The third figure broke formation.

In an instant, twin rockets ignited beneath its feet. A concussive blast scattered dust and debris as it shot through the air like a missile.

"Target locked. Initiating termination protocol."

Its arms shift mid-flight—disassembling with clockwork precision into a thick barrel, converging into a cannon.

A deep green glow gathered at its core—violent, unstable, humming with annihilative intent.

Ezra moved without hesitation.

BOOM.

A beam of viridian fury erupted, blanketing the terrain like a falling star. The ground cracked, then shattered, and a line of mountains in the beam’s path were vaporized—reduced to molten glass, the very bedrock sliced clean.

Chunks of earth hundreds of meters thick floated momentarily before collapsing in a chain reaction of dust and shattered plateaus.

The three madmen are towering figures bearing humanoid frames forged from a fusion of blackened steel and obsidian alloys as crimson lenses pulsed at the center of their helmet-like heads.

The skies overhead shimmer with static as Ezra’s feet skim the cracked earth, his form flickering from place to place, kiting the machine now locked onto him.

The designated attacker, number three as Ezra aptly named it, kicks off an intense pursuit.

The rocket boosters on its legs let out an echoing roar with each redirection, splitting the air with sonic turbulence.

Ezra’s eyes narrow—not in fear, but evaluation.

> "Cannon recharging...26%..."

Its precision along with the power behind its attack was no joke. Its previous blast carved out nature like it was parchment.

And it wasn’t so much the brutality of it but instead the lethality.

This feisty fellow is not to be trifled with.

Another beam crackles out, blazing a searing green trail across the landscape.

Ezra twists mid-air, avoiding annihilation.

He lands low, skidding across dry, splintered soil, fingers trailing across the dirt. A spark of violet Qi hums through him.

He smirks, before his figure abruptly blurs, vanishing from sight.

The construct is forced to recalibrate its calculations as a red reticle sweeps across its HUD.

> "Acceleration speed—high. Optical lock lost."

> "Reacquiring..."

Too late.

A violet shimmer bloomed above the Madman, and Ezra came crashing down, a spiraling axe-kick aimed for its head.

Not to be outdone, the madman immediately has its head covered in new layers of alloy redirected from other parts of the body in a bid to weather the attack.

But instead of the expected strike, Ezra instead presses his palm gently against the madman’s metal carapace.

> "Err-"

<Absolute Induction>

In that moment, space bends in an unnatural way to engulf Number Three, and without fanfare, the machine is gone—ripped from this reality and cast into the Sovereign Universe within the span of two seconds.

Ezra exhales softly, brushing his hands off.

"Now then"

The other two halt instantly, shifting formation.

> "Anomaly detected. The third has been erased or displaced via an unknown method"

> "Detecting altered spatial parameters"

> "Priority escalation. New threat assessment: high-dimensional and spatial displacement abilities confirmed"

> "Engaging under the incalculable-threat protocol"

The Madman on the left leaps into the sky, engines flaring wildly, while the other sinks into the ground with seismic force, before vanishing from sight−predictably aiming to attack Ezra from both above and below, catching him in a pincer strike.

Ezra’s eyes glint, a bit in anticipation and a bit in dismay.

’Hmm...they have adequate intelligence, but their use of it is still far too lacking’

Considering that they would become a potential future fighting force for him to wield in the future, it isn’t surprising to evaluate their average battle strength given the chance.

Launched into the sky with a blinding burst of kinetic force, it ascended into the atmosphere until it seemed to vanish into the horizon, fading into but a dot in from below.

From this same point of view, all of a sudden, many more dots appeared in the air, tearing through the air as they fell, bringing their appearance into full view.

There they were, dozens of drone-like projectiles dropping like hail, each glowing with thick red rather than green, each with its own condensed energy signatures.

The blanketed sky and the vibrating air make them impossible to ignore.

Feeling the mountain-sized pressure of simultaneous assault, even Ezra couldn’t remain unfazed.

