(Marvel, DC, images, manhuas, and every anime that will be mentioned and used in this story are not mine. They all belong to their respective owners. The main character "Karito/Adriel Josue Valdez" and the story are mine)
Meanwhile, in Targon...
The arena roared like surf. Holo-screens hung above the terraces in layered panes, catching the fight no matter how far Adriel and Mangog slingshotted through the void—angle after angle stitched in real time by Targon's conjurers until it felt like the sky itself was a projector.
Artoria watched without blinking. The images made and unmade themselves across her pupils—Adriel's arc like a meteor; Mangog's counter like a fault line remembering it knew how to move. She kept her breath even and her shoulders squared, the way old teachers had drilled into her back when she was still pretending ceremony could organize chaos.
A pressure—familiar, sour-slick—drew out the hairs at the nape of her neck.
Someone sat beside her.
She didn't look. She knew that perfume of wrongness. The quiet next to it. The smile you felt before you saw it.
"Evening," said the man. Cheerful, mid-thirties on purpose, shoes too clean for a mountain. "Carter. Long time."
"Fuck off," Artoria said, still looking at the holo. It surprised even her how flatly it came out.
A soft laugh. "Language from the king? Tragic. You pick that up from your new friends?"
She turned then, because it was worse not to. Carter's face was what he wore when he wanted mortals to volunteer their throats: earnest, handsome, margins unthreatening. The eyes gave it away if you stared long enough—too patient. Predatory patience, like low tide waiting for ships.
The crowd behind them surged—Adriel drove Mangog through a ring of ice and the sound boomed across the arena, delayed by the charms that made the feed feel physical. Nobody around them noticed the visitor. Enchantment or indifference; with him, both were likely.
"You're not welcome here," Artoria said. "Not in this form, not in any."
"And yet." He spread his hands mildly. "Hospitality is Targon's brand tonight. I'm only spectating. Terrible to miss such sport."
"You don't spectate," she said. "You meddle."
"I enable." The tilt of his head was playful. "Red Goblin needed a door and I lent him a corridor. AM needed bite and I gave him seasoning. What they cooked with it was... inedible." He wrinkled his nose, as if the memory offended a gourmand. "You have no idea how frustrating incompetence can be at scale."
"You tried to break Peter." She kept her palms flat on her knees to hide the tremor that wanted to live there. "You wore a face and threaded knives into his doubts and called it help."
"And he stood up," Carter said, delighted. "Lovely, wasn't it? You people call it growth. I call it catharsis. Either way, it played."
"Don't use our words." She breathed in, breathed out. The taste of him in the air was old salt and library rot. "Why are you here?"
He leaned back as if the bench were a couch in a living room. "To keep you company, Saber. We've barely chatted since you resigned from the family business."
"We were never family." She finally let herself look away from the screen. "We weren't even colleagues. I was a weapon you owned."
"Rented," he corrected. "And you were good at it." His smile showed no teeth. "Melancholic, yes. A little... soggy around the faith. But reliable."
She swallowed what she wanted to say. He was stronger; the calculus of now said words were cheaper than blood. "I have a better cause."
"Do you?" He glanced up at the holos where Adriel steadied in freefall, twin blades of storm tightening in his hands. "The boy says please and you say yes. Functionally indistinguishable from orders, only he wraps them in friendship. I admire that. Efficient."
Artoria felt the irritation before she chose the sentence. "He asks. He does not compel. That difference matters."
"If you say so." Carter's gaze tracked a new angle as the feed cut to the ring plane shivering in neon; Mangog burst out of the glare like a wolf shaking off rain. "Still, you're calmer. Purpose flatters you."
The compliment felt like being brushed with a gloved hand. She let it pass.
"What do you know about Anansi?" she asked. "You didn't come to mock Red Goblin's grave. You came because you're bored. Bored men gossip."
He grinned—not at the jab, but at the economy of it. "Good. You've learned to step directly onto the blade." He stared at her for a beat, then sighed as if giving up a small, sweet secret. "You're wondering why I let your clown fail upward while the spider keeps weaving. Because I like wagers, Saber. AM and your goblin were a side bet. Anansi is the table."
