The air screamed as Noctura tore through it. At Mach 3, the world below was a meaningless blur of light and shadow, but to her, it was a symphony. Her Netherblight senses didn't just perceive speed; they tasted the friction, felt the displacement of air currents, and saw the invisible flows of energy connecting all things. She was a living breach in reality, a black-and-violet comet descending upon a battlefield of gods and men.

  Her focus, however, was on a single, aberrant note in the symphony of chaos.

  An aura.

  It was an immense pressure, a weight on the fabric of existence, but it wasn't the raw, explosive energy of a warrior or the cold, abyssal pull of a void entity. This was something else entirely. Something… holy and rotten in the same breath. It felt ancient, Biblical in its scope—the palpable, gnawing jealousy of a forgotten cherub cast out of heaven, forced to gaze upon a creation it could never be a part of. It was the envy of silence for sound, of darkness for light, a fundamental, cosmic resentment given form.

  A slow, predatory smirk stretched across Noctura’s lips, her violet-streaked hair whipping around her like living shadows.

  “Ah,” she purred to the tortured air. “So it’s true. The Archbishops really are powered by the Aetheris now. A direct line to the divine mainframe.” Her smile widened, a flash of white in the gloom. “Kinda cool, can’t lie.”

  Her expression hardened, the playful curiosity freezing into a mask of lethal intent.

  “Buuut… you gotta die now.”

  Her hand, elegant and pale, rose into the slipstream. With a thought, shadows bled from the air itself, twisting and solidifying into the impossible form of Oblivion’s Requiem, its void-metal blade hungry for reality itself.

  Her eyes narrowed, piercing through the miles of urban devastation. She saw them. Hikari and Nami, cornered. And before them, a figure robed in celestial white—Lysandra, the Archbishop of Envy, poised to strike, her very presence making the world curdle.

  Noctura didn't hesitate. She gripped the scythe’s handle with both hands, raising it high above her head as she angled her body into a terminal velocity dive. The world became a tunnel of screaming wind and violet light.

  Just as Lysandra lunged, her hands wreathed in a light that promised blissful annihilation, Noctura arrived.

  She didn't announce herself. She was simply… there. A silent, vertical slash of absolute darkness.

  The scythe’s blade didn’t just cut flesh. It severed the concept of connection. For a single, horrifying microsecond, the upper and lower halves of Lysandra’s body existed in two separate, non-communicating realities. There was no gore. No spray of blood. Just a perfect, clean line of nothingness drawn across her waist. Then, causality violently reasserted itself.

  The Archbishop’s body came apart. Her torso, her expression frozen in a mask of divine aggression, slid sideways off her legs, tumbling to the ground with a wet, heavy thud. An impossible fountain of iridescent, golden blood erupted from the two bisected halves, painting the cracked pavement in holy ichor.

  Noctura’s descent didn't end. She landed, her feet hitting the asphalt with a force that sent a spiderweb of cracks radiating outward. She skidded to a halt directly in front of Hikari and Nami, the sudden, violent deceleration displacing a hurricane-force wave of wind and kinetic energy.

  The wall of air hit like a physical blow. But before it could touch them, a flash of pure, instinctual power flared from Hikari. A translucent shield of cyan psychic energy materialized without her conscious command, solidifying the air into a crystalline barrier that absorbed the full force of the gale. The psychic construct shimmered, holding firm for a second before dissolving into motes of cyan light.

  Hikari stared at her own hands, her heart hammering. The shield had been a reflex, an extension of her will to survive that she didn't even know she possessed. The battles with Gyo, with the sect, with every nightmare this city had thrown at her—they hadn’t just been trials to endure. They had been a forge, and her Aura was the blade being tempered.

  “What the hell!?” she yelled, her voice a mixture of shock and aggression as she spun to face the newcomer. “Who are you!?”