Clearly, the previous attack had been but a tip of the iceberg, these things had only begun to let out their serious attacks in an effort to end his life.

As the attack reaches him, Ezra raises an arm to the sky, blue energy flares and pours out like a blooming flower around him, blanketing his figure.

The drones struck down like meteorites.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! BOOM!

Explosions swallowed the area. Stone melted. Earth trembled.

The explosion carved through a portion of the mountain range more than three times that of its counterpart like a knife across cloth.

As a result, mountains—no, several—vanished in a howling instant.

The majority of mountains in the attack’s range stood utterly annihilated, turned in slightly bigger mounds while others had cleanly broken apart into rubble like brittle glass while the last few on the littering the edge of the explosion’s range lay wounded, missing entire upper halves and some more as the air is left humming with unstable particles and certain portions of the ground sizzle.

Yet, as the smoke cleared—what lay in sight was a landscape of ice with a cocoon of ice at its center.

Though the pristine radiance of the ice had been completely erased by the explosion, Ezra stands untouched, surrounded by his barrier of battered and bruised ice.

With a flick of his finger, the cocoon cracks and shatters, revealing Ezra’s visage.

Without wasting time, he points upward and accurately locks onto the madman in the middle of a ridiculous and dangerous dive.

PEW!

From his hands, blood shoots out in a straight line, tearing through the air towards the falling madman.

But as it would reach, Ezra’s senses tingle in warning.

On the spot, the madman that disappeared beneath the ground erupts like a geyser from below, its arms replaced with outstretching blades looking to land on Ezra’s flesh as a man to his wife.

....?!

Alarmed, Ezra abruptly cuts off his attack and turns, pointing his left arm to face the enemy behind him as he unleashes the projectile of blood once more.

His thoughts become tumultuous as confusion permeates within.

He had expected the madman beneath to either snipe at him with a full powered energy ray or disrupt him when he tries to take down the other one, and as such, had been keeping an eye out.,

Yet, to his shock, the madman had somehow been able to get close to him without his notice.

How so is the question rampaging in his mind, but it ceases to interrupt his response.

As the blade sought to touch his flesh, the projectile of blood pierced through its metal frame, having built up to an absurd level of speed thanks to Ezra’s alarmed state alongside the fact it had been imbued with energy, strengthening it to a high level.

Piercing through its metal frame, Ezra layers the blood in ice, pouring out energy into the attack in an explosive manner to instantly encase the madman’s internal organs in ice before also its exterior.

With the opponent being so close, Ezra is also momentarily blinded by the burst of blue light and forced to shut his eyes. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

Opening it moments later, he is greeted to a frozen outstretched blade mere centimeters from piercing his right eye.

"Huuuu- !

Ezra’s exhale is cut short as an ominous beam of red instantly blankets his entire surrounding.

’Seriously?’

With only seconds to think and act, Ezra managed to muster a response, before instantly vanishing as the light reached him.

+++++++

For half a minute upon reappearing in the sovereign universe, Ezra’s gaze remains blank.

Activating <Gatekeeper> had been his last thought, granting him timely reprieve from what otherwise would have been a premium scalding experience.

’I didn’t think it would cast aside its counterpart in an attempt to kill me’ Ezra reflects. ’But does this prove it’s lesser or greater intelligence?’

Wondering this, Ezra returns to the battlefield.

In the aftermath of the bombardment, the landscape had been levelled by one step and all the ice, fragmented or otherwise had melted and turned into vapour without a single shard left in sight.

Upon appearing, Ezra stares at the madman floating in the air, with the sky as its background granting it a visage with a grand feel.

Not a moment would pass for Ezra to suddenly look back in shock as the previously frozen madman rose right in front of his eyes.

Yet rather than the expected weakened state, it seemed to be literally almost bursting with energy.

Such a turn of events has even Ezra taken aback as he takes ten steps backwards in quick succession while keeping his eyes peeled.

