He nodded shakily and rose to his feet, brushing at his shirt though his hands trembled. “I… I think so.”

The hole in the wall groaned under a shifting beam, spilling light and debris into the room. Hilda’s eyes narrowed at it. “What was that just now?”

“An explosion,” Yuri muttered. His voice had lost its usual playfulness. “Something bad’s happening outside.”

Hilda’s lips parted. “If it’s something bad, then that means…”

“The soldiers,” Yuri said at once, cutting her off.

She spun toward him, puffing her cheeks in frustration. “How did you know I was going to say that?!”

He only grinned, his shoulders lifting in a casual shrug. “Because it’s what you always think about. And this is the perfect chance to see them in action.”

Hilda’s brow furrowed, her heart pounding harder. “No. We can’t. Our parents will notice we’re missing. It’s not safe.”

Yuri reached out, his hand warm and firm as it closed over hers. His voice dropped low, almost conspiratorial. “This is your only chance, Hilda. You want to see the soldiers fight up close. Don’t you?”

Her chest tightened. She tried to shake her head, but the word caught in her throat. Slowly, reluctantly, she nodded, though her frown betrayed her unease. “Okay…”

Their mothers’ voices drifted faintly through the wreckage, calling for them with growing urgency. Hilda hesitated only a moment, then looked to Yuri. He gave her hand a tug, and together they slipped through the jagged break in the wall.

Outside, the Waltz played on. The graceful sweep of strings and horns carried over streets torn apart, mingling with the staccato rattle of gunfire and the ricochet of bullets. Beauty and violence moved together in grotesque harmony, each step leading the children closer to the battlefield.

The streets were no longer familiar. Smoke curled between the houses, drifting in slow ribbons that blurred the edges of shattered windows and broken carts. The Blue Danube played on, the music carried by some distant gramophone that had somehow survived the chaos. Its cheerful waltz only made the destruction more unsettling, like a dance held atop graves.

Hilda clutched Yuri’s hand as they crept forward. The sound of boots striking the cobblestones echoed somewhere ahead, heavy and deliberate, not like the synchronized march of soldiers she had admired from afar. This was slower, heavier, the tread of something that did not need to hurry because nothing could oppose it.

They ducked behind a toppled wagon. Through the smoke, Hilda glimpsed them: soldiers in their green parkas, rifles raised, forming a desperate line. And striding toward them was a figure unlike any she had ever seen.

The Champion.

He was taller than any man, clad in armor of blackened, harmonized steel that seemed to drink the light and hum with a silent, dissonant frequency. His shoulders were draped in torn banners that fluttered not from the wind, but from the palpable vibrations that rolled from his form. Where his eyes should have been, there was only a pale, resonant glow, like the dying ember of a deafening note.

Each step he took was a percussive blast, a sub-sonic boom that hit the chest before the ears, pressing the air itself downward with a physical weight that made Hilda’s breath hitch and her teeth rattle.

“Yuri…” she whispered, her voice a tiny, trembling vibration lost in the din. “That’s not a soldier.”

“I know,” he answered, his voice cracking under an unseen pressure. “Stay low. Stay quiet.”

But the Champion’s head turned. The resonant glow of its gaze focused through the smoke, tuning into their presence as if they were a faint, discordant whisper it was compelled to silence. With a motion too swift for its size, it raised its hand. The air shrieked, tightening into a visible ribbon of distorted space before it cracked—a concussive blast of pure sonic force that ripped through their cover, shattering the wagon into vibrating splinters.

Hilda screamed, a sound swallowed by the overwhelming roar. The shockwave hurled her back, but Yuri shoved her aside at the last instant, taking the brunt of the blow. He slammed into the stones, coughing blood that spattered the cobblestones in a grim, rhythmic pattern, yet still he pushed himself up between her and the monster.

“Run, Hilda!” he shouted, his voice straining to be heard over the ringing aftermath.

She crawled toward him, sobbing. “No, I’m not leaving you—”

“You promised you’d be a soldier,” Yuri said through clenched teeth, his voice a fierce, thin wire against the overwhelming noise. “Soldiers survive. So live.”

The Champion’s hand drew back. This time, the air didn't just distort—it wailed. Energy gathered, not bright and silent, but as a visible sphere of screaming, compressed sound, brighter and louder, humming with the devastating promise of a chord that could shatter the world. Yuri spread his arms wide, a silent, brave note against the coming crescendo, shielding Hilda with his body.

The blast came.

A light made of sound swallowed everything. The air itself shattered.

It was not a flash seen with the eyes, but a pressure that obliterated all other sensation, a single, world-ending note that vibrated through bone and soul.

Hilda squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the pain, the end. But it was not she who screamed.

It was the air around Yuri.

He was still standing, his arms spread wide, a silhouette against the blinding resonance. A silent scream was frozen on his lips. And then, the note began to… deconstruct him.

It started at the edges. The tips of his fingers, the ends of his hair, began to flake away into particles of brilliant, shimmering dust, like ash caught in sunlight. It was a slow, horrifying unraveling, a peaceful dissolution at odds with the violence of its cause. The Champion’s sonic blast wasn't crushing him; it was unmaking him, vibrating at a frequency that dissolved the very bonds holding him together.

The deafening roar faded, leaving only a high-pitched ring in Hilda’s ears and the terrible, silent spectacle before her.

“Yuri?” The word was a choked gasp, a sound too small for the horror she witnessed.

He turned his head slowly, a difficult movement as his shoulder began to erode into a cloud of golden motes. The fear in his eyes had been replaced by a profound, aching sadness. He looked at her, really looked at her, as if memorizing her face for the last time.

His voice, when it came, was thin and frayed, like a radio signal from a thousand miles away, yet it cut through the ringing silence with perfect clarity.

“Hilda…”

She scrambled forward, her hands scraping on the broken stones, but he took a shaky step back. A shower of dust fell from his leg. “No! Don’t… don’t touch me. You can’t stop it.”

Tears streamed down Hilda’s face, carving clean lines through the dust and grime. “No! Yuri, hold on! Please!”

He gave her a weak, lopsided smile, the same one he’d always used right before suggesting a brilliantly bad idea. But now it was a ghost of itself. “My dad… he had books. Forbidden ones. I… I just peeked. I was curious…”

A shudder wracked his body, and the disintegration sped up, crawling up his arms, his chest dissolving into the shimmering, fading cloud.

He met her eyes, his gaze suddenly fierce and urgent with his last remaining strength. His voice was a final, desperate whisper, a secret passed from a dying boy to his best friend.

“Never touch the arcane, Hilda… It doesn’t grant… it just takes…”

His voice trailed off. The light in his eyes, the bright, mischievous spark that had been Yuri, flickered and faded. For one last second, his form was outlined in a halo of brilliant, dancing dust.

And then he was gone. 

The last of the golden motes hung in the air for a heartbeat, illuminated by the pale glow of the Champion’s gaze. Then they too winked out, leaving nothing behind but the smell of ozone and the echo of a warning.

Yuri was just… gone. No body. No trace. Only the memory of his voice.

“It just takes.”

The Champion lowered its hand, the resonant hum of its armor fading to a low, satisfied thrum. It had silenced the discordant whisper. Its pale, glowing eyes shifted from the empty space where Yuri had stood and settled on the girl kneeling in the rubble, utterly alone.

The world came crashing back in, the distant Waltz, the gunfire, the screams. But for Hilda, it was all muffled, distant. The only thing that was real was the void where her best friend had been, and the three words that now burned in her soul, searing away the dream of the soldier and replacing it with a cold, dark vow.

Never touch the arcane.