Panic broke across the inner city of Libertatis like a wave finding the shore. People spilled from the streets into the nearest doorways, throwing themselves into houses that offered no real safety, while others were desperate.
Certain the ground itself could no longer be trusted, they leapt straight off the edge of the flying rock rather than wait to see what was coming for them. Dust hung thick where buildings had already given way, and beneath the screaming a deeper sound rolled through the stone underfoot, slow and patient, like something enormous taking its time.
Achlys ran through it with the others, Lecia, Cryo and Crevial flanking him, the four of them cutting between fleeing bodies while the armored figure closed the distance behind them, step by measured step. He didn't run. He didn't need to. Every stride he took landed exactly where the city had just been, and the gap between him and them kept narrowing all the same.
"Cryo! Lecia!" Achlys's voice cut through the chaos. "Protect the people. Get them down safely!"
Cryo nodded once and broke off to the left without a word. Lecia threw a grin over her shoulder even as she moved. "Kya! I will, honey!" Then she was gone too, peeling off in the opposite direction, and it left Achlys and Crevial alone with the thing chasing them.
"Crevial—" He grabbed half a breath. "This might sound stupid, but get the guards at the entrance. Maybe they can help with this."
Crevial didn't answer. She simply leapt, wings catching the air, already a streak toward the gate before he'd finished the sentence. And then it was just him.
"I'll hold him off," Achlys said to no one, and turned to face the man walking out of the settling dust.
Each footstep landed with the same unhurried rhythm as the last, as though the destruction behind him cost nothing at all.
"...Where are the others. Lower being."
Achlys's eye twitched. "Why should I bother telling you."
The figure smiled. It was not a pleasant expression. "I'll get it out of you, human."
He tapped the ground once with the curved length of his shacram, and the stone beneath Achlys erupted upward, hurling him into the air.
"What the—!"
He scrambled for orientation mid-flight, searching for a landing that wouldn't break something important.
"Don't lose focus now," the figure said, almost gently, and a pillar of stone slammed into Achlys's back like a hammer.
It drove him into the earth. Two houses on either side of the impact crater groaned and slammed shut with him caught between them.
"Stop toying with me!"
The houses split clean in half a heartbeat later.
He was moving again before the dust cleared.
His skills, Boost and Skip lit beneath his feet, and he covered the distance in a blink, sword already in his right hand, the weight of his Order gathering as he appeared directly in front of the man. The figure's arm was already coming around in a wide, telegraphed swing.
Achlys saw it coming. He shifted his attack mid-motion, driving his blade through the open ring of the shacram's head and wrenching it wide, knocking the weapon off-line with his own sword.
"Smart move," the figure said, almost admiring, "if you knew what came next."
The punch caught Achlys square in the chest and sent him airborne.
"Augh—!"
The figure was on him before he'd finished screaming, vaulting onto his flying body and slamming him back into the ground hard enough to crater it, then seizing him by the leg and hurling him through the window of a nearby house.
"C'mon, human. At least try to entertain me."
Achlys reappeared in the broken window frame, blood running down one side of his face, one arm hanging wrong. He bit down on his own lip hard enough to draw blood and didn't stop biting.
"Pain is needed," he muttered, and launched himself forward to finish it.
A disc cracked into the side of his head and stopped him cold.
He turned, dazed, to find one of the city guards standing in the middle of the street, Achlys's fallen sword in one hand, his own returning disc caught easily in the other.
"Fight someone with your own power," the guard said.
The figure clicked his tongue, and in the space between one second and the next, he was simply standing in front of the guard instead. "I've always hated you people." His fist caught the guard across the skull. The crack that followed didn't sound like it belonged to a living thing.
He looked down at his own hand afterward, frowning faintly. The knuckles had broken on impact. "Physical damage can't do anything to you, can it." He let the hand fall and looked back up at the guard, who was…somehow, impossibly…still standing.
He raised his palm. The shacram flew back into it across the open street. "Tell the gods I said hello," he said, almost cheerfully, and tapped it against the stone.
A pillar tore free of the earth and rocketed toward the guard.
"Hey, idiot! Can you block this?" a second guard called, already dropping out of the sky with his arms crossed over his chest.
