As a scout squadron finally crept through the dark grass to investigate the ruined front line, Orden bypassed the need for a fighting stance entirely. Instead, he simply unraveled them. Gripping the biological code of a leading monster, he pulled it apart like loose yarn and wove those raw genetic strands directly into three other creatures.
He stripped away their hybrid traits, forcing the horrifying amalgamation into a single baseline template. Though physically flawless, the result was psychologically shattered. Lacking even the basic muscle memory to operate its own limbs, the newly formed creature collapsed into the dirt. It could do nothing but scream, trapped inside a perfectly ordered body with a violently mismatched mind.
Warrex took a slow, deliberate step backward. Beside him, Lynder and Lutrian remained absolutely silent, paralyzed by the sheer, casual nature of the divine butchery unfolding in front of them.
Tapping his earpiece, Roy offered the Primordial his very own official Nightshatter showcase. Orden beamed. His entire posture lit up with pure, unfiltered joy as he begged to use the moves they had conceptualized together. Roy granted the request with a single, non-negotiable caveat: the damage had to remain entirely localized, far away from the crew.
"I am the only Primordial capable of existing around manfolk," Orden replied, his voice dropping into a chilling, deadpan certainty. "My power, while hard to modulate, can never escape the borders I put on it. Have faith in order."
Waving a hand to rush the preamble, Roy snapped, "Save it for the performance! And make sure you prevent the cameras from being destroyed."
"They will see everything and survive everything. Their order will not be disr—"
"Save it for the performance!"
Above them, the drones repositioned to frame the slaughter. Clearing his throat, Roy slipped seamlessly back into the Thunder Rider persona. Just out of frame, a digital prompter provided by Harmony began scrolling text, translating complex cosmic physics into digestible, broadcast-ready arrogance.
"Witness the absolute authority of the Nightshatter," Roy announced. His voice rolled like heavy thunder over the broken field. "Starting with a simple edit. Censura."
Tipping his hat, Orden unleashed no blast of energy, nor did he channel any flashy magical beam. He simply deleted a localized point in space. Mid-stride, a charging monster stumbled as a mathematically perfect sphere of its own torso ceased to exist. Its physical geometry forcefully corrected into nothingness, the creature was dead before it ever hit the ground.
"You mistake chaos for strength," Roy narrated smoothly, reading straight from his prompter. "Allow us to establish a boundary. Horizonte de Sucesos."
Striking dirt with his heel, Orden triggered a pitch-black, perfectly spherical boundary that expanded outward. Operating as an event horizon stripped of gravitational pull, this expanding dome instantly buckled any monsters caught inside under immense, localized atmospheric pressure. Surviving scouts outside its radius fired desperate magical blasts, only to watch their projectiles freeze instantly upon contact. Trapped like flies against glass, those spells simply broke down into fading photons.
"Still struggling?" Roy mused for the broadcast. "Let us remove the concept of tomorrow. Krystals of Frozen Time."
Tossing a handful of glowing geometric shapes upward, Orden watched them shatter into a sprawling crystalline grid. Ambient temperature plummeted straight to absolute zero. By weaponizing thermodynamics' lowest possible state, atomic vibration within trapped targets fundamentally ceased. Locked inside a perfectly ordered lattice of spacetime, their molecular clocks halted entirely; they could neither move, age, nor suffer damage until that crystal cracked.
"Chaos relies on warmth," Roy read, projecting pure disdain. "We will simply take it away. The Death of Heat."
Sweeping across dirt and grass, an invisible wave brought no flash or explosion. Ambient heat simply ceased to exist. Fires flickered out. As kinetic energy required for basic biological function vanished from reality, remaining scouts collapsed. Even the spark needed to twitch a muscle had been deleted.
Suddenly, Orden dropped into a deep, wide-legged squat. Waving both arms wildly, he scuttled sideways across the grass.
Roy groaned audibly, breaking character for a fraction of a second.
"Cangrejos Pasta!" Orden yelled, bubbling with unrestrained joy.
Takara leaned close, her eyes fixed entirely on their scuttling companion. "Roy. What exactly is he doing?"
Releasing a heavy, exhausted sigh, Roy dragged one hand slowly down his face. "We binge-watched a few universe and nature documentaries last week," he muttered. "I got curious. Casually asked if he could manifest nuclear pasta."
Failing to see any logical connection, Takara just stared. "And?"
"And I expected a dense block of degenerate matter," Roy groaned, watching Orden wave both arms like giant, snapping claws. "I didn't realize he would take ultra-dense neutron star material and actively shape it into nature's greatest evolutionary joke." Roy shook his head, utterly defeated by cosmic absurdity. "He made… a crab. A crab built entirely out of nuclear pasta."
Out on the field, surviving monsters transformed into crystalline crabs. Pushing their biology to its absolute extreme, Orden simulated trillions of years of evolution in a single, horrifying instant. He compressed and reordered every atom of their bodies into biologically active nuclear pasta. Impossibly dense strands of nuclei locked into a crystalline register, yet the creatures retained their original volume and shape. Emerging from the transformation, these new forms scuttled sideways, projecting the absolute confidence of a species having won the ultimate evolutionary race.
