The chamber was a cathedral of quietude, its air still vibrating with the sacred frequency of a vow finally spoken. The soft, pulsing luminescence of the wall fungi was a muted choir to the four hearts beating as one. Nyxara held Kuro, her forehead resting against his temple, her multi hued light a gentle aurora that seemed to absorb and soothe the last of his tremors. Across from them, Statera cradled Shiro, her Polaris glow a miniature, steady galaxy in which his chaotic star had finally found its orbit. They were not four individuals, but one, fused at the soul, a perfect, fragile symmetry of hard won peace. The world, with its knives and its pyres, had been banished. There was only the silence, the warmth, and the profound, mending truth of home.

The sound that shattered it was not a sound, but an anti sound, a splintering of reality itself.

It was the scream of stone giving birth to violence. The fissure entrance did not open; it exploded. A shockwave of pulverized rock and malevolent intent blasted into the chamber, a physical force that snuffed the fungi's gentle glow and choked the air with dust and the reek of iron.

From the maelstrom of debris, they emerged. Not soldiers, but instruments of precision tuned agony. Aella and Athena, their hair not red but the colour of a heart's blood sunset, moved with a synchronicity that was abhorrent, a perverse mockery of the embrace they had just violated. Their eyes were not eyes, but polished obsidian chips, reflecting not light but a void that drank the very concept of peace.

The moment stretched, a single, grotesque tableau of understanding dawning a second too late.

Aella's lunge was a scythe stroke of shadow. There was no flash of a dagger, only a seamless, arcing movement. A line of impossible cold, then impossible fire, etched itself across Shiro's face.

The world did not go dark. It unmade itself.

A sensation not of cutting, but of uncreation, seared through his right eye. It was of pure pain, a burning X that carved through nerve and memory, scalding the very image of his mother's face from the inside of his skull. The pain was so absolute, so universe consuming, that his scream was not a sound he made, but a thing that tore itself from him, a raw, primal shriek that was the death cry of the peace he'd just held.

"GGGAAAH! FUCK FUCK! MY EYE! IT'S..! MOTHER!"

He was no longer in Statera's arms. He was a writhing architecture of agony on the cold stone, back arching, heels drumming a frantic, useless tattoo against the floor. His hands clawed at his face, but the pain was internal, a molten parasite devouring his mind from the inside out. Blood, hot and thick, streamed through his fingers, painting grotesque patterns on his skin.

Simultaneously, a twin damnation was wrought.

Athena's attack was not a slash, but a punctuation of absolute malice. A single, dismissive flick of her wrist that traced a line of liquid fire down Kuro's cheek and across his left eye. It was not a deep cut, but a profound one, a wound that seemed to bypass flesh and sever the very tether to his composure.

The strategic mind, the cold calculus, the princely defiance, it all evaporated in the face of this base, animal violation. A roar was ripped from Kuro's throat, a sound of such pure, unadulterated torment that it seemed to shake the foundations of the mountain. It was the sound of a glacier shattering.

"AAAAAGH! FUCK! FUCK! IT FUCKING HURTS! !"

He convulsed, curling into a foetal ball, his body a rigid bowstring of suffering. His good hand slapped uselessly at the side of his head as if to dislodge the pain hammering into his brain. The world was a smear of crimson and blinding, nauseating fire.

The mothers did not move. For a heartbeat, they were statues of perfect, paralyzing horror, their minds refusing to graft this new, bloody reality onto the tenderness of seconds before. The sounds of their sons' suffering, the profane, guttural screams, the wet, choking sobs, were weapons that found their mark more surely than any blade.

Then, the world snapped back into a hyper real, nightmare focus.

Aella stood over Shiro's thrashing form, her voice a silken corruption in the chaos. "Look at him writhe, Polaris dog. Is this the precious light you nurtured? This mewling, broken thing?" She laughed, a sound like breaking glass. "The King sends his regards. He says a mongrel should not have two eyes to commit a regicide."

Athena kicked Kuro's shuddering leg, her contempt a physical force. "And you," she hissed at Nyxara, whose multi hued light was now flickering in a staccato rhythm of incipient cataclysm. "The Queen of a fallen court, playing mother to a failed heir. He screams just like the weakling he always was. A fitting son for a barren queen."

The taunts were the final, sacrilegious spark.

The love that had moments ago been a shelter now mutated into something terrifying and absolute. It did not warm; it ignited.

Statera's Polaris light, usually a beacon of healing, did not brighten, it detonated. A silent, concussive wave of pure white fury erupted from her, banishing the shadows around her son. Her face, usually a mask of serene compassion, was a rictus of primordial rage. Her gaze found the sword leaning against Shiro's pallet. Her hand did not reach for it; it was simply there, the hilt seeming to leap into her grip as if summoned by her will.

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She did not charge. She appeared before Aella, the movement too fast to track. The air crackled with ozone.

"You will fucking pay for you transgression," Statera's voice was not a shout, but a low, glacial tremor that promised the extinction of suns. The sword in her hand was no longer metal; it was a shard of concentrated vengeance.

Nyxara's transformation was even more profound. Her multi hued light didn't flare, it collapsed inwards, condensing into a corona of black hole darkness shot through with furious, dying star colours. The temperature around her plummeted. The air itself seemed to scream as it was pulled into the vortex of her wrath. She was no longer a woman, but a constellation of vengeance given form.

Kuro's sword was in her hand, its edge humming with a silent, deadly frequency. She did not look at Athena; she simply fixed her with a gaze that held the cold of the void between galaxies.

