Chương 37: 36: Harmonization

The wolf crouched at the far end of the corridor, silver ichor steaming from its wound. Butter could feel its anger now. Beneath the impossible speed and regeneration lurked something much worse: overwhelming physical power. Strength that could punch through mountains, durability that laughed at nuclear fire, every cell engineered into a fortress. A Syndicate masterpiece. And it was furious. Butter raised a hand and pushed Fermata into the space around her. The air thickened. Light slowed.

Sound dragged into a low drone. For ten meters in every direction, time became reluctant. The wolf attacked immediately. It never entered the field. The moment it recognized the distortion, it adjusted. Its strike launched from outside the affected area, exploiting the boundary instead of crossing it. The punch arrived carrying the same reality-breaking velocity that had powered its impossible movements. Butter flinched involuntarily.

The Gloom recoiled violently, yellow, blue, and red collapsing inward like a burned hand jerking away from a hot stove. Whatever powered the wolf's strike wasn't simply moving through her technique. It was actively resisting it. Force had stopped meaning anything. Newtons, joules, momentum - those belonged to sane fights. Through Fermata, Butter sensed violated mathematics, shredded spacetime, and coordinates being overwritten by brute assertion. I am here. Therefore, you are not. For a moment, the Gloom stalled.

Then the yellow core took over. It didn't understand the equation, didn't care, and flatly rejected the answer. Instinct told her exactly what Fermata had done. The impossible force hadn't vanished. Fermata had caught it, suspended it, and stored it inside the field like a spring compressed beyond reason. Her stomach dropped. If Fermata broke, or if she released the stored energy carelessly, the entire attack would come back out. At her. A Big Bang delivered point-blank.

Enough force to shatter Requiem like an eggshell, vaporize her body, and leave nothing behind but a cautionary tale about poor decision-making. Butter's eye twitched.

"Great," she muttered. Following the pressure shifts and instinctive warnings flooding through her senses, Butter surged forward at exactly the right moment. Instead of retreating from the attack, she rushed into it, dragging Fermata's boundary over the wolf as it committed. The creature crossed fully into the field and thickened time wrapped around it like wet cement. Its impossible movement collapsed into something finite. It was no longer an unavoidable event. It was merely a very, very fast predator.

And that was something Butter knew how to kill.

"You're mine now, puppy," Butter growled, a bloody grin splitting her face. The wolf lunged. This time she could follow it. She intercepted the attack before it fully formed, yielding and redirecting with practiced Shaolin and Jeet Kune Do precision. Melody glowed, disputing the force behind the strike instead of meeting it head-on. A spinning elbow smashed into the wolf's muzzle. It recoiled. Butter grabbed its tail and hurled it off balance. Enraged, it lunged again, jaws aimed at her center.

Butter stepped inside its guard. Her hook kick was a feint. The wolf bit down on her prosthetic. CRUNCH -SHRIEK- BLAM! Its teeth shattered against the divine alloy. The impact tore the upper half of its skull apart, sending bone and silver ichor spinning through the corridor. The headless monster staggered, already regenerating. Butter didn't give it the chance. Crescendo was fully charged. A one-knuckle punch (Yee Jee Kim Yeung Ma) hammered into its sternum. BOOM. Another. BOOM.

Then a staccato barrage followed, each strike compounding, tearing at the foundations of its existence. THOOM - WUMP! The final hit blasted a cavern through its torso. The wolf crashed to the floor, twitching weakly as silver ichor pooled beneath it, its legendary speed reduced to little more than dying spasms. Butter released Fermata. Before she did, her hands flashed across her own body in a blur of precise strikes. Pressure points, meridians, places where flesh, will, and Gloom intersected.

For a single precious moment, she locked herself into temporary stasis. Unchangeable. The Gloom flowed over her clothes and skin like liquid paint, sealing the state in place. She reached up, unclasped Requiem, and slipped the necklace into her pocket. Then she released the field. Reality collected its debt. The force trapped inside Fermata detonated. KRRRRRSHOOOOM!

Everything within ten meters in every direction was subtracted as the stored strike unfolded point-blank, carrying enough violence to rival the birth of a universe. Stone, metal, air, light, dust, sound - all of it disappeared, retroactively erased by force so overwhelming it ceased to resemble force at all. The wolf ceased. Every layer, every law, every carefully engineered clause of its existence disappeared beneath the detonation. Nothing remained.