Each body consisted entirely of an ultra-thin, single-layer crystalline membrane enclosing a perfect vacuum. Metabolism, senses, and memory resided exclusively along that sparkling surface. In motion, their shells rippled with geometric interference patterns, overwhelming the eye with a dazzling, almost unbearable intensity.
Clicking its claws, one crab produced a sound exactly like two clocks striking each other. It lifted a rear leg, depositing a single, geometrically perfect cube of ultra-ordered waste. Aligning itself into a flawless lattice, this cubic excrement rolled away like a tiny diamond. A faint flicker of satisfaction crossed Orden's stoic expression. Waving an antenna in a gesture conveying either a grand salute or pure malice, the creature scuttled away. It left behind a trail of flawlessly aligned geometric patterns, possessing an order so absolute it would require a billion years of normal entropy to finally process.
Squinting at the prompter, Roy watched Harmony flash a massive question mark across the screen.
"Wait," Roy said, shedding his Thunder Rider persona entirely. "This one is completely new to me."
"A wild surprise!" Orden cheered. "Telón de la Gran Explosión!"
Standing perfectly still, Orden raised one hand high. A massive, heavy expanse of spectral red velvet cascaded from above, wrapping entirely around the combat arena. Inside this cosmic theater, Orden summoned a miniature section of the universe, featuring thousands of tiny galaxies strung along a glittering web. Choosing a path of absolute compression, Orden seized that messy celestial expanse and dragged it violently backward toward a state of zero entropy.
Space inside the velvet boundary physically compressed. Light underwent a massive cosmic redshift, bathing the arena in deep crimson as profound silence claimed the air. Tightening rapidly, the boundary crushed every trapped monster into perfect, uniform order. That entire localized universe condensed into a singular point of blinding white light resting directly in the palm of Orden's hand. Flashing silently, the singularity and the curtain both vanished together, leaving behind only pristine, beautifully clear space.
Roy stared out at the newly swept field. Profound stillness held for exactly three seconds before Orden launched eagerly into the grand finale.
Using the invisible, compressed remains of his recent destruction, Orden rapidly reordered both biology and architecture. A towering structure rose directly out of flattened grass, assembling itself with terrifying speed.
FDR and Eryndra stepped up to escort Roy across the scarred dirt. Approaching the new creation, they stopped dead before La Catedral del Orden.
It was an absolute horror show. Living, compacted cubes of monster flesh formed the entire cathedral, with thousands of eyes blinking from sweating walls. Though the structure emitted a continuous, unified scream of agony, its suffering harmonized so perfectly that it resonated like a holy choir echoing through sacred halls.
"How am I supposed to use any of that?" Roy asked, keeping his voice entirely flat as he stared up at the macabre architecture. "How do I explain this on a live broadcast?"
Floating over, Orden wore a massive, extremely proud smile. "Did I go slightly overboard?"
"Yes!" Roy threw one hand toward the singing meat building. "This is evil. It is beautiful, but it is terrifying. You turned living creatures into structural architecture."
Orden shook his head, maintaining a bright, absolute smile. "Oh, it goes far beyond mere structural shape."
Roy froze. "What do you mean?"
"Stay out here if you prefer blissful ignorance," Orden advised cheerfully.
FDR pushed heavy, fleshy doors wide open. Interior spaces proved fully furnished. Pews and arches stretched toward an altar, all meticulously constructed from agonizing, living tissue. One scout leader stood preserved in an elegant, frozen pose near back rows. Another mangled monster remained fused to a central podium, compelled to speak endless nonsense to empty air.
Roy stood paralyzed on the fleshy threshold, letting his gaze drift slowly across those weeping pews and screaming archways. Mechanically, he turned his head to the side. Orden hovered right next to his shoulder, beaming with a smile so radiantly innocent it belonged on a vintage greeting card, utterly detached from the absolute nightmare he had just built.
Shifting his attention back inside, Roy watched the fused creature babbling at the podium. He took a slow, deep breath and opened his mouth fully intended to deliver some sort of grounding, authoritative statement about basic cosmic morality. Instead, his vocal cords simply went on strike. Confronted by such pure, unadulterated absurdity, his brain completely misfired. He snapped his jaw shut, swallowed dryly, and just stared, trapped in a loop of profound, speechless bewilderment.
Orden initiated a release by casually waving one hand toward rear pews. One single, relatively unharmed monster detached from weeping walls and scrambled out open doors, sprinting away into deep darkness.
Cupping both hands around his mouth, the Primordial boy shouted at the empty subterranean skies above. "See, Dad! I behaved perfectly and had fun! Plus, I let them all go!"
Those deep skies maintained an undisturbed silence. Beaming, Orden happily accepted Ciego's quiet expanse as complete paternal approval.