My fist flashes forward.
It is no longer just flesh, bone, and muscle; it is a physical manifestation of terminal velocity, a weaponized concept of pure kinetic hatred. I am moving so fast that the ambient air simply cannot move out of the way. The atmosphere compresses into a hyper-dense wall, superheats from the impossible friction, and then violently ruptures. A deafening sonic boom cracks the space between us before I have even covered half the distance to his hovering form.
The wind whips around my driving arm in a localized, shrieking hurricane, tearing the remaining, blood-soaked rags of my sleeve into literal dust. And then comes the lightning. It isn't natural weather. It is the sheer, unadulterated friction of my augmented body tearing through the world. My will can not be stopped by mere physics. Arcs of jagged, crackling blue-white electricity spiral down my forearm, wrapping around my bruised knuckles in a tight, brilliant coil. The static discharge feels almost alive, humming with a vicious, eager joy against my skin, as if the lightning itself is happy to guide my strike, desperate to ground itself directly into that cracked obsidian mask.
But it is not meant to be.
Through the hyper-focused, greyscale lens of my augmented vision, I see Teleb's single visible blue eye widen but it still has an amused glint to it. He doesn't even move his hands nor does he speak. To me in the second it took me to reach him he doesn't consciously construct a defense at all. His connection to his Mark is so deeply ingrained, so terrifyingly absolute, that the metal around him responds to his sheer instinct.
He turns all of his swords the entire hovering armada of thousands of blades that blotted out the canyon sky into one massive, singular shield.
The sky empties. The blades collapse inward, slamming together with the sickening, deafening shriek of grinding, warping steel. They fuse and overlap in a chaotic, impenetrable wall of metal right between my lightning-wreathed fist and his face.
And within that wall, I feel them.
My Fearmonger ability senses them once again as the shield forms, a suffocating, nauseating wave of absolute terror washes over me. It is coming from the metal itself. I can sense the living blades the poor, twisted, agonizing souls that Teleb has forged into weapons. They are trapped in that steel. They are aware at some baseline level of what has happened to them. And they are petrified of the apocalyptic force I am about to bring down upon their metallic bodies.
They are screaming, a psychic wail of dread that echoes in the dark corners of my mind. But the Wolf in my Soul Sea does not pity them. My Fearmonger feeds on it. I drink their terror in, converting their existential dread into even more devastating energy for myself.
My hand connects with the screaming metal shield and the world stops for a single, agonizing microsecond.
An even larger, cataclysmic sonic boom erupts from the exact place of contact. The collision does not just create a sound; it creates a localized seismic event. The air shatters like brittle glass, sending visible shockwaves rippling outward through the canyon dust.
The kinetic feedback loop has nowhere to go but back. It rebounds directly up my limb.
I feel my entire arm shatter.
Because my perception is pushed to its absolute limits, I am forced to experience the destruction of my own body in excruciating, hyper-focused slow motion. The bones of my knuckles powder into a fine, useless dust against the unyielding steel. My fingers splinter outward, tearing through tendons and skin. My arm bows under the impossible, rebounding pressure and then violently, explosively snap in half. My elbow joint vaporizes into cartilage shrapnel, and the humerus fractures in four distinct places, sending jagged shards of bone stabbing up into my shoulder capsule.
My right arm is pulverized into a mangled, floppy sack of meat and bone splinters in the span of a heartbeat.
And then comes the agonizing process of it snapping back into place.
Before the blinding pain can even fully register in my cerebral cortex, the Regenerator mark violently kicks in. Golden light erupts from my ruined flesh, blindingly bright even in the muted, greyscale world of my vision. This is still not a gentle mending. The healing process is a brutal, forceful, and torturous reconstruction.
The pain of the healing is infinitely worse than the break. The golden threads of divine vitality grab the shattered fragments of bone and aggressively yank them back into alignment with sickening, wet crunches that vibrate up into my jaw. Torn, shredded muscle fibers are whipped together and violently braided back into working tissue. Severed nerves are fused back together in a fraction of a second, misfiring in a crescendo of white-hot agony that makes my vision swim.
Simultaneously, the area around Teleb and me can no longer contain the physics of our clash. We are hit with a massive, hemispherical wave of compressed air and blistering heat that explodes outward from the epicenter of the shield.
The stone platform multiple feet beneath us simply gives up, disintegrating into a cloud of deadly, high-velocity shrapnel leaving a massive hole down to a lower platform.
Teleb and I are sent flying away from each other.
The physical blowback hits me like a charging siege engine as I am launched backward, tumbling head over heels through the air, completely devoid of balance or control. Teleb is launched in the exact opposite direction, his massive, fused metal shield shattering into thousands of dull, bent fragments that rain down around his tumbling form like dead leaves.
