AKAME ASSASINATION (39)
Things were looking grim. A corrosive certainty was settling over the battlefield: they were losing. Jericho was a blade worn to the hilt, her movements a fraction slow, her carbon reserves a dry well. Angel was a powerhouse, but her adaptive enhancement was a marathon against a sprinter—the voids were evolving faster, learning her patterns, anticipating her power-strikes. This fight was a timer counting down to a death none of them desired, a stupid, anonymous end in the middle of nowhere.
Below, Teddy was drenched in cold sweat, his own F.E. core sputtering like a guttering candle. The strain of constantly reshaping the terrain, of holding multiple pillars aloft against monstrous strength, was bleeding him dry. 'Iman's the fastest fighter we've got, so if she can't deal with them, neither can Angel...' His mind, usually so focused on support, spiraled toward despair. 'Damn it, we literally stand no chance against these things.'
The air thrummed in his lungs, heavy and oppressive. It was thick... thick with fragments. The cacophony of grunts, shattering stone, and screeching voids filled his ears until—
Thick with fragments... of course!
Fragment voids are fragments. Condensed, corrupted, but pure fragment energy given malignant will. Alchemy wasn't just creation... it was conversion.
"Iman! I have a plan!" Teddy shouted, his voice cracking with strain.
"What." Jericho barked, her focus split for a critical millisecond. It was all the opening her two agile foes needed. A claw she hadn't seen coming raked across her face. She stumbled back with a guttural cry, her left hand flying to her face where her eye had been a moment before. Blood poured between her fingers.
"Angel, help Iman!" Teddy screamed, panic clawing at his throat.
Angel blocked a haymaker from the brawler-void that rattled her teeth. "I'd love to, but I'm a little stuck at the moment!" she roared back.
No time. Teddy slammed his palms into the dirt, pouring the dregs of his energy into one last, drastic reshape.
EARTH ALCHEMY: INVERSION SLOPE!
The U-shaped battleground he'd created suddenly flipped, becoming a steep, smooth bowl. Everyone—Angel, Jericho, the five voids—lost footing and slid violently toward the center.
Angel used the chaotic momentum, twisting in mid-slide to plant her boots and skid to a halt, her back slamming firmly against Jericho's. The two women stood back-to-back in the pit, surrounded. Jericho's hand fell from her face, revealing the ruined socket already knitting shut, a new, milky eye reforming with disgusting, wet sounds. The original was gone, sacrificed to the fight.
"Need me to save you?" Jericho mused, her voice tight with pain masked as arrogance.
"Oh, shut up," Angel shot back, but a fierce smile touched her lips. She cracked her knuckles. For a moment, they weren't rivals or reluctant allies—they were the last two walls of a crumbling fortress.
"I need you two to hold them in the center! Just for a moment!" Teddy lifted his trembling hands from the ground, his mind racing through alchemic theory. Transmutation circles were academia's forbidden fruit: immensely powerful, dangerously inefficient, a sledgehammer where a scalpel was needed. They consumed F.E. at a catastrophic rate and were heavily discouraged for anyone without titanic reserves or a death wish.
But Teddy wasn't planning to create something massive. He was planning to fuel a creation with someone else's energy.
With a finger he burned against the rough soil, he sketched the simplest, most universal glyph of conversion he knew—a basic circle for thermal energy.
A tiny, pathetic flame sputtered to life in its center.
Jericho's newly formed eye snapped toward him. In that instant, she didn't see a useless fire. She saw fuel. She saw the horned void, and she understood.
"On three, we both run in opposite directions!" Jericho announced, her voice cutting through the growls of the encircling voids.
"What?" Angel grunted, shoving back a lunging creature.
"In three."
"Hey, stop! I'm not ready—"
"Two."
"What is your problem?!"
"ONE."
On the beat, Jericho shoved off Angel's back with explosive force, not away from the enemy, but toward the most dangerous one—the horned void standing at the bowl's rim. Angel, acting on instinct honed in a thousand spars, used the push to launch herself in the opposite direction, toward Teddy. Her own brute-force opponent, confused, stumbled after her.
Jericho closed the distance to the horned void in three strides. It lowered its head, the bladed horns beginning to hum with that silent, spatial-tearing charge. One minute, Jericho counted in her head, remembering the intervals from its previous attacks.
