Empires | Arc 3 | Chapter 10 | See ya!

The battlefield suddenly falls utterly, suffocatingly silent.

It is the dead quiet of a graveyard at midnight.

Everyone—the injured, the dying, the executioners—goes completely numb. They aren’t physically frozen; it feels as though the sheer stamina and energy to exist have been violently siphoned from their bodies.

Leon lies paralyzed with his broken spine. Maven barely keeps half an eye open. Friling suddenly stops screaming, the agonizing pain miraculously lifting from his torn flesh as he weakly rolls onto his side to look for his sister. Jarrod, his face slick with blood and his torso screaming in agony, slowly lifts his head.

He sees a wide, grayish back facing them all. The man’s arms, vascular from wrist to forearm, are planted firmly into the concrete on either side of Lesca‘s dismantled, liquified body, acting as an absolute, unbreakable roof. Beside that imposing back stands Makisa, her hand resting calmly on the hilt of her katana.

Slowly, as the group’s nervous systems begin to process what is happening, a terrifying realization settles deep in their guts.

Time hasn’t frozen.

The environment hasn’t forgotten how to breathe.

Taglia’s physical arrival was simply so immensely fast that his body arrived first; his suffocating, gravitational presence is only just now catching up to him, it was like he was faster than even his own shadow to follow him.

Using this undisturbed, silent pocket of time, Lesca’s Heat begins to frantically piece her together. Her smaller extremities knit first—her nose, her lips, her eyes. Then her torso solidifies, pulling her upper arms and elbows back into their sockets.

Finally, she raises her newly reformed left hand, gently touching Taglia‘s cheek.

“You are… late,” she whispers.

Because her throat is still actively knitting itself together, her voice is a harsh rasp. Yet, even in this mangled state, she projects her pure, arrogant control. She isn’t crying in terror; she sounds exactly like a girl complaining to her lover about a ruined dress, or less oil in her food, demanding he fix it for her. It is deeply, bizarrely adorable.

“Look what they did to me.”

Seeing her rapid regeneration, Loyalist prepares to make a move. But he stops. “What is that…?” he asks himself. His legs are vibrating uncontrollably. He takes a single, involuntary step back. “Is this fear? No…”

He remembers Rogue‘s words from the forest. Loyalist lifts his head, staring at Taglia’s broad back. “It’s primal.”

Across the plaza, Rogue’s severed leg begins to regrow.

SLUCK.

First, the dense bone pushes out of the stump, followed immediately by nerves and muscle fibers wrapping around the marrow before the skin rapidly seals the limb. It is a Salamander trait.

Rogue slaps his heavy serpent tail against the ground, stabilizing his chimera form as he stands fully upright on his two feet.

“The myth…” Rogue growls, staring directly at Taglia‘s back. “God of Abyss City.”

Looking down at Lesca, Taglia whispers, “I. Am. Really. Sorry.” He gives her a soft, incredibly warm smile—the kind a child gives to the person they love the most.

Then, he slowly stands up.

Thick, grayish steam begins to violently vent from his pores. Shifting effortlessly into 50% Primal Mode, his height pushes to 6’2″. His skin is gray. The muscles across his chest, shoulders, traps, and lats become defined, thick veins wrapping around his forearms like steel cables.

Compared to the massive 12-foot chimera, Taglia still looks small.

He turns his head. The warm, infant-like happiness he held for Lesca vanishes instantly. As his eyes lock onto Rogue, they go completely dead. There is no anger. There is no burning desire for revenge. It is the cold, absolute gaze of a god looking at a faulty creation right before he deletes it.

Taglia doesn’t go Mach speed. He simply walks slowly toward the beast. There are no heavy DHUMP DHUMP sounds echoing from his footsteps; he moves with the casual grace of an ordinary man taking a stroll. He stops directly face-to-face with Rogue.

Moments pass in absolute silence. Taglia simply gazes up into Rogue‘s eyes, and the chimera stands completely paralyzed under the scrutiny.

Everyone on the battlefield watches, desperate to know what happens next but entirely too terrified to breathe, let alone interfere. Lesca finally manages to lift her torso using her elbows as her lower body finishes merging. Loyalist stares at the standoff, realizing the horrifying truth: This is not a battle of brutes. This is a battle of nature itself.

