Chương 14: Glissando

Far above, moonlight shifted as the remaining four moons adjusted their pale illumination across the wasteland. NuniT moved without transition, his claws already ripping through the space where Butter's throat had been. Every motion carried the unsettling impression that he had already completed it and the universe was only catching up. Butter exploded into motion, and the battlefield became violence.

Elbows, knees, shin strikes, palm strikes, and evasions measured in millimeters blurred together as NuniT's claws carved through the air with enough force to leave scars stretching across the landscape. Vacuum trails followed every swing. Mountains collapsed from near misses. The volcanic plain shattered beneath pressure waves generated by attacks that never even connected. Butter flowed through it all. A knee strike slipped between four claws. An elbow snapped toward his jaw.

A spinning shin strike cracked through the air while Harmony whipped through impossible arcs, redirecting attacks that could have torn planets apart. Then NuniT landed a hit. His tail cracked across the battlefield faster than thought. Butter dropped her prosthetic into its path. CRACK. The impact detonated like a supernova. The dark alloy leg screamed as violet light erupted from every seam, and Butter hurtled sideways through thirty mountain ranges before she could stabilize. The scout probe followed.

Mountain after mountain exploded around her. Continents of stone folded and shattered as she tore through them at relativistic speeds. The Talons watched the footage in silence. They knew Butter was durable. They also knew she wasn't that durable. No biological structure should have survived being launched across such distances at those velocities. The impacts alone should have reduced her to expanding plasma. The probe zoomed in. Understanding followed immediately. Gloom. She was burning it continuously.

Reality bent around her tumbling form. Instead of colliding with mountains, the mountains appeared to deform around her. Stone compressed and stretched like wet clay. Entire ridgelines squished inward as she passed through them, folding around her body before exploding outward in her wake. It looked less like a woman crashing through terrain and more like terrain reluctantly making room for a woman. The Talons' analysis updated in real time.

Gloom was actively renegotiating the impacts, convincing reality that Butter wasn't being hurled through mountain ranges at relativistic speeds. She was being thrown through jelly. The deception wasn't perfect. Every collision still consumed vast quantities of power. Light flickered violently around her body with each impact, and telemetry showed her reserves dropping. Even so, it was enough.

The environment absorbed what should have killed her, squishing around her form instead of striking it head-on as she continued tearing across the wasteland. Her tumbling abruptly stopped. She seized in midair, hung motionless for a fraction of a second, then spun downward into a controlled dive as though she had only just realized the same trick worked on inertia. Momentum abandoned its argument and let her fall.

She corkscrewed toward the battlefield in a blur looking almost offended she hadn't thought of it sooner. Reserve: 18. 6% Butter's boots touched down atop a hill of fractured skulls before she launched again. NuniT was already there. They crashed together once more. Butter erupted into a barrage of flying knees. NuniT twisted aside with effortless precision, slipping between impacts by margins too small for ordinary perception. A claw flashed toward her throat. Butter ducked beneath it midair.

Another hand lunged for her shoulder. Her prosthetic leg snapped upward. The grasping arm was knocked aside. Harmony whipped around and connected with NuniT's face. Tok. No reaction. The probe noticed it immediately. Every other attack NuniT anticipated. Every punch, kick, feint, and shift in weight was foreseen before it happened. Yet Harmony continued to land. Talon analysis suggested a simple reason. Harmony did no immediate damage. It registered as harmless. NuniT's instincts filtered it out.

The nunchaku slipped through gaps that would never have existed for a genuine threat. Butter pressed the advantage. Wing Chun chain punches exploded from her guard. A torrent of fists. NuniT flowed through them with infuriating ease, weaving between strikes before backflipping away. Harmony's chain suddenly extended. The weapon twisted through the air like a living serpent and wrapped around his torso, securing him in place. NuniT's eyes narrowed. He pulled once. The chain tightened.

One of his lower arms seized the links and wrenched with enough force to split continents. The silver chain merely constricted further, drawing tighter across his chest and shoulders. There was no strain in it. Nothing to overpower. Because Harmony was not truly a physical object. It existed because Gloom decided it did. NuniT's grip tightened. Muscles swelled. The wasteland trembled beneath the force he exerted. The chain only cinched tighter. Irritation flickered across his face. Butter launched upward.

Both feet came together. A double stomp descended toward his chest, enough force behind it to drive him through the planet. NuniT flickered out of existence. Butter overshot. Gloom softened her landing, reality briefly forgetting how hard she should have struck the ground. She touched down lightly and immediately began searching for him. Then the air detonated. No hostile intent. A hidden strike landed directly against a pressure point along her spine. Harmony slipped from her grip.

