Chapter 26: End of the First Act

  The void had no floor, yet it still felt like a stage.

  Katherine held her stance in space like a decorative reference point, so the audience would know where to look. On the outside, she showed nothing: back straight, pistols lowered, the purple membrane still. On the inside, something had cracked. Not her will. Her frame of reference.

  The hammer remained in her mind like a hot splinter. Not because of its shape, but because of what it exuded. An absurd amount of energy—brutal, disproportionate. Hard to measure with precision in that environment, but the order of magnitude was clear: galaxies. Several. As if Dinamo had compressed an astronomical disaster into an object he could move with one hand and swing like a toy.

  Katherine felt a cold edge crawl up her spine.

  Not fear as panic. Fear as diagnosis.

  That wasn’t “more power.” That was a different league. A resource that—if it was real—made years of calculation, plans, and margins of error obsolete.

  And he had brought it out casually. With humor.

  “Since when?” The question hit her harder than any impact. Dinamo didn’t improvise that kind of weapon. It wasn’t golden gas in a pretty shape. It wasn’t a theatrical trick. It was something stable. Stored. Managed.

  Accumulated.

  She couldn’t understand it. Not from a technical standpoint, but from a strategic one. When did he gather that much? Where did he hide it? How did he keep that reserve without CORE, without the systems, without the very fabric of reality screaming?

  Her mind assembled two possibilities, and both were an insult.

  Either he had always had it, and everything before—every limit, every “balance,” every concession—had been a carefully performed lie so humanity would keep playing.

  Or he had obtained it later, in silence, somewhere dead where neither her AIs nor her calculations could look, and she hadn’t even known which variable had changed.

  And the worst part was the simplest: she hadn’t predicted it. Not because she lacked intelligence. Because it was impossible to predict what Dinamo chose not to show.

  She tried to return to the familiar: lists, routes, percentages, resources. Her mind searched for anchors. It didn’t work. The hammer stayed there, nailed into her thoughts, reminding her that even her millennia-long war had dark zones—and Dinamo had just turned on a flashlight fueled by, well, the size of galaxies.

  In front of them, Dinamo floated in calm, as if he weren’t holding an end of an era in his hand. The universe was his hallway. They were his targets.

  Baek took a step forward.

  He didn’t announce it. He didn’t ask permission. He simply moved ahead, breaking the formation Katherine had ordered them to keep.

  He was supposed to be among the last. Not out of cowardice—out of efficiency. His sword was a key. A tool they couldn’t afford to lose early. At the very least they had to try to keep him alive a little longer.

  But Baek carried honor like an anchor. And from the start of this whole pandemonium to the end of it, he had felt his performance wasn’t enough. He had cut, yes. He had opened paths, yes. But every time Dinamo changed the rules, Baek fell half a step behind. Always in the back.

  His breathing was even. His gaze, fixed.

  “I won’t end up like my father.”

  He wanted to correct his shortcomings in the simplest way he knew: step forward, force the enemy to look at him, buy even an instant more for the others.

  Katherine opened her mouth to stop him.

  She didn’t make it.

  The unexpected didn’t come from Dinamo.

  It came from Irina.

  Irina turned toward Yehiel without asking the world for context, without asking anyone for permission. She grabbed him by the neck of his tunic with a firm hand—firmer than he expected from someone who always spoke softly—and kissed him.

  It wasn’t a shy kiss. It was a decided kiss, hot, as if there weren’t seconds left to negotiate.

  At a distance, the commentator let out an exaggerated “Ooooh!” multiplied by the artificial echo of the broadcast. Then another. And another. As if he wanted to turn panic into gossip.

  Yehiel went rigid, eyes wide open, not knowing what to do with his body or his pride.

  When Irina pulled away, he barely managed to recover air.

  —What…?—his voice came out broken, more “human” than a messenger could afford—. Miss Irina, I…

  Irina didn’t give him room to become “the messenger” again.

  —Since I met you I’ve felt strange—she said, staring at him, no smile—. I don’t know if it’s love. I don’t know if I love you. I guess it’s too soon for that. But I don’t want my last moment to be pure fear.

  She squeezed his hands for a moment before letting go.

  —I don’t want to die without having lived, not now.

  She bit her lip, as if she hated saying something so simple in a place so absurd. As if her last words sounded like nothing but emptiness.

