Chương 124: 123: Irony

The room had devolved into chaos. Zeinai watched as Butter and Korhess attacked Katherine from opposite sides, aiming to subdue rather than kill her.

"Clang," Katherine said. Onomatopoeia activated. Two colossal anvils materialised above Butter and Korhess, crashing onto their skulls. Narrative Persistence amplified the scene. Their heads cratered into the floor as the impact forced the room to acknowledge the blow. It was a necessary beat in the story. It wasn't enough. Beings like Butter and Korhess weren't going down to something so simple. The anvils served only as a distraction. A gap suddenly appeared in the narrative.

When the story resumed, Butter had already been launched through multiple walls, a bruise blooming across her face. Korhess was bound tightly in glowing bioluminescent seaweed before a punch buried itself into her stomach, lifting her clean off her feet. Katherine followed with a knee that slammed into the side of her head. KOOOOOM! The entire facility shook. Blood streamed from Korhess' nose as she was horribly concussed. The commander's visor erupted with warnings.

That single strike carried enough force to tear apart galaxies. The precision behind it was even more terrifying than the power itself. Only now did he realise the truth. The mouthguard had fused with Katherine's teeth. It wasn't simply armour anymore; it regulated the impossible balance of power flowing through her body. Removing it would unleash an explosion capable of erasing everything around them.

The seaweed also aligned itself to the psyche of whoever it restrained, becoming just strong enough that they couldn't break free. Even a god would feel like an ordinary human bound by rope, no matter how much strength they possessed. Landing a hit on Katherine had become nearly impossible. She relied on Ellipsis relentlessly, carving gaps into the story where anything could occur. Time itself paused until she touched someone, only continuing once contact had been made.

With her impossible speed, "touch" had become meaningless. By the time reality resumed, her fist was already buried deep inside your organs. Even Katherine avoided touching Butter whenever possible. Melody could strike concepts themselves. At point-blank range, there was no telling what it might erase. Butter burst back into the room with a flying kick. The story lurched forward again.

Without anyone witnessing the transition, Butter was suddenly somewhere else entirely, Katherine's uppercut already buried beneath her jaw. It was remarkable her head remained attached. Even while holding back, Sylvia's strikes now rivalled those of a Shroud punch, only without the defence-lifting property. Butter staggered, blood flying from her split lip.

"Stop making me do this, Sugarbear!" Katherine yelled. Another punch came. Sforzando erupted around her, redirecting the impact into another dimension. For a fraction of a second, Butter deliberately released the barrier. Katherine's fist entered the field. Butter restored it immediately. Her fist vanished into the dimensional space alongside the attack. Shock crossed Katherine's face as she pulled her arm back, her entire fist gone. It regrew instantly.

Seaweed snapped out from Katherine, wrapping around Butter's hands and feet.

"Somnolence," Katherine whispered. She was about to force Butter to sleep before remembering the Somnambulist State. The spell was cancelled instantly. Instead, Katherine seized Butter by the leg, swung her overhead, and smashed her face-first into the ground, cratering the marble.

"Synecdoche." She plucked a single strand of Butter's hair and squeezed it between her fingers. Butter rolled away with a groan. The effect translated directly onto her body, as though an enormous invisible hand had begun crushing her from every direction. Only her Gloom prevented her from being flattened like an insect. Korhess incinerated the seaweed restraints with emerald-gold flames. KOOOOOM! An attack from the past struck Katherine at full force. She stumbled through the air.

Korhess' blows were becoming less effective with every passing second. Katherine had settled deeper into her power. Eventually, she stopped countering altogether, simply floating in place while impacts echoed into the present. She staggered... then stopped reacting entirely. Even strikes capable of shaking galaxies had become meaningless against what Katherine was becoming. She had already surpassed Korhess by well over a hundred thousand times.

The dreams she'd absorbed hadn't even finished fermenting into raw power. They were still being digested.

"You grow tedious to handle," Katherine muttered. Korhess' emerald-gold flames washed over her harmlessly. Her powers reduced their force to almost nothing, and Apis had already granted her extraordinary resistance to them.

"Aposiopesis." The phenomenon descended upon Korhess. Reality itself began interrupting her actions before they could be completed. Every attempt to move, cast, or attack was cut short by unrelated events forcing themselves into the narrative. Katherine released Herculean. She no longer needed it. Its strength had become her own. Understatement remained active. Butter still existed. That alone made her dangerous. WOOOSH.

