Chapter 277: THE COLLAPSE

[F1 Corruption: 100%]

[F4 Corruption: 100%]

[F5 Corruption: 100%]

[F7 Corruption: 100%]

All four at the same time.

The Harvester’s attire disintegrated — not dramatically, like a flame going out when the fuel runs out. The black robes with F4’s violet veins, F1’s crimson flames at the edges, the violet blade floating where a scythe should have been in his right hand — all giving way at the same instant the four channels reached one hundred percent.

F1’s scythe in his left hand dissolved.

The four points of light on Alex’s chest — which had been flickering throughout the frenzy with the instability of the four Fragments in conflict — went out.

Not permanently. The bearer’s shutdown from reaching the limit, not the Fragment’s shutdown abandoning the bearer.

Alex fell.

---

Not against a tree. Not sent by a strike.

He fell alone — knees first, then hands on the Eastern Island forest floor, his body giving way to the accumulated weight of forty‑nine minutes of combat and the three‑minute frenzy on top of that weight.

[Alex HP: 21,400]

The same HP he had before the frenzy — the unstable frenzy hadn’t produced more physical damage because the angel hadn’t attacked him during the three minutes. But the frenzy’s internal cost was different from external damage cost. All four Fragments at one hundred percent simultaneously didn’t damage the body the way a strike did — they emptied the channels of everything the bearer had to give.

Alex with his hands on the forest floor.

Conscious.

Unable to get up yet.

---

The angel waited two seconds after the collapse.

Not from doubt — from the final tactical update of something that had calculated exactly when this would occur and was verifying it had occurred as calculated.

The attire dissolved. The points of light out. The bearer on the ground.

Confirmed.

The angel walked toward Alex.

Not at the fight’s starting speed — at the speed of something that needs no urgency because the target can no longer respond.

The channel to the Gods’ plane at ninety‑six percent reestablished. Four more seconds and the full authorization would be available again.

The angel didn’t need to wait those four seconds.

It walked.

---

Raven intercepted.

Not from the barrier of forty‑two skeletons — from the position where she had been throughout the conversation with Jessica, from where she had deliberately put her hand on her stomach, from where she had watched the three minutes of frenzy.

F3 at the limit of what her body with thirty‑one thousand HP could sustain in full mode — her crimson eyes, the double‑bladed scythe in her left hand, her right arm nonfunctional with the bone given way from the angel’s first calibrated strike that was now many strikes ago.

Raven between the angel and Alex.

The angel evaluated her.

Thirty‑one thousand HP. One arm. F3 active but the body visibly without the resources to sustain the combat the HP figures implied under normal conditions.

The angel kept walking.

Raven activated Army of Bones.

Not the units remaining from the previous barrier — F3 summoning everything the north forest’s spiritual plane still had available after hours of combat in the area. Less than at the fight’s start — the forest ecosystem had given most of what was available during the previous summonings.

Twenty‑eight units.

Not forty‑two. Not one hundred thirty‑four. Not three hundred eighteen.

Twenty‑eight.

Raven distributed them in a barrier in front of her — the densest at the front, the most agile on the flanks, the same barrier configuration she had practiced on Threshold Port’s east dock but with twenty‑eight units instead of what she had then.

The angel reached the barrier.

---

The angel’s first strike on the barrier disintegrated eight units.

Twenty remaining.

The angel didn’t pulse — without the full authorization still active, without access to the Gods’ plane for the directed pulse. Just the physical strike of something with a level unreadable to Alex’s Soul Sight against Eastern Island creature skeletons.

Eight per strike.

Raven reconstituting two units with what F3 could still summon from the exhausted spiritual plane.

Net: six units fewer per strike.

Three strikes and the barrier collapsed.

Raven calculated it in the time it took to process the first strike.

And put her body at the barrier’s front.

Not behind it. In front — between the barrier and the angel, F3’s scythe in her left hand raised, her crimson eyes on the repressor.

The angel looked at her.

"No," said Raven.

A single word.

The angel struck the barrier above Raven — the twelve units Raven wasn’t covering with her body.

Eight disintegrated. Four surviving.

Four units plus the two reconstituted: six.

Plus Raven.

The angel evaluated the angle for the next strike.

Raven adjusted position to cover that angle with her body.

---

Kira arrived.

