In Oak-haven, the air was no longer meant for mortals. The atmosphere was a churning soup of ash, super-heated oxygen, and the sickly stench of necromantic rot. The city, once a beacon of peace, had been transformed into an arena of liquid glass and shadows. As Silarias and the rest of the 5 Commandments exchanged the first blows with the gargantuan forces of Ifnera and Olfero, reality split into different fronts of despair.
Jane streaked through the streets like a violet lightning bolt. Her senses, sharpened to a brittle point by her Electric Lynx form, registered the world in frames of pure energy. The red shadow of Ulfera was everywhere and nowhere: a trail of blood and torn air that lured Jane to the edge of the old graveyard.
"Where is she? Every time I lock onto her scent, the air just splits open!" Jane’s thoughts raced as fast as her pulse, her eyes darting through the haze. "She is playing with me. No, she is dragging me somewhere."
Suddenly, the purple glow of Jane’s lightning was drowned out. A neon blue flash, so intense it seemed to sear the retinas, sliced straight through a row of crumbling townhouses. In its wake followed a chrome-colored shimmer: an afterimage so sharp it seemed to cut the air open. A fraction of a second later came the bang: a sonic boom that pulverized the remaining windows in the street and nearly knocked Jane out of her rhythm.
"Does she have reinforcements?" Jane thought, a surge of cold fury racing through her blood. "Two more speed users? From the rifts? No, I don't care who they are. Nobody takes this city."
Her aura exploded. Violet lightning struck from her pores, making her hair stand up like the mane of a predator. She increased her pace, her muscles protesting against the G-forces, determined to crush these intruders before they could completely erase Oak-haven.
When Jane reached the central square of the graveyard, she froze mid-step, her boots scraping over the liquid glass. She didn’t see three enemies. She saw a tableau of divine speed that took her breath away.
In the center of the square stood Beat, his sombrero low over his eyes, but his grin wider and more anarchistic than ever. His floating drums pulsed with a sick, ultraviolet frequency. But it was the man beside him who made Jane’s heart skip a beat. There stood Zephyr. His armor, once functional and dull, was now a masterpiece of gleaming chrome that reflected the neon blue lightning sparking from his body like a mirror.
Zephyr didn’t move like a human. He moved like a vibration in reality. With superhuman precision, he parried Ulfera’s shadow attacks, each strike a calculated explosion of kinetic energy.
"Sensei Sir! On your left, 45 degrees, the frequency is rising!" Zephyr shouted. His voice no longer sounded arrogant, but filled with a deep, almost religious respect. He was no longer fighting to prove himself. He fought as the extension of a greater truth. "I’ve found the resonance, Sensei! It’s not about the distance, it’s about the discharge!"
Jane felt a hype that made her nearly dizzy. "Zephyr? He's... he's following Beat's rhythm? The guy who thought he was the god of speed is calling someone else 'Sensei'?" A wild, adrenaline-fueled smile broke across her face. Zephyr, the man who once thought he was the peak, had buried his ego in the Ward and returned as the ultimate disciple of the Beat.
The Master of Smoke had turned into a natural disaster. When the report came that a Fire Spirit, Ifnera, was confronting Silarias, a mental lock in Juro that had been jammed for ten years finally snapped. The grey smoke that usually hung calmly around him was now a churning mass of pitch-black soot, charged with the static electricity of his trauma.
"Not again," Juro growled internally, his vision blurring as the black soot poured from his skin. "The heat... it's exactly the same. The children... I can still hear them screaming under the wood. I won't let it burn. I'll choke the flames until there's nothing left but ash!"
With a raw growl from the depths of his soul, he stormed toward the center. His presence was so intense that the smoke behind him left a trail of suffocation where no living thing could breathe. But Juro was too blinded by his rage to notice he wasn’t alone. Miki and Ren had slipped out of the Bazaar like ghosts. Miki ran with a determination that defied her eight years. She felt Ifnera’s heat like the call of a distant relative: a fire she had to understand or extinguish. Ren followed her like a silent shadow, his Scarecrow’s Veil unconsciously extended to hide them from the predators in the ash, while connecting his cold energy to his master’s glowing rage.
Back at the graveyard, Ulfera landed on the tip of a crooked tombstone. Her body trembled with pent-up speed, her lips curled in a grin that looked more like a gash than a laugh.
"Do you really think a handful of mortals with a few sparks can keep up with me?" she shrieked, her voice scraping against their eardrums. "In my time, I was the only reason the wind dared to blow! I am the original breaker of laws! You are merely echoes of a race that should have gone extinct long ago!"
She didn’t wait for an answer. She ignored her base form entirely and activated 2nd Form: Soul-bound Overdrive. Her skin became translucent. Her blood turned into a red liquid lightning that stepped outside her body. She became a blur of blood-red flashes, a speed so violent it caused the stones beneath her feet to explode into dust before she even kicked off.
In her time, she might have been the fastest. But she didn’t understand the evolution of the Ward. She didn’t understand that Beat, Jane, and Zephyr had spent the last few years in a hell specifically designed to shatter the limits of the possible.
Zephyr stepped forward, his chrome armor vibrating at a frequency that made the air sing. "At first, I wanted to beat you, Beat," he said with a voice that sounded like cracking ice. "Time and again, I lost. I thought speed was a race. But in the Ward, I finally saw what you were trying to teach us. You aren’t teaching us to be the current..."
Jane leaped into the fray beside them, her violet aura intertwining with their light. "We don't follow the path..."
"WE HAVE TO BE THE DISCHARGE!" Jane, Zephyr, and Beat roared in a perfectly synchronized symphony of power.
The transformation that followed was nothing less than a rewriting of reality.
