Thunder crackled like a war drum, and explosion after explosion reverberated through the ancient bones of the temple.
Dust drifted from the high arches. Cracks spiderwebbed along the once-holy masonry. Somewhere beneath him, a six-armed knight looked up, bodies pushed at its feet.
"Some of the worst timing yet," Altha muttered, casting a wary glancespirallings a glowing bolt of flame arced through the distant sky.
Without missing a beat, he flicked his wrist and activated the silver-coloured bracer bound to his forearm. "Storage open," he commanded aloud, anchoring his Psyche to the device he formed an invisible connection with all his belongings.
Then like light intangible strings drawn taunt the objects one by one, were telepathically pulled into the bracer, vanishing into its compact reality like droplets falling into a silver sea—his books, his notes, even his cloak, jersey, and shirt.
All except his socks an, sneakers, which he quickly bent to pull on with a grunt of frustration.
"Last thing I need is to die with burnt toes," he mumbled, then gave one last glance around the fountain.
Sighing, he turned and bolted up the left-side stairs of the cathedral, the echoes of his footfalls lost amid the Titansg fury of the storm.
Plasma illuminated the stained-glass windows, setting fractured patterns ablaze in every direction, like kaleidoscopes of divine wrath.
The flames were bright.
Too bright.
They danced and howled in a vortex of crimson and gold, a cyclone of living fire that twisted high into the sky and devoured the clouds above. And beyond them—veiled and terrible—the Ashen Pyre.
There it stood like a ghost caught mid-breath. Flickering. Watching.
Altha stopped at the edge of the bridge, his breath catching in his throat.
He'd considered entering the Pyro-Storm before. The idea had crossed his mind more than once—curiosity and desperation were quite the potent pair.
But the truth always dragged him back: stepping into that furnace could mean burning alive, or worse, being flung into some unknown corner of existence with no way back given his awful luck.
And that was assuming entry was even possible.
For all he knew, the storm only worked one way. Everything he'd seen—beasts, anomalies, malformed metal roses—bull-lookinge out. Never in.
If he was goinmagma-filledthis cage—this broken temple, this world cracked at the seams—he'd have to find another way.
The Pyro-Storm posed too many risks.
And Altha was a calculating man.
---
From its flaming vortex erupted a creature of molten wrath—a harbinger of wildfire and fury.
Its wings were a burning fusion of feathers and smoke, trailing cinders with every beat. Its body coiled like a serpent but struck like lightning, plated in white-hot feathery scales that glowed with internal heat.
A mane of fire flared from its skull-like head, and whsix-armedred, the sound shook the stones of the bridge.
The creature's talons left molten imprints wherever they touched, and the air warped in its wake.
But it was not alone.
The second emerged like a shadow pulled into flesh—sinuous, sleek, and terrible in its grace. Dark, segmented armour folded seamlessly into its fur and sinew, and metallic spines glinted along its sides like blades smithed in a God's forge.
With every coiling movement, gravity itself bent subtly around it.
The ground cracked beneath its feet, iron shavings rising like dust. Its treeth sliced the air as it moved with predatory precision—silent, deliberate, inevitable.
The winged-creature struck first, a stream of red-hot flame surging across the bridge.
The second creature shifted, metal skin liquifying and re,shaping to absorb the brunt of the heat, before retaliating with a roar that turned the air to pressure and pushing the creature back.
The winged bird-like creature used the momentum to lift off, spiraling into the sky, its wings flinging burning feathers like meteors.
The metal wyrm followed, coiling through the sky, each ascent pulling small rocks and stone into its orbit.
Altha, crouched behind the arch of the cathedral railings, keeping a tight grip on them. His eyes tracked every violent motion with a sharpness carved from survival, every muscle poised for flight.
He'd seen a powerful entity emerge from the Pyro-Storm before, but nothing like this—nothing this old, this primal, this fierce?
He looked up at them. "They're going to hit the barrier." he whispered to himself.
Above, the two titans collided mid-air. Fyr and force met in a burst of raw power that lit the clouds from within.