A kick swept through the air, releasing a wave of conceptual force like antimatter, threatening to erase Katherine from existence. Butter had activated Cadenza even from the ground. The burst reached Katherine. Understatement reduced it to nothing more than a powerful gust of wind. Not even her hair shifted. Butter tore through the seaweed, her Gloom persuading the restraint to loosen before pushing against Synecdoche through sheer force of will. Upon seeing this, Katherine looked genuinely disturbed.

Katherine reached for Ellipsis again, determined to end everything. A streak of gold and twilight exploded through the room. SKRAAASH! A griffin burst across Katherine's face, one talon raking her cheek while another tore away Butter's strand of hair from her hand before it vanished just as suddenly as it had appeared. It had moved inside the gap itself, within Katherine's domain of Narrative Authority, where everyone else existed as nothing more than black-and-white pencil outlines waiting to be written.

Butter tore herself free. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! A barrage of chained punches shattered the concepts Katherine had painstakingly woven into place, rupturing the narrative itself. Korhess moved before the thought had fully formed. KOOOOM! WHAM! Katherine staggered backwards, the eye within her navel widening in confusion. She had already surpassed Korhess, so why did the pre-attacks still send her reeling? A bruise blossomed across her ribs.

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"By the One Who Bore the Lamb..." Understanding struck. Korhess had abandoned ordinary punches and kicks. She was striking with her hooves. With her horns. Those weapons were countless times denser than flesh, their matter compressed beyond anything a normal body could achieve. Empowered by Apis, Korhess' horns and hooves were all but indestructible. Almost. Almost was the important part. Katherine was still evolving. Soon enough, even those would become irrelevant. Katherine reacted immediately. Ellipsis.

Palindrome. Onomatopoeia. Aposiopesis. Her four passive abilities reset in an instant.... Korhess' spear appeared in her grasp. Its blade, forged from solidified absence, already occupied the space between Sylvia's ribs. The thrust existed in the past before her muscles had even finished contracting, before the spells had time to fully settle.

The surrounding air warped beneath the force of the pre-attack, a strike that should have landed before Sylvia realised it had begun, one that should have pierced the Nonagon's radiance and reached the fragile human heart still buried somewhere beneath it. Butter caught Korhess' wrist, Melody thrusting into the before itself and halting the strike moments before it could connect. The spear stopped a hair's breadth from Sylvia's chest. Its edge hummed. Korhess' blazing eyes met Butter's.

"Don't hurt her." Korhess understood immediately. Butter wasn't hesitating out of weakness. She was calculating. Every one of Korhess' attacks was too lethal. The spear, the pre-attacks, the compressed force behind every blow—they would carve straight through the parts of Sylvia that were still human, pushing her even faster towards whatever she was becoming. They had to find another way. Sylvia's laughter rang through the clearing, bright and melodic enough to make Butter's stomach twist.

"See?" she whispered, her smile widening.

"I knew you'd remember. I knew love would always choose me in the end." She drifted forward as though gravity had forgotten her, sliding her arms around Butter's waist from behind before resting her cheek against Butter's back with a blissful sigh.

"Forever..." she murmured dreamily.

"That's what this was always supposed to be. No more distance. No more lonely little endings. Just you... and me... and forever stretching out until the story forgets there was ever anything else." For the briefest instant, a fragment of the old Sylvia resurfaced. Without thinking, she slid both hands up Butter's torso, instinctively cupping her chest in the embrace, holding onto her with the unconscious familiarity of someone who still remembered how it used to feel.

She gave Butter's chest a playful squeeze once... then twice... before dissolving into delighted laughter.

"Do you remember," Sylvia asked dreamily, "when you became that tall redheaded queen? You looked so adorable trying to hide that large chest..." Butter sighed.

"I remember." She didn't react to Sylvia's wandering hands. At this point, trying to pry them away felt almost pointless. Several metres away, Korhess quietly stepped back, her hooves clicking against the fractured stone. Her gaze lingered on Sylvia, seeing beyond skin and clothing to the thing nested inside her, the impossible presence steadily rewriting her into something that had never been meant to exist. The Nonagon. It had to die. Perhaps... if they destroyed it quickly enough......

there might still be enough of Katherine left to save. Butter's jaw tightened. She read the thought in Korhess' eyes immediately. They both knew what that meant. Destroying something capable of powering galaxies would never be simple. Korhess' head tilted slightly. For a fleeting instant, she saw a future yet to happen. Her eyes shifted towards Butter. Butter understood. Carefully, gently, she eased herself out of Sylvia's embrace, taking slow, measured steps away without startling her.

