Silence stretched between them.
The air of Hell seed to grow heavier.
Caelum did not move.
"That will not be happening," he said flatly.
Arven's eyes glead.
"Oh?" he said softly. "Then I suppose we have reached the interesting part of this conversation."
Caelum moved first.
There was no warning.
The mont Arven's words fell, the air itself collapsed inward.
Invisible pressure surged forward like a tidal wave, space compressing and folding under Caelum's will.
Layers of compressed force stacked atop one another, converging on Arven's position from every direction.
To use his law this openly ant only one thing.
Caelum was going all out.
Arven's smile did not vanish.
Instead, his body split.
The space he occupied fractured, and in the span of a heartbeat, five figures stood where one had been.
One was the original Arven, still smiling, though the madness in his eyes dulled slightly, replaced by an unsettling calm.
The other four were wrong.
Each carried the sa face, the sa presence, yet their auras were wildly different. One looked vacant, eyes unfocused, as if barely aware
of the world. One radiated cold detachnt. One trembled faintly, lips twitching.
And the last.
The last looked insane.
That Arven grinned wide, teeth bared, eyes burning with manic delight as chaos rippled around him. His aura surged violently, unstable and wild, clashing against the compressed air bearing down on them.
Flas erupted.
The fire Arven raised was erratic and feral, twisting against Caelum's air pressure, burning without pattern or restraint. Where the compressed atmosphere should have crushed everything flat, the flas tore through it instead, dispersing the attack in violent bursts of heat and distortion.
The clash detonated outward.
Caelum's face tightened.
He rembered now.
More details surfaced from the fragnts he had once dismissed as
rumors.
Director Arven's law was said to be tied to the greater Law of Chaos.
One that allowed his split personalities to manifest physically, each drawing upon a different aspect of his power. Each personality wielded sothing different.
The one standing against him now, the mad one, was the embodint of destruction.
Fire.
Caelum reinforced his stance, air condensing around Michael protectively as he absorbed the backlash. His gaze flicked across the remaining Arvens, noting how the others simply observed, unmoving,
as if this battle did not concern them at all.
The original Arven watched with quiet interest.
The mad Arven laughed.
Caelum exhaled slowly, eyes cold.
The laughter had not even finished echoing when the others moved.
The trembling Arven stepped forward.
His shoulders were hunched, arms drawn slightly inward as if bracing against sothing only he could feel. His eyes darted once toward Caelum, then imdiately away, filled with a raw, instinctive fear that felt almost contagious.
The temperature dropped.
Frost spread across the air.
Pale mist rolled outward, carrying a biting chill that sank far deeper than the skin.
Ice.
But it was not the clean, cutting cold of simple elental force.
The mont the frost expanded, Caelum felt it.
A subtle tightening in his chest. A faint hesitation, uninvited and unwelco, tugging at the edges of his thoughts. The fear radiating from that Arven did not rely exist. It bled outward, seeping into the environnt itself.
Emotion given form.
For a mont, Caelum felt like killing himself.
Caelum's eyes sharpened instantly.
His will flared, air roaring around him as he crushed the creeping sensation before it could take root. The pressure field around Michael thickened in response, shielding him not only from the cold, but from the emotional influence threaded through it.
The trembling Arven flinched as the resistance hit him, frost cracking beneath his feet.
"I... I don't like this," he muttered, voice barely audible. The ice wavered, but did not fade.
At the sa ti, the vacant Arven lifted his head.
His expression remained blank, eyes dull and unfocused, as if nothing
in front of him truly existed. He raised one hand slowly, fingers loose
and careless.
The space in front of him thinned.
The air itself seed to lose substance, becoming hollow and weak, as though reality had been scraped away and left fragile in its place.
A narrow corridor of emptiness ford.
Everything caught within it was pulled forward
and launched ahead in a silent surge. There was no explosion, no roar, only sudden acceleration as matter was dragged along the line of least
resistance.
Straight toward Caelum.
Caelum twisted his wrist, air condensing into dense barriers that
slamd shut across the corridor, but the precision of the attack still
drew a thin line between his brows.
The cold Arven moved next.
The surrounding air stilled.
Motion itself seed to still.
The heat from the flas dulled. The drifting frost slowed. Even the
chaotic Arven's fire flickered.
Caelum felt his own air law resist instinctively, layers of pressure grinding against an opposing stillness that sought to flatten
everything into quiet compliance.
Four manifestations.
Four expressions of the sa fractured will.
The original Arven finally spoke, voice calm, almost gentle.
"Careful now," he said mildly. "If all of you pull at once, you'll hurt the
boy."
The mad Arven ignored him, flas roaring higher as he lunged again, laughter spilling freely from his throat.
Caelum drew a slow breath.
He was starting to regret coming to hell at all. At least if he wasn't around, there'd be no sense of responsibility and what was happening now would be another man's problem.
Unfortunately, he just happened to be available.
Caelum thrust his hand forward, aiming at the space between them.
The compressed pressure detonated outward in a wide, indiscriminate burst, a collapsing do of force ant to disrupt
everything.
Before any of the Arvens could fully adjust, Caelum moved. Space
warped around him as he seized Michael more tightly, the pressure
field locking into a single direction.
Retreat.
He vanished in a violent surge, air folding inward as his figure blurred toward the far edge of the floor. The battlefield fell silent.
The original Arven watched the empty space, smile slowly widening.
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