The world did not shake.
It sank.
When Obelion descended fully into Earth's atmosphere, the gravitational field around Kyoto buckled. Mountains leaned. Rivers reversed. Birds fell from the sky, unable to fly against the spiraling pressure.
Obelion's voice resonated like tectonic plates grinding against each other.
> "Primordial Anomaly Detected. Sovereign Continuity Directive Activated. Resistance: Invalid."
Rei stood before him—his body encased in a mantle of radiant black and violet flame, Velka's sigils glowing along his arms like a second language.
Noira, Eirenne, and Mireille stood back-to-back in a circle, holding leyline wards in place as the terrain warped.
Karasu whispered, "He's not built to defeat. He's built to collapse realities until only his remains."
---
First Contact — Clash of Authority
Obelion raised a single hand. The air trembled. A dozen leyline pulses exploded into nonexistence.
Rei reacted instantly—his hand carving glyphs from memory and myth. Velka's flame surged through him, turning the space around him into a fractal sphere of protective pyre and void.
Obelion's first strike hit.
The shockwave created a crater two kilometers wide. Trees disintegrated. Earth liquefied.
But Rei stood firm. His boots were embedded in stone glass, but he had not moved.
Velka's voice echoed within him: "You mustn't burn faster. You must burn deeper."
Rei lifted his hands, and the sigils along his forearms shifted into a spiral pattern—like a vortex drawing not just heat, but time.
---
New Skill Activated: Flame Entropy Spiral
> [Effect: Draws from dormant timelines. Weakens constructs of fixed law. Reverse overloads anti-temporal attacks.]
Obelion paused—calculating. For the first time, it adapted.
> "Unquantifiable. Initiate Mass Compression Protocol."
A black sphere formed above the battlefield, dense with compressed causality. It dragged not objects—but events. All previous flame clashes, every fragment of Rei's past, began condensing into a singularity.
Mireille screamed, "He's erasing your narrative!"
---
Spirit Sync — Phase 2: Velka Ascendant
Rei did not flinch. Instead, he pulled every forgotten moment—spirits that never got names, flames that were extinguished in other worlds, and battles that history never recorded.
He shouted their names into the sky.
"I remember you!"
Velka answered.
Together, they cast Remnant Pyre at full capacity.
Dozens of forgotten spirit phantoms emerged—ghosts of victory and ruin. They circled Rei like orbiting moons, each burning with timelines lost to Sovereign censorship.
The singularity above cracked.
Obelion stepped forward, two of his legs sinking knee-deep into the fabric of space. "Violation of Law Expanding. Requesting Override."
But there was no reply.
---
The Sovereign System Falters
Back in the lattice cathedral of the Sovereign Code, alarms blared.
Sovereign Sigma: "Timeline fluctuation exceeds containment."
Sovereign Delta: "Obelion's mass compression is unraveling."
Sovereign Alpha stood still.
> "Let it happen. We need to test the full burn."
---
Final Exchange
Rei rocketed forward.
Each strike of his flame-clad fists shattered not just Obelion's armor, but the laws it stood on. His kicks rewrote gravity into stasis. His words—burned in runes—flashed across the sky as war-songs:
> "The world was never meant to be weighed. It was meant to burn, breathe, remember!"
Obelion, faltering, raised its final defense: a monolith of Eternal Compression, the kind that turned gods into footnotes.
Rei ignited the final spiral.
"Velka—now!"
Together, they plunged into the monolith.
Silence.
Then a shockwave.
Obelion crumbled—not exploded, but forgotten. The laws it carried disintegrated like myths no one retold.
And Rei emerged, steam rising from his cloak, eyes no longer reflecting stars—but possibility.
---
Aftermath
Calen arrived late, wings still forming.
He knelt. "You broke his anchor. Do you know what that means?"
Rei nodded slowly. "It means we're not just opposing Sovereigns now."
Mireille answered, "We're dismantling them."
Noira laughed, breathless. "One god-machine at a time."
Karasu sighed, "Then you'd better be ready. Veyra won't come to suppress. She'll come to erase."
And somewhere, in a palace without time, she opened her eyes.