It was Katherina who opened the Totentanz: a pink lightning bolt, instantaneous, sliced through the air like a blade of living light and shot toward Micheal in less than a heartbeat.

  Micheal dodged it with a brutal telluric burst: the ground beneath his feet imploded in a sharp fracture, and the lower section of the wall beside him split with deep cracks that spread out like veins in shattered stone.

  The leap hurled him to the right, diagonally, up toward the air.

  As soon as he reached the wall, he drove his right foot into the masonry with violent force: the point of impact burst open instantly, an irregular hole surrounded by a spiderweb of fissures radiating outward for meters.

  A vibration rippled through the stone blocks — subtle but penetrating — like a phonon traveling through the mineral mass of the wall.

  The push unleashed a terrifying force, hurling him toward Katherina like a human projectile.

  Just moments before reaching her—ready to strike with a devastating hook already synced into the rhythm of his body—he realized he was aiming at a residual image.

  This time, though, he managed to follow its shift: a messy visual trail, a dull sequence of rushed tweening, like the hastily drawn in-between frames of an animation that fail to hide the gap between one motion and the next.

  Katherina had already pushed herself far away, and she kept increasing the distance with a trajectory almost perpendicular to the crenellation where she’d been an instant before.

  Both of them thought, almost at the same moment, that the other had become faster.

  For Katherina, the realization carried the taste of a cold unease.

  For Micheal, it flashed as a surge of brutal excitement.

  “You’re not getting away from me!” Micheal said.

  He used his right foot again to push himself toward Katherina.

  His movement was directed upward, because Katherina’s propulsion vector—and the technique she used to move monstrously fast from one point to another—relied on vectors completely different from his.

  The parabola of his trajectory, however, was very tight. If it had been possible to calculate the distance between the midpoint of the arc—traced by his trajectory—and the chord that would have underlain it (the sagitta, as it would be called if drawn on a sheet of paper for a school assignment), it would have emerged that, given the initial conditions—namely Micheal’s strength and the type of material the merlon was made of—that trajectory was a sub-optimal one among those closest to being optimal.

  In other words, a nearly perfect jump relative to his initial capabilities.

  It took him only a few instants — the brief stretch of the first half of the parabola he was locked into — to realize that his opponent had already prepared one of those damned energy spheres.

  It pulsed before him, enormous, like the first one that had struck him a year earlier — no, even larger.

  Then it vanished before his eyes.

  “Shit!” Micheal shouted, and an instant later a devastating blast overwhelmed him, knocking him senseless and hurling him in the opposite direction.

  A shroud of light swallowed him whole, and he stared into it with aching eyes and a mind ringing like steel under pressure.

  The explosion struck the upper section of the wall, shattering it and carving out an irregular cavity — which Micheal flew past, still airborne, before crashing into one of the houses of the ghost district behind the barrier.

  He got back up immediately.

  The daze had dissipated on its own, quickly, almost mechanically.

  He looked at the rubble of the house he had torn through, and at the debris that had crashed into the nearby buildings after the explosion. Dust hung in the air, still descending in fine grains; the air scraped his throat with its chalky taste.

  He saw no one.

  He turned his gaze around in a disordered sweep of the surrounding area.

  No movement. No breath. No sign of life.

  The bitch evacuated the area. Or the entire city? Damn her. Then why did you offer me your body? Micheal thought.

  From the peak of a half-collapsed wall he jumped. He didn’t land on the ground: he sank into it, like Scrooge McDuck diving into the coins of his vault.

  The area around him — vast — began to swell grotesquely, taking on the shape of a pustule as large as a handful of football fields.

  The houses above that portion of terrain shuddered at once: their foundations crackled like vertebrae under strain, walls leaned a few degrees forward, then back; tiles slid off the roofs and clattered onto the ground in sharp, bouncing impacts; intact windows splintered with a brief, crisp, almost timid sound.

  The swelling reached the adjacent section of the wall: its base, compressed by the rising ground, bloomed with a constellation of thin cracks that widened by a couple of millimeters in the span of a breath. Small stone fragments detached and clicked against the lower blocks.

  Then the swelling pushed further, and the fracture truly opened: a deep, muted furrow marked the wall as if something beneath it were forcing its way upward with geological fury.

  Katherina watched the entire scene.

  She had landed very far away and had only approached after catching her breath, but she had stopped the moment she saw the onset of that telluric swelling.