Amidst the apocalyptic tension, no one notices Golas walk onto the battlefield. He no longer looks 168 years old. He stands tall and heavily muscular, looking like a vibrant man in his absolute physical prime at 40. Ignoring the standoff completely, he walks over to Maven and sits beside her. Without a flinch, he uses his right hand’s nails to violently slash his own left wrist. He lifts her head and holds his bleeding wrist over her mouth, letting the thick, hot blood drip directly down her throat.

Lying nearby and clutching his own torn shoulder, Friling watches in disbelief. “What are you doing?” he whispers.

Golas keeps his focus entirely on his daughter. “My blood is my Heat. That is why I was able to stay alive for so long… but now, she needs it more than me.”

Back in the center of the plaza, Taglia breaks the silence. “Are you the one who did this to her?”

Rogue smirks, tilting his head backward toward Lesca. “Yeah. She was being a bad girl.”

A heavy second passes.

Taglia‘s expression remains an unreadable void.

Suddenly, Taglia casually raises his right hand toward the chimera’s left cheek.

SLUPP. DHUMP.

The sound of Taglia‘s palm connecting with Rogue‘s jaw is deafening.

Rogue‘s head doesn’t just rip off; the cervical spine snaps like a dry twig.

WHOOSH.

Everyone on the battlefield sees a dark, circular blur launch through the air with such velocity it is impossible to visually track. It crosses 18 meters in a second, violently embedding itself deep into a wooden structure.

Everyone traces the trajectory, then slowly turns their gaze back to the center of the plaza.

Rogue‘s massive, headless body is still standing upright, facing Taglia.

Without even knowing the specifics of how Lesca was humiliated, Taglia had ironically executed the exact same disciplinary slap.

Leon grunts, painfully lifting his head to look at Jarrod. “Go ahead…” he wheezes, a bloody grin on his face. “…tell him your no-kill rule.”

Jarrod gives Leon an exhausted, deadpan look that clearly screams, Seriously?

Realizing that the black blur was Rogue‘s head, Loyalist vanishes from his spot. In the exact split second the realization that it was Rogue’s head hit him, he held his breath, activating A Dying Man’s Last Breath. He materializes instantly at Taglia‘s left side. He raises his right hand, pointing his fingers straight and closed together like a spear tip, fully intending to pierce Taglia’s heart.

Operating 10 times faster than the rest of the world, Loyalist is certain he closed the gap in three seconds of his localized time, leaving him seven relative seconds to rip the heart out before Taglia even realizes what happened.

But a gray blur moves. Taglia’s left hand casually reaches up and catches Loyalist‘s spear-hand—without even turning his head to look.

Stunned by the impossible physics, Loyalist involuntarily exhales. Time snaps back to normal. “Impossible…” Loyalist gasps. “How?”

Taglia finally turns his gaze from the headless chimera to him.

Standing safely beside Lesca, Makisa shakes her head. “You dumb fuck. You are a normal human who freezes time to give yourself a head start. But you are still moving at your normal human speed.” She smirks, gesturing to Taglia. “While he is supersonic in normal time. Even if the laws of time bend around you, his raw supersonic speed is simply beyond it. Especially right now. In 50% Primal Mode, he operates at Mach 2.5.”

Loyalist stares blankly at the swordswoman, then slowly looks up at Taglia holding his wrist.

“It’s about reach,” Jarrod calls out from the dirt, his analytical mind processing the physics. “He tricks the world by freezing time to gain an upper hand. But Taglia‘s supersonic speed is designed to be indifferent to the world itself.”

“That means Taglia’s speed isn’t unaffected by my 10:1 ratio… it just simply doesn’t matter to him because of the vast, mathematical gap between our natural speed limits,” Loyalist realizes with mounting horror. His eyes go wide.

“Correct,” Makisa says flatly.

The exact millisecond she confirms his death sentence, Taglia curls his right fingers into a massive fist, preparing to obliterate Loyalist‘s gut. Because Taglia still has a vice grip on his wrist, Loyalist knows that even if he stops time again, he cannot escape. He braces for the inevitable execution.

