Dr. KWAME POV
Lyra didn't stay in the crater.
The sand began to swirl, not from the wind, but from a terrifying gravitational pull. A pillar of violet light erupted, and she ascended back to the cliff's edge. Her leather armor was shredded, and blood leaked from a gash on her forehead, but her eyes—those swirling Purple pits—were manic with a secondary surge of Impulse.
"Calculated?" she spat, the word dripping with venom. "You think life is a sum of parts, Kwame? You think you can just solve me?"
She didn't reach for her shattered blade. Instead, she clapped her hands together. The sound was like a thunderclap.
"Gravitational Art: Singularity Point."
The space between her palms collapsed. A marble-sized sphere of absolute blackness formed, crackling with violet lightning. The ocean behind her actually began to rise, the water pulled toward her by the sheer density of the technique.
"Eve! Adam! Inside the house, now!" I roared. This wasn't a skirmish anymore. Lyra was burning her life force—the "Harvester" was ready to reap herself just to take me down.
"Too late!" Lyra screamed. She threw the sphere.
It didn't travel fast, but it didn't need to. As it drifted through the air, it consumed everything in its path. The gravel, the sea grass, the very oxygen—everything was sucked into the violet void. The porch of the beach house began to splinter, the wood being pulled into the sphere's hungry mouth.
I stepped forward, my boots sinking inches into the rock as I braced myself. My Golden Impulse flared, turning from a soft glow into a jagged, roaring aura.
"You always were a messy fighter, Lyra," I muttered.
I didn't try to block the sphere. I thrust both hands into the air, fingers spread. "Pinnacle Art: Solar Lattice."
Gold lines of pure, solidified energy shot from my fingertips, weaving a complex geometric web in the air between us. It looked like a golden cage, humming at a frequency that canceled out the gravitational pull. When the Singularity hit the lattice, the two forces clashed with a scream that shattered every window in the beach house.
The ground beneath us cracked. The cliff began to give way, sliding toward the sea.
"Is this it, Kwame?" Lyra laughed, her nose bleeding from the strain. "The great Doctor, hiding behind a cage? Show them who you really are! Show them the man who slaughtered the Rift-Hunters in the Red Desert!"
Behind me, I felt Adam's presence stiffen. He was watching, his logic-driven mind recording every movement, every word. He was seeing the "math" of a mass murderer.
"That man is dead," I said, my voice vibrating with the power of the Golden Lattice.
"He's right there!" Lyra countered, pointing at me. "Look at your eyes, Kwame! They aren't the eyes of a father! They're the eyes of a God who's bored with his creations!"
She lunged through the distortion of her own gravity, her hands glowing with violet claws. She was moving at sub-molecular speeds, vibrating her atoms to pass through my Golden Lattice. It was a suicide move. If she missed the frequency by a fraction, she would be vaporized.
She didn't miss.
She burst through the gold web, her violet claws inches from my throat.