Her jaw set. "Meaning?"
He looked past her shoulder to no one in particular, as if addressing the auditorium. "I'll be gentle. Teasers only. Spoilers are barbaric." His tone warmed. "Your weaver is patient. He's been plucking strands from every Dark you've trimmed, looping their residue through the city with the gears. Every victory you banked was interest he compounded. He is teaching Piltover what a pantheon feels like when it fits in a pocket."
"That's not an answer." She hated how sharp it came out; how hungry.
"It's the only safe one." Carter steepled his fingers. "Here's a firmer morsel: you won't touch him alone. Not you. Not the boxer. Not the spider. It takes the whole choir to drown a storyteller who writes the song you're singing."
"The whole choir," she repeated, tasting it, disliking it. "All Guardians."
"All threads, braided. Don't bring less." His eyes met hers; for a blink, the cheer peeled back and she saw the thing that wore Carter looking at her from a distance you could measure only by dying of it. "Anansi is adjusting the ladder, Saber. He's adding rungs above you as quickly as you climb. When you arrive at the clockwork river, remember that every Dark you unmade is a plank of his bridge."
She pictured Piltover's sky—brass, steam, pride—and the idea of a bridge made of ghosts through its heart. "Why tell me this?"
"Because drama is a garden." He smiled again, all pleasant edges. "It grows best when watered with dread. And because you asked nicely, in your way."
"Nicely," she said, deadpan. "Right."
On the holo, Adriel cut a bright figure through the rings of the not-Saturn, his bioelectric blades leaving contrails that turned to lace in the thin atmosphere. Mangog answered with a tidal swing; the ring plane yowled. The crowd rose, gasped, sat, like a field of grass taught the trick of standing and kneeling to applause.
Artoria exhaled. "One more thing. If you are so high above this board—why involve yourself at all? Why help Red Goblin if you knew he'd fail? If the spider is your table and the Guardians your horses, why tilt anything?"
"Because stillness offends me," he said simply. "Because certainty breeds boredom. Because there is a difference between watching a fire and flicking a match, and I enjoy the scent of my own smoke." The smile sharpened. "And because the boy with the crown fascinates me. He thinks he's learned to say no to fate by learning every word for yes."
Artoria let herself smile, small and honest. "You think you're the only one allowed to be contradictory."
He laughed—genuine sound, bright and cruel. "Perhaps."
A ripple went through the stands as the holo zoomed; a white lance bit a planet's limb and bloomed it from within. The barrier over the arena took the echo like sailcloth taking wind and tightened, clarifying the images even more. Somewhere behind them, someone shouted Adriel's name like a prayer.
Artoria flexed her fingers once, loosening the instincts that wanted a sword that wouldn't help. "If your goal is dread, consider it planted," she said. "But hear me clearly: I remember what you are. Trick me and I cut you the next time we're in reach."
"You tried that once."
"I'll try again," she said. "We improve."
He leaned close enough for the shape of him to push at her aura. "Improvement is what I'm betting on." He straightened. "Do tell your spider and your boxer to hurry. The clock in Piltover has learned to count in more directions than one."
"What does that even mean?"
"Exactly." The word landed like a coin in a fountain.
She blinked, and the seat beside her was empty—no seated weight's memory in the bench, no scent, nothing for the senses to claim he'd ever been there at all. Only the taste of the conversation remained, metallic as the first bite of blood.
Artoria set her hands on her thighs again. She watched Adriel carve through another gale and heard the crowd's hope fold and unfold like origami around the ring. The anxiety that lived under her sternum found a new outline and expanded to fit it.
"Be careful," she said quietly—to Adriel stretched like a comet across the holo, to Ace wherever he was arguing with Peter about food, to herself. "Please."
Then, as if remembering her own advice, she sat up straighter and forced her breath to match the rhythm of the fight. When Mangog's next swing came and Adriel answered, the sound rolled over the mountain like weather, and she let it move through her.
The future felt nearer than it had an hour ago. And heavier.
...
He'd finally stopped babying the planet. No more tiptoeing.
