(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)
The portal pinched shut behind them with a clean, glassy click. Cold air rolled across the stone—thin, high-altitude, Targon-thin—and Adriel's HUD bloomed to life over the horizon like a second sunrise. Party frames, vitals, inventories. For weeks Peter's panel had been a gray static block, like the system refusing to say the quiet part out loud.
It flickered once. Then his nameplate slotted back in.
PETER — ONLINE.
HP: not great. Stamina: worse. Recovery: spiking.
Adriel's breath left him in a shaky laugh he hadn't given himself permission for. "There he is."
Artoria glanced up; she could see the same overlay the way any Guardian could when Adriel shared a feed. Her shoulders eased a fraction. "I told you. Ace would not break a vow over something so dear."
"Yeah," Adriel said, softer than he meant to. "Yeah, you did." He scrubbed a hand over his face like he could wipe the last hour off it. The constant pressure that had been camped behind his eyes since Red Goblin's little magic trick finally let go. "Dios, okay. I can actually think now."
"Then think about the task before us," she replied, gentle where her words were usually carved. "Peter rests. Ace guards. It is our turn."
He nodded and stepped fully out of the portal's spill. Targon came into view the way a cathedral comes into view whenever you stop trying to photograph it and just look—terraces cut into living mountain, ziggurat silhouette against a deep blue sky. Only it wasn't Targon as the stories remembered it. Sentries and spires were pristine, but the Solari golds had been cooled into slate and iron; Lunari crescents were inlaid with black stone you couldn't see until it caught the light and refused to give it back. Iconography had been... reorganized. Nothing shattered. Everything repurposed.
"Remodeled," Adriel said under his breath. "Like a villain bought the place and hired a classy interior designer."
Artoria folded her arms, reading the layers. "No corpses. No chains. The staff walk with care, not terror. This is... incongruous."
"And everybody's... weirdly okay," Adriel added, watching a pair of robed acolytes cross a courtyard with the settled sadness of people who've adjusted to a bad forecast. "Not happy. But not crushed."
At the main causeway, a small ripple of violet sparkles popped into being, and Zoe stepped out as if she'd been there the whole time and they were late to notice. Dark circles haloed her eyes like eclipse rings; her smile was bright and wrong in the same breath.
"Hiiiii! Welcome to Targon 2.0! Please keep your hands inside the metaphysical at all times, do not feed the Aspects, and definitely don't open any doors that say DO NOT OPEN." She leaned forward, lowering her voice conspiratorially. "Unless you wanna, but then it's on you."
Artoria's hand settled a hair closer to invisible steel. Adriel lifted two fingers in a sheepish wave. "Qué tal, Twilight. You're our... host?"
"Our concierge," Zoe said, delighted. "Mangog says no one fights you. That would be rude. Also boring. Please follow me to the Arena He Made Out Of The Old Observatory Because He Likes The Acoustics."
"You're very casual for someone wearing the Dark," Artoria said, polite and uneasy in equal parts.
"Oh, we're all very casual now," Zoe chirped, walking backward as if gravity was a strong suggestion. "There's a theme. Think less 'wrath tantrum', more 'wrath sommelier.' Mangog has a palate now. It's adorable. Terrifying. Adorabifying."
"That's not a word," Adriel said.
"It is if I say it enough."
They walked. The inner terraces of Targon were quiet in a way battlefields never are. Glyphs that once sang to the sun now hummed a steady baritone, a machine-room vibration that made your teeth feel aware. Guards watched them pass with frank curiosity and the kind of respect you give an avalanche before it starts.
Adriel couldn't help it. "So, uh, Zoe. You gonna, I dunno, try to trick us into a star that's secretly a stomach? Pull a lever that opens a pit named Inevitable Hubris?"
"Mangog said, and I quote, 'Let them arrive clean.' He wants the first swing honest." She tapped her lips with a finger. "He's in a mood, you know? Like a sword that got honed so hard it turned into a mirror and now it's trying to be a sword again."
"You say that like it's comforting," Artoria murmured.
They reached a pair of doors that had never been doors before—observatory shutters rebuilt as gates. Zoe palmed the air. The bronze slid aside.
The arena beyond had been made with intent. Tiered stone for echoes. A floor etched with concentric sigils that would keep collateral honest. And at the center, sitting with a patience that made all his old depictions look like caricatures, was Mangog.
He was enormous without being grotesque, a shape cut from the idea of a mountain rather than meat. His eyes were no longer volcanoes; they were furnaces with dampers, heat stored, not exhaled. When he stood, the room seemed to remember the word weight.
"First Guardian. Pendragon."
Adriel's smile was crooked. "Mangog. You look... different. New skincare routine?"
"A year of victory, a century of boredom, a lesson in appetite," Mangog said mildly. "And the inevitable result when wrath is given everything it ever wanted: it begins to select."
Artoria's brows drew. "You did not spare selection when last you met."
"No," Mangog said. "I sent him wandering the Labyrinth That Ends In The Ending." His head tilted toward Adriel. "You broke it. With mathematics. A Mahlo cardinal is a crude key, but the lock was crude. You survived what should not be survivable because you refused the premise of the room."
Adriel lifted a shoulder. "Couldn't fight the guy. He was the end of everything. That's not a boss you punch; that's a dev you patch. So I nuked the instance. Kinda impressed it worked, not gonna lie."
"Luck is the name mortals give to properly brutal preparation," Mangog said. "We will see if you prepared properly again."
Zoe clapped, delighted. "Ooooh, he's doing the thing! The 'measured wrath mentor' thing. I love character growth."
Adriel squinted. "Did you just steal a line from—"
"Our bout will be—" Mangog's mouth curved a hair more. "—legendary."
Adriel pointed at him. "Aja. You did."
Mangog spread his hands, mock-solemn. "You are not the only ones with meta-keys, Guardian. Dark and Light drink from the same well. We differ in what we spit back."
Artoria blinked at the both of them like someone realizing a dream had opinions. "When," she said flatly, "did you become... like this?"
"After I became bored with the other way," Mangog answered. "Rage is a fast blade. Once everything bleeds, one must either learn to carve with care... or rust."
He turned, gesturing toward a side corridor. "There is a room prepared. Thirty minutes. Feed, tend, write your last jokes. Then return. I will not be interrupted, and I will not accept substitutes."
Adriel almost laughed. "You want me at full, huh."
"I want the truth of your edge."
"Deal," Adriel said. "Thirty."
Mangog dipped his head as if they'd just agreed on a sparring time at a decent gym. He walked away with step-control that said every ounce of power had learned furniture manners.
When he was gone, the silence was loud. Artoria exhaled, long and controlled, then turned to Adriel and searched his face with the sharp worry of someone who could cut a man in half and still feel like she'd failed him if she hadn't asked the proper question first.
