Shivam didn't hesitate.
The moment his boots touched the cracked stone, his body surged forward pure motion, no thought. Navik roared and lunged at him like a collapsing mountain, fists swinging in brutal arcs, each one meant to shatter, to erase. But Shivam moved differently now. No wasted energy, no hesitation. He sidestepped the first blow, ducked under the second, pivoted clean beneath the third. Dust curled around his boots as he closed the gap, flipping up and over Navik's shoulder in one impossible motion.
As Shivam twisted midair, he reached down and gripped the torn edge of Navik's chest plate. With a wrench of strength born from something deeper than muscle, he ripped away the thick armor, exposing the black web of corrupted Noctirum coursing beneath. Navik spun, wild and reactive, but Shivam was already landing behind him, boots skidding across the scorched ground.
"Now!" Shivam shouted, his voice cutting through the storm.
Dikshant answered first, vaulting into the air, twin explosive blades spinning in his hands. With a scream, he plunged both into either side of Navik's helmet and activated them. There was a violent flash raw light flaring white and Navik howled, blinded, stumbling backward.
Before he could recover, Naina fired. Three Noctirum tipped arrows slammed into his exposed body in rapid succession one to the knee, one between the ribs, one just beneath his collarbone. The final shot caused a spasm that rippled through Navik's body like electricity short circuiting a god.
Aanchal was already moving. He rushed forward, sword gripped tight, and drove the blade across Navik's right thigh and shoulder in two clean, brutal arcs. The warlord faltered, breath choking in his throat as he tried to stay upright.
And then Adhivita struck.
Her whip lashed forward, slicing through smoke and debris, wrapping tightly around Navik's crackling arm. She yanked with her entire body, feet planted, the tension singing through the air as she pinned him in place. The corrupted energy around his hand sputtered, collapsing back into his skin under the pressure.
Navik screamed not in power, but in pain.
Shivam was already rising.
He shot upward like a bullet, aura igniting around him. Above the battlefield, above the wreckage, above the blood, he ascended. His body gleamed not with fire, but with something older, purer. Energy spiraled from his fists like drawn constellations. He hovered at the edge of the clouds, eyes closed, the wind stilling around him.
Then he tilted forward.
And dropped.
He tore through the air like a star come to crash through the sins of men. Time bent, slowed, warped. Below, Navik's head tilted skyward just in time to see the blur of light come screaming toward him. There was no time to react.
The impact was cataclysmic.
Shivam's fist collided with Navik's chest in an eruption of force so vast it seemed to silence the world. Sound vanished. Dust and debris were flung outward in concentric waves. The ground beneath them fractured, then collapsed entirely, forming a crater that stretched outward in every direction like a sunken scar.
Navik's body jerked, convulsed, then went limp but Shivam wasn't finished.
He caught the warlord by the collar and launched upward again, dragging him like a ragdoll into the sky. They burst through the haze, climbing until the air grew thin and cold, until the curve of the Earth began to show. And then Shivam reversed.
He pulled Navik downward, faster than gravity, faster than sense. They plummeted through the upper sky, through the clouds, through the floating city itself smashing through platforms and towers, slicing a glowing scar through the structures above. Metal screamed. Glass shattered. The city trembled.
Then came the final descent.
Shivam crashed Navik into the ground with a force that ruptured layers of Earth itself. Soil and stone peeled back like paper. The impact was a cannon blast of light and wind, and when it cleared, a crater deeper than a fortress lay in the surface of the world.
Navik Vyer didn't move.
His armor had shattered. His skin was blistered, stripped of its unnatural glow. The body that remained was broken, scorched, small so small compared to what he had been. He looked human again. Mortal. Dead.
Above, at the jagged rim of the floating city, Shivam's friends peered down through the gaping hole his descent had carved. The sky was stained with ash, the air silent. They didn't cheer. They didn't speak.
They simply watched as Shivam rose from the wreckage, breathless, battered, and alone. The warlord The False God had fallen. And Shivam stood over his body alive.
For the first time in hours, there was silence.
No more explosions. No blades clashing. No screams.
Just wind whispering across the broken rim of the floating city, sifting through ash and steel. The crater below steamed gently, trails of dust curling into the air as if the earth itself was exhaling in relief.