Adriel's hands crackled, twin bio-electric blades building out from his fists like he was holding two neon machetes. Dust and iron grit in the void spun up around him—magnetism pulling a thin halo into orbit. Across from him, Mangog rolled his neck and grinned like a problem you can't ignore.
"Now you look worth my time."
"Yeah? Then shut up and swing."
They vanished into each other. No fancy wind-up—just knuckles and knees and bad intentions. Adriel opened with clean karate lines—step in, straight right, hip-turn left hook—then switched to elbows and clinch knees the second Mangog tried to crowd him. Mangog didn't "counter." He crashed. Forearm shields. Hammerfists. A bear trap for a clinch. Every hit landed like a car accident.
A venom-amped cross lit Mangog's cheek. The current crawled under his skin; he drank it like it was Gatorade. His pupils burned hotter.
"More."
Adriel answered with a headbutt. Mangog headbutted back harder. White flash. No air to carry sound, but Adriel's skull still rang like someone smacked a bell in his head. Spider-sense yanked him off the next hook by half an inch; the follow-up elbow still clipped ear and jaw. He phased out, let the elbow pass through a body that wasn't there, re-formed behind Mangog, tried for a neck lever—
Mangog grabbed Adriel by the thigh and whipped him.
The nearest moon didn't survive. He skipped across its surface in a smear of rock and light, carving a trench from pole to pole. His spine rebuilt itself on the run; lungs rebooted; he turned skid into sprint and met Mangog mid-air again.
They traded like idiots who didn't believe in tomorrow.
Adriel's blades weren't slicing "matter." They were slicing permission—trimming the universe's OK to let stuff exist right where he cut. A forearm went; it grew back meaner. Mangog laughed, red steam rolling off him.
"Bleed me again, little guardian."
"Plan on it."
He surged. Halo collapsed inward to armor his forearms; a venom blast rode each punch. Mangog let most of it hit, soaked it, weaponized it. Fine. Adriel stopped feeding the battery. He pivoted to kinetic: compressed iron and rock into a rail-slug with magnetism, then punched the slug point-blank.
It hit Mangog in the sternum hard enough to fold a building. Mangog bowed around it, unfurled, and came away thicker. Adriel swore under his breath. "Of course you do."
The next exchange turned the moon to gravel. Nothing left worth saving—just a smoking band of glass and a gravity tantrum. Mangog used Adriel like a hammer again, bounced him off a stack of falling continents, then flung him toward the ringed world hanging nearby like a prize.
Adriel planted both feet in vacuum, pulled on the ring's hidden magnetic skeleton, and slingshotted back so fast his aura tore a bright line. The two of them met above cloudtops. He stapled both blades together into a single lance, overlaid a lattice of matter-control so the thing wouldn't melt, and threw it straight through the planet's waist.
The world ripped like paper.
Exploding mantle light washed them both. Adriel didn't admire it. Mangog palmed his face and shoved him into his own beam, forcing it through two smaller planetoids downrange. Clean bisects. Clean hate.
"Cabron," Adriel muttered, ripping free. He re-solidified inside Mangog's guard and carved a line across ribs. Mangog pivoted into the cut, locked Adriel's arms, and drove him down. They plunged through the planet's hot gut and out the other side. Glassed rock glittered behind them like another ring.
"Enough," Adriel said. "We're wasting time."
"We're wasting worlds." Mangog smiled wider.
Adriel built speed on nothing, each footfall stamping a temporary platform of magnetized grit. He hammered liver, jaw, temple—clean shots a coach would love—then paid for them when Mangog answered with caveman geometry. A hook that started at yesterday wrecked his ear. An elbow folded his cheekbone in. Adriel bit down and kept working.
They shot past the ring and toward a red star that looked angry for a living. Heat kicked them in the chest. Adriel yanked a storm out of the star's wind and wrapped it around Mangog's ankles, dragging him across the photosphere hard enough to leave a bright scratch. The sun threw a little tantrum. Mangog ripped a prominence like a rope and tried to strangle him with it. Adriel cut the rope; the flare snapped back like a pissed-off cat's tail.
Ahead: a quasar jet, a blade of white cutting the dark.
