The red haze of dusk bled into the smog-filled skies of gacity X, casting a hellish glow over its skeletal skyline. Buildings lay shattered, their steel bones jutting skyward like claws trying to scratch salvation from heaven.
Fires raged in broken windows. The roads were torn up by craters, chunks of rubble, and collapsed transit rails. Sirens wailed in the background, drowned out only by the deafening boom of explosions and the wretched screech of bending tal.
Hovering above the ruined cityscape, a news chopper broadcasted the chaos live.
"—This is Channel 5 Sky-Eye reporting above Ground Zero. Repeat, Ground Zero. A dark-robed figure has single-handedly launched a devastating attack on Union Command HQ. We’ve got confird visuals: the Union President himself, Galisk, is engaged in what looks like a losing battle. We... we don’t know who she is, but God help us, she’s wiping out everything in her path."
The cara zood in.
There she stood—on a rooftop cracked in half, surrounded by the crumbled remains of anti-air batteries and sniper towers.
The woman’s curved black horns glinted beneath the soot-stained twilight.
A black skull mask hid her face, but those violet eyes—glowing with intensity—pierced through the smoke.
Her robes rippled unnaturally, as if shadows themselves were caught in the threads.
Union President Galisk hovered in the air in a massive golden combat suit—a construct made with his talent. But before he had created this massive cha, his body had already taken a very good beating, causing his breaths to be shallow and his face to be roughed up.
Around him were glowing light constructs—gigantic swords, shields, spears—that shimred with radiant energy. His dark brown hair was streaked with sweat, his golden eyes blazing with defiance.
Around the woman, Union officers shouted into comms, plasma rifles trembling in their hands.
"Squad Delta, fall back! Fall back—wait, she’s behind us—AHH—!"
A snap of blackness. A shadow whip lacerated through a formation, lifting three officers into the air before slamming them into a crumbling high-rise. Their bodies disappeared into the explosion.
Galisk rolled his shoulders with an audible pop, grimacing as his armor creaked with the motion. "Can’t an old man catch a damn break?" he muttered, flexing his fingers through the golden gauntlets of his exo-suit.
"It’s always global crisis after global crisis... I’m stretched thinner than ration paper in a warzone."
His golden eyes flicked toward the woman in black as she floated effortlessly above the scorched rooftop, her robes rippling like liquid midnight.
"Son of Thl’lor," her voice was a silky venom, distorted slightly through the skull mask. "Surrender yourself. Drop the barrier shielding this world and hand over your authority... and I promise you a swift death."
Galisk let out a weary chuckle, brushing back a trickle of blood from his temple with the back of his hand. "See, this is the problem with your kind," he said, voice rising over the wind and fla. "Your negotiation skills are always absolute dogshit."
With a sharp motion of his hand, golden energy surged from the rings around his wrists. A giant array flickered to life behind him—an enormous wheel of interlocking runes and geotric light, expanding rapidly until it dominated the sky like a second sun.
"And as a good businessman, there is only one answer I can give to such an offer. Roll over and die already," Galisk growled, voice edged with frustration and fatigue.
"This is getting really annoying."
With a clenched fist, he unleashed the array. Dozens—no, hundreds—of radiant swords erupted from the sky, raining down in a divine storm of destruction.
Each one was larger than a van, honed by light, trailing heat and force as they streaked toward the horned woman like a divine judgnt.
The ground trembled. Air warped. Buildings cracked further from the force of the incoming barrage.
Yet through it all, the woman stood still.
Unmoved. Unshaken.
She slowly raised a hand, shadow tendrils gathering like a coiling storm, preparing to et Galisk’s wrath head-on.
In a split— a pulse of dark pressure whipped out from the horned woman like a heartbeat.
Then ca the chaos.
Dozens—hundreds—of black tendrils burst from her robes, moving so fast they blurred past visibility, like ink sared across the sky. The light-forged swords never even reached her.
They were shredded mid-descent, reduced to fragnts of golden mist that rained down like harmless glitter. The entire cityscape was montarily drowned in a storm of dying light.
Through the sparkling haze, she moved.
Fast—blisteringly fast.
Shadows coalesced and compressed around her, distorting reality as they spiraled into a colossal warhamr, as wide as a bus and jagged with pulsating black veins.
With a furious snarl, she hurled herself forward, the hamr cocked back and crackling with cursed pressure.
Galisk clicked his tongue. "Tch."
He raised both hands, and his suit pulsed. A radiant burst of light exploded from his core, causing the golden construct around him to shift. The chanical limbs expanded, interlocking and doubling in size.
The suit warped into an enormous giant, glowing with divine circuitry and righteous fury.
It raised one massive arm, and with a chanical roar, swatted the horned woman from the sky like she was an insect.
BOOOOOOM!
She crashed through dozens of buildings before finally slamming into the earth with a thunderous quake, sending up a shockwave that shattered windows for miles and collapsed a nearby skybridge.
Without wasting a second, Galisk’s ch-form sprouted two additional arms, thick with arcane plating. In a blinding flash, four golden swords materialized—each humming with high-pressure energy.
In a burst of speed, he was instantaneously where she had landed, hovering hundreds of feet in the air.
He surged downward like a falling god, all four blades pointed to the crater.
The voice from the news chopper ca back, shaken.
"—I repeat, the Union President has just deployed his Divine Arsenal Mode! He’s bringing the full weight of his arsenal to bear! That woman—whoever she is—she might not survive this!"
But even as Galisk descended like divine judgnt, cracks began to spiderweb outward from the crater... and sothing dark began to stir.
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