Chương 125: 124: Expurgation

The exact opposite happened. Slumber's mist made her more awake, while the Discordion made her more whole. The black bandages snapped loose, recoiling back along Butter's arm as Sylvia stretched lazily. The Discordion shattered. Its claws ripped free from the floor, its core dimming to black as the frequency collapsed with a lingering chime, like a bell struck once that refused to stop echoing. Butter dismissed Slumber.

The little badger dissolved into drifting mist before slipping back between the Aria's pages, preserving what little Gloom she had left. The eye within Sylvia's navel blazed. The dream came without warning. A memory that had never happened. A memory that was happening now. A memory destined to happen again. And again. And again. Until the dream itself learned to stop dreaming. Butter saw her father once more upon the training grounds beneath a pale sky.

His palm guided hers through every strike, every stance, every killing blow, teaching her how to become something stronger than herself. Even then, behind the warmth in his eyes, she saw the quiet resolve of a man already preparing himself to let her go. Korhess found herself beneath the moon again, small, hungry, and cold. Frost-bitten grass tasted like freedom beneath her teeth while silver moonlight watched over an empty field.

She did not yet know she would spend the next forty years learning how not to be alone. Zeinai stood before the old photograph. The pink-eyed girl smiled back at him. Beside her stood the father who had begged him to kill his own daughter. Love. Mercy. Monstrosity. The faces blurred until he could no longer tell whether he was looking at another man...... or himself. Sylvia lunged. She tore across the room, determined to end everything before any of them could wake. Korhess broke free first. CRACK!

Her palm slammed across Butter's face with a thunderous slap. The cold touch shattered the dream. Butter's eyes snapped open. She was back inside the ruined chamber, back before the thing that had once been Katherine. Understanding flashed across her face.

"Oh my." Melody surged from her arm as she drove a punch into the empty air. KRAAAK! The blow landed against something unseen. A jagged fracture spread through the invisible spell before a second punch followed immediately after. SHATTER! Irony split cleanly in half. The conceptual curse that had wrapped itself around her collapsed into drifting fragments of black script before dissolving into nothing. Butter felt the pressure lift from her mind, every twisted reversal uncoiling at once. Sylvia snarled at Korhess.

"I detest you, you cervine creature." Korhess answered with fire.

"It is known to me." Emerald-gold flames erupted from her body, crashing into Sylvia and driving her backwards. For the first time, they hurt. Understatement still crushed those catastrophic conceptual flames into nothing more than ordinary fire, but Korhess had changed. The Nonagon had become part of her. Apis now fought Apis. The flames burned Sylvia the way a flamethrower burned flesh. She did not disintegrate. She simply suffered. Yet she never stopped moving. Still blinded, Sylvia lunged forward.

Dark wood nunchaku snapped into existence, their polished grain drinking in the light as silver chains coiled between them like strips of liquid moonlight. Butter's ears perked.

"Harmony?" She never opened her eyes. The nunchaku screamed through the air. Korhess answered with her spear. Butter answered with her fists. Melody blazed around her forearms, every bandage poised to refuse Harmony's strikes before they could accumulate within her body. They attacked from opposite sides. Sylvia flowed between them with impossible grace, her movements carrying neither hesitation nor wasted effort.

Butter's Ghost danced through the battlefield, Korhess' Asherah's Waltz threaded between every thrust, and together their styles overwhelmed Sylvia with superior technique. Neither could commit. Palindrome lingered. Aposiopesis lingered. A reckless strike would simply be reversed or interrupted before it could land. They fought almost entirely on the defensive, weathering the storm one exchange at a time. Then Korhess began forcing the tempo.

The fragment of Apis within her compressed every motion, lending terrifying weight to each step as she drove Sylvia backwards with relentless spear work. Beside her, Butter's Melody battered apart the concepts woven around Sylvia, tearing fractures through the narrative itself. Sylvia smiled.

