The Hellbound woke like a beast being fed.
Obsidian walls clawed upward, veined with glowing glyphs that pulsed in time with the crowd's hunger. Towers bled ash. Bone-banners snapped in a wind that smelled like metal and old screaming. Somewhere beneath the arena, chains dragged across stone—slow, patient, excited.
Qaritas stood with the others in the Ascendant section, wrists still marked where the golden shackles had been. His arms were splinted wrong, bound tight, the pain of the breaks sharp—but the Awakening pain behind his ribs was worse. It kept rising in tides, like something inside him kept trying to stand up.
Eon was quiet again.
Not peaceful.
Caged.
Small.
Fuming.
The fragments and citizens of Mrajeareim roared down at them from every tier—thousands of masks, thousands of mouths, all chanting for blood like it was prayer.
Below, the sand of the arena wasn't sand.
It was ground bone.
It crunched even when no one moved.
Zcain stood at the front of their section, rigid as a blade driven into the world. Nyqomi, Ación, Rykhan, Xasna, Laxiae, Shanian—the "royalty" of Taeterra, stripped of ceremony, still carrying command in the way they held their shoulders.
Tavran, Rivax, and Dheas stood with them. Tavran's face was set into something hard, something that didn't blink anymore. Rivax looked like he wanted to throw up and throw fire at the same time. Dheas watched the arena with the coldness of someone measuring how many bodies they'd have to carry out.
Qaritas's gaze searched for Niriai.
He found her.
She stood alone at the gate to the arena floor.
Mask on.
Blue-green corset dress cut sharp, like elegance meant for war. Her posture was too steady—too composed—for someone about to be fed to monsters.
But her sword—
Her sword hummed.
Quiet authority.
A straight double-edged blade, hollow channel down its center filled with shifting constellations—stars sliding, rearranging, vanishing into new configurations as if the universe inside it was thinking.
The pommel ring rotated.
Sigils clicked into alignment like locks deciding what kind of door they were about to become.
When Niriai held it, even the shadows of the arena leaned toward her.
Not because they loved her.
Because they respected her.
Because they knew what she was.
The Gatekeeper.
Across the arena, the throne sat like a wound.
Ecayrous lounged in it as if he'd invented comfort.
Chains writhed over the black stone, curling and uncurling like eager fingers.
His eyes lifted lazily.
He smiled at Niriai like he was watching a familiar play.
"Remember," he called, voice carrying without effort, "I am still the only one with the key."
Golden light flared at the wrists of those still bound in the Ascendant section—runes pulsing, reminding them of their powerlessness.
Then the light moved.
It slid off Niriai.
Like a collar being unlatched.
One by one, the runes unlocked only on the arena floor—only for the combatants of the Hellbound.
Ecayrous's gaze flicked up to Qaritas in the stands.
A slow, pleased smile.
"Try not to die before your match," he said, almost conversational. Then, softer, like a secret meant only to sting, "Broken arms look so… honest on you."
He winked.
Qaritas's vision flashed dark. His shadow twitched half a heartbeat too late.
Eon hissed in the back of his skull like a child denied a toy.
Then Ecayrous leaned forward slightly, the throne's chains tightening as if listening.
"Begin."
The arena gates screamed open.
And the air changed.
Not wind.
Not heat.
A distortion—as if reality remembered it could be unmade.
Two figures stepped out.
Atramenta first.
The Fragment of Dimensional Ruin.
It did not walk correctly. It moved like a space that had forgotten its geometry—shoulders folding in angles that didn't match any skeleton, limbs bending through shortcuts in the air. Its mask was smooth, featureless—yet the face behind it pulsed, like something trying to be born through porcelain.
When Atramenta breathed, the world around it stuttered.
Edges doubled.
Distance lied.
Then came Noct.
The Fragment of Cosmic Plagues.
It wore a robe made of stitched skins that bubbled like disease. Its hands were gloved in black glass, and everywhere it stepped, the bone-sand darkened—mottled, bruised, rotting in fast motion. Around it, tiny floating motes drifted—spores, or stars, or both—whispering sickness into the air.
Noct tilted its head.
And smiled through a mask shaped like a cracked moon.
The crowd screamed.
Not for victory.
For suffering.
Atramenta's voice came from everywhere at once.
"Oh," it said, delighted. "The Gatekeeper."
Noct's voice was quieter, more intimate, like a fever talking to your blood.
"We missed you," Noct purred. "You ran."
Niriai didn't answer.
She lifted her sword.
The constellations inside the hollow channel brightened, then shifted.
A new sky arranged itself.
And the arena—just for a blink—felt like a door that wanted to open.
