The blood rain fell thick and heavy, carrying a sickening, metallic stench that evaporated with a hiss against the glowing remnants of the copper barracks floor. The pink vapor rising from the obsidian cut deep into the throats of the Nobodies. Ren and Miki, whose faces had just been glowing with ecstasy after Beat’s Enchenkov discharge, buckled under the brutal, abrupt reversal of reality. The corpse of the mutilated city guard, the rabid psalms of Brother Sanguis echoing from the jagged wall, the sheer horror of the approaching Inquisition, it all became too much. Their pupils rolled back wildly, their breathing caught in a suffocating gasp, and with a raspy, shuddering shriek that drew the light right out of their eyes, they collapsed synchronously, completely surrendered to a deep, traumatic shockout.
But the veterans were already standing. There was no time for fear, no time for doubt. The exhaustion of the previous battle was driven into the background by sheer force of will.
Apollo took a step forward, his eyes locked onto the wall. The ash gray poncho hanging loosely around his shoulders suddenly began to ignite from within, not with destructive fire, but with the razor sharp, compressed heat of an awakening star. The fabric mutated, tightening around his muscles and transforming into a fluid, vibrating armor of pure white hot solar light. His silhouette contracted sharply, transforming into a ruthless, agile sun demon, ready to cleave through every fraction of space with pure solar speed.
Beside him stood Beat at the absolute flashpoint of his Enchenkov form. His skin was colored a deep, static purple, the veins on his arms burning like glowing neon tubes, and Blitz sat on his shoulder with wide, crackling eyes, whipping the metronomic war drums in the air into a frantic rhythm.
And Nicola, whose paranoia had been driven to an absolute boiling point, activated his entire survival mechanism. His whole body began to tremble as the ether pumped through his nervous system with the force of a lightning strike. Neon blue power surges blasted from his fingertips with loud, audible cracks, and his glasses flashed bright blue from the sheer pressure of his internal tension.
The three men formed an unyielding wall of purple, white, and neon blue light, standing perpendicularly before the unconscious bodies of the young pups.
Silarias and Beat exchanged a look of pure understanding. Their voices rose raw, synchronous, and carrying through the hissing blood mist:
“ONE TEAM!” Apollo shouted with the clear, razor sharp voice of the sun god.
“ONE TASK!” Beat and Nicola roared right behind him, as the purple and neon blue lightning currents around their feet cracked the obsidian.
It was the signal for the slaughter. Brother Sanguis, the manic monk, threw himself down from the highest edge of the arena wall with a possessed yell, his open stigmata wounds in his palms waving wildly to mold the falling blood in mid air into a murderous barrier.
Simultaneously, the mist cleared and all hell broke loose in the sky. It was a visual explosion of pure dynamism, drawn with the razor thin, possessed details of a master. Silhouettes shot through the ash cloud like inkblots as the remaining Inquisitors leapt down in a coordinated, deadly formation, each targeting a specific foe to decapitate the Nobodies in one fluid motion.
But they leapt straight into a minefield of the absolute highest caliber.
Midway through their fall, precisely at the moment their bodies dictated their trajectory to the ground, the Lotus bombers detonated. These were no ordinary explosions; they were perfectly coordinated, geometric blasts of kinetic and thermal pressure that broke space into visual shards.
The first blast exploded directly beneath Brother Sanguis. The Lotus bomb expanded like an opening, fiery red flower of pure kinetic violence. The expansion was so brutal that the monk was completely intercepted mid air. The shockwave gripped his skeletal frame and forged him sideways with a crushing impact, perpendicular against the massive copper wall of the colosseum. The copper dented meters deep with an ear splitting crash, ash and metal splinters spraying around like black snow, and Sanguis remained suspended in the crater while his Martyr’s Reservoir began to hiss, directing the blood to painfully glue his broken bones shut.
Before the smoke of the first impact could lift, two figures flashed through the wreckage.
The Conductor of Glass appeared as if stepping out of a broken mirror. His movements were elegant, eerily fluid, like an inkblot slowly but unstoppably spreading in a glass of clear water. His voice cut through the sonic chaos, sounding like breaking crystal in a deserted, stone cathedral, razor sharp and carrying: “Do not look at the shards, Silarias. Let go of the flesh.” He floated to the front with a chilling calm, his presence alone forcing Silarias to ignore the illusion of the infinite mirror hell. The memory of that ruthless training activated instantly in Silarias’s DNA; the heavy gauntlets around his hands began to glow white hot, melting away and literally fusing with his own skeleton and genetic structure, changing his fists into biological weapons of pure gold and bone.
Direct behind him, the Obsidian Warden rose from the deepest, most suffocating depths of the barracks. His presence brought a crushing, massive gravity that made the remaining floor plates crack, instantly attempting to synchronize the heart rate of everyone nearby with his own slow, monolithic rhythm. “Only when you are nothing can you destroy everything,” his voice echoed, heavy as a collapsing mountain. His philosophy struck like an invisible wall against Nyx, Balamore, and Lyn. Under his pressure, he forced Nyx to make her moon power so compact, so razor thin, that she simply slipped through the meshes of the gravity lines, untouchable to the enemy. At the same time, Balamore and Lyn found their anchor; they learned the language of pure weight on the spot, their feet sinking deep into the obsidian as they became the unyielding foundations of the world upon which the attack would shatter.
Right through the smoke barrier, Herr Von Jacko and Signora Vespera broke free.
