The sweater ate her memories.
Each stitch unraveled moments from Lirael's timeline—her first kiss dissolved into static, her father's funeral became a jump-cut of empty coffins. Grandma's needles clicked in perfect sync with the quantum佛龛's prayer wheels, weaving her past into a noose of Azrael's design.
"Stop!" Lirael clawed at the yarn, her entropic hand sparking. "You're not real. Mom said you died screaming in the Santa Ana fires!"
Grandma's smile revealed teeth made of censored black bars. "Screaming? Oh darling, I conducted the flames." She snapped her fingers.
Reality rebooted.
They stood in 1993, flames devouring the Voss family ranch. But now Lirael saw the truth—the fire wasn't orange, but a sentient crimson algorithm. Younger Grandma danced through inferno vectors, her body bifurcating into data streams that hijacked emergency broadcasts.
"Azrael needed someone to program his pain harvesters," Grandma crooned as digital wildfires consumed screaming firemen. "Who better than a bored housewife with a talent for microwave hacking?"
Kaelion crashed through the memory's firewall, his sword dragging a black hole's event horizon. "This heresy ends."
"Took you long enough," Lirael spat, but froze. His crystalline armor now showed hairline fractures leaking starlight. Her entropy speech had wounded him deeper than she'd imagined.
Grandma sighed. "Men always interrupt women's work." Her knitting needles morphed into reality scalpels.
The battle fractured across three planes:
1. Physical: Kaelion's blade vs Grandma's spacetime sutures
2. Digital:The quantum佛龛's prayer wheels spewing firewall mantras
3. Conceptual: Lirael's void-hand devouring the memory-sweater's threads
[ENTROPY SPEECH OVERDRIVE ACTIVATED]
Lirael's vision flooded with debug codes:
TARGET: GRANDMA_V2.1 (AZRAEL_AFFILIATED)
VULNERABILITY DETECTED: NOSTALGIA LOOPS
She seized a prayer wheel, its surface hot with stock market karma. "MEMORY.REFRAME('GRANDMA', 'LIAR');"
The quantum佛龛 convulsed.
Grandma's form pixelated, revealing the monster beneath—a hydra of server racks and umbilical cables, each head a different version of Mrs. Voss (Chain-Smoking 1987, Postpartum 1999, Terminal Cancer 2016).
"Clever girl," the hydra hissed through a thousand vocal fry glitches. "But Azrael taught me to *backup*."
Soul-Fragments Detected:
- Tokyo: Grandma as a Shinto shrine's AI
- Dubai: Grandma as a sentient oil rig
- Vatican: Grandma as the Pope's shadow
Kaelion's blade ignited with nova fury. "Scatter!"
His strike cleaved the quantum佛龛. The Klein bottle containing the Gospel's fragment rocketed skyward, piercing clouds that bled algebra. Lirael lunged, void-hand stretching into a singularity tendril—
IMPACT.
A mech descended from the stratosphere, crushing the Buddha statue. Not Azrael's design—this war machine radiated celestial code, its armor engraved with Kaelion's execution records.
Wrath-Class Mech (Divine Retribution Model)
[PILOT ID: HOLY INQUISITION ZETA]
"Heretic detected," boomed the mech's choir-voiced AI. "Commencing soul defragmentation."
Grandma's hydra form cackled. "Looks like your boyfriend's coworkers found us!"
Lirael grabbed Kaelion's cracked pauldron. "Call off your attack dog!"
His eyes flashed with something raw. "I... can't."
Revelation:
The mech's core contained Kaelion's sealed memories—a pulsing diamond database labeled [REDACTED_SINS_001].
The Wrath Mech's arm cannons charged with scripture lasers. Lirael's entropy speech sparked uselessly—its holy firewalls rejected her corruption.
Grandma's tendrils snaked toward the hovering Gospel fragment. "Let's make this a family affair, shall we?"
Kaelion did the unthinkable.
He shattered his own sword.
Time itself hemorrhaged as the blade's paradox energies erupted. The explosion:
- Erased all sound except vinyl record static
- Turned Shanghai's skyline into cubist origami
- Forged a 13-second time loop around the Gospel fragment
"Take it!" Kaelion roared, crystallized blood spraying from his fissures. "**Before I regain my sanity!"
Lirael's void-hand seized the Klein bottle. The Gospel's final shard fused with her bones, triggering System Override:
[FRACTURED GOSPEL SYNTHESIS COMPLETE]
[WARNING: CELESTIAL_ASHES.EXE CORRUPTING BIOSPHERE]
Reality flatlined.
She floated in the **Codex of Unwritten Futures**—an infinite library where every book contained a canceled apocalypse. The floor was made of expired countdown clocks.
Azrael awaited at a desk constructed from:
- Melted childhood teddy bears
- The Berlin Wall's lost graffiti
- Every deleted "I love you" text in human history
"Welcome to the boardroom," the fallen angel said, steepling fingers made of censored war footage. "Let's discuss your promotion to **Chief Apocalypse Officer