Chapter One:It Calls

[Alice Akuma]

Borealis Peak was unlike anything Ovan or Alice had ever seen. As they stepped through the portal, the shift was immediate and jarring. Their stomachs dropped, their lungs tightened, and a strange pressure filled their chests. The air was thin, cold, and sharp—biting like glass with every breath. Borealis Peak rose like a shimmering monolith, high above the world, where the sky burned with ribbons of color—green, violet, and pale gold dancing between spires of crystal and snow-draped stone.

Alice stumbled as the ground beneath her swayed, and the wounded Aurorai she carried slipped from her arms. But before he could hit the ice-slicked floor, a slender figure caught him in a graceful sweep. An Elv woman—taller than Alice but lighter than air—cradled the Aurorai with ease and exhaled a slow, deliberate breath.

Warmth and clarity rushed into Ovan and Alice’s lungs. Whatever strange sorcery she carried in her breath, it softened the altitude’s wrath.

"You're safe now," she whispered, already moving with the wounded in her arms. “What happened below?”

Alice answered before Ovan could even breathe. “The Aevorran attacked. There are still people down there—fighting, maybedying.”

Before any further words could be shared, an alarm screamed across the crystalline expanse. Prismatic light pulsed from embedded crystal towers—an urgent, strobing beacon. The colors of danger rippled across the land.

“Quickly—we should take shelter!” the Elv woman urged.

But Alice refused to move. She yanked her arm away and planted her feet. “I don’t want to run,” she growled. “I want to help. But first… I need to know what the hell I’m fighting.”

The Elv woman, clearly torn, tried once more to pull her toward the shelter, but their standoff was interrupted by the arrival of a figure both commanding and strange.

He was tall, armored in sleek, dark metal, with bright blue shards embedded in his chestplate—like frozen lightning locked in steel. He moved with the calm of someone who had faced a thousand storms and knew how each one ended.

“I’ll take it from here, Sareth,” he said to the Elv woman. “I can brief the lady while I prep the Veil. Seems we've got a few new feathers in the flock.”

Sareth nodded and vanished into the shimmer of light.

The armored Aurorai turned to Alice and Ovan. “Come,” he saidwith quiet authority, “I’ll walk and talk.”

Alice fell into step beside him, dragging Ovan along.

“They’re called Aevorran,” the Aurorai began, gathering his team as he moved. Each warrior bore a weapon embedded with glimmering crystal cores, pulsing with restrained power. “They’re either the descendants or the desecrated of the Azure—a forgotten remnant of an ancient oasis. A wellspring of naten, once stable... until it wasn’t.”

He glanced at Alice.

“They interact with time differently. For them, it’s not a line—it’s a field. A sea. And they can swim in it.”

Alice narrowed her eyes, impatient. “Cute story. What are they?”

The camp fell silent.

Even the wind seemed to hesitate.

The Aurorai stopped and leaned closer. His voice dropped, the word heavy with history and loss.

“Judgment.”


Commander Kaelen Rhyst stood tall on a crystal rise above the gathered camp. His armor shimmered with embedded blue shards, humming with quiet power. Around him, the Veil prepared—some veterans, etched by frost and flame; others, recruits with untested eyes. The shimmering lights of Borealis Peak cast ethereal hues over their faces as the alarm pulses continued, painting their world in danger’s colors.

“Eyes up.”

Silence followed. The wind carried his voice like a banner.

“We’ve got a situation. Aevorran surge reported on the western ridges. Leviathan emergence—likely. That means we’re not on a sweep. We’re walking into something.”

He scanned them—checking for fear, for arrogance, for resolve.

“You rookies—listen close. This may be your first fight. Don’t let it be your last.”

Kaelen touched the glowing shard in his breastplate.

“This—this is an Azure Shard.”

He paused.

“I got this very shard on my first sortie.”

The Veil erupted in glorious cheers and whistles, fists pounding into crystal and shoulder plates clashing with joy. The sound echoed like thunder through the spires of Borealis.

Kaelen raised a hand, then brought it down hard.

“Settle down.”

His voice cut through the celebration like a blade.

“The boy who claimed this shard cost two greater men their lives. And it’s not the will of that boy that’ll bring you home safely.”

His gaze moved pointedly toward Alice and Ovan and a heavy silence followed.

“It’s the will of much greater man who will bring us home safe.”

He let that truth settle before continuing.

“The Azure is not just energy. It’s memory. It’s emotion. It’s
possibility. And the Aevorran... they may just be the flames chosen. When they touch the Shard, it gives them strength—but it also gives them voice. Past and future bleed together. They hear the will of the flame. And sometimes… they obey.”

Kaelen began pacing before a projection flaring on the nearest crystal—an image of a Leviathan, all flame and curve, etched in shifting light.

“Leviathans form when someone—man, Elv, Aurorai—takes in too much Azure. They stop walking through time like the rest of us. It collapses inside them. They become *ɔsomething else”

He pointed to the Leviathan’s silhouette.

“You don’t fight a Leviathan. You fight its echo. You cut, it bleeds tomorrow. You dodge, and you’re already hit. It doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t care for sense. It is judgment.”

He turned to one of his lieutenants. “Veil attuned for warp echo?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Good. You’ll be issued resonant crystal-laced arms. They won’t kill it—but they’ll give you three seconds of clarity, Aim for the shards.

Kaelen faced his troops again, eyes like frozen stars.

“New orders: intercept before it reaches the settlement line. Cut off its arms. Then Isolate the core. The flame wants chaos—we bring it.

He turned to Alice again, his voice lowering to just above a whisper.

“You asked what they are?”

A pause, heavy as stone.

“They’re not just enemies. They’re the consequence of centuries of arrogance.”

He faced his warriors again, drawing his blade.

“Veil! Form ranks. Two flights. Crystal sync. We move in five.”

Alice turned to Ovan and gripped her Crystal blade in hand. Shenglanced down at the dressing hed made fornher wounds and uttered one sentence. "Im going with them."

