You Already Won

Being powerless sucked.

It wasn't just the danger — it was the feeling. Like the entire world decided you didn't matter. You weren't the one making choices; you were waiting for choices to crush you. Every breath carried the weight of someone stronger, faster, louder, and you had no say in the outcome. It gnawed at you, leaving this hollow, ugly thing in your chest that whispered you weren't enough.

Jack wasn't built for that. He couldn't stand watching, couldn't stand being sidelined. So when Caroline asked him what he could do, he didn't answer. That wasn't cool. He'd show her.

"You just need that team of losers off the red guy, right?"

"Yes, but that didn't answer my ques—"

"Sit back and watch, princess."

"Princess?!"

Jack grinned, then hurled himself into the chaos. With all the excitement, pain, and rage tearing through the air, he leaned into it, letting himself sink into the storm. Ryun energy was everywhere and he pulled it in like breathing after drowning.

He raised a hand.

Finally.

He was back in control.

Fingers shifting into a strange shape — pointer and middle finger crossed around each other, ring and thumb linked, pinky angled low — he drew the energy into a single sleek, needle-pointed construct. The air around his palm rippled with power, unstable but focused.

Jack aimed at the battlefield, his grin widening.

"Hope the red guy you care so much about can handle this."

——

North was fighting like an angry honey badger and the sky burned for it.

Red and black lightning writhed around him, serpents uncoiling from his veins, cracking across the air in violent bursts. Every flick of his wrist sent arcs slicing through Outlanders and natives alike, their bodies shattering mid‑air before they could even scream. One knight tried to block with a mana‑shield — North's lightning chewed straight through it, hollowing his chest out in a single strike.

Targith's combos came fast, relentless, forcing North to pivot and weave through the chaos. Sparks screamed as steel met condensed Ryun, the broad blade slamming against his defenses while the longsword carved for openings.

"Pulling aggro! Focus fire!" a voice crackled over the Black Hawks' comms.

"Target him now — now! Tanks front—"

STATIC

"—fuck, I'm down, healer, healer, healer!"

"Who's got rez on Bando? Bando's dead, Bando'..ahh.aahahh—

North snarled, lightning snapping out from his back as he darted above the formation. He raised one hand and clenched his fist.

The nearest Black Hawk gunship screamed as its hull groaned inward. Metal warped and imploded, compressed like an empty soda can beneath an unseen giant's palm. The ship exploded in a thunderous blast, raining down fire and shattered plating.

"The Caged Raven is gone!—goddamnit, we're losing formation!"

"Guild Master, he's picking us off!"

"Stay locked in! Stay lo—" STATIC

North silenced them. Black veins crawled across his arm as his Ryun coiled tighter, a storm contained within flesh. He spun, unleashing a spiral of lightning that tore through two advancing Black Hawks, their outlines burning away into red ash mid‑air.

Above it all, Targith descended again, his broad glowing like an artificial star, shouting:

"Black Hawks! Break him! FORMATION SPIDER!"

The sky lit up, and North roared back.

Three figures converged on North at once.

Targith led the charge, broad sword raised high, his longsword glowing with condensed Ryun, forming jagged arcs that carved streaks of blue across the clouds. Beside him surged Newsaw, an Outlander with bronze skin and cropped black hair, his expression sharp with focus. Ryun condensed around his arms, spiraling into translucent hexagonal prisms. His ability — "Fractal Null Order" — warped the air itself; wherever his strikes landed, space trembled and fragmented like broken glass, forcing North into narrower and narrower lanes of escape.

The third attacker was Yqlen, a native whose four glowing yellow eyes tracked North's every twitch. His centaur-like body thundered through the broken platforms, hooves sparking against steel. In one hand, a massive blackened frying pan hummed with condensed force, and in the other, a serrated whip danced, snapping through the air like liquid. Every movement was erratic yet deliberate, his limbs bending at unnatural angles as if physics itself bent to his will.

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North ducked beneath Targith's first swing, black lightning detonating from his chest in a spiraling burst. The explosion forced Newsaw to weave backward, his prisms fracturing mid-spin and absorbing the blast before reforming with an audible pop. Yqlen didn't flinch — he darted low and whipped the frying pan forward like a hammer, the impact cratering the ground beneath them when North sidestepped.

"Oi, demon!" Yqlen bellowed, his four eyes burning with manic confidence. "Your time is near Blood Prince. Did you expect The Black Hawks to let a tarnished being like yourself roam?!"

North's answer was silent — just red-black arcs coiling around his arm. He grabbed the whip mid-snap, let the lightning crawl up, and ripped it free from Yqlen's grip. Before the centaur could react, North blurred forward, grabbed two of his lower arms, and tore him apart midair. The sound was wet — two halves of a body crashing onto the smoldering wreckage below.

Targith roared, broad sword striking downward with enough force to crack the ground beneath them. North parried with a cross-arm block, lightning screaming as black veins rippled up his forearms. Newsaw flanked left, firing a volley of prism shards that detonated into cascading void waves, forcing North to reposition mid-air. Each blast carved holes in the sky itself, nullifying the charge in his Ryun and throwing his timing off.

North's chest rose and fell, each inhale sharp and jagged. His pupils dilated until his eyes pulsed with alternating rings of red and black, lightning crawling from his sockets in thin, snapping threads.

