Mango held the amulet in her bare palm, watching as her rot failed to consume it. The purple gemstone pulsed stubbornly, its magic coiling and shimmering like a living thing, resisting her touch. As she watched, the blackened, withered flesh of her arm and hand began to knit itself back together, the decay reversing as if time were flowing in reverse. The skin smoothed over, returning to its unblemished state in seconds. A grin crept across her face.

  “Wooowww...” she breathed, eyes wide in childlike awe. “You're strong.”

  She slipped her glove back on with a snap, then looped the chain around her neck and let the amulet settle proudly on her chest. The moment it touched fabric, a transparent barrier shimmered into place around her, the same ethereal shield that had protected Butter, flickering like a bubble of captured starlight.

  Butter stared, dumbfounded in the middle of the bridge. The world, which usually moved with a clarity she could parse at sonic speeds, seemed to stutter and lag. Her own reactions felt thick, submerged in syrup. Cars swerved around her in what felt like slow motion, tires screeching in drawn-out wails, drivers leaning out their windows, their angry yells distorted and deep:

  ? Dégage de là, putain ! ?

  “Get the hell outta the way!”

  She didn’t flinch. She couldn't. The usual seamless flow between thought and action gummed up by the psychic shock of the theft.

  Her fingers touched the hollow space above her chest where the amulet once hung. It was warm, still tingling from the loss.

  “That’s never happened before...” she thought, stunned.

  “I feel... I feel naked.”

  That thought still echoed when Mango charged again, this time with a dagger in hand. It was beautiful and ancient, its blade a shard of captured moonlight inscribed with glowing green script that pulsed like a venomous heartbeat.

  Mango didn't slash; she drew. Her movements were a chaotic artist's frenzy. She led not with the blade, but with her elbow, the dagger held in a reverse grip and slashing upwards from behind her own knee. She cartwheeled past Butter, the knife licking out not at her body, but at the space it would occupy a half-second later. She used the pommel to feint, tapping it against one of Harmony's dark wood shafts, only to immediately flip the grip and thrust with the point from an impossibly low angle, aiming for the tendon behind Butter's ankle. It was knife-play as interpretive dance, every move illogical and born from a mind that saw angles as suggestions.

  But Butter’s defense was a pure, flowing martial arts spectacle. Her panic was a cold fuel, sharpening her instincts. She became water. Her arms wove smooth, circular Tai Chi patterns, wielding Harmony not as a bludgeon, but as a flowing extension of her will. The dark wood nunchaku became a spinning, defensive vortex. She intercepted a thrust by wrapping the chain around Mango's wrist for a split second, yanking the attack off-line. She used the spinning momentum of one shaft to slap a wild stab aside, then pivoted on one foot, the other shaft whipping around to crack against Mango's elbow. She leaned back, her spine arching like a bow as the glowing green edge whispered past her throat, so close it severed a few stray hairs. She didn't just parry; she evaded and countered in the same fluid motion, her wide eyes tracking the impossible geometry of the assault. It was a desperate, beautiful defense against a formless, gleeful chaos. But her eyes were wide in panic, this time, she was scared.

  Mango’s grin widened. She petal-stepped into Butter's blind spot, a shadow to the left behind her. With a flick of her wrist, she threw the dagger. It wasn't a powerful throw; it was a lazy, almost teasing toss, end over end.

  Butter reacted, swinging Harmony to bat it out of the air, a simple, effective deflection.

  But the moment the nunchaku began its arc, it exploded in a burst of cherry blossoms.

  Butter’s instincts screamed a fraction of a second before her eyes could process the change. The dagger suddenly appeared an inch away from her face; a focused, green-lit streak aimed directly between Butter’s eyes.

  There was no time to block. No time to swing Harmony back.

  Pure reflex took over. She jerked her head back, her spine arching. The dagger’s glowing tip filled her vision, so close she could feel the static buzz of its magic on her eyelashes.

  Time didn't slow. It simply ran out.

  Her neck muscles screamed as she twisted her head violently to the side.

  SHINK.

  The sound was unnervingly clean. The blade slid past her lips, the cold, inscribed steel scraping against her enamel. Her jaw clamped down with the force of a hydraulic press, her teeth locking onto the flat of the blade just behind the tip, stopping it dead.

