Chương 15: The Crescendo Curse

ACT II: THE MOUNTAIN'S HEART Before the dust settled, the plain vomited. Butter was already halfway through a large bag of potato chips. Harmony hung out of her pocket while her hand disappeared into the bag, emerging with another generous handful. She crunched absentmindedly, eyes fixed on the smoking crater where NuniT had fallen.

"Oh my." She swallowed, rolled one shoulder, then the other. A satisfying chain of pops ran down her back as she stretched, raising both arms overhead before leaning from side to side.

"Much better." Another handful of chips found its way into her mouth. She tucked the bag beneath one arm, clasped her hands behind her head, and stretched each leg in turn. Satisfied, she bounced lightly on the balls of her feet before casually breaking into jumping jacks. She reached into the bag between repetitions without missing a beat, tossing another handful of chips into her mouth before continuing as though post-apocalyptic calisthenics were a perfectly ordinary part of her day.

By the time the dust finally settled around the crater, Butter had finished nearly half the bag and looked considerably more refreshed than anyone who had just fought a god had any right to. Then the ground exploded. A continent-sized plate of volcanic glass buckled and erupted as a colossal white yeti clawed its way into the world. Four stories tall, fur matted with ice and permafrost, ram horns of pitted stone curling from its skull, black void eyes fixing on Butter and her fallen master.

The scout probe immediately zoomed in, feeding magnified imagery through every available sensor. Dense musculature. Ancient scar tissue. Biological structures that refused classification. The thing looked less like a naturally evolved creature and more like a weapon that had learned how to breathe. A subsonic hum rolled from the creature's throat. Butter staggered back a step.

"... Woah." The entire bag found its way into her mouth. Crunch. Crunch. Empty. Butter folded the wrapper once, opened a tiny tear in space with her thumb, and flicked it through. No littering. Had NuniT kept it as a pet? A familiar? A hunting companion? The thought alone was unsettling. The God of Instinct had crossed galaxies exterminating civilizations for longer than most species remembered their own histories. What kind of monster would follow something like that?

One arm plunged into a mountainside and tore free a skyscraper-sized slab of stone. It hurled it. The megaton projectile crossed the battlefield like a localized extinction event, trailing superheated air and screaming atmosphere. Butter planted her feet. Harmony slipped from her hand and clattered across the volcanic glass. Her fists blurred. THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD. A dozen punches landed in the space of an instant. The air collapsed beneath the barrage. WHAAAAAAAAAMMM- CRUNCH!

The resulting shockwave hit the incoming slab before Butter's fists ever touched it. The skyscraper-sized projectile detonated into a cone of pulverized stone, molten debris, and superheated dust that rolled across the wasteland like a volcanic eruption. At the epicenter, Butter stood untouched, boots sunk ankle-deep into liquefied glass. Far across the wasteland, the yeti stood motionless. Butter looked up. The giant looked back. For a heartbeat, neither moved. Then the space it occupied emptied.

Butter's eyes widened. Something that large had no business accelerating that fast. THOOOOOM. The kick arrived. The strike launched her over the horizon in a streak of fire and shattered sound. She returned before its leg finished recoiling. Distance collapsed. A violet-white blur streaked beneath the lifted leg. Harmony blurred. THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-CRACK! Ten precise strikes landed across tendons, joints, and neural clusters the size of tree trunks. Each impact sealed away another packet of destruction.

The final strike landed on its heel as the foot crashed down. Butter was already retreating. The yeti roared and unleashed a torrent of black magma and star-core fire that ripped across the landscape. Butter sprinted up the beam. Boots hissed against eradication as she climbed the torrent, reached its jaws, and launched onto its arm. Then came the helix. The scout probe zoomed in, slowing the footage as much as its systems allowed. Even then, Butter was difficult to follow.

She became a violet-white spiral racing around the giant's frame, her path wrapping the creature from ankle to shoulder in a continuous corkscrew. Harmony flickered through the blur, tapping shoulder, ribs, spine, and skull. Each touch marked another internal detonation point. The probe tracked impact after impact appearing across the yeti's body faster than it could comfortably process, as though Butter was occupying multiple positions at once.

She finished balanced between its horns, white hair whipping in the wind while the giant thrashed beneath her. Harmony hummed. Fifty strikes. The network was complete.