As I spin helplessly through the violently displaced air, my hyper-focused vision tracks the collateral damage.
I spot Imara.
The shockwave hits her unconscious body with zero mercy. She is picked up from the stone and sent flying like a discarded ragdoll. I watch her travel probably forty feet across the eviscerated, cratered platform. Her limp form rotates in the air before she hits the ground, rolling, bouncing, and crashing over the jagged, ruined stone with a sickening violence. Her broken arm flops uselessly, taking further impacts as she skids to a halt in the dust.
Even bathed in the psychotic, blood-drunk rage of the Fearmonger, I feel my eyebrow raise in a fleeting, detached spike of pity at the scene. If she wasn't already dead when she collapsed, that brutal, uncontrolled landing might have just finished the job.
I have no time to dwell on her survival. The ground is rushing up to meet me.
I crash into the ground hard. The impact knocks the wind from my lungs, but the Regenerator is already working, flooding my bruised ribs with golden light. I use the momentum of the crash to roll, digging my boots into the platform , scraping my hands against the ground to bleed off the velocity until I finally skid to a halt.
I roll to my feet, my chest heaving, my newly reconstructed right arm throbbing with a dull ache.
I look up, tracking Teleb's trajectory. He is hurtling toward the edge of the crateror, about to be thrown into a lower platform yet again.
But he doesn't fall.
I spot the female member of the Midnight Rose. The pristine masked figure. What was it that Teleb had called her? A Petal?
She teleports directly into the air above the abyss, bypassing the physical laws of momentum entirely that most teleporters still have to abide by. She materializes directly in Teleb's flight path, reaching out to grab the back of his ruined, metal armor. The moment her hand makes contact with him, the space around them folds inward like a crushed piece of paper, and she teleports them both back to the safety of the solid ground, setting him down gently amidst the rubble.
My anger spikes even more, a dark, oily inferno burning in the center of my chest.
A one-on-one fight against Teleb is a bloody, agonizing stalemate. He has the mass, the defensive capabilities, and perfect control over his mark of power. I have the speed, the Fearmonger's output, and the Regenerator's twisted brand of immortality. We could grind each other into dust for hours, destroying the entire city in the process.
But with another Petal backing him up especially one who can seemingly teleport perfectly and instantly, and with enough precision to pluck a man out of the air as he is flying with the force of sonic boom the variables have fundamentally changed. I start to feel the cold, creeping realization that the possibility of losing this fight has just gone back up.
The thought infuriates me. The voices in my head scream their absolute rejection of failure and i clench my teeth in anger. The hateful grating worms are not helpful.
I stand there, hissing through my teeth, the golden light of my healing fading back into my skin, when I sense it.
A cold, unnatural prickle races down my spine. The Fearmonger's sensory net flares, detecting a sudden, violent displacement of spatial pressure.
Directly to my left.
My left hand flashes out before I even have time to turn my head or process the visual. It is a pure, instinctual strike, a brutal backhand fueled by paranoia and lethal intent, aimed perfectly into the empty space.
The air unfolds.
The female teleporter appears in all her pristine, obsidian-masked glory, materializing exactly where my fist is already traveling.
If the woman is surprised by my fist racing toward her face the very instant she arrives out of the ether, I have no way of knowing. She wears the same featureless obsidian mask as Teleb, a cold, reflective void that gives absolutely nothing away.
I fully expect the impact to shatter her mask, to cave in her skull, to eliminate the tactical variable she presents in one swift, brutal motion.
But my fist doesn't even come close to landing a solid blow.
As the tips of my fingers merely graze the cold, smooth glass of her obsidian mask, the world abruptly, violently inverts.
I feel a sickening lurch in my stomach, a sensation of reality itself pulling inside out. The solid stone of the ruined platform vanishes from beneath my boots. The burning city of Baelin, the dust clouds, the metallic wreckage, and the teleporter herself all instantly blink out of existence.
They are replaced by a rushing, roaring emptiness.
The air pressure drops. The temperature plummets to a freezing, biting chill. The gravity shifts violently, grabbing my entire body and pulling me down from a height I cannot even comprehend.
I am falling from the sky.
The canyon is gone. I am surrounded by vast, open air, hundreds—maybe thousands—of feet above the earth. The ground below is a distant, terrifying blur rushing up to meet me at an accelerating terminal velocity.
The wind tears the breath from my lungs, howling in my ears with deafening force, whipping my torn clothes against my skin. I flail for a moment, throwing my arms out, entirely helpless in the open, empty air, a victim of a perfect, instantaneous spatial relocation.
I look down at the rapidly approaching earth, the voices in my head shrieking in a cacophony of absolute, unfiltered rage, and I scream. I scream not in terror of the fall, but in pure, untethered, blood-boiling anger at being outplayed.