final battle 2

El Silbón wasted no time.

 

His whistle camThe Whistle wasted no time.

 

His whistle changed.

 

It was not simply louder. It became denser, as if the sound had taken on weight. Waves materialized in the air in curving lines, like invisible whips that bent with inhuman precision.

 

Then, without any pause, he activated his Law.

 

Law of Suppression.

 

The pressure fell on all three at the same time.

 

Arcadio felt it like a guillotine on the nervous system. It was not pain. It was reduction. A deliberate compression of what one could do.

 

It was not total, however. Arcadio calculated the drop immediately: it wasn't a complete override, it was about sixty percent. That meant two things: first, that he could still move his power; second, that the most destructive techniques were, for now, off the board.

 

Sue's golden fire flickered and dimmed, like a torch that had been robbed of air, but it did not go out. In her hands, the flames still danced. More restrained, but steady.

 

Chia's darkness thinned a little. The "body" of his shadow lost thickness, but the silvery barriers he had already summoned were still there, translucent and glowing, as if the Suppression had difficulty biting through them at all.

 

That reaction gave Arcadius information.

 

If the Whistle Suppression really was absolute, everything would have collapsed just the same.

 

But it didn't.

 

For the first time, Arcadius saw genuine surprise on the Whistler's face.

 

His sunken eyes barely opened.

 

The smirk faltered.

 

-How...?

 

The raspy voice sounded, for a moment, more human.

 

-My Suppression should have narrowed them down further.

 

There was no response.

 

Because the exchange of words, in a fight of that level, was a luxury. And the three were already moving.

 

Chia did not attack immediately. First he needed data: if they were to survive, they had to know what the Whistle could do before expending their main resources. So he erected a barrier; three silver barriers materialized around the Whistle, forming a perfect triangle three meters on each side. It was not a defense: it was a testing instrument.

 

Sue understood the intent instantly and corrected the attack she had planned. She planted it downward. She rested her hands on the ground just after the barriers appeared and just before the Whistle could react. Beneath her feet, the ground lit up with golden lines that branched like veins; Sue traced a layered pattern of subterranean ignition, as if she were building a combustible mixture within the substrate.

 

Then it detonated. Golden fire erupted from beneath the earth, but not as an open flame: it was a sudden expansion of superheated gases, a confined thermal wave. Silver barriers sealed the volume, turning the triangle into a combustion chamber. A furnace. The air inside became opaque with turbulence and glowing particles. The temperature did not rise "bit by bit"; it rose in steps, like an enthalpy jump. Arcadius felt it on his skin as infrared radiation. It was not just heat by contact: it was transfer by convection and, worse, by thermal radiation; the interior was emitting energy like a red-hot wall, seeking to burn even without touching.

 

The earth around the barrier began to heat up. The concrete creaked. The moisture in the subsoil boiled. The air outside rippled from the temperature difference, creating a visible distortion, like a mirage. Chia held the enclosure steady, watching: she wanted to see if and, more importantly, how the Whistler would break through the barrier.

 

The dust was slow to settle. Suspended particles floated in the air like ash after an eruption. The light from the street lamps, the few that still worked, pierced the haze with diffuse, opaque beams.

 

Arcadio squinted. Sue kept her guard up. Chia was breathing hard, but she didn't look away from the debris.

 

Then, when the dust finally cleared sufficiently, they saw him. The Whistler was standing. As if nothing had happened.

 

The fractures in his skull were closing with wet clicks. Broken bones realigned under withered skin. Torn flesh wove itself back together, fiber by fiber, as if time ran backwards just for him. The burns on his face and shoulders, the ones Sue had left with her most concentrated fire, were fading. The scorched skin was peeling off in black flakes and new flesh was emerging underneath, pale and taut. Even the charred groove in his collarbone filled in.

 

The Whistler rolled his shoulders. He stretched his neck with a dry crunch. And smiled.

 

-Was that all?

 

His raspy voice echoed down the alley like a slurred whistle.

 

Sue clenched her fists. The halo of light around her body flickered.

 

The Whistler tensed his muscles. He activated his Law of Distance again. But this time he didn't use it to dodge. He used it to break.

