CHAPTER 92 — THE WAR THAT WALKS
The Fragments saw a blur.
That was all.
Where Xheavend stood, they saw distortion—heat ripple, violent silhouette, a shape that refused clarity. Their perception snagged on her and slid off, as though their sight could not find edges to cling to.
They heard her.
They felt the weight shift.
But they did not see her face.
Not the pink and red eyes.
Not the warrior's grin.
Not the tears gathering at the corners of her lashes.
In the stands, Tavran surged to his feet.
"Welcome back!" he roared, fist raised.
Dheas stood beside him, jaw tight, eyes bright.
Rivax laughed once—a sound that carried something close to relief.
"About time," he muttered.
Zcain did not stand.
He could not.
The fragments were watching him too closely—eyes layered inside his skin, blinking, listening. His jaw clenched. His hands trembled once on the stone rail.
His daughter had returned.
He did not dare let his face show it.
Xheavend lifted a hand and waved lightly toward the stands.
It looked almost casual.
Almost playful.
Only those who knew her saw the tremor in her fingers.
Then she inhaled.
The air around her tightened.
And she became war.
A Griefspawn lunged.
She stepped inside its reach.
The stick in her hand snapped long—no flash, no transformation spectacle. It simply was a sword now, blade shaped from a tight, swirling singularity.
She slashed upward.
The Griefspawn split—not in flesh.
In existence.
Its torso folded inward, sucked into the blade's curve, compressed into nothing before it could scream.
The sword snapped back into a stick mid-spin.
Another Griefspawn swung a rusted cleaver the size of a door.
The stick thickened into an axe.
She caught the cleaver's downward arc on the haft, pivoted, and drove the axe-head sideways.
It cleaved through thigh and pelvis with a wet crack, blackened bone splitting under impossible force.
The Griefspawn roared—
She spun low and took its other leg at the knee.
It fell.
The axe shrank back into a stick before its body hit the mud.
It began reforming instantly—shadow knitting, bone reassembling.
She didn't wait.
Her heel snapped up into its jaw.
A sharp click.
A blade deployed from her boot—thin, curved, coated in something too dark to be oil.
She drove it through the Griefspawn's eye socket.
The plague took hold instantly.
Black veins erupted across its face, crawling like frantic roots. Its scream turned gurgled, choked. Flesh sloughed from bone in steaming strips.
It still tried to rise.
It always tried to rise.
She twisted the blade.
Its skull collapsed inward like a rotten fruit.
This time, when it fell apart, it did not reform cleanly.
The curse sputtered around it.
She withdrew the knife, flicked gore aside, and the blade retracted with a clean mechanical click.
No hesitation.
Another Griefspawn came from behind.
She jumped.
Not away.
Into a lava trench.
The fragments laughed again.
She vanished beneath molten rock.
The laughter died when the lava convulsed.
The trench exploded upward in a geyser of red.
Xheavend rose with it.
Skin peeled from her arms in slick sheets. Muscles glowed through the heat. Bone showed for a fraction of a second—
Then flesh regrew.
Seamless.
She landed on the trench's edge as if stepping off a stair.
The stick in her hand stretched into a whip of crackling black filament.
She snapped it forward.
It wrapped around a Griefspawn's neck.
She pulled.
The whip sliced through tendons, through spine.
Its head came free and arced through the air, trailing black blood.
Before it hit the ground, the whip snapped back into a stick.
Three more Griefspawn converged.
She stepped between them like a dancer slipping through partners.
Stick became axe.
Axe became spear.
Spear became a hammer that crushed a crowned skull flat.
Back to stick.
She pivoted and jammed the blunt end into a Griefspawn's throat.
The stick elongated into a blade mid-thrust—black hole yawning at its tip.
The creature's entire chest imploded inward.
Gone.
No debris.
Just a hollow pocket in the air.
The Griefspawn roared louder, furious at the insult of impermanence.
They surrounded her.
Ten.
Twenty.
Fifty.
She did not retreat.
She walked into them.
Across the battlefield, Qaritas moved like inevitability.
Xheavend's kiss burned cold on his forehead.
The world unfolded in front of him in clean, mechanical clarity.
A Griefspawn's shoulder twitched.
It would lunge left.
He stepped right.
Its cleaver descended into empty space.
He thrust upward.
The spear touched its chest.
Gone.
Another Griefspawn raised both arms to smash him.
He already knew the angle.
He pivoted under it.
Erased both hands.
Then its head.
Nez surged beside him, massive paws flattening two more.
Qaritas leapt from her back mid-stride, landed between three advancing Griefspawn.
He saw their next movements layered over their bodies like ghost images.
He struck once.
Three vanished.
He didn't feel like he was fighting.
He felt like he was editing.
He killed over a hundred in minutes.
No wasted motion.
No surprise.
Only inevitability.
The Griefspawn howled, trying to adapt.
They could not.
Every attempt to flank him was anticipated.
Every leap intercepted.
He ducked under a swinging cleaver before it even began.
He erased a creature's leg before it could plant its foot.
He stepped aside from falling trees because he knew precisely when the trunk would crack.
Beside him, Xheavend carved a path of brutality through a different section of the battlefield.
