The Extra's Rise - Chapter 832

832: Confronting A Calamity 832: Confronting A Calamity I exhaled as Rachel’s Purelight washed over me, cool and clean, like liquid starlight poured along my veins.

The radiance threaded through muscle and marrow, not just boosting reflex and reach but pushing back the miasma that rode Gideon’s domain-mana steeped in the ideas of ruin and destruction.

Where his field tried to drain and twist, hers clarified and set bones and mind straight again.

“Much better,” I said, rolling a shoulder as the enhancement settled.

Sword Unity slid into place through Nyxthar like water finding its channel.

I bled in a measured trickle of Grey-enough to lace the blade and carry intent, not enough to burn out what Rachel had just stabilized.

The strain was there, familiar and sharp, but tolerable.

I could hold this for a long fight.

Gideon stood at the center of his expanding ground, the Infernal Armis pulsing in time with his heart.

The molten axe in his hands seemed to scissor space with every idle shift.

His face had taken on that terrible, refined beauty power sometimes gives-lines sharpened, gaze lit from within.

He looked like a statue a god had decided to finish.

“Impressive,” he said, voice thrumming through air and stone.

“But light is temporary.

Darkness is patient.” No one wasted breath on the philosophy.

The perimeter ruptured as new threats wrote themselves into being.

Black roses burst out of thin air-petals rimed in ruin, thorns slick with life-drain.

They moved smart, hunting for seams in our formation.

Their paths braided, feinted, corrected.

Blue roses bloomed to meet them.

They arrived without flourish, simply there, crystalline and impossible.

Their petals bent reality around them in tidy paradoxes.

Where black carried decay, blue carried reversal; where black sought to hollow, blue asserted form.

They met in midair with a dry rip like paper torn in a quiet room.

Black dissolved.

Blue did not stop at negation.

It inverted.

Waves of protective energy rippled outward, restoring what the field had stolen.

“Hello, mother,” Rose said, stepping forward as more blue blooms opened around her.

Calm, steady, lethal.

“I was wondering when you’d try.” The distortion at our flank peeled back, and Evelyn Alaric walked through like a queen crossing her garden.

Her presence felt like atrocity distilled-crimes refined until they gleamed.

Black roses unspooled at her gesture in patterns that made the eyes ache, each bloom a ninefold array disguised as something delicate.

Her gaze was empty of everything but purpose.

“My dear Rose,” Evelyn said, voice warm enough to curdle.

“Look what you’ve made of my lessons.” “Your lessons taught me what to refuse,” Rose answered.

Blue roses layered into a shield line, crisp geometry over living thorns.

“That’s all the credit you get.” “I’ll handle her,” Seraphina said, stepping to Rose’s side.

Frost sheened the air as her wards laced with the azure blossoms.

“Go,” I said.

Tactically risky, emotionally necessary.

Rose deserved this fight.

Seraphina would keep the board honest.

“We’ll hold.” They broke away, ice and blue light bracketing the black.

The sound of their engagement slid a measure back in my attention, distant thunder behind a nearer storm.

That left Gideon for the four of us.

“Four on one,” he said, amusement warming into anticipation.

“How generous.

Do you know how deep the water is?” “We’re about to learn,” Cecilia said.

Crimson kindled around her hands, her Gift pulling chaos up from the seams between order and entropy.

Her magic bent the air even before it struck, a promise of things rewritten.

Reika ghosted wide, blade in hand, script igniting across her skin.

Letters feathered into wings at her shoulders, more characters writing themselves down her arms and ribs, each one a binding she could spend for speed or force or inevitability.

“Together,” I said.

Nyxthar hummed; Grey edged the note.

“Don’t overcommit.

He wants us to.” Gideon smiled.

The axe brightened.

He tested us first.

A horizontal cut-effortless, almost idle-sent a tidal shelf of ruin-laden power rolling our way.

Enough to peel a mountain.

A measure, not a verdict.

Nyxthar met it, Grey singing along the edge.

The blade didn’t so much slice as insist.

Concepts of destruction parted as if I were cutting silk in water.

Beside me, Cecilia’s crimson flared into a lattice that didn’t block so much as translate: fall became lift, end became start, dead force returned as clean momentum we could use.

Rachel’s Purelight thickened around all of us, peeling away the miasma and knitting the little injuries the field kept trying to make-blood pressure spikes, stray fractures of will.

Reika took the opening the way only she can, wings throwing her forward in a blur.

Her sword wrote a pattern that left hairline seams in the air, exits for possibility.

The script along her skin brightened as she spent bindings, pushing a human frame into something that could argue with gods.

Gideon’s off hand flicked.

The air around Reika filled with constructs that weren’t walls so much as conclusions-no successful attack here, no approach that lands, no completion.

He wasn’t stopping her body; he was denying the idea.

Reika wrote a counterfactual over her skin and kept going.

Her Gift asserted its truth: attack isn’t prevented here; attack completes here.

