Chapter 19: Hectically Ecstatic (Part 2)
9th July 2026
Harith and Mutafakir stood their ground against Shagahf, entirely blinded by the blinding, incandescent light of his newborn form. Sweat poured down their faces, driven by two overwhelming forces: the suffocating, unnatural heat radiating from the beast before them, and a psychological tension that thickened with every passing second.
The air itself seemed to curdle, warping under the immense gravitational pressure of Shagahf's evolution. Light did not merely radiate from him; it lacerated the retinas, bleaching the entire urban landscape into a harsh, overexposed glare.
"I thank the two of you, Harith and Mutafakir," Shagahf's voice boomed, vibrating through the asphalt. "You guys have showed me the way to not only break through my limits, but completely incinerate them."
SHH— SHH— SHH—
The sound was not a mere hiss—it was a violent, multi-layered friction of reality scraping against itself.
The aura continued its relentless, roaring ascent, tearing at the very air. Superheated atmospheric currents whipped outward, scorching the pavement until the asphalt began to liquefy, bubbling into black tar.
Yet, despite the catastrophic display, Mutafakir's posture completely relaxed. A faint, knowing smile tugged at the corner of his lips as the tempest rattled his clothes.
"H-how do we defeat someone like him, Mutafakir??" Harith choked out, his mind racing in panic.
(Goodness! How can he be so calm?! If he wants to get himself killed, that's his problem, not mine!)
Slowly, Mutafakir turned his gaze toward Harith. The chaos of the world seemed to slow down around his absolute composure.
"Harith," he murmured.
He extended his right hand forward, offering an open palm.
After a tense ripple of hesitation, Harith reached out.
SLAP!
Unexpectedly, Mutafakir slapped his palm against Harith's with an audible, resonant crack that echoed through the barren streets. The sound was incredibly sharp, cutting straight through the roaring white noise of Shagahf's ascension like a gunshot in an empty cathedral.
Harith braced for the impact, but felt no pain—not even a slight sting. Instead, a bizarre, cold clarity flooded his nervous system.
Mutafakir firmly gripped his hand for a single, fleeting second.
"What are you doing..??"
"So, I don't have much time to explain," Mutafakir said, his voice dropping to a calm whisper.
The contrast was staggering; amidst an apocalyptic storm, his voice carried an unnatural, absolute stillness.
"I'll just say that I've temporarily transferred my Disposition and shared it with yours. That's all I can say… and one more thing."
Mutafakir's smile widened, genuinely peaceful against the backdrop of total destruction.
"You're a good person, Harith. And I trust you with my ability… Don't turn the both of us down."
"W-what are you—"
Before Harith could finish the thought, Mutafakir's eyes rolled back.
His body went entirely limp, falling face-first onto the hard concrete with a heavy, unceremonious THUD—a deadweight sound immediately swallowed by the ravenous roar of Shagahf's aura.
"M-Mutafakir?!"
FZZZT.
Around Harith's silhouette, a faint, gray-whitish aura twitched violently for a fraction of a second. It hummed with the high-frequency vibration of a tuning fork before settling deep into his bones.
It vanished as quickly as it came, unnoticed by the frantic teenager.
Harith screamed his name again, but to no avail.
(Holy shit… did he die?! What drove him to trust me like that?! I don't even know who this guy is!)
"Oh…" Shagahf snickered, observing the fallen strategist.
The sound was a low, guttural vibration that rumbled uncomfortably in Harith's chest cavity.
"I guess he ditched you, then. What was that nonsense about him giving you his Disposition?"
Shagahf lowered his center of gravity, crouching into a predatory stance. The concrete beneath his boots groaned, spiderwebbing with fractures as his physical density seemed to quadruple.
"Mutafakir must have been trusting you with his life, because…"
The heat around Shagahf spiked exponentially as he raised his voice to a deafening register:
"…because he'd be a fool if he blindly gave it to you!"
BOOM!
With absolutely no warning, Shagahf detonated forward.
The sound was a catastrophic acoustic rupture—a vacuum drop that compressed the eardrums before releasing a concussive shockwave.
He dashed at Harith with extraordinary, world-bending speed, leaving a thunderous shockwave and a massive, fractured crater in his wake.
BAM!
