Sun and Moon 2
The world was turned upside down in the blink of an eye.
What was once a desperate battlefield, filled with mud, destruction and fear, now looked like the scene of a divine play. Before Arcadio could process the question, Chia raised a hand. There was no chanting or dramatic gestures, just absolute will.
The silver light surrounding Esmeralda expanded, enveloping them both, the girl and Arcadio, in a perfect sphere.
-Stay here
The sphere rose gently, drifting away from the corrupted ground, floating like a mercury bubble that ignored gravity.
Sue and Chia did not wait. Without needing to propel themselves, they both shot into the night sky. Sue led the charge with her fist wrapped in a miniature solar corona, a compressed nuclear reactor in her hand, while Chia followed close behind, wielding with lethal elegance a scythe of lunar light that left a silvery trail in the air. They did not fly like birds or planes; they ascended as if the sky were their natural territory and the earth only a passing visit.
Below, El Silbón roared. But it was not the sound of a predator; it was the shriek of something that, for the first time in centuries, did not understand what was happening.
-Get down!
The mountain of bones convulsed. From its back, thousands of ribs and femurs shot out like ballistic missiles. A rain of chalky death designed to pierce steel and rock.
Sue didn't even look down. She simply glowed.
Her golden aura expanded three feet around her body. When the bone projectiles entered that space, they did not collide. They disintegrated before the heat of his solar corona. They disappeared before they touched his skin, turned to stardust by an overwhelming temperature.
Chia, for her part, danced through the rain of death. With fluid movements, her scythe of lunar light cut not matter, but the inertia of the attacks. The bones heading toward her stopped dead in their tracks, frozen in mid-air by her silvery reflection, and then fell helplessly, as if they had forgotten their purpose.
-Is that all?
The Whistler, enraged by the mockery, activated his primary authority.
THE LAW OF DISTANCE: ZERO.
The space was deformed. The monster tried to eliminate the hundreds of meters that separated them. It tried to bring them within reach, or bring its claws to their throats instantly. Reality folded like crumpled paper... but they didn't move.
The spatial distortion crashed into them and slipped.
-You don't understand
The Law of Distance tried to collapse the space between them and the monster, but Chia acted at the precise instant. With a graceful gesture, she deployed multiple barriers of lunar light that intercepted the spatial distortion, fragmenting it into thousands of harmless echoes that dissipated like reflections on water.
The Whistler, now panicked at seeing his authority so easily neutralized, changed tactics. If he could not reach them, he would extinguish them.
-SUPPRESSION LAW
A gray shockwave, the color of oblivion and mediocrity, expanded from the monster. It was the power it had used to weaken the Gifted, to extinguish Sue's flames and Chia's shadows before. A metaphysical command that dictated, "Your power does not exist."
The wave hit Sue and Chia squarely.
And nothing happened.
The golden glow didn't flicker. The silver glow didn't dull. They were like two headlights in the middle of a fog storm; the fog could surround them, but it couldn't tell them to stop being light.
-Were you really trying to turn off the light of the stars? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?
Desperate, El Silbón played his last card. The cruelest.
-THE LAWOF DOOM.
The air became heavy, unbreathable. A crushing psychological and spiritual pressure fell upon them. It was the weight of all the sins, of all the deaths, a gravity designed to crush the soul and force the victim to kneel and accept his end.
Arcadius, inside the sphere, felt a fraction of that power and had to clutch his chest, feeling his heart stop.
But above...
Sue and Chia stopped at the highest point of their ascent. The full moon was behind Chia. Although unseen, the sun's presence was felt behind Sue.
They looked down at the grotesque mountain of bones.
-Doom?
For the first time, The Whistler felt something he had always inflicted, but never experienced.
It felt small.
Sue snapped her fingers, and the sound resounded like joyous thunder.
-Hey, Arcadio! Esmeralda!
he shouted, waving from the air with a nonchalance that bordered on insanity.
-Are you ready for the fireworks show?
The Whistler, blind with rage, opened its maw and vomited a torrent of pure necrotic energy. It was an attack designed to rot flesh and wither the earth for miles around.