  Eyes wide, breath still high, a thin fatigue pulsing through her muscles.

  She watched the geomorphic explosion unfold, while the awareness of the immense increase in power Micheal had gained—and learned to control—in just a single year crystallized in her mind.

  Or could he already have used this technique at this scale back then?

  No.

  If he’d been capable of it, he would have done it.

  And maybe this wasn’t even the same technique.

  But I shouldn’t be standing here, perversely admiring the dark beauty of what he’s doing, Katherina thought.

  From the outside, the explosion resembled the collapse of a caldera — but as if the crater had been encapsulated in tungsten-dense ground, forced to deform for an instant like living metal under a pressure it was never meant to withstand.

  Its “pyroclastic flow” wasn’t fire but a chaotic jet of compressed earth and minerals: heavy chunks hurled upward with accelerations incompatible with their mass, lighter fragments unraveling into divergent trajectories, like debris torn loose by an underground detonation.

  The whole thing looked like an expulsion of granular viscera and mineral spores, sprayed into the sky as if a gargantuan fungus had imploded from within and regurgitated its inner chamber outward.

  Then the ascending storm of debris, minerals, and rocks froze, suspended in the air like a still frame.

  The stasis lasted only an instant.

  The floating inorganic mass resumed moving with a disturbing grace: the fragments brushed past each other, crossed paths, shifted, tracing a choreography that oscillated between the elegance of a murmuration of starlings and the disorder of bees in the early stages of swarming.

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  Moments later, those granular viscera began bending toward a new form.

  They moved as if guided by an octopus with thousands of arms handling mineral Lego bricks: orienting chunks, rotating them, slotting them together with unnatural dexterity — until they took on the structure of a massive sphere.

  The inner cavity wasn’t hidden: the gaps between one “spore” and the next — wide, irregular, spaced far enough to form a breathing lattice — allowed an unobstructed view inside, given the colossal size of the structure.

  From where Katherina stood, the sphere loomed like a titanic entity raised above what had once been a city.

  She could imagine the scale of the massacre. With difficulty.

  A concentrated burst of wonder — visual and architectural — and at the same time a sense of inadequacy forcibly injected into your spirit.

  In other words: you’re amazed, and you’re shitting yourself.

  Things were turning bad, and Katherina understood it instantly.

  A sense of guilt — unwanted, especially in that moment — cut through her chest like a sudden stab.

  Her mind became a bottleneck: on one side, what her field of vision demanded of her emotions; on the other, what her personality was desperately trying to force her to focus on.

  In short, she felt far too small to face the future — bleak in a way she had never imagined it could appear to her — and to face herself.

  From the crater overhung by the sphere, a humanoid figure emerged — entirely metallic — surfing inside the cavity on a block of compact earth and misshapen rock, moving with a disturbingly effortless fluidity.

  It had Micheal’s exact same features — every proportion, every line of the face, every externally visible detail — but transformed into living metal: eyes, mouth, cheekbones, even the folds that usually mark a human face, all of it was there, merely converted into a glossy, uniform, continuous surface.

  A perfectly hermetic panoply, as if it had been created in a single act, with no need for assembly — as though Micheal had been generated directly inside that shell, or as if someone had teleported him into it.

  He performed a series of looping arcs, as if he were testing a new toy. Then he shot upward with force.

  He “struck” the dome near its very top. It wasn’t a real impact: the sphere opened for him, and its mineral Legos shifted like the water of a swimming pool would during a dive seen in reverse — as if someone were rewinding the tape of a video recording.

  His exit triggered a violent contraction of the sphere, which collapsed inward like an empty plastic bottle crushed in the hand of a bodybuilder.

  “What the hell…” Katherina said.

  Her legs were shaking. The level kept rising. And the feeling — shamelessly exposed by her own body — was that Micheal could push himself even further.

  It seemed impossible.

  If he had improved this much in just one year… how far could his imagination reach? And how far could talent carry it?

  Of course, this wasn’t the moment to speculate about the frontier of possibilities Micheal was radiating before her eyes; the situation itself strangled any such impulse.

  She had to do something.

  Change the course of the fight.

  After all, she hadn’t been hit yet.

  What if it’s all smoke?

  She forced herself to believe it, even for a heartbeat.

  She gathered the energy she had accumulated while watching, like a fool, Micheal’s display of ontological inventiveness, and channeled it into the creation of one of her energy spheres.

