Free Web NovelChapter 22: How It’s Done.
『"Better sit down for the show."』
The Darkness Malice sensed them the moment they entered its incomplete domain, three points of light descending toward its perfect shadow.
It had been expecting this. Some warrior, champion, or self-righteous defender of a world already drowning in darkness to show up.
Come... witness, it thought, tendrils writhing upward to meet the falling Awakeners. True absence...
Maya’s Sol lantern blazed to life before they hit the ground, golden light expanding in a sphere that pushed back against the hundreds of tendrils with physical force.
She landed in the center of that illumination, boots touching down on rubble that was once a building.
"Containment established," she said into her comm. "At least, I’d like to hope so."
The lantern in her hand pulsed once, twice, and suddenly light was everywhere. Not just emanating from her weapon but materializing throughout the crater in luminescent patterns.
Glowing circles. Radiant squares. Luminous triangles. A mandala of light spread across the devastation, each shape interlocking with the next to form something greater than its individual parts.
The Darkness recoiled, hissing through the speakers. Where light touched shadow, the tendrils dissolved into smoke.
"Pissing it off already?" Dante laughed into his comm as he landed thirty meters to her left, positioning himself at the northern edge of her illumination.
His fingers found his guitar strings immediately, and the first chord he struck rippled as sound warped into a visible wave of distorted air that slammed into the Malice’s center mass with a concussive force.
The Darkness screamed as a result. A sound that came through the audio feed as white noise and static.
It reeled back as its outline stuttered like a corrupted video file, and the black mist that made up its body trembled from the resonance.
"Did you see that?" Hiro exhaled loudly from beside Amara, leaning forward so far he was practically out of his seat. "He’s using sound as a weapon. Amazing."
"I never expected the guitar would be his Spirit Weapon," Amara added, her eyes tracking every movement on the multiple screens.
Before the Malice could recover, Maya swung Sol’s lantern in a wide arc, and light spilled from its core, shaped into ribbons of gold that wrapped around the creature’s limbs like binding chains from a distance.
For a moment, the Malice was pinned in place, its form constrained by solidified illumination.
CRACK!
The bonds shattered like glass, and it broke free with a renewed fury.
"Baba Yaga," Yelena murmured as she completed the triangle, touching down south of Maya’s position with cat like grace, both her blades held up.
One was coated in flame, the other surrounded by wind so sharp it left cuts in the air itself, and the Darkness immediately recognized her as the primary threat, responding accordingly.
Shadow erupted from the crater floor in dozens of locations simultaneously, tendrils lashing out with speed that made them nearly impossible to track even with the Institute’s high-speed cameras.
They moved like serpents made of night itself, each one capable of dissolving matter on contact.
Amara had seen what happened to the buildings they’d touched.
And Yelena ran straight into the approaching tendrils, weaving through them while she sprinted.
Her fire blade cut left, severing three tendrils that burst into smoke. Her wind blade swept right, the cutting air slicing through five more before they could reach her.
She spun, both swords moving in concert, creating a sphere of elemental fury around her body that the Darkness couldn’t penetrate.
"She makes it look easy," Maya murmured approvingly, her lantern still maintaining the containment field.
"I can make it look easy too if I wanted," Dante shrugged.
"Damn," Sophia whispered from Amara’s other side, mouth full. "At this rate, they’ll be done before I’m through with this."
The loud crunch snapped Amara’s focus and she turned to see Sophia sitting there blissfully working through a massive bucket of popcorn like they were at the cinema.
When did—? How? Amara sighed, deciding it wasn’t important. She leaned in, her full attention back on the screen as she absorbed every detail.
From the way Yelena positioned her feet, to the way each strike served multiple purposes of offense, defense, and repositioning, Amara recorded all of it.
This was what a Tyrant looked like in combat. This was the level they needed to reach and hopefully surpass.
The Malice realized its tendrils were useless against this level of opposition and changed tactics entirely.
Instead of striking, hoping to ensnare them with its tendrils, shadow began to spread, flowing across the ground like ink spilled on paper, covering everything it touched.
Buildings still standing at the crater’s edge were swallowed whole, their forms disappearing into blackness that left no trace behind. Emergency vehicles at the perimeter began rolling backward as responders scrambled to escape the advancing tide of annihilation.
"Containment failing!" Maya said with urgency. "It’s moving beyond the crater!"
