The echoing rumbles of devastation hung like a shroud over the fractured obsidian floor. The deep, glowing trench splitting the battlefield pulsed with the aftershocks of the Amber Flux, as heat rose from the depths where liquid stone slowly began to solidify. Then, cutting through that silence, Master Ometol suddenly burst into laughter, synchronized with the lazy speedster. It was a raw, raspy sound rattling from their chests, a laugh that tore the heavy atmosphere to shreds. “Well, would you look at that!” Ometol roared, shaking his broad shoulders in unadulterated amusement, his eyes glinting in the light of the glowing fault lines. “Exactly as the regulations prescribe! Not a single millimeter deviated from the handbook!” The lazy speedster reacted instantly, without losing his laconic posture. He leaned back, arms loosely crossed, though his eyes remained razor-sharp as he shifted his measuring gaze toward the cook and the man with the silver-gray beard. “Doesn’t mean a thing yet,” the speedster spoke, his voice carrying over the hissing obsidian. “You haven’t done it yourself yet, Ometol. And neither have you, old man,” he added with a grin toward the silver-gray beard. As the words sliced through the burning air, the battlefield’s focus shifted like a lightning bolt to Silarias and Nyx. The display of the new generation triggered a slumbering vein in their consciousness, slamming a tidal wave of memories straight into their reality. Images flashed: the days when they fought there side by side, bathed in the blood, sweat, and ash of the frontline, standing against the exact same odds. “Don’t they look just like someone?!” Beat’s voice cut through the mounting tension with a loud laugh. The realization hit. Silarias, Nicola, and the rest felt the adrenaline pumping through their veins. The achievement of the young bloods had brought their blood to a boiling point. This was the moment. Their bodies tensed, muscles trembling under built-up kinetic energy as everyone sought to maneuver into position, ready to seize the momentum and deliver the finishing blow. Silarias tore his throat open, filling his lungs with the sharp scent of gunpowder. But right as the legendary battle cry “Nobodies!” was about to roll off his lips, the laws of gravity mutated around them. The meters-thick floor began to vibrate. A heavy pressure descended perpendicularly from the stratosphere, so massive that the air molecules themselves began to crackle and snap. Before anyone could take a single step, the backfield exploded. A terrifying steam explosion swept the battlefield clean. A wall of white-hot, boiling vapor and liquid condensation rushed forward, reducing visibility to zero in a single frame. There, positioned with precision in the heart of the steaming inferno, they stood. Master Ometol had pushed his Supernova Cycle to its limit, its nuclear heat fusing with the Thermodynamic Conversion of the cook. The immense heat stripped all energy from the surroundings, creating an artificial gravity field—a suffocating pressure crashing perpendicularly onto Silarias and his entire group. The Nobodies slammed into the ground simultaneously with a deafening thud. “What is this?!” one of their voices pooled thickly over the stones, hoarse and heavily distorted with dramatic flair. “We can’t move! Our muscles… they’re refusing! What now?!” Nicola clutched at his throat with wide eyes, hyperventilating excessively as he buried his nails deep into the splinters of the obsidian. Silarias lay flat on his stomach, his trembling arms pushing against the floor with simulated effort, as if a mountain range had been stacked onto his back. Their limbs thrashed and jerked in every direction, twitching and flailing in a coordinated chaos. Beneath the swirling dust and their fabricated masks of agony, their eyes locked for a fraction of a second, sharing a razor-sharp understanding. They were playing the game, pulling the strings of perception. But the veterans gave them no room to breathe. In one coordinated, fluid motion, the lazy speedster, Master Ometol, the cook, and the silver-gray beard spun around. As they whirled on their axes, energy flooded their bodies, instantly mutating them into their active battle forms. The air around them began to bend and warp. Right at the dead center of the spin, the iron beard unleashed his Cosmic Backdraft. The atmosphere surrounding the Nobodies was violently sucked backward in a vacuum howl. It was an implosion of oxygen and pressure, a recoil that instantly reduced the remaining steam to a black, seething vacuum, obliterating everything into ash. Through the roaring chaos and the falling pitch-black dust, no screams echoed—only the icy, calm voice of the lazy speedster lingering in the air: “Pity… I really wanted them to have it.” Through the ashen void of the black vacuum, the first flashes suddenly erupted. It started as a cosmos of creative destruction bursting forth. Static electricity wove together with razor-thin solar beams. Torrents of fire and ice swirled around each other in a frantic double helix, a paradox of freezing heat and burning ice. The flashes left behind a trail of shimmering crystals and flaming particles, exploding around them. The lazy speedster, whose gaze had always been fixed on infinity, snapped his eyes wide open. The dull matte finish in his pupils dissolved, replaced by a radiant, white-hot light. A broad grin stretched across his face as he slowly, for the first time in decades, became genuinely hyped. “So it is…” he whispered, his voice trembling with restrained ecstasy. “So it is!” On the other side of the trench, Master Ometol moved with a speed that defied his gigantic stature. In the fluid sweep of his motion, his arm reached deep into the collapsing volcanic wall. With a brute yank, he dragged the Powder Witch out of the rubble. She tumbled through the air, caught her balance on the glowing obsidian, and stood ready in a flash, her purple gunpowder arms hissing and primed for slaughter. The five titans now stood shoulder to shoulder, their gazes locked tight onto the raised wall of the new generation. “Cinders…” Master Ometol breathed heavily from his chest, his voice thick with awe. “This…” “You don’t experience this in a thousand lifetimes…” the lazy