Chương 38: 37: Cadenza

The Gloom stretched outward. Time thickened, not true temporal manipulation, just persuasion. Reality was convinced to become cartoonishly sluggish around her. The wolf stood frozen in stretched moments while Butter used the stolen breathing room. She needed something different. Every ability she had created either consumed a fortune in Gloom or obliterated everything in its path.

She needed an attack that could choose its victims, one with an area of effect that was selective rather than indiscriminate, devastating without reducing half the battlefield to rubble. She raised both hands. Left rotating clockwise. Right rotating counterclockwise. Two opposing motions. Perfect equilibrium. The Gloom latched onto the concept and performed the impossible calculations she lacked the power to achieve herself. Air twisted. Pressure folded. Matter encountered disagreement.

A circular ring of invisible violence formed around her, rotating so violently that anything touching it was shredded into its constituent particles. Atoms entered. Atoms lost the argument. The corridor filled with a metallic whine as stray dust vanished into sprays of separated protons and neutrons. Ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. Which was why she liked it. A grin spread across her face.

"Cadenza." The name felt right immediately. A wild solo. Improvised. Questionably sane. Unlike Glissando, which erased whatever it touched from existence, whether matter, concepts, or gods, Cadenza was cheaper and far more practical. Instead of deleting its target outright, it turned the surrounding air into a collider, generating antimatter-like reverberations that shredded anything caught within. Most of the work came from precision rather than raw Gloom. By itself, it only affected physical matter.

Melody changed that. It translated metaphysical existence into something Cadenza could tear apart, allowing the ring to shred spirits, ghosts, concepts, laws, and other immaterial structures as easily as flesh and steel. The realization made Butter grin. Cadenza wasn't truly new. It was the polished culmination of dozens of abandoned ideas: layered air punches, vibrational strikes, shockwaves powerful enough to split her knuckles open. One more movement in her growing symphony. Names mattered.

They made techniques easier to remember. Easier to improve. The creature watched from its stretched instant. Butter rolled her shoulders.

"This one isn't part of the toolkit, by the way." The silver glow of Requiem reflected in her eyes.

"You can learn from it all you want." The stretched second snapped. The wolf lunged. Butter settled into Tai Chi, feet rooted in Ma Bu as her arms flowed through Peng, Lu, and Ji. Cadenza answered. Ordinary air couldn't hurt anything. Air accelerated into a metaphysical particle shredder could. The wolf crossed half the corridor before recoiling with a snarl, a dozen sovereign clauses shredded away. It dropped to all fours and circled at impossible speed, attacking from every angle at once. Butter closed her eyes.

Music flowed across her skin. Melody translated. One hand rose as the other fell. Her wrists turned. The corridor seemed to move with her. She swept a palm sideways. WOOSH. Air followed the motion, accelerating into a translucent crescent that crossed the corridor and slammed into the wolf's ribs.

Flesh and law alike shredded apart beneath the strike, silver blood spraying across the stone as the creature's regeneration desperately rebuilt what Cadenza continued stripping away, steadily depleting it with every repair. The wolf stumbled, a guttural howl tearing free.

"AAAOOOORRRRHHHH!" The creature blurred behind her. Butter pivoted and punched. WHUMP. A compressed wall of air crashed into its shoulder and hurled it through a pillar. BOOOOM. Stone erupted outward. The beast recovered instantly and appeared above her. Her hands spiraled. The atmosphere twisted with them, winding into a tightening helix. The wolf flew through it. SHRRRRK. Strips of fur, flesh, and several more sovereign clauses peeled away in ribbons of silver. Butter shifted, one arm lifting in a smooth arc.

FWOOOM. The air surged upward. An invisible uppercut caught the wolf beneath the jaw. SKRRRSHHHK! Its head was shredded clean from its shoulders, flesh, spirit, and sovereign law reduced to ribbons before the body could even react. A fresh head knitted itself together instantly, draining yet more of the dwindling clauses sustaining its existence.

"RRRRAAAAAAAAAUUUUUGHHHH!" Her hands spiraled. The corridor answered. Air rotated around her in vast unseen rings. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. WHIRRRRRR. The wolf entered the currents. Intersecting streams of compressed atmosphere converged from every direction. Silver blood burst across the ceiling. The wolf blurred. A rotating palm. The atmosphere folded. FWHOOOM. A wave of compressed air crashed into its neck.

