Chương 97: 96: Hei

Clock found her in the ruins of the eastern corridor, where the walls had been peeled back like the skin of a fruit and the ceiling hung open to the sky like a wound. Warpfluff stood at the heart of the devastation, her brown dress torn, her seaweed jacket reduced to ragged strips, her orange-and-blue eyes fixed on the hole she had carved through the world. He watched her heal. The jaw Butter had shattered slid back into place, vertebrae aligned with wet cracks, flesh knitting itself together.

She had bound herself to gravity, and gravity refused to let her fall. She took one last breath from an inhaler despite having no need for it. The medicine did nothing for her lungs. She simply enjoyed the feeling. With a content sigh, she tucked it into her pocket and smiled.

"Hei... it's finally just the two of us." Her voice carried an unsettling warmth.

"I'm a little nervous... but I'd really like to kill you again. I enjoyed it so much last time." Her smile widened.

"Only now I've figured out how to keep you dead." Clock regarded her quietly.

"Look..." He exhaled.

"I'm doing this for my sister, but you can still surrender. We don't have to..." He grimaced, forcing the words out.

"... we don't have to fight." His violet eyes held hers.

"We could settle this. Please don't give me a reason, because I'm desperately looking for one not to listen. Attack me if you're ready to die." She laughed softly.

"Brotherly love." She tilted her head.

"I had a brother once. A family too." She shrugged.

"Didn't like them. They hated how I dressed, what I liked, the shows I watched..." Her smile became distant.

"So I filled the house with poison gas one night." She closed her eyes as though reliving a treasured memory.

"I listened to them struggle for air. I watched them gasp... beg..." A shiver ran through her body.

"The look in their eyes as they died..." She almost moaned.

"It did something to me. Something wonderful." She tapped the inhaler against her palm.

"I wore a gas mask. I was perfectly safe." Another dreamy sigh escaped her.

"I've never forgotten those sounds. Hei... hei... hei..." Her pupils widened.

"When the Syndicate turned me into an Abomination, I made sure every victim died the same way. Strangled. Drowned. Suffocated." She took another unnecessary breath from the inhaler.

"I love taking breathing away... slowly... beautifully."

"That's enough." She frowned.

"Your sister interrupted me first." Her smile disappeared.

"Now you have." She lowered the inhaler.

"I've had enough too. You die first." Her gaze hardened.

"I'll visit her next."

"Like hell you will." Her hand stretched toward him. Reality lurched. Gravity erupted through his existence in impossible directions. Parts of him were dragged forward while others lagged behind. Flesh separated from bone. Bone from soul. His body, fate, laws, place in time and very existence were pulled out of sequence as though someone had reached inside reality and twisted every thread that defined him. Blood burst from his mouth. His spine bent. Organs tore. Warpfluff smiled.

"Don't die yet." Her fingers curled tighter.

"Breathe for me... let me hear you." Thought vanished beneath the pressure. Speech became impossible. His lungs convulsed on instinct, dragging in a ragged breath that filled with blood before it reached them. He gargled. Warpfluff shivered in delight.

"... Hei. That's what I like." She loosened her grip for less than a heartbeat. It was enough.

"Zwischenzug." Reality corrected itself. Like two chess pieces exchanging squares, they traded positions within causality itself. Every calamity affecting Clock was reassigned to Warpfluff. Clock stood whole. Warpfluff's eyes flew open in horror as her own body was ripped apart instead. Gravity devoured her from every direction, dragging her flesh, soul and existence out of alignment. She desperately tried to collapse herself back into one point. Clock never gave her the chance. He was already there.

His hand closed around her throat. His fingers dug beneath her jaw. He pulled. CRAAACK! They tore through the corridor floor. BOOOOM! Through the levels beneath. SHAAATTER! Through the ancient foundations of the Nest. Stone exploded around them as they punched through bedrock, molten rock and the bones of the earth itself. Warpfluff became a comet of destruction, her spine grinding through solid stone, her skull smashing against the world's foundations while Clock dragged her deeper with relentless force.

