The Extra's Rise - Chapter 951

951: Hellflame Emperor (3) 951: Hellflame Emperor (3) He vanished.

There was no glamour to it, just a clean subtraction of friction from the air where he wanted to move.

He reappeared at my back, his palm glowing with that hungry, editing fire, aimed for the base of my skull.

Down, Valeria snarled in my hand.

I dropped, folding my body into an impossibly low angle, and stabbed backward with an ugly little reverse thrust.

There was no dignity in the move, only utility.

It had no grand ending for his Ember to cancel; it was simply a sharp piece of metal arriving in a specific spot.

He had to move.

He answered with something new.

The Requiem Ember gave a low, resonant thrum.

This wasn’t about canceling my attack; it was about enforcing his.

A decree washed over the battlefield, a statement of absolute policy: this next flame will be the last decision inside the space it touches.

The Ember flared, and a line of it drew itself from his palm straight toward my heart.

For a single, terrifying breath, the world agreed that nothing could be written over that line.

I met his decree with a refusal.

Not with Grey-that would end the lesson too soon.

I used the oldest truth I own, a law I had written on my own soul.

This line ends where I say it does.

I put that truth entirely on Valeria’s physical form, not on the world.

A personal law, not a universal one.

The flame reached my rib, found that the last decision in this specific spot belonged to a sword, and it blinked.

It didn’t die.

It hesitated.

I used that flicker of confusion to disengage, setting the hesitation down on the floor with the rest of our mistakes.

We reset, both of us breathing harder now.

He had more air left in him; the bodies of new High Radiants are brutally efficient.

He could feed this fire for hours.

My own Mid Radiant frame would start to complain soon.

So I stopped being polite.

I let the nine-circle circuits run at full capacity.

Lightning braided itself into my muscles, gravity tucked itself under my heel, and I threaded the wind through my next three steps.

I bent space a thumb-width to the left, just enough so his reads on my position would arrive a fraction of a second too late.

I framed one of Valeria’s edges in the whisper of Deepdark and lit the other with a sliver of Purelight-just enough to make his single-minded Ember have to choose a side and be wrong.

He answered with the thing he had clearly built for himself, a technique borrowed from no teacher.

The Requiem Ember slid from his hands, wrapping around his shoulders and sinking into his ribs like a mantle of living shadow.

The air went very, very still.

“Requiem Mantle,” he said, his voice flat.

“Outcome Tax.” He lunged.

Every exchange now came with a price.

A simple parry cost me a sliver of momentum.

A dodge cost me a flicker of stamina.

My intent, the very choice to act, was being skimmed, and the stolen slivers fell as cold ash at our feet, feeding the dark shimmer on his shoulders.

He was taxing my will to fight and burning it for fuel.

I had to get smaller, faster, closer.

Taxes have less bite when the economy is local.

I pressed in, and he grimaced, pushing the Mantle’s influence out, letting it own a patch of ground the size of a cartwheel.

Inside that wheel, every choice I made wanted to end the way he wrote it.

Fine.

I didn’t go inside.

I made him come out.

I threw a God Flash-not the true, world-splitting art, but a thin sheet of it, a promise of the real thing.

He tilted his Mantle to eat the attack’s conclusion, leaving just the blinding light.

He walked through the holes he’d cut in my move and his follow-up strike was so fast it nearly took my ear off.

I felt the sting of a shallow cut, the warmth of my own blood.

It felt like signing a contract.

He smiled then, a small, real, terrible thing.

“Round two,” he said.

“Round now,” I answered.

We stopped talking.

He split the Ember into six clean threads and wove them around me like the strings of a harp.

Every time I thought about moving left, a thread would pluck a silent no.

I stopped thinking in angles and started moving in pressures, letting Valeria’s weight pull my hips where she knew the lines were true.

He tried to cancel my Lightning Step’s landing point again.

I didn’t give it a landing point.

I gave it a range, a circle of possibility.

The step dropped me near somewhere good, and I made it good upon arrival.

He frowned.

He tried to break my carry-through law by taxing the second motion of a strike more than the first.