But inches before the fist makes contact, a massive hand intercepts it.

Rogue‘s right arm catches Taglia’s strike. Taglia and Loyalist both look up. The chimera’s skull is rapidly regenerating—first the white bone, then the pulsing veins, and finally the skin. The exact moment a single eye forms in the new socket, Rogue violently twists his body, throwing a devastating left kick.

DHRUK!

The kick connects with Taglia‘s torso. The force pushes him back a few feet, forcing him to let go of Loyalist‘s arm to maintain his balance.

As his head finishes regrowing, Rogue cracks his neck. “Wooow. That was a good one.”

Rogue charges.

DHAM! DHAM! DHAM!

His massive weight shatters the concrete.

Taglia lets out a feral, animalistic laugh. “COME ON THEN!”

He charges to meet the beast.

DHUP! DHUP! DHUP!

The head-on collision is catastrophic.

DHRUMCRUCK!

An apocalyptic shockwave detonates from the epicenter, instantly leveling every structure within a 500-meter radius. Civilians caught in the perimeter are blown away like leaves. Leon, Friling, and Jarrod are violently dragged backward across the concrete. Golas throws himself over Maven to shield her. Makisa buries her katana deep into the ground—CLUNK—holding onto the hilt to anchor herself, while Lesca plants her thick maroon blood to literally glue herself to the plaza floor.

As the dust begins to settle, a terrifying, rhythmic sound echoes across the ruins.

DHICK! DHICK! DHICK! DHICK!

Rogue is lying flat on his back. Taglia is sitting squarely on the chimera’s thighs, his feet planted on both sides firmly into the ground to pin the beast. He is unleashing a blinding barrage of Wing Chun chain punches in a devastating, linear sequence from Rogue‘s forehead down to his navel.

Desperate, Rogue whips his serpentine tail up, sinking its venomous fangs directly into Taglia‘s traps. The moment the teeth make impact against Taglia’s hardened gray skin, they shatter into pieces.

Taglia doesn’t even flinch. The chain punches continue to rain down. “You grow where most of your limbs are, right?” Taglia laughs wildly, his fists turning into a blur of raw kinetic destruction. “Then I am gonna pulverize your entire body! Let’s see where you grow back from then! It’s a good experiment, isn’t it?!”

Watching his partner get tenderized into paste, Loyalist prepares to hold his breath and stop time. But before his lungs can draw the air, the cold, razor-sharp tip of Makisa‘s katana presses gently just beneath his chin. She stares him dead in the eye. The unspoken promise is crystal clear: You move, I pierce your brain.

At that exact moment, a thick, gooey pool of boiling maroon blood slithers around Loyalist‘s shoes. Lesca has fully recovered. She stands with her arms raised toward him, her eyes burning hemorrhagic red, literally gluing the tactician to the pavement. “Hey! Watch it, we are here!” she roars.

Under the relentless, pulverizing barrage, Rogue‘s mangled mouth spits blood. “S… o this… is a god’s power… no… not bad, huh!”

The chimera’s body finally stops resisting. It goes entirely limp. Taglia has methodically shattered every single bone from his skull to his navel. The flesh hangs loosely like an empty rubber suit, entirely devoid of structural integrity.

Seeing the brute fall, Loyalist panics. He roars and violently holds his breath. But he doesn’t hold it for a single second—he holds it for six. In his localized temporal reality, he has just bought himself nearly a full minute of unrestricted movement.

He bends down and furiously rips the maroon glue from his legs. Because Lesca and Makisa are frozen in time, they cannot react. At the 39-second mark, he finally tears himself free. Tunnel vision takes over. Driven purely by the single objective Chaos gave him and the stress of the fight, Loyalist sprints directly toward the necromancer, forgetting about reading the terrain, and who is where.

He takes seven steps. He is closing in for the kill.

But long before he can even reach out to touch Lesca, he abruptly stops. A massive hand wraps around the back of his head. Loyalist recognizes the vice grip instantly; it’s the exact same hand that caught his wrist moments ago. He cannot even turn around to look.

The hand violently lifts him off his feet, suspending him in the frozen air.

