The darkness pouring from Lady Night's enlarged hand fills the entire battlefield, obscuring their surroundings and slowly spreading tens of meters outwards. Nyx immediately snaps her fingers, and multiple stars materialize around her, Angelica and Vincent, burning the shadows away and creating a large ring of protective light.
- "...Okay, at least I can repel it now." Nyx whispers to herself, her face slowly turning pale as she notices the phenomenon expanding further and further. "Angelica, Vincent, don't touch that stuff."
- "Hm?" Angelica reaches toward the shadows at the edge of the light ring, and a ray of moonlight diffuses from her palm. The second it touches them, the light is physically bent by an invisible force, pulled into the shadows and immediately destroyed. "Well now. What manner of underhanded magic is this?"
- "I don't know… it's like something that's made specifically to extinguish light. It's like a black hole, or… the plasma from some kind of dark star."
- "Do you know how to deal with this then?"
- "Not with that much…" Nyx looks up behind Angelica, and her eyes widen in horror.
Angelica wordlessly whips around, just in time to see Lady Night's giant fist coming crashing down on them, covered with flame-like shadows. Her sword moves in a flash to intercept the attack, their clash releasing a shockwave powerful enough to almost send Vincent and Nyx flying. Angelica was breathing heavily, and her arms were trembling under the strain. The ground below her quickly starts cracking due to the pressure exerted by Lady Night's hand, and the shadows covering it begin wrapping around Angelica's sword. The glistening water running along the blade quickly turns dark, and Angelica reflexively pushes against Lady Night with enough strength to force her back. The latter immediately raises her fist again, and keeps slamming it down on Angelica, who keeps narrowly parrying it and repelling the attacks.
- "Sorry for the wait, I'm done!" Nyx shouts as the light in her hands grows in intensity, revealing the second miniature sun she had been preparing.
It quickly expands, bathing the entire battlefield in its light. The only darkness remaining was in the direct vicinity of Lady Night, while the rest burned away in a matter of seconds. She then points her finger towards Lady Night, and a large white star manifests at its tip before unleashing a straight ray of plasma in her direction. Lady Night is hit directly in the stomach by the ray, but doesn't budge. Nyx keeps maintaining the continuous flow of plasma from her to Lady Night, and turns to Vincent, who was kneeling on the ground with his hands on his temples.
- "I really think I need your help here!" She shouts, trying to overpower the sound of her neutron star.
- "...It ceased." Vincent replies, getting up to stare at Lady Night.
- "What?"
- "I heard hundreds of voices calling for help inside this darkness."
- "That's weird, but we can think about that later! We need to take her down now!"
- "...Right you are."
The burning head on Vincent's shoulder separates from him, its fire growing to form the full body of a twenty meter tall lion. It unleashes a deafening roar, and Lady Night's entire body is engulfed in a gigantic tornado of blue flames. In addition, Nyx extends her arms to the side, creating five other neutron stars around her that unleash a barrage of giant plasma rays at Lady Night, finally forcing her back a few steps. Nyx breathes a sigh of relief.
- "Okay… Angelica, we need to-" Nyx's sentence dies in her throat as her gaze shifts towards Angelica.
She was breathing heavily, her silver aura violently bursting around her. Nyx hadn't been paying much attention to it, but now that she looked more closely she could see that this wasn't really magic. She recognized the form and shape of these strands of light: Angelica was directly using her own life force as fuel for her strength, and was burning through it faster every second. Meanwhile, she was intensely staring at her sword with an indecipherable expression on her face. The blade was snapped in half, the other end lying on the floor and emitting a small column of vapor as the magical water inhabiting it slowly poured out on the hot ground.
- "Angelica, you need to calm down or you're going to-" Nyx starts, the stars surrounding her slowly fizzling away.
- "Cousin." Angelica cuts, slowly turning towards Nyx. "I think I am going to cut loose. You should leave."