"You mean to face him alone."
"Sí."
"He is the second-strongest in this incursion. In some forms, the first."
"Which is why I have to be the annoying one who signs up," Adriel said, half-grin, half weary. "Less collateral. Less surprises. He wants me. If you jump in, he starts improvising. That's when things start to fuck up."
She held his gaze a few seconds longer, then nodded once. "Very well. I will stand ready. Should another Dark reveal itself, I will intercept. Otherwise... I will witness."
"Thanks, Saber."
She tilted her head. "Do not thank me for doing what a partner must."
Zoe had vanished like an afterthought, but the door she'd indicated led them to a suite that would have made a Solari high priest ashamed of his budget. Trays of food steamed—not poisoned, Adriel's scan pinged—stacks of towels, healing draughts that tasted like victory mixed with cough syrup. Racks of weapons that politely failed to tempt either of them.
Adriel gave a low whistle. "Dude turned Targon into a five-star fight camp."
Artoria arched a brow. "If only every Dark had this much... hospitality."
"Plot twist: Mangog's evolving into a responsible tournament arc antagonist." He tore into a skewer of something that tasted like the Platonic ideal of charcoal chicken. "Okay, I'm not saying I forgive him for, y'know, everything, but if the man wants to foot the catering bill, I'm not stupid."
"You are flippant when you are scared," she observed, settling onto a bench to oil invisible steel. It didn't need it. Rituals weren't for the blade.
He shrugged, chewing. "I'm scared when I'm scared, Saber. I've just... had practice walking with it." He wiped his hands, then knelt in the center of the room. GAMER — MODULES: FULL. The system unfolded for him like a control room. Lock Arena Boundaries (on). Collateral Dampers (on). Aspect Backscatter (on). Inventory Shared (Ace, Peter: present; status: recovering). He hovered a thumb over Call on both names and didn't press it.
Artoria watched, then set a hand to his shoulder, pressure light. "Peter lives," she said. "Ace lives. You saw to that as much as they did."
He huffed. "They saw to me plenty of times." He closed his eyes, slowed his breath till the HUD learned to stop offering information and wait for questions. "Thirty minutes. Stretch. Eat. Then go put a shoulder into an idea."
"You will not be alone even if I do not raise my sword," she said. "I am there," a tap to his temple, "and there," a tap over his sternum, "and here." A faint smile ghosted. "Annoyingly."
He chuckled despite himself. "I'll take annoying."
They ate. She sipped tea like a queen at a war council; he inhaled calories like a twenty-something from Santurce who'd been late to a barbecue. He ran through breath ladders, stance drills, timing taps on his thigh: 3—3—2—5, the weird rhythm Ace swore would save your life when nothing else would. He pulled up Mangog's footprint from a year ago and compared it to the quiet man outside. The numbers were worse and better in different columns. Rage traded for control. Control traded for endurance. Endurance traded for... curiosity.
"Bro really mellowed," Adriel said at last, almost annoyed. "I don't trust it."
"Then do not," Artoria said. "Respect it."
He stood, rolled his neck, and let the HUD collapse to a single line: FIGHT: READY. For a second, he looked too young for all the years he carried, then exactly the age he'd always been when he decided to do the impossible because nobody else should have to.
"Alright," he said, rubbing his palms together. "Time to be annoying."
"Time to be steadfast," Artoria said, rising with him.
He flashed her a grin as he headed for the door. "Same thing, mom."
"Do not die," she said simply.
"Plan A is 'win pretty.' Plan B is 'win ugly.' Plan C is 'stall till Ace and Peter show up with takeout.'"
Her mouth quirked. "Plan A, then."
They stepped back into the corridor. The mountain murmured around them—chant and machine and wind. Somewhere above, the sky held its breath the way it always does when concepts decide to argue with fists.
At the arena threshold, Adriel paused and glanced sideways at the system one more time. Peter's panel pinged STABLE; Ace's flickered SLEEPING LIKE A ROCK. He let himself smile at that. Then he walked out onto the sigiled stone where Mangog waited, and the doors slid shut on everything that wasn't the next thirty minutes.
The prep room had a little bell you could ring for "refreshments," which felt insane given the stakes—but Adriel rang it anyway. A printed card on the table said DESSERTS BY THE BAKER in a blocky hand, and beneath it a neat list in Targonian script with little translations in Common: honey cakes / mountain sesame rings / olive loaves / citrus custard tart / spiced flatbread with fig.
Adriel flipped the card, half to stall, half out of nosiness. "Dessert by the Baker, huh." He squinted, and the HUD politely answered the question he hadn't finished forming.
PASSIVE KNOWLEDGE (tap to expand)
• League of Legends — "Baker Pantheon" is an official skin: spear → baguette, shield → oven peel, VO references baking, ult SFX includes 'ding'.
• Fandom took it and ran; AU drift made 'Pantheon the Baker' a staple in Wattpad/fic crossovers.
He snorted, an actual bark of laughter that escaped before dignity could catch it. "Oh my God. It is a thing because Riot made it a thing. The spear is a baguette."
Artoria looked up from checking the edge of invisible steel. "A baguette?"
"Like, actual bread," he said, grinning despite himself. "This is why every other fanfic had him running a bakery. It wasn't just a random headcanon. Man's got a skin."
Before she could parse that, the bell on the door chimed—clean, small—and Pantheon stepped in carrying a wooden peel stacked with warm bread and a tray where a custard tart trembled under a gloss of citrus.
He looked... normal. Taller than the doorway had any right to allow, shoulders like archways, hair pulled back. The Dark sat on him like night air: present, cool, not choking. Only his eyes said anything about it—tired-set, old-sky blue dulled by too many mornings that didn't start with sunrise.
"Eat," he said, voice even as a cutting board. He set the trays down, steam slipping up and sideways in the thin air. "People who go to their deaths hungry often romanticize it. I've found bread is more honest."
Adriel blinked. "You're really gonna just—bring us pastries."
"Mangog forbids interference," Pantheon answered, matter-of-fact. "He also forbids dishonor. Poison is both."
Artoria rose, posture wary out of habit rather than expectation. "We expected... more menace."
Pantheon shrugged, a motion like a falling wall choosing not to crush. "Wrath is being... curated." The corner of his mouth twitched, as if the word amused him despite himself. "He wants a duel that can be told cleanly afterward. Not a slaughter."
Adriel tore off a corner of sesame ring and winced when the heat hit his fingers. "You, uh... good with this? Working the enemy kitchen?"
Pantheon's gaze slid to the oven built into the far wall—sleek, modern lines tucked into mountain stone as if the mountain had birthed it. "The old sky left me once," he said. "When that happened, I learned the ground. Dough does not care if you pray or not. It cares if you knead."
