[CHAPTER 35- ZOKRAKS BECOME SERIOUS! HUMAN MONSTER VS PIG MONSTER]
Xorath's fist found Zokraks' jaw like a meteor striking the face of a planet. Bone complained, then obeyed. Zokraks staggered back as if the landscape itself had shifted beneath him. The sound was more than impact; it was a chorus of broken promises that echoed across an empty sky.
"You always hit first," Zokraks snarled, wiping starlight and blood from the corner of his mouth.
"I hit where it matters," Xorath said, cool and precise, already folding runes into his palms. "Breathe slower, old wound. You're flustered."
Silver chains erupted from Xorath's fingers—not metal but compacted light braided from collapsed cries of dead moons. They wrapped around Zokraks' shoulders and torso like patient glaciers, links humming with captured suns.
"Chains?" Zokraks laughed, each sound unspooling black feathers in the air. "Do you think shackles will keep me?"
"They'll keep you long enough," Xorath muttered, tightening the sigils. "Long enough to remind you how to listen."
Zokraks heaved, muscle and memory waring with the geometry that bound him. His eyes, pits of ancient hunger, flashed. He shifted weight, trying to rend the light-loops apart, but the chains only braided tighter—an argument in unspoken tongues.
Xorath stepped back, felt his chest heave. His breath steamed, an engine warming. He raised his head and shouted, "Ahh!"
The shout was a detonator wired to the seams of reality. Stars leaned, entire tapestries of the cosmos responding like audience to a conductor's baton. Xorath's hands sunk into the skin of a nearby universe—a spiraled thing of bone and glass and tiny impossible lives. The universe answered with a cathedral chord and rose in his grip, seas sloshing, continents shifting like beasts disturbed from sleep.
"Think you can throw entire histories now?" Zokraks rasped, coughing though the chains held him. "Do you believe your theatrics can end me?"
"They aren't theatrics," Xorath said. "They're punctuation." He hurled the universe. Its arc carved a new constellation; impact tore the air into ribbons. Meteors and myths cascaded from the strike point.
Zokraks, with a motion that made Xorath's temples itch, unmoored himself from time enough to slide away. The hurled cosmos smashed through the place he had occupied, leaving a hollow, rearranged space where reality seemed to have been bitten.
"You dodge like a cornered god," Xorath said, narrowing his eyes.
"Gods teach dodging to their pupils," Zokraks shot back, seizing another universe in a move both vulgar and graceful. He clenched it like a child clutching a broken toy and swung—a cometary flail with continents clinging to its flanges.
Xorath watched the arc and felt the gravity of intent. The world in Zokraks' hand became a bludgeon with weather and will. It came down like a condemnation, a law brought to bear.
He did not parry. He whispered a name too old to be casual: "Gray Leaf."
"What—?" Zokraks began, mid-swing.
Gray Leaf did not roar; it erased. Where the spell touched, mountains folded into veins, seas thinned into tissue. The planet remade itself into a botanical simile. The moon unraveled into pale ribs; forests leafed together into single giant gray plates. The world transmuted into a single enormous leaf—paper-thin, impossibly detailed with fossilized geographies and city-grids as faint as sighs.
Zokraks staggered, the momentum carrying him forward as his weapon became a leaf the size of an armada. "You — imposter," he spat, staring at the absurdity in his grip. "You turned my war into…a scrap."
"It's not the scrap that matters," Xorath said. "It's what you were trying to do with it."
The leaf fell between them with the soft slap of a sentence ending. For a heartbeat, predator, god, and artifact were punctuation. Then they crashed into the pause.
They met without choreography: fists, claws, spells, bone knowledge colliding with the bluntness of two truths recognizing each other. Xorath's chains shivered as Zokraks expelled them like water from a torn lung. Zokraks' limbs, used once as siege engines, remembered their old functions.
Xorath drove an elbow into Zokraks' ribs. "Tell me something true," he said as the ancient calendars inside Zokraks' flesh crumbled and fell like sand. "Tell me why you keep coming back."
Zokraks spat smoke. "Because the multiverse owes me a reckoning," he grunted, punching back with the kind of force that buckled planets. "Because I remember when stars were cheaper and gods had no taste for restraint."
"You remember too well," Xorath said, jamming a palm against Zokraks' sternum and whispering a spell. Tiny bells burst from the bone and began to ring with each breath. "Now every inhale will announce you."
Zokraks roared; the bell-song was obscene and beautiful. He answered by molding his shadow into an extra fist that struck at Xorath's skull from the inside. Pain bloomed like a foreign language. Xorath hissed and countered, slapping a sigil across Zokraks' throat that made him cough up smoke tasting of recollected victories.
"You play with memories like toys," Zokraks snarled, pulling a broken comet into his fist and hurling it. "You stitch up history and call it propriety."