  She stood frozen for a heartbeat, the dagger held fast in her teeth, its green light casting eerie shadows across her face. The taste of cold forged iron and ozone filled her mouth.

  Butter spat the dagger out. It clattered on the asphalt, the sound unnaturally loud in the sudden silence.

  Mango didn't look offended. She clapped her hands together, her eyes sparkling with genuine, unhinged delight. "That was so cool!" she yelled, her voice echoing with pure admiration.

  Then, in the same breath, she petal-stepped away in a whirl of cherry blossoms. She reappeared thirty feet above Butter, suspended midair with a boulder the size of a refrigerator clutched in her arms. Her sundress fluttered like a war banner, her locs wild as she giggled, swinging her legs forward with gymnastic precision.

  "PILLOW FIGHT!" she shrieked.

  The boulder shot downward.

  Time turned to syrup as the boulder blotted out the sky, Butter’s breath locked in her throat, her muscles seizing with the primal certainty of a rabbit watching the hawk’s shadow eclipse the sun. This is how I die, her mind whispered, smashed into paste on a bridge no one will remember. She could already taste the blood, already feel her bones splintering like kindling.

  Her arms crossed. Not by choice. By instinct, the way a cat twists midair to land on its feet.

  CRASHHHH!

  The sound was a deep, percussive SHATTER. The boulder detonated into a thousand jagged fragments as if it had struck a mountain. A starburst of granite shards and pulverized rock blasted outward from the point of impact, peppering the bridge with a sound like hailstones on a tin roof. A cloud of thick, gray dust bloomed around her.

  Asphalt cracked beneath her boots in a spiderweb pattern. She squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the snap of bones, the crush of ribs—

  But felt only... a profound, resonant THUD. A deep vibration that traveled up her arms and settled in her shoulders, no more harmful than the recoil from a heavy door slamming shut.

  Her eyes flew open.

  The boulder was simply gone, replaced by a halo of shattered rock skittering across the pavement. No pain. No fractures. Just a faint, warm tingle where a refrigerator-sized stone had just committed suicide against her forearms.

  Mango landed lightly in front of her, head tilted. "Huh. That usually works."

  Butter stared at her own hands. The amulet was gone. The shield was gone.

  And yet...

  A laugh bubbled up from her chest, raw and unhinged. Not her usual nervous giggle. Something feral.

  She had relied so much on the amulet, she'd forgotten just how strong she was without it.

  "Oh, you're done now!" she yelled, immediately cringing at her own delivery. But her fists? Steel.

  ///

  Mango exhaled, rolling her shoulders like a performer about to take the stage. "Okey dokey!" she chirped, clapping her hands once.

  The air shimmered.

  One by one, the parked cars popped out of existence, not with a bang, but a sound like bubbles bursting. In their place, swirls of cherry blossoms spiraled lazily in the air before dissolving. The drivers blinked, now standing safely on the riverbanks, their vehicles neatly relocated to a nearby lot. One taxi driver honked his horn in confusion, only for a vine to gently tap his bumper and push him into a parking spot.

  A single bead of sweat trailed down her temple, her first sign of strain. Mango wiped her brow with a satisfied grin, smearing glittering pollen across her cheek, then knelt and pressed her palms to the bridge.

  The ground groaned, not in protest, but like a sleepy giant turning over. From both ends of the bridge, thickets of wild roses and thorny vines surged upward, weaving together into a living barricade, their leaves a vibrant green, their blooms a cheerful riot of pinks and yellows. Bees buzzed lazily between them, as if this were just another sunny afternoon in a garden.

  Mango rose up, dusting off her hands. "Aaand... Thorn bridge’s closed, baby!" she announced, spreading her arms like a ringmaster. A few petals fluttered from her sleeves for emphasis.

  She bounced on the balls of her feet, grinning like a child who’d just built the world’s most dangerous sandcastle.

  The bridge was now a private arena, equal parts flowery and dangerous, just like Mango herself.

  ///

  Mango stared with her big eyes.

  Butter pulled her two shiny sticks apart like a magic toy, and the silver chain between them got longer. It sparkled, like string made of stars.

  Mango tilted her head.

  “Woahhh,” she whispered out loud, already imagining what it would be like to play jump rope with it.

