The night sky tore open.
A thousand Helios drones unfurled like a metallic storm, wings beating against the neon. Their searchlights cut the city in clinical white; their cannons hummed with the same cold precision that had built the Brandie Unit and the Forge Towers. Above them, the Helios Spire burned with emergency protocols — a cathedral of glass and circuitry that had once promised order and now only promised annihilation.
Noctis moved through that storm like a king through his court. Black flame trailed from his palms, a living void that swallowed laser bolts and spit back shards of night. Beside him, Cinder Kai — veins aflame, eyes like small suns — laughed as he hurled molten shards that bent toward Helios armor and fused circuits into useless slag.
"We claim it," Noctis said, voice low and cruel over the comms that bled into the city.
"We take the machine that enslaves them and we burn the towers to their roots."
Below, on the cracked terraces of District Null, Ignis and his ragged band of Sparks moved like a promise. Blitz streaked between gutters of falling debris, a living streak of lightning cutting paths for fleeing crowds. Nira stood amid a collapsing plaza, her hands a hurricane of invisible force, plucking children from the mouths of collapse as if they were leaves on a furious sea. Echo ran along the edges of the battle, weaving replicas of sound — sirens that misled drone targeting, phantom cries that drew soldiers into empty corridors. Kai, still human beneath the Cinder-Core's shadowy myth of himself, worked other miracles: a hacked drone turned to rain tiny EMP pulses that let them breathe for seconds at a time.
They fought to shepherd the city's heart into safe pockets — to buy time for anyone who could not run.
But Noctis's power was no longer simple combustion. He did not merely burn; he consumed. Every blast hurled at him vanished into his chest like food into a furnace. Energy bent to him, not away. The more the Helios grid replied with force, the hungrier he became. Black fire folded into a singularity of appetite — a sun that wanted to be a void.
"Pull back!" Ronak ordered, voice cutting through the chaos. He hovered above a collapsed bus stop, golden-white flame a fragile halo. Below him the city was a map of pain: wells of plasma in the asphalt, molten glass like quicksilver, people huddled beneath flickering market stalls. "Get people out. Move—now!"
Blitz answered with a grin that didn't reach his eyes and launched himself across a swarm, taking a drone in mid-flight and turning its wreckage into a bridge for evacuees. Echo mimicked the chant of a thousand evac crews to calm a panicking crowd; his illusions stitched courage where there had been none. Nira—no longer merely vessel, no longer merely product—reached into the air and pulled a collapsing facade up, muscle and mind entwined until the building groaned and then stayed.
But the grid failed in waves. Helios reactors, pushed past safety by Noctis's hunger and by the defensive counterstrikes from the orbital array, began to buckle. The city's neon — the heartbeat of commerce and spectacle — sputtered and collapsed in patches. Towers that had been beacons became stubs of molten glass. From above came the first whisper of the rain: not water, but plasma, raining down in liquid fire and sizzling the pavement with each drop.
"Marshal Orin!" someone shouted — a Helios Enforcer, his graviton gauntlet sparking. Orin's presence warped the battlefield; gravity folded around him and slammed Noctis's advance back in stuttering waves. For a moment the black tide paused. But Orin's field could not hold forever; Noctis simply altered the geometry of his hunger and slipped through like smoke finding an opening.
Ronak's control frayed. Every life he could not reach sharpened like a blade in his chest. He had learned to balance — until that night, when every pillar of that balance cracked under the weight of molten people and screaming alarms. Guilt and fury braided together until he was furious with himself for feeling both.
"If balance can't be found..." he said under his breath, each word a coal, "...then I'll burn both sides to ash."
He rose — not in measured light but in white-hot necessity. The fire around him bloomed like a star in miniature, pushing out heat that warped the very air. He struck Noctis, and the clash was not of fists but of philosophies: Ronak's flame shaping and yielding; Noctis's flame devouring and refining. The two met above Future Pride in a cathedral of color — gold braided with black, light wrapped in shadow, an eclipse being hammered into being.
Every strike ripped down a chunk of sky. The sound was not merely loud; it was a tearing of the world's fabric — a ripping that sent shockwaves through the lower sectors. Molten glass spun like hail. Plasma rain became a curtain of sparks that lit civilians' faces in terrible, fleeting beauty. Those who watched felt a childlike awe they were too terrified to own.
Around them, the Sparks fought their private wars. Blitz, for all his impatience, shielded a half-dozen people from a collapsing billboard. Nira channeled a wall of force to divert a gravitational spike Marshal Orin slammed into the pavement — and in the instant she did, she felt something else awaken: a resonance, as if the Helios Equation left fingerprints on the energy she now bent.
Echo duplicated Ronak's call to retreat and amplified it until an entire avenue moved like a single organism. Kai, who had once been tempted, now felt his heart split every time he saw his own reflection in the molten puddles — Cinder veins and human ash. He clutched his hands into fists and chose a path that would either redeem him or damn him.
High above, the two Ignises spun light and shadow into a living eclipse. The city's holograms—billboards that once sold dreams—glitched into twin faces, each asking the same question in different tongues: Which flame do you trust? Which future do you want?
Below, a child pointed at the sky and laughed. An old woman began to pray. Somewhere, Commander Voss barked orders that would be answered in blood.
Ronak's blade of light met Noctis's maw of darkness one more time, and the world held its breath.
The clash did not end with a victor. It ended with a promise — molten, screaming, impossible — that the night of ash would not forget either of them. The firestorm had only just found its voice.
And in the wash of sputtering neon and smoke, a line began to draw through Future Pride: those who would follow the balance, and those who would worship the perfection of the void. The war had gone public. The gods had begun to fight like men.