The wasteland of Lysameria's training grounds trembled again as Narisva Starisnova shot forward. Her Mystic Eyes of Spatial Awareness burned as she carved through the battlefield's warped geometry. Her vision captured every fold, every ripple and every potential path.
She vanished, executing Sight Teleportation at the exact millisecond her eyes predicted Adelasta's focus shifting. Her scythe came from behind, its blade curving with a spatial slipstream that dragged hyper-compressed gravity. Narisva then stacked Hyper Relative Velocity atop it, multiplying her speed tenfold.
Her scythe should have severed Adelasta cleanly. It did not. Adelasta merely leaned aside. Her perceptive movement wad so precise it looked like premonition. Her blade met nothing but displaced air.
Before she could react, Adelasta's counterstrike landed. Her fist found itself into Narisva's abdomen. Narisva choked as the shock rattled her ribs. She received another hit. It was an elbow to the jaw, then a kick. She stumbled, sliding back through dust and broken stone.
Adelasta's physical attacks stung worse than the arrows Elyonari used. Narisva coughed, clutching her stomach
"Why does every hit hurt?!"
Adelasta approached with calm steps.
"Narisva, stop relying on flashy space tricks. Think."
Narisva grit her teeth.
'Fine. If pure spatial combat isn't cutting it, then...'
She raised her hand. Space shattered like glass, splitting open into a void crack. She activated Spatial Severance.
Adelasta simply stepped to the side as the blade of nothingness passed harmlessly through the air.
Narisva snarled and switched tactics instantly, weaving a new grid over the battlefield. She used Gravity Manipulation around Adelasta's body, forcing multiple gravitational forces downward.
"Let's see you ignore this!"
The ground dented beneath Adelasta. Air compressed violently. A normal Divine would already be flattened but Adelasta didn't even blink.
"I've endured worse."
Crimson flame rippled over her skin, pushing away the weight of gravity as effortlessly as a wave brushing aside dust. Narisva's eye twitched.
"Fine."
A tiny star bloomed into existence overhead. Its radiance was so intense the space around it distorted. Adelasta didn't move as the sun detonated. Light exploded across the arena in a sweeping wave of annihilating heat.
When the glare faded, Adelasta stood there, her skin wrapped in roaring crimson flame.
"Why are you immune to a star?!"
Adelasta raised her hand and formed a thin, crescent-shaped blade.
"Because you fight like an Ascender trying to cosplay as a Divine."
She flicked her wrist and the crescent blade shot forward. Narisva teleported instantly, appearing behind Adelasta, ready to counter. A second crescent blade materialized from behind her, slamming into her back before she could even register it. Crimson flames erupted along her skin, burning not flesh but her spatial structure itself.
Narisva screamed, collapsing to her knees as the flames chewed through her defenses. She tore the burning layer away with a burst of warped space. Adelasta walked toward her with cold indifference.
"Are you done?"
Narisva glared upward.
"How... how are you defeating me? I've been training! Elyonari's arrow barely hurt me, but you? I'm losing to you?!"
Adelasta folded her arms.
"Narisva. For the last five years since the Sentina Erideae left Erna Isles, we've been training nonstop because we had to."
She crouched, meeting Narisva eye to eye.
"You were grieving Darling's 'death.' And while grief doesn't make you weak, it kept you from learning how to use your Space Divinity properly."
Sure, she had learned to summon suns, generate black holes and manipulate gravity but she did all of it like an Ascender refining techniques, not like a Divine mastering a Divinity.
"You fight like your old self. You keep relying on your Mystic Eyes to calculate everything. You expect spatial manipulation to carry you the way it always did."
She tapped Narisva's forehead.
"You're a Divine now. And you're using only half of what that means. Your power is stronger than ours by a wide margin. If you knew how to use your Divinity properly, your attacks would have killed Sixth Enlightenment Divines without leaving bodies behind."
Narisva stared at her, stunned.
"But you're not losing because you're weak. You're losing because you don't understand what you've awakened into."
Adelasta's eyes shifted as she pointed at them.
"The Mystic Eyes of Perception and my Existence Divinity is what I'm using against you. I'm anticipating your movements before you make them. And I can erase the existence of your spatial tracks before they stabilize. That's why your teleportation feels delayed. That's why your distortions collapse."