Shivam stood in the center of it all, chest rising and falling in slow, deliberate rhythm. His shoulders slumped. His arms hung heavy. Light still pulsed faintly around him, but it was dimmer now like a candle burning low after the storm had passed. Around his feet, the once mighty body of Navik Vyer lay still, crumpled like a burned out husk. The corruption in his veins had fizzled out; the glow beneath his skin had vanished. Whatever godlike force had once lived inside him… was gone.
One by one, the others descended from the jagged edge of the city. Aman was first, landing hard, sprinting toward Shivam without waiting for confirmation. He skidded beside him, breathing hard, eyes darting between Shivam's worn face and Navik's corpse.
"He's really gone," Aman muttered. Naina, Aanchal, Adhivita, and Dikshant gathered around next. Each one bruised, bloodied, exhausted but alive. Aanchal crouched beside Navik and pressed two fingers to his neck, just in case.
Nothing. "He's dead," she confirmed, almost in disbelief. "It's over."
For a moment, they stood there survivors in the eye of a storm that had finally passed. No one celebrated. There were no cheers. Just relief. Quiet, trembling relief.
And then it began. A low, pulsing hum filled the air.
It was subtle at first like a frequency barely detectable, more felt than heard. But it grew louder, more insistent, vibrating through their bones. Shivam's head snapped up. His eyes narrowed.
"Do you feel that?" he asked, already turning toward the palace in the center of the floating city. The others followed his gaze.
From the heart of the city, beyond the ruined courtyard and shattered towers, a column of light erupted into the sky straight up, searing through the clouds. It was not warm like fire, or radiant like Shivam's own aura. It was cold, artificial. And angry.
The beam tore opens the atmosphere above, cracking the sky like fractured glass. Where the clouds should've been, there was a hole a circular wound in the heavens. And through that wound, they saw something that should not have been there.
Their own world. Or rather a version of it. Suspended. Twisted. Echoed. A mirror Earth, drawn slowly, impossibly closer, as if pulled by invisible chains across time and space.
"What the hell is that?" Naina breathed.
Adhivita took a step forward, eyes wide. "That's… that's his plan in the motion."
A dull vibration passed through the ground beneath them, followed by a low rumble from the core of the floating city. Structures groaned. Pressure built in the air like an incoming storm. Suchita's visor blinked with red symbols. "Spatial friction," she muttered. "The gap's destabilizing. That beam isn't opening a portal it's pulling."
Shivam's expression hardened. "Pulling what?" Mansi looked up. "Worlds."
The realization hit like a gut punch. Above them, the rift expanded, stretching like skin over a breaking drum. Massive clouds twisted as gravitational distortion warped wind patterns. Lightning arced through the upper atmosphere, jumping across the void between the two Earths. From a distance, it might've looked beautiful cosmic, divine.
But here, from this ground, it felt like doom. "Whatever that machine is…" Aman started.
"It's pulling both worlds together," Shivam finished. Suddenly the victory meant nothing.
The warlord was dead. But the weapon he left behind was still active. And it was doing something even Navik couldn't have done while alive.
"Look," Adhivita whispered.
They turned. The horizon shimmered, pulsed unnaturally. Pieces of land below, far beneath the floating city, had begun to shift. Oceans reacted. Clouds moved in reverse. Faint cracks ran like spiderwebs across the sky's edges.
"This whole place is going to collapse," Naina said.
"No," Shivam said softly. "Everything is going to collapse."
A sudden wind slammed into them. The beam pulsed brighter.
In the distance, across the city, alarms began to blare.
The Time Space Ripper machine screamed from the palace's main tower. Bright red lights danced along the broken infrastructure. Whatever system Navik had buried beneath this city… it was no longer hiding.
The machine was alive. And it had just woken up.
"Move!" Aman barked. "Everyone gets to the palace now!"
Shivam didn't wait. His legs coiled, and he shot back into the sky, blazing toward the origin of the beam. Behind him, his team scattered running, leaping, flying across the crumbling platforms of the floating city.
The silence had passed. Now came the unraveling. The wind was screaming now.
As Shivam rocketed toward the palace's upper tower, the beam of energy pouring into the sky grew sharper, thinner, more erratic like a blade tearing the air apart. The floating city trembled beneath him, its metal skeleton groaning under the strain of whatever monstrous force the machine had awakened. Below, his team darted through the ruined streets, running full tilt toward the central platform, jumping over broken tiles and sidestepping cracks that widened by the second.