I bent my own rule: the second motion began before the first had resolved.

He tried to tax both at once, but the tax couldn’t get a good grip on two overlapping events.

He hissed in frustration.

I went for his knee with a nothing-cut, just a line drawn in space.

He wrote no on the intent behind it.

I changed my mind mid-swing and tapped his ankle instead.

He snarled and wrote no across the entire floor.

For a moment, the world lost all friction, and we both slipped.

We both laughed, a sharp, ugly sound in that dead place.

The sound died when I saw the ground behind him turn to solid glass where the Mantle’s leaked energy had touched it.

A permanent edit.

I didn’t want that anywhere near a living thing.

Enough.

“Valeria,” I said aloud.

Yes.

“Full plate.” Plates of clean, white light unfolded from the blade, locking over my forearms, shins, and chest.

They weren’t for show; they were a walking ritual, a way to carry my truths without spilling them.

I deepened my Harmony until the air forgot how to lie.

Then I moved, and the world agreed to keep up.

Jack met me with everything he had built to spite his regret.

The Wastes rang with the sound of our battle.

His Ember wrote on my endings; my edge erased his handwriting.

His Mantle taxed my choices; I paid in small coins and kept my larger plans in my pocket.

He flooded the field with helices of white and violet flame that weren’t about heat, but finality.

I answered with water that refused to settle and space that wouldn’t anchor.

A mile of new glass webbed out from our feet.

He pressed, and the brutal truth of his High Radiant rank was that he could press forever.

I was reaching the thin edge where talent becomes stubbornness, and stubbornness becomes need.

You’ve learned everything you can at this speed, Valeria’s voice was very soft in my mind.

I nodded once.

Jack saw it.

Some part of him flinched, a flicker of a memory-a garden, butterflies, a power unmade.

“No,” he said, his voice hoarse.

I didn’t answer.

I opened a page.

Not the whole book.

Just two flat sheets of Grey, overlapping in the air between us, thin as rice paper.

The Wastes went quiet in a way that made even the wind remember it was just a story someone chose to tell.

Jack’s next Requiem thread reached for the end of my cut and found that there were now two places the ending could be.

Both were true, and both were touching.

His Ember, a power built on absolute conclusions, couldn’t write no on both at once.

It staggered.

I stepped through the seam where the two pages of reality met.

Valeria’s edge was no longer in front of his Mantle, but under it.

He saw it.

He screamed, a sound of pure rage, and poured every drop of his focus into his power.

He vanished again, this time dragging the dust with him, and reappeared to strike at the hinge of my breath.

The Mantle taxed the second half of my parry.

I paid with a fingertip of intent and saved the rest for the exit.

He tried to staple my foot to a single square inch of rock; I widened my step into a thin ring of possibility and arrived on the other side of it.

“Stop it,” he rasped.

“Stop hiding.” “It’s not hiding,” I said, my voice calm.

“It’s grammar.” We crossed one more time.

The circle of his Mantle frayed where the two pages of Grey brushed against it.

The outcome tax climbed, trying to bankrupt me.

Every choice I made shed sparks of stolen energy.

So I made choices that could fit in a thimble.

First grain.

Shortest grain.

Exit clean.

He tried to crash the whole field into one single ending.

I flattened my pages, overlapped them another hair, and left a doorway so narrow that only a single, honest line could pass through.

Valeria found it.

My edge slid under his Mantle again and tapped his ribs.

It wasn’t deep.

It was true.

He staggered one step, not from the pain, but from the recognition.

The wind scraped across the glass fields, carrying the sound away.

His eyes were wide now, the raw anger replaced by a dawning horror.

This was the garden all over again, but this time, the rules were mine.

He lifted his hand, and the Requiem flared, a bright, vicious black.

I felt the change.

He wasn’t canceling.

He wasn’t taxing.

He was binding.

He braided every aspect of his power into a single, desperate weave and threw it like a cloak over the page of reality itself.

The Grey shivered.

“Good,” I said softly.

“Now we’re both learning.” And we moved again.