Predator’s Sense reading the distribution of the six remaining units and Raven’s body in the second after the second strike — the angle the angel was going to use for the third, the angle Raven was covering, the space left uncovered on the barrier’s south flank.

Kira in that space.

Without her bow — the bow was useless against the unreadable‑level repressor. With her body, the same decision Raven had made, the instinct of someone who had spent twenty years on an island learning that when the team needed a body at a specific point, that body was yours.

The angel looked at the south flank covered by Kira.

It reevaluated.

The third strike reached the barrier’s front — the six units, not the flank.

The six units collapsed.

Raven absorbed the strike the units didn’t absorb.

[Raven HP: 31,600 → 9,800]

Nine thousand eight hundred HP.

Raven on the ground — on her knees, F3’s scythe on the ground in front of her as a support point, her crimson eyes still active.

Not at zero.

Not yet.

---

The angel above Raven and Kira.

The channel to the Gods’ plane at one hundred percent reestablished — the full authorization back, available, active.

The repressor preparing the pulse that in seconds was going to finish what the fight had been building for fifty‑two minutes.

Emily with Purifying Light in passive healing — exhausted, on the ground, Purifying Light active in her immediate radius but without the energy to extend it to Raven.

[Emily HP: 391,600]

Jessica with fourteen thousand HP and F6 active at the minimum she could sustain.

Grim eight meters away — without the original Harvester’s scythe, without the four Fragments amplifying, his crimson flames looking at Alex on the ground.

**"Master."**

Alex with his hands on the forest floor.

Conscious.

Looking at Raven on her knees with nine thousand HP between him and the angel.

The four points of light on his chest out.

Raven’s hand — her left, the one holding the scythe — releasing the scythe and going to her stomach.

Not as a gesture.

As what it was — the reason F7 had responded to in the frenzy’s first moment, the reason the original Harvester had left in the Silent Threshold’s record as the kind of reason that could change the outcome, the most concrete reason Alex had and that was on its knees with nine thousand HP between him and something from the Gods’ plane.

The four points of light on Alex’s chest flickered.

Out.

Flickered again.

And lit.

---

Not the unstable frenzy’s lighting.

The lighting of something that found the direction the previous three minutes hadn’t had.

F7 first — the previous cycle’s memory activating with the concrete reason orienting the channel toward a single point. The other three following F7 instead of fighting each other for the bearer’s control — the reverse order of the previous frenzy, the most recent Fragment setting the direction and the three older ones recognizing that direction as correct.

The Harvester’s attire materializing.

Clean this time.

The black robes with F4’s violet veins and F1’s crimson flames at the edges but without the conflict between the two — F1 yielding the edge to F4 because F4 had arrived second and F4 yielding the edge to F1 because F1 was the Core and the Core was the base.

F1’s scythe in his left hand.

F4’s scythe in his right hand — not the frenzy’s floating blade. The complete scythe, violet, with the handle held by the right hand whose bone was completely given way and that held the scythe anyway because F4’s channel compensated for the strength the bone couldn’t give.

Two scythes.

Alex stood up.

---

The angel saw the two points of light — F1’s crimson and F4’s violet, the brightest of the four because they were the ones holding the scythes.

It saw the clean attire.

It saw Alex standing.

And it adjusted.

The full‑authorization pulse the repressor had prepared for Raven and Kira oriented toward Alex.

Alex raised both scythes in an X — F1’s edge and F4’s edge crossed in front of his body, the crossing point between the two edges at the center of his chest where the four points of light were active.

The pulse reached the two scythes.

F1 absorbing the portion corresponding to the pulse’s spiritual plane.

F4 reading the pulse’s Gods’‑plane component and finding the angle of least resistance — the same one F4 had used to orient Alex’s body during the fight, but applied to the pulse instead of the body.

The pulse deflected.

Not absorbed. Not blocked.

Deflected — the Gods’‑plane component passing between the two scythes at the angle F4 had created, exiting on Alex’s left side and reaching the tree behind him.

The tree gave way.

Alex didn’t.

[Alex HP: 21,400 — unchanged]

The angel looked at the two scythes.

Alex looked at the angel.

The two in the Eastern Island’s north forest with the fallen trees around the clearing and the impossible‑colored blood on the ground and F7’s channel in Alex active with the most concrete direction it had had in the entire arc.

"Good," said Alex.

And attacked.