Something metallic struck the floor. CLINK. A small pentagonal device rested against the stone. Its cobalt steel body shimmered beneath intricate silver interference patterns. Five curved claws unfolded and buried themselves into the floor like roots searching for fertile ground, anchoring it in place. At its centre floated a sphere of impossible light—not truly light, but a frequency given shape, already humming with quiet anticipation. The Discordion. A disruptor elevated to absurdity.

Thousands of times more expensive. Infinitely rarer. Dangerously unstable until six years of relentless work by the Syndicate's greatest scientists had finally made it viable. Only the Commander possessed one. It didn't need physical contact. It merely required proximity. Fifty metres. One uninterrupted minute of observation. That was what the Commander had been doing all along. The device screamed. The sound wasn't loud. It was corrective.

A precise frequency engineered to seek the Nonagon's resonance, and the instant it found it...... it locked on. Then it began to unravel it. Katherine's spells accomplished nothing. There was nothing to defend against. The Discordion wasn't attacking. It was rearranging. No more malicious than someone neatly folding another person's clothes. Only every adjustment followed a mathematical pattern designed to destabilise the Nonagon's structure itself. Sylvia screamed. Her body convulsed. Both arms flung wide.

The eye in her navel widened, turned white, and stared somewhere beyond reality itself. Her form glitched. Here, there, nowhere, everywhere. Flesh became light. Light became something that was neither. Then both. She was falling and rising at once, pulled apart by a frequency engineered for this exact purpose. The waves came next. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. Cobalt pulses rolled through the chamber like the heartbeat of something that had forgotten how to keep time.

Shockwaves ripped across the room, unmaking everything they touched. Walls frayed into dust. Dust dissolved into mist. Mist collapsed into nothingness. Stone, air, and silence alike unravelled, each pulse dragging existence backwards towards the stillness before the first word had ever been spoken. Butter's hand was already inside the Aria. Pages fluttered wildly.

"Slumber." A small badger tumbled from the book like a dream finally remembering it was supposed to wake. It was tiny. Round. Its fur wasn't fur at all, but soft, translucent mist that drifted endlessly from its body, the kind that settled across valleys before dawn and lingered over fields after rain, blurring every edge until the world forgot how to be sharp. Tiny stars blinked lazily where its eyes should have been, peaceful and utterly incapable of fear. It waddled towards Sylvia.

Mist poured from its body in quiet streams, spreading through the room until it enveloped her in a sphere of impossible drowsiness. There was enough sleep within that haze to cradle an entire city for days, to silence armies where they stood, to lull the world itself into dreamless stillness. Sylvia's screams stopped. Her violent thrashing slowed. Her arms drifted to her sides. Even the eye within her navel began to close. Zeinai watched in silence. His Apis eye perceived what no one else could.

The Discordion was working. The Nonagon's radiance dimmed, folding inward and shrinking into something that could be contained. The frequency held steady. For the first time, the impossible thing was being reminded that it did not belong in this reality. It wouldn't last. Discordions were rare beyond measure. They shattered Spheres, cracked Prisms, and destabilised Hexagons. Against a Nonagon... Against something that existed beyond every taxonomy ever conceived... He simply didn't know. No one did.

They had found a way to wound it. They had not found a way to keep it wounded. Butter lunged instinctively. Nothing happened. Every spell she attempted collapsed before completion. Anything intended to harm, restrain, capture, or even inconvenience Katherine inverted and unravelled before it could manifest.

"Sugarbear!" Katherine's voice cracked with desperation.

"Please! Save me!" Butter's eyes trembled.

"I am," she whispered.

"This is how."

"The Nonagon has corrupted your mind." Katherine shuddered, tears spilling freely from the eye in her navel as laughter and sobs became indistinguishable, two clauses joined into the same unbearable sentence.

"Corrupted?" she breathed.

"You still think this is corruption?" Her smile widened, trembling with something poised between ecstasy and grief.

"How can a story be corrupted by its own author?" She laughed softly.

"How can a dream betray the dreamer who first imagined it?" The eye in her navel gleamed.

"The Nonagon is not an intruder."