  Her body reacted with an internal jolt:

  a sharp heat rose from her abdomen to her chest,

  her arms grew heavy,

  and her vision tightened for an instant, as if someone had abruptly narrowed her field of view.

  What emerged was a gigantic sphere.

  None of the spheres she had created until that moment could be compared to this one in terms of destructive potential.

  When the structure contracted—shrinking, as always, into a small sphere that pulsed with an irregular cadence—Katherina was already exhausted.

  Then the sphere vanished.

  The metallic Micheal was struck head-on.

  The luminous explosion, which assumed its typical pseudo-spheroidal shape, engulfed an immense portion of atmosphere, almost comparable in size to the debris sphere Micheal had generated earlier.

  A large number of those debris—now forming a kind of asymmetric hourglass, as if someone had tried to reassemble an ancient ceramic hourglass shattered into thousands of shards—were caught in the blast.

  And for a moment, it seemed as though they were about to fall to the ground: as if Micheal’s grip on their bond with gravity had weakened… but not completely.

  When the luminous mist thinned, the metallic Micheal emerged from the haze.

  Not a scratch.

  Not the slightest dulling.

  He looked as though he had been touched by newborn fingers, not by a blast capable of leveling a building.

  Then she tried to bring him down with a golden lightning bolt, the same size as the one she had used to pulverize the mud-mecha.

  No—stronger, and infinitely more concentrated.

  An attack that would leave her barely enough energy for one last, desperate maneuver.

  The effort was atrocious.

  Every muscle in her body ached; her tendons and joints, if they’d had any awareness, would have declared an immediate strike.

  Mind and bones conspired to make her collapse.

  But she managed to unleash it.

  Two attacks of that magnitude, one after the other, cannot have no effect.

  He cannot be superior by that kind of margin.

  It isn’t admissible.

  She couldn’t accept it.

  But she was forced to.

  The golden light struck the surfer with its satin-anthracite sheen.

  But it did nothing to him.

  The only result was a smile — sly, cruel.

  In that moment, Katherina freed herself, unwillingly, from the illusion that retaliation was still possible.

  Her knees gave out, and she found herself prostrated on the ground, gaze tilted upward. Toward Micheal.

  What could she still do?

  Nothing, except try to run.

  But she would need her last scraps of energy to manage that.

  And if she failed, she would be completely defenseless.

  No — she was already defenseless.

  She stood up.

  Her body responded with difficulty, so much that for a moment she felt as though she had to control each step individually, like in a proprioceptive polyneuropathy.

  Meanwhile, the debris gave a collective jolt.

  Their fall halted abruptly, and although many fragments had already been destroyed, others had crashed to the ground, and still others had been reduced to tiny shards by the exorbitant energy released by Katherina’s sphere, an immense amount of material still hung in the air.

  More than enough to be used.

  The debris surged back up toward Micheal with violent force, moving like the frantic pulsations of a deranged jellyfish.

  Once they reached him, they began orbiting close to his body, sketching an irregular ring — a mineral, dirty, convulsive version of Saturn’s rings.

  Katherina used what little energy she had left to hurl herself away: out of the city, out of the encampment’s reach, away from Micheal.

  At that exact moment, one of the mineral “Legos” — now spinning in frantic revolutions around him — broke away from the ring, opening a small sort of Kirkwood gap.

  It followed its designated trajectory and struck the stretch of terrain where the chain of residual images indicated Katherina would land a moment later.

  And if that wasn’t the exact point… Micheal wouldn’t have cared in the slightest.

  Katherina was forced to halt her escape abruptly: the debris slammed into the ground right in front of her, with an impact so violent it tore the breath from her lungs.

  She fell forward, awkwardly.

  She pushed herself back up at once, stiff, every joint protesting.

  She changed direction.

  Another chunk of debris.

  Another impact.

  Another brutal stop.

  She lifted her gaze.

  Now that she was no longer moving, Micheal had stopped throwing anything.

  He didn’t want to hit her.

  He wanted to play.

  Cat and mouse.

  Bastard. Piece of shit, Katherina thought.

  She didn’t want to end up in his grasp.

  The very idea terrified her.

  And that terror only made her angrier.

  Inside her, a tremendous rage was rising: one of those moments when, in fiction, you transform, conjure new energies out of nothing, develop impossible techniques.