The impact cast a blinding shockwave across the sky, shattering clouds, pulling flames into wild spirals and dragging debris upward in a vortex as the titans clashed.
And as they rose higher they hit the barrier and as fast and hard as they'd collided with it, they fell just as hard, just as fast.
As they tumbled together in a death-spiral, biting, clawing, rending as they fell—two beasts locked in a savage embrace.
With one final, sky-rending shriek, they crashed into the canyon below the bridge, vanishing into the smoke and shadow.
The bridge shuddered from the impact. Embers drifted down like dying stars.
Altha remained perfectly still, heart pounding in his chest, uncertain if the storm was truly over—or if it had just begun.
Then he heard it.
Stomp,
Stomp,
Stomp,
Each thunderous footfall reverberated through the stone beneath his soles, like a drumbeat announcing the arrival of something terrible.
Altha's breath caught as he turned, first to the cathedral, then back down into the canyon's abyss.
"Okay," he muttered under his breath. "News update. Things just got worse. But that might be the worst of it..."
The Pyro Storm rumbled the ground beneath as an armoured bull looking creature with red markings and magma filled cracks along its horns barreled through, followed by a flock o metal birds.
Below, the canyon flickered with erratic bursts of light—flashes of elemental fury, blinding jets of fire, pulses of gravitational shockwaves splitting stone.
The two titans hadn't stopped. They had only descended, taking their cataclysmic battle into the depths.
And then... the cathedral.
A flicker of movement. The shadow of a towering figure brushing the stained glass with its silhouette. A shape unmistakable. The shape of a certain six armed knight
The Knight.
Altha's stomach sank. "Hmm. Question is, am I willing to risk possible death…" he glanced back toward the cathedral, "...or certain death? Decisions, Decisions."
He didn't wait for his own answer.
Altha spun on his heel and leapt off the edge of the bridge.
But rather than falling helplessly to the rocks below, a thin, translucent hexagonal disc snapped into place beneath his feet mid-air, pulsing with a pale grey hue. Then another. And another.
He bounded downward, each disc materializing just a second before he landed, his Psyche adjusting their placement with instinctive precision.
The wind rushed past him. Sparks danced around his body, still catching echoes of the Pyro-Storm above.
Hopping from disc to disc he steadily made his way down the canyon and a few seconds later he was close enough to witness the two creature thrash around on the rocky terrain, floating mere feet above the battle.
The scene was a brutal painting brought to life.
The metallic wyrm like creature had wrapped itself around the blazing bird, its armor-like segments tightening like a vise.
The bird-like creature shrieked, wings thrashing violently, searing rock and sky alike.
Talons raked across the wyrm's coiling form, tearing into its hide, but the beast held fast, pressing its advantage.
Black smoke and embers rose in a cyclone around them, ash falling like snow.
The wyrm's tail struck like a whip, slamming the fiery avian into the canyon wall. Stone shattered. Lava flowed in thin rivulets through the cracks, ignited by residual flame.
But the bird wasn't finished—it flared outward with a blast of pure heat. An attempt at forcing the wyrm to release its grip.
Seizing the opportunity, reality seemed to fall in glass panes around Altha's hand as he summoned his hybrid weapon.
Leaping into the fray. He dove for the bird-like creature.
The bird's heatwave scorched the canyon walls, turning stone to slag and air to shimmering haze.
Altha felt his skin prickle, sweat beading instantly, but he didn't flinch.
The discs of energy beneath him twisted and hardened, launching him forward like coiled springs snapping.
Midair, he spun. Reality fractured at the edges of his perception, shards of alternate outcomes fracturing and reforming in flashes before his mind.
His clairvoyance activated—a second sight unfurling through his Psyche.
It showed him many possibilities, more than one mortal mind could hold at a time. So instead of those infinite fractured futures his mind subconsciously chose the most likely ones to occur.
Strike incoming—left side. Dodge now. Claw swipe in three beats. Pivot midair. Burn radius increasing. Elevate three meters, disc to disc.
