Everything collapsed into motion.
No warning was announced.
No time to wait.
Just breath.
More like panting.
Four descended in perfect silence.
His spine-blade, an impossible weapon forged from the vertebrae of a long-dead relic god, pulsed with light that wasn't light. Its edge shimmered so thin it cut through sound, and every swing arrived late to the ear, as if space itself lagged behind its presence.
Lanz rose to meet him.
Behind him, root-wings bloomed, not soft, plantlike tendrils, but crystalline constructs. Each root sharpened to fractal points, refracting ambient energy into shifting arrays. They weren't just wings. They were counterweights, allowing Lanz to pivot and launch, mid-air, like he possessed his own personal gravity field.
First clash.
It didn't sound like metal.
It sounded like glass inhaling, a fracture in reverse.
Lanz caught the descending blade with the back of his gauntlet, redirecting, not resisting.
Root-wings curved around him like a closing book.
One angled down.
One angled up.
With a twist of his torso, Lanz spun in-place, transferring Four's momentum into a tight rotational flick that pushed the blade wide.
"Sync registered. Power ratio: 1.4 to 1.1. Anomaly adapting."
Four's voice came from his chest, a disembodied, external analysis. Less like speech, more like a system report.
Lanz pressed the advantage.
A root from his left shoulder snapped forward like a spear, clean, fast, vicious.
Four slid back across the dirt, armored feet carving trenches.
No emotion. No hesitation.
He leapt.
Mid-air flip. Blade spinning in a perfect arc.
One clean slice—
SHHK—
The root was cleaved in half.
"Then I'll adapt, too."
With a flick of his arm, the spine-blade split, hinges unfolding silently.
Two thinner arcs took shape, each with an internal pulse, beating out of sync. Dual-format. Multi-threaded.
"Dual-format combat. Let's sync."
Lanz didn't reply. He didn't need to.
The roots on his back reconfigured instantly, snapping into a forward guard, layered plates like an insect's shell. His stance lowered. Knees bent. Breath shallow.
Four blurred forward.
His movement was impossible to track, twin blades weaving into spiral patterns, each attack covering the other's blind spot. He struck from two angles at once, left sweeping low, right stabbing high.
Lanz dodged the first, shifting his upper body sideways, but his rear root caught on a buried stone.
Balance faltered.
Four saw it. Capitalized.
Right blade arcing up, clean toward Lanz's throat—
Too fast.
CLANG
A side-root shot up in a violent parry, just in time. The blade locked against the flat of it, sparks showering in slow-motion.
The impact threw Lanz off balance.
He dropped, kicked off a root, and used the momentum to somersault backward. Landed in a crouch, dust pluming around him.
Pain flared in his ribs.
He felt the edge, not a cut, but the near-memory of one.
He adjusted his breathing. Controlled it. Focused again.
Four didn't wait.
He shifted stance, lower, more grounded.
Twin blades spun in opposite directions, like twin gyroscopes pulling gravity. He darted in again, sweeping in wide, then reversing direction mid-swing in a whiplash arc.
Lanz leapt up.
A root extended down mid-air and yanked him sideways, avoiding the first blade. But the second came vertically, almost predicting the evasion.
It scratched his cheek. Clean line. No blood.
Yet.
Lanz twisted, forced a root to wrap his waist, and sling-shot himself back toward Four.
The two collided again—
Root versus blade.
Momentum versus calculation.
Every second was a math problem with life-and-death stakes.
Every movement had three purposes: to strike, to feint, to survive.
Four's blades curved unnaturally mid-swing. Arc lines that bent into false paths before snapping back with violent precision. The air behind them screamed from the vacuum trails.
Lanz met the storm with sharp angles, roots adjusting per impact, reading every strike like a tactile memory.
It was beautiful.
Violent. Precise. A battle between beings who no longer obeyed physics.
Lanz's roots grew, split, turned, retracted.
Four's blades spun, fused, separated, curved like falling stars.
They danced across the battlefield, across shattered trees, cracked stone, ruined earth. Each movement born of insight and instinct sharpened to lethal degrees.
A blade nearly took Lanz's leg.
A root nearly impaled Four's heart.
Each survived by nanoseconds.
Lanz slid under a horizontal cut and let his winged roots drag across the dirt, catching debris and using it to launch a projectile arc of compressed matter.
Four sliced through it with a backhand.
But that was the trap.
A secondary root shot upward behind the debris, aiming for his spine—
—Caught.
Four's left blade twisted in reverse, catching the root just before contact. It shattered on impact, but forced him back.
Lanz was already moving. He hit the ground running, roots extending behind like wings of light.
Four matched him.
They ran parallel, then clashed again mid-stride. Each blow louder now. Sharper. Closer to breaking something important.
Then it happened.
Four adjusted his stance.
He slid back two paces, both blades hovering like wings, and spoke, not to Lanz, but to the air.
"...Very well," he said, eyes catching the gleam of dusklight through the trees.
"Let's test the full sync."
Something flew by, barely visible with Lanz's peripheral vision.
It was One.
Four shot into the air.
The four Chainborn rose to meet, converging mid-sky.
They hovered.
Watching silently.
"Full sync. Chainbreaker Protocol. Now."
They clasped hands.
Light surged between them. Not just raw power, but orders, intent, something deeper. Each of their bodies began to shift, pulling apart and reshaping.
One's wires extended outward, curling around the group like binding thread.
Two's threads pulsed with red light, bleeding at the edges.
Three and Four brought their weapons together, forging a single, massive structure between them.
And then—
The sky cracked with a shockwave.
They hit the ground as one, no longer four.
A single, towering form stood in their place. Twelve feet tall. Covered in shattered chainmail. Faces flickered across its surface, phasing in and out like echoes trying to scream.
"I am Syncbreaker. I carry the will of protocol. Anomaly Lanz, prepare for deletion."
Lanz stood firm.
The light at his feet flared, crawling up his body like fire through roots.
"Let's see what happens when the system hits something it can't process."
End of Chapter 23.