User:LordSkorne7/sandbox/Syx and Seven In: Finality

A long silence stretched between them, thick and suffocating.

Absalon turned—slowly, like a machine winding itself back into motion. His movement was unnaturally delayed, stiff, mechanical. His eyes never shifted. They remained locked downward, veiled in shadow like curtains of living night, unreadable, unblinking.

Syx snapped.

"HELLO!?" she shouted, fury rising like steam from an overboiling core.

No response.

Her body tensed as she stepped forward. "Alright, y’know what—"

But before the venom in her words could finish forming, his voice answered—deep, low, and dragging like a stone coffin across ancient earth.

"I should have known..."

A pause. Then Syx, tone sharp and mocking: "...Yesss??"

Absalon didn’t acknowledge it.

"Even at the End... at my great masterpiece... identity would still rise to fight—clinging to itself at the apex of annihilation."

Syx opened her mouth to snap back, but Seven beat her to it, stepping forward without hesitation.

"You won’t have to worry about identity when you’re dead."

A smile — small and thin — ghosted across Absalon’s shadow-laced face.

"I suppose I won’t."

The smile vanished.

And with it; the gauntlet had been cast.

Syx and Seven moved in unison.

In a single, thunderous leap, they launched skyward — air split apart by their speed, rubble exploding in their wake as their feet left twin imprints cracked into the ruin. Their bodies soared toward him as arcs of momentum.

The moment Syx and Seven launched from the ethereal steel of the Sovereign's dais, the air itself warped around them, their synchrony immaculate. They didn’t speak, for they needed not to. They became twin shadows, acting as the operative agents of the same vengeance — the vengeance of the Havriel he had laid low, split only by the angle of their approach.

Absalon remained still.

His eyes still painted to the steel below his feet.

The Last of the Unbowed kept his dark eyes fixed to the floor — almost as if he had felt an ember of remorse for what he was about to unleash.

They vaulted through the open air, arms drawn back and their fists clenched, like twin meteors converging.

But just before impact — one breath before their shared fury met his flesh — their positions shifted mid-flight, silent and seamless: Syx now on the left, Seven on the right.

Their strikes met their target in unison with a force equal to part the stars. The resulting shockwave pulsed outward from the impact point, a detonation of magnitude so immense that it turned the light-made-metal floor of the Circle into a gaping crater. The walls fractured as the ceiling split, and the Sovereign’s image — alongside her ever-present Key-Bearers — crumbled into cascading ruin.

A shared electric pulse of feeling tore through both their minds, manifesting as a quiet shock of hope. Sharp and sudden, the feeling left a whispering of the impossible: maybe, just maybe, they had ended him with that single strike.

And yet.

As the dust began to settle, the truth emerged like a blade through fog — their attack missed its mark.

Absalon still stood.

Unmoving. Unbent. Unbothered.

His head bowed, eyes still fixed on the floor, untouched by the raining devastation wrought around him. It was only when Syx and Seven looked down that they understood. Absalon’s titanic hands were now locked around their arms — gripped not just by the wrist, but further, clamped around their forearms with a vice that felt like a singularity.

Fear washed over Syx's face, in its raw and unmistakable icy presence, as her eyes grew wide in a silent scream. Before either could react— before muscle or thought could respond — Absalon’s grip clenched tighter.

And with its tightening; bones began to crack.

Not as a clean break, but a mangled, splintering mutilation. An immense feeling of unyielding pain surged through their minds like jagged lightning, both having an acute awareness of their limbs folding into themselves under impossible pressure.

The two formed a near-silent choir, singing pain into life through breathless and strained wails, as their bones snapped into a jagged ruin, unable to rend themselves free.

Absalon moved.

And their faces met,

Their skulls slammed together like meteorites — an impact so savage it outclassed their previous strike tenfold. Bone cracked. Vision exploded in white. Syx didn’t scream, she couldn’t. The force robbed her breath, as her world fragmented into a smear of light and ruptured nerves.