 

The space between him and Chia's barrier compressed violently. Two points that were not supposed to touch collided. The silver barrier crackled. Then it fractured like glass under pressure. Fragments scattered in all directions.

 

Chia felt the impact like a punch to the stomach. Her Origin trembled.

 

The Whistler did not lose momentum. The distance between him and Chia contracted in the blink of an eye. He appeared in front of her. No transition. No intermediate steps. As if space had simply delivered him where he wanted to be.

 

His fist was already coming down. Straight to the skull. Chia barely had time to register the threat. But he had no time to dodge. The blow was going to connect.

 

Then a golden flare erupted from the side. It was a concentrated bolt of fire. Sue had thrown it with everything, fearing she would lose chia if she held back just a little. The air hissed from the instantaneous combustion.

 

The Whistler sensed something he hadn't felt in a long time. Real danger. His instinct kicked in before his reasoning. He dropped backward.

 

The flare passed inches from his face. So close that the heat seared his skin. The smell of burning flesh filled the air.

 

The Whistler landed in a crouch. His eyes riveted on Sue.

 

Sue and Arcadio gave him no leeway. Arcadius threw the wind like a wedge, a compressed gust that sought to push him off his axis and force him to make a mechanical error. At the same time, Sue condensed his light and fire into a single stable form: a golden spear, straight and glowing, as if he had solidified the energy into a penetrating vector. The tip sizzled, ionizing the air around it, and Sue hurled it straight at the Whistler's center of mass. It was a double attack: lateral pressure with wind, frontal piercing with fire and light.

 

Then the Whistle activated the Law again: Distance.

 

Space distorted and Arcadio instantly lost reference; the separation between his ankles and the pavement stretched like rubber. He took a step and his foot landed where it shouldn't have, as if he had stepped on an invisible step, and he lost his balance.

 

Sue's spear curved its trajectory. The spear's vector swerved as if it had hit an invisible gradient; the spear spun in mid-flight and embedded itself in a house to the side. There was a golden flash and a small, contained explosion: a pressure wave that burst glass and kicked up dust and splinters.

 

Yet that was exactly what Chia was expecting.

 

Chia had seen it once before: when the Whistler broke its barrier with the Law of Distance, it didn't "hit" the barrier. It compressed the space between two surfaces until it forced a collision of coordinates. That meant that its strength was not brute force, but the absence of friction: if the space was shortened, everything slid toward the new point as if the world had been rewritten.

 

So Chia adjusted the barrier. He didn't harden it. He made it sticky.

 

He changed the texture of the barrier to something viscous, almost organic, like a high surface energy adhesive. The idea was simple: if the Whistler was going to "pull" distance like a rope, she would give him a rope that sticks to his hands. In practical terms, she turned the inside of the barrier into a viscoelastic layer: the faster the space tried to move, the more it behaved like a solid. A non-Newtonian material.

 

When he felt the peak of the Law - that instant when the air stretched and the world lost scale - Chia clenched his fist.

 

The barriers contracted violently, but they did not close over the Whistler's body:

 

they closed over the distorted space. In other words, Chia forced the Distance to "pass" through a medium with friction, to collide against an edge it could not ignore. The manipulated space collided with the silvery structures; reality crackled and the sound made ears bleed.

 

The Whistler grunted and cancelled its Act before the distortion tore it apart.

 

Taking advantage of that instant that the Whistler was a little dazed by the distortion of space.

 

That microdisregard, that split second in which his posture changed.

 

Arcadio moved.

 

He did not run. He didn't jump. He channeled all the wind he could muster through Origin and turned it into displacement. The air compressed beneath his feet like an invisible piston; a controlled overpressure that launched him forward with a speed imperceptible to the human eye. The trajectory was not straight: Arcadius curved it to enter the Whistler's blind spot behind his shoulder, where the reading angle was worst.

 

It appeared behind.

 

And he struck.

 

Not with a bare fist.

 

With a sphere of wind compressed to the extreme, a pressure core enclosed by its own circulation. At the instant of impact, the sphere released its energy like a directed shockwave. The Whistler shot out.

 

It crashed into a house.

 

The wall gave way.

 

Tiles and dust flew off.