The dark nunchaku tumbled end over end through the air, its chain rattling softly as it fell. Butter seized. The Talons understood why. It wasn't a true pressure-point strike. NuniT's previous attacks had been genuine kill techniques, carrying enough intent and consequence for her senses to flag them. This was different. A pseudo-strike. A deliberately incomplete disruption designed to lock the nervous system for only the briefest instant before releasing it. Harmless by itself. Temporary.

Beneath the threshold her warning systems considered a true threat. Which was exactly why it worked. The paralysis would last less than a heartbeat. The problem was that against NuniT, less than a heartbeat was an eternity. A clawed hand hooked her ankle. A sweep followed, and Butter lost her footing. Time stretched. A single grain of black glass drifted through the air between them. Butter was still mid-air from the sweep, body horizontal, white hair floating weightlessly around her face.

NuniT stood beneath her, four arms poised, orange eyes fixed on hers.

"You are subjugated," he said. The words seemed to linger between heartbeats.

"You are bound to abide." His palms drew back.

"I am incorporated immune by design." The pseudo-paralysis faded. Sensation surged back into Butter's arms. Her forearms snapped up on pure instinct. Butter blinked.

"I don't give a cow's tits." Both palms struck her crossed guard. Butter flooded her forearms with Gloom a fraction of a second before impact. Layer upon layer of impossible reinforcement stacked across her arms. THOOOOOM. A hundred thousand miles of wasteland ceased to resemble geography and became a scar carved through reality by raw kinetic violence. Mountains disintegrated. Volcanic glass liquefied. The horizon folded inward beneath expanding rings of force.

"NGH-!" Butter grunted as the force blasted through her defense. She became a streak of white, tumbling through shattered peaks and carving canyons through mountains that exploded around her like brittle sculptures. Entire ranges collapsed in her wake. Stone vaporized. Rivers became clouds. Gloom flared for a single microsecond, desperately renegotiating her inertia. Reality softened around her, turning what should have been a fatal collision into something survivable. Even so, it was almost too late.

The force had accelerated her beyond a million times the speed of light. On an ordinary world, gravity would have ceased to matter almost instantly. She would have punched straight through the atmosphere and vanished into interstellar darkness before the planet could meaningfully pull on her trajectory. She had already crossed enough distance to be launched clean through the planet and into the abyss beyond before the Gloom could fully intervene. The planet was so vast that there was still planet left to cross.

Only that last-second adjustment kept her skimming through the world instead of being shot into deep space like a living meteor. The scout probe couldn't follow them conventionally anymore. Distances ceased to matter. Every few moments it executed a spatial jump, reacquiring the combatants wherever the battle had erupted next. Gloom fought to bleed away momentum as mountain ranges, continents, and entire horizons rushed past beneath her. Then she stopped. Midair. Reserve: 15. 1% The world blurred.

Then the space she occupied emptied. A heartbeat later she emerged high above the battlefield. Her teeth clenched hard enough to crack. Face scrunched in rage. The violet glow of her prosthetic deepened into something furious. She rotated once. Twice. Three times. Momentum gathered with every revolution. The spinning kick descended, igniting the atmosphere around her leg. Entire weather systems twisted into a spiral behind the strike as the world screamed beneath the force of it.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. And NuniT was already waiting. Feet planted. His tiger tail lashed behind him with a crack that split distant mountains. Four arms spread, orange eyes unblinking as the God of Instinct met her on the ground beneath the light of four moons. Butter's spinning kick struck first. The attack crossed the distance in exactly zero seconds. No interval between initiation and impact.

The prosthetic simply flickered from one position to the next. Yet NuniT had already blocked. Comfortably. Without urgency. His instincts had warned him before the kick existed. His body had moved at the same impossible speed. More disturbingly, analysis suggested part of his guard had been positioned before Butter committed to the attack at all. He had options. Multiple counters. Multiple evasions. Multiple killing blows. The God of Instinct was completely confident.

NuniT crossed all four arms and caught the prosthetic against his guard. The collision was inevitable. KRAK - BOOOOM. The world ended. The impact caved the planet inward. A crater the size of a moon exploded outward beneath them, widening until it stretched beyond the horizon. Mountains liquefied. Oceans fled their basins. Fault lines split open like wounds across the planet's crust. And NuniT's arms shattered. All four.