"Mimesis." The word settled upon her. In a single instant she understood. Butter's Ghost. Korhess' Asherah's Waltz. Every nuance. Every rhythm. Every instinct. She copied them all. The battlefield transformed. Sylvia drifted through Butter's mist with ghostlike elegance before turning seamlessly into the flowing circles of Asherah's Waltz, her feet tracing graceful arcs through the shattered chamber. Harmony cracked through the air like a conductor's baton. Butter twisted away. Harmony snapped taut.

Instead of missing, it caught her momentum itself and pulled her back into Sylvia's reach. Korhess vanished. She reappeared behind Sylvia, her spear already driving towards the base of her spine. Sylvia pivoted through Asherah's Waltz as though she had practised it for decades. The spear skimmed harmlessly past her body. She redirected its path, anticipated Korhess' recovery before it began, and met every movement with one of her own. Steel rang. Hooves struck stone. Mist swirled.

For a heartbeat, the three became indistinguishable in a blur of flawless close-quarters combat. Sylvia caught Korhess by her horns. With a single twist she hurled her aside before ducking beneath a hoof kick that split the air where her skull had been. For the briefest instant...... she released every spell. Palindrome. Aposiopesis. Understatement. Ellipsis. All of it. Every ounce of power surged into one attack.

"Boom." Onomatopoeia answered. An invisible detonation tore through the air, hurling Korhess across the chamber like a falling star. BOOOOOOOOOM. Korhess struck the far wall hard enough to shake the entire floor. Stone collapsed around her. She staggered upright almost immediately, planting the butt of her spear against the floor to launch herself back into the fight. One step. Two. Then she stopped. Her eyes drifted down. Half of her torso was simply...... gone.

Where flesh and bone should have been, there was only a ragged cavity large enough for a spread hand to pass clean through. Flames spilled from the wound alongside ribbons of blood before sputtering weakly against the fractured stone. Her spear slipped from numb fingers. The clang echoed through the chamber. Korhess collapsed.

"Butter..." The word barely escaped her lips. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. Butter's eyes flew open.

"Korhess!" The scream tore itself from her throat. For a fleeting instant, she forgot Sylvia. Forgot everything except the broken woman lying motionless upon the ground. Sylvia's smile faltered. Then it twisted. Jealousy.

"You..." Her voice quivered.

"You're worried about her?" Her expression darkened into wounded disbelief.

"You're only supposed to look at me." Harmony lashed forward. Butter barely registered the attack. Sylvia slipped effortlessly through her guard, twisting inside her stance until her elbow descended towards Butter's jaw. CRACK! Butter's prosthetic leg snapped upward on its own, striking Sylvia's arm aside before the blow could connect. Butter looked up. The grief in her eyes had become fury. She drove a punch straight for Sylvia's face. Sylvia leaned aside effortlessly. Every passive ability had already returned.

The punch carved through empty air. Sylvia frowned.

"You never fought this hard..." There was genuine hurt in her voice.

"... for me." She never noticed the Commander. He materialised inside her blind spot with perfect timing, both hands wrapped around an enormous technological war bat. The weapon resembled a baseball bat only in silhouette. Its body was forged from layered orange-indigo alloy wrapped in interlocking silver conduits, each channel pulsing with compressed Apis.

Hexagonal vents along its length bled white vapour while concentric rings near the head rotated against one another, building momentum with a rising mechanical whine. Every second they spun faster, storing enough kinetic force to threaten monsters that ordinary weapons could never hope to injure. The bat finished charging. WHAAAM! It connected with the side of Sylvia's skull. The impact detonated like artillery. She disappeared through three walls before the sound had finished echoing.

The Commander lowered the bat with a tired breath.

"My apologies," he said quietly.

"I've been waiting for it to reach a charge capable of harming something like you." His gaze followed the trail of destruction.

"That delay was... necessary." Before Sylvia could so much as rise, Butter was already standing with both hands outstretched. Her eyes remained tightly shut.

"Perpendosi." Sylvia's head snapped upward. For the first time since becoming the Nonagon... She looked afraid.

