Landing across a mangled field after being blown away from the nuclear detonation of aether, Strife still held Faltha close, keeping him from further harm. Thorn flapped into view, wings glinting. "The hell was that? A finishing crescendo!?"
Around the empyrean crystal, shards of yellow began to coalesce. A humanoid body of topaz ice slowly formed around it—crystalline, faceless, and strange—using the gem as its core, like a heart resurrecting its own ghost.
"Looks more like an outro," Strife muttered. He dropped Faltha gently to the earth and summoned [Sigrid], his blade materializing into his right hand as the claw on his left arm retracted back into its gauntlet form. The sword remained sheathed, but ready.
"Yes! Third boss phase—let's go!" Thorn cried, ecstatic, his silver feathers sparking as Strife's [Sephiwrath] markings quietly glowed, edging into fifth gear, the hum subtle but dangerous.
[Skill: Sephiwrath — Inches the Sixth Gate Open]
[Stigma: Equal Correlation — Fades Its Restrictions]
The [Cadenza Note Empyrean] finished forming its hollow, crystalline shell and staggered forward. Its balance wavered. The humanoid body lurched, limbs unsure in the first moments of its rebirth.
Across the
[Queries of Medics, questions the anatomy?]
[Red Scaled Devastation, eagerly waits for the first strike]
[Supernatural Scientists Flag, fanatically writes down notes!]
Then the answer came.
[Regalius Breaker: Singing World — Dimension of Frequency!]
A surge of yellow aether swept outward, warping the landscape into a realm of radiant yellow crystal. Kilometres transformed into a mirrored reflection of a warm soundscape—a reality born of music.
Towers of yellow ice scraped the clouds where Idaten's shattered skyline once stood. The sound of everything—every breath, twitch, heartbeat—now had form and weight, echoing across the crystalline dimension.
"...That's Faltha's [Regalius Breaker]," Strife murmured, his voice slow with disbelief. "Thorn. The Empyrean copied all of his powers."
"Then watch yourself, princess," Thorn warned with a toothy grin in his beak. "This isn't a solo."
Each of Strife's movements now resonated—his grip on the sword, the drag of his boot, the rhythm of his breathing—causing subtle ripples of dark-yellow air, distorting space itself.
Cadenza rose to its full height, its crystal arms stretching out wide. It brought its legs together like a diver preparing to leap into another plane of existence.
[
[Raid Boss: Cadenza, the Great Orchestra of Finality]
Clapping its hands together, Cadenza unleashed colossal tsunamis of sound. They rippled forward like reality-breaking waves, their harmonics vast enough to drown planets, each cascading through the dimensions.
[Skill: Hollow Void — Enhances the Sheathed Blade!]
Strife's scabbard erupted with silver light. With a single slash upward, he split the approaching waves apart—a black void of a cut severing the catastrophe with silent finality.
But before he could recover—Cadenza was already upon him.
Twin crystal feet crashed into his chest like a meteorite. The impact sent Strife's armoured body rocketing backward, carving a trench in the radiant yellow ground as he tumbled for leagues across the transformed battlefield crashing through towers in the shapes of instruments launching detonating sound down on him.
Thorn dived down, shifting from a raven into a monstrous black wolf, and bit hard into Cadenza's crystalline arm—ripping it clean from its glimmering socket and scorching the landscape with a shockwave of ghostly fire. For a moment, the spectral wolf looked proud. Then the same arm he'd just torn off punched down with impossible force—crashing against Thorn's snout and crushing the shadowy beast into the frigid yellow floor.
Cadenza's severed limb flew back and reattached itself effortlessly as the topaz giant began to stride toward Strife once more—then stopped mid-step.
Its empty gaze scanned the far crater where Strife had once fallen. The impact mark was still there. But it was empty. And Faltha's unconscious body... was gone too.
A tremble passed through the air. "Uhhhhhhooo! Ooohhhuuuu!!!" Unintelligible hymns echoed from the faceless hole in Cadenza's crystalline head, sending chills through the gods watching from the 's stream. Horror crept through divine senses.
How was this thing sentient?
Even the Transcendent's scoured the field, desperate to find where Strife could be hiding. But some—like me—remained quiet, watching, waiting for the counterattack.
Du-dush!!
Amber lightning cracked open the yellow sky like a warning bell.
[Aspect: Taken Devourer — mad fangs!]