Seven’s visor split. A crack tore through it, webbing out from the point of contact like a spider’s shell. Syx’s blood, splashed across the fractured screen in a half-moon streak that dripped down the whole of his helmet.

The shockwave that followed hit a second later.

The walls shuddered.

The floor trembled.

A ripple of raw force surged outward, collapsing another part of the hall behind them. Ancient astral-steel, reinforced and sanctified by the greatest of the Seraphnim, split at the seams.

Absalon released them—just for a breath.

They barely had time to register the drop before his hands were on them again.

This time, his grip found the backs of their heads.

Then — impact.

He drove them down, faces first, into the shattered obsidian floor. The world split beneath them. Not cracked—collapsed. The entire platform buckled inward, folding like paper under a fist. A howl of dust and ruptured energy tore through the air as the level gave way, the chamber's center imploding in a violent cloud of shrieking ruin.

Absalon didn’t follow.

He hovered, standing suspended in the air above the bellowing smoke of the wreckage’s eye —aloof, unscathed—his form silhouetted against the debris-choked light where the chamber used to be.

Syx and Seven hung in his grasp, limp but conscious. Barely.

Through the haze of blinding pain and disorientation, they watched. The remnants of the platform beneath them's giving way, crumbling into a widening abyss. Slabs of light made into solid material and scorched alloy plummeted downward, swallowed by the yawning chasm that stretched deeper with every second.

As they started to drift off into the mask of unconsciousness

Absalon’s grip tightened.

Syx gasped — or rather tried to. The air had fled her lungs. Her scalp screamed as strands tore from the root, his hold on her hair a vice of raw brutality. Blood began to leak down the back of her neck. It felt like her skull was being peeled open from the top.

Veronica fought to steady Violet’s mind—desperately reaching through their link, trying to soothe the chaos, to dull the rising storm of pain.

But the pain surged beyond anything she could contain — too vast, too complete.

So she was left to endure in its full, dark glory.

Seven's pain hit lower.

His helmet cracked — then split with a crunch like thunder. The sound echoed in his ears, deep and wet. A hairline fracture tore through his cranium beneath it. He began to scream as the weight of Absalon’s grip became all he knew, now like the pressure of an entire star collapsing into the shape of a hand.

The two began to flail, helpless and ragged — desperation clawing through their broken bodies and making them writhe like rabbits frozen to the earth by an arrow.

Absalon offered no mercy.

With a downward lurch, he descended into a corridor now exposed through the smoke — a vast arterial hallway of cold, ethereal metal. His grip never loosened. He slammed their faces into the sides of its walls, metal shrieking under the impact, his arms stretched outward, dragging them to either side like broken pendulums.

Then he moved.

He vaulted down the hall like lightning, his velocity splitting the corridor into golden shreds. The walls peeled open in his wake, trailing destruction. Steel cracked. Sigils shattered. Entire segments of the Circle’s foundation, each easily the size of entire worlds, began to fold in on themselves, collapsing behind him in a cascade of ruin.

Thousands of miles vanished beneath them in seconds.

Neither Syx nor Seven could make sense of the world —there was no air, no thought, no gravity. Only vibration. Only light. Only the noise of Finality screaming beneath their bones.

Then, nearing the hall’s end, Absalon arced his shoulders, powerful and violent.

And he let go.

Their bodies were hurled, flung like discarded weapons.

The air detonated with the release. A shockwave split through the corridor, rupturing matter, bending space.

Syx and Seven shattered through barriers meant to withstand the deaths of stars, ricocheting off each other and the curving enormity of Finality’s inner frame. Their bodies spiraled outward — flung to distances marked not by miles, but by the space between worlds.

They finally stopped as their bodies slammed into an etched wall at the terminus of the ever-quickening layers of steel their person collided into, an impact so violent it fractured the carvings themselves, splintering whatever sacred text it had into ruin.