He hit the ground in front of the pillar and took the impact directly on his own body without breaking stride. "We protect this city with our bodies. Each other's, and our own." The first guard (the one with the disc) was already sprinting at the figure as he said it.
From where he lay, Achlys caught movement at the far edge of the city: a sphere of ice forming there, vast and slow, beginning its descent toward the lower districts. Closer, two more ice pillars were already screaming toward him.
Cryo and Lecia landed in front of him a half-second before impact, and Crevial arrived at a dead run behind them. "The guards were already coming, Ach-" She stopped mid-sentence. "Cryo, his arm!"
Cryo turned, saw the wrongness of it, and froze the limb solid before the bone had finished setting crooked, the arm sliding back into place as the ice locked it there. Achlys hissed through his teeth but didn't pull away.
"What were you thinking?" Cryo's voice cracked with something closer to fear than anger. "If Lecia and I can't stop him, what made you think you could?"
Achlys looked down at the frost climbing his own forearm. "I... wanted to save the people here."
Cryo exhaled hard and raised his hand, toward Achlys or toward the fight, it wasn't entirely clear, but Lecia caught his wrist and shook her head, her grip tight enough to whiten her knuckles. "I'm supposed to protect him," she snapped. "I'm his servant. He's my master. Don't you forget that."
"This really isn't the time," Crevial said, stepping between them before it could go further. Something over Cryo's shoulder had caught her attention, and when he turned to follow her gaze, the argument died on its own.
The guards were on their knees in the street, bleeding into the stone, and the figure was walking toward them without any particular hurry.
"Weak," he said. "Not even worth my master's time." He swung the shacram down toward them.
A wall of ice rose between them and, absorbing the whole blow.
"If it's alright with you, Achlys," Cryo said, already gathering frost in both palms, "we'd like to be set loose on him."
Achlys nodded.
Cryo drove the ground beneath the figure into solid ice and split a spike straight up through it from below. "Here we go, Lecia." And then they were gone, both of them, vanished into the speed of the engagement.
Achlys made his way to the fallen guards with Crevial at his side, kneeling to help the nearer one up. The guard pressed Achlys's sword back into his hand. "Yours, human." Achlys took it, still favoring the arm that had only just stopped being broken. "I need to get to Cryo and Lecia," he said, and was already turning to go when something in his gut told him to duck.
He dropped flat to the street a half-second before the world tried to end.
"GIVEN SKILL: LAW BREAKER."
The figure landed and clapped his hands together once. The shockwave that followed erased nearly a third of the city in the space of a breath, buildings folding outward in a ring of collapsing stone and shattering glass, the wave of force rolling on long after the buildings themselves had stopped existing. Screams rose and then cut off in the same instant, swallowed by the dust that came rolling after.
"Tch. Annoying creatures." Cryo had appeared behind him in the wake of the blast. He was seized by the skull and slammed into the ground before he could finish whatever he'd been about to do.
Lecia was already closing in. The figure caught Cryo by the arm instead and threw him bodily into her path. "More. More!" He was running at both of them as they fell, laughing in a register that had nothing human left in it, until fourteen walls of ice rose between them, spikes erupting from every surface.
"REVERSED SPIKES," Cryo barked from somewhere behind the wall, and the figure barely turned aside in time.
The guards forced themselves back up. "We are the guards of Libertatis," the one with the disc said through blood in his teeth. "We protect this city until we die." He slammed the disc into the figure's chest at full force and followed it with a kick that sent him crashing into Cryo's spike wall. The first clean hit either of them had managed to land.
Achlys turned to Crevial. "You said this is your brother. What's he weak against?"
Crevial didn't answer immediately. Her gaze stayed fixed on the fight, jaw tight, fist closing slowly at her side. "My last living family," she said finally. "And the guards' best-kept secret. He always knew what he was, but this isn't him. Not really. He's being controlled." She let the breath out slowly. "Lopo ver Pius. Full-blooded heir to the throne of this free city."
Her fist loosened. "He has the body of a king. There's one weakness in it. If he ever recognizes someone stronger than himself, his body accepts the pain. Accepts the death."
Achlys turned that over for a moment, then sheathed his sword.
"Bellona," he said quietly. "Could you take over."