"It is the unwritten chapter every sentence of my life has been struggling towards." Her voice fell to a hushed, almost worshipful whisper.

"It was conjugated from every hope I ever whispered, declined through every fear I buried, punctuated by every tear I pretended never fell." She pressed a trembling hand against her chest.

"You keep searching for the boundary between Katherine... and the Nonagon."

"There isn't one." Another laugh escaped her, bright enough to hurt.

"It isn't possessing me." Her fingers curled over her heart.

"It is my subject. My predicate."

"My beginning. My conclusion." She closed her eye, smiling through tears.

"I am no longer being written, Butter."

"I..." Her voice dissolved into bliss.

"... have become the sentence." She struggled to stay awake.

"I am the Nonagon." — Korhess wasted no time. Emerald and gold bloomed across her palms. She did not strike. She took. Her hand passed through Sylvia's chest, reaching beyond flesh until her fingers closed around what lay hidden beneath. When she drew them back, a clump of raw Apis came with them, shining so fiercely that every soul in the chamber instinctively shielded their eyes. It was a fragment of something that ought never to have existed. A blasphemy. A geometric impossibility.

A thing that had waited a very long time...... to be consumed. Korhess regarded it in silence.

"The deepest root seeketh ever the hidden spring," she murmured. Her fingers closed. She opened her mouth. She swallowed. The light slipped down her throat like a fallen star descending into a sky that had never been fashioned to cradle one. Her entire body convulsed. Her antlers erupted with emerald fire. Her mismatched eyes, one blue and one hazel, lost all depth, gazing into a place no living thing was meant to behold. A ragged gasp escaped her. Both hands struck the floor.

Her hooves carved furrows through solid stone as breath tore itself from somewhere unimaginably deep, somewhere that had slumbered since the hour of her birth. Then she cried out. Her spine bowed until it seemed ready to break before snapping the opposite way, every muscle writhing beneath unbearable strain. Agony coursed through every nerve. Any other soul would have perished the instant raw Apis touched their being. Korhess endured. Even so...... it was as though she had swallowed molten metal.

The convulsions gradually faded. She rose. Changed. The Apis had settled into her bones, compressing every fibre of her being. It magnified all that she already possessed while granting perfect command over power that had once answered only reluctantly. It no longer merely dwelt within her. It had become hers. Sylvia's navel eye snapped open. Korhess' voice thundered through the chamber.

"Turn thy gaze away!" She was shouting before anyone understood.

"Close thine eyes! The fruit hath ripened beyond its season! Whosoever meeteth that eye surrendereth the garden of the mind unto her keeping. She shall plant whatsoever vision pleaseth her, though no Apis be stirred!" Butter hurled herself backwards, squeezing her eyes shut. The Commander did likewise, dismissing his Apis Prism in the same motion. Too late. Each of them had already stolen the briefest glance. The first drop had already fallen into the sea.

The frequency still bore down upon Sylvia, pinning the Nonagon beneath relentless interference. Yet it learned. It adapted. It became something that refused every cage wrought for it. The mist surrounding the little badger began to thin. Its body flickered. The thing that had been sleeping...... was waking. Sylvia forced herself upright. Every movement warred against impossible exhaustion, against a slumber so profound that it rivalled even her Narrative Authority through quiet, relentless persuasion.

Palindrome could not reverse it. Sleep was no attack. She opened her mouth. Melody struck first. Black bandages erupted from Butter's arm, lashing around Sylvia's face before binding her mouth shut. Layer upon layer tightened until not even the faintest whisper could escape. Everyone exhaled. A wet tearing sound broke the silence. Something peeled open. No one looked. Korhess' warning still echoed through the chamber. Every eye remained shut.

Butter flinched, a sharp wince crossing her face as the hairs along the back of her neck stood on end. Korhess' ears flattened instinctively against her head. Genuine confusion flickered across her features, followed almost immediately by a rare hint of unease. The Commander's eyebrows rose. No one had opened their eyes. No one should have known what had happened. Yet every instinct in his body insisted something impossible had just changed. Something was smiling. They knew it without seeing.

Then a voice spoke from somewhere it should never have existed.

"Irony." The word rang through the chamber in the same doubled cadence as every spell Sylvia uttered, as though two voices occupied the same sentence at once. It was neither louder nor softer than before. It was simply...... closer. As though the speaker had leaned in beside each of them, whispering directly into the darkness behind their closed eyes.