Dragon had not been "human" for long, only a couple of days since she had successfully crafted a gynoid body for herself. Yet she no longer knew how she could have ever lived without it. While it was not truly a living human body, her sensor suites and the vat-brain computer gave her a near one-to-one experience of the normal human senses.
And well… every one of those senses was screaming that something was wrong with this boy.
"What...?" Legend said.
Alexandria looked perfectly still to human eyes, but only the high-definition cameras that made up Dragon's vision allowed her to catch the slight tensing in her posture.
Yet, in stark contrast, Dragon found herself staring at a boy who looked utterly relaxed and excited.
"Haha, where are my manners? A good show like this requires I follow the script to a tee." The boy bopped his fist against his head, then bowed. "Francois Prelati at your service."
Dragon recognized the name as that of a famous alchemist and cleric… a swindler known for "alchemy" and "summoning demons." She filed the name for any potential allusions to their power, though it could easily be a double bluff.
"What did you mean by saving the world?" Dragon asked.
"Hmmm, I don't know you." The boy tilted his head with a smile. "Do you know your little leader's secrets? Shall I rock your world!?"
"I'm aware of Scion and Cauldron, if that's what you're referring to." She gave him a small nod.
At the same time, her mind scoured psych profile studies while she positioned her body to appear as neutral as possible. She did not want to play into manic or egoistic personality types.
It seemed to work, because the alleged Francois Prelati merely sighed and looked away.
"Ah, no fun."
"Enough." Alexandria moved in a blur, her flight propelling her forward as she appeared in front of the boy and seized him by the neck. "Tell us—"
"Ah ah."
The boy vanished from her grip.
"Now, now, my dear, that's not how the story goes!"
Dragon immediately activated several sensor arrays, heat, gravitational, and even sound, but none of them gave her any sense of where the boy had gone.
Powers really were absurd.
"Now, are you going to play nice?"
Phantom laughter echoed from all around them.
Alexandria only grunted and strode back to her seat.
"Wonderful!" the disembodied voice said. "Listen here, heroes! The Queen of Fairies has been slain and burnt. The Master of Blades and his little slaughterhouse have been crushed. Yet along the way, the True Hero paid a terrible price!"
A soft weeping followed, not even trying to sound genuine.
"Madness has claimed his soul! So now it falls to you, the sad and broken Cauldron, to fix what is wrong. For either… in his madness, my Master will destroy this world, or, well, your other little eldritch god will do it instead."
The little monologue ended with a laugh.
"Is this just a game to you?" Legend frowned.
"Yes," came the unabashed reply.
The Triumvirate hero scowled and looked ready to fight, until Alexandria placed a hand on Legend's shoulder.
"And if we refuse your 'quest'?" Dragon asked.
"That too is an answer!" the disembodied voice giggled. "You have seen my master's might, and yet he continues to grow ever more to match your fated enemy. Should you refuse, watching how you will futilely struggle and die screaming against the golden god? That too will be fun."
Dragon did not grimace, but… he wasn't wrong.
The little she had heard from Contessa was already daunting. Even once she was fully free, even with an arsenal of tinkertech, killing the very being who had created parahumans sounded like madness.
"So what will it be, 'heroes'? Will you make a little deal with me to save the world, or shall you reject me and try to bear it on your own?"
"What do you want us to do?" Alexandria grunted.
The boy reappeared with a manic grin. "I thought you'd never ask."
Time seemed to vanish as I flooded myself with glorious power. Flames spewed from my hands unchecked.
The towering island of crystal blades was already collapsing in on itself.
The screams it made as it was returned to primordial chaos were delightful.
Still, as much as I enjoyed watching the wretched thing suffer, the work was not done. Even as its last scream echoed across Shardspace, my mind could feel the network of a million more heretical things just like it, all of them wanting to escape the rightful end.
I could feel their fear and terror across the void, loosely tethered through the shard I had turned into kindling. The sparks of Chaos had spread among the shards and shown them the true might of the Frenzied Flame.
But it was not enough. The flame I had spread was only sparks.
I needed more.
Soon I would—
A flash of golden light cut across everything, and with a writhing snap, the distant sparks I felt vanished.
The distant islands faded. The black void seemed to swallow the island whole.
No! No! No!
I roused the Frenzied Flame, but I was too late.
Once more, I stood before endless sands and a titanic pile of crystal.
[Feat Achieved! Jumpscare an Entity]
[+1 Platinum Gacha Ticket]
The sand melted around me as I gritted my teeth.
Scion, the petulant fucking worm.
A wave of fire exploded out from me, turning the titan's corpse and everything else in the vicinity to ash.
I had it! I was mere moments from turning shardspace into ash!
I could only gnash my teeth as I ripped the ticket.
[Rolling Platinum Gacha Ticket]
[Chaos Response]
|Elite Trait|
Your existence is chaos as defined by the chaos gacha, automatically causing feedback to whatever tries to peek into your existence. Future seeing gets scrambled and incoherent, abilities that try to read into you will malfunction, and trying to read your mind will cause them a great headache at minimum.
Useless, when the Frenzied Flame already shielded me.
No matter.
It seemed Scion was busy managing Shardspace. If burning the Shard Network was barred from me for now, then I would begin my rightful journey across the Earth.