  —I want it to be a kiss. So, would you be so kind as to meet the demands of this fool?

  Yehiel swallowed. His brain, trained to question, searched for a logical explanation. It found none that mattered.

  All he could do was nod, slowly, as if accepting that truth was another form of obedience. They shared another passionate kiss.

  The air snapped tight again.

  Because the impact was coming all the same.

  It wasn’t going to forgive them just because they got romantic.

  Everyone took positions.

  And, in a decision that would have been unthinkable in any other war, Yehiel’s companions moved ahead before the rest.

  They didn’t wait for an order. They didn’t wait for permission. The goats and sheep moved with silent coordination, as if the flock had decided that was their job: put their bodies first.

  No one seemed to want to follow Katherine’s orders.

  Not out of rebellion. Out of instinct. Everyone seemed to understand that if they were going to die, it would be on their terms. At least they could choose the order.

  Yehiel took a step, wanting to go with them. His pride screamed that he couldn’t stay behind. His fear screamed the opposite.

  Caetano stopped him with a hand on his chest. It wasn’t rough. It was absolute.

  —No—he said, not looking at him—. You stay.

  Yehiel frowned.

  —Why? They…

  —Because Mrs. Katherine ordered it—Caetano replied, dry—. And because, like it or not, my duty is to see it done.

  It was almost funny: Caetano didn’t trust Yehiel. Didn’t like him. In fact, he hated him. He treated him like a horned tool. And yet, under his guard, he protected him.

  —If you want to die, die later—he added, with a coldness that was almost mercy—. Now shut up and do what you were ordered.

  Yehiel clenched his teeth.

  “What am I supposed to do, my king?”

  Stolen story; please report.

  But he didn’t pull away.

  Katherine observed the whole tableau in a single instant: Baek forward, the flock advancing, the rest hardening, discipline breaking by choice.

  And she understood something she had no time to analyze: they were deciding, each in their own way, how they wanted to spend the last piece of time they had left.

  Dinamo gave them one last smile. It wasn’t a kind smile—it was the smile of someone who enjoys the theater, even when the curtain is about to fall.

  —Give it your best, kids!—he said, with a light cheerfulness that didn’t fit the void around them—. We don’t want it to end… do we?

  He raised the hammer like it was a microphone.

  —Impactthunder!—he exclaimed, as a joke.

  And he brought it down.

  The blow wasn’t against a floor, nor against an enemy. It was against the concept of “distance” itself. Nothing split. Reality sank for an instant, as if the universe hesitated to keep existing in the same shape. And then the tide came: a discharge of immeasurable power.

  Dimitri and Hanami, out front, were the first to receive it.

  Hanami saw death coming like a perfect wave. Her throat tightened. The child inside her wanted to cry. The warrior forced that part to shut up. She swallowed fear with rage, with shame, with discipline. There was no room for panic.

  Dimitri, on the other hand, felt nothing. His madness wouldn’t let him register danger as such. With the berserker trait active, his body was already at maximum—there was no “more” to draw. He was a machine left running.

  Hanami tightened her grip on the ninjatō. For an instant an absurd, intimate, useless thought crossed her mind: “Would you have liked this view?”

  She didn’t know who she was saying it to. Maybe no one. Maybe someone who was already gone.

  Memories flashed like quick knives. She had no time to hold them. She straightened. She raised the blade toward the incoming energy, as if aiming at a god.

  —I am the rose on your back… Kagebara.

  The ability unfolded at full power, no thrift. The edge of the ninjatō trembled with a strange presence—a dark rose that wasn’t a flower but intent, the intent to harm allies or enemies alike.

  Dimitri didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. His concept had been screaming at one hundred percent from the beginning.

  The tide hit them head-on.

  There was no scream. No fall. No “resistance.” They were disintegrated on the spot, erased as if they had never existed.

  The energy barely slowed.

  The only things that survived were their weapons.

  Hanami’s ninjatō and Dimitri’s gauntlets hung suspended for an instant, bathed by the passing energy at its utmost splendor. The material—nearly indestructible—didn’t give. It only heated up, like metal under a sun that doesn’t belong to this universe. The indigo color on their surfaces became a little brighter. More alive. Almost satisfied.

  Katherine saw it and, for the first time in a long time, let out something like a sigh.

  “Why do I bother?”

