Darlington continued to clap and laugh.
Clap. Clap. Clap. His hands came together in steady rhythm, a one-man audience applauding the show unfolding below. HAHAHAHAHA! His laughter echoed in the void around him, bouncing off nothing and returning to his ears alone.
He took a breath an unnecessary action in his formless state, but a habit he couldn't shake. It grounded him. Reminded him he had once been human.
"I have to say," he murmured, wiping an imaginary tear from his eye, "it's pretty entertaining to watch this."
He looked at the battlefield below at the bodies, the blood, the glory of it all.
"How ironic."
His eyes shifted.
The only unknown card left on this particular section of the battlefield was still floating in the air, still wrapped in darkness, still changing.
Lancelot.
The black liquid that had once been steam, that had once been an orb, that had once trapped him it was doing something new now. It had started to move. To spin. It formed a spiral in the air, a twisting column of absolute darkness that rose from Lancelot's floating form and reached toward the sky.
It looked like a tornado viewed in cross-section a whirlwind of pure void that seemed to drink the light around it.
And it was pulling.
Percival felt it first.
He had been recovering near the rocks, his eyes slowly returning to something resembling functionality, his body screaming from a hundred wounds. Then the spiral activated, and he felt himself moving not by choice, but by force.
"What the hell?!" He dug his heels into the ground, but the pull was too strong. His feet left furrows in the sand as he was dragged forward. "What is going on here?!"
He bent his body, shifting his center of gravity, trying to resist. The force slammed him into a rock hard, brutal, painful. He felt ribs crack. Felt organs shift. Felt blood fill places blood shouldn't be.
But he didn't let go.
His spear reassembled, finally whole again stabbed into the rock. The blade bit deep, finding purchase in the stone. He pushed it in further, pulled it down, using the force of the spiral to his advantage rather than fighting against it.
He slid down the rock face, controlling his descent, until he reached the bottom. There he lay, flat against the ground, breathing hard, looking up at the nightmare above.
The spiral of black liquid bent the air itself. He could see it distortion, wavering, reality protesting against whatever was happening. The darkness spun faster and faster, and at its center, Lancelot floated like a fetus in a womb.
"What..." Percival gasped. "What is happening to you, Lancelot?"
Then he heard it.
A voice. Shouting his name.
"PERCIVAL!"
Tristan.
Percival turned his head slowly, painfully and saw them. Three figures battling against the same force that had nearly taken him.
Tristan fought the pull with every ounce of his remaining strength, his muscles screaming, his feet digging trenches in the sand. Beside him, Sir Kay held onto a rock with one hand and Tristan with the other, his face a mask of pure determination.
And Sir Galahad Sir Galahad moved differently.
He drew his sword.
The Sword of David gleamed in the grey light, untouched by the darkness, unaffected by the chaos. Galahad raised it high and slashed not at the spiral, not at the darkness, but at the air itself.
SHIIIIING!
The blade's first ability Cut.activated.
For a single, brief moment, a repelling force exploded from the point of the slash. It pushed against the spiral's pull, creating a pocket of stillness, a bubble of calm in the storm of force.
It bought them less than a few seconds.
But for Galahad, that was enough.
"Thirty seconds!" he shouted. "We have exactly thirty seconds! We need to move NOW! "
He grabbed Tristan with one hand a grip of iron, unbreakable. His other hand caught a piece of Sir Kay's armor, holding him fast.
"Hang on!" Galahad's voice cut through the chaos. "HANG ON!"
He raised his sword again but differently this time. His grip changed. His hand became strong, fingers locked around the hilt with absolute certainty. But his wrist his wrist became flexible. Limber. Alive.
He began to cut.
Not at the spiral. Not at the darkness. At the air.
His arm moved in a pattern that resembled nothing so much as someone sewing cloth back and forth, up and down, each stroke precise, each motion perfect. The blade traced impossible patterns in the empty space before him.
"Sword style..." Galahad's voice was calm, focused, absolute. "Heavenly Slash."
He cut the impossible.
The air itself parted before his blade. Not sliced separated. A gap opened in the fabric of reality, a space where pressure didn't exist, where force couldn't reach, where the spiral's pull was nothing.
Sir Galahad's sword technique had reached a level beyond anything that had ever existed. He was not merely wielding a weapon he was dancing with it. Becoming it. Transcending it.
He was slowly reaching the pinnacle of the sword.
And in that moment, he created.
A gap in pressure. A room of zero force. A path through the chaos.
Galahad moved, dragging Tristan and Kay with him, through the gap he had carved in reality itself. The spiral's pull couldn't touch them here. Couldn't reach them. They existed in a bubble of Galahad's making, a space where only he decided what forces applied.
They reached Percival.
Galahad landed lightly beside him, releasing Tristan and Kay, his sword still raised, his eyes still fixed on the spiral above.
"We're here," he said simply.
Percival stared at him at the impossible thing he had just done and for once, had nothing to say.
Above them, the spiral continued to spin.
Lancelot floated at its center, still unconscious, still changing. The black liquid that surrounded him pulsed with each heartbeat, each breath, each thought he didn't know he was having.
Something was brewing.
A new battle greater than anything that had come before was about to begin.
The knights stood together, facing the darkness, ready for whatever emerged.
And somewhere above them all, Darlington watched and waited and smiled.
in the space between chaos and calm, between the man Lancelot had been and the thing he was becoming.
The next battle was coming.
And none of them were ready for it.