The world twisted into madness.
The rift consud them all.
The reason Elius kept asking him to join his party was to bring him here, where he wouldn’t be watched by his father, Radiant Man.
Now, that they all t the condition, here they co!
Suddenly, a thunderous roar echoed through the hollow fabric of reality as Keith, Fraven, Shania, and Zhark were dragged into a space that bent not only ti but logic itself.
They didn’t fall. They didn’t fly.
They spiraled.
A kaleidoscope tunnel erupted around them—fractals of color splitting and collapsing like endless shards of stained glass, forming and shattering in eternally recursive patterns.
The tunnel bled geotry.
Shapes ca alive, symbols spoke, and sowhere within the maddening vortex, the laws of physics screeched and twisted into an unfamiliar tongue.
Ti seed to stutter forward, then backward, then sideways.
Zhark gritted his teeth, clutching his arms as arcs of lightning spurred out from his body uncontrollably. "Damn it... this place... it’s trying to unmake my spirit!"
Fraven twisted beside him in the shifting void, hands clamped on his head as waves of invisible force smashed into him from all sides. "The pressure! It’s like a black hole made of thoughts! My mind—!"
Shania’s body flickered, her form breaking into fragnts and reforming in milliseconds. "It’s not real! It’s just a test of perception! Hold onto your sense of self!"
Keith remained eerily silent.
He drifted like a stone in still water, unshaken, his expression distant, unreadable. The blood on his arm had long dried, but the wound still whispered at him. For the first ti in his life, he was entering a battlefield not with certainty, but with a sliver of doubt.
Then—sudden stillness.
The kaleidoscope folded into itself.
They dropped.
Boom!
They landed on solid ground, a platform made of glowing hexagonal tiles suspended in an endless sky.
Floating islands spiraled overhead.
Above them, an aurora of golden light curved like serpents dancing across a darkened heaven.
Elius stood at the far end, his coat fluttering in the windless void.
The mont their feet hit the ground, they didn’t wait.
Fraven struck first.
A storm of jagged debris and glass shards launched through the air as he clenched his fist, telekinetically hurling hundreds of floating rocks into a spiraling death spiral.
Elius moved like water.
He leaned, twisted, glided between the barrage, never halting, never flinching. Not a single shard touched him.
Zhark unleashed a horizontal bolt of lightning—CRACK!—but the thunderbolt hit only a floating illusion of Elius, who blinked out an instant before impact.
Shania clicked her fingers, and her illusion magic flooded the battlefield. For Elius, everything warped: Keith’s face took on Fraven’s expression, Zhark now wore Shania’s uniform, and they all began moving in perfectly mirrored sequences.
A dozen false attacks ca at once.
Each illusion carried weight—distorting his perception of space and intent.
But still, he danced.
He dipped under Keith’s sweeping punch—no, that was Zhark?
He sidestepped a stabbing blade—but wasn’t that Fraven’s construct?
For the first ti, Elius narrowed his eyes.
And then Keith got close.
No illusions. No distance. Just a clean, brutal straight punch.
Thwack!
Elius’s arm ca up just in ti, absorbing the blow. But the force sent him skidding back five ters across the tiles.
Keith landed, eyes sharp. "Got you."
Elius chuckled softly, brushing dust from his shoulder.
"You’re all pissing off."
Suddenly, the air cracked.
A golden shimr appeared beside him—and with a burst of smoke and light, his clone erged.
Sa calm smile.
Sa uniform.
But this one flexed its hand—and from it sprouted a monstrous draconic arm, red-scaled, glowing with runes, the fingers sharpened into black claws that radiated raw Qi like a heartbeat.
"Dragon Claw," Elius muttered.
The clone launched forward like a cannonball.
Fraven’s eyes widened—he raised a telekinetic shield just in ti, but the claw tore through it like paper, slicing across his ribs and hurling him back into the air with a strangled cry.
Zhark shot lightning after lightning, the air boiling with plasma, but the clone spiraled through the electric storm, unaffected, and raised its arm to the sky.
Dozens of swords erged behind it—glowing, floating, spinning.
And then they rained down.
Shania scread as the ground burst around her, tiles shattering like glass under the hail of Qi-imbued blades. She summoned an illusion do around her, but the blades were real—and they pierced through falsehood.
One scratched her thigh. Another nearly clipped her shoulder.
Zhark leapt to her defense, summoning a lightning shield that cracked with power, shielding both of them montarily from the deadly rain.
anwhile, Keith engaged the real Elius again, fists blazing, strikes fast and relentless.
But Elius wasn’t attacking.
He was evading.
Slipping, weaving, flowing around each blow with supernatural grace.
His eyes were closed.
And then... he whispered:
"I don’t need sight. I see your spirit."
In the realm between realms, normal senses ant nothing. But Elius could feel it—the unique ripple of a soul’s presence. Their Qi signatures. Their intentions.
He wasn’t fighting illusions anymore.
He was fighting truths.
Fraven hurled a slab of compressed air like a guillotine, but Elius sidestepped, twisting his body unnaturally as if he were liquid.
Zhark scread, lightning bursting from his chest like wings, turning the very sky blue—but Elius’s clone absorbed it with the dragon arm, storing the lightning in its veins.
Shania tried again—projecting clones of Keith, illusions of exploding swords, illusions of self-destruction.
Elius didn’t even look at her.
He raised a finger.
A single sword spun in the air, then darted straight at her heart.
She shrieked and ducked—but it wasn’t real.
That had been the illusion.
And behind her, the real sword was already moving.
Zhark shouted a warning.
Keith dashed in, parrying the sword just in ti with an arm sheathed in Solarion aura.
His eyes narrowed. "He’s adapting."
Elius’s draconic clone now crouched on one knee, drawing Qi from the void itself.
The four regrouped, battered and panting.
They were loud, desperate, trying to mask their true positioning with noise and banter.
"Go left!" Fraven shouted, but he moved right.
"Flank him now!" Zhark yelled, but he stayed put.
"Switch! Switch now!" Shania scread, casting illusions to confuse even sound direction.
But Elius no longer cared for their voice tricks.
He had tuned into sothing deeper—their souls.
He closed his eyes once more.
The world slowed.
Each beat of their heart echoed in his mind.
Each flicker of thought shimred through the air like ripples on a pond.
He raised his hand.
His sword spun again. His clone’s claws extended. The next blow would—
BOOM.
Without warning, the ground beneath all of them shattered.
They plumted.
The sky vanished.
The infinite floating platforms were gone.
And suddenly, they landed with a heavy thud on tallic tiles.
Lights buzzed overhead.
Strange machines lined the walls.
White steel. Sterile air.
Flickering holograms displayed charts, DNA spirals, spirit energy graphs, and unfamiliar technologies.
They were in a laboratory.
Elius stood first, brushing off his coat.
The others groaned, pulling themselves up one by one.
The battle paused.
Only for a breath.
Because now, the ga had changed.
Elius cracked his knuckles with a sound like brittle bones snapping in the dead of winter.
The echo of the motion reverberated through the steel-plated laboratory chamber like a warning, sharp and deliberate.
Then he tilted his neck to the side, one vertebra at a ti, each pop more mocking than the last, before finally stretching his arms forward like a predator rousing from sleep.
His voice was low, laced with simring derision.
"So, Zhark..." Elius’s eyes flickered toward the brooding figure whose shoulders still sparked with residual static. "Where did all that arrogance go?"
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