In the same moment, a blur of neon silver and blazing amber tore through the clouds and slammed into Cadenza's back—releasing a tornado of pressure. A maelstrom of razor winds erupted. Hellborn blades. Invisible until flashing amber-silver light on impact. They slashed across Cadenza's body in a rhythm too fast to follow, the sound of every cut an echo of ruin that swept through and silence the universe of sound.
Again and again, the neon blur returned—an unstoppable pattern woven into the storm.
Amber thunder. A flicker of twisted light. Then pain.
The Empyrean twisted, confused, desperate. It couldn't react fast enough. Couldn't anticipate the next blow. Its body screamed with every strike, crystalline nerves flaring in agony.
Then, with one brutal cleave, the black wolf returned. Thorn bit deep into the back of Cadenza's neck and yanked it backwards, howling.
"Uooh! Oohhhh!!!"
A final bolt of lightning tore the sky in two—and Strife followed it down.
He came barrelling from the heavens.
One sword swing.
One vertical cut.
The world split.
A gaping rift carved down the centre of the frozen dimension—continent-splitting and sky-reaching. Half of Cadenza's body floated in the open air as the bottom half dropped down the new-born ravine, severed and falling. Even the void of space seemed to open beneath it.
Strife stood still. Poised. Sword ready. On the cliff where the slash had begun.
Below, the yellow world began to stitch itself back together. Mountains melted down to tundra. The land tried to forget what had just occurred.
But it couldn't forget the cut.
Cadenza's severed lower half snapped back to its torso with a blast of yellow light, and the crystal man turned into a giant before they came rocketing down from the sky—crashing into the now-flat ice and sending out shockwaves like tsunamis across a frozen ocean.
"Bring it!" Strife roared.
His sheathed sword pulsed with orange-silver light, glowing with feral wrath. He raised it in both hands, then swept it downward—cleaving apart the crashing waves of sound and slamming the strike into Cadenza's massive form ripping it apart before the crystal alien shrunk back down.
The sheer force obliterated the land further. The song-world trembled. Whole continents vanished beneath the blade's fury before slowly beginning to regenerate.
Dust and yellow shards filled the air. Silence returned.
Only yellow flashes and amber-silver flares lit the battlefield now. The fight had become too fast to follow, too vast to witness in full. Cameras in the stream could barely keep up—tracking streaks, blurs, silhouettes carved from starlight.
"Wuwuwuw!"
The air quaked.
Dust scattered.
Cadenza clapped.
And Strife flew backwards like a comet—his chest caved in, his helmet cracked in half, revealing a shattered skull and blood-streaked face beneath.
Thorn screeched down in raven form, talons catching Strife mid-air. "You're not out yet, pisspot!"
With a flap of his wings, he spun and carried the knight back into battle—evading missiles of sound with acrobatic finesse—just as Strife's wounds healed in real time. Skull reforming. Flesh stitching.
[Skill: Bass Zeal — amplification 10x!]
[Skill: Fervour Queen's Symphony — song at the end!]
Cadenza clapped again. Then clicked. Then again. Like a twisted conductor orchestrating doom.
Waves of sound crashed out—tsunamis of pure aether, spiralling arrows of music, all targeting the two like divine punishment.
"Alleyoop!" Thorn shouted, tossing Strife like an amber-silver spear.
The knight soared through the noise. Charging with feral thunder in his boots. He never drew his blade. Not yet. Still sheathed in white, [Sigrid] glowed with orange fury as Strife swung it in a wide arc.
The entire world screamed.
Cadenza's attacks—those impossibly large, world-ending waves—were cleaved in half, like paper before a god. The distant towers behind him shattered from the aftershock.
[Aspect: Taken Devourer — take the effect!]
What remained of Cadenza's assault faded into nonexistence. Stolen from the air.
And Strife? He was already there. A flash of black-gold. His fist forward. A tiny black orb in his palm, inky and pulsing.
[Aspect: Taken Devourer — release the effect!]
[Skill: Autumn King's Conquest — Breach Surge!]
"Wuddududu!!"
The explosion of stolen sound cracked the crystal colossus. Cadenza's glass skeleton was laid bare beneath the blast. The yellow light inside dimmed—flickering now.
Its time was nearly over.
"Uooohhhh!!!" Cadenza raised its fists in rage and smashed them into the ground—releasing a sonic burst that hurled Strife skyward.
