The Solar Arena
There was a solar system with a golden sun at its center. Full of patient light, its flares unfurled like banners in the windless void. Worlds circled it in silence, lifeless. Uninhabited. Their oceans boiled or froze in silence, their mountains knew no names. Their deserts bore no footprints and their skies held no birds. There were scars here and there, accidents of celestial geometry and forgotten impacts.
The Sun was young, hot, bright, and naive, yet old enough to recognize power. It knew gravity. It knew heat. It knew orbit. And now, it knew them.
They arrived with no craft nor ceremony. They stepped from nothing. Not summoned, not born, they arrived as if the laws of reality had written them into place. On the third planet from The Sun, a cold world of basalt plains and fractured obsidian spires, they appeared. Silent. Still. Terrible.
The Red One stood tall, taught like a bowstring and gleaming like fresh blood. A living red, radiant and gleaming, like fire licking across oiled bronze. He seemed to have been carved from impact, a body shaped by collisions and force and stress endured and returned. His limbs were lean with every motion an insight into the storm contained within. The tilt of his chin spoke provocation, the twitches of his knuckles whispering of rhythm. Rather than shift his weight the world shifted around him. He coiled, like a predator in wait.
The Blue One was denser, broader. Forged rather than sculpted, his skin bore the shape of a deep ocean, like a lapis left underwater for eons. His back was so wide as to block the horizon, his arms hung low and ready like sledges. He stood, toes clawed into the rock like talons belonging to a great bird made of granite. He stood like a mountain not yet fallen, he stood as if gravity bowed down to him.
They were not alive in any biological sense, nor were they machines nor weapons nor avatars of violence. They were violence. Violence in its earliest, most elemental form. Unreasoning, unrelenting, irreplicable. Their presence spoke of collapse, the planet beneath them feeling the weight of their inevitably and bracing for death. The Sun flared in the distance, reverent.
The Blue One moved first.
With no sound nor shout, he stepped forward and the ground beneath him cratered, fault lines raced outwards as the tectonic shelf snapped like old bone. Mountains began to list, the planet exhaled dust. The Red One answered, his body sliding forward in a straight line faster than light should have allowed. A pivot of the hip, a raising of the knee, the kick landed on The Blue One’s ribs with a thunderclap that split the sky in half. Atmosphere peeled away in spirals, the shock travelling through space and striking a nearby moon enough to shift its orbit.
The Blue One barely flinched, turning with the blow. Flowing like a glacier, he locked his arms around The Red One’s waist and threw. Not to the fractured ground, not at the planet, but through the crust of the globe itself did he throw his opponent. The Red One flew, the force burning him shoulder-first into the ground. The planet buckled. A continent caved inwards, The Blue One advanced. Leaping after his foe, he struck elbow first. A falling hammer driving into The Red One’s sternum, the impact flash fried a thousand square miles.
The mantle cracked, magma hissed in the open air then turned to glass in the vacuum produced by the explosivity of the onslaught.
The Red One’s strikes came in bursts. High knees, driving elbows, arcing heels and crashing fists that twisted waves across the world’s crust. Every kick rended the sky, every feint warped light. He fought like a war drum’s sound made flesh, a cadence born to shatter.
The Blue One met every flurry with gravity, stillness and interrupted motion, frames that redirected the force. He slammed his shoulder into The Red One, driving him through a mountain and down into a trench that had not existed prior. He broke a ridge with a toss. He crushed a valley with a pin. They rose.
Again and again they fell and rose.
The planet wept, The Sun burned brighter. It watched. It was enraptured, and it knew this was what stars were made for. Witnessing.
The Red One leapt backwards, heel slicing the air to ribbons. The Blue One met the blow with his shoulder and rolled, catching the leg, absorbing the motion and redirecting it into a throw that sent The Red One into orbit. Stone shattered and clouds collapsed, the sky turning black as the atmosphere fled. The Red One arced up, his body curled and twisting mid-flight. And then he dived back down, a crescent kick like a meteor.
He hit, the planet broke from pole to pole. The equator ruptured like a seam, The Sun pulsed with pure gold light.