"So that's a yes?"
"It is a statement," he returned, not unkind. "The world changed masters. My craft did not."
Adriel coughed around a laugh. "Bro, that's either the most zen thing I've heard all week or the saddest. Not sure which."
Artoria inclined her head. "Many regions are ruins. Here, people live. That is... difficult to argue with, even if it unsettles me."
Pantheon cut the tart into precise diamonds, handed them over with the flat of the peel. "It unsettles me as well," he admitted, and the honesty of that landed like an extra plate on the table. "But discipline is better than indulgence. Mangog has found the former. For now."
"Still wild seeing you like this, man," Adriel said, easing onto the bench again. "I grew up seeing clips and memes and then the fandom turned you into 'Pantheon the Baker' in, like, every AU. I thought it was a joke."
Pantheon's eyebrow rose the barest degree. "They wrote me as a baker."
"Everywhere," Adriel said, unable not to grin. "Wattpad went 'General? Nah. Apron.' I mean, it tracks. The skin with the baguette spear. Baker Pantheon. It's canon-adjacent."
A beat. Then: "I am the Baker." The flat delivery almost killed Adriel; he wheezed, hand over his face. Pantheon let him have it for exactly three seconds before continuing. "Bread is patience weaponized. Heat applied with purpose. You learn things in kitchens that you lose in wars."
"Like?"
"That 'searing' is just burning you decided to like."
Artoria's mouth tipped despite herself. "You sound like a teacher."
"I am tired enough to be one," Pantheon said, and it was the first time the fatigue sounded near rather than observed. He passed them thick slices of olive bread. "You move in a way that will grate on him."
"Mangog?"
"He has mellowed from tantrum to ritual," Pantheon said, slicing more bread. "You will not match him if you try to become a mountain. You will match him if you remain weather."
Adriel chewed, thinking. "So—don't meet power with power. Make him spend it on nothing."
"Make him spend it on you," Pantheon corrected. "On your terms." He set the knife down. "He will test boundaries with you because he respects yours. That respect is not mercy. Do not mistake it."
That landed clean. Adriel nodded. "Got it."
Artoria studied the man across from them. Up close, the Dark on him read like a shadow taken in by the body rather than draped over it. "You do not look... twisted."
"I am not," he said simply. "Mangog does not require it here. He wants hands. He has rules." A faint humor flickered again. "He has receipts."
Adriel made a face. "He really is running this like a gym with a really aggressive HOA."
"You mock because you are relieved," Pantheon observed, not unkind. "Relief can make fools of wise men."
"Facts," Adriel said, and took another bite.
Silence stretched companionably for a few breaths, the kind that kitchens make space for: whistle of kettle, creak of wood, the soft crack of crust cooling. Outside the door, the mountain hummed low like an animal asleep but listening.
Adriel cleared his throat. "So... if it comes to it. If he loses. What happens to you?" He kept his tone light on purpose; he wasn't fishing for an oath, just trying to understand the shape of the room they were in.
Pantheon didn't pretend not to hear what he wasn't asking. "I will abide by the terms he set," he said. "We are under his rule, not his whim." He glanced toward the arena. "He gave his word there would be no reprisals on the noncombatants if you come alone and leave alone."
"Trust me," Adriel said, "I'm allergic to collateral. It breaks me out in moral hives."
Artoria took a neat slice of tart, tasted, and blinked—once. "This is... very good."
"It is simple," Pantheon replied. "Simple is hard."
"You always talk like that?" Adriel asked, amused.
"I try," he said. "Words should do work." He looked at Adriel's hands—the way he held the bread, the slight bounce in his heel. "You are steadier now that Peter breathes."
Adriel's grin went a little sideways. "I'm very obvious, huh."
"Only to people who have watched comrades through mess halls," Pantheon said. "Eat. Stretch. Your jokes will not be as clever if you are hypoglycemic."
"¡Diablo, okay, Abuela," Adriel muttered, but he obeyed. He broke the olive bread, handed half to Artoria without looking, the kind of small choreography that only happens around kitchens and long campaigns.
Pantheon leaned his weight onto the counter, easy, present. "You carry Puerto Rico in your voice," he said, not as a question.
Adriel's mouth made the smile before he decided on it. "Sí."
"Keep it," Pantheon said. "Old names make new plans bearable."
Artoria's gaze softened. "You are kinder than I expected of a Dark."
"Kindness is a discipline as much as wrath," he answered. "Do not confuse this with defection." No heat in it; just a fence-post placed where it needed to be.
"Wouldn't dream of it," Adriel said. "I'm still going to hit your boss very hard."
"I expect nothing less."
Adriel flicked the dessert card with a finger. "For the record, the whole 'baker' thing? Ten out of ten brand synergy."
Pantheon looked at him, and something almost like a smile pushed the tired aside for a heartbeat. "If I must be reduced to a meme, I will at least be a good one."
"That's the spirit."
He started to gather the plates, but Pantheon waved him off with two fingers. "Leave. Ritual is for after. You have ten minutes."
"Already?" Adriel checked the HUD and grimaced. "Time is a hater."
Artoria rose as well, setting the last fork neatly down. "Thank you," she said, simple and true.
Pantheon inclined his head. "Go," he said. "Make it a story worth telling that does not need my bread to make it soft."
Adriel paused at the door, turning back. "Hey, Baker."
Those tired eyes lifted.
"Thanks for keeping the room human."
A beat. Then, softly, "That is all any of us can do."
The bell chimed again as the door closed behind them. The smell of honey and toasted sesame clung to the hallway as they walked. Adriel rolled his shoulders, exhaled, and let the last of the sugar settle into muscle memory.
"Okay," he said, voice low, almost happy in its steadiness. "That was... not what I expected."
"No," Artoria agreed, matching him step for step. "But perhaps what you needed."
"Perhaps," he echoed, and grinned at nothing. "Let's go then."
They stepped out into a high corridor of pale stone and starlight—Targon's interior ways cut like veins through the mountain—and almost walked straight into her.
Soraka stood centered in the passage, staff at rest, hooves quiet on the marble. She was not the chibi myth the city merch made of her, nor the brittle saint some stories demand. She looked like what healers look like after centuries: soft where softness doesn't cost anything; iron where it must.
Artoria slowed first. Adriel slid a half-step to her shoulder, reading the room, then the face. Soraka was composed—but her eyes had that alert brightness of someone braced for pain. For him.
"Adriel Valdez. Artoria Pendragon." No flourish; her voice was a low bell. "I am Soraka. I am to guide you."
"Figured." Adriel kept his tone easy. "You've all been... weirdly hospitable."