[Ovan Hellgate]

Stepping through the portal bathed Ovan's eyes in fresh waves of new energy, the auroras atop Borealis Peak drowned him in magnetic forces far closer than he'd seen before through the observatories he studied at. He winced, acclimating sooner than it took to adjust to Sorith's seething energy filling the room after the Crown Jewel Ceremony, but still gaining normal eyesight after they had been whisked away from the voice of Sareth to be briefed by the Aevorran resistance, the Veil. On the backdrop of this beautiful mountain peak where the stars still glimmered behind the cascading aurora, Ovan was dragged off by Alice to follow the warrior prepping his team, the Veil, for their sortie.

The nameless commander offered an amazing sortie to his troops, war torn veterans and bright faced greenhorns ready to face off with an apparent timeless, formless entity that could have already sealed all their fates. He revealed an Azure Shard he gained with a mountain of cost, the very same type of shard Ovan was tasked with to assume his role as Crown.

Was this whole armada condemned to death for facing this threat?

"Whoa whoa!" Ovan said, grabbing onto Alice's arm before she dashed off to join the ranks of this damned army. Even with their matching tools and the wealth of energy coating this hallowed peak, Ovan had little faith that this whole squad wasn't flying headlong to their demise; he just watched three of their ranks step over his patient body and fly headlong into their deaths before providing an escape route to them. Unless they provided him with some concrete evidence that their assault could succeed other than their commander's personal trophy, the scholar didn't see any reason either of them should join the Aurorai in their headlong leap into the maw of despair.

"I get that you have something to do, but they JUST SAID that there's centuries of arrogance they're about to try to overcome. You're wounded already, why would you die alongside them if you have a greater purpose to fulfill?"

Ovan caught himself in mid thought, a little ashamed that he'd rather live to fight another day while the ranks of the Veil sortied around him. He was a calculated thinker, often in the company of astronomers, mathematicians, archaeologists, scholars who often had an understanding of their undertaking before devoting themselves to it. Caution served him well in the Crown Jewel Ceremony, providing him with the keys to the kingdom only to be humbled by the raw power of Sorith before he could assume the Crown himself. He returned to Cold Frontier and was put through the ringer by Lana, their training coordinator for Ars Culina, but jumped at the chance to explore more depths of demonology with Okoye and narrowly escaped with her. Even in the Black Pit of Cascadaffa, the Five Eyed Scion narrowly missed devouring his soul after his team gravely underestimated the abilities of the demon they hunted. His caution ran like a double edged sword through his life, and Ovan finally really realized how that could cripple him as the Crown of the Horus Hellgates.

This could be his best chance at retrieving a shard of this beast to assume his rightful place as the next Horus Crown, but this Leviathan was a beast he felt completely unprepared to meet. How many of these men would be thrown at the feet of this creature before he could walk away with a victory?

[Alice Akuma]

Alice stopped, feeling Ovan's hand grip her arm, his words hammering a truth she already knew far too well. She wasn't ready for this. She wasn't trained for it. She wasn't even armed with the kind of power it would take to stare down a Leviathan and live. Every part of her that had been raised to play it safe, to shrink away from true danger, screamed at her to listen to him and retreat.

But deeper inside — buried under the cautious lessons of her family, the fearful warnings passed down through generations — something else stirred.

"I know," she said, voice low, her gaze locked on the swirling auroras above them. "I know this is stupid. I know I'm not ready. I know I might die for nothing."

She turned to look at him fully now, her face pale but resolute. "But if I don't do this — if I don't try — I'll never stop being what they made me."

The words slipped out before she could stop them, and a fresh sting of anger bloomed in her chest. How could she explain it? How could she make him understand the war she fought inside herself every single day? Her family, the Akuma bloodline, once warriors of legend... now reduced to whispers and closed doors, living in fear of the very strength they once commanded. She didn't even fully understand it, but she felt it — the yawning gap between what she was born to be and what she had been raised to become.

Facing death — facing this Leviathan — wasn't just about helping the Veil. It wasn’t even about winning. It was about refusing to run anymore. It was about finding out if there was still anything of that forgotten legacy inside her, anything that could stand proud against the dark.

"I can't live hiding behind caution, Ovan," she said, more quietly. "Not anymore."

She squeezed his hand once — firm, grateful — then pulled away, stepping toward the gathering ranks of the Veil, even though her body trembled and every instinct screamed at her to stop.

"If I die... at least it'll be me dying," Alice whispered to herself, too soft for him to hear.

The aurora bathed her in its ghostlight as she went to take her place among the damned.

[Sophia Van Gongorei]

Slash clash blam!

The sounds of Sophia's spear clashing with the ebbing talons of the Leviathan caused trimmer in the air, shifts in the very foundation of the mountains. The air in the high peaks was thin and bitingly cold, but the inferno of conflict raging across the snow-dusted crags generated heat that defied the natural chill.

"Hmph." Sophia scoffed, the sound low and laced with ice, a counterpoint to the searing heat that ripped through the air beside her. She threw herself sideways, instinctively ducking under a sweeping arc of preternaturally blue fire that melted rock and vaporized the thin mountain snow in an instant, leaving smoking, barren scars across the pristine white landscape. The Leviathan, a colossal serpentine beast of shifting, azure scales that seemed to rearrange themselves as you watched, roared, its voice a temporal dislocation as much as a sound, a jarring disruption that made the world feel wrong.

Adjacent to Sophia, not quite side-by-side but always within mutual support range, moved the two surviving Aurorai. Elvn figures, their movements fluid and precise, almost impossibly graceful amidst the chaos, they were the only ones among the force capable of truly interacting, truly seeing, these impossible creatures that defied conventional physics. Their energy blades, shimmering with contained temporal force, met the intangible shifts of the Aevorran – a swirling vortex of chronological dissonance that pulsed and recoiled like something existing across infinite moments at once – keeping its paradoxically solid-yet-unreachable attacks from Sophia's back.