But Thorn was faster. The wraith darted between Strife's legs, shifted into a massive bird mid-air, and slammed into Cadenza. Black flames surged. His many tail-feathers wrapped the golem tight.
Then—he threw it. Straight up.
Strife came falling back down and a blazing golden-orange [Fragarach Spear] manifested in his hand. He hurled it straight into Cadenza's chest.
The explosion of his throw split the air and shattered into Cadenza's chest. The ground below collapsing inwards on a continental scale on the empyrean's impact.
When the smoke cleared, Cadenza crawled from the pit—broken, flickering, failing.
Its limbs cracked. Its light died. It was done.
Strife landed nearby, exhaling slow, heavy breaths through his helmet as he started to run once more. "Let's finish this, Thorn!"
"Don't slow me down, princess!" The raven shouted back seething with violent hunger.
The moment the crystal smoke thinned, Cadenza's hands snapped up like a conductor restarting a symphony—blasting Strife and Thorn away with the force of a thousand tornadoes with his conductor's wand.
[Skill: Recursive Beat — Indefinite Tune!]
A pulse erupted. Space warped—not once, but again and again, stacked into echoes. Strife was pulled into a spiral of mirrored sound, every movement trailing into delayed afterimages—predictable.
Cadenza struck without mercy.
Strife's head was the first to go—crushed by a single jab of harmonic pressure. But his body kept moving, even as the top half of his skull liquefied into silver ichor. Bone spliced back through void, reknitting his neck mid-charge. He didn't stop. He howled like a mad beast and slammed his shoulder into Cadenza with enough force to shatter kilometres of crystalline ice beneath them.
[Skill: Hollow Void – Berserker Drift!]
Still sheathed, Strife's blade remained untouched. He resorted to raw brutality—jagged elbows, dislocating his arms after attacks before he wrenched the bone back into socket mid-swing, and a blur of snarling silver-gold rage. His helmet had long since peeled away. His face was a ruined mask of ash, glinting bone, and gleaming metal. He grinned madly with teeth that shouldn't have regrown yet.
"You think your home makes you untouchable?!" he roared, as the air screamed around him—whistling as deadly blades cutting through Strife before freezing inside of him. Tearing free of the ice Strife stepped forward and healed. "Let me show you what an intruder does!"
Cadenza answered with frequency. Not words—just layers of sonic language turned to knives. The world pulsed. Yellow towers twisted, then detonated. The sky cracked, and songs fell like meteors. One struck Strife's chest and exploded, turning his torso inside out.
"Hahaha!!" Strife laughed through the pain, ribs reforming like serpents coiled around broken symphonies. He seized what remained of his collapsing arm and grabbed Cadenza by the face—then smashed the crystalline giant into the ground hard enough to invert the terrain.
Thorn reappeared—a burning gale of obsidian flame morphing mid-flight. First a wolf. Then a lion. Then a ribbon of fire, coiling around Cadenza's limbs just long enough to restrain him for Strife.
Strife grabbed his sheathed blade—still unopened—and used it like a club. He slammed it into Cadenza's spine, again and again, then smacked Cadenza in the face with it while fire and pressure and musical terror surged around them in a kaleidoscope of blood and fractured crystals.
The ice world itself began to crack. The dimension of weaponized sound was buckling.
Cadenza retaliated.
[Skill: Dominant Frequency – Harmonic Extermination!]
A roar of death-notes surged from its core. A sphere of destructive vibration. Strife's body was torn in half—longways. The sheathed sword being released from his melting fingers before being blasted away by a drum beat. But before Strife's legs could hit the ground, his torso was already reforming from his spine like a reverse-blooming flower, wrapping around his three hearts of aether.
He didn't stop laughing. "You can't kill me," Strife spat, slamming his fists together with enough force to create a sonic boom creating a brief silence in the sound dimension. "You can only make me worse!!!"
Cadenza swung. A blade of vibrato, forged from the death throes of dying stars, passed by—barely missing.
Strife ducked, cracked the floor, grabbed Cadenza by the leg, and tossed him into a towering pillar of ice—hard enough that the world went out of tune.
Strife was dying again. Already reviving. Already adapting. Flesh bursting, regrowing. Bones breaking and reforming harder. His body wasn't fighting to survive—it was fighting to devastate.
Cadenza began to retreat—ascending into the cracked sky.