  “Maybe it sings when it swings...” she thought.

  Then Butter swung it.

  CRACK.

  Mango flinched as the air snapped. It didn’t break anything. Didn’t even make wind. It hit her arm without a sound, the amulet didn't even react to it. There was no familiar violet shimmer, no ripple of absorbed force spreading across the barrier. She had stood still, bracing for the satisfying thump of the shield doing its work. But there was nothing. Just a light, stingless tap.

  She poked the spot with curiosity. "It didn't do anything," she thought, utterly fascinated. The shield hadn't recognized the hit as a threat. Why? What kind of attack was this?

  Butter swung again. Then again. And again.

  CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.

  Mango stopped dodging entirely. She let the blows land, each one a silent, harmless tap against her skin and clothes. She was conducting an experiment. She wanted to feel what Butter felt, to understand this strange, quiet weapon that didn't register on the Sonata's defenses. It was like being slapped with the world's meanest lightest ribbon.

  But nothing exploded. Nothing got sliced in half. It wasn’t scary. Not like Pest or Sphinx or the scary man with the hell fire.

  Just Slap. Slap. Slap.

  “Heehee, she's playing weird.”

  Mango giggled and stopped dodging. She puffed out her chest and threw her hands up like a brave hero in a cartoon, offering herself as a target.

  SMACK.

  Right in the shoulder.

  Then the belly.

  Then her hip.

  Mango stuck out her tongue. “Blehhhh! Try harder, slowpoke!”

  She flicked her wrist and shot a few blue pellets - pew pew pew! - not even aiming, just playing now. The pellets zipped harmlessly into the sky as she started to twirl, her sundress flaring out. She began a little dance, completely forgetting her mission to send Butter to the Happy Place. This was more fun than any mission. This was a game, and Butter was a fascinating new playmate with a tickly stick.

  Butter kept hitting. Over and over.

  Mango started counting in her head like they taught her in the labs, her dance moves becoming more elaborate with each light tap.

  “One. Two. Four. No wait, three. Um. Eight. A hundred?”

  Then Butter stopped swinging.

  She had a weird look. Not a smile, not a frown. Something shiny in her eyes. Like she knew a juicy secret and wouldn't tell Mango.

  And then she said something.

  “Resound.”

  Mango blinked, and the world exploded. BOOOOM!

  She didn't understand this pain. It was like the sky punched her. Like the air itself burst into her bones. Every place she’d been hit, all of them, exploded from the inside.

  Her brain didn’t know how to think anymore.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts...”

  Her amulet cracked. It shattered like glass. She felt it leave her, like when they took her teddy bear away in training and made her sleep in the cold box.

  The pain was loud.

  She didn’t even scream. Couldn’t.

  She just flew. Back, fast, too fast, spinning through the air like a tossed doll. The sky turned upside down.

  She smashed through the vines she made. They didn’t catch her. They broke. Then concrete. Then road. Then dark.

  Mango lay there, her cheek pressed against the road, horribly bruised. Her vision flickered, floating between the night sky and the blurry outline of a traffic light.

  People were shouting. Cars screeched in the distance. But it all felt far away.

  Her fingers twitched. Everything buzzed. Her tummy hurt. Her arms wouldn’t move. Tears spilled sideways onto the street.

  “I don’t like this game anymore.”

  A piece of the shattered amulet crumbled near her lips. She whimpered. It tasted like pennies and magic.

  She thought of Clock.

  “Hope he’s not still mad at me. Hope he wins.”

  She thought of cartoons.

  “I wanna watch something soft. With bunnies. No booms.”

  And then she was dead.

  ///

  Butter stood still, Harmony loose in her grip, the chain humming with spent energy.

  For a second, the world seemed quiet.

  Mango had taken every single hit like it was a joke, like she was teasing. A slap on the arm, a sting to the ribs. She’d even laughed. Butter almost believed it too, that the blows didn’t matter.

  But that was the trick of Harmony. It remembered. All fifteen strikes had sunk into Mango like invisible needles, weightless, harmless.

  Until now.

  Butter narrowed her eyes, voice low, almost like a ritual.

  “Resound.”

  The air around Mango warped.