A flick of those long ears, as if she heard more than the words. She turned and began walking. They matched the pace. The air tasted like cold iron and citrus peel, a leftover ghost of the kitchen they'd left.
The silence stretched too taut too soon. Artoria cut it with clean steel. "Have you met before?" She glanced between them. "You look at him as though you have."
Adriel huffed. "I don't know what I did, but if I broke a celestial parking rule, just ticket me."
Soraka's grip tightened a fraction on her staff. "You did nothing," she said. Then, quieter, almost to herself: "He did nothing."
"Who?" Adriel asked, knowing and not.
Soraka's mouth moved around an answer and let a different one out instead. "Peter." The name landed heavy and gentle at once. "It is not an accusation. Only... awareness."
Artoria's eyes narrowed. "Awareness of what? This self of you has not met him."
They turned a corner into a gallery where constellations had been inlaid in the floor with mother-of-pearl. Soraka's hooves made no sound on Orion. "Becoming Dark changed what I can see. If I wish, I may view strands beside my own—selves of me written by other hands for other screens." She swallowed, and it was the most human thing about her. "Some are tender. Some are... not. I have watched versions of me become ornament. Wish. Commodity. I have watched versions of me deciding badly, apologizing badly, healing badly. The distance between 'it is not me' and 'I am implicated' is not as wide as I hoped."
Adriel listened without interrupting. The corridor swelled with the open sky ahead—an atrium with a view straight down Targon's throat to the world. He had expected the existential spiral sooner or later. It still cut.
"When Peter was taken to the Star Guardian Universe," Soraka went on, "the me from there... did not help as I could have. Where my kindness was correct in tone and cowardly in action. I see those now. I see the hurt. I do not know why I want to apologize to you for what I did not do—but I do."
He scrubbed a hand over his face. "Look, I'm... not gonna pretend I fully get what that feels like. I'm from the other side of the glass." He tapped his chest. "But you're carrying guilt you didn't earn. That's still a heart doing the carrying. That matters."
Artoria's chin tipped—his serious voice had arrived, and she gave it space.
Adriel continued, gentler. "If I beat Mangog—and I will try very hard to—Targon gets a reset. You get you back. Then talk to him. Not a version. Him. You'll find out pretty quick the burden you're holding for someone else isn't yours to hold."
Soraka looked down, the way people do when they are testing whether words fit inside their ribs. The mountain breathed. "You think he will not hate me."
"I think he'll recognize someone trying," Adriel said. "He's annoyingly good at that."
Artoria allowed herself a small smile. "Annoyingly."
They climbed a final ramp where the stone grew darker, denser, as if the mountain itself were leaning its weight toward whatever was above. The air opened into a stadium hollowed from the peak—a ring of cut basalt, seats circling like terraces of a crater. The night hung close and deep; the stars over Targon looked near enough to bruise.
Before the archway, Soraka reached out—not quite touching—stopping him without force. "Thank you," she said, the words bright as fresh water. "For saying it in a way I could keep."
Adriel's mouth tilted. "Then do me a favor and cheer. I'd like at least one star on my side while I try not to get turned into red paste by Wrath with a gym membership."
Soraka actually laughed—quick and clear. "I will do more than cheer." She glanced toward the benches that ringed the arena, then back. "I will watch." The way she said it made watching sound holy again.
She led Artoria toward the watchers' dais. Adriel stepped out into the light.
The arena was full.
Not a mob drunk on spectacle—faces awake, wary, alive. People of Targon with their thin mountain blood and steady feet, artisans with flour still on their sleeves, acolytes with ink on their thumbs. An entire peak's worth of souls who should have been ruined and... weren't. When they saw him, a sound rose—not the roar of a crowd who wanted blood, but the swell of a city who wanted a story to end right. They were cheering for him.
"How is this the one place that isn't a horror show," he muttered, half to himself, half upward. The question didn't need an answer yet.
He found his target across the ring.
Mangog waited with the patience of a volcano pretending to be a hill. The Dark sat on him like a crown hammered from anvils—wrathful calm, the kind you see in bulls right before the dust whistles. His presence thickened the air, not with noise, but with the knowledge that noise was coming.
"Are you ready, Guardian?" The voice carried without effort, a tide that knew exactly where shorelines were.
Adriel rolled his neck, popped a shoulder, stretched once like a man waking from a nap he didn't have time for. "Yeah," he said. "I'm ready to kill you."
The smile that answered him was wrong in exactly the way a smile should be wrong on Wrath. "Good." Teeth. "That is the energy I want radiating from you. JUST PURE KILLING INTENT!"
"This won't be like last time," Adriel said, steady as a level.
"I know," Mangog purred, settling lower, hands splaying like talons then closing to fists. "That is why I am here." His stance wasn't a stance; it was the memory of a thousand stances boiled until only the bone broth of violence remained.
A new voice rang out, clear and ceremonial, bright as a blade catching sun.
"PEOPLES OF TARGON," Leona intoned from the announcer's dais—armor sunlit even under moon, eyes hard with purpose. "BEARING WITNESS TODAY: A DUEL BY RULE, BEFORE MANGOG'S LAW AND THE MOUNTAIN'S STONE." She lifted a gauntleted hand toward Adriel. "ADIEL VALDEZ—THE GUARDIAN OF FICTION. WARDEN OF NARRATIVE. THE ARCHIVEBREAKER." The crowd surged again at the titles; Adriel stood still, accepting the weight, not the worship.
Her other hand cut toward the beast. "MANGOG—WRATH INCARNATE. THE BILLION-FOLD HATE. CORRUPTION OF FICTION. DEVOURER OF STORIES." The floor fissured hairline under his feet, as if agreeing.
"FIGHT."
Adriel didn't waste the syllable. The Toxin symbiote climbed his spine and sealed over him in a hiss: matte black, seamless, drinking the arena light until he looked like a shadow that decided to stand. Tendrils locked down; the suit clicked at the throat like a vow.
Across the ring, Mangog just clenched—as if winding a machine—and the basalt under him spider-webbed. The ring felt one size too small and exactly right.
They moved.
No fanfare. No feint. They closed like magnets given one second of mercy. Fists met on centerline.
For a plank second the math was simple: two bodies, one point of contact.
Then everything shook.
Stone buckled; terraces groaned; the mountain said hold in an octave lower than sound. The first shock hit the city like a missed heartbeat; the second ran the ribs of the range and into the sky where constellations flinched in their frames. Dust leapt and froze—pressure only—then slammed out in a white ring that chased itself along the arena wall.
Stone buckled; terraces groaned; the mountain said hold in an octave lower than sound. The first shock hit the city like a missed heartbeat; the second carried out along the ribs of the range and into the sky where constellations flinched in their frames. Dust leapt and froze, held mid-air by pressure alone, before slamming out in a white ring that chased itself along the arena wall.