  Nami, already on her feet, brushed dust from her silver-streaked clothes with a practiced nonchalance that defied the carnage around them. Her gaze on the Netherblight was cool and appraising. “Hayashi. Didn’t expect you to show up. But then again, why are you here?”

  Noctura rested the massive blade of her scythe on her shoulder, leaning against it with a casual, hip-shot pose. “Ohh, Nami baby,” she cooed, her voice a delightful, chaotic purr. “Not happy to see me? That hurts.” She gestured vaguely at the sky with her free hand. “I sensed the metric ton of weird energy in the area and decided to investigate. Seems my instincts were spot on, because you’ve got not one, but *two* different flavors of apocalyptic cult trying to kill you. It’s a party!”

  “Can someone please explain who this is!” Hikari’s voice was ragged with desperation, her eyes darting between Nami, the gothic Lolita with the reality-cleaving scythe, and the bisected, bleeding halves of the divine being on the ground.

  Nami clicked her tongue, muttering under her breath with venomous clarity, “I fucking hate newbies.” With a long, theatrical sigh, she turned to Hikari. “This is Junko Hayashi. Combat alias: Noctura.” She jerked her head toward the smirking girl. “She’s a Netherblight. Sometimes, when she’s bored and the collateral damage seems entertaining enough, she helps out.”

  Hikari’s brow furrowed. “The hell is a ‘Netherblight’?”

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  Before the question could be answered, a sound filled the air—a loud, wet, tearing SWOOSH.

  They all whirled around.

  Lysandra’sbisected body was dissolving. The two halves melted not into flesh and blood, but into pools of writhing, sentient shadow. The golden ichor turned black and coiled back into the masses, which then churned and swirled into a howling typhoon of pure darkness.

  A voice, layered and echoing, as if spoken by a thousand envious souls at once, slithered from the heart of the vortex.

  *“Oh, the way you talk to each other… the casual familiarity… the way you all seem so connected, despite your clashing personalities… and you…”* The voice focused, its chilling resonance zeroing in on Nami. *“…the way the silver-haired girl still explains things to the new one, even with all the weariness in her soul… all that shared history… that trust…”*

  The typhoon of shadow collapsed inward, imploding with a silent flash.

  And there she stood. Whole. Perfect. Unmarred. Her white robes were pristine, her golden eyes burning with a cold, possessive fire.

  “How I envy it.”

  She raised a hand, her palm open to the dark sky. The shadows that had reformed her pooled at her feet once more. Then, they kicked up, lashing out not as liquid darkness, but as solid, grasping tendrils of solidified spite. Each one was a tangible manifestation of jealousy, a grasping hand of resentment.

  The tendrils struck not to kill, but to separate. They wrapped around each of the three girls—Hikari, Nami, and Noctura—and with the convulsive, petulant force of a god throwing a tantrum, flung them in three different directions, sending them crashing into the skeletal remains of the surrounding buildings.

  Dust and shattered concrete rained from the sky as Hikari clawed her way out of the wreckage. The psychic shield she’d instinctively thrown up had absorbed the worst of the impact, but not the whiplash of kinetic force that had slammed through her bones. Her body screamed in protest. Her ribs felt like a cage of fractured glass, each breath a fresh wave of agony. A searing headache pulsed behind her eyes, a white-hot throb that made the ruined world shimmer and distort.

  She spat, and a thick glob of blood, dark and viscous, splattered against a piece of twisted rebar.

  She clutched her chest, her knuckles white. Another trickle of crimson, this one warmer, ran from the corner of her eye, tracing a path down her cheek like a single, bloody tear.

  “Fuck!” she rasped, the word tearing at her throat. “Is this… is this what Lila was talking about?” The memory of her friend’s quiet warning, the unspoken fear in her eyes, echoed in her mind. Your Aura… it’s a fire. It’ll keep you warm, but it’ll also burn you alive.

  Then it started.

