The Hellbound did not roar this time.
It waited.
Obsidian tiers loomed in silence, bone-banners hanging limp as if the arena itself had learned restraint. The chains beneath the floor dragged once—slow, uncertain—then stilled.
Daviyi stepped through the gate alone.
No flourish.
No armor.
Just a slim figure in dark scholar's robes, dusted with sigils that rearranged themselves as she walked, correcting their own syntax.
Her blade rested at her side.
Small.
Leaf-shaped.
Almost insulting.
Qaritas leaned forward despite himself.
"That's it?" Rivax whispered, disbelief cracking his voice. "That's the weapon?"
Niriai didn't answer.
She was watching the blade.
The dagger's surface crawled with moving script—languages that predated sound, glyphs that rewrote themselves mid-sentence. Each symbol paused when Daviyi's fingers brushed the hilt… then accelerated.
Learning her.
Daviyi inhaled sharply.
"It's reading me," she muttered.
Rivax swallowed. "Is that bad?"
Daviyi smiled faintly. Not humor. Recognition.
"No," she said. "That's inevitable."
Ecayrous rose from his throne slowly, chains slithering aside like obedient pets.
"Daviyi," he said warmly. "Ascendant of Knowledge. Flame of the First Mind. One of the Ten."
His eyes glittered.
"Let's see what you remember."
The arena gates split open.
Reality hesitated.
Then Atramenta stepped out.
The Fragment of Dimensional Ruin looked… wronger than before. Its angles had sharpened. Its movement stuttered less—as if it had learned how to exist more efficiently.
Behind it, Noct followed.
The plague-cloud around the Fragment of Cosmic Plagues pulsed thicker, darker, threaded with unfamiliar motes—data-shaped, almost geometric.
And then—
The ground screamed.
Creatures poured forth.
Not beasts.
Errors.
Things that looked half-finished, stitched together from failed evolutionary paths. Limbs duplicated. Heads split. Eyes stared in patterns that hurt to follow.
Monster army.
Daviyi exhaled.
"Good," she said softly. "Context."
Qaritas felt something cold slide down his spine.
Daviyi lifted her blade.
The script along its edge froze—
Then rearranged.
The first monster charged.
Daviyi moved once.
Not fast.
Not slow.
Precise.
Her blade passed through the creature's neck without resistance.
The body did not fall.
It paused.
Then collapsed inward, folding like a theorem that had just been disproven.
A thin white symbol flared in the air where her blade had passed—then shattered like glass.
Daviyi's wrist burned.
Not pain.
Computation.
The ground swallowed it.
The crowd inhaled as one.
Atramenta lunged.
Space warped—folding to erase the distance between them.
Daviyi did not dodge.
She spoke.
One word.
Axiom.
The word struck the arena like a dropped law.
Invisible pressure rippled outward—pillars groaned, bone-sand compacted, and several spectators gasped as if gravity briefly remembered them.
The space Atramenta tried to fold rejected the instruction.
Distance reasserted itself violently.
Atramenta staggered—confused.
Noct reacted instantly.
Plague surged outward—conceptual infection, designed to rot certainty, to make facts decay into contradictions.
Daviyi slashed once.
Not at the cloud.
At the idea of spread.
The plague froze mid-expansion, its motes hanging suspended like punctuation marks waiting for permission to continue.
Daviyi frowned.
"Oh," she murmured. "You've changed."
The monsters attacked together.
Daviyi stamped once.
A circular sigil slammed into the ground, expanding outward like a dropped equation.
Three monsters froze mid-leap—then inverted, their insides folded neatly into absence.
Daviyi moved through them like a reader skimming a text she'd already mastered.
Every strike:
Corrected a flaw,Closed a loophole,Erased an assumption
Her blade didn't cut flesh.
It cut premises.
Creatures unraveled mid-charge, collapsing into footnotes of failure.
Qaritas's breath came shallow.
"She's not fighting," he whispered.
Hydeius answered quietly, "She's editing."
Atramenta roared—offended.
It twisted the arena's geometry, collapsing angles, duplicating exits, turning the floor into an impossible maze of folded space.
Daviyi stopped walking.
She closed her eyes.
The script on her blade screamed—symbols racing faster, overlapping, rewriting themselves in panic.
Daviyi tightened her grip.
"No," she said firmly. "One at a time."
Light flared beneath her feet—concentric rings of text anchoring her to a single, undeniable position.
The maze recoiled from her like a bad argument Interesting
Atramenta shrieked—not in pain, but in protest.
It folded space inward, violently, collapsing a fracture directly through Daviyi's chest.
A clean, perfect tear. Dimensional annihilation—absolute, immediate.
The fracture stopped.
Mid-action.
Suspended like a sentence waiting for review.
The air around Daviyi shimmered, not resisting, not breaking—buffering.
Atramenta froze.
The fracture twitched.
Then… rewound.
Not repaired.
Replayed.
Atramenta struck again.
The same fracture.
The same angle.
The same outcome.
Stop.
Suspend.
Reject.
A third attempt.
This time, Atramenta screamed as the space looped back into itself, folding ruin into ruin until the attack collapsed into meaningless geometry.
Daviyi didn't move.
A new glyph burned itself into her shoulder—thin, branching, written in blood that didn't drip.
Atramenta staggered back.
Its mask split further, fissures crawling across it like cracking porcelain.
"You are not negating me," it hissed, voice folding in on itself.
"You are—"
Daviyi looked at it.
Calm.
Focused.
"I'm citing you."
Atramenta recoiled violently.
For the first time since its creation, the Fragment of Dimensional Ruin understood:
It was no longer an actor.
It was source material.
She opened her eyes.
And the maze vanished.
Not undone.
Outargued.