Sue yawned.
Literally yawned, covering her mouth with one hand as she flung a small sphere of golden light toward the deadly torrent with the other. Upon contact, the Whistle's attack didn't explode; it transformed. The black energy broke apart into thousands of colored sparks: red, blue, green and gold, which burst into the sky forming figures of rabbits and flowers.
-Woooow!
exclaimed Esmeralda, sticking her hands and nose to the transparent wall of her bubble. Her eyes were shining, no longer reflecting the abyss of death, but the lights of a carnival.
-Look at that! Arcadio, look!
Arcadio looked, yes, but with the expression of someone who thinks he has lost his sanity.
-What the hell...?
stammered the veteran
-He turned a Breath of Rot into... pyrotechnics?
Chia was not far behind. She appeared behind the monster's gigantic head, gently touching its bony shoulder (or whatever functioned as a shoulder in that mass of corpses).
-You bring it
-He whispered in the monster's ear.
The Whistler spun with terrifying speed, launching a claw capable of cutting mountains. But Chia was no longer there. She was sitting on one of the monster's horns, swinging her legs like a child on a swing.
-Very slow, Mr. Bones
Chia hummed
-For a legendary nightmare, you have the reflexes of a dead turtle.
The monster howled, a sound that mixed fury and humiliation, and released waves of "Pure Fear" in all directions. But Chia reached out her hand and touched the invisible waves.
Pling. Plong. Twing.
The waves of fear turned into giant soap bubbles that bounced off each other emitting musical sounds, as if someone was playing a giant xylophone.
Esmeralda burst out laughing. The sound, crystalline and full of life, cut through the stale air of the battlefield. It was a harder blow to the Whistler than any sword.
-Again! Make it sound again!
cried the girl, jumping in her floating VIP seat, clapping her hands with delight.
-Damn them!
roared The Whistler, trying to grab Chia, but hitting himself in the head as she vanished in a beam of moonlight.
-I'm the end! I'm the Doom! Fear me!
Sue swooped down, grabbed one of the monster's giant arms and, using the beast's own inertia, forced it to dance.
One, two, cha-cha-cha-cha!
Sue counted, moving the hundred-meter colossus as if it were a rag doll.
-Come on, put your heart into it! Esmeralda is watching!
The Whistler tripped over his own feet (made up of thousands of skeletons) and fell flat on his face, raising a cloud of povo.
-Hahahahahaha!
Esmeralda was laughing so hard she had to hold her stomach. The tears in her eyes were no longer tears of sadness.
-He looks like a clumsy clown! Look how he falls!
Arcadio ran a hand over his face, feeling reality slipping away.
-They're... they're playing with him!
he muttered, a mixture of horror and hysterical relief in his voice.
-They're humiliating a Law of the World to entertain a child.
The Whistler stood up, trembling. Not from fear, but from a rage so dense that the air around him began to boil. But every time he tried to attack, every time he tried to summon his power, one of them interrupted him with a joke. They would bind his tentacles with ribbons of light, paint energy whiskers on his cadaverous face, or use him as a trampoline.
The great predator, the horror of stories, had been reduced to a circus attraction.
Sue and Chia paused for a moment in mid-air, flanking the stunned monster. They both looked up at the bubble where Esmeralda was laughing and pointing.
-Mission accomplished, phase one: "The Fun Adventure!"
Sue said, winking at her sister, her body glowing with the warmth of a summer sun.
-Watching her laugh is worth the energy expenditure.
agreed Chia, her smile soft as moonlight.
-But I don't think Mr. Bones wants to play anymore.
The Whistler looked at them, panting (metaphorically), his aura shrunken and pathetic.
-Who... are... you? you?
he asked, his voice breaking.
Sue and Chia looked at each other and smiled.
-We're just the tour guides
they said in unison.
However, the air changed.
Chia's smile faltered for a split second. Her silver eyes lifted to the moon and she noticed something no one else could have seen: the moon seemed... smaller. A millimeter farther away. A degree dimmer.
