The rooftop detonated the moment Mythara's roar split the night. Power ripped through the air like a storm, and he hurled himself at Cefketa with all the fury he had bottled since their first clash.

Cefketa barely shifted. He raised one arm, and still the force of Mythara's blow drove him back across the sky, the impact cracking the air with thunder. He steadied himself easily, but his eyes narrowed with the faintest flicker of surprise.

"So… faster. Stronger. But still unbalanced," Cefketa mused.

Two years ago, Mythara couldn't have forced him back with raw strength alone. Now his fists blurred like strikes from a cannon. As before, his punches were fueled by more than muscle, but also by the seamless manipulation of momentum. However, now those blows were significantly faster and hit harder. Mythara lunged, his body folding into bursts of acceleration, every kick carrying him across the skyline like a missile. When he struck, the air shook.

But Cefketa saw it—the flaw.

When Mythara pushed speed, his strength scattered. When he poured momentum into a strike, his precision wavered. He was powerful, yes—but raw, clumsy, still unpracticed at wielding both in tandem.

Shards of glass rained from shattered windows below as people stumbled into the streets. Civilians looked skyward, hearing only the booming quake of the air. To them, it was like the heavens themselves were breaking.

Cefketa glided between strikes, his robe barely rippling. No explosive displays, no overwhelming tides of Vaylora, or grand Systems. Instead, he moved with calm subtlety—redirecting Mythara's rage with precise flicks of his wrist, twisting the momentum aside, letting fury expand itself into collapsing rooftops and fractured streets.

That difference gnawed at Mythara's heart. He had trained, fought, pushed himself. He had widened his strength until he was unrecognizable from the boy he'd been. He had closed the physical gap; he could feel it. Yet as he watched Cefketa slip between his fists with cold elegance, the precision with which he moved Vaylora around him was evident. Achieving feats of manipulating momentum, comparable to himself, not exceeding it. The truth stabbed him: the gap was wider than ever.

Mythara sparred with the simulacrum nearly every day, but it was a pure battle of physical strength. In his fight against Watabe, he had restrained himself. This was the real fight he'd had where he needed to use both his new strength and apply his knowledge of Vaylora, and it showed. The Scale Rot had limited Cefketa's physical activities. It had caged him. But instead of weakening, he had drowned himself not only in the Blood Pool but in study, immersed himself in Vaylora and Systems. And now that mastery shone through, subtle, effortless, untouchable.

"You've gotten weaker!" Mythara snarled, hurling a strike that split a rooftop clean in two.

Cefketa leaned aside, letting the blow crater an abandoned high-rise. His smirk was faint, infuriating. "Then why can't you touch me?"

Mythara roared and called the weapon into his hand. Momentum snapped into form, lengthening into a nebulous scythe, in the night. Unlike the simulacra, this scythe could weave a true death. He swept it in a deadly arc, tearing through towers, the blade shrieking as it cut the skyline apart.

Cefketa spared the weapon a single, disdainful glance. "Still just trying to be me. Still a copy."

"Not a copy," Mythara spat, voice raw. "An upgrade!"

He swung again, the blade cleaving through the steel bones of the city. Towers buckled, glass stormed the streets, and crowds below scattered in panic.

Cefketa sighed, almost bored, and raised his hand. His scythe slid into being, smooth and seamless, as if it had always been there. When the weapons met, Cefketa's movements were liquid, deflecting Mythara's every savage cut with an ease that drove him deeper into madness.

"Fight me back!" Mythara cried, his voice breaking. The plea was as desperate as it was furious.

Cefketa caught the next strike and held it there; their scythes locked in place. His eyes burned cold. "Do you even understand what that means?"

Mythara's teeth ground together, but he said nothing.

Cefketa gestured with his chin at the shattered ruins below. "There is no mirror-dimension here. My mother isn't here to cage us. The Wanderer doesn't care enough bout humanity to reduce damage that isn't towards his precious Persequions. When Dragons fight, really fight, the world itself is the battlefield, and this world isn't ready."