She tried to speak. His fist answered. CRACK! Her jaw reset crooked. THOOOOM! Her ribs folded inward. ROOOOAR! The Nest shook from top to bottom. Alarms already screaming found new frequencies. Across every level of the fortress, Operatives, Steppers and scientists felt the impact beneath their feet and froze. For one dreadful moment...... they wondered if the galaxy-thing had awakened early.... Punching her felt like striking the densest thing imaginable. Harming Warpfluff demanded force beyond calculation.

Butter's prosthetic kick finally made sense. It generated astronomical momentum and immeasurable force destined to break whatever it struck. Warpfluff's fixed weight alone was like asking a human to punch through a mountain-sized block of tungsten. Her body could still be damaged. Making that damage matter was the impossible part. She had anchored herself to the gravity of everything in the expanding universe. The weight preserving her existence had no meaningful upper limit.

As long as gravity endured, she could rebuild herself indefinitely. Clock understood. Destroying her body would accomplish nothing. Breaking her concentration would. His psychic abilities had already failed. Steering her mind was impossible. Her consciousness no longer behaved like a mind at all. Touching it meant subjecting his own brain to the weight of infinity. He would become a vegetable before changing a single thought. Castling was equally useless. Her body was too grounded in reality to hijack.

There was no room to exchange positions, no opening to slip another consciousness into place. She had to let go herself. Only one path remained. Shake her concentration so violently that she released gravity for an instant. Clock tightened his grip. Pawn's Advance. Every punch became a thousand. Gloom flooded his body, rewinding fatigue from muscle and bone the instant it appeared, allowing the technique to continue far beyond his limits. CRAAACK! Warpfluff's body smashed through another level of the Nest.

A laboratory exploded around them. Scientists in white coats dove aside as benches, holographic workstations and half-finished prototypes scattered like toys.

"What the-" If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"Is that... an angel?" Clock's white hair streamed behind him, his marble-like features illuminated by violet Gloom as he drove Warpfluff straight through the opposite wall. BOOOOM! They burst into the residential wing. A young couple froze halfway through climbing into bed.

"... Honey?"

"I don't think that's maintenance." Clock tore through the room before either could blink, dragging Warpfluff behind him in an avalanche of shattered furniture. KRASH! The bathroom beyond ceased to exist. Someone brushing their teeth stared at the hole where the wall used to be.

"... Do I... finish brushing?" THOOOOM! They ripped through a private cinema. Rows of trainees watching an old surface film recoiled as Clock streaked across the screen itself, reducing it to fluttering scraps. The projector kept playing.

"I think we should pause it."

"No."

"Alright." BOOOOM! The game room disappeared next. Poker chips erupted into the air. Pool tables overturned. A dartboard embedded itself in the ceiling.

"... Was that white-haired guy carrying somebody?"

"I think so." CRAAASH! The training hall fared no better. Steppers sparring in full Magpie armour barely had time to react before Clock thundered between them. Weapons snapped toward him.

"What in God's-""CONTACT!" One Stepper raised his rifle. Another hesitated, his visor zooming in.

"Wait."

"Is... is that Clock Viperlit?" — Clock never acknowledged them. His attention shifted elsewhere. Butter. She was only a corridor away. Jump bounded across the floor, one colossal kick launching a Stepper through three reinforced pillars. Butter flipped overhead, spinning into a perfectly timed double kick that blasted another attacker sideways. Her eyebrows lifted as she spotted him. Clock's gaze lingered for the briefest instant. Jump. One of his favourite summons. Most assumed the name came from the kangaroo.

They were wrong. Jump existed because Butter and the summon were designed to jump you together. Its ability was deceptively simple. Jump's blows never carried a fixed amount of force. They carried an outcome. Every strike delivered exactly enough power to move, restrain or injure whatever stood before it, yet never enough to kill. The same kick could shove a human across a room, crack apart a continent or stagger a god. A cockroach and a deity struck by Jump would both survive. Just enough. Always just enough.

Butter supplied the finishing blow. Clock gave the summon an almost imperceptible nod before dragging Warpfluff through another wall. Behind them, the Nest repaired itself. Apis flowed through fractured stone like liquid starlight. Cracked pillars fused together. Walls sealed. Floors smoothed. Broken furniture rebuilt itself as though time had reversed. Within seconds, entire sections looked untouched. As though the devastation had never happened.... He hit her again. Again. Again. His fists were no longer fists.