 

Before it could steady itself, Sue appeared and raised her hand.

 

This time it wasn't a flare.

 

It was a beam.

 

Sue combined her light with the golden fire to form a beam of coherent energy. The column pierced the air with a sharp hum, disintegrating everything in its path: splinters, glass, dust, even smoke was swept away as if matter had to decide whether it existed or not.

 

The Whistler dodged it using the law of distance.

 

Chia appeared where the beam was not.

 

It froze the area.

 

The ice sprouted in layers, not as a single wall, but as a volume: soil, air, debris, all sealed in a mass that sought to immobilize it completely. And within that cold, Chia's darkness entered like a second pressure, attacking from within, like filaments seeking to cut through everything in its path.

 

The Whistler responded with more force.

 

Suppression.

 

The pressure dropped like a slab. The ice weakened. It did not melt, but it lost cohesion, as if its crystalline structure had been "quenched" at the level of principle.

 

And with the ice weakened, the Whistler activated Distance again. To get out.

 

The distance between it and the edge of the ice shrank to zero and the monster appeared outside as if it had stepped through an invisible crack.

 

He was greeted by a blast.

 

Arcadius had already prepared it: wind in the form of a scythe, a curved edge that went straight for the neck, a clean execution.

 

But the Whistler pulled the Law again.

 

The Distance drove the blade through his neck without touching him.

 

It was not intangibility.

 

It was a geometric correction of space.

 

Arcadius' blade was a pressure front: accelerated, compressed air moving along a steady trajectory. But the Law of Distance did not "push" the Whistler's body. It altered the local mapping between coordinates and physical volume. For a fraction of a second, the space around the neck underwent a shear: the set of points where the trachea should have been shifted laterally by a few centimeters, without the Whistler needing to travel that distance as a normal movement.

 

Thus, the scythe crossed a line that seemed to go through the neck, but in reality it went through a volume that remained empty. It was like making two transparent layers slide over each other: the line remains straight on one layer, while the "real" object remained on the other.

 

His whistling changed to a higher pitched tone.

 

-Condemnation.

The existential weight fell on all three of them. But this time it was different. It wasn't simply crushing. It was judgment. Arcadio felt memories that were not his own brush against his mind. Footsteps in mud. A rope dragging. A hissing in the darkness. Sue trembled. Chia gritted her teeth until they bled.

 

-No...

 

Sue said, refusing to give in to the psychic intrusion.

 

I won't let it define me.

 

Intense light emanated from her body, condensing into a glowing halo. The suffocating pressure of the Doom was immediately relieved; the purity of its energy not only illuminated, but burned away the evil influence.

 

-The light purifies even judgment

 

he sentenced.

 

The Whistler roared, frustrated by the resistance, and launched into the attack. This time it abandoned any caution; it was pure speed and violence. Chia reacted instantly, striking the ground with both palms. A massive wall of ice -five meters high by three meters thick- sprouted from the concrete directly in the monster's path, seeking to slow its advance with an impenetrable physical barrier.

 

But El Silbón did not stop. It ran straight at the ice wall, and just when it looked like it would crash, it let out a devastating hiss.

 

The wall didn't just shatter; it atomized in its path. The ice exploded outward, clearing a perfect tunnel through which El Silbón shot past, his speed not slowing for even a fraction of a second. He flew through the cloud of shrapnel like an arrow, as the remains of the barrier fell harmlessly at his back.

 

Taking advantage of the distraction, Sue materialized a golden fire harpoon the size of a pole and hurled it with lethal force, aiming straight for the chest.

 

The Whistler barely bowed. The weapon whizzed past her shoulder, grazing her collarbone just enough to leave a charred furrow in her dead flesh. Far from stopping, the creature seized the momentum of the spin, caught the harpoon with both hands in midair and drove it into the ground like a stake, rendering the attack useless. The fire was still burning, but he had already closed the distance. He was on Sue. A bony fist descended toward her head with the force of a pile driver.

 

A silver barrier materialized in time, but the impact created a shockwave so violent that windows exploded in a huge radius and the ground cracked beneath her feet. Sue felt her halo waver, not from lack of faith, but from the sudden lack of air.