They slowly dropped down the ruined metal together, crumpled and broken, their forms now side by side in a pool of darkening blood.

It oozed from their heads, slow and steady — dripping from torn flesh, seeping from wounds too deep to count. Groans escaped them, breath wheezing in thin, pained strands as consciousness clawed its way back.

Syx stirred first. Her fingers twitched. Her torso rose.

She tried to stand.

But her knees buckled immediately.

She collapsed again, and this time her body wretched upward, as a torrent of blood came as a vomit spilling from her split lips, the inside of her mouth torn and jagged from the violence of the descent.

Beside her, Seven clawed at the remains of his helmet.

The visor, now nothing but shredded glass and broken circuitry, cracked beneath his grip. He tore it free, shards falling like shredded paper as he tossed it to his side.

His face was a wreck — eyes inflamed, skin carved open and battered, red veins thick and wild. Blood streamed down his cheeks, not in rivulets, but in tears. With every breath, a mist of red escaped his mouth, each exhale more labored than the last.

Violet’s cry was a detonation—DO IT!!—and Veronica did. Something shattered. Inside. Through her skull, through her spine, across her soul—the Process Limiter broke. No snap, no pop, no polite fracturing of restriction. It was a crack, a rupture of form, of function, of fate. Her brain moved. At the velocity of God.

Everything.

EVERYTHING.

TWISTED.

TIME.

UNSTITCHED.

CAUSALITY.

WRITHED.

Her heartbeat no longer counted in seconds. It dictated them. Each thump demanded more than a life could give—demanded a trillion lives lived in simultaneous fracture and absolute urgency. The towers—those impossibly ancient titanic graves of law and consequence—collapsed. They reached across the void, beyond the forever that preceded the birth of breath itself, and they bled red. That red wasn’t color. It wasn’t light. It was a signal. A transmission into Veronica’s being:

FLEE.

ESCAPE.

NOW.

Syx could see it—SEE IT—not with eyes, but with overlays flooding her mind in a lattice of neon geometry and quantum intuition. Green lines, thousands, all mapped, intersecting, crashing, recombining—one. One line through this dying cathedral of forever, and it sang. A path through the kaleidoscope shrapnel of history’s collapse, through star-forged ruin, through death fractals expanding with every heartbeat.

Each wrong step? Annihilation.

Each hesitation? The end of stars.

At the end of the path?

Nowhere. Not salvation. Not victory. Just NOT-FINALITY. Just AWAY from the screaming terminus of all.

The message was carved into every atom:

"Use the body. Not to live. To move. TO OUTRUN THE END."

Her arm tore forward. Shoulder snapped, tendon screamed, fingers dug into the titanium throttle until they bled. She was no longer pilot.

She was vector.

A streak of incandescent terror through a universe unmaking itself.

“SEVEN!!!” she roared, lungs ripping at their seams, vocal cords vibrating like the engine itself. “I HOPE YOU’RE FUCKING READY!!”

No reply.

He didn’t need to.

Because he was already there.

The ship. The hull. Her nerves. All of it began to blur, shred, twist, hypercycle, split, reform, stutter into fourth, fifth, sixth states of being. Chrono-delirium struck like a hammer—images folding into themselves, feedback loops creating forward movement. Her teeth rattled in their gums. Her eyes trembled in their sockets. Muscles spasmed as her own chronometry betrayed her.

Still faster.

Still.

FASTER.

She surged. Walls vanished. Floors folded. Time slid sideways. Each moment became a vector of pure suffering-speed, shredding sensation, input, coherence.

What is time?

WHAT IS TIME?

There is only motion.

There is only flight.

There is only the red-stained throttle—and her hand, still on it, now fused by force, melted into it by intensity, screaming backward through reality as the speed hit something beyond measure.

She screamed again. Not from pain.

From momentum.

From agony-touched transcendence.

From velocity that had no concept of stopping.

The gilded and Sovereign flame inside her exploded.

And the universe recoiled.

DO IT!!