They were judgment. Every blow carried the weight of everything he had failed to stop. Everyone he had failed to save. Every moment he had stood frozen while the world burned. Warpfluff never found the chance to answer. His fists pounded into her face like a jackhammer moving at the speed of light. CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! Each impact felt like thousands. Her concentration splintered beneath the relentless barrage. She couldn't think. Couldn't speak. Couldn't even tell where one punch ended and the next began.

The world blurred into a single stream of violence. The corridor they had started in was a memory. The Nest itself became a smear beneath them before she even realised they had burst through its surface. Stone gave way to open air. The ground disappeared. Clouds exploded around them. She barely registered any of it. Another thousand punches drove her higher. Another thousand. Another. The blue of the sky darkened toward black. Only then did she realise they had already left the atmosphere.

Clock's final uppercut caught beneath her jaw. VOOOOOM- Warpfluff blasted into space. Sound disappeared. The vacuum swallowed every trace of violence. She tore through the stratosphere into silence... through the ionosphere into deeper silence... beyond the reach of air, beyond the reach of echoes, until only the void remained. The void did not care what she had anchored herself to. She died. Her body unravelled in layers. Skin peeled away into drifting ash. Muscle followed.

Bone splintered apart, the delicate framework that had carried her since before she had a name dissolving into fragments. Her orange-and-blue eyes dimmed. Her hair drifted through the darkness like smoke. Warpfluff became a constellation of scattered remains. Clock was already moving. Reverse blasts erupted from his outstretched palms. Twip. Twip. Twip. The violet spheres crossed the distance instantly. BOOOOOM. Every atom of Warpfluff's body was stripped from existence in a single violet flash. Skin. Muscle. Bone.

Blood. Nerves. Organs. Even the dust she would've become disappeared, annihilated so completely that nothing remained to scatter through the void. There was no corpse. No fragments drifting through space. Only emptiness where Warpfluff had been. Clock floated silently in the vacuum, watching. Waiting. Silence answered him. Then... Gravity remembered. It reached into the impossible absence, searching for what no longer existed. Every trace of the woman who had bound herself to it. It found nothing.

It refused to let go. So it made her again. Existence bent. Atoms appeared where there had been none. Molecules condensed from the vacuum itself. Flesh knitted together, followed by muscle, bone and blood, rebuilding the delicate architecture that had carried her since before she had a name. Her body reassembled. A heartbeat. Another. Her long hair spilled weightlessly around her. Warpfluff had been reduced to absolute nothing. Gravity refused to accept that answer.

Lungs expanded out of instinct despite the absence of air. Her eyes snapped open, staring at the blue planet hanging impossibly far below. Shock crossed her face. She had never travelled this far from home. Never come this close to absolute nothingness. She had never realised the thing binding her could reach across the void itself...... and drag her back. — Clock intercepted her resurrection. He hadn't given her even a second to understand she was alive again.

His guitar was already swinging, its head aimed to split her in half. Warpfluff moved first. She loosened the gravity around herself - the law that declared I am heavy. I am slow. I am bound. She twisted through it. Clock's strike carved through empty space where she had been an instant before. Her hand was already there. Already swinging. Already reaching his ribs. Transport didn't answer. She had lifted the gravity of the law protecting him. His eyes widened. THOOOM. Her fist landed.

For one impossible instant, two overwhelming forces collided and refused to destroy one another. KOOOOOOOM. Clock's telekinetic blast erupted from his chest the exact moment her knuckles buried themselves into his side. He had expected it. He had known she could bypass Transport by manipulating the gravity of concepts themselves. He had prepared for the moment she touched his real body. His power answered instantly. CRACK - BOOOOM. The blast detonated point-blank. Space folded between them.

The force was like a collapsing star deciding to explode instead. Clock became a missile hurled into the void. Warpfluff became a comet racing the opposite direction. The place where they had collided lingered as a wound in space itself, reality briefly forgetting which laws it was supposed to obey. Clock finally slowed beyond Mars. The red planet hung behind him like a rust-coloured bruise, its gravity barely whispering across the emptiness. His ribs were cracked.