Bone, muscle, and divine anatomy burst apart beneath the violet-black strike, fragments scattering across the sky like meteors. No blood followed. Liquid starlight poured from the wounds instead, luminous essence scattering across the wasteland in glittering streams as pieces of a god fell to the ground. His confidence disappeared. For the first time, Butter saw genuine surprise flicker across his face. NuniT stared at the ruined stumps where his arms had been. Then he laughed. A deep, delighted sound.

"At last." Orange eyes locked onto hers.

"A warrior worthy of remembrance." Fresh muscle was already knitting across the wounds. His smile widened, exposing rows of sharp fangs.

"Thou hast earned my full attention, little warrior." The praise felt far too close to a threat.

"Take pride in that." His eyes narrowed.

"For I shall no longer hesitate to kill thee." Then NuniT roared. WHOOOOM. The sound struck first. Butter felt the Gloom ripped from her body in ragged streams as the shockwave washed over her. Violet radiance peeled away from her skin and scattered across the battlefield like torn ribbons. The probe's sensors screamed. This wasn't merely sound. Space buckled. Time rippled. The atmosphere fractured into expanding rings of distortion. Reality itself shuddered beneath the force carried within the roar. NuniT moved.

A claw descended toward her neck. The Gloom immediately surged back toward its owner, racing through the air in luminous currents. Butter's prosthetic leg inserted itself into the attacker's path. NuniT caught it. One arm committed. The other three continued toward Butter. The probe slowed the recording. Butter's face had gone paler. She knew exactly how expensive the next move would be. Her body rotated. A fist swung through empty air. Nothing happened. Everything happened. KRAAAAAAAAA - BOOOOOM.

The shockwave struck NuniT like a newborn cosmos exploding into existence. His feet left the ground. Mountains disappeared. Continents folded inward. The God of Instinct was hurled backward through the wasteland as expanding rings of force devoured everything in their path. Butter landed. Hard. One knee hit the ground.

"HAAAH... HAAAH..." Her arm smoked. Blood poured from ruptured flesh. Cracks raced through muscle and bone. Then the damage healed. The probe rewound the footage. Frame by frame. Analysis revealed the truth. Butter had not thrown a single punch. She had thrown a thousand. Every strike had occupied the same instant. Every shockwave had been compressed into one release. The resulting force was so catastrophically large that conventional models predicted immediate galactic annihilation.

NuniT should have been vaporized. The world should have been vaporized. Butter should have been vaporized. Gloom had prevented all three. Vast quantities of power had been burned stabilizing the output, persuading reality not to collapse beneath the attack's existence. The cost was immediate. Light flickered weakly around her body. Reserve levels plunged. And Butter remained kneeling in the ruins, gasping for breath as the consequences finally arrived. Each ragged breath scraped through her lungs.

Her arm trembled violently, smoke curling from the healing flesh as the delayed recoil continued to work through her body. Harmony's chain sagged against the fractured ground. Above her palm, the invisible rhythm of Crescendo unraveled. One by one, the stored strikes bled away into nothing, the technique resetting after several long seconds. Only then did Butter finally manage a full breath.... The probe searched for NuniT. At first it found nothing. Continents no longer occupied their previous coordinates.

The landscape itself had been rewritten by the exchange. Then it found him. Thousands of miles away. Standing. Impossibly. Orange eyes fixed on Butter across the wasteland. A grin spread slowly across his face. CLAP. The sound never arrived. The force did. FWOOOOOM. The air between his palms winked out. Landscapes on both sides of him disintegrated into expanding corridors of ruin, colossal trenches carved through the world as though invisible giants had dragged their fingers across the planet.

Then the shockwave reached Butter. From both sides. Simultaneously. The pressure converged on her body, leaving nowhere to dodge and nowhere to redirect. Butter's eyes widened. She was still on one knee. Still recovering. Her body launched backward through the ruins before the echoes of her own attack had fully faded. She released Gloom at the last possible instant. Reality bent. The attack should have erased her entirely. Instead, the Gloom negotiated. The force remained. The consequence changed.

Rather than annihilation, her nervous system simply stopped. Every muscle locked. Every signal died. Paralysis.

"Gah-!" The twin shockwaves crushed together around her, trapping her within impossible pressure. Her body refused to move. Everything except the prosthetic. The dark limb hummed. Unaffected. Butter's pink eyes locked onto NuniT. His fist snapped forward. SHIIING. A silver wave erupted from the punch. The same impossible revocation that had erased a moon. Air collapsed into vacuum.