Adriel skimmed the edge until his bones vibrated, dipped a blade to "charge" it, then crossed both weapons into a glowing X. Mangog hit the cross and split his forearms open to the elbow. He didn't grow them back before he tackled; he just slammed shoulders first and shoved them both through the jet.
They came out boiling, silhouettes missing pieces and then not.
Up close again. No speeches—breathing too hard for that. Mangog's hook walked Adriel's brain around in his skull. Adriel kneed him under the ribs hard enough to crater. Hate filled the crater from the inside out. They clinched and went ugly: collar ties, thumb peels, headbutts with shitty intentions. Mangog grabbed hair, yanked down, and bounced Adriel's face off his knee until cartilage stopped bothering with integrity. Adriel vanished; the decoy ate a haymaker. Mangog didn't buy it twice. He snagged ankle mid-swing and used Adriel as a flail on an asteroid belt.
Fine. Adriel blinked his ankle out of reality for a breath, slipped the grip, grew it back, and webbed Mangog's wrists together with crackling energy thread. One yank; a knee rocketed up. Mangog's chest dented. He laughed into it.
"Pain is a teacher."
"Cool. Do your homework."
He carved a Kaine brand across Mangog's side, a suck-the-heat-in burn. Mangog rolled with it, hip-threw Adriel into a planetoid, and followed, both hands on the crust like he meant to drink the planet's past. He did. Old impacts, old quakes, all that kinetic memory—he swallowed it, stood up heavier.
Adriel clapped palms and ripped the planetoid open, then slammed both halves shut like a bear trap. It blew apart. The blast woke the whole system—stars coughing, nearby moons stuttering in their orbits, a shock bubble swelling out like a red bruise.
They needed a new arena. They found one in a glass world—a sphere of silica dunes and sharp pride. Mangog slung Adriel across it; the top layer atomized into glitter. Adriel threw a magnetized discus the size of a city. It bisected Mangog at the waist. His halves punched and kicked their way back together like that was normal.
"Okay," Adriel exhaled. "Time to cheat."
The Hacker came on like a cold draft. He edited the local sandbox: throttle chain reactions, keep the collateral down, protect bystanders back home. The code obeyed with a shiver. Mangog hated the feeling on principle.
"What did you do?"
"Made sure we don't accidentally delete the book we're fighting in."
Limit Breaker opened the taps. He didn't get bigger; he got sharp. His guard cleaned up. The future leaned an inch closer to his eyes.
They burned through the rest of the system. A gas giant got a permanent white belt line etched into its clouds from a miss. An orphan world got turned into six new moons. In a tight pocket of space crowded with small bodies, they met power with power and refused to blink.
One straight right from Adriel—bio-electric payload braided with a matter shear—threaded Mangog's guard and slammed him back. Mangog's hook erased Adriel's eyebrow and tried to turn his cheek into a different country.
They kept going. Ribs broke and grew. Teeth pinged away and returned mid-cuss. They were painting the void with a steady drip of blood and laughing at how stupid that was.
Mangog wrenched both of Adriel's arms out at the shoulder. The sockets spun, popped back in. Pain put a hand on Adriel's shoulder like, "hey, remember me?" He kicked through the centerline and fired a lateral burst from his foot to turn the kick into a rocket. Mangog's sternum cratered and refilled with something older than anger.
"Better," Mangog said, breath smoking. "You're not pretending you're small."
"Wasn't pretending. Just busy."
He yanked reality like a rug and cut scenes. One blink, they were above a blue supergiant—light so white it looked like knives.
This is where the pace changed. Not slower. Meaner.
Adriel shut off flourish and fought like a guy who had reps. Tight jab; chop the guard; low kick; shoulder bump; elbow in the pocket. Mangog answered with answers that didn't belong to gyms: shoulder checks that felt like whole coastlines; clinch squeezes that turned vertebrae into white noise. Adriel tore one of Mangog's arms off and fed it to vacuum. The new arm showed up already flexing.
They punched a small moon until it rang. The bell note rolled across the star's atmosphere and pulled a curtain of plasma into the air. Two silhouettes wrote their argument across it—one precise, one feral—neither backing off.
Adriel spit blood. "Last round?"
"Last round—" Mangog's smile got sharper. "—for now."
