The air in the spire grew so heavy it felt like a physical weight. Liora's Reapers, elite assassins who knew no fear, instinctively tensed, their augmented muscles straining against the sudden, crushing pressure. It felt like reality itself was bending around the boy in the school uniform.
Liora, however, merely laughed, a sharp, exhilarating sound that defied the oppressive aura. "Confidence. I love it. It makes the kill so much sweeter." She gave a flick of her wrist, a silent command. "Reapers, show him the meaning of despair."
In perfect, synchronized motion, the ten assassins attacked.
They were a blur of black armor and deadly intent. Two lunged forward, their arms transforming into razor-sharp blades of obsidian composite. Three others vaulted onto the walls, their magnetized boots allowing them to run horizontally, flanking him from impossible angles. The remaining five vanished into the shadows, their cloaking technology rendering them invisible to both the naked eye and most electronic sensors.
The first two Reapers reached Ravi, their arm-blades scything through the air in arcs designed to decapitate and disembowel.
Ravi didn't move.
Just as the blades were about to connect, they stopped dead in the air, inches from his skin. The Reapers stared in shock, their full, augmented strength unable to push the blades a single millimeter further. They were pressing against his aura, an invisible wall of absolute force.
"Too slow," Ravi stated.
He made two simple, precise movements. He tapped the flat of one Reaper's blade with his index finger. The resulting shockwave traveled up the man's arm, shattering every bone and rupturing every muscle before blowing him back into the glass wall with enough force to crack it.
He then glanced at the second Reaper. It was only a glance, but in that instant, the Reaper's world fell apart. His mind was flooded with a glimpse of the void behind Ravi's eyes, an infinite, cold, empty space. The assassin froze, his mind overloaded, and collapsed to the floor, catatonic.
Simultaneously, the three Reapers on the walls launched themselves at him, their movements a whirlwind of deadly acrobatics.
Ravi's hand shot out and plucked one out of the air by his ankle. Without pausing, he swung the man like a club, smashing him into the other two. The sound was a sickening crunch of armor and bone. The three of them went down in a tangled, broken heap.
All of this had taken less than three seconds. Five Reapers, the pride of the Pale Hand, had been neutralized without Ravi taking a single step.
Liora's smile tightened, but she remained in place, watching, analyzing. She was not surprised. She had expected her soldiers to be disposable pawns, meant only to probe his defenses.
The five invisible Reapers chose that moment to strike. They appeared from thin air, their attacks perfectly coordinated to hit him from five different directions at once. One held a garrote wire humming with energy. Another wielded a neuro-toxin injector. A third lunged with a fist encased in a kinetic force-field.
Ravi sighed, a soft sound of disappointment. "Hiding in the shadows," he said, his voice laced with an almost paternal pity. "Shadows are born from light. You cannot use the child against the father."
He raised his hand, palm open. The crimson glow in his eyes intensified, and a wave of pure, un-light—a pulse of absolute darkness—emanated from him.
It was not a lack of light. It was an anti-light. It consumed everything. The Reapers' cloaking technology short-circuited violently. The five assassins became visible, stumbling as their systems failed. The one with the kinetic fist found his energy field dissipated into nothing. The one with the neuro-toxin saw the liquid in his injector boil away into inert vapor.
They were exposed. They were vulnerable.
Ravi moved. He was a phantom, a whisper of motion between them. A finger-jab to a pressure point. A palm-strike to a sternum that didn't break the bone but stopped the heart. A simple trip that sent another crashing face-first into the humming broadcast antenna, where he was instantly electrocuted.
In another five seconds, it was over.
The broadcast spire, which was meant to be Ravi's tomb, had become a throne room of broken bodies. Ten of the world's deadliest assassins lay defeated around him.
And Ravi stood in the center, not a single drop of sweat on his brow, not a single thread of his uniform out of place. He looked at Liora, the last one standing.
"Your assassins are broken," he said. "Your storm is just noise. Your blade is the only thing left. Are you going to use it, or are you going to continue to stand there and watch?"
Liora's face was a mask of ecstatic, unholy glee. The display of power hadn't terrified her. It had aroused her warrior spirit to a fever pitch. This was the fight she had been born for.