  The force struck all at once, a single moment collapsing into thunder. The accumulated impact of every hit detonated, compressing a mountain of punishment into a heartbeat. The amulet on Mango’s chest shrieked, cracking down the center as purple light burst in wild spirals.

  Then came the blast.

  Mango's body lurched, violently, helplessly, like a ragdoll shot from a cannon. Her limbs flailed in the air as the shockwave hurled her across the entire length of Thorn Bridge. She smashed through the vine-walls she’d summoned earlier, each barrier exploding into splinters and leaves.

  Then pavement. Then silence.

  The bridge was cracked and quiet, wind scraping over the vines like whispers. Harmony’s extended chain hung limp from her fingers, still warm and twitching with aftershock.

  Mango was gone, blown through her own barricades, swallowed by the city beyond.

  Butter stared at her trembling hands.

  "...I’ve never landed fifteen before," she whispered. Her voice felt distant. Hollow. Like it came from someone else.

  She tried to steady her breath but her lungs weren’t listening.

  One hit. Her average strike, with Harmony or her bare fist, was already a hundred and fifty times stronger than what most people could muster.

  She knew that. She lived with that. Trained to contain that. But fifteen stacked hits? With Harmony?

  A cold, nauseating realization washed over her. In the fight, she’d been holding back, using only a fraction of her strength, a mere third. It was a subconscious restraint, a failsafe drilled into her to prevent total devastation. Against Mango's unpredictable style, it had felt like enough.

  But with Harmony, it didn't matter.

  The weapon didn't care about her restraint. It took the kinetic value of each blow she landed -whether it was a third of her power or all of it- and used that as the base unit. The multiplier didn't discriminate. Her conscious mercy was rendered mathematically irrelevant by the beautiful, terrifying engine in her hands. She had been fighting with one hand tied behind her back, but Harmony had used the full weight of her body to swing the axe.

  She ran the numbers in her head — fast, like survival instinct kicking in.

  First hit: 150.

  Second: 300.

  Third: 600.

  Fourth: 1,200.

  Fifth: 2,400.

  Sixth: 4,800.

  Seventh: 9,600.

  Eighth: 19,200.

  Ninth: 38,400.

  Tenth: 76,800.

  Eleventh: 153,600.

  Twelfth: 307,200.

  Thirteenth: 614,400.

  Fourteenth: 1,228,800.

  Fifteenth...

  2,457,600.

  Approximately over two million pounds of force, all packed into that final, resounding echo. A tidal wave in a fist.

  Butter staggered backward.

  Her hands were still humming. One hit. Her average strike, with Harmony or her bare fist, was already a hundred and fifty times stronger than what most people could muster. In raw numbers, where a champion boxer might land a 1,300-pound blow, hers was over 195,000 pounds.

  And that was before Harmony's true nature. The nunchaku wasn't just a conduit for her power; it was a perfectionist. It could guide a swing with flawless, impossible biomechanics. In the hands of an amateur, Harmony would guide their limbs to strike with the perfect angle, torque, and transfer of force. With that ability, even a hit from a baby, propelled by the weapon's own innate power, could shred a tank. The true horror was this: if those fifteen strikes had landed directly on Mango's skin instead of being absorbed and distributed by the Sonata shield, Mango wouldn't have flown. She would have turned to dust, her atomic structure obliterated by perfect, focused points of impact.

  She knew that. She lived with that. Trained to contain that. But fifteen stacked hits? With Harmony?

  A cold, nauseating realization washed over her. In the fight, she’d been holding back, using only a fraction of her strength, a mere third; a subconscious restraint drilled into her to prevent total devastation. Against Mango's unpredictable style, it had felt like enough. She had been striking with a "mere" 65,000 pounds of force.

  But with Harmony, it didn't matter.

  The weapon didn't care about her restraint. It took the kinetic value of each blow she landed —that 65,000 pounds— honed it to perfection and used that as the base unit. The multiplier didn't discriminate. Her conscious mercy was rendered mathematically irrelevant by the beautiful, terrifying engine in her hands. She had been fighting with one hand tied behind her back, but Harmony had used the full weight of her body to swing the axe.

  She ran the numbers in her head —fast, like survival instinct kicking in.

  First hit: 65,000 lbs.

  Second: 130,000 lbs.

  Third: 260,000 lbs.

  Fourth: 520,000 lbs.