Rising from the smoking crater, skin cracked in long glowing lines where pressure had exceeded even his unknowable resilience, The Red One narrowed his eyes. From his wounds came not blood, only heat. Not quite fire, not quite plasma, but something older dripped from him. He felt not pain, he felt nothing but the present moment.
The Blue One had not moved, he stood in the shattered landscape as the last of the atmosphere howled away into the skyless dark, silhouette wrapped in drifting ash. His breath came slow, seismic, like tectonic shifts. His jaw hung loose from the orbital kick, but even that was beginning to settle back into place with the low, grinding sound of mountains realigning. The Red One charged, no feint or flourish. Just devastating, pure speed. The ground did not survive his approach, each step sending shards of bedrock fountaining into orbit. He reached The Blue One and vanished into a flurry of strikes.
Fists, elbows, knees, palms, he became a symphony of close-quarters obliteration. Every strike placed with such precision that continents moved in reaction. A spinning elbow to the base of The Blue One’s skull and a ridge on the opposite side of the crumbling planet fell into the sea. A push kick landed on the chest sent The Blue One rocketing through layers of geography, and then into vacuum. The Red One pursued, and now they were above the world.
Their limbs wrapped like serpents, clinching for the domination of physics itself, The Blue One shifted and The Red One was beneath him. They slammed down onto the planet’s moon, their combined force cracking the satellite in half. One half spun away, bleeding dust and ice, and the other held the two combatants. A jagged shelf of rock beneath their feet, they stood.
Not dazed, not tired, they just stood there while The Sun held its breath.
The Red One brought his hands up, The Blue One stepped forward, a crack on his back bleeding blue light bright as a star core and cold as dead gravity. The half-moon shuddered as again they moved.
They met in the void between moon and planet, nothing beneath but ruin. They collided, fists to bodies, and the vacuum tore. A wave of pure, directionless force unbound by physical laws erupted, striking the neighboring planet and slicing off a third of its mass in one clean line. Then they began to grapple, not the crude wrestling of creatures but the impossible mechanics of force against force. The Blue One latched a grip onto The Red One’s thigh and drove his adversary downwards, a throw that had no business in existence. The Red One reversed before the throw ended, pulling The Blue One through a content-sized asteroid that had drifted too close. It split, they barely noticed.
They continued. Their bodies burned. Time slowed around them because time was trying to understand what it was watching.
The Red One ducked under a strike and drove his fist into The Blue One’s solar plexus seven times in rapid succession. Each impact echoed through space in pulses of unknowable force. On the far edge of the solar system in which they fought, a gas giant collapsed into itself from the resonance, folding into a molten knot of elements.
The Blue One responded by grabbing space itself and folding it, wrestling the fabric of reality into submission. He appeared behind The Red One, cinching his hip and wrenching them both down to another planet. Another battlefield, a molten world of magma and fire and ash. The two burst through the planet, emerging on the opposite side trailing mantle like a burning cape.
The Sun watched, its surface rippling and flaring. The Sun was thrilled because it remembered. Before light, before motion, before time, there had only ever been this.
Collision.
Contact.
Violence.
They stood in the ruins of the molten world, the ground beneath them cooling to stone out of deference. The sky had fractured, not just from the loss of an atmosphere but from something deeper, a kind of structural failure in the geometry of geometry. The solar wind flowed, spiraling in great ribbons of gold and white around the chaos, veils before an altar.
The Sun glowed with impossible flares, golden snakes of radiation snapping like tongues at the sweet violence. Without malice, without hate, without reason, for itself, as itself, the sweet violence spoke euphoria to The Sun. It beheld them, its light curving in on them.
The Red One and The Blue One.
They circled now, The Red One moving first because he must. He was the first blow, the daring move, the unexpected opening. His step sent waves ripping over the broken, molten sea, each footfall forging patterns in the magma that hardened to black glass instantly. His body was a blur of coiled muscle and explosive lines, he launched a combination with no build up only arrival. A forward elbow came like a falling star, his hips turning and torso twisting. The crack of the blow enough to peel the dusty crust off a nearby moon.