The battlefield split apart beneath its advance as the wave raced toward her, carrying the denial of matter, spirit, and existence itself. The silver edge closed in. Then she spoke.

"Fermata." The word drifted across the battlefield like the final note of a song. Reality stuttered. The God of Instinct felt it immediately. The certainty of his movement was delayed. The universe suddenly hesitated to let him proceed. Every action encountered a moment of suspended possibility, as though reality itself needed an extra heartbeat to decide whether he was allowed to continue. His ears flattened. Orange eyes widened a fraction. Even the silver wave faltered.

Its advance slowed into hesitation, the erasure hanging in front of her like a paused note waiting for permission to continue. The pause lasted less than an instant. For Butter, it was enough. She threw her weight onto the prosthetic. The dark limb flared violet. The prosthetic fired. THOOM. Like a cannon. Butter launched herself headfirst across the battlefield. NuniT's eyes narrowed. The lingering effect of Fermata held him in that infinitesimal hesitation, a frozen beat in the cosmic rhythm.

A single stolen note. And Butter spent it. CRASH - KRAK. Her forehead struck the center of his chest. The impact folded the air inward, and NuniT shot backward across the wasteland, carving a canyon through mountains as his feet gouged trenches hundreds of miles long. Entire peaks burst apart behind him with rolling BOOM-BOOM-BOOMS. Butter hit the ground moments later. She bounced once, then collapsed onto her back hard enough to crater the landscape beneath her. Nothing moved. Her arms lay limp.

Her legs refused commands. Even breathing felt optional. Then she stuck out her tongue. Using tiny, precise movements, she touched specific points inside her mouth, hidden pressure nodes and neural pathways learned through a lifetime of impossible combat. One point. Two. Three. Electric agony shot through her spine. ZZZT. Four. Five. Six. A twitch returned to her fingers. Her arm jerked. Seven. Feeling flooded back into her legs. Butter sat upright with a sharp gasp.

"There we go." She paused, tested her limbs, rolled one shoulder, then frowned. — Far in the distance, NuniT was already standing back up. His silhouette rose from a mountain range he had been driven through, dust and debris cascading from his shoulders as he stood unharmed. Reserve: 13. 2% Harmony snapped back into her hand from half a continent away, crossing the distance in a dark blur before the last echoes of the battle had even faded.

Butter closed the distance in a blur, boots skidding across black glass as Harmony whirled through dark arcs. NuniT moved at the same instant.

"RAAAAGH!"

"HYAAAH!" BOOM. Claws and nunchaku collided, shockwaves tearing across the wasteland. Glass plains shattered. Skeletons and ancient weapons vanished into expanding walls of debris. Harmony blurred through Butter's hands in dark, whirling arcs, snapping against NuniT's shoulders, ribs, jaw, and wrists. Tok-tak-tok. Strike after strike landed cleanly. He ignored every one. To the God of Instinct, they carried no immediate threat. His attention remained fixed on the attacks that could actually harm him.

Butter exploited it relentlessly. While Harmony slipped through his defenses, her prosthetic leg intercepted the attacks that mattered. A claw aimed for her throat met dark alloy instead. CRACK. A tail strike capable of splitting continents slammed into her shin guard. BOOM. Another hand shot toward her ribs, only for her knee to rise and knock it off-line before it could connect. The exchange became a violent rhythm. Harmony landed unnoticed. The prosthetic absorbed what could not be avoided.

NuniT pressed forward with overwhelming precision while Butter flowed backward through the storm, feeding Crescendo one touch at a time. Butter emerged inside his true guard. The end of Harmony tapped NuniT's brow with quiet finality, the period at the end of a sentence he hadn't realized was being written. Crescendo had been active. Every strike had been stored. Nothing wasted. Each impact doubled the force of the last. Touch 1: 1x Touch 2: 2x Touch 3: 4x...

Touch 19: 262, 144x Touch 20: 524, 288x Touch 21: 1, 048, 576×... Touch 25: 16, 777, 216× Touch 26: 33, 554, 432× Touch 27: 67, 108, 864×... The twenty-seventh touch was that feather-light tap against his brow. Butter flowed backward twenty meters, landing in a crouch as the glass plain held its breath.

"Resound." Harmony obeyed. The stored force collapsed inward and returned all at once. What began as a whisper became an avalanche focused through a point smaller than a fingertip. SHUNK-WHAM! Reality split around the impact. A starburst of force erupted from NuniT's skull. Spectral fur ignited. Shattered claws became meteor showers. Storm-gray flesh and golden sparks fanned across the wasteland as enough energy to devastate continents detonated through a space no larger than a coin.