Atramenta recoiled as if struck.
Its mask cracked further.
Noct did not roar.
It laughed softly—intimately.
"Oh," it murmured. "You're indexing."
The plague changed.
It no longer surged outward.
It sank inward.
The motes dissolved into invisible vectors, slipping between thoughts, infecting not flesh—but questions.
Daviyi's blade paused.
Just once.
Not from weakness.
From ambiguity.
The script along its edge stuttered, glyphs flickering between contradictory meanings.
Daviyi frowned.
For the first time.
The plague whispered:
What if you're wrong?
What if this truth contradicts the next?
What if knowledge eats itself?
Her grip tightened.
The blade trembled—not violently, but hesitantly.
Qaritas felt his breath hitch.
"She stopped," he whispered.
Hydeius didn't answer.
Daviyi inhaled.
Slowly.
Then she nodded.
"…Clever," she said.
And that was the moment.
The moment she chose.
Noct hissed—genuinely angry now.
The crowd began to murmur, fear threading through the awe.
Niriai's hands clenched at her sides.
"She's pushing them back," Rivax breathed.
Cree didn't look relieved.
"No," they said. "She's showing them how."
Qaritas didn't feel awe.
He felt pressure.
The same tightness behind his ribs—the warning that always came just before a truth surfaced that could never be put back.
His shadow moved.
Not toward Daviyi—
—but toward the space she was cutting apart.
That's not power, he realized.
That's damage.
Knowledge, wielded like this, didn't enlighten the universe any more than the void did.
It wounded it.
Qaritas exhaled slowly, something cold settling into place.
Different tools.
For an instant, something old inside him recognized her blade—not as an enemy, but as a sibling wound.
Same threat.
Niriai swallowed.
Not because Daviyi might lose.
Because she might not.
Daviyi stood amid dissolving monsters, her blade humming—learning faster now, absorbing every attack, every adaptation.
Blood slicked the bone-sand.
Not hers.
Ecayrous watched, smiling—but his fingers had stilled on the arm of his throne.
Interesting.
Far above, several skull-lanterns cracked.
Not from force.
From recognition.
Daviyi glanced up at him.
Just once.
Her eyes met his.
And for the first time, Ecayrous's smile sharpened—not with amusement.
With calculation.
Because Daviyi was winning.
And worse—
She was teaching the Hellbound how she thought.
The blade pulsed.
The script accelerated again.
Daviyi felt it.
Too much input.
Too much certainty.
For half a second, Daviyi didn't see the arena.
Daviyi lifted her blade—then stopped.
"No," she said quietly. "That's not the flaw."
She turned the dagger inward.
Pressed it—not into her flesh—
—but into the concept of herself.
The blade sank without resistance.
Runes erupted across her skin.
Not glowing.
Bleeding.
Layer after layer of script unfurled beneath her flesh—ancient laws overwritten by newer ones, mistakes crossed out, truths annotated with warnings.
Her robes burned away—not from heat, but irrelevance.
Beneath them, her body was no longer skin.
It was text.
Living.
Revising.
Dangerous.
Noct recoiled.
"That knowledge was sealed," it hissed. "You were not meant to—"
"I know," Daviyi replied.
Her voice echoed strangely now, layered with citations.
"That's why it's dangerous."
The plague faltered.
Not destroyed.
Outpaced.
Atramenta screamed as another rune carved itself into Daviyi's spine.
Each attack fed her.
Each strike made her worse.
Her hand shook.
Not violently—worse. A fine, persistent tremor that refused to still even when she tightened her grip.
The blade pulled back.
Just a fraction. Just enough to be undeniable.
Heat flared beneath her sleeve as a glyph burned itself into her skin—thin, angular, unfinished—and when she blinked, it was still there.
Daviyi's breath caught—not from pain, but from recognition.
Slowly, deliberately, she drew her sleeve back.
The glyph was not glowing.
It was bleeding.
A single, precise line of blood traced the symbol's edge, dark and measured, as if her veins had learned restraint. It did not drip. It did not fall.
It curved.
The blood shifted, thinning, sharpening—reshaping itself into strokes and hooks too deliberate to be accidental. New characters formed beneath the original mark, smaller, tighter, nesting into the negative space of her skin.
Daviyi watched.
Her pulse quickened.
With each heartbeat, another line appeared.
Not spreading.
Appending.
Layer by layer, the script continued—inked not in light, but in her own circulation, settling beneath the skin as if it had always been waiting there for permission.
The blade hummed softly in her hand.
Satisfied.
Daviyi did not pull away.
She did not curse.
She did not scream.
Her fingers brushed the edge of the mark, careful not to smear it—like a scholar respecting fresh ink.
"…So that's how," she murmured.
Not fear.
Assessment.
Around her, the arena seemed to lean closer, as if it, too, had noticed the change.
Because the knowledge was no longer passing through her.
It had begun to stay.
Daviyi inhaled slowly.
She was still learning.
She was no longer choosing how much.
She saw a thousand unanswered questions—stacked like bodies.
And one truth she had sworn never to learn.
Her smile faded.
Somewhere deep beneath the arena, chains tightened.
And the monsters—
They began to change.
Not yet.
But soon.
Daviyi adjusted her stance, breath steady, blade angled defensively for the first time.
"…Right," she murmured. "That's the cost.
For a heartbeat, every sigil on her robes dimmed.
Then reignited—less stable.
Sharper
Above her, Ecayrous leaned forward.
"Marvelous," he said softly.
"And now, Ascendant…"
The arena shuddered.
"…let's see what happens when knowledge starts answering questions you didn't ask."
The blade twitched in Daviyi's hand.
A new glyph appeared on its edge.
One she had never learned.
And never intended to.
The Hellbound held its breath.