The Blue One caught it.
He grabbed the elbow. Simple.
But the simplicity was a falsehood. The catch absorbed the force, channeled it into a pivot, into a shoulder throw, and into a fall that was as certain as entropy. The Red One was suddenly locked inside a throw, a real one. Nothing fancy, nothing acrobatic.
Just form, perfect and brutal.
The world flipped.
The Red One was hammered into what remained of the planet, and the crust gave way entirely. The core was exposed. A pulsing, ferrous heart suspended in a chasm of gravity. The pressure alone should have turned them to mist. But they were not matter, they were the idea of matter in conflict. The Red One kicked off the inner shell of the core, launching at his opponent and striking with a knee that could have pierced a black hole. Then a second knee. A third. He spun, delivering an elbow that hit like creation.
They clinched mid-void, locked in something part wrestling and part cosmic storm. They rolled through space, grappling as fragments of planets rose around them. They slammed into these rocky, sometimes molten, satellites, each impact creating new rings of planetary debris. And then The Red One broke free, twisting under The Blue One’s arm. He brought his foot around in a wide arc, cutting objects in its path with the mere intention of the strike. The debris followed the motion, launching at The Blue One. The Blue One didn’t dodge, he walked through it. Meteor chunks exploded against his shoulders, shards of worlds split around his head. He advanced unblinking, seizing The Red One’s Neck like a craftsman seizing his tool. He lifted The Red One overhead and slammed him into the side of a passing asteroid the size of a city. It dissolved on contact, as if embarrassed to be less real than this fight.
The Sun was closer now, truly closer. Its gravity warped space in spirals, dragging light and heat and attention inwards towards the two. Something ancient stirred in The Sun, some memory of before time, and it began to cheer. In pulses of radiation that matched the rhythm of the blows, The Sun cheered. The Blue One broke a comet over The Red One’s back, The Red One caught a falling moon and used it as a fist. The moon was caught mid swing and thrown away. The Sun ate it gladly.
There came a moment when neither struck.
It was brief, impossibly so, yet vast. A pause between collisions, a single beat in which fists hovered nanometers from flesh, torsos twisted in motionless torque, eyes lock. They were no longer bodies. They were concepts, so real the universe bent to accommodate their stillness. In that moment, the stars cracked.
Reality, the substrate, the lattice upon which distance and dimension were pinned, could no longer contain the sum of what had happened. Their fight had destroyed mass, broken gravity, made a sun cheer, and now they had ruptured causality. Time slipped around them like water unable to wet oil, space no longer knew what direction to offer them. They had exceeded the language of physics. Their fight had become too pure, too perfect. Too sustained. Too real.
The Red One drove an elbow into The Blue One’s throat as his spine was crushed in turn. Simultaneously, perfectly, everywhere. The impact did not happen in space, it removed space and their fight fell. Fell not down, not across, but fell outside the void.
And they were gone.
Not dead, not defeated. Gone in the same way thought disappears when spoken aloud. Transformed, transcended, lifted out of the medium that once held them. The void did not ripple, it healed itself as if embarrassed to have been breached so casually. All that remained was The Sun.
It was not disappointed, nor was it afraid. It had witnessed, and it was ecstatic.
The Sun spun slowly at the center of the hollow system, now emptied of planets and dust, scorched clean by the two who had met within its boundaries. The Sun calmed, flares receding. The cheer it had made, pulse by radiant pulse, echoed now as deep, slow tones beneath its roiling surface.
Anticipation.
It turned, it focused, it called back its fragmented moons and planets and elements. Already, new crust was forming, gravity was returning, spheres began to take shape from the scattered remains.
The Sun would wait, as it had waited before, as it would wait again. The violence was not over. Somewhere, beyond the skin of things, The Red One and The Blue One still tumbled, still struck, still grappled. Maybe they would return, maybe they would find their way back through the cracks they had made.
Or maybe they would fall forever, perfect and unknowable.
But The Sun would be ready, and the arena would be whole.