The creature reeled as another distorted howl ripped free.

"GRAAAAAAAAAHHHH!" Above. Below. Behind. Every direction became another note in the song flowing across her skin. The wolf's speed no longer mattered. It darted around her like a storm around a mountain, only to be battered away by invisible currents whenever it attacked. Butter never opened her eyes. She listened. Tiny bursts of Gloom nudged the air by fractions of a degree, turning it into invisible accelerators and razor-thin waves of pressure. Every lunge met another motion, another current, another trap.

The corridor had become an orchestra. The wolf was merely being played.... The wolf crashed onto the stone, silver blood spreading beneath it as its body knitted itself back together, slower now. Only a dozen clauses remained. Trembling, it forced itself upright and growled, rage and fear mingling in its pale eyes. It had crossed the corridor a hundred times and died a hundred times in return.

Every burst of impossible speed carried it into another invisible current of Cadenza, shredding away flesh and the sovereign laws sustaining its existence. Its claws never reached her. Its jaws never reached her. Butter had turned the battlefield itself into the weapon. The wolf circled warily, every instinct urging it forward while every surviving memory warned against it. Butter never moved. Eyes closed, Melody flowed across her skin. The wolf had finally learned the problem.

Speed only mattered if there was somewhere safe to arrive. The wolf sprang upward. Butter rushed forward. The creature was already behind her. Claws descended with enough force to tear her, Requiem, and half the fortress apart. SKRRRSHHHK! Its arm hit the turbulent shell surrounding Butter and came apart as though thrust into a colossal blender, exploding into sprays of silver blood, shredded flesh, and fragmented law. The wolf yelped. Butter didn't even turn.

She was actively controlling the atmosphere around her body. Layered atop Requiem and reinforced by Cadenza, the air itself had become an execution chamber. Anything entering it was reduced to debris before it could touch her. Cadenza had no meaningful time limit. Focus and fatigue were its only price, and Butter possessed both in abundance. She could maintain the rotating field for hours.

To those moving at their current speed, those hours would pass as only seconds beyond the corridor, leaving ample time to finish here and go help Katherine. The wolf stared. Then it stood upright once more. It spoke. Butter froze as a cold spike of fear slid through her stomach. Until this moment she'd categorized it as a beast.

"Young Butter." The voice was aristocratic. A deep cultured baritone weighted with ancient stone and polished marble. Her skin crawled.

"A masterpiece of violent potential. Yet you ration your glorious fuel like a pauper counting coppers in a treasury." Its claw pressed deeper into its own chest. Silver blood slipped between its fingers.

"I have no such qualms. My currency is suffering." The corridor trembled.

"And my account is deep." Butter's jaw tightened.

"I will not let you retreat. I will not let you replenish. I will not let you learn from this encounter." The remaining clauses glowed beneath its skin.

"This ends here." The pressure in the corridor climbed.

"In the silence between ticks of the clock." Something inside Butter snapped. Every active technique fell away. Cadenza ceased. Fermata collapsed. The invisible barriers around her body dispersed. Her hand shot forward. Glissando would drain the last of her reserves. It might even trigger the Red State. She didn't care. She would erase the wolf. The corridor. The fortress. Anything unfortunate enough to exist in the same direction.

More importantly, Glissando would erase the very concept of the wolf from existence, taking every other copy with it. Permanently. The wolf's icy-blue tufts ignited. A sweet scent of incense flooded the corridor, as though it were burning its own essence for one final exchange.... Nobody saw what happened. The wolf never moved. Its spirit did. A translucent silhouette burst from its body in a single slash, plunged through Butter, and tore her own essence screaming from flesh.

Jaws closed around the glowing shape, ripping it to pieces before diving back into the wolf. Butter's body went empty. Her eyes became vacant sockets. She hit the stone and lay perfectly still. Silence. The wolf remained where it stood, chest heaving. It drew one long, trembling breath through bloodstained teeth, relief washing over its battered frame. It had survived.... Something moved. A tiny white moth crawled from the corner of Butter's open mouth and fluttered weakly into the air. The wolf stared.