Zephyr reached his new peak. His chrome turned into a deep, neon blue crystal. He no longer reflected light. He absorbed it and converted it into pure kinetic mass. He was no longer a speedster. He was a projectile that slowed time itself.
Jane exploded into her Electric Lynx 1.5. This was not the wild, uncontrolled lightning of before. Her aura was now streamlined: a violet cocoon of concentrated destruction. She had studied Nyx’s gravity manipulation and Aurelius’s light precision and applied them to her own speed. She didn’t run through space. She tore space open and appeared on the other side.
Beat went full ONI Mode. His lightning horns grew into a crown of liquid fire. He began to play his floating drums: not a rhythm to dance to, but a rhythm to kill. Every strike of his sticks sent a shockwave that froze the molecules in the air.
"The set is over, darling," Beat grinned, crossing his drumsticks in an X-shape before his face.
With a sound like the tearing of the heavens, the three shot forward. Three colors of lightning: neon blue, intense violet, and white-hot: converged from three different angles on the red blur of Ulfera.
The moment of impact was a point of silence in hell. In the fraction of a second before the three forces hit Ulfera, you saw her face. The arrogance was gone. For the first time in centuries, the Hell-spawn was afraid. She saw Jane’s claws warping space, Zephyr’s sword moving faster than her own thoughts, and Beat’s drumstick taking over her heartbeat.
In the heart of Oak-haven, the air was saturated with the scent of death and burnt glass. Juro stood rooted to the spot. His black smoke cloud, normally a symbol of unshakable discipline, trembled violently. Ifnera’s heat was not just physical. It was a psychological hammer blow that ripped open the scars on his soul. Juro, the master who drilled the New Gen with an iron fist, was at this moment nothing more than a traumatized man fighting the urge to run away.
"Move, you coward! Move!" Juro screamed at himself inside his mind, his lungs burning from his own suffocating soot. "They're going to die again because you can't breathe!"
Nearby, Silarias, Aurelius, and Nyx held the necromancer Olfero in a deadly stranglehold. Nyx’s gravity pressed the Elf to the ground, while Aurelius’s light swords cut away the black vines of rot. Olfero still giggled, but his eyes were fixed on a point in the sky.
There, floating amidst the ash, hung a small figure. It was one of the creatures Olfero had summoned, but it wasn’t fighting. It was in conversation with the small spirits escaping from the rifts.
"Mmm, the Nobody you say?" the creature whispered with a voice like rustling leaves. He looked at Silarias with a gaze of recognition. "Tell that ear..."
Before he could finish his sentence, a beam of white-hot light flashed straight through his chest. An invisible force, faster than the perception of the 5 Commandments, eliminated him in a fraction of a second. The entity dissolved into nothingness before his words could even hit the ground.
The shock of the sudden elimination was immediately overshadowed by an image no one thought possible. Miki, the eight-year-old fire wielder, walked with tearful eyes straight toward Ifnera’s scorching heat. She didn’t look like a warrior. She looked like a child who had lost her way home. The heat around Ifnera was enough to vaporize steel, but Miki didn’t stop. The tears evaporated on her cheeks before they could fall.
"Don’t come closer!" Ifnera roared, her voice a painful mix of heat and despair. The fire spirit trembled, her white flames lashing out wildly. "You’re hurting yourself, little girl! Go away before I turn you to ash!"
Miki ignored the warning completely. With a determination that silenced the Gods present, she stepped into the circle of white-hot plasma. Her clothes began to singe, the edges of her dress turning black, but she reached out and grabbed Ifnera’s liquid fire mantle. She pulled hard on the spirit’s clothing, her own hands burning. Her eyes didn’t glow with hate, but with a fiery instinct.
"DON’T BE AFRAID!" Miki screamed with a voice that broke with emotion. "Mamma still knows you!"
From Miki’s small chest, a burning specter suddenly shot up: a fiery apparition of her own mother. It was not an attack, but a living memory. The specter began to play a scene etched deep in Miki’s soul. You saw Miki’s mother, softly talking to her daughter about the Lighthouse of the North, the spirit who kept the winter warm. But the memory shifted. You saw the pain in the mother’s eyes, the moment she began to forget the spirit’s name due to the Federation’s suppression.
"Auntie If... please calm down..." Miki whispered now, her voice softer as the heat bit into her skin.
The corruption that had enclosed Ifnera’s spirit like black armor began to crack. The veil was lifted. Ifnera’s white-hot rage faded into a warm, soft glow. The mighty fire spirit broke mentally. The memory of Miki’s mother’s love hit her harder than any gravity field ever could. Ifnera fell to her knees and gently picked Miki up, her hands now soft and cool for the child. The fire spirit’s tears were small drops of molten gold.
"You... you know me?" Ifnera sobbed, her voice now human and fragile. "She told you about me? She hasn't forgotten me?"
Before she could finish, Miki looked her straight in the eyes with a sad smile on her face. "Everyone... even your brother..."
Ifnera didn’t know what to say. The world seemed to stand still for a moment. The heat was gone, the hate had vanished. For a short, fragile moment, everything seems as if its going to be alright.
But the peace was an illusion. The world trembled. Suddenly, we shift with a violent jerk back to the graveyard. The silence there was not of peace, but of the dead second before a collision.
There they stood: the three speedsters. Jane, Zephyr, and Beat, their bodies still in the last millisecond of their transformation. Zephyr’s blue crystals, Jane’s violet Lynx mane, and Beat’s flaming ONI horns converged on the red haze of Ulfera. The air began to crackle with the approaching explosion. Miki’s emotional victory was a contrast to the brutal, mechanical destruction about to take place here.
Three colors of lightning hit the heart of the red shadow. The moment the three attacks hit Ulfera, you hear no explosion. You hear a deep, low tone that tears the ground beneath Oak-haven wide open.