The Talons' calculations struggled to reconcile the result. Twenty-seven strikes of Crescendo had compounded into roughly 228 million gigatons of force, enough energy to shove a dwarf planet through space if released conventionally. Instead, it detonated inside him. From the inside out. He should have become vapor. Mist. A fading memory scattered across the wasteland. NuniT's existence simply refused.

His form was so absurdly durable, so catastrophically beyond anything the probes had recorded, that the impossible force merely mutilated him. Half his body vanished. Flesh, bone, and divine anatomy erupted outward in incandescent ruin, yet enough of him remained to continue existing. NuniT toppled sideways, convulsing as he crashed into the glass plain. Butter remained still, hair whipping in the blast wind, Harmony hanging loose in her hand. There was no triumph in her glowing pink eyes, only acknowledgment.

The God of Instinct lay broken amid the shattered wasteland. Half his body was gone. Entire sections of him had been erased by Harmony's arithmetic violence. Yet his orange eyes still burned. Thick streams of silver-gold blood spilled across the glass plain, glowing like molten starlight as they spread through shattered craters and fractured stone.

Chunks of ruined flesh twitched among the debris while luminous droplets drifted upward against gravity, drawn toward the broken remains of his body as regeneration struggled to reclaim them. A wet laugh rumbled from his ruined chest.

"Magnificent." Blood spilled from his mouth.

"Truly magnificent." Butter's expression remained unreadable. NuniT pushed himself up on trembling limbs. His gaze fixed upon her.

"I understand now." The remaining moons cast pale light across his ruined frame.

"Had I survived this day, little warrior, I would have sought thee again." Butter said nothing.

"Across worlds." The smile that split his face was terrible.

"Across ages." His claws dug into the glass plain.

"I would have followed the scent of thy strength to the birthplace that forged thee." Something flickered behind Butter's eyes. NuniT saw it. And smiled wider.

"I would have slaughtered them all." The wind died.

"Every teacher. Every friend. Every child. Every living thing that shared thy sky." His voice softened into something almost reverent.

"I would have left thee alone at the end of eternity, so that thou might finally understand loss." Wind swept across the wasteland. It rattled through billions of sun-bleached skeletons. The remains of civilizations NuniT had deemed unworthy. The wasteland held its breath. For several seconds, Butter simply stared at him. Then she slowly raised her free hand. The lights in her prosthetic leg flickered violently between violet and red, the limb humming louder with each pulse as though arguing with itself. Violet.

Red. Violet. Red. Butter drew a slow breath through clenched teeth.

"Easy," she muttered. Her fingers spread, and a small sphere appeared above her palm. Candy-bright colors swirled within it. Red bled into blue. Blue slipped into yellow. Yellow folded into white, spiraling faster and faster until the orb resembled a miniature star made from melted confectionery and impossible physics. Sugar-sweet light leaked between her fingers. The air around it warped and sang.

The sphere swelled from marble-sized to baseball-sized, then larger still, its colors spinning so quickly they became impossible to track. Butter's arm trembled. The red flashes in her prosthetic became more frequent.

"Don't," she whispered, whether to herself or the orb was impossible to tell. NuniT watched the growing light. For the first time since the battle began, he looked genuinely pleased.

"Ah. Now I see it." The orb screamed. The colors slid across a continuous spectrum, every shade existing for only a fraction of a heartbeat before becoming the next. NuniT laughed again.

"You fear thyself more than thou fearest me." Butter's jaw tightened.

"Yes." The answer was immediate. Honest. The God of Instinct nodded once. Then his smile returned.

"Good." The sphere howled. The ground beneath Butter's feet began to melt.

"Glissando." The word left her lips like a prayer and an execution in the same breath. The orb erupted. SKRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMM! A beam of impossible color detonated from her palm, red, blue, yellow, and white braided together into a single ribbon of annihilation. It crossed the distance instantly and swallowed NuniT whole. Every atom touched by the beam simply ceased to exist. The God of Instinct was removed.

The beam continued beyond him, carving a perfectly smooth corridor through the wasteland before punching into the distant horizon and disappearing into the night sky. Silence followed. Reserve: 10% Butter lowered her hand. The orb was gone. The red glow in her prosthetic flickered one final time before settling back into its familiar violet pulse. The Talons' HUD summarized the encounter in a single line: You are not fighting a warrior. You are facing the perfected answer to: "Can violence be perfected?"

The Talons' shared neural space was silent. Neither needed to voice the conclusion their processors had already reached.