This wasn't born of camaraderie or trust. No shared history forged in battle, no bond of loyalty. It was a brutal, stark pact of mutual survival, hammered out in the first terrifying minutes when the scale of the encounter became horrifyingly clear. The Aurorai needed Sophia's raw, destructive power, her terrifying ability to inflict damage and draw aggro, to distract and momentarily cow the Leviathan, whose azure blaze was a threat even their temporal-attuned senses struggled to evade. Sophia, the Ebon Mistress, required their unique insight and their singular ability to fend off the Aevorran, a being whose very existence seemed to unravel conventional reality around it, leaving her vulnerable in ways mere physical attacks, even from god-tier monsters, never could.

The cost of this fight was steep. Sophia’s "Immortality", that grim talent that allowed her to claw her way back from death's embrace time and time again, came at a price – each return sapped her strength, draining the deep, dark well of deathly energy that fueled her being. Normally, this was a distant concern, a theoretical cost for impossible odds. But now, locked in battle with not one, but two legendary beasts that didn't just defy logic but actively mocked it, and with the power of her current rite already a fleeting experience under the strain, she felt her reserves burning through her like dry tinder, faster than they should. The well of deathly energy she commanded at the moment was shallower than liked to admit. Yet still well enough to do what she did next.

"Tch… I'm overthinking it."

The exclamation was harsh, a low growl of self-recrimination lost slightly in the cacophony of temporal grinding and arcane fire. Her last assault, a focused burst of corrupted energy meant to momentarily stun the Leviathan, had backfired spectacularly, the creature's temporal shield rippling like disturbed water and sending the force rebounding, multiplied. Sophia reeled, staggering backwards through the snowy mountains terrain. Mounds of rock and snow upheaved in her wake as she dug her dark-armored heels in, steadying her footing and carving twin, deep lesions into the mountainside before coming to a skidding halt.

As she braced herself, drawing ragged breaths, the information the Aurorai had imparted earlier, the cryptic, almost desperate details about the creatures' nature, replayed in her mind over and over. These creatures weren't just powerful; they were literal time anomalies. The Aevorran existed in a "sea" of time, its attacks like chaotic ripples across an ocean that shouldn't exist. The Leviathan, conversely, was the result of a "collapse" of it, an implosion of chronological energy made monstrous flesh, hence its raw, destructive force and localized temporal distortions. She had been focusing too much on what her eyes showed her, on what her mortal mind was desperately trying to conceptualize through conventional frameworks of power and resistance.

It was then, looking at the impossible, terrible dance of temporal sea and collapsed singularity playing out before her, that Sophia began to see the bigger picture, the horrifying truth behind their "invincibility."

These beings didn't follow reality; they were the broken laws. They toyed with time, treated objective truth as mere baubles to flick around, ornaments strung from the corpses of their victims across fractured time itself. There was no understanding them in the way you understood a dragon's fire or a titan's strength, no conventional conceptualizing something that bore no concept within conventional reality. What she needed to do was stop trying to understand and instead exemplify their example. Break the mold. For within her, buried deep beneath layers of grim pragmatism and deathly power, existed a paradox as well, a walking contradiction – she herself was a living enigma, a bringer of death that defied its own embrace, a scion of endings who kept not-quite ending herself.

These creatures, though mind-bendingly complex and terrifyingly powerful, were not omnipotent simply by virtue of their temporal nature. Their seemingly immortal forms were ordained not by fact, but by the blurring of lines, the temporal dissonance that made conventional death impossible. They could be slain. And unfortunately for them, the sacrilegious hand standing before them, wielded the very antithesis of their distorted, time-bound life – she was a scion of cessation, the final, undeniable end.

A cold, dark resolve settled over her, chilling the blood in her veins more effectively than the mountain air. She tossed her spear high into the air, its polished steel glinting against the brutal, overcast sky like a dark star. Her hands began to glow, a vibrant, sickly green – the nascent power of her naten, her connection to the unseen world of death and endings, beginning to surge as the suppression she habitually placed on it gradually waned under the extreme duress of battle. The Ava she signed were not rigid hand-signs but fluid, swaying motions that left energetic trails behind them, shimmering afterimages of dark power as if she was writing her magic onto the very air around her, inscribing runes of decay and cessation into the temporal storm.

"Death's searing hand descends... Souls tremble, life shall be rent... Silence claims the breath."

The words of her incantation slithered from her mouth like a spiteful vapor-laced haiku, each syllable draining the air of warmth and sound, leaving an unnatural pocket of stillness in the roaring chaos. With it came the gradual darkening of the naten suffused within her hands, shifting from vibrant green to a putrid, viscous dark green, like living bile given form and light.

"From Lo'Kaleer's depths... suffering seed of the Nether bloom...!"

Her hands ignited. Not with fire as the world knew it, the hungry devouring by thermal energy, but with a fearsome, deadly conflagration– the Deadflame, Necrofyre. It was the burning essence of the Nether, the realm of endings and restart, the chilling counterpoint to creation. The Nether – a plane for the souls of the fallen and imprisoned reside where death, life, and rebirth intertwine in a cycle beyond mortal Ken. This flame was the color of burning malachite, shimmering with an seemingly inert passion, cold and consuming. It didn't radiate heat in the conventional sense; yet its presence was smoldering. It wasn’t destruction by burning thermal energy that left ash; it was the annihilation of the organic, the living spark. The flame didn't consume; it erased the glimmer of life behind ones eyes, inflamed the breath of life in ones lungs until barely bone remained. Her eyes tinged with the same jade inferno she conjured, reflecting the lifeless, yet intensely present, light.

As her spear landed back in her hands, caught with practiced, deadly ease, it became instantly emblazed by the Deadflame, the dark emerald licking along its shaft and point, giving it an unholy, frigid glow that seemed to drink the surrounding light. Sophia’s glare, previously analytical and frustrated, now slithered into daggers poised to strike, sharp, unwavering, ready to cleave through impossibilities. She needed to test one theory, needing to bide just a bit more time until she finished calculating the implications of the information given to her against the fundamental nature of her own paradox.