She raised her lantern high, pouring more power into it. The light burned brighter, pressing back against the spreading shadow.
But for every square meter of darkness she purified, two more appeared elsewhere. The Malice was too large, too spread out, too vast to be held back by light alone.
"It’s adapting too fast," Ethan said quietly. "At this rate..."
The Director’s expression didn’t change, but his jaw tightened slightly.
He’d noticed the same thing.
"Dante!" Maya called out.
"On it!" Dante’s fingers blurred across the strings in patterns too fast for Amara’s eyes to follow.
With each movement of his finger, pressure began to build around him, and a small sphere of compressed sound took form in front of him.
"Oi, fuck face!"
The Malice turned toward Dante.
"Yeah... that’s right." The sphere shifted from white to green as energy gathered and compressed. "I’m talking to you."
He brought his hand down across the strings one more time, and the sphere expanded into a massive wave that pushed the shadows itself back, tearing up the ground in the process.
The shockwave this technique generated was so intense that Yelena and Maya had to brace themselves despite standing on opposite ends of Dante.
The Malice then howled with a sound that made the speakers crackle with distortion, its form rippling with disruption.
Dante then directed the wide-spread sound waves to converge and surround the Malice from all sides like a barrier.
Immediately, its body spasmed and what was once solid form started to lose cohesion, collapsing onto the floor like sloshing tar.
Dante turned to face Maya. "That oughta do it. And see? I made it loo—"
The sounds of vibration stopped him mid-sentence.
’Vibration?’ Amara heard it too from the speakers. They all did.
The shadow’s sloshing form was vibrating now.
But it wasn’t just that. It was vibrating in harmony with Dante’s barrier.
The sound waves were being absorbed. It had essentially used Dante’s own frequency against him.
"Cheeky bastard," Dante muttered, and Amara could hear the grudging admiration even as he switched frequencies mid-chord.
"Yelena!" Maya shouted. "Before it adapts again."
The Russian Awakener had been waiting for exactly this moment. She crossed her blades above her head as fire and wind merged nto a single spiral of elemental destruction.
The air temperature in the crater dropped and spiked simultaneously, creating pressure differentials that made windows for blocks, explode outward in glittering clouds.
Yelena brought both blades down in a devastating X-slash.
And the combined attack screamed toward the Malice’s center as a tornado of flame that burned hot enough to turn concrete to glass, guided by wind that cut on a molecular level.
The Darkness tried to disperse, to spread itself thin enough that the attack would pass harmlessly through its form.
But Maya’s light constructs had been positioned for exactly this contingency. They flared simultaneously, creating walls of solid illumination that prevented the shadow from escaping laterally.
The Malice found itself funneled, compressed, forced into a smaller and smaller space as Yelena’s attack bore down on it with inexorable force.
"It’s trapped," Raj breathed. "They actually trapped it."
The impact was devastating.
Fire and wind and darkness collided in an explosion that sent shockwaves rippling outward, visible even from the aerial cameras.
The crater enlarged in size and the ground heaved like the earth itself was trying to vomit out the corruption. Far away buildings already damaged by the initial impact simply collapsed, unable to withstand this secondary assault.
The screens went white with the intensity of the blast, then slowly cleared as the cameras adjusted exposure.
When the fire cleared and the wind died down, Darkness remained.
It was smaller. Diminished by perhaps half its original mass. But still present and refusing to die.
"It’s regenerating," Yelena observed with a casual indifference. Her blades glowed brighter as she gathered power for another strike.
Amara leaned forward, her hands gripping the armrests of her chair. "How do you kill something that keeps coming back?"
"Only one way to find out," the Director said quietly.
On screen, the Malice shifted tactics again.
It lunged forward with terrifying speed, its amorphous form suddenly sprouting four arms of solid shadow. No longer tendrils anymore, but limbs with defined musculature made of concentrated darkness.
"Light this, light that," the Malice said, its voice coming through the audio as a chorus of whispers. "But they fail to realize that the darkness is equally as fast."
Amara watched the screens with growing understanding and growing dread.
If three of the Institute’s finest could only do so much as hold it back.
What chance did the five of them have?
The Malice’s four shadow-limbs flexed experimentally, testing their new form.
"This is big problem," Yelena said with her characteristic understatement, blades already moving to defensive positions.
"No shit," Dante replied.