  It wasn’t surrender. It was a cold calculation mixed with a fatigue that came from millennia. She stepped ahead of everyone remaining. Irina’s confession had touched a small, irritating fiber in her—enough to make her decide something irrational: to give them time. Even if it was crumbs. She also believed they’d earned it.

  She used her true speed for an instant.

  The body she was wearing was deficient. It didn’t withstand the transition. Her legs gave out, came apart—lost like pieces no longer necessary to a mind that didn’t walk, only positioned itself.

  She appeared in front of that untamed energy, between the tide and those who remained.

  —Babel Terminal.

  The library didn’t appear as shelves. It appeared as an impossible order: layers of information, structures, words stacking on top of each other to try to describe the indescribable—and, by doing so, slow it. Space filled with something that looked like pure logic.

  Katherine’s body barely endured a fraction of the power she channeled. It fractured at invisible points. It emptied out like a used shell.

  Even so, she bought them three Planck moments.

  Three.

  Next came Baek.

  He arrived before Yehiel’s companions. He didn’t hesitate. He planted himself like a swordsman who finally accepts that honor isn’t recovered with speeches, but with a single correct gesture.

  He raised his sword. Everything he knew about the art of the blade gathered at that point. It wasn’t just technique: it was life, discipline, pain, pride, and a history written in cuts.

  —Haidong Gumdo.

  The descent was the most beautiful thing Baek ever achieved in his life.

  And yet, the impact of all his talent, sweat, and tears barely delayed the incoming energy a little more than Hanami and Dimitri combined.

  Enough for the rest to have an instant to choose.

  Next were Yehiel’s companions.

  Yael. Mila. Cap. Akem. Zlag. Amaltea.

  And—against all logic—even Tirsa, on the edge of death, held up by sheer stubbornness.

  They surged forward like a flock choosing to become a wall. There was no polished heroism in them. There was bond. There was obedience to a simple idea: if Yehiel stayed alive, then something in that world still made sense.

  The animals manifested their powers in a unique, visceral way. These weren’t human “techniques”: they were instincts turned into rules.

  Heat distorting concepts. Gravity squeezing the tide as if it could compact it. Turbid water to blind an attack that didn’t need to see. Mists, twists, improbable resistance.

  The seven of them did better than Baek. Not because they were stronger. Because they were designed to work together—to overlap, to leave no gaps.

  The tide took them anyway.

  And it kept going.

  Ramiro was next.

  He didn’t run. He didn’t shout. He only positioned himself, eyes sunk deep, the world broken behind his gaze.

  —The Pop of Bubble.

  The bubbles detonated like a chain of soft explosions. A pressure front that tried to slow the advance, to deflect, to break the continuity of the attack.

  Ramiro struck with all his power, knowing it didn’t matter.

  He had lost almost everyone he cared about. He had lost his home. He had lost everything he loved.

  And he had no way to do anything to the one responsible.

  He had never felt the way he felt in that moment: hollow, humiliated, alive by inertia.

  The energy devoured him.

  Irina didn’t look at the front.

  She turned to Yehiel. Only him. Nothing else mattered to her in that moment.

  She wore the calm expression of someone who has already decided how she ends.

  —Cotton Mercy.

  The cotton manifested as a white, gentle explosion that wasn’t gentleness, but accumulation: dense fibers, layers, a nest trying to cushion the impossible. A maternal gesture against a god.

  Yehiel closed his eyes.

  He had lost everything for the second time in the same day.

  He was shattered.

  He didn’t want to look.

  Six.

  Six Planck moments—that was what all that combined effort bought Caetano and Yehiel.

  Six crumbs stolen from the end.

  But… was it enough?

  When Katherine returned, the “arrival” wasn’t a pretty flash or a clean jump. It was an appearance with friction, like the place didn’t want to accept her.

  The first thing she saw wasn’t Dinamo.

  It was the damage.

  Off to the side of the battlefield, space was wounded. Not an optical distortion, not a light effect: a real hole, a void with jagged edges, as if someone had torn a piece of the universe out and glued it back badly. The surface around it tried to close. The cracks contracted slowly, stitching themselves in a process that looked almost organic.

  But they didn’t seal completely.

  Something seeped from some of the fissures.