She lowered her hand.
"I'm not stronger than you, Narisva..I'm simply trained and you're not."
Narisva's shoulders slumped. Her scythe fell to the ground. Adelasta extended a hand.
"Give up. Lysameria wants you to see what you've been missing. Grief stalled your growth but it doesn't have to chain you. After all, Darling is alive, right?"
Narisva hesitated and then slowly and painfully, placed her hand in Adelasta's. Adelasta pulled her to her feet effortlessly. But before any of them could speak, a scream tore through the arena. The scream did not sound normal.
Phaenora was kneeling inside the water sphere and for a split second, their minds refused to accept what they were seeing.
Her eyes were bleeding. Liquid sapphire streamed down her cheeks, burning through her skin as if her face were cracking glass. Her pupils flickered between existence and absence, blinking in and out like corrupted frames of a broken reel.
Her body was glitching.
Sections of her form stuttered forward and backward. Her silhouette fractured into overlapping versions, some for half a second ahead and others lagging behind.as if multiple timelines were trying and failing to agree on where she should be.
Before anyone could move, Lysameria's vast water sphere, evaporated into gas. The arena slammed into view. Lysameria recovered first with sword already in hand.
"Lady Lysameria," Elyonari asked. "What's happening?"
Lysameria didn't answer immediately. She was staring at Phaenora.
"As a Nexus, even I do not fully understand the physiology of an Omniscient."
Phaenora screamed again. Her voice stuttered like a rewards glitch, breaking into static mid-syllable before resuming at a higher pitch. Her skin split along glowing lines as if something inside her was trying to claw its way out.
"No one should touch her!"
Phaenora collapsed to the arena floor.
Her body spasmed violently, glitching harder now. Entire sections of her torso kept glitching out of reality and snapping back in with nauseating distortion. The stone beneath her melted, turned to solid and then inverted itself inside out. Her screams became unbearable. Each cry carried layered harmonics that scraped directly against the soul, like multiple versions of her screaming across different realities at once.
Adelasta stepped forward with her crimson flames flaring instinctively.
"I can stabilize her. The Existence Divinity. If I—"
"NO!"
Phaenora's head snapped up.
"No. NO DON'T—"
Her scream ruptured again. Her body kept arching as sapphire light detonated outward in a shockwave that nearly tore the arena apart.
"VENERI... He's in danger! EXTREME DANGER!"
Her eyes rolled back as sapphire covered them completely.
"The Hidden Citadel—" her voice broke into static, then resumed. "—is a DEATH TRAP—"
Sapphire energy erupted outward. It was a lethal, omnidirectional burst that would have erased them instantly but Lysameria moved. She used her blade to make a single, perfect arc. The sapphire wave was sliced apart mid-expansion. Its fragments dispersed harmlessly into glittering dust.
A massive glacial structure made of pure sapphire erupted around Phaenora. It grew in massive spires, encasing her completely in an instant.
Lysameria raised her sword and hesitated.
"Something's wrong."
Narisva swallowed. "What do you mean wrong?"
Lysameria closed her eyes and her expression changed. Her hand trembled.
"I can't feel her body."
"What?"
"I mean at all. There is no physical presence or feedback."
Adelasta's eyes widened.
"Because Omniscients don't need one," she said slowly.
Lysameria nodded grimly.
"They don't require physical vessels. Consciousness alone is sufficient. The only reason Phaenora even has a body is because of my son."
"Veneri."
"Body and Soul Reconstruction, to be more elaborate. When his Aeterium abilities reached a sufficient threshold—likely during his Ascender phase—she must have anchored herself to a physical form. She chose to have a body."
"So if her body isn't responding…" Elyonari said slowly.
"Then she's abandoned it," Adelasta finished.
Narisva clenched her fists.
"She said Veneri is in danger."
Lysameria sighed as her sword turned to motes of light.
"If she said that, then it's already too late."
They all turned to her. Adelasta shook her head in disagreement.
"We can still go. We can intervene."
Lysameria snapped her gaze to Adelasta.
"No. The portal to the Hidden Citadel has already opened. If she sensed danger, then he's already inside it. If we interfere now… Fate will retaliate."