Qaritas heard Tavran's breath catch beside him.
"Do they know?" Rivax whispered, voice raw.
Dheas didn't look away. "They're about to."
Down in the arena, Atramenta rolled its shoulders like a dancer warming up.
Noct's fingers twitched.
Tiny black motes drifted outward like pollen.
"Let's make her beg," Atramenta said cheerfully.
Noct smiled wider. "Let's make her forget begging exists."
The first strike didn't come from either of them.
It came from the arena itself.
A seam tore open beneath Niriai's feet—reality folding like paper as Atramenta tried to drop her into a collapsed dimension, a pocket of nothing that ate direction and time.
Niriai stepped—
Not away.
Through.
Her blade dipped.
The pommel ring clicked.
And a gate opened beneath her like a calm decision.
She vanished.
The dimension snapped shut on empty air.
Atramenta's head tilted, curious. "Still elegant."
Niriai reappeared behind them, sword already moving.
Not toward flesh.
Toward space.
The blade's constellations flared, and a thin line of starlight cut through the air—
—and the distance between Niriai and Atramenta broke.
Atramenta jerked as if yanked by an invisible chain. It stumbled forward a full ten meters in a heartbeat, dragged across bone-sand without choosing to move.
Its mask cracked slightly.
Noct hissed.
Niriai didn't chase.
She didn't need to.
She opened another gate.
A door in the air, outlined in soft blue-green light.
The arena saw it and recoiled.
Some of the crowd leaned back instinctively. Some of them stopped screaming.
Because gates weren't just travel.
Gates were permission.
Niriai's voice finally rose—quiet, controlled, clear.
"You should not be here."
Atramenta laughed. "Says the woman who built pathways through the cosmos."
Noct's spores drifted toward her, a slow storm.
Niriai's sword hummed.
The stars in its channel shifted again—forming a spiral constellation that looked like a lock being turned.
"I am not a pathway," she said. "I am a threshold."
Then she swung once.
The gate she'd opened didn't close.
It bit.
A vertical tear widened like a mouth, and the edge of it sheared through the air between Niriai and Noct. The motes—the plague spores—hit the gate's boundary and vanished, swallowed into whatever "elsewhere" Niriai had chosen.
Noct's smile faltered for the first time.
"Oh," it murmured. "You're using that."
Atramenta lunged.
Reality bent around it, trying to erase the space Niriai occupied. For a heartbeat, she blurred—her outline duplicating, splitting into wrong angles as Atramenta folded the arena's geometry.
Niriai's mask didn't move.
But the constellations inside her blade did.
They rearranged fast—stars streaking, vanishing, reappearing—until they formed something that looked like a corridor.
Her pommel ring spun.
Click—click—click.
A gate opened behind her.
Another opened in front.
Another opened above.
Another opened beneath.
Doors.
Too many of them.
Atramenta froze.
Noct's breathing hitched.
Qaritas felt it in his bones—the sick, instinctive animal knowledge of what those doors meant.
Not escape routes.
Not shortcuts.
Options.
Consequences.
Niriai stepped into one gate and out of another in the same motion, her blade already descending.
Atramenta raised its arm—
And Niriai's sword struck.
Not the arm.
The space holding the arm.
For a moment, Atramenta's limb was in two places at once—one still attached, one already falling away into a different "there."
Dimensional ruin screamed.
Not in pain.
In offense.
Its own law was being used against it.
Noct reacted fast—its hands swept outward, releasing a thick black cloud that crawled across the air like mold. It wasn't poison.
It was cosmic plague—a sickness that infected the concept of "wholeness."
The cloud brushed a pillar and the stone began to rot, collapsing into soft decay.
It reached Niriai—
And her gates flared.
She opened a door inside the cloud itself.
The plague fell into it like water down a drain.
Noct's eyes widened behind the cracked-moon mask.
It whispered something in a language that sounded like fever dreams.
And the plague didn't stop.
It rerouted.
It erupted from behind Niriai—trying to infest her lungs from the inside.
Niriai's breath caught.
For the first time, her posture shifted.
A tremor.
A weakness.
Atramenta smiled through its featureless mask.
"There she is," it crooned. "The part of you that still bleeds."
Niriai closed her eyes.
Just for a beat.
And in that beat—
Memory flickered.
Not the full story. Not yet.
But enough to make her shoulders tighten like a blade being drawn.
A field of sunstar flowers, lit from within. Gold and white blooms glowing under a gentle sky.
A man standing awkwardly, holding a bouquet like he didn't know if he was allowed to offer anything to someone as vast as her.
A gentle voice.
A gentle man doesn't break easily. He bends.
Komus.
