Northern knew it was not proper for him to be punched a second ti. He knew he could really die from it. But at the sa ti, what could he do about it?
If an Origin wanted to punch him, then the world wanted him to be punched. His will was not strong enough to override the will of the world, so he was screwed.
’I’m going to die...’
Kryos’ hand flew forward without the concept of speed, and ti fractured the mont Kryos’s knuckles connected.
Northern felt the impact before it happened—a sensation that defied causality itself. This ti, his body registered the blow three heartbeats ahead of contact, every nerve screaming in anticipation of destruction that was simultaneously inevitable and impossible to comprehend.
When the fist finally t his chest, reality simply... gave up trying to make sense of what was occurring.
The punch didn’t land like a physical strike. It arrived like the concept of violence itself, distilled into a single point of contact that rewrote the fundantal laws governing Northern’s existence. The force didn’t travel through his body—it beca his body, every atom suddenly rembering what it felt like to be the epicenter of a cosmic collision.
Northern’s ribcage didn’t simply break. The bones forgot how to be solid, their crystalline structure unraveling at the molecular level before reforming into patterns that hurt to exist within. His sternum collapsed inward, then outward, then seed to occupy multiple positions at once, each iteration more wrong than the last. The pain was architectural—not just felt, but built into his very being, a cathedral of agony constructed from his own reford anatomy.
But the physical damage was rely the opening movent of a symphony of destruction.
The Origin’s power flowed through the point of impact like liquid madness, spreading through Northern’s nervous system with purposeful malice. His vision shattered into kaleidoscopic fragnts, each shard showing him a different angle of his own destruction. In one fragnt, he saw himself being punched through seventeen different dinsions. In another, he watched his own soul being thodically unraveled like a tapestry pulled apart thread by thread.
His hearing split into layers—the sound of his own bones breaking played at frequencies that shouldn’t exist, harmonizing with the wet percussion of organs rearranging themselves and the crystalline chiming of his ice powers being systematically corrupted.
Beneath it all, he could hear Kryos counting, each number corresponding to another fundantal aspect of his being that was being dismantled and rebuilt wrong.
"One."
Kryos whispered, and Northern’s sense of up and down inverted.
"Two."
His mories of childhood winters beca searing heat.
"Three."
His understanding of his own na beca a question rather than a certainty.
The force carried him backward—or perhaps forward, or perhaps through directions that didn’t have nas—across the maddened landscape that now seed to cheer his destruction rather than prevent it.
The ice formations he passed through didn’t shatter from his passage. Instead, they reached out with crystalline fingers to caress his broken form, each touch adding new layers of wrongness to his already corrupted state.
He struck one mountain with enough force to level a city, but instead of demolishing the peak, his body sohow passed through it while being pulverized against it at the sa ti.
The contradiction didn’t resolve—it simply existed, another impossible truth added to the growing collection of realities that his mind was failing to process.
The second mountain caught him differently, wrapping around his form like a closing fist before spitting him out the other side. But not before every ice crystal within had whispered a small madness directly into his bloodstream. His veins began to glow with a sickly light as Kryos’s influence spread through his circulatory system, each heartbeat pumping corruption deeper into his core.
By the third impact, Northern realized he wasn’t just being physically destroyed—he was being rewritten.
The Origin’s power wasn’t content to simply break him. It was editing the very concept of what Northern was, line by line, until the finished product would be sothing that rembered being him but had never actually existed.
His ice talents, which he had praised as one of his greatest strengths given the way he could control them, beca his greatest vulnerability as Kryos’s madness flowed through the frozen constructs he had created.
The fourth mountain received him like a lover, embracing his broken form and crooning softly as it absorbed the chaotic energies radiating from his body. The ice began to change, taking on the sa sickly crimson glow that had infected the rest of the landscape. But sohow worse—because this was his ice, his power, being turned against not just his body but his very identity as a wielder of winter’s might.
When he finally ca to rest—if ’rest’ was the right term for the strange suspension he found himself in—Northern was no longer entirely sure which parts of his body belonged to him and which had been borrowed from the maddened landscape around him. His left arm seed to be made of the sa corrupted ice that had once been his fortress, while his right leg appeared to exist in a state of constant phase transition between solid and liquid and sothing that defied classification entirely.
The pain was no longer just physical. It had evolved into sothing taphysical, a wrongness that extended beyond his body into the very idea of him. He could feel parts of his personality dissolving, mories becoming uncertain, convictions wavering like heat mirages. The punch hadn’t just damaged his body—it had introduced chaos into the ordered narrative of his existence.
Through vision that kept fragnting and reforming, he saw Kryos approaching with the leisurely pace of soone who had all the ti in the universe.
The Origin’s form seed to shift and blur, sotis appearing as the man who had stood before him monts ago, sotis as a towering colossus of living shadow, sotis as sothing that hurt to look at directly and left afterimages burned into Northern’s retinas.
"That... was approximately point-zero-zero-one percent of my actual strength. I thought you should know, so you can properly contextualize what just happened to you."
Northern tried to speak, to respond, to assert so asure of defiance, but discovered that his voice had beco a symphony of breaking glass and weeping ice. When he finally managed to force words through his reconstructed throat, they ca out as whispers in languages he didn’t recognize, carrying anings that made his own ears bleed to hear.
Both punches had lasted less than a second in real ti, but Northern understood with crystal clarity that he would be feeling their effects for the rest of his existence—however long or short that might now be.
Because this was what it ant to be struck by an Origin: not just to be hurt, but to have the very concept of not being hurt edited out of your personal reality.
And Kryos was just getting started.
’...ah, crap.’
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