This upturn once again throws his mind into turmoil...but he quickly comes up with an answer!

’That attack! It absorbed the energy from that attack!’

While the thesis lacks confirmation, it seemed the most plausible explanation.

But this doesn’t make the situation any better as more questions rapidly pop up.

’Can they absorb all of each other’s energy rays or only the red ones?’

But he isn’t given time to think.

The two collide the next moment, with the madman being eagerly engaging as always.

Moreover, he could instinctively feel the floating Madman charging up an attack of its own

’These two work well together...I should speed this up’

Ezra doesn’t evade.

The madman motions to stab through his shoulder—when the unthinkable happens.

The blade automatically retracts as it abruptly halts its steps, forming a small crater.

It follows up with a hop off the ground in a smooth somersaulting motion in an effort to avoid Ezra’s approaching palm.

’This!’

Ezra’s gaze deepens.

While it probably isn’t intelligent enough to understand the situation intricately, it understood the principle to avoid Ezra’s touch.

In the short instance of falling to touch it as a result of the somersault, the madman floating in the air let off another energy beam.

This time, the ray of energy is concentrated, piercing Ezra’s location with precision.

Simultaneously, the madman standing before him reveals places both hands together to release it’s own blanketing energy beam as well.

The concentrated beam arrives first, cleaving through Ezra’s form causing the surroundings to churn, burn and boil from the point of impact.

Only for to Ezra’s form to fade as his visaged is exposed as an afterimage, while the a fading shimmer of crimson light dances in its wake.

In the same instant, an extremely small line of red as thin as a line of thread touched upon the grounded Madman’s chest.

Meanwhile, it lay in the midst of shifting its attack in the direction Ezra had moved to.

No matter that the ice previously encasing the madman had melted, a lasting bit of the blood that initially pierced it still remained.

But all that bursting energy made its position hard to grasp.

The thread of blood nullified such concerns and using this, Ezra manipulates said blood into piercing the madman’s innards.

With its movements thrown into chaos as a result, Ezra arrives before it in an instant.

Seeking to thwart the enemies plans, it tries to self destruct, but Ezra causes the blood in its body to freeze, causing another disruption in its actions.

With his fingers trailing along its body, a pulse of energy ignited in his palm, causing space to tremble.

With a sudden surge, the second Madman vanished like the first—forcefully swallowed by the warped space and pulled into the Sovereign Universe.

No explosion. No death scream.

Just erasure.

Ezra landed again, breathing lightly.

But he wasn’t done.

Now only one remained.

The floating madman had seen it all—from the sky, through dozens of sensory feeds.

And it chose survival.

> "Assessing escape vector. Prioritizing self-preservation."

It doesn’t hesitate.

With a sonic burst, it abandoned its assault pattern and darted away, heading toward the mountainous ridges miles away—boosters screaming, cloak systems activating to evade detection.

Ezra’s brow twitched in mild amusement, but his gaze wasn’t.

"Like I would let you leave"

He flicked two fingers forward, a projectile of blood shooting out and embedding itself in the machine’s body before being destroyed.

But then nothing happened and a full minutes passes as time around him seemed to slow down.

In the next breath, he reappeared mid-air directly in front of the fleeing machine, now frozen mid-boost.

He landed on it with one foot and inducts it before it has the chance to pull any moves.

A third and final induction.

The machine vanished—dragged away into that unfathomable inner world.

In desperation, the madman rushes toward a mountain’s hollow, aiming to burrow in and collapse the path behind it.

It never made it.

Silence falls and dust drifts through the air.

Only the wind remains.

Ezra stood at the peak of the mountain it had tried to flee to, gazing out across the war-torn landscape.

"If these things are supposed to match a Nascent, then the creator has outdone himself" Ezra murmurs in joy as his face turns strange

"Well, the creator should be a constellation...so it would be insulting if they couldn’t at least do this much?"