At one point she planted the stick in the mud and raised both hands to the sky.
The air darkened.
Clouds churned.
A low hum began—subsonic and violent.
The fragments shifted uneasily.
Flaming asteroids tore through the artificial sky of the Hellbound.
They crashed into the rainforest kingdom with thunderous impacts, trees exploding into splinters, mud vaporizing in waves of steam.
Griefspawn were flattened under celestial rock.
Bodies shattered.
Some tried to reform beneath burning stone.
She leapt into lava again.
Vanished.
Reemerged farther down the trench.
When she pulled herself free this time, her left arm did not reform immediately.
Bone showed through molten flesh.
Muscle knit slowly.
She flexed the hand once.
It did not close all the way.
She didn't look at it.
She kept fighting.
The stick became a sword again for half a heartbeat—black hole flaring bright enough to distort the air—and she carved a sweeping arc through a cluster of towering shapes.
Ten gone.
Twenty.
She spun, ducked, kicked, stabbed.
One Griefspawn caught her leg mid-swing.
There was a sickening crack.
Her damaged arm failed to parry a cleaver in time.
The blow caught her across the ribs.
She staggered.
Only once.
Then corrected.
Her shin snapped sideways.
She didn't react.
She twisted in its grip, slammed her heel into its face again.
The boot blade deployed.
She drove it up through its chin and into its skull.
Plague spread in branching lines.
She ripped free.
Her leg realigned with a wet pop, bone sliding back into place beneath regrowing muscle.
She did not slow.
Nez roared as another wave hit.
Qaritas vaulted over her shoulders and landed in front of her, spear humming with absence.
He carved a clean circle around them.
Fifty Griefspawn vanished.
The predictive sight burned at the edges of his vision—time bending, stretching, laying itself flat before him.
He saw one move too far ahead.
A shift in the mud.
A gathering.
"Move!" Xheavend shouted.
He didn't ask why.
He ran.
She ran too.
They crossed paths in a blur of motion, leaping fallen trunks, skidding over wet earth.
Behind them—
The ground detonated.
A delayed cascade from her asteroid strike and his void erasures combined.
The rainforest kingdom split open in a roaring chain reaction.
Lava surged upward in a tidal wave of molten rock.
Steam exploded outward in a scalding shockwave.
Griefspawn caught in the blast were shredded, burned, crushed under falling debris.
Over two thousand vanished or were obliterated in the span of seconds.
The shockwave hit the outer edges of the arena and rebounded.
The stands trembled.
Even the fragments fell silent.
When the steam cleared, a crater smoked where a forest had stood.
Griefspawn corpses—partial, crushed, burning—littered the rim.
Some tried to reform.
Many failed.
Qaritas stood at the edge of the devastation, chest rising and falling in measured breaths.
He glanced toward the center of the battlefield.
Hrolyn had not moved.
Not a step.
The staff remained planted.
The threads still held him upright.
Blood still ran upward.
His eyes remained fixed—black voids with frozen stars.
Griefspawn gathered again around him, but slower now, as if uncertain.
Qaritas frowned.
"Why isn't he moving?" he muttered under his breath.
Eon answered, voice low and colder than before.
"He never did his own work."
Qaritas's eyes flicked to the Old God.
"Like the Ascendants?"
A pause.
Then Eon said one word.
"No."
The way he said it chilled something deeper than skin.
Not delegation.
Not pride.
Something older.
Something calculated.
Hrolyn stood like the eye of a storm that did not need to rage.
Xheavend landed beside Qaritas, shoulders rising and falling once.
Her armor smoked faintly from lava.
The stick rested casually against her shoulder.
She looked toward the stands.
Then toward Ecayrous.
And her smile vanished.
Qaritas followed her gaze.
Ecayrous was clapping slowly.
Not mockery.
Approval.
"Delightful," he said.
He lifted both hands.
The air above the Hellbound darkened.
Not cloud-dark.
Cosmic-dark.
The volcano's glow dimmed.
The lava pits quieted as if afraid to erupt.
The rainforest canopy shuddered.
Even the Griefspawn paused.
The sky tore.
It did not split like fabric.
It opened like a wound.
Space peeled back, revealing something beyond the architecture of the arena.
The fragments leaned forward involuntarily.
Even they felt it.
Six shapes descended through the rupture.
Massive.
Wrong.
Cathedral-sized silhouettes of writhing shadow and sinew.
Dozens of burning eyes glowed like dying suns within each shape.
Tendrils uncoiled slowly, tasting air and gravity and life.
Their presence bent the forest.
Bent the lava.
Bent light.
Qaritas felt the pressure in his bones.
Xheavend did not move.
Ecayrous's smile widened.
"Let's raise the stakes," he purred.
The Behemite fully emerged into the Hellbound.
And for the first time since the arena had ruptured—
Everything stopped.
The tear in the sky did not open cleanly.
It ripped.
Sound split like bone under pressure.
Fragments in the stands recoiled, some clutching their temples as if their skulls were being pried open from within.
Jrin dropped to a knee, blood leaking from his nose.
Even lava trembled.
Even fragments went silent.
The sky tore open.