Blood floated from his mouth in crimson spheres before Gloom reclaimed it, knitting bone, lung and muscle back together thread by thread. She really was the perfect counter. Every injury forced him to spend Gloom regenerating. If that reserve ever ran dry...... he would die. Gravity never would. He floated in silence, staring toward the tiny blue marble that was Earth, wondering how many more exchanges he could survive before his thread finally snapped. Warpfluff drifted to a halt near Venus.

Its atmosphere burned like an endless furnace beneath her. Its gravity reached for her with irresistible warmth, promising permanence, promising weight, promising that she would never fall again. She stopped barely a hundred kilometres above its clouds. She turned. She looked across the vast darkness toward the man who had thrown her beyond the world. She smiled. Her human shape was gone. What floated near Venus was what she had been becoming all along. An iridescent silhouette.

Her translucent body shimmered like living crystal, edges scattering sunlight into colours that did not belong anywhere in existence. Cobalt ram's horns curled from her temples in magnificent spirals, beautiful only because terror often was. She raised a hand. Gravity answered. Pressure spread through the vacuum, weaving an invisible lattice around her. Weight bent. Distance warped. Space itself began pushing and pulling according to her will. It was a principle.

Anything approaching her would simply find the universe refusing to let the attack arrive. Clock studied the phenomenon in silence. His speed...... had become irrelevant. He could cross galaxies in an instant. Outspeed thought. Outspeed causality. None of it mattered if the universe simply refused to let him reach her. One by one...... she was erasing every avenue by which she could be defeated. Clock slowly ran a hand through his white hair. His breathing steadied. His eyes never left hers.

"I'd still win." — She appeared a hundred metres from Clock. Her voice was a vibration travelling through the vacuum itself, a frequency his bones translated into words.

"... I should thank you." Clock wiped the blood from his mouth. His hand came away crimson, but his blazing violet eyes never left her.

"You showed me what I truly am." She slowly spread her arms, her iridescent form scattering impossible colours across the darkness.

"Hei... your punch in that dimension opened my eyes. Your ferocity. Your skill. Your prowess." She smiled.

"Every step you took led me here. To this. To what I was always meant to become."

"You're on the wrong side of this war," Clock replied. His voice was quiet. The voice of someone who had exhausted fear and discovered something colder beneath it.

"You won't live very long." Warpfluff laughed. The sound resembled no human laugh. It was the vibration of planets turning, stars burning, galaxies breathing.

"Hei... I'll live long enough to take your head." Clock met her gaze.

"I dare you to try." The stars watched in silence. She lifted a hand. KOOOOOOOOOOOOOM. The weight of a thousand planets crashed into Clock's chest. Gravity itself had become a weapon. A vast horizontal wall of force swept across the void, folding unimaginable mass into a razor-straight slab that attempted to crush his ribs, collapse his lungs and hammer through his spine. Clock was batted through space like a tennis ball.

His body spun end over end, arms flailing as Gloom desperately fought to stabilise him, reminding reality he wasn't supposed to become a projectile. Mars blurred past. The asteroid belt dissolved into streaks of light. His vision shook. Somehow...... he stopped. He didn't know how far he'd travelled. He didn't know where he'd ended. The constellations had changed. The Sun had shrunk to a distant golden coin. Clock stared back toward her. That...... had been casual. One careless swing.

The next strike could carry the weight of a million planets. A billion. There was no meaningful ceiling anymore. Clock exhaled. Transport dissolved. The invisible lattice surrounding him simply... vanished. He released it willingly. There was no point maintaining it anymore. The gravity she wielded reached past everything, grasping the very concept of his body and applying weight there instead. There was nothing for Transport to intercept, no projectile to divert, no force to redirect. Against her...

Transport was irrelevant. Her existence had become synonymous with gravity itself - the architecture holding the universe together. She could fold entire galaxies into blades. She could drop every star that had ever existed onto him and still call it restraint. His body could endure it. Durability had never been his weakness. Gloom and his own impossible resilience meant even a Big Bang exploding in his face wouldn't necessarily kill him even without Transport. Precision, that was the danger.

If she ever learned to apply that same impossible weight directly to his Gloom...... or worse, to the very concept of Clock...... the fight would end instantly. He understood at last. Everything he had would have to be enough.