Then, it slams him directly down into the concrete.

CRCUKSLUCK!

The concussive impact instantly snaps his neck and shatters his skull, killing him on the spot. His Heat immediately evaporates. Time violently snaps back to reality.

As the group’s perception stabilizes, they witness the aftermath. Taglia is stomping on Loyalist‘s head.

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

The tactician’s skull is reduced to literal jelly; there is no bone, no face, no structure left. And unlike Lesca or Rogue, he cannot regenerate.

No one on the battlefield dares to tell Taglia to stop. No one dares to tell him the man is already dead.

Suddenly, an all-knowing, eerily calm voice rings out through the near-dawn air.

“I think you can stop now. He has literally been dead for the last 23 seconds.”

Taglia stops his boot. He turns toward the sound, and everyone follows his gaze.

Standing perfectly relaxed on Taglia‘s right flank is Chaos. On his left stands Intellectual. Beneath Chaos‘s feet, the black hole of Satan’s Gaze from the Purgatory is actively swallowing the pulverized, rubbery remains of Rogue‘s body.

“I thought you were going to be impartial,” Chaos smiles.

“I was. And I still am,” Taglia replies casually. “But you forgot to tell your bitches my one rule. Don’t fuck with me.”

Chaos‘s smile widens. “So this is how it’s gonna be?”

SWOOSH. DHRUCK.

Before Taglia can even process the reply, Chaos disappears, standing directly under Taglia’s guard.

A thick smoke surrounds both of them, as the smoke slowly begins to rise, Chaos‘s right fist, wreathed in golden fire hues, is already buried deep into the thick, grayish smoke currently venting off Taglia‘s body. He aimed the catastrophic punch perfectly at Taglia‘s gut.

Then comes the impact.

SLASHHHH!

The cloud of smoke surrounding Taglia is violently blown away. He hasn’t moved an inch, but his body has fundamentally morphed. He is now in 75% Primal Mode. His skin is a dark, hardened gray. Thick, interlocking enamel plating covers his knuckles. His lats have flared outward into the terrifying silhouette of a King Cobra’s hood. His waist is as thick as a redwood trunk, his traps sloping so heavily into his deltoids that he appears to have no neck. His arms resemble General Sherman trees, and his legs are thick bundles of steel cables. All human muscle definition and vascularity are gone, replaced by pure, impenetrable biological armor.

Taglia tanked the apocalyptic blow head-on, using both of his massive arms to catch the fist before it could touch his gut.

But the sheer kinetic force had to go somewhere. The air displacement blasts past Taglia, and the resulting shockwave instantly vaporizes a full kilometer of Royal City directly behind him, reducing the landscape to flat, barren dust.

Chaos smoothly retracts his fist from his gut.

Taglia stands perfectly upright.

The group watches, their mouths hanging open in absolute shock. The entire exchange happened in under ten seconds. Their human brains physically cannot process the velocity of the movements, let alone the apocalyptic scale of the impact. Lesca, Jarrod, and Makisa literally gasp for air—the only three left who can still stand.

Chaos glances back down. The black hole has finished consuming Rogue‘s body. He looks back up at Taglia.

“Okay, see ya,” Chaos says pleasantly, stepping backward as a black void opens behind him and swallows him whole.

Intellectual watches his boss disappear, then slowly looks up at the towering biological nightmare that is Taglia.

“Big fan, Mr. Taglia,” Intellectual whispers, genuine, terrifying admiration dripping from his voice. He then turns his gaze to the bleeding Jarrod holding his ribs. The admiration dies instantly. “Hey, Buffoon.”

He hops once on the concrete, and

BOOM—the gravitational manipulation launches him into the sky like a rocket.

Thick steam vents heavily from Taglia‘s body again. He rapidly shrinks, returning to his normal human size and height. At that exact moment, the golden light of dawn finally breaks across the sky, illuminating the utterly flattened, one-kilometer stretch of destruction behind him.

Seeing the sunlight, everyone slowly turns their gaze back to Taglia.

Taglia surveys the apocalyptic crater, slides his hands into his pockets, and offers a casual, lazy smile.

“Well, that’s that.”