"Oh, you magnificent monster," she breathed, her voice filled with a terrifying passion. "You are everything they said you were and more."
CRACK-BOOM!
A massive bolt of lightning, commanded by Liora's will, struck the spire. But this time, it didn't dissipate. The energy was channeled down the broadcast antenna and straight into Liora's waiting katana. The blade glowed with the power of the heavens, its monomolecular edge now wreathed in captive lightning.
"Let's dance, Black Crown," she hissed.
She vanished. Her speed, while not the reality-bending trick of Quicksilver, was immense, augmented by the pure power of the storm. She appeared before Ravi, her supercharged blade a blur of silver and violet lightning, slashing down in an arc that could cleave a skyscraper in two.
This time, Ravi moved.
He met the blade not with his aura, but with his bare hand.
His open palm caught the flat of the sword. The moment of contact was silent, but the impact sent a shockwave outwards that blew out every glass window in the spire. The storm winds howled into the room, a vortex of rain and fury.
Liora stared in disbelief. He had stopped her ultimate attack, a storm-infused blow from her Oracle-forged blade, with his hand. His skin was not even scratched.
"Impossible!" she snarled, pouring more energy into the blade.
"Your blade cuts the bonds between molecules," Ravi said, his voice calm even as he held back a storm's worth of energy. "But my body is not held together by mere molecules." He looked her directly in the eye. "My existence is a law. You cannot cut a law."
With a simple twist of his wrist, he disarmed her. The katana flew from her grasp, embedding itself to the hilt in the solid steel of the broadcast antenna.
Liora, weaponless, stumbled back, her ecstatic confidence finally replaced by a sliver of genuine, mortal fear.
Ravi took a step towards her. "You wanted to see if a god could bleed," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. He raised his hand, his fingers extended. "You should have been more concerned with whether an Archon could be broken."
He reached for her.
But before he could make contact, Liora made a desperate, final move. She slammed a button on her wrist gauntlet. A hidden device on her belt overloaded, unleashing a concussive blast that sent both of them flying in opposite directions.
It was a tactical retreat device. Liora was thrown back towards the ruined wall and the open air. As she flew, a stealth VTOL aircraft de-cloaked outside, its ramp already down. She landed on it with practiced grace, a trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth.
She stood on the ramp, her hair whipping in the storm, her eyes burning with a mixture of fury, humiliation, and a newfound, terrifying respect.
"This isn't over, Zero!" she screamed over the wind. "You have won nothing! You have only shown me your power! The Oracle has seen it too! Now we know how to build a weapon that can kill you!"
Ravi stood up from the blast, brushing a non-existent piece of dust from his shoulder. He watched the VTOL turn to leave.
He did not try to stop her.
He simply raised his hand towards the central broadcast antenna, where her storm-charged katana was still embedded. He made a clenching motion.
The monomolecular blade, an artifact of immense power, shattered into a thousand pieces.
Liora gasped, feeling the destruction of her weapon like a physical blow.
Ravi then walked to the main broadcast console. It was still active. He patched Ayla into the system.
"Ravi! Are you okay?!"
"I'm fine," he said. "The broadcast. Is it ready?"
"Yes! I have it queued!"
He turned on every speaker, every screen, every public address system in the city. He looked out at the raging storm and the retreating aircraft carrying a defeated Archon.
Then he gave the city his message. It wasn't a speech. It wasn't a threat. It was a recording.
It was the sound of twelve elite Pale Hand security guards being brutally dismantled. The sound of an Echo's neck snapping. The sound of Juggernaut's augmentations failing. The sound of Liora's ten elite Reapers being broken and defeated.
It was a symphony of slaughter. A testament to his absolute power. It was the sound of the Pale Hand's finest being broken like toys.
He let it play on a loop for a full minute, broadcasting the utter failure of their gods and protectors into every home and every street corner.
He ended the broadcast with a single, live sentence, his voice calm, cold, and echoing across the entire city of Duskfall.
"That wasn't a fight," he said, for all the world to hear. "That was your god kneeling."