"Good."
He killed the cute stuff. Magnetism hugged bone and tendon like plating. Bio-electricity crawled under his skin in slow waves. Matter-control slimmed his fists to tools. The Hacker penciled one more line on the local rules: Straight line between us, no more drifting.
Across from him, Mangog simplified too. Feet a little wider. Hands loose. Breathing deep. Rage—compressed.
Three small worlds wandered between them like nosy kids.
They stepped.
The first collision turned the nearest world into fireworks. It went out in a single dirty bloom.
They blew through the debris and didn't stop. Adriel's second shot—pure straight right—dragged a light track across space like someone drew with a welding torch. When it passed through a line of tiny planetoids behind Mangog, they popped into halves clean enough to be educational.
Adriel pinwheeled through the void after that last exchange, both of them blasted to opposite ends of the sky like bullets fired at the speed limit of reality. He chewed through a belt of rock, ping-ponged off two dead moons, and pancaked into a sulfur-skinned world that looked a whole lot like Io.
The crater bloomed like a nuke. Ten Tsar Bombas, easy. The whole planet rang.
Adriel's ears screamed; he coughed twice, shoved to his feet. Suit knit. Ribs sealed. Vision steadied. The once-yellow plains now spider-webbed into rivers of glowing glass.
"Great. I'm the natural disaster," he muttered, rolling his shoulders. This had gone on too long. He flicked his gaze up and let the vision sharpen. There—far, far out—Mangog, a spark with teeth, nearly a million light-years away and already smiling like he'd heard the thought.
"FINALLY." The word crawled across vacuum and into Adriel's chest like bass. "NO MORE TRAINING WHEELS."
"Yeah, yeah. Don't get cute," Adriel said, mostly to himself. One last crash. End it. Keep Runeterra safe.
He stamped once. The crust cracked in a perfect circle, and he launched—gone—punching the dark so hard the dark gave way. The trip should've taken forever. It didn't. He wasn't aiming for Mangog yet; he was aiming for the scaffolding behind all this.
He hit the farthest "edge" you could hit in a universe that didn't end anymore. Anansi had stretched this cosmology into a climbing frame: the Von Neumann hierarchy cranked to infinity and then some. Adriel let the Hacker snap on and the picture unfolded—sets stacked atop sets, ranks like floors in a tower that had no top, ordinals braided like cables. Beyond that, other towers. Beyond those, the black water everything floated in.
"Okay," he breathed. "We're doing the stupid thing."
He reached—not with hands, with the admin keys baked into his soul—and yanked a symbol out of the skeleton: a Mahlo cardinal. Not a number. A property. A summit that birthed more summits. He crushed it down until it fit in a fist—bio-electricity knitting around the concept like rebar around a star.
Across the universe, Mangog did something he didn't have a name for. He didn't understand set theory; he didn't need to. He gathered rage the way a planet gathers mass—every hatred, every grudge, every scream that ever echoed across a story. It all flowed into a single, impossible "measure," a judge that decided what counted and what didn't. In math, mortals would've called it a measurable—a wrath-measure, a living ultrafilter that turned the whole hierarchy into fuel. He pulled that measure over himself like a knuckle-duster.
"COME BREAK ON ME."
Adriel snorted. "Cabrón, I've been trying."
The universe noticed. Time quivered. Other timelines felt it as disasters they could actually understand—a sky that wouldn't stop being dawn, a sea that forgot how to be water—then stabilized. No casualties, not there. Here, though? Here was bad. That's why Adriel kept a part of himself split off since the bell rang, baby-sitting Runeterra with layered barriers and magnetic cages. He tightened them now, cinching the solar system shut like a fist inside a fist.
When their charges peaked, distance died. They were just there—nose to nose at what passed for center, fists cocked, pupils thin.
"HIT ME."
"Gladly."
They swung.
Impact wasn't sound. It was adjudication.
The Mahlo charge tried to shear through the V-hierarchy like a diamond wire, slicing ranks clean, promoting ordinals into heat. Mangog's wrath-measure answered by collapsing everything it touched to his level—forcing higher peaks to agree they were plains, crumpling cardinals into one another until the ladder groaned. Their powers weren't energy beams; they were edits. And the edits collided.