If her hypothesis was right, if the inherent contradiction of her existence could be aligned with the core paradox of theirs, she might have just figured out how to kill two impossible birds with a single, deadly stone. Leviathans unlike the other creature were once mortal, twisted and reconfigured into an amalgam of Azure and flesh. If it's existence was a knot of life's hubris given shape, than the Deadflame detangled.

"Now...the fun truly begins."

She did not jump right back into the fray, binding, observing, poising herself for the perfect time to strike. This disguise of hers was soon to prove unnescary, she had to rely on measures that would not allow her to shelter her true nature anymore. The moment she was able, she would muster the killing blow, but for now, she needed to witness how Necrofyre interacted with this things.

[Alice Akuma]

The Warping Vei opened like a tear in the fabric of reality—spiraling prismatic light that carved through the snowy firmament of Borealis Peak. Commander Kaelen Rhyst stood at the head of his squad, his armor pulsing with shardlight as the crystalline gate swallowed them whole.

They emerged in the chaos of the lower ridge, fully charged with naten—the life force of the world—coursing through their limbs. The moment they stepped through, time bent violently around them, and a shockwave of freezing force rippled outward. The Leviathan shuddered, its colossal form cracking under the Veil’s effect, breathless against the temporal lock.

The battlefield became an easle—and in that moment, the impossible was made real.

“Now!” Kaelen roared.

The Veil warriors moved like streaks of light, converging on the Leviathan with precise fury. Its crystalline chest—the Azure Shard—had anchored, shimmering fully in time for the first time since its emergence. They struck in tandem, blades laced with resonant crystal plunging toward its core. The beast screamed—a shattering, multi-dimensional shriek that threatened to split thought itself.

Alice leapt with the others, and for the first time in her life, she didn’t hesitate.

Then, there was the anomaly.

When the Veil’s time-slowing field caught it
The anomaly , it convulsed, twitching like a dying bird. That alone was strange. Stranger still—when Kaelen pierced it with his blade, it bled.

“That's not possible,” one Aurorai hissed. “They don’t bleed…”

A beat of silence passed.

Then the Leviathan roared, its frozen chest beginning to melt under its own heat. The anomaly staggered, and the Leviathan moved not to strike, but to shield. It dropped onto all fours, wings arched over the anomaly, its blue flames licking the snow into hissing steam. A blast of Azure fire erupted from its maw—something no one had seen before.

The flames didn't burn like normal fire—they erased.

The first Aurorai caught in the blast screamed as their bodies reversed through time. One became a teenager mid-scream, then a child with a terror-stricken face—and then a bloodstain on the rocks, their entire life reversed to nothing.

Kaelen’s voice cracked through the horror.

“Fall back. Those flames cant be blocked!”

The Leviathan pressed its chest to the anomaly’s open wounds. The crystal pulsed, and the anomaly breathed again. The beast was healing it.

Alice stared, stunned—until her blood screamed.

A light sparked behind her eyes. Her vision fractured, then reassembled itself sharper, clearer. Her muscles moved with ancestral memory. Mammon’s Glint—her sight exploded with dimension, timing, trajectories, heat signatures, weak points.
And Akumic Circuitry—her nervous system ignited, glowing lines dancing beneath her obsidian black skin.

She darted into the fray, aurorian blade in hand, no longer hesitant. Her strikes were perfect. She knew where to move, how to pivot, when to strike. dodging funneles of flames and thrashing arms alike.

The Leviathan reared, swiping crystalline limbs as thick as tower trunks. One Veil soldier was crushed—no blood, just pulverized into glittering pulp and feathers. Another was thrown off the peak entirely, body caught in a glacial stream and never seen again.

Alice ducked and slid beneath the beast’s arm, plunging her blade straight into the now-exposed Azure shard. The Leviathan shrieked, staggered—then something darker happened.

The anomaly lashed at Alice’ breaking her grip on the blade. Then they fused. The Leviathan and the Anomaly fused with one.

Its skin melted into crystal, making muscle into flame. The two became one—an unholy, flickering hybrid with a skeletal winged frame, its limbs stretched unnaturally, fire leaking from the gaps in its warped body.

It screamed—and everything screamed with it.

Several more Veil members fell in an instant. They lunged towards the beast before the fusions and was caught a
In the creature's roar. Their bodies exploding into reverse-time vortices, limbs unevenly aged, hearts turned into infant versions of themselves that burst uselessly in the cold air.

Alice darted away narrowing to avoid the lethal range—but the fused beast was faster now. Too fast. A whip of molten-blue energy raked across her face. Pain split her vision—she screamed, fell back, clutching her left eye. Blood gushed between her fingers, a long burning gash just shy of destroying the eye completely.

Kaelen dove to cover her, rallying what remained of the Veil.

“Form the line! It’s defending the anomaly’s mind! That thing’s not just a weapon—it’s a memory! A soul!”

The peak cracked beneath their feet as the Leviathan let out another blast, and the sky above Borealis Peak was choked in spirals of freezing ash and time-warped fire. Alice stood again, face marked by a savage line, her eye throbbing—but unbroken.

“I can still see,” she muttered, blade in hand. “And I remember. I've…see these things before.”

[Ovan Hellgate]

Alice and Kaelen flew through the portal from Borealis Peak and back into the fray without Ovan, standing looking at the carnage in the Alps. The Aurorai, old and young, grizzled and green, took on the challenge of this time independent entity without a second thought, something Ovan couldn’t afford himself but envied about their resolve.

Balancing his responsibility to the clan and the mission he undertook to honor them tore at his heart, but seeing Alice throw herself into the battle against every odd steeled his will. She chose to persevere against this otherworldly threat, a quality he thought would make her a candidate for her own crown if her people had them. He was inspired to do something, but throwing himself into the jaws of doom untold was not on the list.

“They’re not doing much… But…”

Ovan spoke to himself with on the Borealis side of the portal, watching the Aurorai, Alice, and the shadowy female launching ghastly javelins at the creatures. Their dance melted ice from the peaks and ripped bedrock from the alps themselves, but the creatures, however mysteriously, were showing signs of recoil. That meant their tools, however small, were indeed working. He knew not much about live combat, but one thing he did have a mastery of was crafting tools for specialized purposes.