  A black miasma. Not “dark”: truly black—black that ate all colors, reflected nothing, and refused to be defined. It flowed very, very slowly, like heavy smoke underwater. So slowly that if you blinked you could doubt it was moving, but Katherine saw it. Measured it by instinct. And felt it like an uncomfortable datum at the back of her neck.

  It had no smell. No stable form. Only that unnatural quality: absolute absence of spectrum.

  Katherine stared at it one second longer—just long enough to accept it was there, that it was a direct consequence of the hammer’s brutal strike, and that if space could bleed, then that thing was the blood.

  She said nothing.

  She didn’t point it out to anyone.

  She knew what it was, but she didn’t have the time—or the energy—to examine it.

  Not because she didn’t care, but because her mind was already saturated. Evacuation. Losses. Calculations that didn’t close. Dinamo revealing a resource that shouldn’t exist. She wasn’t going to open a new crisis in that instant.

  She archived the phenomenon as just another data point.

  “Residual spatial anomaly. Demiurge. Slow leakage. Cracks in self-sealing process.”

  And she kept walking, as if a broken universe was part of the scenery.

  When she reached the zone where everything began—and ended—the scene felt like déjà vu.

  Caetano and Yehiel were still there, facing an amused Dinamo, holding the hammer as if it were a stage prop. Both carried a myriad of feelings, but there was one they shared in abundance: a deep aversion to the false god in front of them. Only fear of that inconceivably strong weapon—one Dinamo moved like a toy—kept them from attacking.

  The moment Katherine stepped beside them, Dinamo spoke, as if he’d been waiting for that instant.

  —Heh… so you made it. I guess congratulations are in order.

  His gaze dropped with particular appreciation on Caetano, like someone inspecting a rare piece.

  —So that’s your ability. You can obtain your subordinates’ abilities when they die. Isn’t that moving—must be beautiful to raise lambs, fatten them up, and slaughter them.

  He laughed at his own joke. The three of them looked at him with seriousness, not giving him a single gesture.

  Dinamo continued, never losing the good humor.

  —I’m sure you’ve got limitations and conditions. But I don’t care. The interesting part was watching you adapt that pink plague’s ability and show up on my back. I hope I get to see how you incorporate the other eight.

  Then he looked at Katherine, completely ignoring Yehiel. To him, the messenger had nothing to offer.

  —So, little Katy? Got anything you want to know?

  The tone was that of someone willing to answer almost any question—not out of generosity, but out of absolute confidence.

  Katherine watched him for a moment, then looked at the hammer. The power it exuded was frankly terrifying, even for her. She didn’t show it, but she was affected: the evacuation, the battle, her failure, and Dinamo’s new resource had pushed her to the edge. All she wanted was to return to her refuge, the Central Dome, and think how to proceed from there without everything collapsing within the next hour.

  So she asked only one question.

  —Did you ever take me seriously?

  Dinamo fell silent for a moment. Seriousness tinted his face. Then a sincere smile appeared—rare in him for how simple it was.

  —Yes. I always have, and I always will. After all, you’re the only one I don’t know what to expect from.

  He wanted every word to sink in, with no escape.

  Katherine looked at Caetano and Yehiel, completely ignoring the last part.

  —I’m leaving. Get to the Central Dome as fast as possible.

  Both nodded. Katherine disconnected.

  The body she’d been using dropped like a puppet with its strings cut and vanished into the void. Caetano and Yehiel didn’t take long to leave as well. Neither of them wanted to entertain Dinamo for even one more second.

  —Ooh… so cold—Dinamo said, acting wounded for a moment as he recovered his frivolity—. At least you could’ve given me a little kiss after that confession?

  At a distance, the commentator burst into applause as if grief and death didn’t exist, only the spectacle.

  —THIS is what I’m talking about! Splendid! Masterful! With an ending worthy of a god! Audience, I hope you enjo—

  Dinamo shut him up with a casual wave of his hand. He didn’t feel like listening anymore. After all, he had somewhere to be too.

  He turned to the camera directly, as if the lens were a person.

  —So? What did you think of the show? Hope you enjoyed it, because I’m going to take some time for Act Two. The characters of Act Two have to get ready to step onto the stage.

  He winked at the camera.

  —But before that, I’ll leave you with one last message to think about. A simple task.

  His smile turned predatory. As if he could see someone on the other side of the glass.

  —Do you have what it takes to challenge me?