"I play so you listen," Xorath replied, catching the comet with a chain and wrapping it until the rock screamed and dissolved into ash. He tore a chain away and let it snag a passing meteor; the meteor shattered, a hundred minor myths spilling into the nothing.
Zokraks, teeth bared, pulled a tooth free and hurled it like a throwing star. "Then listen to this," he growled. The tooth spun and struck Xorath's shoulder; the wound opened, embers of orbiting pain spitting from it.
Blood annotated them both like small constellations. When Xorath's skin split, tiny runes—micro-sagas—leaked into the air and blurred into mist. Zokraks' flesh bled glyphs that pulsed like slow drums. They grafted wounds onto one another, half medical miracle and half vandalism, the grafts still warm and angry.
"You are worse than a god," Zokraks said through clenched teeth as he drove a knee into Xorath's gut. "You're an editor."
"And you are a footnote who thinks he's a chapter," Xorath answered, lifting a fist and running a palm along Zokraks' cheek until bone and will rearranged. "Read properly."
They escalated. A strike birthed a counterstrike that birthed a countermove that changed the environment, which then changed the strike. They repurposed stars into ropes and laws of physics into hammers. Brutality became craft.
At one point Zokraks grabbed Xorath by the collar and lifted. The battlefield telescoped beneath them like a sleeve pulled from an arm. They hung—immense and very small—suspended above scarred plains and hollowed stars.
"Do you think this will break me?" Zokraks sneered, pressing his forehead to Xorath's. "You with your spells and pretty chains. I am older than the sentences you try to write."
"You don't get to be older if you never learn from your age," Xorath whispered back, throat hard. "You get to be bitter."
Zokraks laughed and bit. Xorath tasted a memory of slaughter and tasted, too, the acid truth of it. He shoved Zokraks down and they hit ground like tectonic plates with grudges.
They traded names and debt like knives. "Remember Tyrr?" Xorath called once, a taunt and a needle. "Remember how you left him for the wolves?"
Zokraks' eyes flickered. "I remember he owed me—" he began, then spat, "No. I remember he betrayed more than he owed."
"Then you learned nothing," Xorath said, and cracked his knuckles against Zokraks' jaw. The jaw snapped, not in exit but in argument, and Zokraks tasted stars as teeth ground.
They moved inside a hollowed star; the heat made their wounds sing. Xorath wrapped a hand around a filament of its core and tugged; the star burst into a rain of singing slag that they used like a net. Zokraks pulled a river of memory from his chest and flung it as barbs; the memories found purchase and split.
"You think the multiverse cares about any of this?" Zokraks barked as he pinned Xorath against a ruined cathedral of gravity. "We are noise to the cosmos."
"We are the noise that writes margins," Xorath said, his voice a rasp. He stamped a sigil into Zokraks' palm and the creature's grip loosened, fingers fumbling as old debts rose like moths from the bones.
A spin of violence, a hush, a burst—then both were bleeding and laughing, the laughter like small wars. "You are beautiful when you are wrong," Zokraks said, surprising himself with a smile that was half scorn, half something older.
"And you are handsome when you admit you lose," Xorath shot back, then shoved a forearm through Zokraks' midsection so hard that galaxies in the distance hiccupped.
They fought as artisans. Each bruise carried intent, each rip in the air had a purpose. They used the leaf Xoraks had created as a shield once, wrapping it like a cloak and tearing it across Zokraks' face. It left a pale print, an imprint of continents and ruined rivers across his skin.
"Stop pretending you can end me," Zokraks grunted, throttling Xorath by the throat with a loop of shadow.
"I never pretended I could end you," Xorath said, fingers clawing at the shadow, pulling reality into countersignatures. "I only pretend to stop you long enough to make you remember how to be less monstrous."
Zokraks' eyes softened for the split of a heartbeat—an almost-human thing. "You talk like a man who keeps neighbors," he said. "We aren't neighbors."
"No," Xorath said. "We are cartographers."
The phrase landed like a small blow. Zokraks' mouth quirked, then folded into a snarl. He shoved and they separated with a sound like bone folding into syllables. They circled, panting, each discovering how much of the other was pain and how much was history.
They came together again, and the brutality resumed—faster, more intimate. Xorath aimed for a tendon; Zokraks countered by digging knuckles into the soft part behind Xorath's ear until memories spilled like dice. They traded blows and names until speech was just another weapon.
At last they lay for a heartbeat overlapping, chests heaving, wounds bright with story. The battlefield around them was a manuscript of damage—craters that read like script, trees with rings that counted wrong. The universe leaf smoldered between them, ridiculous and absolute, its veins mapping the thing they had been trying to write into each other.
"Tell me one truth," Zokraks croaked, blood and cinder in his throat.
Xorath looked at him, and for a second the chains unwound in his hands, not fully released but slack enough to be a question. "I will," he said. "But not now."
They vaulted toward each other again, not for conclusions but for continuation, and the fight continued—brutal, personal, and exact—until the chapter closed on the clamor of their war.