The ring met the barrier and rippled across it like rain striking lake glass. The ward held—violet facets locking, relocking—so the crowd felt only a shove of wind and a static crackle that lifted hair and fur. Beyond that pane, two bodies blurred and kept hitting each other as if momentum were currency and both were rich.
Mangog came forward like a verdict. He moved the way avalanches think: everything downhill, no second guessing, no brakes. The experience was there—angles that should've been counters folding into mauls, feints that baited guards only to club the ribs they'd just exposed—but the finesse was swallowed by intent. He fought to end.
Adriel answered in clean lines. No flourish, no wasted orbit. Southpaw lead, weight centered; a karate backbone threaded with Muay Thai joints. His Toxin suit skinned him in scorched black with a red starlight seam; beneath it, cells hummed with a bioelectric lattice waiting for a switch. He didn't fish for power—he timed for it.
They met in the dead middle: Mangog's overhand like a meteor, Adriel's left shoulder tucked, right hip loaded. Spider-Sense pulsed—a silver metronome tick behind his eyes—so he slipped inside the meteor, shaved knuckles with a glove-brush, and drove a gyaku-zuki straight through sternum. Mangog didn't block. He bit the punch with muscle, clamped the forearm like a jaw, and used the catch to rip Adriel off his feet.
Adriel flowed with it. He let his body go long—whip, not rod—and cut his own torque with a hook of web to the ceiling beam. The silk went taut; his spine slingshotted; his heel snapped down in an ushiro-geri that cracked on Mangog's temple like a gunshot. Bioelectric current kissed the strike—Venom-edge—and lit the air in a yellow spoke. The barrier flared again. The front row cheered like thunder trying to learn a language.
"GOOD. DON'T WASTE MY TIME."
Adriel exhaled through his nose. "Not wasting it."
"WARMTH IS FOR MORTALS."
Mangog's answer was a takedown that wasn't a takedown. He stepped inside, shoulder-checked Adriel as if the Guardian were a gate, then lifted—a savage Greco scoop that took both of them shoulder-high—and spiked Adriel back into the floor. Tiles shattered in honeycomb slabs. The arena sagged, then rebounded with a trampoline snap that threw dust like confetti.
Adriel tucked on instinct; the spike translated into roll; he slid under the follow-up stomp and let it crater where his chest had been. He slid through, popped to a knee, and ripped a web-line to Mangog's heel. A yank stole the beast's balance; a step-in gave Adriel the clinch; and elbows started to talk.
Sok ti khum: diagonal elbow over the brow. Sok tad: horizontal cutter to the cheekbone. Sok ngad: quick rising elbow under the chin. Each elbow dumped a nerve's worth of Venom charge into the impact, tiny lightning rods that made Mangog's wrath-aura crackle. When Mangog finally tore free, he left a comet smear of his own energy hanging in the air. He didn't look hurt. He looked pleased.
"EFFICIENT. BUT HOW LONG CAN YOU KEEP THAT UP?"
Adriel didn't answer. Mangog swung with both hands—no art, all apocalypse. Adriel crossed, caught one forearm on forearm, ate the other on the deltoid and let the momentum carry him. He latched a second web to the far wall and cut it at the apex; the sudden fall dropped him behind Mangog's hips. Heel hooked, calf cut, sweep—osoto-gari stolen from judo's vocabulary and printed in Muay Thai's ink. Mangog fell like a tower.
Adriel lunged to stack him. Mangog let the stack start, then exploded off his shoulders like a bridge detonation. The blast wasn't physics; it was emotion made kinetic—Wrath-pressure. It flung Adriel into the arena wall so hard the barrier behind him warped an inch and sang. The crowd gasped as one organism. Stone dust rained like cold ash.
Mangog did not let him breathe. He grabbed Adriel's ankle and dragged him. The wall became a belt sander. Sparks fountained from the suit's skin; carved channels scored the rock like claw marks. Adriel's teeth clacked together, white stars bursting behind his eyes. He planted palms, webbed the ground, and stuck—sudden as a brake lock. Mangog yanked; the web held; something in the floor gave with a cannon crack.
Adriel used the stall. He jackknifed, slashed the web himself to add give, and launched both heels up into Mangog's jaw—double mule kick with Venom punched through the insteps. The sound came back late, like thunder behind lightning.
"BETTER."
Adriel drove a mae-geri teep into Mangog's chest so deep the beast's heels skidded twin trenches backward.
The trench lines hit the arena rim. The barrier trembled, whined, shimmered—and then, like a window deciding it was a door, it fractured open in a four-sided star. Pressure equalized in a roar.
Mangog did not hesitate. "OUT." He shouldered through the failure and took the fight with him.
They blew across Targon's upper terraces as two stones skipping a black lake. Each landing dented a plaza, folded a walkway, or spun an obelisk ten degrees on its pedestal. Adriel ricocheted off a colonnade, webbing pillars to pivot. Mangog chose the straight path, running through statues and rails, preferring lines made by momentum to any that man had laid.
The last skip became a dive. They went off the mountain.
Wind roared; the slope blurred. In the long exposure of freefall, Adriel used the down time. Spider-Sense flickered him a staccato map of branches and ledges to come; he printed karate combinations over the future like notes on sheet music. When the first spine of rock rose to meet them, he turned his body into a pinwheel of knees and elbows. Mangog tried to bulldoze; the pinwheel carved grooves in the bulldozer.
They hit a shelf hard enough to fold it. Stone vomited outward in slate sheets. Mangog swiped Adriel across the broken surface headfirst until the Guardian hooked a web to a cliff spur and snapped himself perpendicular to the slide. Momentum bent; the slide became a swing; the swing became a long, brutal arc that ended in a knee—sok kao trong—buried in Mangog's solar plexus. Venom Flash detonated on contact, a sunflower of electricity.
Mangog staggered one step, then rewarded the effort by throwing Adriel off the mountain entirely.
The world rotated. Adriel counted rotations by the way his gut tried to leave. He webbed a cloud for spite—it tore—and then found a tower with the next shot, swung once, and slingshotted himself back toward the falling dark god. They met midair and traded three shots each, fast enough that the air between their fists burned from friction.
A cliff face took them both. They went through like bullets through paper and came out into bright. Targon fell behind them as a jagged crown, and then the highlands gave way to rolling, bleeding green.
Ionia received them.
They hit hardwoods that had learned patience from wind. The first tree slowed them by breaking. The second did not have time to learn from the first. Adriel webbed a third, ran the underside of a crumbling branch like a monkey bar, then let go to drop on Mangog with a chopping elbow. The forest took the hit with a wave that flattened grasses a hundred yards out.