An entire swath of the universe went blank and then negative, as if a bite had been taken out of its disk—stars smeared into a crescent, lanes of dust folding toward a black wedge that wasn't a hole so much as a verdict.
Adriel's arm disintegrated up to the shoulder. It already regrew. Mangog's jaw ripped off; he roared without it, "MORE!" and another jaw grew in under the sound.
They didn't separate. They leaned into it, foreheads almost touching, each trying to drown the other's concept. Adriel's Hacker worked the seam—if Mangog's immortality rested on hatred, then narrow the domain. He reached into the wrath-measure and told it it only recognized hatred that included witnesses. He quarantined the arena, their audience, the solar system—zero witnesses there. The measure hiccupped, just a glitch, barely a stumble.
Mangog felt it and shoved harder, forcing the collapse back outward, shattering cardinals into smaller selves. "YOU CAN'T PATCH FASTER THAN I CAN BREAK."
"Bet," Adriel hissed, pressing forward. He forked the Mahlo charge—not splitting it, reproducing it, the way Mahlo points reflect stationarity down the ladder. Every sub-blow sledged into the main blow, a stack of echoes crunching inward. At the same time he redirected collateral through fake addresses—null sets he spun up on the fly like inboxes that delete their mail on arrival.
The clash drilled on. Planets died in rows. A gas giant went bright white and then wasn't anything at all. Adriel saw himself losing one way and only one: if Mangog's measure decided that "wrath" equaled "existence," then collapse would drag everything down to a single point with a single mood. He couldn't let the definition propagate.
He changed the rule again—small, precise. Wrath had to be about something. He made "nothing" ineligible as a target. The measure staggered; rage couldn't anchor to the blank he was trying to carve the universe into. For a micro-instant the pressure dropped.
Mangog did what Mangog always did when denied: he got angrier. Which made him stronger. Which shoved the pressure right back. The shock crushed Adriel's chest flat; it sprang back with a wet crackle. Blood boiled out of his ear, evaporated, re-beaded. His legs skated half a light-second across vacuum because vacuum decided to be glass for a moment.
"God, you're annoying," Adriel groaned. He took one step that was actually a hundred million. He set his back foot on a fixed point—an anchor in the ranks, V_β\betaβ with β chosen on the fly—and he pushed.
Everything screamed. The wedge widened. Stars slid like beads of mercury drawn by different magnets. The arena's holo feed stuttered for everyone in Targon; to Artoria it looked like the universe flinched and then gritted its teeth.
"DIE WITH ME."
"Hard pass."
Mangog's forehead slammed into Adriel's. The wrath-measure convulsed, trying to decide that "Adriel" was a subset of "wrath." Adriel let it—just for a tick. He opened a vein of himself that was anger: all the times he'd watched friends get hurt, all the months he'd pretended not to be tired, all the jokes that kept the floor from dropping out. He fed it in—and then flipped it. Anger wasn't hatred; it was care running hot. He told the measure that. And because he was root on this story's machine, the measure had to consider it.
That was the breath he needed.
Adriel torqued his fist—micrometers only, a martial tweak, leverage hidden in God-math—and pushed the Mahlo through. The reflection stack caved Mangog's collapse back on itself. Measurable wrath imploded to κ; the ultrafilter lost ground and slid off the knuckle like oil off glass.
The universe cracked.
Not broken—cracked. The way tempered glass takes a hit and becomes a map of fractures but stays in the frame. Across a transfinite swath of the V-hierarchy, ranks desynced and then re-latched on new alignments. If Adriel hadn't been riding the Hacker like a firewall, the crack would've raced on into the multiverse, and then into everything above it, until the only true statement left was "no."
He held it.
The bite in the galaxy sealed to a bruise. The wedge dimmed to a shadow. Energy dumped into those null mailboxes and burnt them to zero.
Mangog took one last step into the push, eyes wide and finally, actually thrilled. "YES." The word carried satisfaction and nothing else.