 

Arcadius came in from the side with wind in his legs, throwing blow after blow in a desperate attempt to break through. But the Whistler always retreated half a step before contact; every time Arcadio thought he had it, the monster had already changed its axis, spinning like a leaf in the current. The Whistler smiled. It was no longer mockery. It was hunger.

 

Then he activated his three Laws at the same time: Suppression, Distance and Condemnation. The Suppression intensified while the Distance spiraled out of control: what was fifty meters away appeared at five, and what was close suddenly receded. The Whistle tugged at the Distance like a rope and Arcadius felt the world pull at his stomach. A distant alley came crashing down on him; it wasn't a jump, it was a spatial impact.

 

The air compressed and a wall "appeared" where it was not. Arcadio crashed and the concrete exploded, not by physical force, but because two places tried to occupy the same spot.

 

And then the Whistler attacked. It appeared in front of Arcadio. Arcadio raised his arm. The blow threw him. He felt the concrete sink into his back. A hot pang shot across his ribs.

 

-Arcadio!

 

Sue shouted.

 

Chia threw filaments of darkness to envelop the monster. The Whistler didn't break them. He let them take him. For a heartbeat it seemed trapped. Chia felt hope.

 

And then the monster pulled. It pulled so hard that Chia was swept away. The air cut her throat. The Whistler caught her by the neck.

 

-Weave well," he whispered.

 

he whispered.

 

-But nets are for fish.

 

Sue popped up her right side and reached out her hand. A burst of golden light erupted. It struck the Whistler's arm. The light burned. Not just flesh. The Whistler hissed and let go. Chia fell down coughing, but quickly took the opportunity to get some distance.

 

But the counterattack was immediate. The Whistler spun and kicked Sue in the abdomen. Sue went flying. She flew through the wall of an abandoned cafe. The place collapsed in on her.

 

There was silence. A second. Arcadio swallowed.

 

-Sue...

 

From the dust, a flash. A hand. Then the other. Sue stood up, covered in blood and dust. But her eyes were burning.

 

-I'm still here.

 

The Whistler cocked his head. Intrigued. Arcadius jumped onto a roof with a rush of wind. Not to run away. To change the board.

 

-Chia

 

he said.

 

- I need ten seconds.

 

-I don't have them

 

Chia answered.

 

And still she raised her hands.

 

But she didn't raise blind walls. Chia remembered the texture of the previous success, when he made his magic "sticky" against distortion. This time, he applied that principle to an entire structure.

 

Silver barriers emerged, but they were not rigid. They were membranes. A six-sided prism that enclosed the Whistler. A prison designed specifically for his Law: if he tried to shorten the distance to get through it, the barrier would react by becoming infinitely dense at that point. An Achilles paradox made magic.

 

The Whistler stopped. It touched the surface. He understood the trap instantly.

 

If he could not shorten the way out, then he would do the opposite. The Law of Distance is not unidirectional. It not only compresses; it also dilates.

 

The Whistler focused on the atomic structure of the barrier. On the infinitesimal space between the threads of silver and darkness. And he applied the Law.

 

He expanded the distance between the components of the wall. A microscopic pore stretched into a one-meter gap. He did not break the barrier; he simply made the space inside the barrier large enough to walk through.

 

He began to cross, walking through the "nothingness" that he himself had widened, invisible to the eye.

 

Sue watched the cage closely, trying to discern any suspicious movement. The Whistler was still inside, visible through the translucent walls of the barrier. But something didn't fit.

 

There was a strange sensation. A disturbance he couldn't see directly, but felt. Like when the air changes just before a storm.

 

Then he noticed it.

 

The light of his spheres, which he placed to illuminate the battle that night so he could see the silbon well, began to behave abnormally. Not all of them. Only those on the north side of the structure. Their beams curved subtly, as if something invisible was drawing them in.

 

Sue squinted. The Whistler was still inside the barrier. She could see it clearly. But the space outside the cage... was distorting.

 

-No...

 

she whispered.

 

He understood instantly. The monster wasn't trying to break through the barrier from the inside. It was manipulating the space outside it, creating an alternate path. The cage was still intact, but he was already building his way out on the outside.

 

-He's escaping!

 

Sue shouted

 

I can see the curvature of space outside!

