Kaelix didn't give the entity time to think.
With a thunderous boom, he launched himself upward, the crater below igniting in a spiral of crimson flame. His body, half-shrouded in the blood-born fire, tore through the air like a falling star in reverse—erratic, furious, unbound.
The entity could barely move before Kaelix slammed into it.
The collision cracked the area above the stage.
Crimson fire burst outward in a ring of shock and heat, flame flaying glitching runes from the air.
The entity recoiled, its body jarred from control as Kaelix's open wounds leaked wild, seeking fire—flames that latched onto every exposed rune and devoured them in bursts of rebellious light.
The entity reeled.
Its instincts screamed of impossibility, of danger, but it had no countermeasure. Kaelix didn't fight like a rational person... he fought like a mad man.
Slash.
Slam.
Burn.
Each strike from Kaelix was brutal, not clean.
There was no grace, no precision, only fury weaponized into motion. The entity barely parried a descending strike before it took a headbutt to the jaw.
Then came the hook, igniting its side in bloodfire. Every flame that touched it spread like a virus, devouring the glitching runes it emitted.
Kaelix wasn't letting up. Not when his lungs burned. Not when the bones in his arms cracked from overuse. Not when his vision blurred from blood loss.
Not when his body wanted to stop.
No. He wouldn't stop. Because this thing had stolen Nick.
Because everyone wanted him to die—this cursed world, the Advent, the system of fate. All of it had lined up just to erase him, to silence him before he could speak.
Then let my anger be louder than their silence.
But just as Kaelix pulled back to unleash another strike, the world flickered.
Reality bent.
Glitch.
He passed through the entity like smoke through a sieve.
His body collapsed onto the ruined ground, cratering it again with a crash. He had long forced himself and the entity onto the ground so it was no that big of a crash.
His muscles spasmed, jerking. His bones broke again in his back. He gasped—but no breath came. The flames flickering off him dimmed momentarily.
Not far from him, the entity steadied itself. For the first time since it had gained form, it understood fear and rationality in equal measure.
This is not normal.
Its thoughts were no longer drifting—they were calculating.
This anomaly, this Kaelix, had evolved into something beyond instincts. Its logic didn't know what to do.
His flames, which it identified previously been identified as a Minor Nexus Rune, had now changed in their nature completely and resembled the power of a Worldforged.
It's natural enemy. It needed to figure out what to do. And its very instincts did.
The anomaly had to die.
That glitch—when Kaelix passed through it—had been more than a fluke. It had seen them.
Not the glitching runes of the Advent.
No, something deeper. Older. Stable, structured World Runes. Systemic, static blue. A law of existence.
They had moved to interfere. To break him.
The entity recognized this reaction. It happened only in extreme cases—when an Adversary attempted to leave the Advent's confines before a full integration. It meant the world itself was retaliating.
The world was trying to kill him.
That didn't lessen its fear. It only deepened it.
For both the Advent's Runes and the World's Runes to act in concert against one anomaly? That was a threat unlike any it had known.
It had to end.
Kaelix writhed against the ground, vision swimming. His nerves were screaming. His muscles were cooked. He could feel something tearing in his mind—between will and sanity.
Crimson runes appeared in the air before him. Blunt. Unforgiving.
[The World is counteracting your existence. Incomplete transformation. Integrity dropping]
Kaelix grunted, eyes flicking upward as blood poured from his torn lips.
"No shit."
His mind raced.
How the hell do I complete a transformation I didn't even understand?
You never let me live in peace and now you're trying to kill me.
World, Advent, both of you can go fuck yourselves.
Then his will locked onto them.
The static blue runes around him.
The World's Runes.
They were cold, clinical, unwavering. They didn't replace—they restricted. He could feel them closing around him, pushing his unstable state back into order. Denying him form.
His eyes widened.
They're what's killing me.
And if the runes were trying to erase him, then… perhaps they were his target.