Then the head went first, shoulders next, chest last—wrath-measure folded inward, and the Dark who had been the concept of anger here became a vanishing point. Adriel followed him right up to that point, because if there was a trick, it would be there. He didn't see one. He still didn't trust it. So he did the ugliest, simplest thing he could: he wrote a patch note.
Instance: 'Mangog (Dark) — this narrative branch.
Status: deprecated.
References: cleared (local).
External pointer to universal wrath: preserved (global).
Not killing wrath everywhere—just garbage-collecting this one parasite.
Silence. The kind that lives in your bones.
Adriel hung there, trembling, the last of the Mahlo charge fizzing out in his palm. He realized his heart had stopped and restarted somewhere back in the push. He also realized his feet were not on anything and his knees still wanted to bend like they could land.
"By a hair," he rasped, and only then noticed he'd stripped every safety he had to keep the blast from snowballing. He breathed, slow. One by one he re-latched the cosmology where it had slipped, sewing the crack lines shut until they were just scars you'd need the right eyes to see.
He looked back toward the little fenced-off dot that was Runeterra. The cages held. Targon's mountain still existed. The crowd would be seeing the holo again. Saber would be fine.
"Okay. Okay." He wiped at blood that wasn't there anymore. "It's done."
He turned—and the space where Mangog had been remained empty. No echo. No respawn tick. Just the bruise across a galaxy and the long, slow ring of a universe remembering what its shape had been five minutes ago.
Adriel sagged in the dark, alone with the shake in his hands, and let himself admit the truth in a whisper no one could hear.
"That almost killed me."
He pointed himself home.
...
Targon was still ringing when Adriel dropped back into the crater.
The arena was a melted bowl. The mountain wore a new scar—clean down the spine, still smoking. The city below looked like it had braced for a punch and taken two. He felt it in his calves, that leftover hum you get after sprinting a flight of concrete stairs—except the stairs were a continent.
"Damn," he muttered. "My bad..."
He expected fear. Maybe hate. What he got was noise—cheers that came raw from throats that hadn't had any reason to cheer in a year. Hands up. Banners torn into streamers. Faces tired, yes, but not dead in the eyes.
Artoria landed beside him, cape settling. She didn't say I told you so. She didn't have to.
He looked up at the rim. Champions—dozens—ringed the crater. Leona with her jaw set; Diana half-shadowed; Taric shining even in dust; Pantheon with a baker's forearms and a warrior's stare; Aphelios like a silent eclipse; and Zoe, already leaning dangerously far over the lip like gravity was a rumor.
Adriel raised a hand, meaning to ask the obvious. Zoe beat him to it, voice piping through the regrown ward so everyone could hear.
"You're confused why we aren't mad," she sang, and even her brightness couldn't hide the crack in it. "Mangog made us watch."
The crowd quieted. That name still owned a shadow.
Zoe's eyes skipped the crater, the gouged terraces, the horizon. "Every region. One by one. He took his time. Said it was 'educational.' If anyone raised a hand, he'd point at the feed and rewind what happened to their friends and say: 'More.' We tried once. He killed Aurelion Sol like flicking a moth." A twitch of her mouth. "The dragon screamed like a star going out. After that? We stopped pretending we could win him."
Leona's voice carried next, steady as a drumline. "We made a choice. Live under the chain and keep our people breathing. Or break it and watch them burn. We chose to be… sad and alive."
Pantheon didn't look away. "Warriors learn which battles are theater and which are funerals. He made ours both."
Adriel swallowed. The air tasted like glass and regret. "Okay," he said, simple. "Then we fix it."
He rolled his shoulders, opened the part of himself that wasn't muscle or bone or even power—just admin rights—and let the interface float. It wasn't visible, but the world responded like a terminal waking: tags unfurled, flags lit. [status: DARK] sat in every champion's file like rust.
"Hold still," he told nobody and everybody. "This is gonna sting."
He pinched and dragged. Cut permissions. Killed a process named WRATH_INHERIT. Rebound CONTRACT: NULL. Where corruption had written itself in with claws, he overwrote with something cleaner than light. It wasn't holy. It was precise.
One by one, the tags flipped: [status: DARK] → [status: SELF].
A sound went through the stands—nothing dramatic, just the collective exhale of shoulders un-hunching. The ward above them brightened a shade, like it had been waiting for a yes that finally arrived.