"You have carved your death warrant into my son's flesh," Nyxara whispered, and the whisper carried the mass of a collapsing world. "I will ensure you read every word of it before you die."

The chamber, once a sanctuary, was now a crucible. At its centre, two sons writhed and screamed on the altar of their torment. And circling them, their mothers, transformed into avenging deities of love and fury, prepared to paint the stones with the blood of those who had dared to break their world.

The battle had not begun. It was a force of nature already in motion.

The chamber did not descend into chaos; it crystallized into a nightmare of perfect, opposing forces. The air, thick with pulverized stone and the coppery stench of fresh blood, became a conductive medium for hatred. On one axis, Statera and Aella, a maelstrom of glacial fury against a whirlwind of sadistic precision. On the other, Nyxara and Athena, a dying star's final conflagration against a poised, mocking shadow.

The screams of their sons were the engine of the violence.

"GGGK! MOTHER..! IT'S..! AAGH!" Shiro's shrieks were not words but raw, synaptic feedback, the sound of a mind being flayed alive by the unholy geometry of pain Aella had carved into his face. He thrashed, a dying fish on the cold stone, his back arching and slamming down, his fingers scrabbling at the ruin of his eye as if he could tear the agony out by its roots.

Each guttural, broken sound was a shiv of ice plunged into Statera's heart. She felt them physically, each one a puncture wound to her soul. Her love, a moment ago a sanctuary, was now a supernova of protective rage. She did not engage Aella; she unmade the space between them.

Her sword, a shard of her own Polaris light given brutal form, met Aella's twin daggers in a shower of white sparks that sizzled like dying stars. The clash was not of metal, but of concepts, healing versus violation, love versus nihilistic hate.

"He calls for you," Aella hissed, her voice a serpent's dry slither in the din. She flowed around a decapitating strike, her form blurring. "But what is a 'mother' to a thing like that? A temporary comfort. A delusion. His true mother was ash on the wind long before you decided to play house with a stray."

She ducked under Statera's guard, not to strike at her, but to plant a brutal kick into Shiro's ribs.

CRACKKKK.

The sound was sickeningly loud. Shiro's scream hitched, then exploded anew, a wet, choking gasp of pure, airless agony. His body curled instinctively around the new hurt, a fresh wave of tremors wracking his frame.

"See?" Aella taunted, dancing back from Statera's enraged lunge with infuriating grace. "He only knows pain. That is his true inheritance. Not your pathetic, borrowed love. Ryo will remind him of that when he peels the other eye from its socket."

Across the chamber, a symphony of parallel torment played its movement.

Kuro's roars were deeper, more bestial, the sound of a fortress being demolished from the inside. "NNNHHGG! He clawed at his own face, his nails drawing bloody furrows alongside the precise, burning line Athena had scored across his eye. His body was a rigid arc of suffering, every muscle locked in a battle against a fire that consumed thought, strategy, pride, everything that made him, him.

Each desperate, shattered sound was a hook in Nyxara's soul, tearing chunks from her with its passage. Her multi hued light wasn't just dark; it was a cancellation. It drank the light around it, a localized apocalypse contained within the form of a queen. Her attacks were not swings, but gravitational events, each one meant to pull Athena in and crush her into dust.

Athena met her not with brute force, but with a viper's contempt. She parried, her own blade a sliver of darkness that seemed to absorb the fury of Nyxara's blows.

"Listen to him sing," Athena mocked, her voice a cold, clinical scalpel. "The mighty 'Baby Black Prince.' Reduced to a sobbing infant. Did you think a title bestowed in pity could ever replace the blood he lacks? You are a placeholder, Nyxara. A barren queen cosplaying a mother for a broken son. Ryo will enjoy showcasing your failure."

She feinted high, then swept a leg out, not at Nyxara, but at the ground near Kuro's head, kicking a spray of sharp stone fragments into his writhing form. He flinched violently, a fresh, hoarse cry tearing from his throat, the sound of a spirit breaking.

The taunts were weapons as potent as their blades. They found the cracks in the mothers' armour, not in their skill, but in their newfound, terrifyingly fragile hearts. Every jeer about their "fake" motherhood, every promise of Ryo's victory, was designed to unbalance them, to make them doubt the very thing that gave them this fearsome power.

And it worked.

Statera, driven mad by the sound of Shiro's ragged breathing behind her, overextended. Her rage made her predictable. Aella flowed inside her guard, and the pommel of a dagger cracked against Statera's temple. White light exploded behind her eyes. She stumbled, the world tilting, her Polaris glow flickering erratically.

"You bleed like any other creature," Aella purred, pressing her advantage. A slash opened a line of fire across Statera's forearm. "Not so divine. Not so maternal. Just another fool who attached her heart to a thing meant for the pyre."

Nyxara saw Statera falter from the corner of her eye, and the split second distraction was all Athena required. A kick, deceptively graceful, caught Nyxara in the side. The air left her lungs in a pained grunt. The crushing gravity of her aura wavered for a microsecond.

It was enough.

Athena's blade, a tongue of black flame, licked out and traced a burning line across Nyxara's thigh. It was a shallow cut, a mockery of the wound she'd given Kuro, but it carried the same corrupting fire. Nyxara hissed, not just from the pain, but from the insult of it.

"He will make you watch," Athena whispered, her face inches from Nyxara's as their blades locked, her obsidian eyes reflecting Nyxara's fury twisted features. "When he takes the other eye. When he breaks the other twin. He will make you watch, and then he will ask you if your love was worth the price of their suffering."

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