Even the sound retreated, pulled backward into silence by the impossible event. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. At the center of the catastrophe stood Butter. For one frozen instant, she existed outside alteration while the apocalypse passed around her. Then the stasis broke. The Gloom peeled away from her skin. Time resumed its grip. Sensation flooded back into her limbs.

Butter swayed slightly, rubbed at her shoulder, and stared at the perfectly empty sphere carved through the fortress.

"Okay," she muttered.

"That worked." Gunfire from Katherine's direction hammered a desperate rhythm. Butter ran, a streak of white hair, blood, and bandaged fury. The corridor blurred around her. Melody glowed in silence - the silence of a decision made, a threat contained, the held breath before the final move. Even as she sprinted, her mind worried at the wolf. Why? Conceptual regeneration. Super strength. Faster-than-causality movement. It wasn't a collection of powers. It was a single solution to a physics problem.

A body moving that fast should destroy itself instantly. Spacetime friction alone should reduce it to atomic debris. So the Syndicate hadn't made it tougher. They'd made its regeneration conceptual. Every displacement was a death and rebirth. Its speed wasn't locomotion. It was a continuous cycle of self-destruction and reconstruction, an "I exist" law stitching the pieces back together faster than reality could object. The agony of that process had to be constant. No wonder the thing was feral.

The truly disturbing part was its independence. No magic. No Apis. No external fuel source. The laws were written directly into its biology. Power suppression wouldn't work. Conceptual bans wouldn't work. The creature wasn't using powers. It was the power. A self-contained system. Butter almost admired it. Almost. Temporal prisons, dimensional anchors, folded space, recursive loops - none of them would hold it. You couldn't trap movement because it wasn't really moving.

Every "step" was annihilation followed by resurrection somewhere else. A process. A law. A machine made of flesh. Fermata hadn't beaten its speed. It had forced the process to pay a cost. Inside the field, every fraction of a second became a Sisyphean struggle against a hostile reality. Velocity stayed absurd. The suffering required to maintain it skyrocketed. The wolf hadn't slowed because time was thicker. It had slowed because existence became expensive. Butter's jaw tightened.

The silence in Melody's bandages felt like a countdown, and the victory she'd carved from the wolf suddenly felt less like a solution and more like a loophole. Katherine still needed her. She ran faster. The corridor stretched ahead like the throat of the next nightmare. Behind her came the slow, wet, hateful sound of a sovereign horror learning to stand again. — Katherine ran, breaths sharp in the filtered air.

The polished corridors twisted through the fortress while the Steppers followed at a steady, professional pace. The knuckle-user caught her with insulting ease. He wasn't a Talon. His speed would barely register to Butter. To Katherine, it was overwhelming. An armored hand shot out, caught her by the collar, and lifted her effortlessly off the floor. Dangling there, her accelerated mind pieced it together. The Steppers were still alive. Their grey-and-red suits amplified existing strength rather than replacing it.

The Apis cores regulated the flow, boosting speed, durability, and weaponry without destroying the wearer. A normal human would die inside one. The baseline had to be monstrous already. The ranks were a ladder of tolerance. Survive enough deployments and a Stepper earned an Operative suit. Stronger body. Higher output. More Apis. More strain. And if they died? Her thoughts flashed to the Talons. The hollow lenses. The perfect, emotionless movements. Promotion.

A Talon was what happened when the human became unnecessary. Once no living mind remained, there was no nervous system left to protect. The Apis could run unrestricted, integrating fully with the body and unleashing reality-bending defenses and impossible processing speeds through an empty shell. The entire hierarchy suddenly made sense. Start with a person strong enough to survive the power. Increase the power until the person can't survive anymore. Then remove the person and keep the power.

The Syndicate's highest achievement wasn't creating stronger soldiers. It was engineering a weapon that no longer needed a human inside it.... The realization took only a moment. The Stepper's free hand lunged for the clasp of Sonata. The gem erupted. Violent purple light burst from Katherine's chest with the sound of shattering crystal, blasting the Stepper backward while she crashed to the floor. Something heavy clattered into her palm. Harmony. The dark nunchaku hummed faintly, naturally warm against her skin.

