Clang!
The first strike came like an fractured illusion, a smear through reality.. A flicker of steel, faster than breath, faster than what time could comprehend... colliding with an arc of frozen death.
Clang! Clang!
A curved blade met ice, venom lashing against frost. Multiple illuminated sparks scattered around, glinting against the mirrored loose camp ground. Ice shards broke apart mid-air, suspended in the moment before they hit the ground, frozen in time by the sheer pressure between them.
Celia’s grip tightened.
Her Icy blue blade, wreathed in absolute chilling frost, pressed forward. The blade hummed.. cold creeping along its length, devouring the space itself, dragging temperature into the void of its existence.
But Hela’s curved blade did not break.
Greenish-black liquid slithered slowly across its edge, thick and viscous, dripping in sticky, calm movements. It clung to the steel like something alive, refusing to freeze under Celia’s chilling frost, resisting even as the it tried to consume it.
Hela grinned.
"You’re stronger than you look. I’ll say", " where did you learn to fight". She asked, her amusing expression in a mocking grin..
"Quiet".. Celia silent her as both blades screeched violently, grounding against each other like a chaos was descending. The air hissed.. unquenchable rot meeting unyielding chilling frost. A battle of absolutes, neither yielding, neither breaking.
But it was In that moment of an unyielding clash...
Hela twisted.
She let Celia’s weight slide forward, pivoting on her heel, angling her blade to redirect rather than block. The shift was seamless. What should have been an overbearing force became nothing but an empty swing, a calculated redirection of momentum.
And in that gap..
She struck.
Clang!
Celia’s icy blue blade snapped back, blocking before the strike could land.... Before it could even connect... It was a brutal parry..
Frost surged outward, pulsing from her icy blue weapon, a breath of winter that turned moisture to solid ice.
Clang! Clang!
A second. A third. A fourth strike.
Each faster than the last.
Each precise. more precise that previous...
Each hunting for flesh. searching for blood..
Kang!
Celia’s sword locked against Hela’s curved blade once more. The mirrored ground beneath them had already succumbed to her chilling frost, jagged veins of ice spreading outward, crawling over the surface.
Hela noticed.
Her footing faltered. A fraction of imbalance.
Celia moved... her figure blurred..
A pivot, weight shifting, bringing her blade down.. a cleaving strike meant to end at that very moment....
But.
Hela vanished.
Bowoosh!
A rip in space.
Behind Celia, another void bloomed.
A black hole.
No sound. No warning. No hesitation.
It swallowed everything... air, space, light, sound, fragments of ice. The battlefield tilted toward it, drawn into the abyss.
But Celia’s eyes saw it earlier...
Eagle Gaze.
A slow, creeping certainty. The moment the void formed, she had already seen it. She moved before its pull could fully take hold.
Her frost carved a path.
A staircase of solid ice glittering formed beneath her feet, manifesting in an instant. She skidded through the air, gliding along the frozen surface with absolute control, twisting her momentum into movement.
Bowoosh! Bowoosh!
More voids began to rip open.
One above.
One to the left.
Another to the right..
Three more blinked into existence across the battlefield, swallowing everything in their grasp. The mirrored loose camp ground cracked under the pressure of it’s pull, like it was about to suck the very fabric of this mirrored loose camp, pieces by pieces, it spiraling into the consuming dark.
Celia dodged.
She weaved through them, skating across the frost she conjured. Her path bent, curved, adapting with each shift of the ever changing battlefield.
But the black holes only grew. More larger. More wider
More Overwhelmingly Hungry.
Her movement slowed.
Her escape routes vanished. Everywhere was blocked, totally covered, there wasn’t a breath of space left around her...
The pull became inescapable.
She braced herself, legs tensing, frost surging, ice forming in a desperate attempt to resist the pull..
It was then...
Hela’s voice slithered through the battlefield.
"You can’t resist it."
It came from everywhere. And nowhere..
A whisper from every direction. And no direction at the same time...
A voice with no source, yet ringing in Celia’s mind like a truth already written.
But Celia’s eyes,
She already saw her.
She was not where the voice came from...
Vrooooom!
Celia was already getting sucked into the the all consuming hole...
When In that moment.
She exhaled, dematerializing her frost blade as a chilling frost left her lips.. .