A blinding, streaks-of-neon orange trail tore through the air where Shagahf had just been. The displacement of air was so severe it created a localized sonic boom, threatening to shatter every pane of glass within a three-block radius.
Yet, somehow, Harith moved.
His body contorted in a perfectly fluid, professional evasion—a flawless slip of the frame, executed as if he had been practicing the maneuver his entire life. There was no panic, no wasted motion; his muscles reacted with a cold, geometric perfection that bypassed conscious thought.
Shagahf's form materialized a few meters behind Harith, his momentum grinding to a halt with a harsh, scraping shriek of rubber and pulverized stone.
For Harith, the entire world had abruptly inverted.
His vision bled into stark shades of gray and white.
The deafening, chaotic roar of the battlefield dropped into an eerie, absolute silence. A sensory vacuum.
As Shagahf had initiated the dash, Harith's mind had instantly, mathematically predicted the exact trajectory of the surprise attack, triggering Mutafakir's transferred Disposition into overdrive.
He watched Shagahf's hyper-accelerated figure move in absolute slow motion.
He could see every muscle twitch, every shift in weight, and the endless, gray-and-white afterimages tracing the villain's path. The world was standing still, reduced to a blueprint of pure intent and trajectory.
"So, that's what Mutafakir was talking about…" Harith breathed in utter bewilderment.
"This is Mutafakir's ability??"
With effortless precision, Harith simply stepped to the side, letting the lethal trajectory pass him by completely. It was like dodging a ghost.
The world snapped back to real-time.
Sound rushed back into his ears with a concussive pop.
"Well, Harith. I am surprised," Shagahf admitted, turning his head slightly.
"You've actually managed to dodge my attack like an experienced martial artist."
Shagahf fully turned around, his eyes locking onto his target. The ambient fog began to swirl around him, drawn in by his immense thermal pull.
"So, you're gonna stand there all day, mourning about how your friend ditched you? Because I ain't willing to do the same.
I don't show pity to my opponents because you said it yourself before—it's a street fight.
If rules aren't identified here… then neither is pity!"
Shagahf smiled grimly.
"And speaking of pity…"
He lifted his massive arms, extending them far out to his sides like a conductor preparing a crescendo.
"This fog's annoying. I don't pity it at all."
CRACKLE!
Both of his arms flared into a molten, magmatic orange. The air around his limbs began to hiss fiercely as the moisture instantly vaporized into superheated steam.
With terrifying physical force, Shagahf brought his hands together in a colossal clap.
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
An apocalyptic tempest of compressed air erupted from the impact. The shockwave stripped the top layer of asphalt clean off the street, expanding outward in a devastating, visible ring of kinetic violence.
Harith primed himself to dodge, but the sheer area of effect left nowhere to run.
The intense, gale-force winds violently lifted his feet off the ground, threatening to throw him into the stratosphere. The upward draft was so immense it defied gravity itself, creating a crushing atmospheric vacuum.
Reacting on pure instinct, Harith slammed his hand downward toward the earth.
His skin flashed with a brilliant blue-and-white static as he funneled raw strength into his fingertips, driving them deep into the rigid concrete to anchor himself.
CRACK!
The visual fracture rippled through the pavement, but the sound was entirely drowned out by the screaming, deafening roar of the atmospheric wind. The auditory landscape was completely dominated by the howling gale, a wall of pure noise that erased all other senses.
(What is he trying to do… kill me from fall damage? I've grown levels stronger than that!)
All around him, the environment was being torn apart.
Abandoned cars were ripped from the streets, their metal frames screeching as they were torn from the chassis.
Boulders and massive shards of urban debris went airborne, screaming past Harith's anchored form like unguided missiles.
SWISH! SWISH!
A cluster of jagged, razor-sharp rocks shot through the tempest directly toward him.
One jagged edge sliced cleanly through Harith's cheek.
Blood immediately splattered backward into the gale, painting a crimson line as the wound opened up, the droplets instantly swept away by the velocity of the storm.
But the sting was the least of his concerns.
Sensing the oncoming cluster, Harith twisted his heavily injured body with miraculous precision, weaving through the remaining projectiles despite the crushing weight of the wind. His perception, enhanced by the gray-and-white domain, mapped out every airborne hazard.
A few meters away, completely unaffected by the storm that was lifting multi-ton vehicles, Shagahf stood perfectly still, his arms crossed over his chest. He was an unmovable anchor of pure mass.