"Resound." The yeti unfolded. From its core outward, bone, sinew, ice, and flesh separated along perfect geometric lines. Chunks the size of cars drifted apart before gravity reclaimed them in a slow avalanche of ruin. Butter landed lightly among the falling remains, Harmony hanging loose at her side. She scanned the wasteland. In a world like this, killing a giant was usually just the opening act. ACT III: THE SWARM & THE SILENCE The mistake was in anatomy. Every fragment reconstituted midair.

One giant became five hundred. Bear-sized replicas slammed onto the volcanic plain, transforming the wasteland into a sea of white fur, stone horns, and black eyes. They attacked immediately. Hypersonic bodies blurred into afterimages as waves converged from every direction. Some charged head-on, others flanked at impossible speeds, and more dropped from above like frozen meteors. CRACK - BOOM! Entire mountains tore free and screamed across the battlefield.

Stone, claws, and bodies closed around Butter in overlapping kill zones. Butter moved before perception could catch up. To the probe, it looked as though she had simply ceased occupying that position. In reality, she was already elsewhere. A blur threaded through the swarm. One yeti. Two. Ten. Fifty. A hundred. Five hundred. They were far too slow. Before a single one could complete a blink, twenty precise strikes had landed on every creature in the swarm.

Butter reappeared where she had started, Harmony dangling in her hand.

"Resound." WHOOOOM. Five hundred bodies erupted simultaneously. White fur, bone, ice, and flesh burst into expanding clouds of destruction. The shockwave rolled across the wasteland and flattened mountain ranges. For a moment, nothing remained. Butter stood alone amid the devastation, shoulders rising and falling as she caught her breath. One second. Two. Five. Ten. Then the fur moved. Tiny white tufts scattered across the battlefield began twitching. Butter's expression fell.

"... Bruh." The hairs swelled, multiplied, and knitted themselves together. Flesh followed. Bone assembled. Horns spiraled outward. Black eyes opened. Five hundred yetis stood once more. The probe's readings spiked. Every one of them had returned improved by the experience of dying. Harmony's chain elongated again in a blink. The links lashed through the battlefield, wrapping around the entire swarm and cinching them together into a single struggling mass.

Growls and roars rolled across the wasteland as hundreds of monsters fought against restraints that only tightened the harder they struggled. Butter was already moving. She sprinted across their heads midair, her prosthetic leg blurring from skull to skull. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK. Bone collapsed. Bodies burst apart. One after another, the creatures were reduced to ruin beneath a relentless barrage of kicks. Moments later, Butter flipped free. Harmony snapped back into her palm. The remains twitched.

Then they began growing again. The probe zoomed in. Butter's expression darkened. For a brief moment, she glanced toward the sky as though expecting someone to arrive. No one did. She sighed. Then turned back toward the resurrecting yetis. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. Reserve: 7. 3% The scout footage caught something else. Butter was tired. Her shirt hung torn.

Sweat mixed with dust across her face, and the radiant flare of Gloom surrounding her visibly shrank, collapsing from the blazing inferno seen against NuniT into a tighter, controlled glow. She'd gone all out against the God of Instinct. Now she was conserving. Harmony slipped from her hand and clattered across the black glass. Butter exhaled slowly and lowered into stance. Five hundred monsters. A dwindling reserve of Gloom. The Talons noticed the shift immediately. Harmony's delayed detonations had worked.

That wasn't the issue. The issue was time. The force only arrived after the command. She wanted to try something else. Butter wanted the buildup and the payoff to be the same moment. The swarm came. She met it. The first wave hit at elevated speed. By the second exchange they were moving ten times faster. Then a hundred. Every bound, every lunge, every mile devoured across the volcanic wasteland fed their acceleration.

They grew faster simply by moving, building momentum into momentum until the battlefield became a storm of white fur and distorted air. The first thrown mountain came apart under a Bong Sau deflection, splitting cleanly down the middle and crushing several charging yetis behind it. The swarm chased anyway. Sonic booms merged into a single, continuous roar as their speed climbed higher and higher. Butter never stopped moving.

She sprinted across oceans of volcanic glass, flipped through collapsing mountain ranges, and threaded through storms of flying stone. Gloom flared brighter. Her speed climbed. The footage struggled to track her as she crossed a distance equal to ten Earths laid end-to-end in a single moment, her white hair trailing behind her like a comet. She landed atop a distant mountain ridge and glanced back over her shoulder. The yetis were still coming.

White blurs pounded across the world after her, tearing through continents, vaulting over oceans, and ripping mountains from their foundations as they accelerated. Some bounded from horizon to horizon in a single leap. Others dug claws into the planet and launched themselves forward hard enough to split the landscape apart. They hadn't fallen behind. They had kept up. Reserve: 5.