"I don't care!" Mythara's voice was raw with rage.

For the first time, Cefketa smiled—slow, dangerous. "Then remember, you asked for this."

His scythe pulsed, and with a single swing, the rooftop vaporized. The shockwave ripped through the city, windows bursting for miles, streets caving under the force. The sky itself quaked as the true clash began.

They moved faster than sound, faster than sight. One moment, they were above the city; the next, continents away. They collided over massive expanses of ocean, resulting in waves larger than any produced in any natural storm. In a blink, they vanished.

They collided in Paris. The Eiffel Tower shuddered, its lights flickering as shockwaves rolled across the Seine. Onlookers screamed, scattering as windows burst in a wave of concussive force. Mythara's scythe threatened to slice Cefketa in half, and he fluttered away through bended space.

Mythara tracked him to Beijing, where Cefketa's scythe slammed into his ribs with a force that split the air. A commercial district crumbled as shockwaves rippled through its skyline. Civilians saw nothing but a flash in the heavens before glass rained down in sheets.

They streaked across the skies, unlucky planes that passed near them, vaporized by the sheer force of air pressure exuded by the two as they passed.

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When they next stopped, they collided over New York City. Sirens screamed as skyscrapers cracked and bent, whole blocks swallowed in dust. People clutched their ears, praying, unable to see what monster warred above them.

To the world, it was as if gods had chosen to fight unseen in the heavens.

Cefketa's strikes were measured, graceful, his power folded tightly around him. Every blow was precise, every clash redirected toward the least-populated zones, and each destructive ripple curbed as much as possible. He fought like a surgeon amidst chaos.

Mythara was fire. His scythe tore the air apart, every swing a storm. He cared for nothing but Cefketa, his rage boiling over into blind obsession. And yet—moments of clarity pierced through. When a tower began to fall, his body moved instinctively, momentum carrying him beneath the rubble to steady it, to fling it safely aside. When screams reached him, he shielded a crowd, halting the momentum of the falling debris, before hurling himself back at Cefketa with renewed fury.

Every strike sent the world deeper into chaos. Oceans surged. Forests snapped in half. Cities cracked.

Still, Cefketa defended, barely striking, his eyes cool. Every moment he looked at Mythara was a silent judgment: Stronger. Faster. But still a child.

And Mythara, through the blood and dust, could feel it. That truth enraged him most of all.

For the briefest flickers, it seemed Mythara was gaining ground. His strikes grew sharper, momentum layered on momentum until the air itself warped under the weight of his fury. He was quickly adapting his new strength with his unmatched ability to control momentum.

Cefketa's robe tore under a grazing blow. Mythara's scythe drove him backward through a mountain's ridge, cleaving the stone into a yawning canyon. Mythara's chest heaved, sweat and fury streaking his face.

For a moment, it looked as though the child might finally surpass the father.

Cefketa tilted his head, expression unreadable, and then… he let the scythe vanish from his hand.

"Remember," he said, voice carrying cold through the quake of air, "scythes were never my weapon of choice, little copycat."

Two vicious black daggers shimmered into his grip. The air recoiled as though the space around them was being devoured, warping in jagged ripples that bent light itself. Their edges bled a soundless hum. Each dagger pulsed faintly, veins of Vaylora threading along the blade like living things.

Crafted by the Twins with Ferradon's hand guiding the forge, they were no ordinary weapons. They had been made from Cefketa's first shedding—a pair of blades that marked him as untouchable. The Twins' first masterpiece, according to Ferradon, born of blood and Vaylora, now revealed to carve the world.

While things didn't go the way Mythara had hoped, a slight grin danced across his face. Cefketa would finally take him seriously.

Cefketa moved. The dance began. Mythara's smile faded.

Where Mythara's scythe split buildings with brute force, Cefketa's daggers slipped through the air with surgical grace. Each step was a measure, each turn a rhythm, his strikes flowing like a symphony of death. One dagger deflected Mythara's swing, the other traced across his neck in, never drawing blood but carving cracks like glass under pressure.