Targith felt it. Newsaw felt it.

They didn't speak, but both moved in unison, decades of Guild synergy manifesting. Newsaw set his hands against the air, summoning a twisting lattice of fractal prisms in an interlocking dome, locking North into a funnel-shaped zone. Targith leapt above him, Ryun condensed into the longsword until it blazed like a miniature star, casting everything in ghostly blue.

North grinned through the blood dripping from his jaw.

"Alright… try me."

Then

The shift in energy was sudden and violent, shaking the entire battlefield.

Targith froze for half a breath, his grip tightening on his blades as the Black Hawks' comms went eerily silent. He turned his head just in time to see it—a blast of white and purple Ryun carving across the sky like a barreling comet. It tore through the air with a soundless violence, dragging atmosphere and gravity into its wake before stopping midair, spinning faster and faster, until entire ships and clusters of Black Hawks were yanked toward it.

Then it detonated.

The explosion didn't just rupture eardrums; it rattled souls. The force wave cracked platforms, shredded defensive barriers, and disoriented everyone within range.

North didn't hesitate. Using the chaos, he ripped himself out of Newsaw's fractal funnel and unleashed two colossal bolts of red-black lightning that tore through the smoke like jagged spears. Targith pivoted midair, longsword raised, and blocked both, the impact rattling his arms to the bone but holding his ground.

"Go," Targith barked, voice low but sharp. "Find out what the hell that was. I didn't expect him to have allies."

Newsaw didn't argue. With a blur of prism-laced steps, he darted toward the source of the explosion—but North was faster. A spiraling streak of crimson and obsidian lightning intercepted him midair, the collision detonating a shockwave that rippled across the battlefield.

The two clashed in a blistering exchange, blows so fast they left afterimages. Newsaw's Fractal Null Order shattered and reformed endlessly, redirecting North's lightning into broken, spiraling pockets of null-space, while North ripped through each one with raw force, burning holes straight into reality itself.

Targith snarled, launching himself back into the fray. His broad sword crashed down between them with meteoric force, splitting their clash apart and forcing North backward. In that instant, Newsaw seized his opening and shot toward the site of the detonation, leaving Targith and North alone in a charged silence, sparks raining around them.

——

Caroline grit her teeth, still glaring at the battlefield above.

"Idiot. Absolute idiot," she hissed under her breath, watching the lingering ripples of Jack's last attack warp the air. "I said help me, not nuke the entire damn zone."

If North got hurt because of that… she shook her head, forcing the thought down. No time to spiral. She needed a ship, needed to lock into its systems and start tearing through the Black Hawks' formation from the inside. Her UI could override their protocols, but she wasn't fast enough to get in without cover. That's why she'd needed Jack. That lunatic.

Jack, meanwhile, was floating in bliss. The chaos, the screams, the surging Ryun—it all fed him. His grin was wide, almost feral, his grey eyes brightened as the attacks came flying at him. But instead of resisting, he drank them in. Every blast absorbed, every strike twisted into his momentum, until the air itself seemed to pulse with his rhythm.

They came for him—vengeance in their eyes, righteous fury burning through their auras. He only smiled.

Raising a single hand, Jack locked his fingers into an intricate form again, his pointer and middle finger pointing forward, while curling his ring and thumb, pinky angled just so. He aimed upward.

Above, the Ryun swirled into a massive black-and-purple sword, hundreds of meters long, forged from the stolen fragments of the Black Hawks' own attacks. He dropped it—not on the world, but at a single invisible coordinate only he could sense.

The blade didn't strike.

Instead, it detonated at a point in space, sending razor-thin black and violet lines spiderwebbing through the air. Twenty Black Hawks froze mid-action as the patterns crisscrossed their bodies, a split-second of silence before they imploded inwards, folding into nothing before shattering like glass.

The remaining dozens stared in horror.

Jack stood alone in the drifting mist of their dissolved comrades, shoulders rising and falling. Then he laughed—a high, sharp bark that broke into wild, unrestrained joy.

"HeheheHAHAHAHA! That's what I'm TALKING about!" He threw his arms up toward the roaring battlefield. "Yeah! I'm HIM! Oh—wait, is that a fireball?"

He looked down. Caroline was below, practically hopping in place, waving her arms like a woman possessed.

"Oh. Right."

In the blink of an eye, he was next to her. "Wassup?"

Caroline spun on him, six tails flaring with static and frustration. "Dumbass—ohhh, I wanna say so much right now—but GET me into one of those ships. ASAP."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, mock salute and all. "But did you see that coo—"

"Now."

"Okay, okay, geez, man. Or—uh, woman. Anyway, may I have your hand?"

She gave him a deadpan stare. "…Really?"

"Yes."

She slapped her hand into his.

WARP.

Reality bent around them, and they blinked into existence on top of a Black Hawk ship mid-flight, the wind tearing at their clothes and hair. Caroline crouched low.

She risked a glance at Jack.

Something about him unnerved her—the black-purple mist still clung to his shoulders, and his aura hummed unnaturally, unstable but… intoxicating. She shoved the thought aside. She needed him for now. Let the chaos consume him if it made him useful.

Besides, a little womanly charm could turn this maniac into her weapon. And if she played it right? She'd lead this battle.