"No!" Her voice cracked.

"You wouldn't!" Her shadow convulsed. It peeled itself from the ground like wet ink, rose behind her, and opened into a waiting maw.

"Fragmentation!" The word burst from her lips as her shadow swallowed her whole. Silence settled across the chamber.... A heartbeat later, another Sylvia stepped from the darkness several metres away. Her clothes were immaculate. Her body bore no wound, no trace of the spear or the flames. Only the eye within her navel betrayed her. It had narrowed into a furious frown. Her gaze found Butter immediately.

"You…" The single word trembled with disbelief before hardening into anger.

"You attempted to consign me to Perpendosi." Her expression twisted.

"You were prepared to cast me aside."

"You were prepared to erase me." Butter's face tightened.

"No. Perpendosi doesn't erase anyone. Glissando does. Perpendosi buries." Sylvia laughed, though there was nothing joyful in the sound.

"Do not insult me with half-truths. You selected the spell. You made the choice. Whether you call it burial or oblivion changes nothing to the one being condemned." Butter shook her head.

"When Perpendosi draws someone into my shadow, what happens afterwards is entirely my decision." Sylvia's expression faltered.

"I can leave them there forever…" Butter swallowed.

"…or I can bring them back. Everything Perpendosi claims is recorded inside a metaphysical ledger. With objects, I may simply forget them, and they cease to be. Living things are different. I can imprison them… or I can release them." She lowered her eyes.

"I was going to keep you there." Her voice softened.

"Until we found a way to save you." For the briefest instant, the fury drained from Sylvia's face.

"So…" Hope bloomed across her features.

"You still love me, Sugarbear? Even after everything?" Butter answered without hesitation.

"Of course I do, Honeycakes."

"You just have to stop this." The hope shattered.

"No." Sylvia's reply was quiet.

"Your kindness is precisely why I cannot."

"You would only persuade yourself that forgetting is mercy, and I refuse to become something you remember with regret." Her eyes softened for a fleeting moment.

"You are the one who has to stop." Her gaze drifted beyond Butter. It settled upon Korhess' fallen body. Something ugly rippled across her face. Rage. Jealousy. Resentment.

"So… you truly cared." Her voice quivered.

"You cared about her." A bitter smile spread slowly across her lips.

"I'm glad the deer is dead." The words dripped with venom.

"She was forever standing between us."

"She was forever whispering doubt into your heart."

"Now she's gone." Her smile widened with unsettling tenderness.

"I'm going to take you away from everyone, Sugarbear."

"You'll never have to look at another soul again."

"You won't even remember their names."

"There will be no world beyond us."

"Only you…"

"…and me."

"Forever." THOOOOOM! The air answered before anyone could. Sylvia's body lurched violently sideways, as though struck by the weight of a collapsing mountain. She spun instinctively. SKRRAAASH! A spear erupted through her back. Its emerald-gold blade burst cleanly through the eye within her navel, sending crimson blood and cobalt radiance spraying across the chamber. Sylvia gasped. Slowly, almost mechanically, she lowered her gaze to the weapon protruding from her body. Disbelief emptied her face.

Behind her stood Korhess. Whole. Untouched. Every wound had vanished. Her garments were pristine, and her spear blazed with emerald-gold brilliance. The Nonagon had never perceived her. Korhess had moved through it as though she were already part of its impossible geometry, because a fragment of Apis now dwelt within her.

"Who saith I had fallen?" Korhess's voice was calm, almost gentle.

"The oak yieldeth not because a single branch is shorn." Emerald-gold fire surged along the spear. This time she did not feed the flames into Sylvia's flesh. She fed them into the Nonagon. The fire ignored muscle. Ignored bone. Ignored every human remnant Katherine still possessed. It sought only the impossible geometry buried within. Sylvia screamed. She lashed out blindly. Korhess slipped beneath the strike with effortless grace, twisting aside as she wrenched the spear free in the same motion.