-She's adjusting
Chia whispered, and the amusement evaporated from her voice.
-He's using the Law of Distance in the sky itself. He's trying to push the Moon out of my conceptual range.
Sue stopped dancing. Her fire condensed, losing the flamboyance and gaining in lethal intensity.
-If he manages to isolate you, my sun won't be enough to sustain the two of us for long," Sue said, analyzing the monster.
Sue said, analyzing the monster coolly.
-It's a plague. The longer it exists, the more it rewrites the rules in its favor.
The Whistler, noticing that the game was over, stopped roaring. Its silence was worse. The mountain of bones stopped moving erratically and began to compact. The hundreds of thousands of corpses coalesced, not into a humanoid form, but into a dense, dark, pulsating sphere of pure denial.
-LAWOF DOOM: WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
said the monster's voice, now echoing from everywhere and nowhere at once.
-IAM THE JUDGMENT. AND JUDGMENT IS INEVITABLE.
The ground shook. The laws of physics began to groan under the weight of that statement. The Whistler was using the Doom not to attack their minds, but to anchor its own existence, becoming a fixed, immovable point in reality. If they didn't destroy it now, they would probably never have that chance again.
Sue and Chia looked at each other. There was no need for words. They had shared the same soul, the same pain and the same hope.
They held hands.
Sue's gold and Chia's silver began to swirl, mingling in a spiral that defied sight. It was neither daylight nor nightlight. It was the exact moment where the two meet.
Twilight.
-Arcadius
Sue said, her voice sounding double.
-Cover Esmeralda's eyes. This is going to glow.
Downstairs, Arcadio obeyed instinctively, hugging the girl and protecting her against his chest, his back to the sky.
-FUSIONOF ORIGIN: ETERNAL ECLIPSE
Sue and Chia uttered in unison.
They hurtled downward as a single meteor.
The Whistler reacted. The sphere of bones opened, unfurling millions of hands, millions of screams. But he did not use a new law. He used the ultimate combination of his three authorities.
-ABSOLUTE SUPPRESSION!
shouted the monster, as it applied Distance to move the impact away from its core.
The impact was silent at first.
The two-colored light slammed into the wall of death. For a second, it seemed that the attack would stop. The Whistle Suppression was devouring the energy of the attack, dulling the fire and obscuring the reflection, while the Doom kept its body hard as a black diamond.
Sue's flames licked at the bones, but were extinguished. Chia's reflections bounced.
-That's too much suppression!
gasped Chia, blood gushing from her nose.
The Whistler laughed, a vibration that shook his organs. The barrier of corpses began to envelop them, swallowing the light. Darkness was winning. Hopelessness was winning, as it always did in this broken world.
But then, Sue looked down through the chaos. She saw the silver bubble. She saw Arcadio protecting the girl. And she remembered Esmeralda's laughter. She remembered why they were fighting. It wasn't for power. It wasn't for glory.
It was so a little girl could see fireworks instead of monsters.
-Chia
Chia understood.
It wasn't a battle of physics. It was a battle of meanings. The Whistle was static death. They were change. They were tomorrow.
-AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!
The scream from both was not of pain, but of absolute release.
The spiral of light changed. It stopped trying to pierce and began to.... embrace. The gold and silver expanded, enveloping the darkness, accepting it and then, transcending it.
The Whistling barrier did not break; it dissolved.
The bones turned to dust. Condemnation faced the one thing that always defeats it: forgiveness, the passage of time, the cycle of the sun and moon. Suppression failed because you cannot suppress something that does not fight, but illuminates.
The combined beam pierced the core of the Whistle.
The monster opened its eyes (the thousands it had) in an expression of utter disbelief. It looked at the hole in its center, a void where a light shone that did not burn, but purified.
-Beautiful... light....
whispered the monster's collective consciousness.
And then, The Whistle exploded.
There was no explosion of blood. Just a shockwave of light that swept through the forest, cleansing the miasma, erasing the fear and leaving, for the first time in years, a silence of absolute peace.
