The Extra's Rise - Chapter 952

952: Hellflame Emperor (4) 952: Hellflame Emperor (4) We moved.

The tatters of my Grey pages clung to the air as his Requiem Mantle pushed in around me.

His power was a declaration, an absolute edition of the world.

My small truths, my personal laws, were holding, but they were costing me more with every breath.

The Skeld Wastes kept score by laying down new, spider-thin sheets of glass where our feet passed.

He wore the Ember now like it was a part of his body.

Six fine threads of it slid off his shoulders, combing through the space between us, tasting my intentions.

Every time my mind tried to write an ending to a sequence, one of those threads would flick it away.

So I stopped writing endings.

I wrote beginnings, over and over, letting Valeria find her own conclusions.

But it wasn’t enough.

He was a fortress, and I was a single soldier at the gate.

I needed a key.

Soul Resonance is my second Gift.

It’s not theft, not a permanent copy.

It’s a whisper, a brief and costly echo.

When I’m close enough to feel the rhythm of another’s power, I can mirror a sliver of it for a single heartbeat.

I watched him, felt the steady, hungry pulse of his Ember.

I touched that cadence and let the Resonance bite.

The Requiem came through into me-a thin, imperfect reflection, like seeing a cathedral in rippled water.

I didn’t get the whole thing.

I got one clause.

A single, beautiful veto.

One heartbeat where I could say, in his own voice: not that outcome.

He flicked a ribbon of Requiem at my ankle, the same tripwire as before.

I cut-first truth, hand-sized-and felt his Ember reach into the moment to spill the ending.

I mirrored the clause.

Resonance put a tiny no on his no.

My cut didn’t hit harder.

It simply happened.

The ribbon snapped, and for the first time, Jack’s eyes widened in genuine shock.

“You copied me,” he said, his voice a low growl of disbelief.

“For a heartbeat,” I answered.

“That’s all I need.” He rolled the Mantle outward, and the ring of edits on the floor unfolded with a soft click.

“Nine-circle,” he said quietly, a declaration of a higher art.

“Requiem Litany-Pallbearer’s March.” The ring began to tax not just my intent, but my movement.

The ground grew heavy, viscous, each step costing me twice the effort.

To cross it was to feel my own momentum skimmed away and fed to the ash-black gear of his Mantle.

My own nine-circle circuits woke under my feet.

“Bahamut Method-Gravity Loom.” Invisible threads dropped from the dead sky, tying soft anchors into the ground, a neat grid like a child’s string game.

The Loom tracked and stored the physics of my motion.

When his March skimmed the top, my Loom answered with a whisper from below-not giving me more energy, but the permission to use what I had honestly.

He layered a second litany over the first.

“Nine-circle-Requiem Mass: Wake of Silence.” Sound didn’t die.

Conclusions did.

The Mass archived the end of every action on contact, telling new ones they were late to their own funeral.

A sword swing would feel complete a half-second before it was.

He walked forward into that hush and brought a white-violet helix down like a collar.

First, the sword law: first bite, hand-sized.

Then, the answer.

“Nine-circle-Bahamut Method: Prism Sanctuary.” Lucent Harmony framed itself into six clean planes of light around me.

It wasn’t a wall; it was a lantern I wore like armor.

The Prism didn’t stop his helix; it bent the clause inside it.

My endings ran on my clock, not his.

He grunted.

“Of course you built a church.” “You built a tax office,” I said.

“We all have our hobbies.” He snarled and showed me the tool he’d built to win.

He poured his focus into the Mantle, and the tax climbed.

Every swing, every parry, every choice now cost me.

I mirrored the veto clause twice more, quick scalpel-strikes of Resonance, to negate two critical edits aimed at my footing.

The mirror stuttered with the effort, then cooled.

I couldn’t lean on it.

He answered with a new nine-circle.

The air settled, going flat and dead.

“Nine-circle-Requiem Mass: Bell of No Tomorrow.” The gear in his Mantle turned.

An unheard bell swung.

Every plan I tried to make wanted to arrive early and die.

The ground glazed over, turning slick.

Valeria went quiet for a blink, her connection to me momentarily muffled by the tolling of that silent bell.

Lucent Harmony held me to the floor.

Then I changed instruments.

“Aegir Diagram-Tide Inversion.” Water magic likes cycles more than endings.

The Bell rang, and Aegir’s diagram replied: not yet.

Jack’s absolute policy frowned, as if paper could.

He stacked more.