BEEP! BEEP!
Car alarms wailed mid-air, spinning erratically in the violent updraft.
Stray cats and dogs caught in the vortex screeched as they were swept away by the rapidly rotating currents, their cries lost to the mounting frenzy of the storm.
"Hey, Harith," Shagahf called out over the noise. His voice somehow bypassed the gale, cutting straight through the acoustic wall.
"You do know what keeps eating and never gets full, right?"
Harith gritted his teeth against the wind, his fingers digging deeper into the breaking concrete.
"You mean… fire?"
"That's it," Shagahf grinned.
"Now, you may wanna take a look behind you…"
Still clutching the fractured concrete for dear life, Harith strained his neck to look backward.
His heart stopped.
Harith's eyes widened to their absolute limits.
Looming over the horizon was a catastrophic, highly anomalous natural disaster.
A tornado.
But it wasn't made of wind and dust—it was a towering, churning vortex of pure, roaring cataclysmic flames, expanding in diameter by the second.
The sound it produced was a bass-heavy, demonic growl, a low-frequency rumble that shook the very foundations of the city.
(Shit!) Harith realized, his jaw tightening.
(His goal wasn't to launch me into the air and watch me fall. His goal was to trap me inside that blazing furnace!)
The fire tornado had already reached town-level proportions, casting the entire scenery in a sickening, blood-red hue from the sheer, radiating heat.
The sky above turned a bruised, apocalyptic purple, choked with ash and burning embers.
The oxygen was actively being sucked out of the air, creating a suffocating pressure that made it nearly impossible to breathe.
(If I don't think of something right now and move, that shit's gonna incinerate me down to the bone!)
CRACKLE-FZZZT!
The hand Harith was using to anchor himself suddenly ignited with violent, erratic arcs of electricity. Bright blue lightning arced across the melting pavement.
A moment later, his other hand followed suit, the high-voltage current cascading down his legs and surging through his feet, turning his entire nervous system into a localized power grid.
Pounding against the crushing atmospheric pressure, Harith forced his body down into all fours, his limbs glowing blindingly bright with a dense coat of lightning.
The electricity hissed and spat against the pavement like a trapped beast, fighting against the suffocating thermal draft of the oncoming inferno.
"This is gonna hurt," Harith muttered, staring into the vortex.
"But I've got no other option."
BANG!!!
The floor beneath Harith detonated diagonally in a brilliant flash of kinetic energy, launching his body like a railgun projectile high into the air, away from the gravitational pull of the storm.
The sound was a sharp, concussive snap that split the air open.
He soared across the sky, utilizing the electric currents to glide through the upper atmosphere, cutting through the thick layer of rising smoke.
The heat had taken its toll—his limbs were severely blistered, his skin darkened and singed from the brief exposure to the perimeter of the vortex.
The wind rushed loudly against his eardrums, a roaring friction that threatened to deafen him, but he pushed through the agonizing pain, steering his trajectory clear.
Suddenly, a shadow fell over him.
The light from the fire tornado was blocked out as a silhouette intervened.
A figure cut through the sky at impossible, blinding speeds, matching his altitude instantly and breaking the sound barrier without effort.
"Where do you think you're going?" Shagahf's voice hissed right above him.
"Did I tell you that you could leave?"
Shagahf cocked his leg back, driving his heel downward like a meteor meant to crush Harith into paste.
The displacement of air ahead of the kick carried enough force to shatter bones before the blow even landed.
Harith gasped, his vision briefly flickering into the gray-and-white domain.
Time dilated once more.
With a desperate contortion of his spine, he barely managed to slip past the descending heel, the heat of the attack searing his clothing as it passed.
"I knew you'd dodge that," Shagahf chuckled, his voice right in Harith's ear.
"That's why I kept my fist ready!"
Before Harith could even recalibrate his posture or trigger another evasion, Shagahf's coiled fist drove directly into the center of Harith's chest.
CRACK!!!
The brutal impact fractured the air.
The sound was thick, heavy, and sickeningly visceral—the definitive crunch of kinetic force meeting flesh and bone.
The kinetic shockwave sent Harith hurtling backward, a human missile plunging straight out of the sky and directly down into the epicenter of the growing fire tornado—which had now expanded massively, partially swallowing the city below in a blanket of absolute devastation.