Chương 13: NuniT, the god of instinct

The silence in the chamber stretched thin, but within the Talons' shared neural space, a video recovered by a Syndicate deep-scout probe at the edge of recorded reality from years ago played in an instant. — An orange sky hung above a wasteland of cracked volcanic glass illuminated by five moons, each five thousand times larger than Earth. They dominated the heavens like celestial continents, filling vast stretches of the sky with their looming presence.

It was a planet beyond the reach of the known universe, buried so deep within the uncharted expanse that entire star systems passed unnoticed. Here, worlds the size of suns were considered minuscule, mere debris drifting through a reality scaled beyond comprehension. On one side stood Butter, a faded blue beanie covering her white hair, an oversized T-shirt hanging over black shorts and scuffed combat boots. Her dark prosthetic leg pulsed with a steady violet glow from thigh to ankle.

The landscape told the rest of the story. This was not the planet's natural face. Once, these plains had been fertile beyond imagination, covered in forests, oceans, and ecosystems that had thrived for ages untold. The black glass stretching to every horizon was the scar left behind by war. Sun-bleached skeletons littered that glass in broken poses of defeat. Crushed skulls, shattered ribcages, rusted weapons, melted rifles, twisted energy blades, and scorched banners stretched to the horizon.

Entire armies had come here to kill a god and ended up as scenery. The only sounds were boots crunching over bone dust, the rhythmic hum of Butter's prosthetic, and wind rattling through hollow skeletons. Opposite her stood NuniT. Seven feet of predatory elegance and impossible skill. Storm-gray skin stretched over granite muscle. Four arms ended in claws of fractured darkness that shimmered with contained velocity. Wild gray hair drifted like smoke around feline orange eyes and exposed fangs.

Behind him, a powerful tiger tail lashed through the air with a rhythm that seemed to dissect time itself. He wore only loose black trousers. He never assumed a stance because he existed in all stances simultaneously. Every martial art, every battlefield lesson, every killing technique humanity and a thousand other civilizations had ever discovered had been refined into pure instinct. Violence was not something NuniT practiced. It was what he was.

He had crossed worlds for longer than most civilizations remembered their own histories. Entire species had vanished beneath his claws. Cities, nations, planets, and bloodlines had ended because they failed to entertain him. When a world proved too weak, he broke it. When a civilization produced no worthy opponents, he exterminated it and moved on. Solar systems had burned in his wake. Fleets had shattered around him like glass.

He leapt from galaxy to galaxy in search of stronger prey, leaving extinction events behind as casually as footprints. Children. Elders. Warriors. It made no difference. If it lived, it was a potential challenge. If it failed, it died. The scale of the slaughter had eventually become impossible to ignore. Somewhere beyond ordinary reality, even Lucien had taken notice.

NuniT's endless pilgrimage of destruction had become so catastrophic that he had personally intervened, dropping Butter into this wasteland with a single purpose: Stop him. The Syndicate had been tracking NuniT for years by then. Deep-scout probes shadowed his path across galaxies, collecting fragments of data whenever they could survive long enough to transmit it. Every battle, every extinction, every impossible feat had been archived and analyzed.

The footage the Talons were watching now had been recovered after the fact, pieced together from shattered probes and surviving sensor ghosts. Even so, much of it remained beyond explanation. Because NuniT was not merely a warrior. He was what happened when the pursuit of combat consumed everything else. A god of instinct. A predator so absolute that entire civilizations had become little more than entries in his kill count. The scout probe recorded physics coming apart around him.

Claws sliced air with a vacuum-tearing SHIIING. His tail cracked through spaces Butter had not yet entered. A deep, resonant hum accompanied movements that seemed to ignore inertia entirely. His combat was flawless logic. Pressure-point strikes landed in empty air and detonated a second later. Tiny shifts in his shoulders destabilized footing before contact occurred. His four arms attacked on separate timelines: one for the present, one for the dodge, one for the retreat, one for the space behind the target.

A complete equation of death solved before the fight even began. Yet neither moved. The wasteland fell silent beneath the light of five moons.... NuniT regarded her with unblinking orange eyes. His tail swayed once behind him.