Thorn intercepted the crystal being. This time, a winged serpent of black wind and burning silver will. He tore into the back of Cadenza's head just as Strife barrelled in from below.
[Regalius Breaker: Apocryphal Edge!]
Strife reached out and grabbed the air. A thread—trembling like a soundwave—slipped into his fingers. He pulled.
The void split. And from it came the sheathed blade—radiating heretical power. Bound in chains. Wrapped in prayers of silence. It pulsed like a rabid thing, begging to wake.
Strife held it and grinned. "You wanted a finale, maestro?"
He stepped forward. The ice didn't crack—it screamed. Trying to attack him but being glitched out of tune by the sword before the wind could cut.
"Let's end this horrible song once and for all!"
[Regalius Breaker: Apocryphal Edge – One Inch Draw!]
Cadenza froze. Silence rang out through the frozen yellow dimension. Pure. Dreadful.
The crystal titan backed away—hesitation creeping into its perfect posture. It felt it. That sword. It didn't belong. Not here. Not anywhere.
A blade that sang in anti-notes—its hum unravelling harmonies, turning the yellow pillars of sound into collapsing chords.
Even the sky forgot its melody.
Cadenza began to tremble.
[Skill: Sevenfold Verse – Recalls Every Fallen World]
[Skill: Crescendo Finalis – All Notes Burn as One]
[Regalius Breaker: Singing World – Domain of Maestro!]
The world screamed.
Towers of choral flame erupted, singing arias in reverse. Blades, whips, fangs of sung memory danced through the air. The ground convulsed, turning into a living musical score that tried to ensnare Strife's legs. Clouds bled sonnets. Verses detonated like cannons.
Cadenza hovered at the heart of it, summoning every scrap of divinity it could still command.
Strife stood still. Blood sprayed from his body with every note as he got hit ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times all within just a few seconds by millions of world-killing sounds. Yet he refused to flinch. The chains still wrapped the sheathed sword, its edge barely exposed.
Strife endured with mad tenacity.
Cadenza screamed—not with music, but with terror. Not fear of Strife. But of what he was about to become.
Bolts of glitching energy crackled from the blade's inch of freedom.
[Regalius Clash Initiated — 'Singing World' vs 'Apocryphal Edge'!!!]
Strife walked forward—dragging the sword like the anchor of the end. Armor melting. Flesh unravelling. Still smiling.
Cadenza unleashed symphonies. Hurricanes of harmony. Cataclysms formed from extinct choirs. Each one a planetary executioner.
Strife didn't care. His right foot struck the ground. The world split. The horizon lit up. With his left hand, he gripped the sheath. With his right—the hilt.
Chains snapped. Pillars crumbled. Notes evaporated mid-air around him.
The moon made of silence fell from the sky—Cadenza's final masterpiece—dropping down to destroy the entire dimension as bands of instruments played.
[Regalius Breaker: Singing World – Masterpiece Drop!]
"Haha!" Strife's voice was hoarse. His lips bloody. His body coming apart under the weight of what he was about to do before his body was set alight with golden fire exploding through cracks in his body. "I AM SO GOING TO CUT YOUR FUCKING NECK!!!"
[Regalius Breaker: Apocryphal Edge – Mad Slash!]
Then—Light. Absence. Infinity.
The sword sang a single scream—the scream of the end of time. The slash didn't just strike and cut. It removed.
First, nothing happened. Then—everything shattered. Space cracked apart and time ruptured like spilled blood. The yellow world cracked. Glass drowned in golden-silver flames. Skies split. Melodies fell. The moon sliced in half and dissolved.
The slash didn't stop. It devoured the dimension, the symphonies, the last of Cadenza's defiance, stretching the seams of reality before they could finally no longer hold and surged beyond.
Burning the veil. Sliding out into reality. Cutting the real moon—a single perfect, impossible line going perfectly through its centre.
Cadenza collapsed, its crystalline yellow body falling to the field in fragments of song and sorrow. Only the depleted empyrean remained, looking up at its executioner, before it too crumbled.
Even the gods watching through the
The single inch of the revealed blade sunk back into its sheath.
The dimension collapsed into dust and falling light. A scenic, haunting ruin. A victory scored in blood, glass, and silence.
Strife stood alone in the ruins of a god's dream, smoke curling from his fingertips. Admiring the view.
"What a beautiful victory." Strife said, watching the crumbling ruins of the dimension and source of universal sounds. As if it were a sunset on at the beach.