 

-He's crossing it!

 

Sue shouted from the rubble.

 

Chia couldn't see where. To her, the barrier was still intact.

 

Sue understood the problem. They needed a reference. Something that couldn't be fooled by the invisibility of empty space.

 

Light.

 

Sue raised her hands and dozens of spheres of light, small and static, floated around the cage forming a perfect three-dimensional grid.

 

Light travels in a straight line. This is an absolute rule. Unless the space through which it travels changes.

 

The moment the Whistler dilated space to create its tunnel, the light beams from the spheres bent violently, sucked in by the expansion. The perfect grid warped, drawing a visual funnel in the empty air.

 

-Follow the curve, Chia!

 

Sue shouted

 

-Where the light bends!

 

The guidance was perfect. Chia saw the deformation in the web of light and reacted. He didn't attack the Whistler; he attacked the anomaly. It saturated with darkness the exact point where the light indicated that space had opened, forcing the barrier to fill in the artificial expansion.

 

The tunnel slammed shut, pushing the Whistler back toward the center of the cage.

 

Meanwhile, Arcadius took advantage of the containment. He began to compress the wind. It wasn't a gust. It was a spear. The air began to glow with a pale blue hue.

 

-Now!

 

he shouted.

 

Chia closed the circuit. Sue raised a wall of light for a second. Curtain. The Whistler hesitated. A flicker. Enough.

 

Arcadius threw the spear. The projectile fell like a meteor. The Whistler stepped back. But not completely. The wind blade tore off part of his left arm. It broke his right leg. He fell to his knees.

 

And still he laughed.

 

-They're cornering me

 

he said.

 

-Good.

 

The whistling rose to a pitch they had never heard before. A resonance that vibrated not in the air, but in the very metric of space.

 

Reality around them began to bend. Law of Distance, in massive mode.

 

The Whistler stopped trying to cross the Chia prison. He understood that the barrier reacted to movement, to inertia.

 

So he attacked its existence.

 

He applied his Law to the internal structure of the barrier. He reduced the distance between the atomic components of the barrier to absolute zero.

 

It was a flagrant violation of the Exclusion Principle.

 

Matter and energy cannot occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. By forcing the superposition of coordinates, the Whistler created an infinite degeneracy pressure within the walls of silver and darkness.

 

The barrier did not break; it collapsed at the fundamental level.

 

The links that held the barrier failed because the space necessary for them to exist was erased. The structure suffered a catastrophic failure and sublimated in an explosion of unstable particles, expelled from reality by the very physics that attempted to correct the paradox.

 

Free, the Whistler expanded the effect.

 

Space in a huge radius became distorted. Distant buildings seemed close. Straight streets curved. The Whistle closed its hand. The distance between two facades shrunk to nothing. Walls collided. Windows burst. A car was bent. Then he opened his hand. The distance loosened. Debris flew out like projectiles.

 

An invisible scar cut across the street toward them. Chia tried to raise a defense, but the metric distortion was too unstable to anchor anything solid.

 

-Don't let it separate us!

 

she shouted, opting to connect them with chains of darkness and barriers, flexible in the face of spatial chaos.

 

-If we let it grow... it will fold the town like paper.

 

The Whistler hit the ground. The shockwave, combined with the distortion, folded four city blocks. Metal twisting. Concrete pulverizing. The street became a maze. And in the midst of the chaos, the Whistle disappeared.

 

The whistle sounded everywhere. Arcadio spun around. Sue clenched her fists. Chia swallowed blood. One second. Two. Two seconds.

 

Then...

 

-Back.

 

Chia's voice was a whisper. Late by an instant.

 

The Whistler emerged from a fold of space behind Arcadio. As if from under a sheet.

 

But he didn't throw an ordinary punch.

 

He threw a fist into empty air and activated his Law.

 

He eliminated the distance between his fist and Arcadio's back.

 

The space separating them ceased to exist in a nanosecond. The fist did not travel; the impact was transferred instantaneously, without loss of force, compressing the air trapped between them until it became as hard as steel.

 

It was a blow without trajectory.

 

Arcadio did not receive a push; he felt his ribs and the space itself close over his lungs, collapsing them.