"Thou standest before me without trembling," he said, his voice carrying across the glass plain like distant thunder. It was a predator's voice, the tone of something deciding whether its prey might prove entertaining. Sharp fangs flashed as a slow smile spread across his face.

"Tell me, little warrior. Art thou worthy?" Butter rested Harmony across her shoulders.

"I'm not really sure that's the question I'd ask after slaughtering half the universe." One of his ears twitched.

"You speak of the civilizations."

"I speak of the civilizations, the planets, the solar systems, the people minding their own business. You know. The usual."

"I remember them not." The answer landed with more weight than a threat. Butter's frown deepened.

"That's horrible." NuniT spread his four arms slightly.

"The weak perish. The strong endure. Such is the oldest law."

"No," Butter replied softly.

"That's just the law you like." Something resembling interest flickered in his eyes.

"Then wilt thou attempt to stop me?" Butter glanced toward the horizon littered with the bones of challengers. Then she looked back at him.

"I pray I can." The God of Instinct smiled. It was the smile of something that had forgotten there were alternatives.

"I reject thy prayer." The moons seemed dimmer. NuniT's presence pressed outward like a living catastrophe.

"I am the only god present." Silence followed. Then Butter sighed.

"Good thing you're not my God then. Dork." Harmony spun into her hands. The dark nunchaku flowed through her grip like an extension of thought, yet there were moments it seemed less like a weapon and more like a willing accomplice. It twisted through impossible angles, changing trajectories before conscious intent could fully form, circling her body with eerie, playful intelligence. At times it felt as though Harmony already knew where it needed to be and was merely allowing Butter to come along for the ride.

At the same time, Gloom blazed around her in soft waves of radiance. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. The wasteland darkened. Reality loosened. NuniT's perfect calculations began to fray at the edges. Certain strikes became possibilities. Guaranteed outcomes became suggestions. The claws that should have landed now occupied branching futures instead of fixed ones. Fatal trajectories dissolved into probabilities.

The absolute certainty of his instinct found itself forced to negotiate with a world that no longer agreed on what had to happen. Butter never challenged his technique directly. She rewrote it. Harmony blurred in dark arcs, deflecting only what could not be avoided while Gloom quietly transformed inevitability into chance. The God of Instinct solved combat like an equation. Butter altered the mathematics. The Talons quickly noticed something else. Butter refused prolonged contact.

NuniT's claws cut the space the objects occupied. Every swing left thin vacuums hanging in the air. Mountains split apart without being touched. Shockwaves failed to stop them. Energy barriers offered no resistance. The probe recorded reality itself separating along the path of each strike. Anything occupying that region simply came apart. Butter kept her distance. A slash swept across the plain. She sprang backward.

The fracture raced onward, splitting mountain ranges for thousands of miles before finally dissipating. Another followed. Butter zipped away again, pink eyes wide and locked onto his hands. Whenever he closed the distance, her prosthetic intercepted. CRACK. A claw that carved vacuums through reality struck the dark alloy and bounced away. CRACK. Another met the prosthetic's shin and deflected harmlessly aside. The discrepancy baffled the probe. NuniT's attacks ignored conventional durability. They ignored defenses.

They ignored shields. Yet the prosthetic obeyed none of the rules being violated around it. The claws cut reality. The prosthetic disagreed. NuniT stared at her. Then he stomped. BOOM. The volcanic glass plain ruptured. Entire slabs of black earth exploded upward, some the size of mountains. Before the debris had even reached its apex, the space NuniT occupied emptied. He appeared atop a tumbling slab of stone as though it were a perfectly stationary platform. Then another. Then another. Impossible speed.

He ascended through the raining debris with leisurely ease, four arms folded behind his back, his tiger tail swaying lazily as shattered mountains drifted around him. The floating rubble seemed frozen compared to his movement. High above the battlefield, beneath the light of four moons, his orange eyes settled on Butter.

"Canst thou keep pace, little warrior?" His voice rolled across the wasteland.