"THIS WORLD IS BEAUTIFUL," Mangog said, rotating his neck until it clicked. "I LIKE RUINING BEAUTIFUL THINGS."
Adriel spit bark. "Pick a new hobby."
Mangog blurred. He wasn't speed; he was priority. His fist arrived where Adriel's head intended to be. Spider-Sense beeped red; Adriel changed his mind and let the fist step past. He clipped Mangog's ear with a backfist, stitched a low kick to the calf, then drove a straight right into the armpit seam. The Venom current rode through nerves; muscles charlied for a half beat. Adriel tried to capitalize with a Thai clinch.
Mangog tolerated three knees to the ribs and then solved the clinch by picking Adriel up by the waist and using him to fell half a dozen trees. The last oak signed a treaty with gravity and collapsed, its crown taking more with it. Birds ripped out of the canopy in a screaming swirl.
The ground wasn't keeping up. They needed wider.
Mangog got there first. "COME." He kicked Adriel under the ribs so hard the world skipped frames. The kick drew a line through the landscape; the horizon surged. Adriel remembered to breathe after the second mile. By the fifth, he was laughing because of course they were headed to sand.
Shurima opened like a page.
They touched down as points becoming craters. Heat gusted up from glass as the top layer of sand fused into plates. Adriel stood, one hand on a knee, smiling through the pain. "Round two."
Mangog answered by running at him with his hands down. It wasn't arrogance; it was contempt for footwork. Adriel gave him geometry instead.
Step off line. Left hand checks the bicep; right palm heel pops the chin up; lead leg bites the inside thigh; rear knee nails liver; elbows sew over the top while webbing binds a wrist. The combo read like a recipe; the bioelectricity turned it into something a sun might order for lunch.
Mangog burned it off and tackled him into a dune. They rolled; time lost meaning; the world became grit in the ears and grit in the teeth and grit in joints that didn't need grit. Adriel got top for a moment, posted to drop elbows, and then exploded backward as Mangog simply flexed.
"YOUR TECHNIQUE IS EXCELLENT," the Dark mused, dust steaming off his shoulders. "I PREFER RESULTS."
"Same." Adriel vanished.
Camouflage pulsed. The Toxin suit rolled its pigments to match sand and sky; heat shimmer did the rest. Mangog stopped, nostrils flaring, aura reaching. Spider-Sense filled in what sight couldn't. Adriel ghosted left, then back right to bait a swing, then was suddenly there under Mangog's guard with both palms loaded. The Venom Blast he threw wasn't the city-wide mortar—this was surgical: two beams that drilled into Mangog's abdominal fascia and made it decide whether it was muscle or drum.
Mangog chose drum. He hammered back with a forearm the size of a girder. Adriel's block was textbook and meaningless; the impact dragged him across glass like a skipped stone. He left eight bright smears and a laugh that surprised even him.
"Okay. You hit."
"YOU ENDURE." Genuine appreciation colored it. "GOOD."
They moved together. Paths crossed. A sand geyser corkscrewed into the sky. When it fell, there were footprints where they'd been, and beyond that, a scythe cut through dunes pointing toward the coast.
The coast obliged. They slammed down on Demacia's white cliffs and went through the first three strata as if they were chalk. Sea spray leapt to meet them; gulls reversed course mid-cry. Adriel webbed a chunk of cliff as he fell, swung under, and scythed his leg across Mangog's. Physics cooperated; Mangog's back kissed stone.
Adriel stomped—downward axe kick with the whole line of the body dropping behind it. The heel landed, and the cliff threw its voice inland in a sound like a cathedral gargling gravel.
Mangog caught the foot on the bounce and whipped Adriel into the surf.
Cold collapsed around him. Pressure tried to hug. He Venom-flashed the water; fish wrote exit strategies; the whole cove lit sulfur yellow. Mangog came down like a meteor and hammered him deeper. The sea floor became powder.
Adriel kicked off bedrock, webbed Mangog's wrists in a cross, and spun him into a reef. The coral didn't appreciate being asked to referee. When they broke the surface again, they did it sideways, skimming along the top like two skippers who had forgotten how boats worked.
They brawled across waves. It looked ridiculous and it was, but ridiculous things become laws when the people doing them say so with enough authority. Mangog used the water like a mat; Adriel used it like a springboard. He landed on a swell behind Mangog and used the give to send a teep that read as a spear. Mangog answered by dropping elbows that turned water to steam.
They hit the beach in Noxus like loaded dice hitting a table. The nearest fortification stared for a moment and then decided it had always been a ruin. Adriel stood, rolling his shoulder. His ribs sang like cut glass. He checked his Spider-Sense—no red spikes beyond the god in front of him—and let his grin flatten.
"Keep it on me."
"I AM."
Mangog came back in with a wrestler's drop level. Adriel sprawled, cross-faced, and then went from defense to offense in a stitch: knee to crossface, elbow to occipital ridge, palm to ear. A web-lariat looped around Mangog's neck; Adriel pivoted and used the line to throw a Muay Thai roundhouse that landed with a bong.
It bought him three steps. He used them. He saw the old masters in the distance—the kata done in empty gyms at night filed into muscle—and ran one of those old shapes with new electricity. Jab-cross, low kick, switch, body kick, teep, step-through knee, right hand down the center, short elbow left, short elbow right. Every shot a metronome click. Every click a little yellow sun.
Mangog weathered it like mountains weather storms: by being too massive to move. When the flurry slowed, he grabbed Adriel by the leg.
The slam was obscene.
Once, twice, thrice—each impact taking a new bite out of the city's bones. Street became trench; trench became crater; crater became a new map feature. On the fourth, Adriel cut his captor's grip with a Venom burst from the knee into Mangog's wrist. On the fifth, he webbed a fallen pylon and wrapped it around Mangog's ankle. On the sixth, he released the web, and the line jerked Mangog's leg just enough to steal the slam's rhythm.
Adriel rolled with the seventh and came up on his feet with an elbow already on the way. He put it through the hinge of Mangog's jaw and felt cartilage ask for a rematch. Spider-Sense ticked hot; he smothered a counter hook by gluing his chest to Mangog's bicep and dumping him with a leg reap.
They hit asphalt. The asphalt flinched.
"NOT BAD," Mangog breathed, strain finally edging the words. "SHOW ME MORE."
"You first."
Wrath washed off Mangog in a halo. Not fire—pressure. Even the air seemed to repent. Adriel's suit pricked his skin as failsafes woke. He ducked under a telegraphed nothing and ate the real punch: a backhand that felt like getting a car door closed on all of him at once. He bounced, rolled, bounced again. The world tried to gray out.
He bit his tongue. Copper shocked the palate. He stood.