  Fifth: 1,040,000 lbs.

  Sixth: 2,080,000 lbs.

  Seventh: 4,160,000 lbs.

  Eighth: 8,320,000 lbs.

  Ninth: 16,640,000 lbs.

  Tenth: 33,280,000 lbs.

  Eleventh: 66,560,000 lbs.

  Twelfth: 133,120,000 lbs.

  Thirteenth: 266,240,000 lbs.

  Fourteenth: 532,480,000 lbs.

  Fifteenth...

  1,064,960,000 pounds of force.

  Over one billion pounds of force. All packed into that final, resounding echo. Not a tidal wave in a fist. A continental plate shift.

  Butter staggered backward.

  Her hands were still humming. Her bones hurt. Her eyes widened as a sharp chill ran down her spine.

  “Heavens,” she muttered, the world tilting on its axis. “I hit her with a meteor.”

  Her legs almost gave out. The thought of that kind of power, stored in her arms like it was casual, like it was nothing, made her stomach twist.

  That was her?

  She did that?

  She looked toward the shattered edge of the bridge again, like Mango might still be there, twitching, whispering, breathing.

  Nothing.

  “I didn’t even try to kill her,” she said aloud. “I didn't want to...”

  The silence that followed her voice was deeper than before.

  For the first time in a long time, Butter wasn’t afraid of who she was fighting.

  She was afraid of herself.

  ///

  Butter didn’t hesitate.

  Her body moved before her thoughts could form, sprinting, stumbling, lunging across the ruined bridge, slipping over dust and vine ash. Her legs burned. Her chest hurt. But none of it mattered.

  Mango lay still. Too still.

  Butter dropped to her knees beside her, fingers trembling as they hovered over the girl’s chest.

  No rhythm. No pulse. No breath.

  Her skin was cold. Green blood was puddled beneath her, sickly and iridescent, leaking from wounds that folded her body in on itself like broken origami. The dent in the concrete below her was deep, like she'd been hammered into the world.

  The amulet, the one Butter had once clung to, sat shattered beside her like a broken tooth.

  And in that terrible stillness, Butter understood. Mango was dead, truly dead, and it wasn't just the physical damage that had killed her. The Resound's shockwave had been more than force; it had been a psychic blast of pure, overwhelming information, a mountain of pain delivered in a single, impossible instant. Mango's mind, so accustomed to a world of playful chaos and cartoon physics, had no framework for that kind of absolute, reality-shattering violence. The shock hadn't just stopped her heart; it had startled her brain into permanent silence.

  Butter’s eyes burned.

  “I did this...”

  It was a whisper in her head, but it might as well have been a scream. Her hands clenched against her own mouth as tears spilled freely. Her whole body shook.

  If that amulet hadn’t absorbed most of it... if that barrier hadn’t held...

  She would’ve vaporized her. There would’ve been nothing left.

  A stain. A mist.

  “I didn’t mean to...”

  But there was no one to say it to. Only the corpse of a girl who’d fought with the joy of a toddler playing tag.

  Only silence.

  Butter had feared the Syndicate before. Feared their power, their reach. Their intentions.

  But now something darker crawled into her chest.

  Hate.

  Sharp. Bitter. Acidic in her gut.

  They made Mango like this.

  They pointed her like a weapon and laughed. Trained her. Twisted her. Sent her to die for something Butter still didn’t understand.

  She wasn’t even mad at Winter anymore... or Lucien.

  They were just trying to protect her from this. This disgusting, heartless, machinery of a creation called the syndicate of the magpie.

  She wiped her face roughly, trying to choke it all back, the guilt, the grief, the fury, when something moved.

  Mango’s finger. Just a twitch. But it was there. Then another. A ripple in the blood. Magic.

  Butter stared, her sobs catching in her throat. This wasn't Mango. The pilot was gone, the cockpit empty. This was the ship's emergency systems firing on automatic. Mango's magic was still alive, a ghost in the machine with no hand to guide it, desperately running its last programmed command: heal the user. It was trying to revive her, trying to reboot a system that had suffered a catastrophic core failure.

  It’s healing her... trying to, Butter realized, squinting. But it wasn’t enough. Her aura was thin. Barely flickering. Most of it had been blown away, scattered like leaves in a storm.