“Funeral Constellation-Dirge of Ash.” Tiny, malevolent stars of intent lit up along the paths a sensible swordsman would take.

Step there, and pay a toll in pain.

“Loom,” I said, and stepped almost there.

My Gravity Loom paid the toll with a stored mistake I had made earlier.

The stars flared and went out, confused.

Jack split the Ember into a dozen threads and stitched them into the dirt, a snare for my follow-through.

For a beat, I used Resonance again, this time not to copy his power, but his perception.

I saw my own next move through his eyes, saw the angle he meant to cancel, and chose a different one at the last possible second.

He grabbed air.

He pressed me to the lip of an old lava river and widened the Wake of Silence until even a small pebble trying to tumble had to stop and think.

I met it with Bahamut anchors bigger than I liked.

My circuits sang, getting close to the red line.

Now, Valeria hummed.

I put a page down.

Not to erase him.

To make a seam.

Grey is two flat sheets of ordinary laid over a world that is getting too loud.

I set them at an awkward angle only I could love.

His next edit came for an ending that now had two mouths.

The Ember stuttered.

The tax clerk misfiled the paperwork.

“Don’t you dare,” he said.

“Don’t bring a cathedral to a library,” I replied.

I used the two breaths that gave me.

“Nine-circle-Bahamut Method: Thousandfold Anchor.” A quiet forest of hair-thin, single-use anchors grew in the air, each one owning a single grain of space.

Requiem hates certainties it didn’t write.

It spent a torrent of energy chewing through them.

Then, a soft art.

“God Flash: Split Horizon.” A horizontal cut that belonged to two halves of the world at once.

His Mantle caught the top half of the attack.

My blade lived in the bottom half, where the tax hadn’t arrived yet.

The cut kissed the gear.

A hairline fracture crept across its face.

Jack didn’t scream.

He bit down, and a thin line of blood ran down his cheek.

He paid the price.

“Requiem Mass-Wake of Silence: Closing Rite.” The ring became a room, the walls made of edits, the ceiling made of tax.

Inside, every one of my plans had to visit a clerk with his handwriting.

I stepped through the two Grey pages at a crooked angle.

The seam in his Wake met the seam between my pages.

Two awkward truths shook hands and let me walk right past the clerk.

I arrived inside his guard when he was expecting me at the door.

Valeria rose along his elbow and came down in a tiny arc, made just to say hello to the fracture I had started.

“Don’t,” he whispered.

“Don’t make me,” I said.

He made me.

He threw his last new thing, spending everything High Radiant would ever let him spend.

“Nine-circle-Requiem Canticle: Sovereign Wake.” Not dragon sovereignty.

His.

A swollen, absolute policy that said: no other voices in this circle unless I bill them after.

It ate my Thousandfold Anchor.

The Loom ground its teeth and shattered.

The Prism turned to plain glass.

Jack stepped forward like a man paying for his own execution.

I used Resonance one last time, full and careful.

I copied the hinge in his logic: the place where Nirvana’s stillness and Abyssal endings argue, and Requiem sits as judge.

For one beat, I owned the rule about unanimity.

I wrote a single note in his own language: unanimity requires consent.

I do not consent.

I put a capstone on top of it.

“Bahamut Method-Starfall Refraction: Final.” Orbits of light spun under my boots.

Every invoice his Wake filed landed on a desk that was already stamped: paid elsewhere.

He brought his palm down in a final, world-ending vow.

I raised Valeria and cut as gently as a true cut can be.

I didn’t aim for his flesh.

I aimed for the flaw in his argument.

The gear cracked.

The Bell died the rest of the way.

The Mantle tore.

He stumbled but did not fall.

Blood came, human and honest, bright against the gray rock.

He looked up, his eyes finally open.

And we both heard the Skeld change.

The glass under our feet began to sing, a thin ringing like a flute made of ice.

Far off, three pale pillars of light sparked through the haze-Redeemer beacons, counting in a code I knew too well.

They had felt the edits.

They were coming with chains of light and a jurisdiction that would make this place theirs.

Jack lowered his hand first.

The mantle thinned to a dark shawl over his shoulders.

“Not under her writ,” he said, his voice rough.

I eased Valeria down.

“Name a place that doesn’t answer to anyone.” He thought for exactly one breath.

“Raven Stair.

At dawn.” “Bring your clerk,” I said.

“Bring your library,” he answered.

We stepped backward in the same second, boots grinding on new glass.

The Redeemer pillars brightened, and the Wastes, tired of our arguments, laid one more thin sheet over our footprints, keeping our secrets for the night.