Venom Dash: the lattice flashed across nerves, made synapses think distance was opinion. He appeared in Mangog's shadow, low, left hand on the hip, right elbow stabbing up into rib meat like a pickaxe. The shock traveled through Mangog's torso and hit the spine. Adriel felt it bounce back into his own bones—closed circuits hurt both ends.
"YES."
They threw the same punch at the same time. The interference pattern wrote itself on the city as a new kind of weather. Windows far away exhaled their glass in sighs. A bridge sagged, reconsidered, and stood straighter.
Adriel's lungs burned. He tasted ozone and grit and the thin sweetness of blood. Around them: a slow panorama of ruin—crushed markets, carved stone reduced to confetti, smoke rising like ideas trying to escape. He kept his eyes on what mattered: stance, shoulders, elbow flare, weight transfer.
Mangog rolled his neck, inhaled slow. "YOU'RE HOLDING BACK."
"I said I'd give you what you came for," Adriel said. "This was the warm-up."
"PROMISES. I LIKE PROMISES I CAN BREAK."
He lunged. Adriel didn't retreat. Heel-toe—zenkutsu-dachi locking weight—hips snapping like a door on oiled hinges. The punch looked like any other straight. It wasn't. Timing made it different; the Venom charge made it matter. It sank into Mangog's centerline and stayed, buzzing there like a coin welded into bone.
Mangog grunted—filed away.
They were a moving storm again. The Shadow Isles lurched up—dark coastline, ruined towers the color of dead teeth. The fog narrowed its eyes at both of them.
They didn't stop. They crossed broken causeways hammering each other. When a ghostly tree reached for Adriel, he melted out of sight and reappeared long enough to slap its hand away. "CHILDISH," Mangog laughed, and drop-kicked him through a mausoleum that wasn't there a moment ago and wouldn't be there once they left.
Adriel bounced off a sarcophagus, landed on a wall, and fired webbing like a mad tailor, crisscrossing a whole courtyard in three heartbeats. Then he yanked. The cat's cradle tightened, big enough to snare a god. Mangog fell into it like a meteor into a net. The silk stretched, blazed yellow as it drank power, smoked—and strand by strand, held.
Adriel dove in, knees and elbows reintroduced in rapid succession—liver, solar plexus, jaw hinge, temple. Mangog's returns were fewer, heavier; some missed by a hair thanks to Spider-Sense, some found shoulder and hip and sent body parts on brief vacations.
The web atomized with a noise like frying snow.
Mangog burst free and grabbed Adriel by the collarbones. The lift became a throw became a shot put. Adriel looked up at a sky that had forgotten it was overcast and thought, Okay. That hurt.
He hit a hillside in Bilgewater on the way through and left a long wound in the dirt. He stood at the bottom of it, spat pink, rolled his shoulders. "We done sightseeing?"
"SOON." Eyes bright as forge slag. "YOU'RE CLOSE."
"Close to what?"
"TO BEING WORTH KILLING."
"Cool. Worry instead."
He dug in and breathed out everything useless. The world narrowed to stance, rhythm, decision. Let karate be a straight line; Muay Thai a circle; electricity a fuse. When Mangog came in with another avalanche, Adriel met him with a mountain that learned to move.
The combination didn't look special—that was the trick. White-belt simple, wired lethal. Jab, cross, body kick. Teep to reset. Cross again. Hook. Low kick to calf. Each shot hit the hinge in Mangog's structure, each wired to hum instead of explode, setting up harmonic fatigue.
By the eighth strike, posture shifted a degree. By the twelfth, two. By the twentieth, there was breath where there hadn't been.
"CLEVER." He lunged to break it.
Adriel let him. Took the shoulder through the sternum and rode it—legs shock-absorbing, hips giving, hands already posting. They caromed into a valley outside Navori where rice paddies stepped down like green mirrors.
Adriel slid through mud, came up filthy, glanced at his boots. "You tired yet?"
"I DON'T TIRE."
"How fuckin' annoying," Adriel said, and stopped talking.
He turned the paddies into a training hall. Narrow berms became balance beams. Water reflected mistakes. He ran lines—front kicks hiding entries, hand traps borrowed from Wing Chun kept to a minimum, elbows opening doors for knees. When Mangog freight-trained through a berm, Adriel punished the overreach with a skip-knee drilling the underarm seam again, hot and singing with Venom.
The valley answered like thunder trying not to cry.
At the exact peak of rhythm, something else peaked—far away, at the edge of sense. A tremor that wasn't theirs. The sky crooked a finger. The mountain behind them seemed to lean.
Targon remembered it started the day with a hole.
Wind turned. It pulled toward the peak with a slow insistence, gravity remembering a promise. Both of them felt it. The fight didn't stop. It accelerated.
Three steps—then back on the mountain, not teleportation so much as narrative deciding this is where the sentence ends its clause. The arena was a crater with a shining lip. The barrier had regrown around it, thicker, faceted like the inside of a diamond.
Leona at the rim like a statue learning worry. Soraka's knuckles at her mouth. Zoe leaning so far the cosmos held her collar.
Adriel and Mangog slid into center, boots cutting crescents in stone. They breathed.
Adriel's chest pumped like a tired bellows. Venom sparkled across his knuckles like a fault line at night. Spider-Sense ticked, steady.
Mangog rolled his shoulders. Wrath smoked off him in ribbons. "IS THAT IT? I KNOW YOU HAVE MORE POWERS THAN THAT."
"Yeah."
They stepped. Adriel's lead hand carried a caged sun—a Venom sphere cinched so tight it whined against his palm. Mangog's knuckles were black-banded with the kinetic debt he'd collected from every strike. When orb met fist, nothing exploded; everything compressed. The barrier screamed like glass turning to steam as pressure knifed outward in a ruler-straight fault that bisected the dais and sprinted for the horizon. Plates of bedrock heaved up like slow ships; gravel rose, reconsidered, and hung trembling. A white column lanced from their locked hands into the sky, collimated by the ward, while a blue-edged halo raced the arena wall and left it shining.
The mountain opened its ribs. A new canyon yawned—sheer, luminous, heat mirage crawling the edges like script. Sand vitrified into mirrors; snow sublimed; dust froze midflight before peeling away in rings. Air thinned to metal on the tongue. Still the orb held—screaming quietly in Adriel's grip—still Mangog poured kinetic wrath through bone and iron, and between them two wills told the planet to stay.
The glare bled out. Dust went from sheet to fleck to glitter hanging on a held breath. Adriel checked the stands first—because of course he did—and only let his shoulders drop when he clocked the dome over them: a full-hemisphere ward humming like a second sky. No casualties. Good. Then this was just stalling.
He'd tried to make "Miles plus hands" carry it. Nah. Mangog wore damage like a chain and paid it back with interest. Both of them healed on contact; the scoreboard never moved.