  Butter reached out with one hand, hesitating for only a second. Then she closed her eyes, and focused harder than she ever had.

  Magic poured out of her not in a stream, but in a fountain, a geyser of pure, golden, ethereal essence. It was warmth and sunlight given form, spilling over her hands and cascading down onto Mango’s broken form. It felt like the first breath of spring after a long winter, a refreshing, life-giving radiance that pushed back the night's chill and the stench of blood and concrete. It was the opposite of Harmony's destructive power; this was creation, pure and undiluted.

  It was slow and reluctant at first, a trickle against a dam of her own exhaustion. She could feel her essence being squeezed, drained, wrung out to the last drop. It hurt.

  But she pushed anyway. Letting her magic thread into Mango’s, link arms with it. Support it. Fill the gaps.

  Together, the healing took hold, a faint chlorophyll scent rising from Mango's wounds as her body righted itself like a trampled sapling seeking the sun.

  Mango’s bones cracked into place. Her spine reformed. Bruises shrank. Her heart began to beat again.

  Butter stumbled back, gasping. Sweat soaked her back. Her vision swam. Her beanie itched like fire, so she pulled it off and tossed it to the ground, letting her tangled hair spill free.

  She slumped against the side of a cracked traffic barrier.

  She watched Mango’s chest rise.

  Then, after a few seconds, the girl yawned.

  Loud. Careless. Bright.

  Mango sat up, blinking sleepily, then stretched her arms overhead like she’d just woken from a nap.

  Her eyes landed on the chaos of the blocked-off street, the crater, the startled crowd, the distant sound of honking.

  “Oh! Is there a carnival going on?” she asked, clapping her hands with innocent delight.

  Butter stared at her for a long, long moment. Exhausted. Confused. Frustrated beyond belief.

  But somewhere, deep in that fractured storm of emotion, was the beginning of something unexpected.

  Fondness.

  Butter could barely feel her limbs. Everything inside her felt wrung out like an old rag, her magic, her strength, her will. She was soaked in sweat, her skin cold, trembling. Every breath burned.

  Mango stood not far away, stretching like a cat after a nap, completely oblivious to the chaos around her, the crater in the middle of the road, the bystanders frozen on the sidewalks, phones held up, their faces pale with disbelief. One woman screamed. Another man yelled into his phone, probably calling emergency services.

  Butter tried to sit up, but her legs gave out. Her arm wobbled.

  She dropped back down, slumped on the ruined street.

  The sirens in the distance were getting closer now, a low, urgent wail cutting through the thick night air.

  She looked at Mango again. The girl was brushing debris off her sundress, humming as if she hadn’t just been violently launched across a bridge and nearly killed.

  Butter swallowed the lump in her throat.

  “Playtime’s over, Mango,” she croaked, voice dry and thin. “You don’t have to kill me. I don’t want to fight anymore.”

  Mango froze. Her fingers twisted around the frayed hem of her tattered dress. Her expression shifted, not confusion, not anger, but something small. Ashamed.

  Her eyes didn’t meet Butter’s when she mumbled, “But... Dad’ll get mad if I fail. Last time I did, he put me in the bad room for days.”

  She fidgeted. Kicked the ground softly. Her voice dropped to a whimper.

  “Very painful. No candy or cartoons.”

  Butter’s breath hitched.

  “You like candy?”

  Mango’s head popped up like a spring, eyes wide. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” she squealed, practically bouncing on the balls of her feet.

  Butter, through cracked lips and a desperate kind of hope, managed a smile.

  “I have a roomful of it,” she said softly. “You can have it all. If you promise not to kill me.”

  Mango tilted her head, considering. Her curly locs bounced with the motion. Her eyes, wide and uncertain, narrowed in thought, then she reached out her hand.

  “Pinky promise?” she asked in a whisper.

  Butter reached out. Their pinkies locked. Mango’s touch was warm, not a weapon anymore, not a threat, just a child’s.

  "No take-backs," she whispered.

  It was done.

  The sirens grew closer now, red and blue light flickering at the edge of the broken bridge, painting the smoke and vines in ghostly hues. Horns honked, a cop shouted something unintelligible, phones flashed like stars.

  Butter tried to rise, but her legs wouldn’t respond.