He needed Lorerunes.
And now it seemed that these ones had just offered themselves up.
The entity glided closer, arcs of glitching color dancing around its arms. It hadn't waited. It was done waiting.
It hurled a bolt of chromatic flame downward—but Kaelix was already in motion.
Despite his jaw shattered and ribs broken, he moved.
With a roar that no longer needed a mouth, Kaelix met the attack in kind. His own blood ignited, leaking from open wounds, and consumed the flame that tried to end him. The flames fought like hounds, gnawing at each other in mid-air.
Then the nearby area became a war.
The two clashed, again and again—Kaelix's strikes monstrous but wild, the entity more refined, efficient. It was still stronger, but the gap between them had narrowed drastically.
Kaelix bled with every hit. Flesh tore. Bones broke.
But for every wound he received, he returned one. A deep one. A rageful one.
And these wounds didn't heal.
Then, at one critical moment, Kaelix focused.
His jaw was gone. His ribs fractured. Yet his will surged.
Ignite. Not because I say it. Because I mean it.
The leaking crimson runes obeyed.
And the flames exploded.
A wave of bloodfire ignited the air itself and launched upward in a cone of roaring crimson. Both the Advent's glitching runes and the World's blue ones screeched in resistance. But they were caught—some were scorched, others converted.
One of the World's runes died.
One of the Advent's runes shattered.
Then the scorched ones reformed. And Kaelix's runes grew more numerous.
The entity staggered.
This was madness. It was watching something new, something utterly alien. Kaelix's crimson runes were multiplying through cannibalization. Each time they died, they were reborn—slightly stronger, slightly wilder.
His runes weren't just words.
They were rebellion given shape.
And they would not stop.
They collided again.
Kaelix swung his limp bleeding arm with a wild arc of flame, and the entity caught it mid-air, its body twisting unnaturally as it countered with a glowing elbow to Kaelix's gut.
Bones splintered under the impact. Kaelix didn't stop—he ducked low and brought a surge of flame up with his knee, charring the entity's side.
The attack worked.
So he tried again. Same motion. Same angle.
This time, the entity predicted it and shattered his kneecap.
He collapsed to one leg with a pained hiss as flame sputtered out of the joint.
"Dammit... not again—"
Another attack from above. Kaelix threw up a wall of crimson flame—too slow. The entity's blow shattered blew threw the flames and cratered him back into the ground.
He hit the dirt hard, jaw fractured further, arm dislocated, vision spiraling in red. The only thing keeping him moving was the burning ache in his chest. That heart—not of flesh, but flame—still pulsed. Still leaked.
His runes kept fighting.
They weren't coordinated. They weren't perfect. They collided with both the World's static blue and the Advent's chaotic multicolored ones in a clumsy dance of attrition.
For every rune that struck true, five more were wasted. He didn't know how to guide them properly—not yet.
But what they lacked in finesse, they made up for in relentlessness.
The World's runes pushed forward like a law given form. Cold, mechanical. They cut through Kaelix's runes cleanly—but some of those cuts began to slow. Over time, the crimson grew used to the resistance. They learned.
So did Kaelix.
But slowly.
Every time he tried to replicate a parry or redirect he'd seen before, he was a beat too late. A fraction too sloppy. And every miss earned him a price in blood and fire.
"I'm not built for this," Kaelix thought grimly, wiping a smear of blood from one ruined eye.
"I wasn't chosen. I wasn't trained. I wasn't even meant to exist like this."
Another bone cracked as the entity landed behind him and sent a kick through his ribs.
"But I'm still here."
He twisted on reflex and grabbed the entity's leg as it passed. The flames in his hand surged—clumsily, unevenly—but they scorched through.
The entity hissed and jerked back. Kaelix stumbled forward, using the motion to catch its torso with a sweeping flame-fueled shoulder bash.
The entity recovered fast, but even it was beginning to show signs of wear. Its form flickered. Cracks glitched along its limbs. Its colors distorted—its entire form a canvas of instability.