 

For an instant Arcadio saw his end.

 

Sue screamed. Her light exploded. No attack. Beacon. The brightness saturated the air. It blinded him long enough to interrupt his next attack.

 

Chia closed one cage another cage to contain the whistler, a different one seeing that his previous attempts failed. Twenty meters high. Thick walls. Frozen darkness reinforced with silver barriers. The Whistler was left inside. It hit a wall. It didn't come out. The cracks appeared. Yes. But they took time.

 

-Arcadio

 

Sue said

 

-I'm going to make something big. and I need your help to launch it.

 

Arcadio didn't turn around. He looked at the cage. Inside, the Whistler was trying to break the bonds that contained him through his Law of Distance.

 

-Even locked up...

 

murmured Arcadius.

 

-Even locked up

 

confirmed Chia.

 

-But I'm forcing him to expend energy.

 

His hands trembled. The veins stood out. The cage seemed to drink strength from him. Sue breathed. Once. Then another. Like someone preparing to dive.

 

And then she drained her energy. It wasn't gradual. It was a burst. His hands glowed. Pale gold. Intense gold. Blinding gold. A sphere of fire was born between his palms. Small. Then the size of a football. Then more. The air shivered with heat. The asphalt bubbled. Shadows cast hard. Arcadio felt the heat from afar.

 

-Sue...

 

-Don't stop

 

she said.

 

-I'm going to finish this.

 

The sphere grew. The size of a car. The size of a house. It roared like a second star. It lit up the town. The sky turned orange. Sue fell to her knees. Blood ran from her nose.

 

-Now

 

she whispered.

 

Arcadius raised his hands. The wind responded. It circled the sphere. Spiral. The wind did not extinguish the fire. It accelerated it. It fueled it. It forced it to spin. The sphere moved. Slowly. Then like a projectile. Arcadio roared. The wind hurled it toward the cage.

 

The Whistler looked up. For the first time, his smile faded.

 

The fireball collided with Chia's barrier. The barrier groaned. Metal. Gong broken. It resisted for an instant. And shattered. The cage disintegrated. The fire fell full on the Whistle. The explosion was immense. A golden flash consumed the street. The roar emptied the air from Arcadio's lungs.

 

The heat bit into his skin. The ground shook as if a titanic fist had struck the town. The ruins shook. Cracks opened. The wave of wind tore down signs. It overturned cars. It kicked up dust and ash. Arcadio took cover. Chia gritted her teeth. Sue barely held on.

 

Then came silence. Crackling. Debris settling. Ringing in the ears. In the center was a crater. Black. Smoky. Empty.

 

Arcadio moved forward.

 

-Did he...?

 

He didn't finish. Something moved on the edge. A shadow. A figure. The Whistler emerged from the smoke. Burned. Broken. But walking.

 

His laughter began as a whisper. Then it grew. High-pitched. Raucous. Not human.

 

-This...

 

said

 

- is just beginning.

 

And then the ground shook. Worse. The asphalt split open in jagged lines. Deep cracks opened with wet sounds. Hands emerged from them. Dozens. Hundreds. Rotting hands. Twisted fingers. Black fingernails. Arms crawling. Then bodies. Corpses. Recent. Old. Pieces.

 

All towards the Whistle. Like ants to their queen. They climbed. They melted. They tangled. Bones crunched. Flesh tore and reattached. The sound was endless. The Whistle remained in the center. Arms opened. And disappeared under the mass.

 

The mass grew. Three meters. Five. Ten. A monster with no definite shape rose. No head. Only accumulated skulls. Open jaws. No face. Just empty sockets looking in all directions.

 

Then the tentacles were born. Thick as trunks. Made of intertwined corpses. One. Two. Five. Eight. They moved with a life of their own. They crushed debris. They left a slimy trail. The smell of death filled the air.

 

Sue fell to her knees, holding back. Chia recoiled, wide-eyed.

 

-What...shit...is that...?

 

The mass finished forming. Nearly a hundred meters. Its shadow covered the street. And from somewhere inside the flesh and bone, the Whistler's voice echoed. Distorted. Multiplied. Like a thousand voices speaking.

 

-Now... let's play for real.