"Or shall thy fragile form rend itself asunder in the attempt?" Another step. Another impossible leap. The debris field became a staircase only he could perceive.

"I would have thee endure for a while yet." A smile revealed his fangs.

"Thou art the first amusement I have encountered in many ages." His eyes narrowed.

"It would disappoint me greatly if thou wert to perish before I had finished enjoying thee." Butter's jaw tightened. Scout telemetry updated. Accessible Capacity: 25%. Remaining Reserve: 23. 7%. Reality Compliance: Stable. A faint tremor ran through her shoulders as violet light pulsed along her prosthetic and soft waves of Gloom radiated from her skin. The glow brightened, then dimmed, then brightened again, each pulse a little sharper than the last. NuniT watched. His grin widened.

Butter's fingers slowly tightened around Harmony. A muscle jumped in her cheek. The God of Instinct had seen it. Every time he accelerated, her expression hardened a fraction more. Every impossible change of direction drew another pulse from the Gloom surrounding her. Every exchange left the light around her body burning brighter. Costlier. Her breathing remained steady, but her eyes gave her away. They never left him for a single instant. Focused. Searching for an ending. NuniT's smile sharpened. She knew.

His speed wasn't measured by distance crossed per second. It was measured by how little time reality had to react to his decisions. Her body was being pushed beyond its limits, held together by sheer stubbornness and the Gloom's interference. Yet when his orange eyes met hers, Butter only lowered her stance. Harmony settled into position. The frustration disappeared. What remained was resolve. A look that said she had already accepted the price. And intended to finish this before it came due. They clashed.

Her movements bordered on teleportation, slipping through microscopic gaps in his calculations. When NuniT unleashed a storm of claws, tail strikes, shockwaves, and pressure projections, Butter simply folded into the negative spaces between them. Tiny pivots, slight leans, impossible angles. The barrage passed around her as though she occupied a different version of reality. She slipped through the gaps between certainties themselves. A redirected claw collided with a tail strike.

Kinetic force looped back into itself. NuniT's own power turned against him. It was motion spoken in a language his instincts had never encountered. He was the God of Instinct. She was the silence after the final note, the part of the song that could never be predicted. Yet even that description failed to capture the reality of the exchange. NuniT wasn't merely attacking from different directions. He was attacking from different moments. One arm struck where she was now. Another where she would be.

A third where she had already been. The fourth threaded between them all, exploiting the transitions. Claws arrived seconds before they were thrown. Others landed moments after they should have missed. Cause and effect tangled around him as instinct solved combat across multiple points in time simultaneously. Butter answered with Gloom. The radiance curled around her body in soft waves, quietly persuading reality that the normal flow of time was a suggestion rather than a law.

A strike that landed too early found her not there yet. One that arrived too late discovered she had never left. She twisted, blocked, and slipped through attacks that should have been impossible to evade, threading herself between contradictory moments as Gloom negotiated on her behalf. Even so, the Talons' analysis was unanimous. Without Gloom, Butter would have died within the opening seconds of the battle. The God of Instinct wasn't being matched. He was being argued with.

Then came the climax, a moment of transcendent impossibility. NuniT pounced. The space he occupied emptied. He ricocheted through thin air as though the atmosphere itself were a battlefield, changing direction without warning, without leverage, without any visible source of momentum. Pure predatory agility elevated into absurdity. Butter flipped backward, boots skidding across shattered volcanic glass as she fought to maintain distance. NuniT stopped. More than a hundred meters away. Four arms blurred.

His claws carved quick, casual motions through empty air. Nothing happened. The scout probe zoomed in on Butter's face. Confusion. Then realization. Her pink eyes widened. She launched skyward. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. The air detonated where she had been standing. Invisible impacts erupted at the exact locations her heart, spine, throat, skull, and lungs had occupied a fraction of a second earlier.

The volcanic glass plain collapsed inward beneath the barrage, punched apart by attacks that had crossed a hundred meters without warning, projectile, energy signature, or observable travel time. Talon analysis concluded that only precognitive warnings had saved her. No detectable attack vector existed prior to impact. Butter was still airborne when NuniT's tail moved. It elongated. The appendage shot across the battlefield like a living spear, crossing impossible distance before wrapping around her ankle.