He reached the tower first. The shattered glass doors had already been blown inward by the pressure wave pulsing from the core of the machine. The inner halls buzzed with flickering lights and scattered debris. As he entered the command room, his boots screeched across the steel floor and he froze for a second. The chamber was alive with noise alarms wailing, red symbols flashing across every screen, data streaming down faster than anyone could process.
Sage Agastya stood at the center of it all, hunched over a console, hands flying across a glowing interface. His face was pale and soaked in sweat. Across from him, a team of nervous scientists scrambled from station to station, shouting updates over the rising din. Shivam didn't waste time with questions.
"What happened?" he demanded. "That machine what is it doing?"
Agastya looked up; eyes wide. He stepped back from the console, his face grim and defeated. "He left a final order. Navik. Just before you killed him. A command override routed through the inner core of the Space Time Ripper. We caught the signal it came in seconds before his core failed. I think he knew he was going to die."
Behind him, a scientist piped up, voice cracking. "We thought it would open a new passage. A clean bridge to another timeline. That's what the machine was designed to do."
"It's not opening a bridge," Agastya said. His voice was flat. Cold. "It's pulling them together. Both worlds. Ours and the mirrored one beyond the rift."
Shivam's jaw tightened as he stepped toward the central display. A rotating simulation showed two planetary masses drawing nearer and nearer caught in a dance neither could escape. Gravitational fields were colliding. The timelines were bleeding into each other. There were flashes of impossible weather patterns, eruptions of tectonic instability, distortion fields growing like tumors across both versions of Earth. If left unchecked, the convergence would result in something far worse than collapse.
It would be erasure.
The others entered moments later Aman with a bruised shoulder, Naina breathless, Aanchal bleeding from her temple, Adhivita dead silent as her eyes locked on the spinning visuals. Dikshant took one glance at the simulation and muttered a curse.
Agastya turned to them, his expression folding under the weight of what he was about to say. "We can't shut it down from the console anymore. The override burned the interface locks and destroyed the remote subroutines. It's no longer a machine running on code. It's self sustaining, converting its own structure into power. To stop it now "
" you'd have to tear it apart," Mansi finished.
Agastya nodded once. "And tearing it apart will trigger a backlash. The entire floating city will explode. Everything within a ten kilometer radius will be gone."
For a long moment, no one spoke. The air inside the control room seemed to thicken. The beam outside howled louder, rising into a shriek that clawed at their ears. Earthquakes trembled beneath their feet, and the chamber lights flickered as if they, too, were losing faith.
"I'll do it," Shivam said, the words escaping him before anyone else could speak. "I'll fly to the core. I'll pull it down, piece by piece, if that's what it takes."
"No," Aman said, stepping forward immediately. "Not a chance."
"This isn't a debate "
"It is now," Naina cut in. "You think we came this far to watch you die alone?"
"You're not dying," Aanchal added. "Not if we're still breathing."
Adhivita stepped up beside Shivam, eyes shining with fury and something else. "You told me we would free this world. You never said you'd vanish the second it was done."
"I don't want to vanish," Shivam whispered. "But if it's me or everything, then "
"Then we make it all of us," Dikshant said quietly. "Together. Or not at all."
There was a stillness between them then, the kind that only comes when people know exactly what they're about to do and choose it anyway. Shivam looked around the room at the faces he had fought with, bled with, survived with people who had every reason to run, and every intention to stay. He didn't argue again.
Agastya moved toward a second console. "If you're serious, you need to give us time. We need to get everyone off this city before it blows."
"How long?" Shivam asked.
"Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. There are warships parked in the palace hangar. I can override their launch sequence remotely."
"Then start moving," Shivam said. "And get everyone out."
As the command center burst into motion, alarms still screaming, Shivam and his team turned back toward the hall. The time for fighting was over. Now came the cost.
The city groaned beneath them as the first evacuation sirens pierced the air.
From the highest tower, Shivam stood near a shattered window, watching the beam in the distance warp the sky. The Space Time Ripper had transformed the atmosphere into a swirling wound, and now that wound was widening dragging clouds upward in spirals, drawing pieces of the floating city's scaffolding into orbit. Each second, the air grew thinner, tighter, less real. And yet, across the platforms below, people still ran. Still hoped. Still moved.