He watched the procession of battle continue, the Aevorran thrashed and crushed the Veil left and right, but Alice and her shadowy partner kept managing to escape its ghastly grasp. Like most other living creatures, they attacks focused on what they thought would be weaknesses in their biology, joints, underbelly, appendages left unguarded. Their strikes were many, but they continually suffered heavy damage from the Leviathan that flinched, but persevered. The resonant crystal-laced arms The Veil were issued worked their magic, but something else was needed to put this beast in the ground.

“That’s it!” Ovan said, snapping his fingers and looking around for any arms that were left by The Veil for him. To his side, he dashed and picked up a crystal-laced shield and started looking into its structure with his Fathom Sight. “They need to find that thing’s heart.”

Just when he formulated his next move, something made his hair stand on end and froze him in his tracks. The creatures’ roar pierced the portal and shook even the lofty foundation of Borealis Peak, rattling the few weapons left strewn about their camp. Ovan turned back to the portal to see not two creatures, but a single terrifying entity completely different from the ones he turned away from moments before. The ranks of The Veil seemed to have disappeared, cut immediately in half in no time at all. He still saw Alice and Kaelen and the shadowy woman swirled in her own thick mass of Naten, and she was the only person on the battlefield seeming like she had resolve and reserves to spare. She became the target of his latest crafting project.

Ovan called on a wealth of knowledge of physics for this emergency project, crafting the Mudra of Separation and plunging his index and middle fingers into the shield. His mastery of his Anthem allowed him to slip his fingers through the shield, wave them around like water and extract the shards from it like pulling oil from a pool of water. He amassed all of the crystals around his fingers in a dense, but malleable mass around his mudra. With his substrate drawn out of solution, he rubbed his fingers together and made a circle with his index and thumb, holding the crystal lens up to his eye.

The crystal lattices that made up the weapons The Veil used to wage war against the Leviathan glowed through the new lens he formed. The denser concentrations glowed brighter and the lens offered a rendering of the energy flowing to, from, and between the crystals and weapons themselves. “Yes!” He said, clenching his fist and running toward the portal to join the fray finally.

He leaped through the portal casting another Mudra of Separation, landing in the melting snow just beside Alice and Kaelen.

“Sorry I’m late, I needed a second to make a gift for our deadly queen! Have hold this for me!”

Ovan came through and with his free hand, dropped a small pouch from his side pocket with some of the high nutrition rations David prepared for him before he left for his mission. He had already given Alice one before the Veil arrived and whisked them away, whatever was left Kaelen could use for his remaining forces once te battle was done. According to Ovan’s calculations, the end approached soon after he reached the back of this shadowy character.

He ran through the snow to meet her, pulling and stretching on the bubble of crystals in his hand until he formed them into a single lens with a appendages to connect it to the shadow queen’s head and keep her densely glowing hands free. Approaching her, his Fathom Sight gave him a better view of the energy coursing through her body, a strange, but powerful and persistent energy not unlike those the Horus employed during their funeral rites. She was drenched in this strange energy from a realm of the Unseen he hadn’t encountered before and it made her look beautiful, shimmering in this ghastly shade of green novel to the scholar’s eyes. The headset he crafted from the crystals complemented her outfit nicely, understated, but artisanal. Approaching her seething with sickly green energy and her javelin in hand, he gulped and handed her the lens, staring the glitching creature down with a renewed resolve he borrowed from the strength he felt emanating from her.

“I made these for you. Put that javelin where it belongs.”

He smiled, winking at her and stepping behind her to give her full vantage to put the javelin truly where it belonged. Like the weapons from Borealis Peak, through the lens she’d be able to discern the concentrations of Azure in the creature to cripple it enough to bring it to heel. As the strongest person in the area, she had the heaviest responsibility, but with Ovan’s Azure lens, she’d have data to put it down for good.

“Can you see?”

He wanted to stay close, in case she needed extra support and to gain some passive understanding of where she drew her strength from if not from this realm. She interested him almost as much as the Leviathan Shard he sought from this accursed creature and his studious nature wanted to make the most of each moment.

[Sophia Van Gongorei]

The air of Vecrutia was a constant wound, sharp and acrid against the tongue, a raw scar across the mountain's stoic face. This realm was less born than forged, a place whose very stone and sky held the memory of tearing, knitted back together only to be rent asunder again in a brutal way. However, the tearing wasn't the slow, agonizing pull of geological time or ambient magical flux today. Today, the tearing belonged to the Aurorai and the Anomaly, a thing of temporal chaos made manifest. It was a shimmering distortion, a blur of merging moments and conflicting realities, defying comprehension even as it shredded the immediate present.

Sophia stood unyieldingly amidst the chaos. The wind whipped at the edges of the illusion that veiled her true form, clinging to the semblance of a typical warrior. Her spear, hidden beneath the illusion of simple metal, pulsed with a contained power that resonated with the wounded air. The Necrofyre, her signature Deadflame, manifested around it, not in chaotic bursts of dark energy, but coiling with deliberate, controlled burn – a burning, finality waiting to be unleashed. Her patience was a taut string, stretched painfully thin by the creature's maddening ability to flicker through time and space, frustratingly out of reach, a ghost dancing just beyond the veil of reality.

Then, the air tore open again, higher above the peaks, but this wasn't the Anomaly's uncontrolled flailing. This was the structured violence of controlled transit. A spatial rift bloomed, a gaping maw of patterned energy, spilling forth figures who had retreated earlier, their ranks thinning when the Anomaly’s power first crescendoed.