2% Butter gritted her teeth and pushed off again as the swarm flooded across the distance, black eyes locked on her, closing the gap with terrifying persistence. Molten blasts erupted from dozens of jaws, carving canyons across the landscape as she twisted between them, white hair whipping behind her. Ahead lay an ocean. Calling it an ocean felt inadequate. The body of water stretched beyond horizons, a dark blue expanse so vast Earth's seas would have looked like backyard pools beside it.

Waves the size of mountain ranges rolled beneath storm-choked skies, their crests exploding into continents of foam. Butter never slowed. Her boots touched the surface. SPLASH-SPLASH-SPLASH. She sprinted across the water, light and nimble, barely disturbing it. Each footfall kissed a wave crest before she was already on the next. She darted between walls of spray, vaulted over collapsing swells, and skimmed across the ocean like a stone refusing to sink. Behind her came the swarm.

The first yetis landed on the water with all the grace of extinction events. Waves detonated outward. Entire sections of ocean collapsed beneath their weight. The creatures staggered and sank knee-deep into the churning abyss before wrenching themselves free and continuing the pursuit through sheer stubborn brutality. Their frustration grew. Black eyes burned. Then dozens opened their jaws. FWOOOOOOOSH. Star-core heat erupted across the sea. The ocean screamed. Steam exploded skyward in planetary quantities.

Water evaporated by the cubic continent. Entire regions of the ocean flash-boiled into expanding clouds of white vapor. Within moments, the impossible expanse was gone. The seabed stretched naked beneath them, a scarred abyss of trenches and shattered stone. The yetis dropped into it without hesitation. THOOM. THOOM. THOOM. They continued running. Butter didn't falter. The splash from the ocean's death still hung in the sky. Countless droplets. She stepped onto one. Then another. And another.

She bounded upward through the falling water, treating the droplets like platforms. Flips, spins, and impossible pivots carried her higher as she danced through the rainstorm left behind by an evaporated sea. Far below, five hundred yetis thundered across the exposed seabed, heads tilted upward, tracking her every movement. Butter kicked off a droplet no larger than a pea and shot toward the horizon once more, white hair trailing behind her as the hunt continued.

A mountain a thousand times larger than Everest rose ahead, and Butter ran straight up it. A heartbeat later, one of the yetis launched itself after her, slammed into the mountainside, and unleashed a barrage of strikes so violent the entire peak came apart. Continents of stone collapsed into avalanches. The mountain ceased to exist. Butter shot from the explosion, tumbling high above the debris field as more mountains followed. The swarm hurled them like stones.

Boulders the size of cities screamed through the atmosphere. She bounced off one, vaulted from another, twisted around a third, and drove a spinning kick into a lunging yeti's temple. The creature's skull folded inward and it shot over the horizon, punching through mountain ranges as though they were made of paper. Crescendo climbed. Another reached her and ate a Wing Chun elbow. The impact detonated through its body, launching the beast across a continent.

It skipped through the crust, the space it occupied emptied beneath the horizon, and it erupted from a distant mountain chain in a plume of molten rock. Another caught a palm strike. Its chest imploded. The yeti folded around Butter's hand before blasting backward, carving a glowing trench across the planet. The footage revealed something alarming. The replicas were absurdly dense. Scans estimated tissue, bone, and muscle compressed to pressures approaching those found within planetary cores.

As they moved, their cells continued settling and compacting, packing themselves tighter and tighter. Every second made them denser, tougher, more resilient. They were rapidly approaching a level of durability where bathing in a star's surface would be an inconvenience and napping in its core would be survivable. It stopped mattering. Crescendo kept climbing.

Butter's strikes grew heavier with every exchange, her accumulating force outpacing the swarm's escalating durability until even creatures dense enough to endure stellar extremes began flying apart under her blows. Reserve: 3. 5% Every touch fed Crescendo. Every impact doubled the next. Butter's movements changed as the count rose. Early on, Gloom had reinforced every strike, every dodge, every burst of speed. Now the radiance around her was fading because she no longer needed as much of it.

A knee shattered a yeti's shoulder and sent it tumbling through three mountain ranges. A backfist spun another so violently it ignited from atmospheric friction. One beast lunged from above and Butter answered with an upward punch that launched it into orbit. The numbers kept climbing. A casual shove flattened one into the landscape. A low kick folded another in half. A flick of her prosthetic foot struck a charging yeti beneath the jaw and launched the creature beyond visual range.