The blade carved a brilliant crescent through the air before she rolled across the fractured stone and rose beside Butter and the Commander. Her eyes never left Sylvia.

"Borrowed footsteps," Korhess said quietly, "shall ne'er equal the feet that have trodden the road." She lowered her spear.

"Skill may be imitated."

"Instinct may not."

"Neither can years watered by sweat, sorrow, and battle be swallowed within a single breath." Sylvia trembled. Every muscle quaked as the emerald-gold flames continued devouring the Nonagon itself. At last… …she smiled.

"I believe I have exhausted the notion of combat." She slowly lifted her head.

"I shall simply bring this story to its conclusion." Her mouth opened, and the eye within her navel shone with the colour of a sky that had never learned to cradle clouds.

"Expurgation." She did not shape it into a beam. She let it bloom. Cobalt radiance erupted from her body in every direction. It was not merely a shockwave. It was a law expanding through reality, travelling at speeds that should never have existed, arriving before it had even finished being born. Butter's skin blistered. Korhess' antlers splintered with sharp cracks. Zeinai's hand moved instinctively towards his belt. It did not matter.

The expanding law engulfed them in an instant, swallowing the chamber, the facility, and the country beyond. It would continue until nothing remained untouched. Laws did not stop. They only ended...... when someone stronger rewrote them. Sylvia poured everything she had into the attack. Narrative authority surged through every word, overwriting the possibility of resistance itself. Everyone died. The end. That was the story she wrote. It didn't matter if someone was immortal.

It didn't matter if they could react within Planck time, outrun causality, or exist beyond ordinary sequence. None of it mattered because, in that moment, Sylvia was writing reality directly. Reaction itself ceased to exist. Butter could always be recreated later. Facsimile would solve that. RESET. Zeinai rewound time by one second. Reality lurched. For the briefest instant, confusion flickered across every face before memory caught up with them.

Most of that stolen second vanished as their minds struggled to realign with the restored timeline. Expurgation bloomed once more. This time...... they were ready. Butter's perception sharpened until a single nanosecond stretched into an eternity. She remembered. It wouldn't happen again. She couldn't use Melody to punch the spell apart. Irony still clung to her, twisting every attempt to harm, interrupt, or oppose into its opposite. She could feel it. Katherine had recast the spell specifically for her.

Moth Step suffered the same fate, every avenue of escape folding neatly back into failure before it could even exist. Her thoughts raced through the Aria instead. She reached for the worst possible counter. Irony answered. It summoned the best one. Tentacles. It was already there. Its countless arms, the ones that reached through the spaces between thoughts themselves, wrapped around the expanding law. It held. The wave pressed against it. Tentacles held. The cobalt radiance scorched its body. Tentacles held.

The thing that sought to become the only law left in existence strained with impossible force. Tentacles answered with only one concept. No. It embraced the law the way a mother throws herself around a child running towards certain death. It pulled with everything it was. Then it pushed. Everything. Into Butter. Its body flickered violently. The burden proved too great. Tentacles burst apart into countless motes of light before sinking back into the Aria, having restrained a word heavy enough to crush worlds.

Butter's eyes widened.

"What are you doing...?" The redirected force flooded into her all at once, leaving her completely helpless. She couldn't move. She couldn't dodge. The unavoidable attack awakened something else. Her prosthetic erupted in brilliant yellow light. RESONANCE MODE ACTIVATED. The limb sampled the incoming law. Absorbed it. Understood it. Then calmly sent it back to its source. Sylvia. The wave folded inward before reversing course, racing back towards the one who had created it. Sylvia's eyes widened.

"S-Sugarbear...?" Terror seized her voice.

"What's happening?!" Butter stared in horror as the impossible unfolded before her.

"No..." Her voice broke.

"I'm so sorry..." Tears welled in her eyes.

"It reversed..."

"I'm so sorry... it reversed!" Sylvia screamed. It was the sound of a star collapsing beneath its own gravity, of a galaxy ending after being compressed for far too long. Butter's mouth fell open.

