The glowing round met the fanatic halfway through the air.
"...NO!"
He twisted his body with everything he had left.
Too late. The crystal touched his shoulder.
Crack.
Gold fractures spread across him like lightning racing under his skin.
His eyes went wide with horror.
"No — no!"
His blade shattered into a spray of harmless sparks.
"What is this?!"
The Collector's expression finally cracked. "...Damn it."
The pendant unfolded midair, petals of crystal peeling open, and something reality-warping poured out of the gap between them.
The fanatic clawed at empty air.
"HELP ME!"
"My grandfather — he said I'd—"
His voice thinned out. His whole body shrank with it.
Full size. Half. The size of a child. A doll.
Then nothing left but a figure the size of a fingertip.
The pendant snapped shut.
Click.
Silence.
Inside the transparent prison, the tiny fanatic pounded against the crystal walls in a rage nobody could hear.
The Collector caught the returning pendant on reflex, jaw tight.
"...You." He stared down at the freshly filled crystal. "You made me waste one."
He clipped it back onto the chain without another word. The miniature figure kept striking at the glass, ignored completely.
He raised the rifle again.
"This changes nothing."
Another empty pendant slid into the chamber.
Click.
His emerald eye lined up with the sight.
"You'll just replace him."
The barrel found Zekai. The trigger moved.
Click.
Another round drifted forward, unlike a bullet — no spin, no violence to its motion, just a slow, almost peaceful float.
Every instinct in Zekai screamed the same thing: don't let that touch you.
His body reacted first.
One step. The crystal slid past his shoulder.
Another shot. He stepped. It passed under his arm.
A third. A fourth. A fifth. Each round adjusted mid-flight, hunting for him like it could taste where he'd be next.
The Collector's brow furrowed. "...Missing? No." His eye narrowed. "He's reading the firing line."
Zekai himself looked just as thrown by it. "That wasn't the path," he muttered. "It felt wrong."
Every round showed up inside his head a beat before it arrived — not as one guaranteed outcome, but as a spread of possibilities branching out in every direction, and his body kept picking the one that didn't end with him inside a crystal.
The Collector lowered the rifle a fraction. "...Remarkable. Prediction alone won't save you forever."
He reached for the belt. Three pendants loaded at once this time.
Click. Click. Click.
Sebastian's breath caught. "...Three at once? He's about to flood the whole courtyard."
The Collector fired.
Three rounds split apart midair. Then six. Then twelve, each one curving onto its own separate line.
Every gap he might have used vanished at once.
The courtyard turned into a cage built out of light.
Zekai went still. For the first time since awakening, his pulse spiked.
...There's no path left.
The crimson interface flickered into view.
Zzzzsup!
[ Limited Control Authority Active ]
Control Correction... Available
Before the words finished registering, his body moved on its own. He stepped forward.
Not away from the storm. Straight into it.
One round passed behind his neck. Another skimmed under his elbow. A third grazed his hair.
He slipped through the impossible barrage by the width of a single finger.
The Collector's eye went wide. "...Impossible."
In a single breath Zekai had already crossed the distance between them. The rifle hadn't even finished its recoil.
The Collector abandoned range entirely, swinging the heavy weapon sideways like a staff.
CRACK!
Zekai's forearm came up to block. The impact rang across the courtyard and shoved him back several steps, his arm throbbing under it.
He's strong. Stronger than the fanatic by a wide margin.
The Collector drew a combat knife with his free hand, calm as ever.
"So. Not invincible after all."
Zekai steadied his footing, guard easing back into place. "No. I'm not."
His eyes went straight to the pendants at the man's belt. One in particular.
Inside it, Aldric Marune stood with his arms folded, motionless, expression unreadable.
I need that pendant. Whatever it costs.
Wind cut through the wrecked courtyard. Neither man moved.
Containment officers reached the edge of the battlefield and stopped there, none of them daring to cross the fractured ground. One young officer lifted his weapon on instinct. A veteran beside him pressed the barrel back down.
"...Don't. We'd just be in the way."
"...Then what do we do?"
"Watch. And pray the kid doesn't slip."
Both fighters waited for the other to make the first mistake. The next exchange would decide it.
The silence lasted one heartbeat.
Then both of them moved at once.
*BOOM!*
The Collector vanished into a cloud of shattered concrete. His rifle wasn't just built for range — the reinforced stock came around toward Zekai's temple, fast and clean.
Zekai leaned back. The stock cut through nothing but air.
The Collector transitioned instantly, no wasted motion, the combat knife flashing toward his ribs.
Clang!
His forearm guard caught the blade, the impact numbing the whole limb.
He's adapting to me.
"It just lets you survive," the Collector said, expression flat.
Zekai didn't answer. He wasn't even sure that was true.
All he knew was that every motion around him split into countless branching outcomes the second it started, and his body kept choosing the path that left him alive.
The Arcana screen flickered again.
[Control Correction Active]
Calculating...
Gone before he could read further.
The Collector's eyes narrowed. "...You're distracted."
He jumped back, left hand sweeping across the pendants at his belt. Three detached at once — and instead of loading the rifle, he threw them straight into the air.
Click. Click. Click.
The pendants burst open midflight, each one releasing a ribbon of Grave Energy that spread out and wrapped through the courtyard like translucent chain.
Sebastian's face changed. "...Those aren't bullets. They're anchors!"
The ribbons closed off the battlefield, cutting Zekai's movement down to almost nothing.
The Collector raised the rifle, calm. "I don't need to hit you. I just need to leave you nowhere to go."
Click. Another round floated forward. The ribbons had already boxed him into a corridor barely wide enough to breathe in.
His eyes flicked through the gaps.
Left — dead. Right — dead. Forward—
A gap opened, barely a hand's width. He stepped without thinking twice.
The round brushed his shoulder. The chains snapped shut behind him an instant later.
The Collector's composure cracked open for real this time. "...Again. You're seeing the spatial opening before it even physically exists."
"No." Zekai's voice came out low. "I just — can't stop moving."
A roar cut through the smoke behind them.
"I'M NOT FINISHED!"
Not the fanatic — he was still trapped, still pounding uselessly on glass. Just a secondary blast, leftover magma catching the collapsed debris and going up.
The distraction lasted a single second. That was enough.
Zekai's eyes locked onto Aldric's pendant.
Now.
He lunged.
The Collector's rifle swung up to intercept.
Too slow.
Zekai's hand closed around the chain at his waist and tore it loose.
The links snapped. Dozens of pendants scattered across the broken concrete, ringing out in a chorus of glass chimes that sounded almost beautiful against how wrong the moment felt.
The Collector's composure shattered completely. "...Don't touch them!"
Zekai didn't stop. His fingers closed around the crystal.
Every pendant on the broken chain trembled at once.
The frantic pounding inside them all stopped cold. Instead, tiny hands pressed flat against the crystal walls, reverent.
A horned beast slowly knelt.
A silver-haired woman smiled quietly.
An ancient, armored warrior bowed his head in a solemn military salute.
Deep in one glowing pendant, something enormous and primordial began to laugh, a soundless vibration that seemed to shake the air itself.
Even the swirling dark inside the last crystal went still, flattening itself against the glass like it was trying to bow too.
Silence dropped over the whole courtyard.
The Collector's emerald eye widened.
"...Why—" His hands trembled where they hung in the air. "Why the hell are they answering to you?"
✦ End of Chapter 41 — The Relics That Recognized Him ✦