Chapter 66

"[Flame Empress]!!!" Vivi roared, her voice reverberating through the chamber as an explosion of red and blue flames erupted around her. Heat rolled outward in waves, her fiery aura swelling until it matched the oppressive force radiating from Legia.

The Monarch of Beginnings didn’t give her the luxury of a full transformation. He stepped forward in a single earth-shaking stride and hurled a colossal punch.

BOOM!

The chamber shook violently. Dust rained from the high ceiling, and jagged cracks spiderwebbed across the dungeon’s ancient walls.

When the smoke cleared, Legia’s eyes narrowed.

His massive fist was halted, hovering inches from Vivi, by a sphere of crackling blue fire that burned so hot the air around it shimmered.

Standing within its protective glow, Vivi’s form had shifted. She no longer looked fully human. Her body was a roiling mass of purple and crimson energy, shaped vaguely like a humanoid figure. Her hair looked like chaotic, childlike streaks drawn into existence by some unseen cosmic hand.

Orbiting her were seven flames, each a different color of the rainbow, drifting lazily in the air like moons around a star.

Her eyes were no longer eyes at all, each iris was a yin-yang symbol, spinning in opposite directions, endlessly revolving.

"Now," she said, her voice echoing from everywhere and nowhere despite the lack of a mouth, "who’s overconfident?" A low, distorted laugh bubbled up. "This isn’t even my final form! Hahahaha!" Her flames surged outward with manic delight. "You… are so screwed."

Legia didn’t so much as flinch. He extended a massive hand toward Vivi, and the floor beneath her collapsed inward with a deafening crack. A crater bloomed outward as if the dungeon itself was being crushed. The air warped and groaned, gravity around her had multiplied thousands of times over.

"That should keep you busy," Legia intoned, his voice cold and sure. He turned to Kaede. "You are the only dangerous one here."

Kaede raised a brow, a faint smirk tugging at her lips. "Are you sure about that?"

Legia’s expression faltered. Slowly, he turned back...

...and caught a fist to the face.

The blow was accompanied by an eruption from one of Vivi’s orbiting flames, the brown sphere detonating point-blank. The blast hurled Legia across the chamber and into the far wall, the impact sending cracks racing up the ancient stone like lightning. He dropped to one knee, then one elbow, blood sizzling where it struck the floor.

"How?" he growled.

"Easy," Vivi said, planting a foot on the back of his head. "I burned through your gravity."

Legia snarled, shoving her leg aside as he vaulted backward to gain space. "Impossible. Everything is bound by gravity."

"Not everything," Kaede interjected, stepping forward. "Vivi’s current form is a massless energy construct. She has no mass, therefore no weight. Your gravity can’t touch her, so she burned through it all simply because she could."

Vivi somehow managed to look smug despite lacking a mouth.

A deep rumble came from Legia’s chest as his aura swelled. The red energy around him tightened, compressing until it clung to him like a second skin. His flesh darkened, taking on the color and sheen of obsidian.

[Amplification]

In the blink of an eye, he lunged. The sheer force of his movement liquefied the air, shards of crystallized vapor scattering in his wake.

Vivi didn’t retreat, she met his incoming strike with her own blazing fist.

Kaede spoke casually, as if the chamber wasn’t trembling from the clash of two titanic forces. "Fun fact, back in the day, Mii was one of the very few people capable of killing me in battle. So… this is going to be a very tough fight for you."

Vivi's punch was overpowered, but she twisted at the last instant, narrowly avoiding Legia’s crushing fist. She spun with the momentum, her leg whipping around to catch him under the jaw.

The King of Giants staggered a step, his head snapping back, but his recovery was instantaneous. His massive hand shot out, clamping over Vivi’s face like an iron vice.

"I told you," Legia rumbled, voice dripping with menace, "overconfidence would be your undoing."

Kaede’s instincts screamed a warning. Something was wrong, very wrong. She moved to intervene, but the moment had already passed.

[Black Hole]

The world seemed to lurch into slow motion. A pinprick of pure darkness bloomed within the center of Vivi’s skull, so small, yet so impossibly heavy that space itself trembled around it.

The effect was immediate. The dot swelled, dragging reality into its center. Vivi’s head collapsed inward, space and flame folding in on themselves with a sickening distortion before vanishing into the void. Her neck followed, spiraling away as if being unwound from existence.

In seconds, her entire form was gone, swallowed whole by a marble-sized sphere of absolute nothingness. The black hole pulsed once, then winked out of sight, leaving only silence.

Kaede stood frozen, shock etched across her face. "Wha..."

"Now do you see?" Legia’s voice rumbled through the chamber as he turned toward Kaede. Behind him, the black hole swelled, its edges rippling like liquid night. "This is the true power of a Monarch."

Kaede’s eyes trembled, tears threatening to spill as her fists clenched so tightly her knuckles whitened. "You…"

Before she could move, a jagged spark of black lightning leapt from the black hole, splitting the air with a sound like tearing metal. Legia’s head snapped toward it, a flicker of unease crossing his features.

"That’s… not possible," he muttered.

From within the churning void, a hand shot out, slender, familiar, fingers curling into the empty air as if gripping the fabric of reality itself. The hand strained, pulling, and another followed, grasping the other side.

With a wrench that made space itself scream, Vivi hauled herself free, tearing open the black hole’s event horizon. Shards of fractured light and shadow rained from the wound in reality, black and red lightning crackling wildly around her.