NuniT yanked. Butter vanished from the frame. A distant mountain exploded. The probe immediately executed a spatial jump to keep pace. The recovered footage resumed just in time to catch her tearing through the mountain's interior. Stone, magma, and entire layers of bedrock erupted behind her as NuniT's tail dragged her the full length of the range. The mountain folded inward around her passage before detonating outward in a rolling chain of explosions. Butter finally burst from the far side.

NuniT flicked his tail. THWACK. The motion looked almost casual. Butter crossed the horizon before the crack of the impact could fully form. A white streak carved across the wasteland as shockwaves chased her path. Mountain peaks collapsed seconds later beneath the wake she left behind. NuniT released the tail. Harmony moved first. Butter's arm snapped outward mid-flight. The nunchaku's chain stretched instantly, crossing impossible distance before spearing into the volcanic glass plain with a metallic SHRIEK.

The chain pulled taut. Her trajectory bent. The wasteland groaned as Harmony carved a trench thousands of miles long through the landscape. Then she came back. The air above NuniT distorted. Butter collapsed the distance in a heartbeat, rolling through the air in a tight spin before touching down lightly atop a drifting slab of shattered stone. Dust swirled around her boots. Butter adjusted her grip on Harmony. NuniT smiled.

"Excellent." Reserve: 21. 6%. NuniT, fury condensed into a cold, focused nova, unleashed his ultimate technique. His form multiplied into causal echoes, four versions of himself striking from different angles and converging on the same Yoctosecond. Every dodge led into a strike. Every block opened another line of attack. The air crystallized and screamed. But that was only the setup. From each echo, NuniT's arms blurred into reality itself.

His fists moved with contempt for physics, punching holes through local causality. Where they stopped, the world rippled with revocation. Shimmering silver waves erupted outward. They denied existence. Air collapsed into trails of vacuum. The glass-black ground dissolved into smooth, depthless scars. A lattice of erasure expanded through the battlefield, sealing every avenue of escape. Matter, spirit, and existence itself were the targets. It was an ultimatum.

Touch a wave and your molecular bonds, your metaphysical anchor, the very permission allowing you to exist, would be severed. Butter stood at the center. She stepped through. Defying sequential time, she occupied every fatal angle at once, a blur of overlapping possibilities. She ignored the echoes entirely, moving instead through the flaws connecting them. One silver wave swept toward her shoulder. Harmony cracked outward. The nunchaku struck the edge of the erasure field with a sharp TOK. The impossible happened.

The wave changed direction. Instead of consuming the battlefield, it ricocheted skyward. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then one of the five moons flickered out. No dramatic fracture. No explosion. The celestial body simply ceased to be, a perfect circular absence replacing its place in the heavens. Silence followed. Even NuniT's echoes faltered. Butter stared at the empty patch of sky. The color drained from her face. Her grip tightened around Harmony. Every trace of levity burned away.

NuniT watched her with ancient orange eyes. Then he smiled. A slow, predatory thing.

"I smell it." Butter's gaze snapped back to him.

"Your fear." The words rolled across the wasteland like distant thunder.

"I wondered if such a thing dwelled within thee." Butter said nothing. The remaining four moons cast pale light across the glass plain, reflecting in her pink eyes. NuniT's tail lashed once.

"The scent is sweet."

"I'm not afraid for me," Butter replied quietly.

"If that attack can erase a moon by accident, then there are worlds that wouldn't survive you sneezing." The God of Instinct regarded her for a long moment.

"Worlds are fragile." His orange eyes narrowed.

"Yet thou remainest." Butter glanced once toward the empty space where a moon had existed moments earlier. When she looked back, her expression had hardened into something sharp enough to cut.

"Yeah. I'm terrified." NuniT's smile widened.

"At last." Butter lowered her stance.

"But fear's not the same thing as surrender." The wasteland darkened. The God of Instinct's eyes brightened.