  Or someone arrives to save you at the last second.

  A classic Deus ex machina.

  Had her mind been clearer — with that usual pseudo-omniscient attitude of hers, a trait she sometimes despised, often precisely while displaying it in her own streams of consciousness — she would have immediately recognized that sudden spark of hope for what it was: the grace delusion that Frankl described in Man’s Search for Meaning.

  The illusion that the flow of events would bend in her favor, despite every single sign pointing in the opposite direction.

  That hope was duly shattered by Metal Mike.

  A hail of mineral “Lego” shot down on the patch of earth where Katherina’s gaunt figure was still trying to move.

  Many projectiles missed her. Many didn’t.

  She raised her arms to shield herself.

  The impacts were brutal: each fragment hit with a dull, bone-deep thud that traveled through flesh and rattled wherever bones met.

  Her body held—but only because she was forcing it to.

  That sort of microscopic super-glue, that substance lining her tissues and bones from the inside, making them difficult to cut and nearly impossible to break, didn’t act automatically.

  It needed to be pushed. Summoned. Reinforced in an instant, by distributing energy and focus in ways no human being should ever have been able to grasp.

  And Katherina tried.

  It was the only reason she was still alive.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  The left arm gave out first: a sharp, nauseating pain—ulna and radius snapping like two beams under impossible pressure.

  She tried to “glue” the structure from within, to call up that impossible reinforcement, but the next shockwave hit before she could finish.

  Then the right: a different pain this time—deeper, muffled, almost underwater—announced the fracture of the ulna.

  The super-glue surged along the arm, trying to set, to brace, but it arrived too late.

  The blow had already landed.

  Other fragments struck her everywhere: shallow cuts, lacerations, pulsing bruises that blossomed visibly, irregular and purple, like ugly flowers blooming in the flesh.

  The ground around her was a field of craters.

  And she, at the center, breathed in ragged bursts, struggling to keep that internal protection active the way someone fights to stay conscious after a crash.

  She was alive only because she was forcing herself to be.

  And she had less and less control over that with every heartbeat.

  “Enough…” Katherina whispered, and the ground rushed up to meet her as she collapsed.

  “I should have let the debris kill me,” she managed to think — barely.

  Every fiber of her body screamed. The darkness at the edges of her vision promised a collapse that felt almost merciful.

  An unreal, metallic, cavernous laugh bubbled through the air.

  Metal Mike was descending on his “surfboard.” He glided a few centimeters above the ground, shaving it, as though he were brushing the earth itself just to humiliate it. He was still some distance away, but he was advancing. Slowly. Enjoying every second.

  Katherina pissed herself. The warmth trickled down the inside of her thighs. Her tears spilled without control, a constant stream disappearing into the dust.

  Her mind filtered nothing anymore. It was a puddle of fragments, thoughts annihilating one another like virtual particles in a Dirac sea.

  In that moment, she was only terror — pure, without footholds.

  Metal Mike stopped a few meters away. He stared at her with that perfectly smooth, smiling face, drenched in an emetic self-satisfaction so slick it looked like cold sweat that had decided to solidify.

  He winked at her.

  Then he disintegrated into countless small pieces, which in turn disintegrated, in some spots down to fine powder, right in front of her. And inside… there was no Micheal. There was nothing. Only stone. Raw, irregular stone, as if the metallic shell were just a skin, a coating stretched over it to deceive.

  And that too, after a moment, began to give way: it cracked, crumbled, and fell apart like the rest.

  Delirium of grace. Again.

  But it made sense, didn’t it? To produce all that metal, he would have needed immense heat. He couldn’t have generated it from nothing. He had manipulated the metal of the city. Bent it, tamed it; he wasn’t transmuting matter. You can’t transmute matter and control a stone dummy coated in metal with such an extreme level of precision in facial micro-expressions and fine motor control.

  “Tame it,” she thought. “Simply.”

  Simply my ass.

  It was absurd. And pointless to think about.

  She had to defend the delirium of grace, ignore the logical inconsistencies in the slapdash reasoning her mind was stitching together.

  He too had to be destroyed, emptied out: he had miscalculated, demanded too much of his body. She laughed — a broken sound, out of place.

  “Asshole…” she thought.

  And she gathered that tiny scrap of energy she didn’t even believe she had — the kind that only appears when a hope that shouldn’t exist clings on with its nails — to try, one more time, to run.