The footage showed the shift clearly. The swarm was still monstrously strong, still durable enough to survive impacts that would pulverize lesser beings, but Butter's physical strikes were becoming increasingly overwhelming. With every second, Crescendo turned her body into a larger and larger catastrophe. And the ledger was still growing. She ran across continents while dismantling them one by one, always moving before they could surround her.

Behind her stretched a trail of eviscerated yetis, shattered mountains, burning canyons, and enough stored kinetic debt to flatten civilizations. Dozens descended at once. The sky disappeared behind white fur, black eyes, and stone horns as the swarm converged from every direction. Some charged across the ground. Others launched themselves from shattered mountain peaks. Butter's pink eyes tracked hundreds of trajectories simultaneously. By now, the swarm's acceleration had reached absurd levels.

Every leap fed the next. Every movement compounded their momentum. They had long since surpassed relativistic speeds and kept climbing. The footage's predictive systems began failing outright as the creatures reached velocities that made light itself look crippled by comparison. White streaks carved across reality. Continents flashed beneath their feet. Oceans became blue smears. Mountains ceased being obstacles and became brief impacts in their paths. And they were all closing on Butter. Simultaneously.

Reserve: 2. 7% The first yeti lunged. She slipped sideways by inches, a claw the size of a truck shredding the air where her head had been. Butter pivoted beneath its arm, planted a hand on its elbow, cartwheeled over its back, and snapped her heel into its neck. KRAK - THOOOM. The creature's head folded sideways and its entire upper torso erupted into white vapor.

The remains crossed the horizon before the shockwave finished expanding, taking three nearby yetis apart in a storm of shattered bone and superheated flesh. Another descended from above. Butter twisted backward into a bridge so deep her white hair brushed the volcanic glass. The yeti passed over her by a hair's breadth. She kicked upward from the position, both feet slamming into its ribs. BOOOOM. The impact punched straight through the creature.

A circular void appeared in its chest as compressed tissue, bone, and organs detonated outward. The upper half of the monster separated from the lower and streaked into the sky as a burning trail. Three more attacked at once. Butter spun, arms whirling around her body in looping circles. One strike redirected a claw. Another knocked aside a horn. A third guided a descending arm into the path of a charging yeti. The collision annihilated both. A white flash rolled across the plain.

When it faded, nothing remained except expanding rings of molten glass and a crater stretching beyond the horizon. She never stopped moving. A butterfly kick carried her over one attacker. The wake of the motion peeled the fur from its skull. A spinning hook kick connected with another's jaw. KRAAAK. Its head ceased to exist. The rest of the body continued forward for several kilometers before realizing it was dead. A forward handspring threaded her between two sets of claws.

One beast tore a mountain from the earth and hurled it. She sprinted up the flying boulder, launched from the peak, and dove headfirst through a gap between six converging attackers. Their claws collided behind her. The resulting shockwave erased an entire mountain range. A molten lance erupted toward her from the left. Butter twisted. Heat screamed past her cheek. The blast missed by less than an inch. Another claw finally connected. A black talon raked across her shoulder. SKRRRRAAASH.

Blood erupted across the battlefield. The strike carved diagonally through her torso, tearing through muscle and bone with enough force to nearly split her in half. Her shirt darkened instantly, crimson spreading from shoulder to hip as chunks of flesh and shattered fabric spiraled away behind her. Butter staggered. For a single terrifying instant, the probe's analysis predicted total bisection. Reserve: 2. 1% Iridescent radiance flared desperately.

The wound sealed almost as quickly as it appeared, leaving only blood-soaked fabric and a fading scar to prove the strike had landed at all. Butter hissed through clenched teeth but never slowed.

"Give me a break." Her prosthetic leg snapped out. KRAK - THOOOM. The kick connected beneath the creature's ribs and continued straight through it. Flesh, bone, organs, and compressed stellar-density tissue erupted outward in a cone of destruction as the yeti was eviscerated from the inside out. The ruined halves spun away in opposite directions, carving trenches across the landscape before disappearing over the horizon. Butter was already moving before the remains hit the ground.

A moment later, three of the monsters piled onto her at once.

"GET OFF ME, FURBALLS!" Her prosthetic flared violet. THOOM. A rising knee launched one into the stratosphere. She elbowed another beneath the jaw, rolled across its shoulders, kicked off its face, then twisted away as the third grabbed for her ankle.