Instead of attacking, she jumped, landing on the creature's broad back. Her hands, coated in the last gritty layers of her carbon, locked around its horns like vise grips. With a wrenching heave of all her remaining strength, she forced its head up, aiming the charging weapon away from the ground, away from Teddy and Angel—and directly at the cluster of other voids now converging on her position.
"But I wonder if you guys can tank your friend's shot!" she hissed through gritted teeth.
The creature thrashed, but she held on, a desperate rodeo. The hum intensified. The air around the horns warped.
The two agile voids pounced on her, claws tearing at her legs and back. She took the damage, her carbon coating spider-webbing under the assault. The brawler void, following Angel, was now in the line of fire.
The hum peaked.
A silent, visible distortion—like a heat haze shaped into a crescent—erupted from the horns. It passed through the torso of the brawler void and clipped one of the agile ones. The brawler was hurled aside with a massive chunk of its midsection simply gone. The agile one shrieked, its leg severed at the hip.
But the horned void wasn't done. And the spider-void, now missing a leg, was still coming.
"Teddy, close it NOW!" Jericho screamed, leaping from the horned void's back as it began to charge again.
Angel, seeing her opening, jumped clear, landing in a tactical roll next to Teddy.
Teddy's face was a mask of absolute focus. This was it. The vow. The equivalent exchange.
"EARTH ALCHEMY: IRON COFFIN!"
The earth of the bowl didn't just rise—it curled inwards with a grinding roar, forming a perfect, massive sphere of compacted soil and rock, sealing Jericho, the horned void, the wounded agile void, and the spider-void inside a tomb of earth.
"What the hell? You locked her in there with them!" Angel shouted, appalled.
"Yeah! But we need to drain the F.E. from the voids!" Teddy panted, his hands still pressed to the transmutation circle. The small flame flickered wildly.
"Drain the fragment energy?"
"Yep! The circle... it's not for making a big fire... it's the conduit!" Teddy's theory was a mad gamble. By using a transmutation circle for a specialty not his own (energy conversion), and by making a solemn, alchemical vow—entrapping the targets as the "materials"—he could invoke a deeper law: Equivalent Exchange. He would sacrifice the fragments composing the voids themselves to pay the immense cost of maintaining the Iron Coffin and power the circle's true function: a battery.
Inside the pitch-black sphere, the sounds were horrific. Bestial shrieks, the crunch of carbon against bone, the skitter of spider-legs on stone, and Jericho's own furious grunts and curses echoed dully through the thick earth. It was a free-for-all in a sensory deprivation chamber.
For two minutes, the small flame on Teddy's circle burned not with his energy, but with a stolen, violent purple light—the color of corrupted fragments. He was shaking, veins standing out on his temples, acting as a living filter for malignant energy.
Then, with a final sputter, the fire went out. The transmutation circle scarred itself black into the ground.
Teddy gasped, the connection severing. With a wave of his hand and the last whisper of his own power, the Iron Coffin crumbled open.
Smoke and dust billowed out. The torso of the agile void, now barely more than crumbling ash, made a pathetic crawl forward before disintegrating completely. Behind it, from the gloom, emerged Jericho.
She was a mess. Her carbon coating was shattered, her clothes in tatters, fresh blood—both red and black—smeared across her. In her hand was a sharpened shard of her own carbon, buried to the hilt in the skull of the final, twitching spider-void. She put a boot on its head, wrenched the shard free, and let the creature dissolve into fading fragments.
She took one staggering step out of the ruins of the coffin, her breath coming in ragged, painful heaves.
"I'm never doing that again," she wheezed, every muscle screaming.
"Iman!" Teddy's relief was a tidal wave. He rushed forward, forgetting his own exhaustion, and wrapped her in a crushing hug.
"Teddy..." Jericho croaked, her body a tapestry of bruises and shallow cuts. "You're... breaking... my ribs.
But for the first time since the fight began, the air around them was still. The last of the humanoid voids were gone, their stolen fragments returned to the stormy sky. The only sounds were their labored breathing and the distant, ominous rumble of thunder from the fragment storm above.
They had survived. Barely.
TO BE CONTINUED!