Another followed. Then another. One emerged from the hollow of her left eye. Another crawled from the right. More spilled from between her parted lips, each one climbing over her lifeless face before taking flight. Soon they came by the dozens. White wings marked with delicate cream patterns poured endlessly from her empty sockets and mouth, filling the corridor with the dry whisper of beating wings.

Higher and higher they spiraled, circling one another until the countless insects merged into a single humming cloud. They gathered. Butter spun out of the swarm, blood trailing from her lips as her heel crashed down in a spinning axe kick. SKRRRSHHHK! KRAAAAK! Cadenza swirled around her leg, shredding flesh, spirit, and sovereign law even as the kick split the wolf from crown to groin. The rotating field ground every remaining clause anchoring its existence into nothing. It wouldn't regenerate. She didn't pause.

Hands already rising, she turned toward the corpse.

"Glissan-" Another wolf was already standing. Reality stopped. Not time. Butter could've argued her way out of a stopped clock. This reached deeper. The fabric beneath time, law, and causality seized. The wolf stood burning as one clause after another ignited beneath its skin. Fuel. It was feeding fragments of its own soul into whatever lay beneath reality's laws, spending itself for permission. The sacrifice outranked anything Butter could offer in her current state. It was working. Butter's thoughts fell silent.

The corridor faded. Sound vanished. Even her own body slipped beyond awareness. Only the wolf remained. Its outline blurred. Its burning clauses dimmed. Distance unraveled as perception itself was stripped away. Soon, even the wolf began to disappear. Only a fading silhouette remained, suspended in a void where reality had forgotten everything else. Its outline softened. Its burning clauses dimmed. The concept of distance unraveled. Perception itself was being stripped away, layer by layer. Soon there was nothing.

Only the wolf, suspended in a void where reality had forgotten everything else. And even that would not last. Somewhere beneath the paralysis, the Gloom perceived the law being imposed. It perceived. And it rebelled. The Aria fell from her pocket dimension, rejected by the Gloom's automatic defenses. It had existed elsewhere, occupying a location existence had never agreed upon. It struck the floor with a soft thump that did not belong in the frozen world. Then its pages began to turn. Flip. Flip. Flip.

Past landscapes. Past weapons. Past utilities. It stopped on a feathered velociraptor painted in electric yellow, jungle green, and blood-red streaks. Black pits stared from where eyes should have been. Its name was its nature. Clap. It existed in the gaps between thoughts, in the moment after exhale and before the body chose to draw breath again. Permanently out of phase with consensus reality. The wolf had stopped reality itself. Butter could not move because she remained bound to it. Clap did not.

Emerald light tore from the page. A wound in the air. The summon stepped through and solidified beside Butter, its body flickering with sickening translucence as reality repeatedly failed to decide whether it belonged. Feathers rustled from winds blowing through adjacent possibilities. The world stood still. Clap did not. It inhabited a place adjacent to reality, close enough to touch, distant enough to ignore its rules. Its head snapped toward the far end of the corridor. Clap saw no creature there.

Only a screaming knot of rewritten physics. The wolf stood upright now, a towering parody of a man. One claw remained buried in its chest as silver ichor flowed backward into the wound. Its pale eyes had dimmed to a bruised violet. Butter had stripped away its defenses. Now it was burning the coherence of its own existence, buying a handful of stolen moments. Just enough to erase the girl who had unmade it before its own contradictions collapsed. It raised a claw wreathed in color-drinking light.

Clap phased through space. The imposed stasis meant nothing to it. Its pale eyes widened. Its claw descended toward Butter's exposed body. Clap intercepted. Mirror-slit teeth lunged past fur and flesh toward the violet ember in the wolf's chest. Its jaws closed. Nothing. The ember was only a burning equation, expended existence masquerading as consciousness. The wolf grinned. It had expected this. A soul-eater was useless against something engineered rather than born. Clap adapted.

Its teeth shifted from soul-rending to law-unstitching and sank into the deeper structure beneath the ember, the lattice forcing countless contradictions into a single coherent being. This bite unraveled it. The wolf's grin disappeared. Its descending claw jerked away from Butter and struck at the translucent raptor phasing through its chest. A horrified snarl replaced aristocratic calm.