It was all falling apart.
The rooftop had cracked down the middle, debris falling into the abyss of the street below. Craters smoked with melted stone. The sky burned with residual Rift energy. Thirty foot soldiers lay broken or dead, their weapons smoldering in pieces. But the three elites?
Still standing.
Kaela Vane flickered through time slices, vanishing and reappearing behind Nova mid-swing.Vraen the Hollow was tanking Kairo and Rhea's combined attacks like a titan made of regret and gravity.And Lucen Marr bloodied, armor dented, was still grinning through it all as he raised a glowing fist and lunged at Liam.
"This ends now!" Lucen roared.
Liam braced.
He was low on breath, bleeding from the ribs, and his synchronization was pushing dangerous limits.
And that's when he heard it.
Through the storm, through the noise, through the chaos
Juno whistled.
Just one note.
Short. Sharp.
Then she said three words.
"Code: Heartbreaker."
For a second just a second the battlefield paused.
Kaela's time flicker stuttered.
Vraen tilted his head.
Lucen blinked.
And Liam
Liam smiled.
So did Nova.
So did Kairo, even with blood dripping from his mouth.
Even Rhea, eyes still narrowed, cracked the ghost of a grin.
Juno popped her bubblegum. "Time to show 'em why we're undefeated."
Lucen's punch came down crackling with Rift-null energy
and Liam caught it.
Fingers locked.
Feet grounded.
Not flinching.
He met Lucen's eyes and said, low and calm,
"This is why we're the strongest team alive."
Then the world broke again
But this time, because they made it break.
Liam moved first.
A blast of energy erupted from his core time energy, but refined now, elegant. He wasn't skipping seconds anymore; he was commanding them.He blurred forward, delivering a punch that hit Lucen so hard, the shockwave rippled backward in time, hitting Lucen twice, once in the present, once in the moment just before.
Lucen flew back, crashing into the far wall, groaning in disbelief.
Nova glowed like the sky was pouring through her. Her blades stretched, bent, curved into spirals of hardlight. She didn't dodge Kaela's flicker this time she stepped into it.Kaela blinked—
Nova anticipated her skip and drove a blade into her shoulder mid-flicker.
"You can't skip through what's already lit," she said.
Kaela screamed, flickered one last time, and vanished in a burst of broken time.
Kairo's eyes lit up with an inner storm.
"You think I'm just defense?" he growled at Vraen.
He drove his fists into the ground, summoning an inverted gravity wave that lifted Vraen thirty feet into the air.
Rhea leapt, riding the wave with a spear made of condensed fracture-glass
And impaled Vraen through the gut.
The hulking brute gasped. Then detonated in a wave of pure force absorbed and returned by Kairo, who twisted the pulse and redirected it into the sky.
Juno, mid-spin, hurled a set of sonic drones into the battlefield.
"Tag, tag, tag!" she sang.
The drones hit fallen weapons, corpses, even Lucen's damaged armor and ignited in sequence.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Precision chaos.
Lucen staggered, burning, coughing through the smoke.
He looked up.
All five of them stood glowing, wounded, furious, and beautifully in sync.
Even Eira, eyes wide, shook her head slowly and whispered with a smirk,
"So this is what it's like... to not hold back."
She lifted both arms.
The Rift energy she'd been hiding beneath her coat exploded out, wrapping her like armor woven from lightning.
She blurred forward in a flash of motion, leaping over Juno, twisting in mid-air, and slamming a Rift-forged spear straight through Lucen's final defense wall.
Lucen dropped to one knee, barely upright.
Liam stepped forward.
Lucen looked up, coughing blood. "You… you were just the weapon…"
Liam crouched beside him.
"No," he said. "I'm the catalyst."
Then he whispered the same code Vex had branded into every part of Liam's mind
And reversed it.
Lucen's core imploded with a soundless pulse, collapsing inward like a failed star.
He was gone.
The rooftop was quiet again.
Ash in the air.
Blood on the stone.
Nova leaned into Liam's side, breathing hard. "That was…"
"A warm-up," Juno said, already stripping tech from the fallen soldiers.
Rhea cracked her knuckles. "We've never used the Heartbreaker Code in a real battle."
"Until now," Kairo added quietly. "And it worked."
Eira stood beside them all, silent.
Until she smiled, eyes glowing.
"Well then," she said. "Next time we fight Vex… I won't hold back either."
Far above them, in a chamber they could not see, the Unseen Crown stood in shadow.
He did not speak.
But the Rift flickered faintly around him.
And on the walls of his throne room
Five names began to glow.