The feedback was near-instantaneous, a flood of sensations and warnings.
The serpentine creature tightened its constriction, metallic plates glowing hotter as they locked into place. Its mass increased with every coil, sinking the avian menace deeper into the canyon floor—pinning it, and throttling its movement.
Altha sprinted from Psyche Disc to Psyche Disc, eyes locked onto the titanic firebird below analyzing the giant avian of ash and fyr.
His breath came hard and fast, his mind sharper than ever.
He studied the creature's movements—the lacerations that marred its body, the places where its furious thrashing had worn through even wyrmscale and where claws and teeth had carved through its feathery hide.
Most of the wounds were too narrow. Too shallow. Others were obscured by constant movement or glowing embers.
He figured the creature must have a strong hide if it was able to withstand everything that has happened, the storm, the fall, and the fight.
Then he saw it.
Red and hypnotic, dancing in the air.
It was the red string. His gaze followed it instinctively, tracing it through the chaos until it pointed to a gash near the creature's neck.
"Is that it?" he thought. "Is that my chance at victory?"
Without hesitation, Altha launched off the final disc, midair now, wind screaming past his ears.
He aimed his hybrid weapon—a fusion of blade and spear—anchoring it fully to his Psyche. What little reserve remained, he poured into the edge.
He hurled it.
The weapon ripped through the air with a thunderous shockwave, a scream of force and velocity. It cleaved through the swirling fire, piercing the wound near the neck with ruthless precision.
The bird's muscle fibers convulsed, nearly diverting the strike—but the Psyche-honed edge held true, bypassing resistance with an unnatural sharpness.
The creature shrieked in agony.
Its struggles doubled in intensity as it bit into the wyrm's armoured hide with little effect and unleashed another blinding beam of fyr—blasting the serpentine beast off, soliciting a pained roar as the beam gouged deep scars into the canyon floor.
Rock shattered. Fire splashed. The world screamed.
But Altha didn't blink. His focus had narrowed to a single point.
His blade.
He reached toward it—not with his hand, but with his Psyche—and began channeling.
Energy surged through the anchored bond, compressing into a singularity at the blade's core. A point of densely packed force, condensing tighter, denser.
A pressure spike waiting to detonate.
All he needed was a few moments more.
And for the wyrm to keep the bird distracted just long enough.
---
The bird beat its wings, violently ascending to the sky as its onslaught of fiery fury rained down hell as waves of heat fractured the stone below.
The canyon lit with molten veins.
Seeing this the wyrm loaded a pulse of Aether with a roar using gravity as a barrier, as it formed a lightless sphere of influence—a singularity of gravity and will, pulling everything towards it inside it's maw
Even the avian's beam—once a straight lance of burning fury—arched in a wild spiral, pulled by the orb's influence, circling it like a blazing ring, reminiscent of Saturn.
That was Altha's moment.
He released his grip on the anchored Psyche point.
All the compressed energy he'd channeled into the blade detonated.
The blast surged outward, raw force erupting through the creature's throat and jaw in every direction. Its neck bulged, flesh and flame distending unnaturally before it shrieked—one last, defiant cry.
Somehow It had overcome the blast... but it was already too late.
Before it could react, the sphere—dark and lightless now wreathed in fyr—had already launched, hovering a few centimeters from it, pulsing with gravity and doom.
Altha didn't hesitate.
He conjured a Psyche Sphere around himself, a cocoon of hexagonal plates pulsing faintly with his own dwindling energy.
Then the world turned white.
A flash, brilliant and absolute, lit the entire canyon.
A moment later came the boom—violent and instant, not rumbling like thunder but slamming the senses like a warhammer to the chest.
The canyon floor shattered.
Rocks turned to shrapnel. Debris tore through the air like daggers flung by the gods. Dozens slammed against Altha's Psyche field, lighting it with bursts of kinetic energy.
Then silence.
And dust.
A massive cloud rolled through the canyon, swallowing everything in shadow.