Zoe blinked twice, then smiled for real and wiped at her face with the heel of her hand. "Okay, hacker-boy. That was pretty clutch."
Leona stepped forward and dropped to one knee—not the ornate kind, just a soldier's acknowledgment. "I wanted the strike that felled him," she said, "but I'm content with the sight of it. You… returned us to ourselves."
Taric squeezed Adriel's bicep like they were already friends. "Delicious," he said, the grin unstoppable. "Not in a weird way. In a 'you shine' way."
Diana's eyes searched him, wary and tired. "Victory is complicated. Today it is simple. Thank you."
Aphelios didn't speak. He never does. He touched two fingers to his heart and then to the crater's edge. That was enough.
Pantheon rolled his massive shoulders and allowed himself the ghost of a smile. "When this is over," he said, "I'm making pastries. For the Guardians. For everyone." A beat. "I hear there's a market for it."
Adriel snorted. "Bro, if you make quesitos, I'll cry."
"Consider it done."
He lifted his hand again and split space like pulling curtains. A round, clean aperture to Ixtal irised open, its rim beading with motes—code, starlight, both. On the far side: green, intact, loud with life. The way things should look.
"Listen," he said, and he kept it straight. No speechifying. "You've all been living under a chokehold. That's over—for you, here, now. We've got one last problem in Piltover. I need you safe while we handle it. We'll get you fed, rested, put your heads back on straight. Then when it's done, we start rebuilding for real. I can't promise no more damage. I can promise we won't stop 'til your story isn't a hostage situation."
Silence. Then noise again—the good kind. People didn't bow. They moved. Families first. The wounded next. Champions took the back of the line so kids could go through. Leona organized without ordering. Taric kept a hand on every shoulder that trembled. Pantheon found a little girl who'd dropped a toy and gave it back like it was a sword.
Artoria walked the edge like a shepherd, eyes counting. When the last handful reached the portal, she turned to follow—and caught a figure standing apart.
Soraka.
She hovered at the periphery with that healer's stillness, staff tucked close, eyes on a point that wasn't here. The ward-light made her look like a painting left in sun.
Artoria stepped closer. "You're thinking of him."
Soraka didn't answer at first. Then: "I am… ashamed," she murmured. "And I don't know that it belongs to me."
"You mean Peter."
A small nod.
"Another version of you hurt him," Artoria said. No softness, just truth. "Not you. But you carry it anyway."
"I see echoes," Soraka said, voice thinner. "What other selves have said. Done. The way the Real watches and makes of us… shapes. I know what happened to him in that universe. I know what I did there. I want to say sorry and fear I have no right."
Artoria's gaze cut the crater, the torn mountain, the portal shining like an answer. "You're not that echo," she said. "You have the right to be who you are here. He remembers, yes. He also forgives more than he should. If you meet him, and you will, speak to the person in front of you. Not the ghost. He'll hear you."
Soraka turned the staff in her hands, indecision thinning. "Do you believe that?"
"I do." A beat. Less knight, more friend. "And if he's dumb about it, I'll smack him."
That pulled a small, startled laugh from the Starchild. "Very well," she said, and looked at the portal like you look at a door you finally trust again. "Thank you."
They stepped through together, last in the line. The aperture sealed behind them with a whisper that sounded like a ledger closing on a chapter—Targon's page, messy but saved.
On the mountain, wind moved ash into new patterns. The crater cooled by degrees. Somewhere in the broken stone, a single flower decided it didn't care about context and started working on blooming.
Ixtal took them in with color and noise. Banners. Pots clattering. The smell of something with too much garlic because the cook loved whoever it was for. People looked up and saw old champions stepping through and started shouting names.
Adriel let the relief hit and then set it aside. Joy could have its turn when the math was finished.
Artoria touched his elbow. "One left."
"Yeah," he said, eyes on a point past the trees where the air had started to feel like threaded silk. Piltover, out there, humming with someone else's rewrite. "Anansi."
She lifted her chin. "We end it."
He didn't smile. He didn't need to. "Let's go. But first, we rest."
To Be Continued...