The breath she exhaled curled like mist.. cold enough to freeze even the very existence of sound itself.
Crack.
Chilling frost slithered through the breathless air, not spreading, but consuming. A creeping tide of absolute ice, devouring space itself.
Crack.
The mirrored battlefield... the Loose Camp.. fractured, the chilling frost crawling like veins through a fragile glass. A sharp, bitter scent filled the air. Not just cold. Absence. The kind that left no room for existence.
Celia’s body blurred. No wasted motion, not even the slightest of hesitation. She skated across her ice, weaving through the ever-growing black sucking void, black holes ripping into existence, their gravitational pull dragging at her limbs, distorting the battlefield with crushing weight.
But she had already seen it all.
The second before they appeared. The second before Hela moved.
Eagle Gaze.
There,
A breath out of sync with the mirrored battlefield. A twist of very air in a place untouched by motion...
Hela materialized, mid-step, body flickering at impossible angles, space itself folding around her in an unnatural motionless dance. No acceleration. No inertia. A presence that simply was and wasn’t at the same time....
Celia shifted, ice forming beneath her armored boots as she evaded the inevitable.
And the moment she did....
BOOM.
Hela’s attack missed.
By a whisper. By the thinnest sliver of space between a fatal strike and empty air.
Her grin widened ever so slightly... "Oh?"
Another BOOM. BOOM!
Another missed strike.
Hela flickered.. no, dislocated from reality and existence. A ripple in the world, her body appearing at angles that no creature should ever stand in, limbs folding, unfolding, reappearing and disappearing mid-motion.
Each attack struck nothing. Every time.
Celia never reacted late. Never even looked surprised.
Hela clicked her tongue."This is getting annoying"
And then,
Silence.
Not a pause. Not an absence of sound.
A severance.
She was already behind Celia. No transition. No movement. Just there.
The curved poisoned void blade swung in a whisper, coated in venomous black rot.. something even more than poison, something alive, eager to consume the existence of anything it touched.
Celia leaned.
No panic. No excess movement.
The edge barely grazed her, passing through the space she once occupied.
And in the same calm, fluid motion..
BAM.
Celia’s armored knee drove deep into Hela’s gut, a brutal, compacted force that caved her armor inward.
A flicker of breath hitched in Hela’s throat.
But her grin never wavered. not even the slightest...
BAM. BAM. BAM.
Fists after fist, coated in a chilling frost beyond frost, slammed into her armored ribs, each impact carrying the weight of something deeper, something fundamental.
A creeping corruption. Not an attack. Not a technique. A force... An undeniable force..
Ice did not spread.
It removed.
Hela’s exoskeletal bio-armor cracked, splintering under the pressure.
Fwoosh.
Celia’s blade materialized in an instant, the downward arc carrying an absolute inevitability.
Hela’s instincts screamed.
She moved.
No step. No dodge.
Just,
Gone.
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Space twisted.
The blade fell.
And the ground where she had been..n
Ceased.
Not shattered. Not broken.
It simply… wasn’t.
Icy chill corruptive frost crawled outward, sinking into the space left behind, spreading in jagged veins.
And for the first time..
Hela hesitated.
She felt it.
The edges of her being, numbed. The curved void blade in her hand,
The tip was gone.
Not severed. Not destroyed.
Just… absent.
As if it had never been.
Pausing for a moment she said, "What a remarkable power you have there.. I’ll give you that"
Gesturing with her hand as she held her curved void blade, "Did you know that this blade was created in the Null". She chuckled, "I’m sure you don’t... Well never mind that..", She continued, throwing away the curved blade she once used as it wasn’t useful to her anymore..
"What I want to say is.." She paused briefly for a minute, savoring the moment like it was just a blissful entertainment for the inevitable, "Your powers, are more useful to me than I thought it would".
She exhaled calmly, "Which is why". Another quiet, thoughtful breath....
And then
A smile.
"I guess…"
Her fingers flexed.
The mirrored loose camp ground beneath them shook.
Faintly.
Then violently.
"I need to increase my strength a little."
The world answered. a violent answer..
A ripple through reality. shuddering the very existence around the mirrored Loose Camp..
And then a massive black hole created behind Hela like a declaration saying...
That The Fight Had Only Just Begun....