Kaelix bled from everywhere. His jaw was a memory. His limbs dangled only through will and raw sinew woven by runes and flame.
And still he stood.
This was how he learned. Not because he was quick or gifted—but because pain taught fast and failure taught permanently.
High above, the Advent's sky began to shift.
The entity paused mid-strike.
It had felt something.
Far beyond the battleground, brushing against the outer reaches of the Advent's boundary, the presence of foreign minds became undeniable. The protectors of this realm.
The entity's bloodless heart seized.
They were planning to enter.
Not inside the Advent yet—but near enough. Their approach was deliberate. Measured. Some came with caution. One came with bloodlust. Another... something else. An unknown.
It couldn't fight all of them. Not at once. Not while also fighting this anomaly.
Even if they attacked both of them—Kaelix and itself—the outcome was uncertain.
Too uncertain.
And after everything that happened since its birth...
... it despised uncertainty.
It looked at Kaelix again, now crouched low, one hand braced on the ground as blood steamed off his body like vapor.
He was weak. Broken. Mortal.
But he would not die.
And it couldn't afford to gamble.
The entity had made up its mind.
It would make a sacrifice.
The blow came faster than Kaelix could see.
A punch. Raw and charged with enough power to crater the entire stage. It struck him square in the chest and blasted him deep into the scorched ground.
Kaelix's form ricocheted through cracked stone and ruined metal—his body skipping like a pebble across molten ground before slamming into the base of a blackened spire.
His mind reeled. His ears rang with static.
He pulled himself out of the rubble, ribs shifting like liquid under his charred skin.
Then he saw it.
The runes were moving.
The Advent's glitching, multicolored runes. The World's cold, system-blue runes. They weren't fighting anymore. They were converging.
A whirlpool of unstable glyphs and absolute rules spiraled toward the entity.
Kaelix blinked once, eyes wide.
"No... It's absorbing them."
The entity opened itself to the ruin.
Advent's runes coiled into it, saturating its form with chaos. Its limbs pulsed and grew, twitching between shapes as instability merged into adaptability.
Then came the World's runes.
The static blue symbols slammed into the entity like barbed wire. It spasmed—convulsed—parts of it screamed as order tried to rewrite it. Pieces were torn away.
But power bloomed regardless.
It hurt—but it worked.
The entity's form distorted. Larger. Broader. Arms too long, joints bent in reverse. A new frame, forged in pain, pulled from both ends of reality.
Kaelix stared.
"It's going to widen the gap. Enough to kill me."
The air bent around it now. Power radiated like a hurricane of fractured logic. The earth cracked beneath the gravity of its transformation.
And the runes—they just kept coming.
Kaelix clenched his fists.
He couldn't allow this.
He couldn't stand. Not really. His right leg was long gone. His ribs had long since turned to slush. But his runes still burned.
So he willed them to obey.
His ligaments, flaming and frayed, twisted around one another as he knit himself together—not with flesh, but with defiance. He didn't need pristine form. He needed motion.
He pushed off with everything he had left.
A single, sky-rending leap.
You want to pull off some last second bullshit? he thought. Not in this lifetime.
Kaelix raced like a crimson comet—his body battered, his will screaming louder than his broken bones. The entity was no longer humanoid, not even remotely.
It had become a malformed colossus of twitching limbs and fractal geometry, eyes blooming where none should be, mouths opening without sound, leaking smoke and letters.
But Kaelix didn't care.
He had to stop it.
He hit its center with the full force of his momentum—shoulder-first, one last desperate plummet aimed to disrupt the convergence of runes spiraling into its core.
The impact... failed.
He bounced off with a thunderous shockwave. His only remaining arm was now shattered at the elbow. He crashed down in a spiral of flame and flesh, rolling through rubble and ash.
The entity didn't flinch.
Instead—it completely changed.