The Extra's Rise - Chapter 953
953: Hellflame Emperor (5) 953: Hellflame Emperor (5) He laid the Funeral Constellation again, but the little stars of intent that lit the paths between us lacked their old zeal.
The cracked gear at the heart of his Mantle was turning slower, the Outcome Tax less certain.
My Gravity Loom and Prism Sanctuary had found their lanes, and they had teeth.
I didn’t try to outlast him.
His High Radiant reserves were still deeper than mine.
Instead, I stacked compression-art into art until the world had to agree with my math or choke on it.
I veiled myself in a thin sheet of God Flash and made my first cut from inside it.
I sewed the shortest possible line down with two tiny anchors from my Loom.
My carry-through began before the first move had decided to exist, and I buried my exit clean inside the motion of sheathing a blade that was still cutting.
On top of it all, I braided two nine-circles, a clumsy-looking but effective pairing: the Gravity Loom on my ankles so my feet always had permission, and the Aegir Tide Inversion on my wrists so my hands refused to add any drama.
He answered with a new choir.
“Nine-circle-Requiem Oratorio: Black Procession.” Figures made of ash and legal fine print rose from the ground, each holding a heavy stone stamp.
Every time my blade completed a fluid thought, one of them would lunge forward and stamp the air where my sword had been, leaving behind a mark of pure void that tried to pass its nullity back into my Ember.
I could play that game for about five seconds before my power became just another voided document.
I used Soul Resonance again, a scalpel-thin copy, mirroring only the ‘proof’ clause inside his Procession.
If you void something, you must keep a record.
Then I met his nine-circle with my own.
“Bahamut Method: Archive of Virtue.” A library floor made of pale light spread out beneath my feet.
Every honest cut I made etched a single, shimmering line of silver script into the floor.
The ash-figures brought their stamps down.
The Archive demanded their copy of the paperwork.
They had none.
Their stamps of void fell through the light and vanished.
Jack bared his teeth, a flicker of his old, wild self.
“You’re the worst kind of cheat.” “You invented taxes,” I shot back.
“Don’t cry about the audit.” He didn’t.
He lunged.
The Requiem Ember stopped being an editor and started writing as a pen.
A line from his heart to mine, a final sentence he was willing to spend his own life to finish.
Don’t make his death her final kindness, Valeria’s voice was a sharp warning in my palm.
I wouldn’t.
I laid down two Grey pages-not to erase him, but to place a seam in his path.
Then, “Nine-circle-Bahamut Method: Seam Kintsugi.” The two Grey sheets became like broken ceramic, and a hairline of Lucent Harmony traced the seam between them, gluing them into one beautiful, flawed thing.
His all-or-nothing line of Requiem reached the seam and found no place to overwrite.
It passed straight through me into the basalt behind and died, drunk on its own importance.
He blinked, like a child who had just seen a magic trick.
Then he gave a short, ugly laugh.
“You glued paper with calm.” He hurled his right hand up and spoke a thesis that would make old men leave rooms in protest.
“Nine-circle-Dead Sun Thesis.” A point in the air before him ignited, but it wasn’t a star.
It was a hole in the shape of a star, no bigger than a pinprick, radiating a cold that was somehow also a searing heat.
It didn’t explode.
It forbade any return to baseline.
A cut made in its presence would be permanent.
A wound that could never heal.
“No,” I said, the word flat.
Grey would end it, but that was a hammer.
I needed a scalpel.
I used Resonance to copy the still-heat of his Nirvana flame, leaving the Abyss and Requiem behind.
Then I set that tiny, stolen piece of calm inside my own Lucent Harmony.
“Nine-circle-Lucent Method: Quiet Star.” No glow.
A point of my own appeared opposite his, a point where cuts remained honest because they had no desire to be remembered.
The Dead Sun pressed its law of permanence; the Quiet Star refused to become a story.
The two absolutes met and cancelled each other out into nothing.
Jack flinched, as if slapped by a child he loved.
Then he smiled-a look that was thanks, hate, please, and stop all at once-and threw everything he had left.
