The sky tore itself open.
Not split—peeled, like flesh rejected by bone.
BlightMist-9 spiraled upward in reverse gravity, dragged screaming into a vortex of impossible geometry as Netoshka's presence destabilized the local laws of consequence. Streets folded into themselves. Time stuttered. Sound lagged behind motion. The city of Cerevra ceased behaving like a place and began behaving like a thought having a seizure.
Malithra felt it immediately.
Not fear.
Recognition.
"That resonance…" she whispered, her many-layered voice losing its divine cadence for the first time.
"…You are remembering."
Netoshka screamed.
It was not a human sound.
It was the sound of identity tearing.
THE FRACTURE
Inside Netoshka's mind, walls shattered.
Not memories—boundaries.
Her thoughts began to overlap. Voices that were once distant concepts now spoke with clarity, tone, and judgment.
Not commands.
Truths.
> You are tired of pretending you are singular.
You are tired of mercy that invites recurrence.
You are tired of surviving.
Her glitch-field collapsed inward, compressing her body like corrupted data being forcibly recompiled. Bones restructured. Flesh lost meaning. Her silhouette elongated, twisted, re-authored.
Spines erupted from her back—not bone, not metal, but ideas given shape, each one etched with shifting sigils that hurt to observe. Her limbs split and rejoined at impossible angles. Her jaw unhinged, reforming into a crown of interlocking mandibles lined with fractal teeth that reflected realities that never occurred.
Her eyes multiplied.
Then fused.
Then vanished.
Then returned as a single void-ring orbiting a core of burning, violet-black cognition.
The air vibrated as something ancient named her.
Not a title.
A classification.
" KATASTROFA "
Yv'Ghrothl'Gna'Uidrr Ascendant Manifestation:
"It Who Ends the Cycle by Devouring the World"
Malithra staggered back.
"No…"
Her voice sharpened into fury..
"No—this is wrong. This form—this cognition—YOU WERE NOT MEANT TO UNSEAL IT."
Katastrofa lifted her head.
The city screamed.
Every violent thought ever conceived within Cerevra—every murder, every betrayal, every justification—was echoed through her nervous system. She did not feel them as emotions.
She processed them as patterns.
War was not tragic.
It was redundant.
She moved.
Not forward.
Across.
A district ceased to exist—not destroyed, not collapsed—removed, its probability overwritten with silence. Synarchy soldiers firing upon evacuation corridors vanished mid-thought, their weapons clattering uselessly as their operators were erased from narrative relevance.
Malithra struck back.
Entire Layers unfolded at once—war-forms, judgment-constructs, weapons forged from myth and divine arithmetic.
Katastrofa did not dodge.
She accepted.
The attacks entered her mass and never exited, absorbed into her structure like arguments swallowed by a conclusion.
She laughed.
The sound broke windows across continents.
INFERIUS — EVACUATION ZONE
Rue slammed her fist into a terminal.
"DAMMIT—SIGNAL'S SPIKING—Neto's not just glitching—she's rewriting herself!"
Lyra turned, eyes wide beneath her visor.
"That thing in the sky… that's not Malithra anymore."
Taran wiped blood from his mouth, firing downrange as Synarchy remnants made a desperate push toward the evac convoy.
"No time!" he shouted. .
"We're getting flanked—dam's about to rupture—MOVE!"
Rue's hands trembled.
"She's losing herself," Rue whispered.
"I can feel it."
Lyra looked back one last time.
In the distance, a thing towered above the city—spined, radiant, wrong—wrestling with a god amid collapsing reality.
"…Or becoming herself," Lyra said softly.
They had no choice.
The city demanded everything.
CHAOS --
Katastrofa tore Malithra's upper Layer apart.
Not ripped—invalidated.
Malithra shrieked as one of her divine aspects ceased to be conceptually supported, unraveling into screaming fragments of failed godhood.
"Hehe, You would annihilate Life itself!" Malithra roared.
.... responded—not verbally.
She showed her.
A vision forced into Malithra's perception:
Civilizations repeating the same wars.
Weapons renamed, not replaced.
Peace treaties as pauses, not conclusions.
Children inheriting the same graves.
Meaning was already rotting.
She was simply accelerating the inevitable.
Katastrofa lunged.
Her claws passed through Malithra's chest, dragging out something luminous and screaming—a core of worship, the belief that sustained Malithra's divinity.
Malithra struck back in desperation, unleashing a catastrophic wave that split the horizon—
—and it hit.
Katastrofa screamed again.
This time in pain.
Her form destabilized.
Too much power. Too much memory. Too much truth.
She began to thrash.
Buildings disintegrated. Fault lines erupted. The sea recoiled.
Her thoughts fragmented.
Netoshka's voice surfaced—small, terrified, drowning.
> No... Stop… please… I can't—
The "Yv'Ghrothl'Gna'Uidrr" answered without malice.
> You asked for an end.
This is one.
Katastrofa turned—not toward Malithra—
—but toward the evacuation route.
Toward people.
Rue felt it.
Her heart dropped.
"Neto—NO—"
Katastrofa raised her arm.
A beam of annihilating cognition began to form—
—and stopped.
Something resisted.
A memory.
A silver pendant.
A child's hands, shaking, offering kindness to a monster.
.... convulsed.
Netoshka screamed from inside the form, her will clawing upward like a trapped animal.
> I am not your weapon.
I am not your conclusion.
I choose.
The beam collapsed inward, detonating harmlessly into the sky.
Malithra watched, breathing hard.
"Hmm…You hesitate," she said.
"That is why you will lose."
"Yv'Ghrothl'Gna'Uidrr" turned back, her form destabilizing, bleeding distortion.
Her berserk state was unsustainable.
But she stayed calm in a cold demeanor.
A terrible, fractured thing.
"Maybe," she said—Netoshka's voice leaking through the horror—
"But not today."
She lunged again.
Not to kill.
To bind.
Reality folded around both entities as the battle tore itself into a higher, unreachable Layer—away from the evac zone, away from the people.
Away from everyone else.
Rue collapsed to her knees as the pressure vanished.
"She's gone…"
Lyra whispered:
"She chose them over herself."
The city burned.
The war escalated.
And somewhere beyond reality, Netoshka fought not just a god—
—but the monster she was becoming.