speedster finished seamlessly, his laconic tone completely gone, replaced by the adrenaline of a god who had finally found his equal. The Armor Cook took a step forward, the metal of her gear burning white-hot. “Ooh… Cherish the young cubs,” she hissed, her gaze gleaming with pride. The Powder Witch wiped the black dust and blood from her face with the back of her purple hand, her eyes burning like hot coals. She finished the veterans’ rallying cry with a raw, soulful shout: “Protect them with your heart! They will cleanse the world… I don’t know how by God, but they are going to do it!” The atmosphere reached a boiling point. Master Ometol stood still. The lazy speedster dropped his jacket. The air began to warp, bend, and break under the layered pressure of five titans who decided the time for games was over. Synchronously, they threw their heads back and unleashed a roar that split the mountain to its core: “GIVE THEM EVERYTHING!!” Reality snapped in two. In a blinding transition, the Five Legends of CinderPulse City mutated simultaneously into their dreaded Second Forms. Master Ometol’s golden cloak dissolved into floating rings of liquid gold, while his skin began to glow from the inside out like a dying star, his eyes turning into pitch-black holes. The hundreds of glass vials on the Powder Witch shattered; the purple powder shot into her bloodstream, making her veins glow as four arms of compact, hissing gunpowder manifested behind her back. The matte-black armor of the Armor Cook melted away under heat, fusing with her torso into a mechanical centaur form of glowing copper and iron. The Silver-Gray Beard slammed his sword onto the ground, shattering the blade into thousands of shards hovering within a neon-blue resonance field. And the lazy speedster dropped his oversized puffer jacket, which hit the floor with the weight of a meteorite, transforming into a constant, flashing line of white-hot neon light. But as the flashes of the transformations illuminated the battlefield, a new symphony broke loose, cutting straight through flesh and bone. At the back of the lines stood Beat. His Rajin Volt Anting pulsed with a divine rhythm, and massive, crackling arms of static electricity manifested behind his back. He began to slam his drums. The thundering beats rolled across the field like a declaration of war, a deep, heavy bass taking over the vibrations of the earth. The music elevated the cadence of the entire battle, pumping energy into his comrades’ veins. Empowered by this soundtrack, the clash erupted. The Powder Witch surged forward, her four gunpowder arms slamming together to trigger the Neuro-Vessel Spark. Apollo stood straight in her crosshairs. Carried by the driving drum rhythm, his pupils narrowed. He held his movement back, forcing the solar energy back into his core. He suppressed the discharge, compressing the heat until his veins glowed white-hot beneath his skin. At the exact moment of the Witch’s neuro-ignition, Apollo exploded into a focused solar beam, tearing the gunpowder arms apart before the catalyst could reach his blood. On the left flank, the mechanical centaur form of the Armor Cook thundered forward, transforming the arena into a sealed pressure cooker of ten thousand degrees. Izumaru reacted without a sound. No loud lightning, no brainless screaming. He enveloped himself in a chilling serenity, his presence nearly vanishing from the field. He controlled his breathing, waiting for the exact split-second the Cook’s safety valve opened to release her steam. The moment it popped, he glided beneath the scalding cloud like a silent ghost, his claw striking the weakest pressure point of the copper armor with cold efficiency. The Silver-Gray Beard raised his arms, sending the thousands of hovering shards into a destructive resonance that threatened to shatter the molecular structure of the space itself. Balamore, Ren, and Lyn formed the front line. Moving in perfect sync with the thunderclaps of Beat’s drums, they didn’t fight the vibrations; they bent with them. Their bodies absorbed the kinetic impact. Lyn swung her hammer back up, multiplying the absorbed energy, while Ren thrust his Iron Straw forward, shattering the shards with their own frequency. In the center of the inferno stood Master Ometol in his Dying Star form, his eyes activating the Event Horizon Detonation to pull everything into a single point of collapse. This transcended the individual. Nyx and Silarias locked eyes and instantly filled each other’s void. Silarias unleashed the solar presence of his Bansaday lion form, his heavy gauntlets straightening the distorted gravity lines with his aura. Before the intense heat could scorch his defenses, Nyx filled the gaps, her moon and ice powers manifesting as a freezing shadow that neutralized the thermal energy. Supported by Jane’s barriers, Miki’s fire spirit, and Cilla’s roots, they shattered the boundaries of their individual limits and pierced the Event Horizon together. Then, reality ripped open from the flashing storm of The Absent Tachyon. The lazy speedster raged across the battlefield like a neon line. Nicola moved right in the heart of this storm. The data around him was overwhelming, a chaotic mess of visual noise. He closed his eyes, pulling his electrical ether power deep within his mind to eliminate all mental interference, perfectly matching the zero-point of Beat’s rhythm. The surroundings fell dead silent. The thousands of afterimages dissolved in his calculations until only one true, flashing line remained. With pinpoint accuracy, his blade cut precisely at the dead center, deflecting the speedster’s path. But the real strike of the Absent Tachyon was a trap. The infinite mass of the speedster instantly regrouped into one devastating point, aiming directly at the exposed heart of the group. The complete reality threatened to collapse. The electrical arms in the background slammed the drums with a possessed fury, letting the symphony explode into its absolute climax. Beat took a slow breath. He closed his eyes, his mind clearing of all residual noise as the world around him fractured. When his eyes snapped open, the Rajin Volt Anting flared with a resurrected, blinding intensity. Without a single shred of hesitation, Beat stepped forward.