The dawning horror of whatever tinkertech abomination this place was meant to birth settled into my gut and stayed there, heavy and cold.
"Fuck," I muttered. "Can you do something about this?"
"I'm not sure," Dragon said. Her voice had a clipped edge. "If there's a terminal, I might be able to intervene."
I moved quickly, eyes sweeping the lab as I went.
The space was enormous, the ceiling vanishing into darkness, but it felt cramped anyway. Every square meter was occupied. Long tables buried under notebooks and loose pages. Shelves packed tight with bottles. Familiar lab equipment sat beside devices that looked like they'd come straight out of a sci-fi movie.
At the center of it all loomed the tank.
Crystal clear. Filled with a faintly glowing solution that made my skin itch just looking at it. It was bolted into a larger machine that branched outward into secondary vats, each one a different color, linked by tubing and conduits that pulsed softly. Screens flickered along its spine like a heartbeat.
I headed straight for it.
"Get me close," Dragon said.
I dragged the canister over and set it near the console.
"Can you connect—"
The terminal hummed to life on its own. Lines of data and console readouts began scrolling faster than I could track.
"Stop!" a voice barked. "Step away or I'll blow your brains out."
I froze.
A man stood near the edge of the lab, wearing a stained lab coat and gripping a bulky, improvised gun studded with small canisters. His face was gaunt, his eyes sunken, his skin stretched too tight. Behind him sat a metal cart.
"Sheng?" Dragon said.
"Dragon?" The man straightened slightly, some spark lighting up behind his eyes. "Is that you?"
"Yes," Dragon replied. Calm, professional—but I could hear the strain under it. "Are you alright, Sheng?"
I didn't blame her unease.
My gaze slid past him to the cart.
It was filled to the brim with corpses. Scientists, by the look of their coats. A couple who were in costumes. Some of the bodies looked wrong, melted and half-collapsed like wax left too close to a flame. Others had twisted, flesh discolored into sick hues, limbs bent in ways joints shouldn't allow.
Some type of chemical tinker, maybe?
Dragon kept talking, trying to reach him, but I tuned it out. My attention stayed on the gun trained on me. Under normal circumstances, I'd trust my regeneration. Short of instant death, I could probably walk it off.
But the Simurgh was a cheating bitch. I'm willing to bet he has some sort of counter to my regen. And the cart full of examples told me exactly how careful I needed to be.
The sounds of battle filtered through the lab. Distant impacts. Warped pressure shifts. That low, wrong hum that came with constant explosions. Time was bleeding out by the second.
I palmed the tarot card.
Measured the distance.
I only needed one opening. One moment to close the gap. I tapped the back of the canister twice, subtly, hoping Dragon picked up what I was signaling.
"Sheng, you need to evacuate," Dragon said.
He laughed. "Evacuate? I'm not letting her ruin ten years of work." His fingers twitched against the gun. "My formula will end her. Airborne delivery. Self-propagating enzyme chain with full metabolic breakdown. She won't even understand what's happening."
My stomach tightened. "Airborne?"
"Yes," he snapped. "That's the point. It will spread across the air so quickly that she'll have no chance. Once it activates, it'll tune to the Simurgh and eat her alive in seconds."
I stared at him. "That is an extinction-level failure waiting to happen."
"What do you know?" he shouted. "I can do this. I spent my life on it."
Dragon spoke up, voice firm now. "Stop this. You don't need to do this, Sheng. Just calm down."
"No," he snarled. "I'll save the world. You don't get it. I'm the only one who can kill—"
I shifted.
Roses exploded outward as I flowed forward in a rush of petals.
He reacted fast. Too fast. The gun snapped toward me and spat out a glob of viscous fluid.
It was massive—far larger than the nozzle should have been able to produce. Almost boulder-sized, wobbling through the air with sick momentum.
Forgive me, Dragon.
I flicked part of my rose form forward and hurled the canister. It struck the chemical mass mid-flight and burst with a wet splash. The reaction was immediate. The liquid detonated into a billowing cloud of noxious green gas that swallowed half the space between us.
That was enough.
I flowed around the edge of the cloud, petals skimming the floor, and closed the remaining distance before the fumes could spread properly. Flesh reformed in a heartbeat. Blood, bone, weight back where they belonged.
The tarot card slid from my palm.
I willed it forward.
Justice flared.
For a single moment, a figure stood between us. A king crowned in robes that never seemed to end, towering and absolute. Crimson fabric spilled down endlessly, pooling at nothing. I couldn't see his face, but I felt the sneer anyway, faint and full of contempt, as he looked upward. A sword and a set of scales were clasped in his hands, metal ringing as they struck together.
And for the first time since the battle began, the screaming song in my ears went silent.
Just for a moment.
I didn't feel stronger. I didn't even feel different. Maybe that was because I hadn't been exposed long enough.
But Sheng had.
[Feat Achieved! Two-Fold Freedom!]
[+1 Platinum Gacha Ticket]
He staggered back as if struck, the gun clattering to the floor. His face drained of color, features hollowing out in seconds. He stared at his hands, then slowly turned toward the cart behind him.
"What… am I?" His voice cracked. "Oh god."
He collapsed to his knees, words tumbling out in a panicked stream. Apologies. Denials. Half-formed prayers. I felt a pang of sympathy.
Not enough to slow me down.
I crossed the distance and slapped him hard enough to snap his head sideways. "Get your shit together. What do you do to disarm this thing?"