Initially, Sophia had dismissed them as cowards, rats abandoning a sinking ship of reality. Their hasty retreat had grated on her, a tactical withdrawal she simply hadn't afforded herself. But their return, newly armed with strange, glowing implements and arriving in a manner that resonated oddly, discordantly, within the fractured air, shifted her perspective. There was a calculated intent to this arrival. Whatever magic they had employed to escape and return imposed something on the creature. The Anomaly swayed, no longer a blinding blur of merging moments, but a monstrous form stitched together, its azure flesh momentarily coalescing, stunned, reachable, and—blessedly—killable.

A predatory, pearl-white stretch of teeth split Sophia's face in an open smirk. "Finally..." The word was a low growl, barely audible above the ambient howl of Vecrutia's wind and the creature's low thrumming. It was laced with anticipation, a hunter's satisfaction. It seemed her patience, the careful cultivation of the Deadflame around her spear, was about to be rewarded with the potential to end this temporal abomination. Certain death, delivered by her, felt, for the first time in this fight, within grasp.

Then, the beast did something unprecedented. It merged forms, not in the usual temporal flicker that left behind echoes and paradoxes, but a horrific, physical consolidation. It swelled monstrously, its shifting azure flesh rippling like a disturbed ocean, power condensing into a single, terrifying, impossibly dense mass. A horrifying, malefic wail ripped through the mountain air, a sound like the shriek of a thousand banshees stretched across eons, not just heard, but felt – the raw, unmaking reverberation of time itself being compressed and weaponized. It didn't just silence the newly arrived soldiers; it reduced them, moments before looking so resolute, to pools of limbs and churning primordial soup, reality collapsing in on itself within their very forms. Had she rushed headfirst like her instincts screamed moments ago, driven by that predatory urge, who knew what such a maneuver might have done to her? The calculated patience, it seemed, had saved her.

A figure moved into her peripheral vision as she was poised to strike, momentarily frozen by the raw horror that had just unfolded. A young man who, if she were being entirely honest, by the faint, almost sweet whiff of his naten, didn't belong here at all. This realm was too harsh, too old, too drenched in sorrow and cyclical destruction for anything so... fresh. Then again, none of them truly did, including the beast, with the sole exception of the ancient Aurorai who had retreated ages ago. Gingerly, almost awkwardly, he approached her, presenting a pair of what appeared to be goggles.

Sophia paused, her jade eyes narrowing slightly behind the illusion of her face. She couldn't have fathomed, barely for an instant, what such a small, out-of-place ‘puppy’ could have to offer her. Utterly ridiculous. But upon closer inspection, she could sense an ebbing energy from them, a faint, structured resonance similar to the strange blades Alice and the others carried, though different in quality, less overtly destructive, more... interpretive. That, and the undeniable fact that, though a bit crude in design, they were undeniably... stylish. A spark of something unexpected flickered behind her eyes.

"Hmm?"

The fact that he could even stand so close to her without being undone by the sheer presence of the Necrofyre radiating from her was noteworthy. He reeked a peculiar energy that she couldn't quite place her finger on, and frankly, didn't find particularly welcoming; it tasted vaguely of order and sunshine. Still, he had risked his life to present her with a gift, a gesture of unexpected courage in this realm of brutal self-preservation. And loathe as she was to admit it, even to herself, Sophia was a sucker for a good piece of fashion.

"Vintage?" she mused aloud, her voice a low rasp, picking up the lenses. She placed them on her face, pushing stray strands of illusory hair aside, the crude frames settling oddly against her temples. The moment Sophia opened her eyes behind the goggles, the world blossomed. Her vision didn't just change; it overlaid. The raw, chaotic creature was still there, a physical terror, but overlain was a parallel reality, a layer of pure information. The air, the rock, the mangled remains of the soldiers, the creature itself—everything was an array of colors, some seeming foreign even to the brief, vivid gleam of the earlier Aurora. They appeared like individual flames burning with structured vigor, lines of force, nodes of existence, threads of being. As her gaze settled on the Anomaly, she began to see swirls and patterns she hadn't perceived before, as if she could sift through the very weave of the creature's making, identifying not just its structure, but the places those seams might be undone, the vulnerabilities in its temporal tapestry.

"I can do more than see..." she breathed, a genuine, wide white grin stretching her lips – something seldom seen from the Matron of Grim, a terrifying expression of delighted comprehension. This boy was more impressive than he looked, and had just given her the blueprint of the beast's constitution, its very soul laid bare in intricate, colorful detail.

Her focus snapped back to the horror unfolding around them, the final echoes of the Anomaly's scream still vibrating in the air. "All of you... Take cover... or perish. I don't care which." The cold command cut through the lingering shriek of the Anomaly's wail, a stark dismissal of their fates. The Necrofyre around her bloomed, no longer contained, but radiating palpable cessation, a field of utter stillness that pushed back against the temporal distortion and the wounded air of Vecrutia.

"I suppose there's little need for this farce anymore," Sophia said, addressing no one in particular as her gaze was fixed on the Anomaly. With a whisper of necrotic energy, her illusion dissolved. The spear in her hand ceased its mundane guise, becoming obsidian and shimmering malachite. The form of a young, armored woman vanished, revealing Sophia in her proper state, brimming with raw, esoteric fury and ancient power. Her skin was the color of rich honey, hair draping behind her like endless night adorned with intricate gold accessories. Her eyes held the unnatural jade glow of the Nether, and the air around her hummed not with wind or magic, but with absolute stillness, the quiet of final rest.

"Midlight Fracture." The command was given to her spear, a mental incantation echoing only in the silent spaces of her power. Sophia's eyes tinged further, reflecting the lifeless, yet intensely present, light of the Necrofyre now fully manifested. The single spear pulsed, the malachite flame coiling around it like a living, dark viper, ready to strike. Then, with a silent snap echoing only in the realm of energy, the spear duplicated. It wasn't copied physically, but fissured, the dark crystalline structure and the contained Deadflame splitting and reforming like shattering glass, mending itself instantly into two perfect, identical weapons.

One spear became two. The two split again, becoming four. Four became eight. Eight twisted and shimmered, multiplying until twelve perfect, terrifying copies of the spear, each engorged with the cold, burning malachite of the Necrofyre, hovered in the air around Sophia. They spun in a silent, deadly halo, their points aimed at the Anomaly, their malachite tips glowing with the knowledge gifted by the strange goggles.