"Alright," Adriel muttered, rolling his neck till it clicked. "I'm done messing around."
That—said like it wasn't a big deal—was what finally yanked the mask off wrath.
"YOU'RE STILL HOLDING BACK? FOR THEM?" The voice didn't get louder; it got heavier, like the words put on muscle.
"For them," Adriel said. "And for the planet."
"THEN LET ME HELP."
No wind-up. He just appeared. Uppercut from nowhere—like someone booted the bottom of space. Adriel's jaw popped; vision smeared; the world turned into a hard line and he rode it.
He hit the moon like a drilled round—through dust, rock, old fused glass—and kept going. When he finally punched daylight again, there was a clean tunnel from pole to crater.
He skipped once off vacuum—surface tension and spite—and knifed into a ringed giant, Saturn-looking, not Saturn. The entry scar lit half a world. Mantle roared up the bore like a blowtorch; a sun-bright plume punched into space.
The rings rang. Billions of ice stones chimed, traded lanes, then resynced. The magnetosphere stuttered and rewove; twin auroras unzipped over the poles. Lightning scribbled the cloud decks, and new storm eyes bloomed bruise-dark out of the pressure.
Spider-Sense went white-hot. He jinked right on reflex and the space his neck had occupied split like fabric. Mangog didn't chase—he manifested—arm scything a clean plane through the cosmos.
The "miss" took the world instead.
Crust unzipped in a sound too big to hear. A black seam became daylight from the inside out—mantle glare flooding up as the planet showed its bright, molten heart. Rings kinked; gravity snarled; two continental faces started to drift like halves of a coin sawed mid-flip.
Adriel steadied in the debris wake, jaw tight, shame burned off into focus. No more guardrails. Not here.
He raised one hand. Bioelectricity gathered—not a blast, a shape. A blade pushed out of his palm, serrated with static, star-hot. A twin hummed into being in the other hand.
He rose without a jump. Matter listened like metal to a magnet. Shattered crust drifted into formation around his calves, a halo of iron filings obeying a field.
Mangog watched him climb and smiled with too many teeth. "GOOD. FINALLY."
"Save the Yelp review," Adriel said—and moved.
To slower eyes it would've read as teleport spam. It wasn't. He just picked different next-frames and stepped into them. Venom sabers sketched arcs geometry never taught. Mangog met him with hands that knew every art and hated the idea of art—elbows like hammers, knees like verdicts, a headbutt that put hairline cracks in vacuum.
Adriel took the first trade to learn the weight, then paid it back. Karate hips into Thai elbows; a hand feint that would've been JKD if he cared about labels; a low, rolling step that became a magnetic drag, pulling an equatorial belt of iron grit into Mangog's shins.
"TRICKS," Mangog laughed, turning a palm-heel into a gravity well. "FINERY FOR A FUNERAL."
"Craft," Adriel corrected. He shoved the well sideways with a thought, threaded a venom blade through its rim, and let the redirected singularity scythe a flock of mountain-size shards into glitter.
Mangog blurred—lunging cross that landed like a meteor. Adriel met knuckles with a Venom Punch; the flash went white and every system—nerves, concepts, circuits—sang wrong. Wrath didn't flinch. He absorbed, coiled, paid back with interest.
The rebound hit nastier than the first. Adriel pivoted inside it, parried on forearms humming with magnetic counterforce, stamped a hard stop into nothing—made his own footing. Short knee up the centerline, head position, tight clinch; he walked Mangog's skull through a tumbling slab the size of a small country and kept grinding that face across kilometers of incandescent stone. No style points. Just ugly.
The slab came apart. Mangog's hands still found a grip—Adriel's waist. "MY TURN."
He flailed Adriel like a chain mace, slamming him end-over-end through strings of asteroid pearls until pearls were dust and dust was light. Ribs tried to protest, remembered who they belonged to, recompiled.
Pain became notation, not narrative.
Adriel snapped his wrist and flung a net of bioelectric filaments. They bit, shocked, locked joints for half a heartbeat—long enough to lay a skin of absolute cold across Wrath. Motion slowed under atoms.
Adriel drew a straight line through that stillness, sabers leading. One kissed clavicle and etched a nova. The other carved down the centerline—belly, sternum—
Wrath flexed and the world cracked. "PAIN IS VOTES," he said, delighted, as his chest stitched closed in reverse lightning. "I COUNT THEM ALL."
"You talk a lot for 'pure rage.'" Adriel flipped both blades to reverse grip, overcharged them—Venom into something deeper, more pressure than sound. He stepped off a magnetic rung, perfect shot to the outside gate—knee torqued, ankle locked.
His knee shattered on Mangog's thigh and reassembled before the pain finished arriving.
"Fuck," he hissed—and put the craft back in.
Karate for entries, clean and mean. Silat for limb destructions that write themselves into bone. Systema for breath and body-water. Hapkido to steal momentum. Boxing for cheap, tight hooks he hid inside a Venom feint that blew out the universe's eardrums. Not a list—one language, finally spoken at full volume.
Mangog loved it.
"YES." He ate a saber, hated it, got bigger. "MORE." He clapped, and space between his palms tried to go smaller than zero. Adriel pried it open with Magnetism like forcing elevator doors, rode the recoil into a spinning heel that should decapitate anything else.
It rang. Mangog's grin took the hit as a tip and threw payment: a chest-level hook that arrived as a continent and landed as a crater in Adriel's sternum. Shocklines fanned out, turning oceans of rubble to glass, painting the cleaved world below with a second sunrise.
Breath hitched; systems recalibrated. Damage Empowerment did its dirty math. Power rose like bile and lightning.
He inhaled; the blades collapsed into his palms. He condensed the current—suns the size of fists woke and whined.
Mangog felt it. "BETTER."
"Kill the scoreboard," Adriel muttered—and crossed the suns.
They didn't explode. They unzipped. Reality peeled where the cores touched and the seam ran until it met the planet's raw rind. Light poured, then reversed; debris slowed, stopped, then sprinted backward as his field seized charge across a thousand kilometers and made it all serve.
He dragged the planet's iron veins into a helix around them—railgun rails at tectonic scale—and fired himself down the barrel. Impact. Mangog reeled, not from hurt, from surprise at the flavor.
"YOU'RE USING ALL OF IT," Wrath said, pleased. "GOOD. GIVE ME YOUR WHOLE."
"I'll think about it."
No more blinking between frames—commit. Authority of magnetism, the Void's stillness, spider speed and precog, and the stubborn, regular-guy arrogance of a kid from PR who doesn't stay down—stacked. Adriel became his own answer and met Wrath dead center—sabers reborn, suns leashed, vectors singing.
To Be Continued...