"No!" Sylvia reached towards her. Butter reached back. Their fingertips never touched. Sylvia's body began to dissolve. Not gradually. All at once. Between one heartbeat and the next. Her entire body unravelled into radiance. Only the eye within her navel remained for a single lingering moment. It looked at Butter with quiet heartbreak. Is this... what you wanted? Then it, too, vanished. Butter collapsed. Her knees struck the floor.

Every remaining ounce of strength left her as she bowed her head, unable to stop trembling. After several long moments, she looked up at the Commander, tears gathering in her eyes. Butter lifted her head, tears gathering in her eyes.

"Can you keep resetting?" she pleaded.

"Please... take us back." Zeinai gave a slow shake of his head.

"No." His voice was steady, calm, carrying the measured certainty of a commander delivering a report rather than offering comfort.

"The reset device was never designed for long-range temporal reversal. Its maximum range is one second." He glanced down at the mechanism resting in his hand.

"That limitation is deliberate. Restricting the interval allows repeated activation without risking catastrophic failure. Extending it beyond that threshold would destabilise the device." His expression darkened.

"A Hexagon could force a deeper reset."

"The Talon only exhausted the Hexagon's stored energy. The Core itself still exists."

"It remains hidden. It remains secure." Korhess stepped forward before anyone else could speak.

"Nay." The single word rang through the chamber with quiet authority.

"Speak not of unveiling that relic whilst this hour endureth." Her mismatched eyes settled upon the empty space where Sylvia had vanished.

"Should Katherine return unto this place ere the Hexagon be borne away..." She lowered her spear.

"... she shall feast upon it once more, and what riseth thereafter shall be a calamity beyond all reckoning." — Butter's hand remained on the Aria. Her fingers had gone white around its cover. Her breathing had stopped. Her eyes never left the place where Sylvia had vanished, where the fading light marked the end of someone who had once been her friend. She understood. The human part was truly gone. Her own attack had finished what the Nonagon had begun.

The girl who had been Katherine, who had been Sylvia, who had once been a blue-haired delinquent wandering the streets of Paris with more questions than answers... she no longer existed. Whatever returned would not wear that face. It would be something greater. Something made entirely of dream-stuff. The being the Nonagon had been waiting an eternity to become. Butter knew what had to happen next. Korhess understood as well.

Apis still shimmered beneath her skin, the fragment of the Nonagon she had devoured compressing every fibre of her being into something denser, sharper, stronger. She regarded Butter with the quiet stillness of a deer that had first learned to become a sword... and was now learning to become something beyond even that.

"What is thy design," she asked softly, "when next she returneth?" Butter didn't answer immediately. Her Gloom was almost gone. Fifteen percent. Perhaps she could still create one final creature. Something capable of reversing time to the instant before Expurgation had ever been spoken. But then what? What happened after that? When her Gloom ran dry...... and Katherine still stood before her? Butter parted her lips. The answer never came. The explosion rose from beneath them.

It was the sound of a star that had endured compression for far too long, of something that had dreamt of annihilation since before the facility's foundations had ever been laid. Custard had lost control. Far below, the Magpies fought desperately to contain it, surrounding the impossible creature with restraints built to imprison things that should never have existed. They were failing. Nothing could contain what Custard was becoming. The explosion erupted.

Its expansion dwarfed the birth of a star, multiplying upon itself until speed ceased to describe it. It arrived before perception. Before thought. Before awareness itself. Like the beast that birthed it, the blast always reached you a single moment before you realised it had begun. Butter's eyes barely had time to widen. Her skin blistered. Her lungs burned. Her thoughts dissolved beneath unbearable heat. The blast would tear through her. Through the chamber. Through the facility. Across the continent.

Half the planet... Perhaps even the solar system...... would vanish beneath its passage. The oceans would boil. Mountains would weep molten stone. The sky itself would forget it had ever been blue. Thornburgh was already there.