"NOPE!" She planted both hands on its horns, flipped over its back, and drove a double-footed kick into its spine. The creature folded in half. Another dozen closed in, claws, teeth, horns, and molten death arriving from every direction. Butter's expression hardened further.

"I AM NOT DYING IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE!" She launched into a corkscrew kick that sent one crashing through the length of continents. A molten lance roared toward her from the opposite direction just as a charging yeti blocked the path. Butter planted her prosthetic foot. The kick landed beneath its jaw. The creature launched skyward. The molten projectile struck it square in the chest. The explosion swallowed both the yeti and half the horizon in a column of black fire. More were already coming....

By hit 100, Crescendo had become a catastrophe on a leash. The Gloom wrapped around Butter, persuading the universe to accept what should have been impossible. Multipliers climbed past 10¹²⁰x. A finger tap carried more force than a supernova. Air twisted into light-bent distortions. A glancing elbow could crack a galaxy's core. Butter blurred. She punched the air. The probe noticed she was still glancing toward the sky between exchanges. Waiting. No one came. Below, the swarm refused to stay dead.

Yetis struck by blows that should have erased them completely were gone for only moments. Survivors split apart and multiplied. One became two. Two became many. Butter stopped making direct contact. The risk was too high. Instead, she kept her distance and attacked with shockwaves alone. BOOM. A black scar ripped across the battlefield. Eighty yetis vanished beneath the aftermath of punches she never actually landed. Shockwaves carved black gashes through the atmosphere.

Entire packs of yetis were caught in their path and ripped apart, erased by displaced force alone. She punched again. Another wound split the horizon, swallowing dozens more. Thud-thud-thud. A lance of molten stone screamed toward her. Butter twisted aside, boots skidding across molten glass as it flashed past her shoulder. One of the shimmering shockwaves from her punches missed the swarm entirely. It streaked upward. For a moment, nothing happened. Then it struck one of the moons. BOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMM.

The celestial body detonated instantly. Butter's eyes widened. She slapped both hands over her ears as a silent bloom of destruction painted the heavens. Fragments and dust spread across the sky, turning an entire section of it into a dark scar of drifting oblivion. A blur of white fur slammed into her ribs. WHAAAM. Butter shot across the plain, skipping over the landscape like a stone flung across a pond. Mountains exploded beneath her impacts. She finally rolled to a stop, clutching her side.

"AAAGH!" Grimacing, she forced herself upright and started punching the air again. BOOM. BOOM. BOOOOOM. Each strike sounded like a newborn universe tearing itself into existence. Even the backlash threatened to blast her apart, Gloom flaring wildly as her body struggled to survive the force of its own punches. Reserves: 0. 9% Butter was slowing. She could no longer burn enough Gloom to keep pace. White blurs closed from every direction. Above. Below. Behind. Ahead. The gap shrank. Butter turned and ran.

Continents blurred beneath her feet. Mountains exploded in her wake. The yetis gained anyway. Closer. Closer. Closer. Her jaw tightened. The first reached her. Butter pivoted and struck. Contact reduced it to expanding vapor and light. Another arrived. Another strike. Erasure. Another. Another. Every direct hit instantly vaporized whatever it touched. And every impact fed Crescendo. The numbers climbed higher. Higher still. The swarm kept closing in. Butter kept hitting them.

The catastrophe on the leash grew heavier with every heartbeat. Hit 400: 1. 26 × 10¹²⁰x. A strike carrying more force than the total energy contained within countless observable universes. Hit 450: 3. 5 × 10¹³⁵x. A blow so far beyond universal scales that conventional cosmology ceased to provide useful comparisons. Hit 500: open-palm strike to a yeti, 1. 64 × 10¹⁵⁰x. It occupied a magnitude where numbers themselves lost descriptive value.

The difference between destroying a universe and surviving one had become effectively zero. Physics strained. Causality groaned under the weight of it. The universe settled into uneasy stillness. The cost landed on her. Blood dripped from her lips. Her shirt was soaked crimson. Each breath scraped through her chest. The pale radiance of the Gloom flickered and shrank around her, visibly weaker than before. Punching was no longer an option.

At Crescendo's current output, a missed strike could tear apart the entire galaxy they stood in and reduce her to dust along with everything else. Even Butter looked alarmed by the implications. Worse, Crescendo would reset after five seconds. Under normal circumstances, five seconds was nothing. Here, it was eternity. The entire battle had unfolded in less than a millisecond. Waiting five whole seconds for a cooldown was death.