it, then drove a headbutt into her face hard enough to nearly launch her through the atmosphere.

For the first time in decades, Korhess lost. She still remembered the moment she saw her own blood. Red, yet drowned beneath bioluminescent gold and green, the colors of years of Apis saturation. It spilled from her face in luminous strands as she stared at it in disbelief. Then she felt Clock's gloom. The pressure of it carried the promise of erased universes. Korhess panicked, she turned away from a fight and refused to return.

The thought of facing him again before growing stronger felt less like combat and more like suicide. She had returned for more Apis. More power. Higher limits. Proof that she still deserved the title she had carved from fifty years of suffering. Yet now his sister stood in her way. As Butter rushed forward, Korhess felt no hatred. This was never truly a war between them. The war had always been with herself. The beast in the kennel. The failure on the table. The donkey in the halls.

If she could not rise beyond that final barrier, then every stolen moment, every swallowed scream, every grain of dream-stuff had been for nothing. All of it flashed through her in the instant Butter chose not to destroy, but to create. She was offering a portrait. And the subject was Korhess's oldest wound.