Before Nyx can answer, a massive ray of darkness pierces the flaming tornado, and swallows the giant lion spirit. When the energy dissipates, the only thing left of it was a deep crater, and the tornado disperses. Vincent puts a hand on his heart, gritting his teeth as if he was just severely injured. Lady Night was standing there, surrounded by her aura of shadows and mostly unscathed. However, there was a singular, light burn mark on the back of her hand. She calmly looks down at her injury, then pans over to Radiance who was floating far away from her.
- "Radiance, call the cultists to the surface." She orders.
- "...Why would you do this?" Radiance asks, his eyes widening in shock. "This should be enough!"
- "I sense more powerful energy signatures headed in our direction. I do not possess enough shards to deal with all of them along with my counterpart at the moment."
- "...As you command, my goddess."
Radiance joins his hands together in front of him, and hundreds of strands of starlight emanate from them, quickly dispersing across the capital like shooting stars.
- "It is done, however… someone is interfering." Radiance finally says.
- "Who would that be?" Lady Night asks.
- "I-"
- "Yah!" Nyx interrupts, firing a large star at Lady Night, which explodes in a bright yellow cloud of cosmic dust.
- "..." Lady Night silently turns to look at her.
- "Why are you still here?" Angelica asks Nyx.
- "Because I'm the one who asked you to come here! So we fight together!"
- "Am I not making myself clear? You are holding me back."
- "I can see you're about to use a bunch of your life force! And I don't want you to die!"
- "I will be fine, like always." She menacingly steps towards Nyx. "If you do not leave, I will be the one to make you."
- "Spare me the damn heroics!" They hear a familiar voice shout from the sky.
Julian was standing in the air with his hands in his pockets and his cape flying in the wind, hundreds of meters above the ground. He winds up and throws something in Angelica's direction, while Lady Night looks up at him, frowning in confusion. He puts his hands back in his pockets, looking down at her.
- "You're in Specta, so act like a Spectan and use your magic!" He shouts to Angelica. "Who cares about some damn sword?!"
- "Julian?! I had to work extremely hard to be worthy of Vortex!" Angelica protests.
- "Like it matters! Clearly it was the one that wasn't worthy, since it snapped like a twig!"
- "..." Angelica's grin returns to her face, and she reaches her right hand towards him.
She seizes something invisible mid air, and a ray of moonlight emanating from her hand outlines the rough shape of a transparent greatsword, with a blunt edge.
- "Ha! How unsightly!" She laughs, the silver aura around her regaining its stable flow.
- "I can't do better than that, so deal with it!" Julian shouts back.
Angelica raises the sword above her head, and her hair flies up as her aura flares. The blade is covered in a veil of moonlight, which grows several times its size to form a giant blade of pure white energy, half the size of Lady Night.
- "I might not be a proper hero, but accept this offering O goddess of Night!" Angelica chants as the intensity of the blade's glow grows. "This is the strike that felled the mighty dragon Izan…"
- "Foolish." Lady Night comments, reaching down and firing a giant dark ray at her.
A ray of flames similar in size clashes with it from the side, deflecting it and sending it a few meters to the side, digging a crater tens of meters deep on impact.
- "Are you not aware that it is considered exceedingly impolite to disrupt an incantation?" Vincent comments, dusting himself off. The burning lion head on his shoulder had returned, albeit much smaller than before.
- "Curse you…" Lady Night whispers.
- "...the blow that carved my name in history, splitting mountains and reshaping the land…" Angelica continues.
Her magical energy starts surging from her body in the form of a powerful white light, merging with her silver aura. Lady Night attempts to obliterate her with another ray, but Vincent deflects it again, the lion head on his shoulder roaring to unleash a giant torrent of flames before disappearing.
- "...Take the tales of my exploits with you to the afterlife!" Angelica swings down, and the sword extends even further as it falls like the blade of a guillotine. "Hollow Moon's Radiance!"
- "Radiance!" Lady Night calls, and Radiance disappears in a flash of light to reappear behind her as she raises her hands to deploy a giant dome of black energy.
