He deliberately stopped his pursuit, letting a carefully controlled hint of frustration show on his face, playing into the role of the overwhelmed, outmatched opponent she seemed to expect, perhaps even desire. "Come on, Alyssara," he called out, injecting a subtle note of strained exasperation, a calculated vulnerability into his voice. "Stop dancing around. Afraid to face me directly? Let me touch you."
It was a crude gamble, a blatant psychological ploy aimed directly at her arrogance, her possessiveness, her desire not just to win, but to dominate utterly, to prove her superiority through direct, controlling contact. For a single, almost imperceptible instant, her fluid spatial shifting stuttered. Her mind, perhaps momentarily caught between the ingrained desire to maintain absolute control over distance and the instinctive, predatory urge to accept his apparent challenge, experienced a fractional lag in its command over the local reality. Her constant warping flickered, just for a picosecond.
It was less than a microsecond, an opening invisible, imperceptible to any ordinary senses, even those of most Radiants. But Arthur's senses, amplified by Peak Radiant power, honed by two years of relentless training under Alice, and focused entirely on finding such a seam, registered the flicker. And his intent, honed by countless life-or-death battles, was absolute.
'Now!'
His fingers, already reaching from his last failed lunge, didn't need to physically traverse the remaining distance. Leveraging the momentary, infinitesimal instability in her spatial control, he activated No-Distance – not brute force teleportation, but the conceptual assertion of location without travel, location without permission 1. His palm wasn't moving towards her; it simply was, instantaneously, where it needed to be. His fingertips brushed the surprisingly cool, almost static-charged fabric of her crimson silk dress, just above her stomach.
'Not goo-' Her thought, broadcasted unintentionally by her sheer shock at the impossible, intimate contact, cut off abruptly.
Arthur closed his fist, pushing forward simultaneously, completing the zero-inch punch. It wasn't about raw physical power; it was about focused, conceptual impact, delivered directly to her core before her defenses could fully reassert, bypassing her spatial buffer entirely. His knuckles connected solidly against the surprising tension, the subtle resistance, of her divine form.
"Ow," Alyssara breathed, a sharp, genuine sound of pain and utter surprise escaping her lips. A flicker of disorientation, of disbelief, crossed her perfect features. The punch itself, while carrying immense focused force, was unlikely to be truly devastating to her divine resilience – perhaps akin to a solid blow against tempered celestial bronze. But the fact that it had landed cleanly, that he had somehow bypassed her absolute spatial control, that he had touched her against her will when she believed herself untouchable, clearly shocked and infuriated her on a fundamental, conceptual level.
The playful, condescending amusement vanished instantly, completely, replaced by a glacial, terrifying fury that radiated outwards, chilling the very air. She reacted with blinding, reflexive speed, divine power erupting around her. Her hand lashed out, grabbing his punching arm with inhuman strength far exceeding her delicate appearance, twisting it brutally, aiming to snap the bone cleanly at the elbow. Simultaneously, Arthur felt the familiar, insidious crawl of her crimson threads attempting to infiltrate his arm, seeking not just to inflict pain, but to suppress his natural regeneration, to ensure the damage was permanent, a lasting, humiliating mark of her displeasure.
CRACK!
A sickening sound echoed sharply in the unnaturally quiet chamber. Alyssara ripped his arm off at the shoulder with a snarl of triumphant fury. Or rather, what she thought was his arm.
Instead of flesh, blood, and bone, she held a disconnected collection of blackened, ancient-looking skeletal fragments, held together tenuously by flickering strands of dark, entropic energy. Erebus's bones, projected, solidified, and subtly substituted for Arthur's real arm via Grey spatial manipulation just nanoseconds before her grip fully tightened and the brutal twist occurred. A minor construct, a calculated sacrifice, offered up to avoid a debilitating injury while gathering more data on her physical strength and reaction patterns.
Alyssara stared at the skeletal limb crumbling rapidly in her hand, her fury momentarily displaced by confusion, then by a flicker of grudging, almost impressed, acknowledgment. "A cute trick," she conceded, crushing the bones to fine, iridescent powder with a contemptuous squeeze. The dark energy dissipated harmlessly into the controlled atmosphere. "Using your pet Lich King as a convenient spare parts depot? Why don't you bring that darling skull-boy out to play properly? Let's see how he fares against true divinity."
"I am not stupid enough to feed him to you," Arthur retorted calmly, flexing his real arm, which he had retracted fractionally during the substitution, the Grey power within already smoothing over the minor conceptual strain of the rapid, complex maneuver. Erebus was a powerful ally, a Lich King of considerable might, but against a Divine entity wielding Complete Control, his role was purely auxiliary – distractions, decoys, subtle manipulations from the relative safety of his shadow dimension. Direct confrontation would result in his immediate, permanent destruction.
Alyssara contemptuously tossed the swirling bone dust aside. The brief flicker of pain and surprise from the zero-inch punch was completely gone now, replaced by a colder, sharper, more dangerous focus. The playful testing, the manipulative dance, the psychological games – all seemed definitively over. Her aura intensified dramatically, the subtle pressure becoming a tangible, suffocating weight once more, the very air growing thick and resistant around her. The temperature in the alien sanctum dropped noticeably, a chill that had nothing to do with physical cold and everything to do with her rising divine wrath. Her form began to subtly shimmer, less sharply defined, the crimson silks seeming to bleed into the fabric of reality itself, her eyes glowing with a dangerous, internal light that promised annihilation.
"Very well, Arthur," her mental voice echoed, stripped bare of its earlier warmth or manipulative amusement, resonating now with chilling, absolute power and a hint of genuine rage at his impudence, his refusal to play by her rules. "You wished to touch divinity. You succeeded. You landed your clever little blow. Are you satisfied? Did you learn what you needed to learn during our brief engagement?" Her aura flared, pressing down with suffocating force, far exceeding anything Arthur had felt before, even during the initial confrontation moments ago. "Because the lesson is now concluded. Playtime is definitively finished."