  The familiar, terrible agony that had been her shadow since the fight with Gyo. It wasn’t just pain. It was deconstruction. It began as a sharp, cellular itch deep within her marrow, a feeling like every nerve ending was being systematically peeled away from muscle and bone.

  A choked gasp escaped her lips, cut short as her body seized.

  “AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!”

  The scream wasn't just sound; it was a physical force, a desperate, animalistic howl torn from a place beyond reason. Her vision exploded into a universe of white static. Her eyes felt like they were trying to tear themselves out of their sockets, to escape the impossible pressure building behind them. It felt as if a thousand red-hot needles were being driven into every pore, every cell, every molecule of her being at once. Her body convulsed on the ground, a grotesque marionette animated by strings of pure agony.

  Her back arched, her spine threatening to snap. Her teeth ground together with a sound like stone pulverizing stone. She could feel her own flesh warring with itself—healing and tearing, mending and breaking, all in the same horrifying instant. The cyan light of her Aura flashed erratically, no longer a protective shield but a cage of torment, each pulse sending a fresh wave of exquisite, unimaginable pain through her system.

  “Ahhh… ahhhgghhh…” Her screams devolved into choked, guttural sobs, her mind fracturing under the onslaught.

  And then, as quickly as it had begun, it stopped.

  The white-hot torment vanished, leaving only a profound, echoing emptiness. The pressure behind her eyes receded. The thousands of needles withdrew. She lay on the broken ground, trembling, her breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps. The blood from her eyes was gone. The searing pain in her ribs had faded to a dull, phantom ache. She was… whole again. Unscarred. Unbroken.

  And it was the most terrifying thing she had ever experienced.

  “Ahh… fuck…” she whispered to the indifferent, ash-filled sky. “I want this shit to end.”

  A surge of pure, violent adrenaline, born of terror and rage, flooded her system. A storm of cyan energy, chaotic and untamed, erupted around her, swirling like a miniature hurricane. She was ready to tear the city apart, to find Lysandra, to end this, to end something.

  But before she could move, a shadow fell over her.

  Noctura landed with impossible silence, her void-metal scythe resting on her shoulder. Her mismatched eyes—one violet, one abyssal black—regarded Hikari with an expression that was unnervingly ancient and deeply weary. Her voice, when she spoke, was laced with an authority that brooked no argument.

  “No.”

  The word was a command. A law.

  “Your fight isn’t here. Go find the other Apostle. The pink-haired one. Go fight alongside her.” Noctura’s gaze shifted to the horizon, where the five impossible pillars were beginning to bleed their power into the sky, warping reality with their very presence. “It’ll be needed when Blare finally shows her one-eyed face around here. Your power… it resonates with hers in a way that is… significant. You are an anchor. She is a storm. Go be her calm.”

  The mention of Lila’s name was a bucket of ice water to Hikari’s raging soul. The chaotic, swirling storm of her Aura faltered. The image of Lila’s smile, of her hand in hers, of the feather-light kiss on her forehead, cut through the red haze of her rage.

  Is she safe? Is she fighting alone? What if…

  Hikari shook her head, forcing the thought away before it could take root. She couldn’t afford to think like that. Not now.

  “Whatever,” she snarled, the leftover anger clinging to her voice like static. “I’m just sick of this supernatural shit already.”

  She pushed herself to her feet, her body still trembling with the aftershocks of her gruesome regeneration. With a single, explosive exertion of will, she wrapped her telekinesis around her own body and launched herself into the air. She didn’t soar. She tore through the sky, a cyan missile ignoring every obstacle in her path.

  She punched through the wall of the building she’d been thrown into, then through the next, and the next, carving a straight, brutal line of destruction through the ruined cityscape. She wasn’t flying. She was a projectile, propelled by a desperate, all-consuming need to get back to the only thing in this shattered world that still felt real.

  The only thing that still felt like home.

  To be continued

  Wraithbound is an original series by Figures, The Architect. ? 2025 Veilbound Productions. All rights reserved.