Legia instinctively stepped back, his towering frame tense.

Kaede’s voice was nearly lost beneath the roar of unstable energy, her grin wide and unshaken. "You’re insane."

The black hole shuddered violently behind Vivi, spitting sparks like the dying heart of a star.

"As if," Vivi laughed, her voice crackling with residual energy. "I doubt that would’ve even made you flinch."

She reached back into the air, fingers closing around the unstable sphere of darkness, and lifted it as though it weighed nothing. The black hole twisted and warped in her grasp, its surface swallowing the light around it.

"Here," she said, tossing it casually toward Kaede. "Bottom’s up."

Kaede caught the sphere of condensed annihilation without hesitation and popped it into her mouth as if it were nothing more than candy. She exhaled slowly, the faint shimmer of absorbed power dancing over her skin.

"You scared me half to death," Kaede admitted, her voice low. "I thought I’d lost you."

"I'm not going anywhere, Maple," Vivi said, her eyes softening for a moment as she offered a faint smile.

Then she turned back to Legia, her expression hardening. "Now, do you wanna keep commentating the fight? Because right now, I'm pretty pissed off."

Kaede’s hair shimmered into a radiant golden blonde, her own smirk forming. "Well, the deal was he’d fight both of us, after all."

[Loving Sacrifice]

A golden ring of light rippled outward from Kaede’s feet, flooding the entire chamber with its warm yet oppressive glow.

Legia’s eyes narrowed at this unfamiliar transformation. He took a single step forward, only to stumble as if the ground itself had betrayed him.

[Commander’s Authority]

Kaede clenched her fist, forcing Legia to crash to his knees.

Vivi didn’t waste a second, she drove an uppercut square into the King of Giants’ jaw with enough force to rattle the chamber.

Before he could recover, Kaede appeared behind him, slamming her heel into the back of his skull, sending his head snapping forward, right into a spinning back kick from Vivi that smashed into his throat.

Legia tried to rise, but Kaede’s precise kick to the back of his knee sent him down again, just in time for Vivi to deliver another punishing uppercut.

This time, Legia caught her by the head with one massive hand, only for Vivi to remain completely unmoved. A sharp crack rang out as the bones in his hand snapped in the wrong direction.

Vivi drove her knee upward into Legia’s jaw, the sharp crack of bone echoing through the chamber. He staggered back, snarling, and whipped around, slamming his other fist into Kaede’s cheek.

[Devour]

The hand that struck her shimmered and vanished into nothingness, leaving Legia wide open. Kaede seized the moment, stepping in and driving a devastating punch deep into his gut.

"Fight back!" Vivi barked, her voice cutting through the din as she kicked the back of his leg, forcing the King of Giants to drop to one knee.

"Come on! Fight back!" Vivi yelled again, as Kaede followed up with a crushing downward hammer blow to his face, snapping his head forward.

"Fight back, bitch!"

The two moved like a machine, Vivi striking from one side, Kaede from the other, passing Legia back and forth like he was nothing more than a battered training dummy. Every attack he attempted was shut down instantly, punished with another bone-rattling counterstrike.

"C'mon!" Vivi shouted, another kick sending him stumbling. "Fight back!"

"Enough!" Legia roared, his voice shaking the air.

His form began to swell, muscles and armor-like skin expanding at an alarming rate.

[Spiritual Manifestation]

He grew, and grew, until his titanic frame dwarfed the chamber itself. His head smashed clean through the ceiling, sending a rain of stone and dust downward. The cracks in the dungeon’s walls deepened, spiderwebbing outward until...

Smash!

The dungeon ruptured violently, its structure collapsing in an earth-shattering explosion. Kaede, Vivi, and the massive form of Legia were hurled into a dark, endless void where chunks of shattered dungeon drifted aimlessly like debris in space.

Kaede and Vivi landed hard on one of the larger floating fragments, the void around them eerily silent except for the distant rumble of collapsing stone.

They looked up at Legia’s transformed state, and the scale was staggering. He now towered thousands of meters high, a living colossus so massive he could stand upon the Earth and be visible from the Moon.

Vivi let out an amused chuckle. “You know, Maple… apart from the part where I died a moment ago, I’m actually having fun with this. We should go on more dates like this.”

“D Dates!?” Kaede sputtered, nearly tripping over her own feet. “What are you even talking about?”

Vivi only laughed, stepping off the floating chunk of rock beneath them. Massive wings of crimson and sapphire fire burst from her back, unfurling like banners of living flame.

With a cry that shook the void, a phoenix descended into the world of nothingness at Vivi’s call, its body a searing blaze, hundreds of meters from beak to tail, with a wingspan stretching over a thousand meters.

Even so, the fiery creature was still dwarfed by Legia, standing barely a third of his immense height.

Perched atop the phoenix’s crown, Vivi narrowed her eyes toward the towering Monarch. “Maybe I should take her on an actual date,” she murmured.

Legia noticed her approach and swung his colossal fist toward her, so vast it blotted out her entire view. The void itself quaked under the force of the incoming blow.

Before it could reach her, an equally massive, clawed hand shot out from the darkness and caught Legia’s fist in an unyielding grip.

Vivi’s lips curled into a knowing smile as the void thundered with a roar that could shatter stars. From the darkness, a second giant emerged, six glowing eyes burning like suns, four titanic arms flexing with primal power.

[Atrocity]