The rumbling came first.

Low. Heavy. Close enough now that the tiles beneath their feet began to tremble.

Dust shivered loose from the ceiling. A row of abandoned prize charms jingled softly on a nearby rack. Somewhere outside, beyond the shattered glass and smoke-choked halls of the convention centre, something let out a roar so vast and feral it seemed to shake the whole building from its bones.

Ray, watching from the half-ajar bathroom door, narrowed her eyes. “That’s not good…”

Before she could move, something massive collided with the corridor wall beside her, sending her tumbling backward into the dark with a thud.

Bursting from the shadows came a towering, twelve-foot grotesque—a behemoth of bloated, gelatinous pink flesh.

A pig-doughnut monster.

Its snout squelched frosting with every breath, its skin glazed and sprinkled, and its movements were slow but thunderous. It waddled like a corrupted mascot on sugar steroids—adorably horrifying, its body undulating as it threw its weight around like a wrecking ball of icing-covered doom.

Ray stared up from the floor, pale and breathless.
“…This convention officially sucks,” she muttered, deadpan, just as the doughnut pig roared—spraying frosting like shrapnel.

Celeste jerked Lumina back, shielding her with both arms. Her voice trembled but held firm.

“R-Run! Please—just go!”

Mezzo froze, eyes bulging. “That thing—” he jabbed a paw at the beast “—needs cardio. And maybe a therapist!”

The group scattered, the air thick with fear and powdered sugar.

They barely made it ten steps before the next nightmare revealed itself.

From the cracks in the floor, ceiling vents, and even spilled candy bins, they appeared—tiny, hyperactive mouse-like creatures, each barely knee-high.

Their bodies were dense, glittering sugar cubes stacked like miniature bricks.

But their faces…

Celeste’s stomach turned.

Wide, jagged grins stretched unnaturally from ear to ear, packed with crystalline teeth.

Their eyes? Empty black holes, as if the very idea of mercy had been extracted from their design.

They moved fast—too fast.

“What the—!” Mezzo yelped as one launched itself at his leg.

Another bit into Pitch’s coat, making him spin, flailing and growling, trying to swat it off with a discarded foam sword.

“Get it off! Get it—oh, that’s my tail, you demon sprinkle!”

More mice skittered across the ground like sugar-coated piranhas.

Meanwhile, Arcade and Skye darted into a side corridor—but their path was blocked.

A marshmallow bunny stood at the far end.

Not the cuddly kind from Starbloom baskets—this thing was the size of a small car, with a body that shimmered and pulsed like taffy under a heat lamp.

Every step it took was deliberate and heavy.

It didn’t bounce.

It absorbed.

With a sickening squelch, the plushy white mass stepped onto a toppled vending machine, and the metal groaned before disappearing completely into its pillowy body, like it had never existed.

Arcade skidded to a stop. “Nope. Nope nope nope!”

“We are so gonna get diabetes and die,” Skye muttered, holding his trading card device up like it might ward off evil. “This is how it ends.”

Celeste grabbed Lumina’s hand tighter, her eyes darting for another route. “We need to run! These things are everywhere!”

The hallway pulsed with a twisted melody—some cheerful chiptune jingle warped into something off-key and monstrous, like the soundtrack of a child’s nightmare.

Ray stumbled to her feet, powdered sugar clinging to her fur. “Okay, so I vote we stop splitting up!” she yelled, kicking one of the sugar-mice across the corridor.

“Agreed!” Mezzo shouted, now using a folded con banner as a makeshift shield.

Somewhere behind them, the doughnut pig let out another enraged, frosting-gargled bellow.

The con had officially become a sugar-coated hell.

Celeste’s heart pounded.

We need a plan, she thought. Or we’re not getting out of this candy-coated nightmare.

Then the candy-cat zombie emerged from the shadows, and the world felt wrong.

It didn’t move like a creature.

It glided—limbs flexing with unsettling grace. Its body looked as though someone had sculpted a mockery of a feline out of sweet wrappers, taffy, and twisted sugar glass. Its hands were clusters of stiff lollipops that clinked together as it walked, yet where a mouth should have been… there was nothing.

Just a smooth stretch of sticky, waxy cellophane.

Still, it spoke—and what it said turned Celeste’s blood to ice.

It wasn’t its voice.

It was his.

“Disappointment… why don’t you roll over—and give up.”

The voice of her father.

Cold. Controlled. Brutal in its finality.

Celeste froze.

Her breath caught in her throat, her knees buckled, and the world twisted into a sickening carousel of colour and dread. It felt as though her soul had been dredged out and stretched raw.

The creature lunged—not fast, but deliberately—and began wrapping her in a cocoon of sweet wrappers. Her arms, her legs—her thoughts—being bound tighter and tighter.

She couldn’t scream. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t fight.

“Celeste!”

Lumina’s voice cracked through the panic, small and terrified.

She grabbed at Celeste’s sleeve with both paws, tugging hard.

“Celeste, move! Please—please move!”

But Celeste only stared.

Frozen to the spot with fear, ears flat, pupils blown wide, she looked less like a knight and more like a girl trapped in an old nightmare she had never really escaped.

“C’mon!” Lumina cried, shaking her arm now. “Please! Please don’t leave me!”