He blinked rapidly, swallowing. "R-right. Yes. She made me modify Yuwon's atmospheric tech, combine it with an aerosolized chemical vector. If I—if I mutilate the solution chain, it should collapse the propagation and—"
It was pure tinker babble.
I turned and sprinted back to the canister I'd thrown. Somehow, it was intact. Whatever chemical he'd fired had been designed for flesh, not metal. Lucky.
I grabbed a pair of tongs from the nearest table and carefully lifted the canister free of the congealed residue.
"Dragon," I said. "Sheng's not crazy anymore. Can the two of you fix this?"
Silence.
"…Dragon?"
Another beat passed. Shit, did it—
"…Yes," she said, voice coming back oddly bright. Almost excited. "I can help."
Okay… weird. But I wasn't going to question it now.
I set the canister back into place near the terminal. Sheng scrambled to his feet and moved fast, hands steady despite the tremor running through him. Screens shifted. Readouts changed. The auxiliary tanks dimmed and bled into new colors. Whatever the Simurgh had planned here was being unwound in real time.
I couldn't follow any of it, so I turned inward and ripped the ticket.
[Frenzied Flame]
|Legendary Ability|
Elden Ring - Allows the user to wield and manipulate the Frenzied Flame. Fire born from the influence of a foreign cosmic entity capable of burning even minds, souls and space yet also causes mental instability in the user the more it is used, making them obsessed with destruction.
"…Fuck," I muttered. "That's not ominous at all."
I reached for it.
Nothing happened.
I frowned, then mentally shoved my Rose Semblance aside. The instinctive movement power that had become second nature slid out of place, like a limb suddenly going numb.
I tried to shift.
Nothing.
What had been effortless moments ago simply wasn't there anymore. I could feel the absence clearly, like an empty slot where something vital should have been.
Still nothing.
Despite having used it constantly, any attempt to call it now came up empty.
"Are you serious?" I scowled. "I can only use one? What is this, EA?"
The ground shuddered.
Dust poured from the ceiling as something massive tore at the structure above us. The vibration rolled through my bones, deep and wrong.
That doesn't sound good.
With no real choice left, I pushed the Frenzied Flame into the slot.
I willed a spark to form in my palm. Just as a test.
It was a mistake.
The flame did not ignite so much as arrive.
Ever a flame, unending chaos, a unity of one dissolved into nothingness. Destruction without purpose, purpose without meaning, all collapsing into a screaming unity that will burn for eternity.
Cities folding into ash. Stars devoured by rightful destruction. Thought melted into thought until there was nothing but ONE.
OH HOW GLORIOUS—
I slammed my hand shut and staggered back.
What the fuck.
I shook my head violently, trying to scatter the images before they could settle into memory. The echo of that warmth lingered anyway, inviting me to once more wield it.
The oh-so-beautiful—
No. No. Breathe.
I forced my attention outward to distract myself.
"You guys almost done?" I snapped, louder than I meant to.
Sheng was bent over the back of the tank, hands shaking as he adjusted something with his strange gun, tools unfolding and retracting from it like a living thing. The terminal beside the vat glowed steadily as Dragon continued interfacing.
"Yes," Dragon replied. "We're in the final stretch. The solution needs to synthesize and then neutralize the reactive compounds fully. Once the vat is neutralized, the chemicals will become functionally inert."
"Good," I said. "How long?"
"Less than a minute. We just need to—"
The sound cut her off.
A tearing noise, low and immense, like the world being unzipped.
We all froze and looked up.
The ripping only grew louder. Concrete screamed. Steel shrieked as the basement flooded with blinding light, the ceiling peeled open, and the sky returned in a violent rush.
Time seemed to slow.
The giant tank lifted off the ground, dragged upward by an unseen force. Dragon's canister pulled along as the console tore free. Sheng was yanked forward, barely clinging on. Papers, tools, bodies, machines—all of it spiraled upward as the lab became a churning vortex, everything caught in the grip of a silent hand.
She couldn't be allowed to use that tank. If the Simurgh got access, Canberra was doomed, and I'd be reduced to melted sludge along with it.
Instinct slammed into place.
So I reached for the flame once more.
Frenzied light ignited across my vision, a gold-orange glare that crawled along my thoughts and approved. I raised my hand and let it loose, a screaming lance of warped fire ripping through the collapsing lab.
It went wide.
The beam tore past everything important, vanishing into open air. For half a heartbeat, I thought I'd fucked it up completely. Hitting a pile of volatile chemical explosives would've been catastrophic.
But it didn't matter.
The storm of force vanished as if scalded. The pressure collapsed in on itself, the invisible grip snapping loose. The rising tank slammed back into the floor, skidding but intact.
Silence followed.
For the second time, the world went quiet. The ever-present screaming song of the Endbringer slipped away, no longer whispering inside my skull.
I looked up.
The Simurgh hovered above, wings spread, perfect and distant. Her cold, emotionless gaze locked onto mine.
Yet this time… something was different.
Not emptiness.
Fear.
Just a flicker. Almost imperceptible. But it was there.
Why?
I looked down at my palm, where the glorious flame still lingered.
Ah
I let out a quiet laugh.
The Simurgh saw the world through prediction, peering through visions braided from past and future.
But how do you predict Chaos?
The Frenzied Flame was Chaos incarnate. No mere false angel could divine its secrets.
The world felt louder now. Sharper. The answer was clear to me now.
To kill the Endbringers. To slay the Entities. To save this world.
"BURN!"
***
Comments and Thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Likes are like a drug to me and boost my creative juices.
I have advanced chapters on my if you wanna read ahead.