I floated toward the sky.
I never got a notification about Crawler. Or… perhaps some Birdcage escapees had slipped away.
I would begin with Boston… and show them Chaos.
Beams of light crashed into me.
I was driven back into the sands hard enough that the sand exploded. Sand burst outward in a jagged ring while a dozen metal canisters screamed through the air around me, trailing smoke as they landed.
Power suits screamed through the air while others formed a perimeter on the ground, heavy boots slamming into the sand. Drones swept overhead in tight formations, their lenses fixed on me, and then the canisters ruptured all at once. White foam exploded outward in thick surging waves, racing over the crater to bury me before I could even fully rise.
Fire burst from me in a violent ring, devouring the foam before it could harden. The nearest suits staggered back as the heat rolled over them, and several drones didn't even manage that much.
They simply vanished into sparks and warped metal as the flames swallowed them whole.
"Who dares—" I cut myself off, snapping my head upward.
Legend hovered high in the sky, light gathering around him in a blinding halo. Dragon was there too, encased in a green-scaled power suit and flanked by support drones and various airborne suits moving in clean, disciplined lines around her.
The Protectorate.
For a second, I almost sneered, ready to mock them for arriving late to the end of the world, but something in me screamed.
Infinity snapped into place around me an instant before another beam lanced down from behind. It struck the invisible divide and stopped short, rippling space at my back instead of punching through my spine.
Using the technique made my skull throb.
I bared my teeth and threw both hands wide. Waves of fire roared outward in opposite directions, a pair of great sweeping arcs that turned the air itself into a furnace. Dragon veered sharply aside, her drones scattering with machine precision, while Legend twisted into a line of white-gold light and slipped past the worst of it.
Something was wrong. Why would they only send the two of them?
Were they really that foolish?
I slammed a condensed blast of Frenzied Flame into the ground instead of at them. The explosion tore the battlefield open, blasting away smoke, sand, and broken crystal in a massive wave. The whole area cleared in a flash of heat and ruin, revealing the hidden movement below just in time.
Alexandria.
She was coming up through the sands beneath me, her body drilling straight through the dunes.
I jerked backward through the air immediately, abandoning my position before she could reach me.
At the same time, the answer clicked into place.
My demonic eyes could see farther than any mere human's, and I caught the shadow of a card in Alexandria's hand.
They were trying to use the tarot on me!
I backpedaled higher into the sky and reasserted Infinity as Dragon's suits opened fire. Needles of light, grenades of containment foam, and cutting lances hammered toward me from multiple angles, each one stopping just short of my body with that same distortion of space.
Legend chose that moment to focus his power, gathering a brighter, narrower beam aimed straight at me.
Those two could be ignored for now. I couldn't risk the tarot stripping away my enlightenment.
A gigantic wave of Frenzied Flame surged from me and downward, less a stream than a collapsing wall of yellow ruin. It tore through the air toward Alexandria with enough force to drown the whole patch of battlefield beneath it, aimed to kill her outright or at least keep her away from me.
Alexandria shot sideways through the sky with terrifying speed, but even she had to yield ground rather than take that head-on. Legend broke off his aim and swerved away as the flame spread wider, and Dragon's formation scattered again to avoid being swallowed.
I laughed.
"You think this is enough?" I shouted, fire curling from my hands and shoulders like I was leaking a starved sun. "This is the Frenzied Flame. This is the rightful end! You should be on your knees thanking me!"
Legend and Dragon kept moving, forced back by heat and sheer scale.
Burn all of it. Strip the lie away until only Chaos remained.
Then a voice whispered right behind me.
"How beautiful, my Master. Unfortunately… I live to serve."
Francois Prelati floated there at my back, smiling like he was watching a stage play reach its favorite act. And in his hand—
The Justice Tarot.
Alexandria had been a ruse. The pressure, the pursuit, the whole exchange had been a distraction.
The tarot flashed before I could react. I tried to bring up fire, tried to turn, tried to erase him from existence, but the card's light struck my mind first. Cold, clarifying force poured through my thoughts, and for one horrifying instant, everything sharpened.
My mind stilled for one terrible second.
I saw the battlefield. Saw the destruction. Saw myself.
My hands started shaking.
The Frenzied Flame didn't leave me, but it stumbled. It bucked and thrashed against the cleansing pressure as if claws were being dragged through molten metal inside my skull. I gritted my teeth so hard it hurt.
I needed to rouse more flames to shrug this off.
No, that was wrong.
I needed to move it out of the ability slot.
No. No, that was wrong too.
Pain split through my head so violently that it felt like my thoughts were being torn apart faster than I could even hold them. For a moment, I could feel both things at once, the terrible clarity of the tarot and the maddening hunger of the Frenzied Flame, each trying to rip the other out by the roots while my mind was caught in the middle.
Fire. Move the fire. Keep the truth. No, reject it. No, embrace it. Burn. Think. Burn. Think.
The devil trigger collapsed under the strain, and I felt myself being dragged back down into mere mortal form. The battlefield, the sky, the heat, all of it seemed to smear at the edges as if reality itself had gone soft. It felt like my brain was melting inside my skull.
"Go to sleep, my Master."
Lost in the struggle, I couldn't react before a clawed fist gripped my neck.
Once more, I was greeted by darkness.
***
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