Before Lexen.
Before forgetting.
Before blood sledges and forced smiles.
He'd offered her flowers and said—softly, stubbornly—"Every girl deserves them. Even an Ascendant."
Niriai's eyes opened.
And the tremor became rage made quiet.
The plague behind her tried to sink into her spine.
Niriai turned her sword sideways—
And pressed the flat of the blade against her own chest.
The constellations inside it flared so bright the arena dimmed.
A gate opened within her body.
Not in flesh.
In the path the sickness was taking.
The plague vanished into the door like it had never existed.
Noct staggered backward, suddenly… cautious.
Atramenta's voice sharpened. "Stop playing. Break her."
Noct's mask tilted toward Niriai. "We can't. Not like before."
Niriai lifted her sword again.
Her voice was still calm.
But the calm had teeth now.
"You don't understand what you did," she said.
Atramenta laughed. "We did everything."
Niriai took one slow step forward.
"And you lived," she said. "That was your mistake."
The pommel ring rotated.
Sigils clicked into a new alignment—one that felt older than the Hellbound.
The gate behind Niriai widened.
Then another opened.
Then another.
Then another.
The arena began to react like it was afraid.
The crowd's roaring thinned, replaced by scattered, uneasy noises—confused laughter that didn't sound convinced.
Tavran leaned forward in the stands, eyes wide.
"That's not travel," he whispered.
Rivax swallowed. "What is it?"
Dheas answered quietly, without blinking.
"Judgment."
Atramenta lunged again—angrier now, warping the arena's distance, trying to fold Niriai into ruin.
Niriai didn't dodge.
She opened a gate.
And Atramenta's attack went into it.
The dimensional collapse swallowed itself—eating its own teeth.
Atramenta froze mid-motion, like a predator that had just bitten through its own tongue.
Noct moved to flank her—
And Niriai's blade moved once.
A simple arc.
The sword didn't strike Noct.
It struck the space where Noct's trajectory existed.
Noct's body jerked sideways, dragged into a door that hadn't been there a heartbeat ago.
For a fraction of a second, Noct was half in the arena, half in somewhere else.
Its plague motes spilled.
Niriai's gates snapped shut.
And the motes didn't fall.
They stayed suspended.
Trapped.
Contained.
The crowd went quiet.
Not because they were impressed.
Because they were starting to understand what the Gatekeeper truly controlled.
Not doors.
Not passages.
Access.
Existence.
Niriai's voice carried, not loud—but it didn't need to be.
"You want to unmake me," she said, looking between Atramenta and Noct. "You tried."
Her grip tightened.
"And you still don't understand."
She lifted the blade so the shifting constellations faced them.
"I am not afraid of ruin," she whispered. "I built gates for the places even ruin can't reach."
Atramenta twitched, suddenly uncertain.
Noct's voice dropped. "You're bluffing."
Niriai smiled beneath her mask.
It was small.
It was terrible.
Then she opened the final gate.
It didn't glow blue-green.
It glowed black.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, everyone felt the ground forget them—like missing a step that never existed.
A door outlined in the absence of light.
The arena's shadows leaned toward it like worship.
Even Qaritas's broken body in the stands felt it—the dark inside him stirring, aching, recognizing something that wasn't his.
Eon whispered from his cage, almost reverent despite himself.
The chains on Ecayrous's throne stilled—just for a breath—before resuming their slow, eager writhe.
"…That's a real door."
Niriai stepped aside and gestured with her sword.
"Go on," she said softly.
Atramenta recoiled. "What is that?"
Atramenta searched for distance—any fold, any angle to escape—and found none; space returned the same answer from every direction.
Niriai's answer was quiet enough that only the nearest could hear.
But the arena did anyway.
"The place you send things," she said, "when you don't want them to ever touch reality again."
Noct's laugh came out wrong. "You can't banish fragments."
Niriai's blade hummed.
"Watch me."
The gate widened.
And for the first time since the Hellbound began—
Atramenta and Noct looked like they remembered fear.
Not pain.
Fear.
Because pain ends.
But doors?
Doors are forever.
Niriai took one more step forward, the constellations in her sword rearranging into a pattern that looked like a lock choosing its key.
Above, Ecayrous leaned back in his throne, smiling like a man watching his favorite meal learn to bite.
And in the Ascendant section, Tavran's hands clenched on the railing until bone creaked.
Because the Gatekeeper wasn't trying to win.
She was trying to teach the arena something.
Trying to teach Mrajeareim.
Trying to teach Ecayrous.
That the cosmic gates didn't exist to serve kings.
They existed to end them.
Niriai raised her sword.
And the Hellbound held its breath.