Mythara's rage only swelled. He spun the scythe in wide arcs, momentum snapping into his limbs, speed building until his own body blurred. Yet every strike was caught, turned, dismissed. Cefketa weaved between the blows, his movements graceful, merciless.

"You're slower when you're angry," Cefketa murmured, his words slicing deeper than the daggers. "Where did that control go? You were doing better. "

"Shut up!" Mythara roared, and in desperation, he flung open the lattice of his greatest weapon.

The Clockwork Paradox System.

Vaylora folded into lattices that stretched across perception itself, halting the battlefield, choking even the sound of screams. The battlefield slowed to a complete stop, the sounds of destruction and screams muted. Their voices were not allowed to carry in this sacred space. It should have bound Cefketa, slowed him, trapped him inside Mythara's will.

Instead, Cefketa stood unbothered in the center of it all.

A vantablack aura, no, it was somehow darker than that, radiated off him. The black aura devoured all light; it devoured everything. Even the influence of Mythara's System.

This was like The Conductor; this wasn't Cefketa's will fighting off Mythara's, this was a bold disregard for the very existence of the System, for life itself.

Mythara staggered, horrified. "The black aura again. What—what is that?"

Cefketa's eyes gleamed in the void. His daggers pulsed with the same black energy. He looked at the cracks he had left on Mythara's body. "It's almost time," he said, his voice calm, certain. "But not yet."

The darkness surged, swallowing everything—the system, the air, even the sound of Mythara's own heartbeat. For one terrifying instant, there was nothing but the abyss, and Cefketa's voice echoing inside it.

"You have no one to blame but yourself. Remember that."

Then the blackness peeled away.

And Mythara came back to himself.

He blinked, panting, the red haze of rage finally cracking. For the first time since he had lunged from the rooftop, he truly saw.

They stood in Seattle.

The skyline was broken, smoke rising from cratered streets. Whole districts had been chewed into rubble. People fled in every direction, their screams scattering under the moan of collapsing towers. Mythara's eyes widened in horror. He knew this place. He remembered.

Here, in this very city, in this exact spot, he and Cefketa had battled the crater left by Nina in the mirror dimension she created. Just like then, they stood facing each other in a crater expanding several city blocks. But back then, it had been different.

This time, there was no cage, where they could run wild.

This time it was real.

Mythara's gaze fell to himself, and for the first time, he realized: despite Cefketa's countless slashes, there was no blood. Instead, faint cracks spread across his scales where the daggers had landed, glowing like fault lines in glass. His breath hitched.

His shedding had begun.

"No…" His voice shook. "No, no, no…"

The scythe slipped from his hands, dissolving into sparks. The rage that had carried him dissolved with it, vanishing like mist. It left only the raw taste of panic. His chest heaved as he staggered backward. He launched himself into the sky, fleeing, anything to escape what he had done.

Cefketa lowered his daggers and watched him vanish into the clouds. His face betrayed nothing, but his words carried sharply into the broken city.

"Good job."

From the shadows at the edge of the crater, a figure stepped forward. The Kitsune leader bowed her head, her tails swaying behind her, eyes glimmering with faint guilt. "He fought well. Thank you."

Cefketa's gaze cut to her, cold and amused. "Thank you. Though I didn't expect you to be able to so easily control the emotions of a Gteju."

She lowered her eyes. "It was far from easy, but he's still very young. Also, his mind was already weakened after your words. I only nudged the fissures wider."

"Did you record everything?" Cefketa asked without turning, his eyes fixed where Mythara had fled.

A voice crackled over comms, deep and assured. Ferradon, Fifth Seat. "I did."

Cefketa finally sheathed the daggers, the black aura fading into silence. He looked once more to the sky, toward the boy who had fled in terror.

"They will hate you," Cefketa murmured. "They will hate us. So what will you do?"

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