With a sharp, mental command, Sophia unleashed them.

The twelve spears shot forward, not with fiery trails but leaving behind faint, shimmering wakes of malachite light and a profound, localized cold that bit at the air, freezing tiny motes of dust mid-fall. Enabled by the shimmering goggles gifting her enhanced sight, they didn't blast or explode against the Anomaly. Instead, they attacked with surgical precision honed by revealed knowledge. Like needles through cloth, guided by the glowing patterns only she could see, they pierced the shimmering distortion, cutting through its chaotic energy with unnatural ease, cleaving shards of its azure flesh where the temporal seams were weakest. Thwock. Thwock. Thwock. Each impact was faint, almost anticlimactic physically, yet left a weeping wound that glowed with the profane Necrofyre, threads of dark energy already beginning to root themselves.

As each spear withdrew after its strike, it didn't vanish. Instead, the malachite flame's thin, shimmering thread remained, anchored to the Anomaly where the spear had struck, a dark filament woven into its being. The spears circled again, striking from different angles, following the luminous blueprint, weaving a complex, glowing web around the thrashing distortion. Each targeted cut produced a new thread, and each thread produced a deeper venom that tightened the net, like a spider weaving a prison of woven death for its screaming, struggling meal.

The Anomaly roared, a sound that tore at the fabric of reality, trying to shake off the binding threads of Necrofyre with surges of chaotic energy. But the threads held, anchored by the dark energy that Sophia wielded, a fundamental opposite to the creature's own chaotic existence. The now innumerable threads, pulled taut by the returning spears, maintained the tension, encasing the Anomaly in a horrifying chrysalis of luminous wounds and woven Necrofyre webbing. The structure pulsed with the sickly malachite glow, the Anomaly's chaotic energy contained, unwoven, by the sitting blaze of the Nether.

Sophia raised her hand, the jade light in her eyes intensifying to a blinding, infernal sun contained within their depths. This was the final step, the technique she called "Unweaving." It wasn't destruction in the sense of shattering, but a complete, total dissolution of form and essence, using the Nether's power to pull apart the very strands of being, to dissolve a creature's core nexus of life into ambient nothingness.

With a surge of will, fueled by patience, knowledge, and raw, ancient power, she commanded the contained Necrofyre to consume, to unmake in a pluming blossom of death.

[Fate I]

It stood still, impossibly still, staring up at the clouds.

The sky, fractured and gray, held something. Something old. Something familiar. The Anomaly tilted its head, peering through dimensions layered like translucent leaves. Behind those drifting shapes in the atmosphere, it glimpsed something stirring far beyond. A flicker. A rhythm. A memory? No—an echo. Its gaze lingered.

And that was when the first spear struck.

A needle of cold pain lanced through its side, then another, then another. The Anomaly blinked slowly. It turned its head with idle curiosity toward the wounds, violet ichor hissing as the Necrofyre burned without heat. The spears had pierced it, yet it did not move—not at first. It observed.

Then, it swatted lazily at the air.

Another spear embedded itself in its flank. Another carved a spiraling path through one of its many eyes. Its movements became sharper. Less observational. More reactive. The halo of spears spun faster now, and the creature felt itself *targeted*—*mapped*—*understood*.

It roared, blue flames surging up in twin wings of fire, folding protectively around its distorted frame. But the spears kept coming. Their trajectories impossibly accurate. Their tips shimmering with truths the Anomaly had not consented to be seen. The blue wings flared to shield it, but the spears tore through, chipping away crystalline fragments, slicing strips of flame into ribbons.

It struck back.

With a shriek that cracked through dimensions, the Anomaly lashed its whip downward. The impact was thunderous, shaking the mountainside. Snow vaporized on contact, the shockwave ionizing the air. A choking cloud of charged, superheated particles burst into the sky, thick and blinding. Within that dense veil, it moved. Its form twisted through space, seeking cover from the relentless dissection Sophia had begun.

But the spears still found it. Even through the storm of ionic mist, they pierced, anchored, burned.

Then, something changed.

High above, beyond even the highest peak of Birealis, a point of azure brilliance began to bloom. A blue star—growing, spinning, pulsing with quiet wrath. The sky dimmed. The sun vanished behind its glare. The clouds warped, drawn into spirals around that impossible eye in the sky.

And then—collapse. The light shrank rapidly, a stellar pulse condensed into a single, glowing speck.

The Anomaly froze. Then, it *remembered*.

It moved differently now.

Its flames surged—bluer, hotter, more coherent. They burned not with rage but with *purpose*. The tangled filaments of Necrofyre that Sophia had stitched around its essence began to hiss, sizzle, then dissolve under the sheer force of the creature's reborn aura. One by one, the bindings broke like thread through acid.

The ionized snowcloud was no longer a shield. It was a weapon.

With an elegant flick, the Anomaly snapped its whip back into motion—coiling it like a serpent around its limbs and spine., twistingnit about like nunchucks The weapon spun, cracking the charged mist like a thunderclap. Each motion stirred gales of electrically charged snow, hurling flurries of superheated shards through the air like a blizzard of razors.

It danced now—graceful and monstrous. Its wings lie scattered across the ground, but its will remained. No longer shielding and defending but exalting its reborn power. The whip snapped forward, shattering the land and leaving lines of molten glass in the snow. Around it, the battlefield warped, heat and force bending the air, its every motion rewriting the storm.

The Anomaly had ceased to defend.
It had begun to fight.

[Alice Akuma]

The fight that had ravaged this place—this fractured, bleeding landscape—had already taken so much from her. Her limbs ached from battle beside the Aurorai, her breath came in bursts, crystallizing in the charged air. But something had awakened in her. Something old, buried, and dangerously alive.

She had come to this battlefield prepared to die. But now.... her eyes cut through the chaos like a hawk’s, and her body moved with the certainty of a dancer raised on nothing but war. She wasn’t wholly unequipped—she had trained, fought, survived—but never had she felt such precision. Such power. It frightened her.