  “Mango,” she gasped, head drooping. “Take us back... back to the mansion.”

  Mango stood tall — as tall as her thin limbs could manage — and turned toward Butter. Without a word, she crouched, slipped her arms beneath her, and lifted her onto her back like a sleepy sibling.

  Butter sagged against her, arms around Mango’s neck. She could smell smoke. Blood. Magic.

  But she also smelled strawberry shampoo.

  It was only then, in the ringing silence that followed her own ragged breaths, that the world rushed back in. The sound of distant, panicked horns. The wail of a siren blocks away. The murmur of horrified voices.

  Butter looked up.

  They were surrounded. Dozens of eyes watched from the sidewalks and the mouths of alleyways, a frozen tableau of shock drawn by the thunderclap of Mango's impact. The road was a ruin, cracked and spiderwebbed beneath them, thorny vines still curling from the pavement like the grasping fingers of a sunken god. A fresh crater yawned where Mango had landed, and a single, broken traffic light above them flickered erratically, casting the scene in stuttering pulses of bloody red and sickly yellow.

  A man in a delivery uniform had his phone held high, its screen a tiny, recording square of light in the gloom. A woman had both hands clamped over her mouth, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Others simply pointed, their faces pale masks of disbelief.

  And then Butter saw her. A little girl, no more than six, peeking out from behind her father's legs. She wasn't crying. She wasn't scared. She was staring, utterly transfixed, at Mango's broken form. Her eyes were wide, not with terror, but with a world-shattering, wondrous recognition. She tugged on her father's pant leg, her small voice cutting through the hushed tension with the clarity of shattered glass.

  "Papa...? Ghost-girl? She's... she's real?"

  The question hung in the air, more devastating than any scream. It wasn't just a body on the pavement. It was a myth, a storybook character, a secret hope dragged violently into the real world and broken for everyone to see. And Butter was the monster who had put her there.

  Mango looked up at the sky.

  Then, with a small bounce of her heels, she vanished, leaving behind only a swirl of falling petals and a street that would never forget what it saw.

  A single petal landed on the lens of a phone still recording the empty space where they'd been.

  ///

  The boy, Leo, sat on the riverbank, shivering despite the warm night. One moment he’d been in the backseat of his mom’s sedan, arguing with his sister about the music. The next, a flash of petals, a sensation like falling through a bubble, and he was standing here, unharmed but disoriented, his mom gripping his shoulder tightly.

  All around them, other teleported drivers were out of their cars staring at the distant, vine-choked silhouette of the Thorn Bridge. Sirens wailed, and news helicopters were already beginning to circle like mechanical vultures.

  Then he remembered. His phone. He’d been filming out the window when the world went green.

  With trembling fingers, he pulled it from his pocket and opened the video.

  It wasn't the epic, clear battle he’d half-expected to see. It was chaos.

  The footage was a nauseating jumble of screaming, blurring asphalt, and the bridge's railing whipping past. In the few split seconds where the camera chanced to point in the right direction, it didn't capture two superhuman teenagers fighting.

  It captured ghosts.

  A streak of blue ricocheted off the roof of a truck. A splash of cherry blossoms exploded in mid-air for a single frame. A shockwave of dust and debris bloomed for no apparent reason. The camera jerked violently as a sonic boom rattled the car’s windows a full second after a blur of white had already vanished.

  There were no punches, no kicks, no discernible forms. Just the physics-defying aftermath of their movements: a car door caving in by itself, a streetlight snapping in half as if hit by an invisible train, a geyser of water erupting from the river below in a perfect line, tracking something moving faster than sight.

  The only clear moment was the very end. The camera, by sheer luck, stabilized for two seconds. It showed the girl in the sundress standing tall, the exhausted albino one with the nunchaku slumped on her back. Then, in a blink, they were gone. No flash, no smoke. Just... gone.

  Leo lowered the phone, his heart hammering. He hadn't filmed a fight. He had filmed a storm. He had recorded evidence of things that moved in the spaces between heartbeats, beings whose very existence made the world he knew feel like a flimsy set piece.

  He looked from his phone screen to the cordoned-off, shattered bridge, then back again.

  The adults were talking about terrorists, or gas leaks, or military experiments.

  But Leo knew.

  He had seen gods. And all his phone had captured was their passing shadow.