“Requiem Ember-Last Wake.” It was grief with a budget.
It came for my Archive, my Loom, my Star, my Prism, my seam.
It wanted to turn my entire symphony of logic into a single sentence that ended with his name written in my ash.
Respect for respect.
No Grey.
No tricks.
“God Flash: Two Places.” One cut that belongs to two coordinates at once.
It’s the only time I let Valeria be pretty.
I moved the world a hair under my foot and let the single cut live in that perfect, impossible overlap.
The Last Wake split around it, trying to close behind the attack.
The Archive asked for its paperwork.
The Loom tied its ankles.
The Quiet Star gave it nothing to hold on to.
The cut landed.
It crossed his Mantle and his chest not as a bisection, but as a fold.
The Mantle tore like silk.
The gear shattered with a sound like breaking stone.
Jack dropped to one knee, catching himself on one hand.
His High Radiant rank kept his body from coming apart, but the power was gone.
A line of blood went down his chin, not dramatic, just present.
He looked up, and for the first time, his eyes were completely open.
“Please,” he said.
He wasn’t asking for mercy.
He was asking for it to mean something.
There are clean kills and there are clean refusals.
This was a third thing.
“Erebus,” I called into the quiet.
Columns of clean, white bone rose from the rock around Jack.
They weren’t a prison.
They were a brace.
A cool place the last embers of the Requiem did not want to sit.
Erebus stepped from his own shadow, his skull tilted like a polite, curious bird.
“Heal him enough to keep the parts that can learn,” I said.
“Of course,” the Lich King replied, and wrote three dead letters in the air.
The bleeding slowed to something a conversation could carry.
Jack coughed, a wet sound of ash and red.
“You win.” “I win this,” I corrected him gently.
“Not you.” He nodded like a student who had finally understood a difficult page, but hated the handwriting.
The Gates of Transcendence tilted near.
I could feel them, closer than they had been in a week.
The weight of a potential breakthrough gathered near my heart.
One more step, and I could learn a new way to carry truth.
Not on his back, Valeria squeezed my palm.
I stepped away.
The weight cooled.
The Gates faded to their patient, platinum-silver certainty.
I would earn them, but not like this.
Not by turning Jack into a rung on a ladder Elara wouldn’t have wanted me to climb.
Grey tugged at my spine, pulling me toward a thread that smelled like velvet and knives.
Rose.
I opened a lane through Ouroboros and didn’t ask permission.
Erebus nodded, needing no thanks, and closed the bone around Jack like hands cupping a candle that shouldn’t go out just yet.
I stepped into quiet.
A garden spread out before me in terraces of dark stone, glittering with dew.
Blue roses climbed trellises and spilled over paths, their petals bending light into soft, impossible angles-edges gentled, corners honest only when you looked twice.
The wind moved, but only where the flowers allowed.
The whole world kept its voice low.
She stood at the center, her back to me, hands loose at her sides.
The air around her had changed.
It was wider, steadier, a clean hinge-shift in pressure.
Not for show.
Rank.
Mid Radiant.
Her Paradox Gift no longer tugged at reality; it agreed with it, and then chose.
Blue sigils pulsed once under her feet and settled, as if they had belonged there long before tonight.
Pride hit me first.
Relief second.
Then the tired hurt I hadn’t had time to sort.
I didn’t call her name.
I walked the path the roses made for me and let Valeria rest quiet against my hip.
I softened my footfalls, not wanting to break the stillness.
When I reached her, I put my arms around her from behind, my palms flat over the line of her ribs, my cheek resting against her shoulder.
No speech.
Just my weight, my warmth, and the silent promise that the fight was over.
Here, at least.
For this one breath.
Her back went rigid, a sharp, shaking inhale, then she slowly, deliberately, steadied against me.
Around our feet, the blue roses opened in a collective, soundless hush, like a crowd deciding to be kind.
Her new rank settled fully then, a clear, true bell ringing under my hands.
I closed my eyes.
The garden held its breath with us.