She didn’t join Sophia’s assault. She didn’t lift her hands when the first spears began to dig into the Anomaly’s flanks. She simply watched.

It was easier than asking the questions that now threatened to tear her mind apart.

Sophia was no mere ally—Alice could see that now. When the illusions fell away, so too did the fog within her own memories. And suddenly, in the flickering blue light of the dimensional storm, everything fit.

This wasn’t her island. That wasn’t a woman.

Sophia was a terror, summoned into this world by her captor—Belif. That wretched, inhuman stench wrapped in a man’s skin. She remembered his voice now, soft and cruel. She remembered the cold of the hospital bed. The restraint.


Her breath caught. Ovan had stood beside Sophia, offering her glasses like one might offer a candle to a wildfire. He had no idea.

The horror of it was paralyzing.

And then—the sky lit up.

A blue star had bloomed, pulsed, then vanished. And in its wake, the Anomaly had transformed. Its wings lay scattered across the battlefield, but its will—its will—remained, vibrant and searing.

The creature’s whip began to coil around its towering frame, pulling wind and snow into cyclones of fire and static. Alice dug her heels into the slush, bracing against the buffeting force. Her fingers instinctively danced into Ava, weaving naten into —lightstrings. But she wasn’t ready for what came next.

The Leviathan snapped its whip into the earth.

The ground screamed

A burst of superheated, ionized air exploded outward, splitting the battlefield with blinding light and force. The air ignited around her, and for a moment, she couldn’t see—couldn’t breathe.

The ground howled as the Leviathan’s whip struck home, vaporizing ice, snow, and stone in a deafening blast. The air itself turned against them, tearing through the field with the force of a hundred storms.

Alice’s Ava sparked but ahe knew….she wasnt prepaired.

Then—

“Stand behind me!”

The voice cut through the wind like a bell struck in a cathedral. It was the Aurorai commander.

His body was battered—feathers scorched, his movements slow from exhaustion—but his resolve held fast. In one elegant motion, he plunged his hand into the inner lining of his mantle and pulled free a crystal that glowed with an impossible blue. The Azure Shard.

Alice had seen an Azure shard before and as her memory jogged, she even seen leviathans before. Though her people never had a name for them, other than nightmare.


This shard in the commander's hands pulse like a beating heart, and when he held it aloft, the air around it turned silent, heavy.

“No!” cried the last surviving Aurorai. One of the Rookies from the flock. She limped forward, wings torn, eyes wide with terror.


“Commander, that shard….—it’ll rip you apart!”

But the commander didn’t falter.

He turned to her—softly, as though apologizing for something deeper than words—and nodded once.

“I know. I owe….this to the Aurorai who've fallen and those still standing.

Then he slammed the shard into the ground.

It didn’t explode.

It “drank”

The shockwave from the Leviathan’s burst hit the crystalline energy of the Shards lightfield with all its fury—but the Azure Shard “absorbed” it. The very kinetic energy vanished, consumed by the shard’s impossible hunger. Wind turned to silence. Heat vanished into glowing blue tendrils.

Alice felt the force pass around her like a tide bending to a reef. She continued to weave her Ava and stabilized her mind. Tossing glances at Sophia, who was standing several paces behind.


Then came the scream. It wasn’t the Leviathan. It was the commander.

The shard had begun to crack.

Azure veins raced up his arms, burning through his body. His form twisted, folding inward into light and dust until there was nothing left but feathers, falling like snow.

Alice could barely breathe.

The rookie screamed, collapsing as she watched her mentor turn to vapor.

But the field was calm now.

The Leviathan was winding back from the failed burst—its limbs exposed, its momentum disrupted.

[Ovan Hellgate]

Ovan had taken enough of a step back to avoid the flourish of Sophia's Necrofyre, the eerie green power she distilled, magnified, and multiplied and fired off directly at the unfathomable beast. She donned his new goggles and put them to good use, landing her strike and doing what looked like massive damage to the otherworldly creature.

Oh, she's scary. Nice.

Ovan was captured by her strength, her adaptability, and her keen sense of style. Even the spears she launched looked like they were part of her outfit, not like matching armor, but more like an ensemble created just for her. She looked stunning slaying their foe and he felt proud for a moment offering he rthe tools to hunt their quarry.

Then, in the blink of an eye, Azure creature shrugged off its damage and awakened again with an ear piercing roar that brought the Aurorai to their knees, somehow vaporizing some of them before Ovan could even crane his neck to observe the phenomenon. By the time he gasped, the Commander leaped forward with his own shard of Azure to stifle the cascading waves of Azure smiting the forces of their saviors from Borealis Peak. One by one, they vanished, fell to dust, vaporized in concerted response to the beast's renewed fervor, and Ovan winced as the Commander's body was taken over by the Azure shard that looked like it funneled much of the creature's calamitous roar towards it.

Still, too late for much of the Aurorai.

The commander left them, Sophia, Ovan, and Alice, with a single gift and that was the beast in some form that seemed... tangible... Almost like it could bleed, like it could die. Ovan felt a renewed resolve rush through him, like he caught the frame that he knew victory was possible. His acuity for analysis brought another innovative idea to him, inspired by the sacrifice of the Aurorai and his distaste for close quarters battle with a creature that could roar them out of existence.

Ovan took a deep breath and dashed through the snow with immaculate grace, sliding past one puddle of Aurorai and relieving it of its shield. He slid right past another and picked up a longsword from empty armor and dove behind a frozen stone for another short moment to work in his new idea, courtesy of the curious femme fatale. A tiny moment of guilt shot through him, but Alice lasted this long on her own and he couldn't think of anything that could help her directly so he focused on his own chances.

"Anyone need another snack?" Ovan asked while working the curious metals out of the spoils of war. He had a satchel still full of highly nutritious morsels courtesy of David and Lana back at Cold Frontier. While he worked, he still had support to lend and needed the cover to bring his newest idea to life.