The mark on his arm pulsed yellow, and a low laugh rolled out of it. "Oh, I can. Easily. But your body isn't built to carry what I-"
He slapped himself across the face hard enough to cut her off.
"So you can. Then do it. I don't care what it costs me…protect the people."
Bellona's laughter rose, delighted now, and black crept through the tips of Achlys's hair as his eyes darkened from edge to center. "I'll take half the wheel for now. Be ready."
Where Achlys had stood, something else now stood in his place, call it Ors, for lack of a better word for the fusion. It vanished from beside Crevial before she'd finished turning to look at him, and reappeared beside Lopo in the same heartbeat.
"SEVENTH ORDER: MYRIAD SURGES."
The walls of ice came apart. The ground came apart. Cuts opened in houses hundreds of meters distant, the air itself seeming to fray along invisible lines, and when it was finished, Ors sheathed the sword without ceremony.
Lopo's armor was scratched from collar to boot, and the whole street had gone still and silent watching him slowly climb back to his feet.
"Two and a half seconds," he said, almost conversational. "Thirty thousand slashes, cuts, and swings. And you only managed to scratch my armor."
He stood fully upright, the cracked plating shedding off him in pieces, and reached for the shacram where it had fallen.
Two blades came out of nowhere and buried themselves in his back.
A fully armored figure, winged, carrying a pole the size of a small tree, dropped from somewhere above and drove the haft of it into Lopo's stomach, the blow sending him through three houses, two church steeples, and finally bouncing off the ground to slam directly into the castle at the city's center. The structure cracked down its full height and folded in on itself in a single, thunderous collapse.
"Dop... dop..." Lopo managed, somewhere underneath the rubble.
The figure who'd thrown him touched down lightly, the two blades flying back to lock onto either end of her pole as she landed.
"Lisare?" The guard standing nearest Crevial blinked at her, baffled. "What are you doing here?"
In Achlys's voice, but not quite his cadence, Bellona spoke once more. "That's enough, Achlys. Your body can't take any more." Then she was gone, folding back into the mark, leaving him standing there blinking and entirely himself again.
"Oh, hey! Kind armored guy." Lisare turned toward him, reached up, and unwound the chains wrapped across the lower half of her face, revealing it beneath them was a face that was, by any measure, beautiful.
Lecia made a noise like she'd been personally wounded. "How dare you look that pretty in front of my husband." She rounded on Lisare with a finger jabbing the air. "Don't even think about making him yours! He's mine. Got it, armored bitch?" She was still going when Achlys crossed over, grabbed her by the back of the head, and smacked it lightly enough to shut her up.
Cryo sighed, long and well-worn. "Always this angel."
The castle Lopo had been driven into finally gave way entirely, the last of its towers folding down into the rubble with a shockwave that rolled outward through the street.
Then the ground itself began to crack.
Houses on the periphery of the wreckage collapsed inward as the whole flying island shuddered beneath them, a deep groan running through the stone like something waking that had been asleep far too long. At the center of the new devastation, a hole tore open in the earth, and pink light spilled up out of it in a slow, steady bloom.
.......................................................................................................
A man rose out of that light.
Pink-haired, limp-limbed, hanging in the air the way a body hangs from a noose rather than the way a living thing moves, he spread his arms slowly and lifted his face to the sky, pale glowing eyes scanning the ruin of the city beneath him without any visible reaction…no satisfaction, no surprise, nothing that suggested the devastation meant anything to him at all.
Then he found the group standing at the edge of the new crater and descended toward them without any particular urgency, snapping his fingers once as he came. A sheet of paper unfurled itself from behind him, opening wide enough to reveal hundreds of laws and rules written across its surface in a hand too small to read from any distance, the gray-white parchment rustling though there was no wind to move it.
Lopo appeared beside him a moment later, dropping to his knees, head bowed low. "Forgive me, my lord. I haven't been able to end their pitiful lives."
The pink-haired man looked down at him and rested a hand briefly on his shoulder as he walked past. "They're giving you trouble." It wasn't really a question. "I'll spend a mere fraction of my laws on them. Go take a few for yourself. Enjoy your playtime."
He took a few more steps forward, and the paper behind him began to glow—a slow, spreading gray light, like something coming awake.
"How many of you," he said, to no one in particular, "can dance?"