Herr Von Jacko, his head covered by the filthy burlap sack with the two glowing orange eyeholes, did not think for a fraction of a second. With a foul, possessed motion, he brought the dented copper trumpet to the opening of the sack, attempting to push straight into his Second Form. The subsonic frequency began to vibrate through the copper pipe, ready to completely hijack the spirits of the youth and force the young Gemulus at his rusty ship chain into a bloody frenzy.
But the attack was crushed in the bud by his own ally.
Signora Vespera, her arms deathly pale beneath the stiff convent linen and covered in deep ritual incisions, raised her heavy, rusty censer. With a brutal, sudden swing, she hurled the glowing coals not at the Nobodies, but straight into Von Jacko’s face. Simultaneously, she activated her Anting, the Liquid Cross. The black, viscous fluid oozing from her earlobe splattered in a thick stream over the trumpet and the arms of the false bard. The substance solidified in a fraction of a second into a rock hard, glowing, foul crust that blocked the mechanics of his instrument and locked the joints of his arms completely tight.
Von Jacko let out a choked, furious cry through the burlap sack, finally weakened and deactivated by the unexpected sabotage.
Vespera did not even look back at the burning bard. With a fluid, desperate movement, she dropped her censer and slipped through the chaos, straight toward the position of Nyx and Silarias. Her head, tightly wrapped in the filthy gray bandage, bowed low. Through the narrow eye slits, no fanatical madness was visible, but rather pure, deep disgust for the Inquisition. She raised her pale, trembling hands, not to attack, but in an open gesture of surrender, her voice a hoarse, urgent whisper pleading for asylum and help.
On the other side of the arena, the most brutal, tragic confrontation took place.
The Peasant Twins, Qayin and Hebel, made an aggressive, beastly leap from the copper supports, their hand axes glinting in the purple Enchenkov light. The pure, suffocating pressure of their mutual dynamics hung like a leaden blanket over the flank; the murderous Qayin, his cattle hide apron smeared with old grease, drove his brother forward with cold glares, forcing him to form the front line.
They plunged with total abandon into the line of Nicola, Beat, and Apollo.
Hebel went first, his serpent axe on the rust colored ether chain swinging wildly, while his wounds covered in gray white scales absorbed the first blows. But the defense of the agile sun demon and the purple Oni was absolute. Beat countered the rotation with a brute, dead stop of his electrically charged forearm, while Nicola drove a gigantic discharge of neon blue current through the chain.
With a deafening crack, Hebel was completely knocked out of his trajectory mid fight, smacked into the air by a coordinated upward strike of Beat’s purple Oni power.
Hebel hung weightless in the blood mist for a fraction of a second, his canvas rags fluttering in the wind. He did not look at Qayin with hatred, but with a terrifying, deep seated loyalty forged through years of abuse and obligation. As he plummeted downward, his body caught by the phantom pain of his own binding, he screamed out to Nicola and Beat, his voice cracking with pure, desperate panic:
“Forget him! Please… can you forget my brother?! Spare him, erase him from your minds, do not fight him!”
It was the rabid, psychotic plea of a brother who knew he was being sacrificed, but whose spiritual venom and phantom pain still bound him to the bloodlust of the man waiting below with drawn axe, ready to impale him through his own flesh for the ultimate transformation.
Hebel’s words still hung raw and thin in the hissing blood rain when the logic of the fight completely imploded. Beat, Apollo, and Nicola held their positions tight, their gazes focused razor sharp on the falling boy. A fraction of a second of heavy confusion flashed through their systems. Was this a trap? Was Hebel pure in his desperate plea, or was he trying to psychologically disarm them with his spiritual venom?
They did not receive the answer from the boy himself. They received it from the ground.
Qayin looked up with eyes in which every form of brotherly love had rotted away decades ago. There was no doubt, no hesitation. Before Hebel could touch the obsidian floor, Qayin stepped forward with a brute, beastly rotation. With the full, heavy mass of his cattle hide apron and his arms wrapped in bloody bandages, he drove his single bladed serpent axe through the chest of his falling brother with a sickening, dull thud.
The impact stopped Hebel completely still mid air. The biting fluid of the axe sank into the flesh with a hiss.
“YOU ARE GRANTED EVERYTHING!” Qayin roared, his voice filled with a rabid, deep frustration that echoed off the copper walls. “AND NOW I ASK FOR SOMETHING, AND YOU CAN’T EVEN DO IT?!”
It was the mechanism of their Shared Martyrdom, but completely reversed into a parasitic slaughter. The serpent axe began to pulsate like a hungry vacuum. The Nobodies saw in visual detail how the physical strength, the ether currents, and the gray white scales of Hebel’s skin were sucked from his body with brutal speed, straight into the axe and through the arms of Qayin. Hebel’s eyes rolled blankly, his muscles withered to a thin frame, and his breathing stopped. Qayin let him slide from the blade in an absolute, critical condition.
Qayin leaned heavily on the shaft of his axe for a moment, his own muscles pulsating and swelling from the stolen life force. He looked down fleetingly at the heap of a man beneath him.
“Hmm, dead already,” he muttered coldly. With a bone dry, nonchalant gesture, he kicked his brother’s trembling, half dead body in a heavy arc to the far side of the arena, as if it were a dirty rag.
Then he threw his head back. A psychopathic, hysterical laugh tore from his throat, resonating in the red mist:
“HAHAHA!!”
He laughed in full, pure ecstasy, his aura mutating to a coarser, monstrous caliber as he let himself be carried away by the adrenaline.