Katherine had no idea how it got there and no time to wonder. The second Stepper fired. Orange-glowing rounds screamed toward her. Katherine yelped. Harmony moved. The nunchaku tugged her arm through a sweeping arc. CLANG-CLANG-CLANG! The shots ricocheted away, exploding against walls in sprays of molten stone. Her fingers went numb from the impact. A nervous laugh escaped her.

"Come on!" she shouted.

"Don't run! Come fight me!" The knuckle-user recovered first. He blurred forward and punched the air beside her head. WHUMP. The blast should have liquefied her brain. Harmony yanked her into a crouch. The shockwave shattered a stained-glass window behind her while Sonata flared like a miniature star, its violet shield absorbing the rest. The rifleman immediately switched tactics, hurling a yellow-emitting suppressor designed to disrupt the amulet.

"No!" Katherine swatted it away. POP. The device sparked, smoked, and died instantly. Both Steppers froze. Their lenses locked onto the satchel at her hip. Inside, the Nonagon pulsed once. A silent supernova. The suppressor had been overloaded. Katherine grinned despite herself. Sonata kept her alive. Harmony fought for her. The Nonagon apparently murdered any gadget stupid enough to get close. Three artifacts. Katherine settled into a stance.

Awkward, unbalanced, obviously copied from Butter, but the intent was there. The Steppers moved together. The knuckle-user charged low while the rifleman recalibrated for a headshot. The weapon immediately glitched. The Nonagon's unstable signature flooded the area, scrambling its systems. With a frustrated twitch, he lowered his aim and targeted the floor beneath her instead. Katherine held her ground. Harmony hummed in her hands. Sonata warmed her throat. The Nonagon pressed against her hip.

A damsel carrying a dragon's hoard. Now she just had to figure out how to use it. — Butter took three steps before a sensation crawled up her spine. She stopped and slowly turned. The wolf stood at the far end of the corridor. Standing upright. Two legs. Hands hanging loosely at its sides. Pale eyes fixed on her without blinking. Watching. The sight was wrong in a way claws and speed never were. Every layer she had painstakingly stripped away had returned. The vast stack of sovereign laws. The metaphysical onion.

Hundreds of declarations nested inside one another. LAYER 47: I OCCUPY SPACE. LAYER 89: MY FORM PERSISTS. LAYER 103: EXISTENCE IS A DEFAULT STATE. All of them. As though she had never touched it. For a fraction of a second, genuine disbelief hit her.

"What?" Her senses snapped outward. The answer arrived immediately. Not the same. Her pink eyes narrowed. The distinction was subtle but absolute. This wasn't the wolf. It was a copy. A replacement. Like destroying a film reel only for someone to load an identical reel into the projector. The movie continued. The previous reel was gone. This was another one.

"Oh my." Understanding settled over her.

"The Syndicate made backups." The wolf continued staring, motionless and patient. Kill one. Another takes its place. Somewhere in this fortress there had to be storage, vaults, growth chambers, printers, whatever nightmare process generated these things. Which meant she couldn't win by killing it permanently. She'd have to find the source and destroy every copy. The realization made several recent events click together. The Gloom locking away Moth. The forced development of Sforzando. Arpeggio. Melody.

Maybe it wasn't only trying to make her stronger. Maybe it didn't want this thing studying her old habits. Building counters. Butter's eye twitched.

"Unfathomable." The wolf remained silent. Butter growled.

"I am absolutely not fist-fighting you. Your punches are localized Big Bangs. That's a ridiculous thing for an organism to have. I'm not fluffing boxing with that." The creature remained motionless.

"Unless you want another Arpeggio to the face, kindly get lost." She pulled Requiem from her pocket and slipped the gray teardrop necklace back around her neck. Silver light washed over her skin. Not that it mattered. If one of those punches landed properly, Requiem would crack apart like an eggshell. Only Sforzando had demonstrated the ability to survive universe-breaking force. Which meant she needed another solution. She was still Butter.

An absurd martial artist with just enough reality persuasion to make terrible ideas function. Her thoughts drifted to telekinesis. Her father had it. Her brother had it. Her sister had it. She didn't. A stupid insecurity she'd carried for years. Then she remembered Crook. Her mother couldn't move objects with her mind either. She simply treated air as an extension of her body. Enough skill. The result looked identical. Butter immediately disliked the comparison. Unfortunately, it was correct.

She had maybe seven percent reserves left. Barely enough to be dangerous. Perfect.