The paradox sparked, little stars popping into being and then out again between two statements of reality that refused to agree.

“Interesting,” Gideon said, tracking with bright, greedy focus.

“Not just force.

Structure.

Good.” He stepped in and the axe moved like an answer you don’t get to refuse.

Each swing cut through more than air, leaving suspended lacerations in the world that the Armis held open as persistent hazards-a maze of wounds where space hadn’t finished being convinced of itself.

I felt excitement slide under my ribs, clean and sharp.

This was why I trained past sanity.

Not to crush lesser threats, but to stand where the ground tilts and still find a way to move.

“Your turn,” I told the others, and went.

Grey tightened along Nyxthar and I drove in at the edge of one of Gideon’s cuts-the place where rule meets boundary.

The blade kissed that seam and slid through, refusing the hazard’s premise.

Gideon’s axe flashed to intercept.

It met Grey and a wrong note rang, as if someone had plucked a string the world didn’t own.

Cecilia stacked a figure-eight of crimson behind me and detonated it sideways.

The burst snagged one of Gideon’s hanging cuts and braided it into a new vector that didn’t want to hurt us-redirected malice turned into a force that knocked his stance half a beat off center.

Rachel rode the moment, spiking my focus and clearing the miasma that tried to rope back in.

Breath easier; blade lighter.

Reika came low, script blazing, and laid a line across Gideon’s thigh where plate and principle didn’t quite mesh.

Not deep, but real.

He bled a bright, wrong red that steamed and sealed almost at once.

He looked down, then up, and didn’t smile this time.

He recalculated.

We adjusted.

He multiplied hazards; Cecilia converted two into clean air for Rachel to fill with strength.

He negated a swath of fire in a perfect band; Aurelius would have cursed that-Rachel simply avoided it and laced light through the gaps.

He tried to write no-approach over my path; Reika wrote must-approach over my bones and I arrived anyway, Nyxthar leaving a shallow seam under his ribs that the Armis mended with a grind of sound I felt more than heard.

“Refreshing,” Gideon said, and the axe turned a shade more serious.

He swung in a pattern that wanted to be everywhere at once.

The air stuttered, edges stacking into a three-dimensional knot.

Cecilia tore the knot and reseated it a step to our left.

Rachel blocked the migraine that wanted to ride the rearrangement.

Reika shouted one clear word-down-and I obeyed before the meaning finished forming.

The blade went by where my head had been; the ruin it carried carved a new hazard behind me that Rachel immediately softened with light so it wouldn’t eat our heels.

Gideon pressed.

His domain leaned the ground three degrees toward him; jumps came up short by half a meter.

The air felt thicker in front of his blade than behind it.

He wasn’t just swing-and-crush.

He was swing-and-edit.

“We hold,” I said, and meant it.

We held.

We gave ground where we had to, not where he wanted.

When he poured pressure, we turned it sideways.

When he tried to teach the world to forget how to be kind to us, Rachel reminded it, and her reminder stuck.

When he tried to erase the idea of our offense, Reika tattooed a new thesis across our skin: we land.

Cecilia wrote cheats into his maze.

I cut the rules as they crossed my line.

Piece by piece, we mapped what he could do and where he hesitated.

At our flank, ice cracked and sang.

Blue roses bled white light through black.

Evelyn’s laugh rang cold, then cut short.

Rose said something we couldn’t make out and the battlefield answered as if it agreed.

Gideon noticed.

He didn’t look away, but some portion of him disliked being anything less than the entire sky.

The axe dipped.

The Armis pulsed.

“Enough testing,” he said.

He drew a breath and swung down a verdict.

The cut he made wasn’t through air.

It was through a rule.

The impact shaved a layer off the idea of defense in front of him.

Nyxthar met the fall, Grey flaring, and for a heartbeat we argued about what counted as real.

The world picked a side and let us continue.

Barely.

“Push,” I said.

Cecilia hit his off side with a crimson blossom that wasn’t a blast so much as a suggestion-your balance wants to be over there.

Reika scrawled inevitability across her shins and arrived in the space that suggestion created.

Rachel poured a sliver more light through my next step and the strain hit and passed like a cough.

Nyxthar bit at the seam below Gideon’s clavicle and left another sting of truth.

Not deep.

Enough.

Gideon’s eyes brightened.

He adjusted his stance again, micro-corrections traveling down through plate to earth.

The domain’s tilt shifted back a degree.

He smiled like a man who had finally found a good hill to climb.

“Better,” he said.

“Don’t stop.” “We weren’t planning to,” I said.

He came on and we met him, again and again, trading inches and axioms, until the battlefield stopped being theater and became a workshop: every swing a hypothesis, every counter a test, every breath a price counted and paid.

And under the hammering noise, under the bright ringing of blade on blade and law on law, the shape of the fight began to reveal itself-narrow, steep, survivable, if we were exact.

“Your turn,” I said once more, and the four of us moved as one.