Then—

the whisper.

It came like wind slipping through a crack in a closed window.

Soft. Familiar. Caerfaenic.

“Deffro…”

Awaken.

The word echoed like a spark in dry grass, racing through her veins.

Celeste’s Mana Suppression Rune, dormant until now, surged.

But before it could fully suppress her, something deeper answered first.

A light—soft at first, then blinding—bloomed from her chest.

It drew in everything—every drop of mana left in her body.

Instead of exploding outward in fire and fury, it flashed bright blue, then rippled outward in delicate tendrils of light.

Her fear didn’t trap her anymore.

It poured out—carried by the light, lifted from her chest like breath in winter.

The energy threaded through the air, reaching far beyond the ruined convention hall.

And then—like stars lighting up on a constellation—it touched them.

One by one.

A flicker of red on Mezzo’s chest.

A twitch of purple light in Ray’s.

A heartbeat of yellow echoed in Skye’s chest.

Lumina gasped as her chest glowed pink.

Arcade, halfway across the ruins, faltered and looked towards Celeste.

They felt her.

And in that moment, as the last of her energy left her body and the microchip re-engaged with a painful snap, Celeste collapsed back into herself.

Then her hands began to glow.

From her palms, warm starlight erupted.

Crystalline particles danced in the air like fireflies as she lifted half upright, hair shifting as if underwater. In each hand, something formed—no, returned.

Twin swords.

Far Easten in design, but unlike anything from a museum or anime.

Their hilts shimmered, inlaid with glowing stars—little constellations that flickered as if alive. Long ribbons extended from each one, flowing behind them like comets’ tails, with shining shooting stars weighted at their ends.

The Celestial Blades.

Starlight and Starbright.

The wrapper-zombie hissed with mimicry as it reached for her again.

Too late.

BOOM.

The burst from Celeste’s aura blasted it backward—shredding its candy wrappings and sending it skidding across the floor like litter in the wind.

She stood tall—

wobbly, shaking, terrified—

but alive.

Her blades hummed like soft music boxes in the ruin.

She dropped to her knees, panting, glowing veins dimming.

Her hand found the cracked marble wall beside her, and she whispered a spell with barely enough voice to speak.

Celeste, breath ragged, lowered her blades. The glow around her dimmed, but her voice—quiet, trembling—still reached her friends.

“Did… did I do that? I didn’t mean to—well, I did, but not like that—”

Lumina stared in awe.

Mezzo, mouth hanging open, whispered, “…Okay, that was cool.”

Pitch just nodded slowly, eyes fixed on the glowing ribbons curling from Celeste’s blades. “That… explains not a lot.”

Celeste looked down at her hands.

At the swords.

At the sparks drifting softly around her like falling stars.

Her ears twitched once. “What are these?” she asked, breathless. Then, with baffled horror, she pressed a paw lightly to her chest. “And why does my chest feel so sparkly?”

For one strange, suspended second, no one answered.

Celeste’s aura flared again—

a radiant burst of starlight rippling outward like a shockwave through the darkness.

As the pulse rolled across her friends, something deep within each of them stirred. Mana Suppression Runes embedded beneath their skin—dormant until now—hummed with rising energy, responding to Celeste’s surge like tuning forks catching a shared frequency.

One by one, a core in their chests lit up—each a different colour, each glowing with a light that linked briefly back to Celeste before fading.

And then each hybrid formed a weapon.

Lumina was the first to react.

Her eyes widened as glowing light enveloped her hands. With a gasp, she instinctively held them out—and flash—a gleaming heart-shaped shield materialised in her left hand, intricate and soft-coloured, its edges laced with golden curls and a central pink gem pulsing like a heartbeat.

In her right hand, a sword followed—a slender, curved blade forged from rose-gold and pink-gold alloy, with a hilt shaped like a blooming flower. At its centre sat another gem-heart, warm and protective, a light that radiated hope.

Heartguard and Roselight Blade.

The moment she gripped the sword, her posture changed.

A little more confident.

A little less scared.

The candy-cat zombie, now shrieking in mimicry and clearly furious, launched itself at Lumina—lollipop hands swinging wildly, wrappers flapping like sails.

But Lumina stood her ground.

She planted her feet, snapped her shield in front of her—and the moment it struck, the shield pulsed with a resonant thrum. The impact sent the zombie recoiling as if it had slammed into a wall of love itself, its movements glitching and twitching in confusion.

Celeste saw her chance.

Still reeling from her awakening, legs shaky beneath her, she pushed forward, gripping her twin blades tight. Her eyes locked on the zombie’s exposed arm—torn slightly by Lumina’s shield pulse—and with a sharp upward sweep of her ribboned sword, she sliced.

A crunch—

then snap.

The zombie’s arm, brittle from the impact, flew off and landed in a crumpled heap of candy and cellophane.

The creature staggered back, letting out a garbled screech, mimicking a dozen voices at once in static terror.

Behind Celeste, faint crackles began to form.

Skye.

Arcade.

Even Pitch.

Their new cores were reacting too.

And in the flickering ruin of the convention hall, with sugar smoke hanging in the air and starlight still drifting from Celeste’s hands, she realised one thing with sudden, breathless clarity:

Whatever had awakened inside her…

it had not awakened in her alone.