The distance between Ravi's hand and the Archon's palm was a meter. It was a universe. He closed it in a single, heart-stopping moment.
There was no sound. No scream of tearing reality. No hiss of dissolving matter.
There was only… contact.
The moment his skin touched the non-surface of the Archon's gauntlet, the world vanished. There was no square. No rubble. No Kaelith. No Lyssara. There was only Ravi, floating in an absolute, infinite blackness, facing the Archon. Except it wasn't the suit of armor anymore. It was a shimmering, geometric lattice of pure thought, a web of cosmic law that stretched into forever.
He wasn't in Vaelorra. He was inside Vyr. He had touched its operating system, and it had pulled him in.
[Error,] the crystalline thought of the Archon echoed through the void, no longer calm, but laced with a flicker of something akin to static. [Causality mismatch. You are not compatible with this matrix. Your resonance is… corrosive.]
Ravi looked at his own "hand" in this non-space. It was a chaotic, shimmering thing, a roiling ball of static and quantum noise, the physical representation of his dissonance. He was a virus that had just achieved root access.
He felt the Archon's vast intellect trying to analyze him, to categorize his dissonant nature, but it was like trying to catch water in a net. His reality and Vyr's did not obey the same rules. Kaelith's words came back to him: It is not of this world. Your power may not even affect it.
But the inverse was also true. The laws of Vyr's reality did not affect him. He was immune to its overwhelming psychic pressure, to its logic. He was a junk file that could not be read or deleted.
With a surge of defiant will, Ravi pushed. He didn't push with his body. He pushed with his entire being, projecting his chaotic, world-breaking nature into the perfect, crystalline lattice of the Archon's mind.
The effect was instantaneous. A hairline crack of pure, raw chaos appeared in Vyr's geometric web. It was a line of nonsensical, screaming color in a realm of perfect, black-and-white logic.
[Damage detected,] the Archon's thoughts came, strained now. [System integrity compromised. Isolate the contaminant!]
The void around Ravi began to constrict, walls of pure logic closing in, trying to box him in, just as the magister's shield had. But the walls were made of the same lattice he was corrupting. As they pressed against his chaotic form, they began to fissure and decay, the perfect lines of the Archon's being breaking down into screaming static.
He was poison to it. His very existence was anathema to its own. They were two absolutes, mutually exclusive. And for the first time since it had crawled out of the world-wound, the Archon was experiencing a sensation its eons of existence had never prepared it for: harm.
Back in the ruined square, reality reasserted itself with a violent, wrenching snap. Ravi was thrown backward, stumbling a half-dozen steps, his entire body shuddering. A thin trickle of blood dripped from his nose.
He was bleeding.
It wasn't a cut. It wasn't an impact wound. It was a nosebleed, a simple, mundane, physiological reaction to an immense, unnatural strain. His mind had gone to war with a god, and his frail, human body was paying the price.
Across the square, the Archon also staggered back. For the first time, it looked clumsy. Uncoordinated. A faint, almost imperceptible shimmer of static now clung to its lightless armor, like dust motes on a black mirror. It had been wounded, not in its physical form, but in the arcane, conceptual architecture that gave it substance in this reality.
Lyssara's voice was a choked, incredulous gasp from the comm-stone. "Ravi… what did you do? The slate… the hole in the map is… flickering. It's unstable!"
He had done the impossible. He had hurt it.
Kaelith, at the edge of the square, let out a raw, guttural cry that was half prayer, half war-chant. He gripped his battle standard, his eyes blazing. "The Sun strikes! And the darkness recoils!"
The Archon straightened up, the shimmer of static around its form fading. The psychic voice that filled Ravi's head was no longer a calm, academic report. It was cold. It was focused. And for the first time, it held a genuine, unmistakable trace of killing intent.
[Recalculating,] Vyr's thoughts came, each mental syllable a shard of ice. [The anomaly is not a tool to be acquired. It is a competing law. Incompatible. Volatile. Final protocol initiated: Sterilization.]
The offer was off the table. The performance review was over. This was no longer a collection mission.
It was an extermination.
The Archon's faceless head tilted toward the sky. It raised its hand, palm upward, toward the First Crack, the humming, permanent tear it had crawled out of.
[Consensus is breach. Local reality is forfeit. Calling the rain.]
Ravi didn't know what "calling the rain" meant, but the sheer, absolute dread that poured off the Archon told him it was the Vaelorran equivalent of a nuclear option. He had pushed the entity from logic into rage, from collection to destruction.
He looked down at the blood on his hand, the first time he had shed any in this world. It wasn't from a weapon. It wasn't from an enemy. It was from himself. From the strain of his own impossible power. It was the first sign that he, too, had limits. Not of invulnerability, but of endurance. His body was a human container for an inhuman force, and the container was beginning to crack.
He had won the first exchange. But in doing so, he had proven that this wasn't a fight he could simply touch his way out of. He had to engage it on a level that was physically and mentally tearing him apart.
He wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his hand and looked up at the sky. A change was happening. The humming, violet-black tear was beginning to pulse with a faster rhythm. And from its depths, small, dark shapes were beginning to emerge, like droplets of oily black rain, falling toward the city.
The Archon had called for reinforcements. And the first drops of a storm from a black and godless sea were beginning to fall on Vaelorra.