At first, the sword goes through Lady Night and anything on its path like an illusion, only leaving a long, thin strand of moonlight where it had cut. Then, the strand flashes brightly enough to force everyone, even Lady Night, to look away. When the light levels returned to normal, everything on the path of the line was cleanly split in half. The ground now featured a deep, almost bottomless canyon. Even the clouds in the sky looked like they had parted, a clean line cutting through them. Lady Night's barrier was still standing at first, but when Angelica taps the ground under her with her foot, it is cleaved in twain, each half slowly falling to the side to reveal Lady Night. She had her arms raised in front of her in defense, and a clear cut was visible on her left arm, oozing with black blood. She immediately turns around.
- "Radiance? Radiance, are you still here?" She quickly asks.
- "I am, my goddess." Radiance replies, floating up to her head. "Seriously, you should not be taking such risks. You could have just shrunk to your usual size to evade the blow."
- "Do not tell me what I should do." Lady Night turns her attention back to Angelica. "You are dangerous, I will admit that. But your magical energy is depleted, along with your life force. This is over."
- "Haha, are you worried about me? I am flattered!" Angelica flashes a bright smile. "But I was merely a distraction! Cousin, give her hell!"
- "I don't have any cool incantations, but you can count on me!" Nyx replies, a blaze of starlight as large as Lady Night herself emanating from her body.
Lady Night realizes too late that her attention had been diverted from Nyx this entire time, and that she didn't notice in time that the latter had been gathering magical energy ever since her last attack.
All of Nyx's starlight gathers in the palm of her right hand, into a tiny orb that slowly travels towards Lady Night. It begins progressively accelerating, leaving a trail of blindingly bright plasma in its wake, and before even reaching its target, unleashes a catastrophic explosion of pure light. It shone bright enough to dispel the night for an instant, illuminating the entire neighborhood as if it was daytime. Nyx panickedly waves her hands in all directions, shielding everyone from the effects of the light as it cut through the battlefield and melted everything it came in contact with. She hesitates for about a tenth of a second before creating a protective sphere of light around Radiance as well.
- "Good thing we finished the evacuation in time…" Julian comments from above, shielding his face with his hand as he watches the entire neighborhood be bathed in this lethal light.
When it finally dissipated, there was practically nothing left of the battlefield. A thirty meter deep crater of vitrified earth was now standing in place of the land the headquarters of the Fifth Branch used to occupy. At the bottom, Nyx catches a glimpse of one of Radiance's cosmic portals closing. She stares at it with very conflicting feelings, until Angelica walks up to her.
- "So, did you get them?" She asks, her silver aura slowly dissipating.
- "...I think they both escaped." Nyx frowns. "I don't want Ka'el to die, but maybe I should've…"
- "Well, you probably would not be satisfied if you killed him, right?"
- "...No. I don't want to kill my friends."
- "Then that is all there is to think about!" Angelica gives her a powerful pat on the back, almost sending her flying to the ground before loudly laughing. "We can just… finish this... later…"
Angelica falls forward face first, her hair returning to its usual black color. She then simply lies there, unconscious, completely motionless and barely breathing.
- "Angelica?!" Nyx calls, trying to shake her awake.
- "She is a fool." Vincent comments from afar, readjusting his glasses. "Then again, one cannot defy a being of this caliber head on and walk away unscathed."
A small lion cub made of flames forms on his shoulder, licking its paws.
- "Now if you will excuse me, my contracted spirit needs rest." Vincent concludes, before a burst of flames erupts from his feet, propelling him into the air.
- "Thank you Vincent!" Nyx shouts. "I'll remember this!"
- "Oh but I am counting on that." He smirks before flying away.
Julian lands next to them shortly after, a panicked expression on his face.
- "Oh we're in deep shit." He comments as he looks at Angelica, who Nyx had laid on her back.
- "It's fine, she's still alive!" Nyx replies. "I think she can be fine, if we give her time."
- "Yeah I really wish she was still awake… But that's not the main problem, there's a bunch of people in white robes that popped up from portals all around the capital and are attacking people indiscriminately, the entire city's on lockdown! We need to head back to defend the headquarters!"
- "..." There's a few seconds of silence as the corners of Nyx's mouth slowly drop. "...What?"