Nikhil’s death and the God-Poking Round ambush mark one of the clearest reversals in the conflict between Cato and the divine System. Nikhil arrives expecting to cleanse a powerless heretic, but Cato has arranged the encounter around a single orbital shot: a relativistic antimatter projectile that can defeat the protection separating a Bismuth-rank champion from ordinary weapons. The ambush kills Nikhil, destroys the meeting site, and leaves the surrounding battlefield altered by the blast, while also freeing Arene from the chains that had held her.

The Trap and Nikhil’s Certainty

Nikhil tracks a pair of Sydean Coppers to the place where they are supposed to bring Cato into the open. He considers whether Cato will recognize the meeting as a trap, but regards the outcome as effectively settled. In Nikhil’s judgment, only a delusional fool would deliberately challenge the divine System, and Cato’s previous setbacks should have shown him that resistance was hopeless. The meeting is therefore framed by a profound mismatch in knowledge: Nikhil believes he is hunting a heretic who has run out of plans, while Cato has arranged the location and timing for a strike that depends on Nikhil’s confidence.

A farcaster informs Nikhil that Cato will arrive in roughly ten minutes. Nikhil acknowledges the report and takes satisfaction in the obedience of the Coppers, whom he believes understand what is best for them. He keeps his senses fixed on the pair, both to detect Cato’s arrival and to observe how the supposedly elusive neo-human will enter the scene. Nobody appears to know Cato’s actual Skills or rank, so Nikhil expects an unusual arrival without understanding that the uncertainty itself is part of Cato’s defense.

Cato’s Arrival and Capture

Cato arrives in a single violent descent. Something nearly the size of a building drops from the sky, slowing only slightly before striking the ground about a hundred feet from the two Coppers. The impact throws them off their feet. The conveyance is marked by the strange essence-fuzzing that has begun to conceal the rank of Cato’s creations, making it difficult for Nikhil to read the technology through the System’s usual categories.

A person-sized figure emerges from the craft with four enormous beasts beside him. Nikhil recognizes the creatures as the same general type he had previously erased with the Scepter of Annihilation. The figure itself carries no reliable essence signature, but Nikhil assumes that Cato is using a shrouding artifact and that the odd signatures of his creations are an imperfect imitation of its effect. His interpretation is confident but incomplete: he correctly sees concealment, yet mistakes the apparent vulnerability beneath it for actual helplessness.

Nikhil crosses the distance with his divine movement Skill, traveling through the air like a golden projectile. He lands in front of Cato as the two Coppers recover, raises the Scepter of Annihilation, and channels his energy through it. All four of Cato’s guards are annihilated immediately. Nikhil takes pleasure in the surprise on Cato’s face, treating the destruction of the beasts as proof that the encounter has already been won.

Appraise identifies Cato as a neo-human of Low Copper rank and reports that he has no Skills. Nikhil cannot reconcile the reading with Cato’s apparent power, but attributes the contradiction either to an unusually effective blocking artifact or to Muar’s account that Cato can leave reality and return. He dismisses the possibility that Cato is stronger than a Bismuth, however, and his chains snap around Cato without appreciable strain. The visible contest seems to confirm Nikhil’s hierarchy: the Bismuth stands free, the Copper is restrained, and the System’s rules appear to favor the divine champion.

The God-Poking Round

Nikhil declares that Cato should never have come and presents the confrontation as a divine judgment. He claims that the gods sent him to cleanse Cato from the world, gestures toward the two Sydean Coppers, and interprets their presence as evidence that even Cato’s allies have abandoned him. Cato answers without visible panic, rejects Nikhil’s claim that the gods sent him, and says that he intends to cleanse Nikhil instead. Nikhil responds that divine protection makes him untouchable and that he can destroy Cato’s creations merely by touching them.

Cato’s reply supplies the ambush’s governing principle: “If you aren’t willing to shell your own position, you aren’t willing to win.” The statement is not a boast about surviving the confrontation. It is a description of the tactical cost Cato has already accepted. The shot must pass through the same battlefield where Cato stands, and the plan only works if the apparent capture is allowed to proceed until Nikhil occupies the precise position Cato needs.

Cato has only one opportunity to fire because the two satellites cover separate hemispheres and the available orbital support is hours away by orbital velocity. The God-poke weapon is nevertheless better suited to striking the small target than Cato’s railgun rounds. Railgun projectiles travel at about one percent of the speed of light, whereas the God-poking Round can reach more than half the speed of light. The difference gives Cato both the necessary speed and the precision required for an attack against a single protected body.

The weapon launches a globule of anti-hydrogen inside extraordinarily powerful magnetic fields. Those fields contain the antimatter and hold an outer layer of heavily ionized ordinary hydrogen around it, creating a plasma sheath that protects the round from stray particles and the atmosphere. A laser of the appropriate frequency ionizes the path at the moment of release, further reducing the chance of premature contact. Laser guidance lets Cato place the round within millimeters of its intended point: the fur at the back of Nikhil’s neck, just below his helmet.

The attack is synchronized with Cato’s contingency planning. Immediately before the shot, he saves the experiences of Raine and Leese, preserving the sisters’ experiences against the possibility that the blast will destroy them. The round then enters the atmosphere in a fraction of an instant, at a speed that only Cato’s foreknowledge and powerful sensors allow him to perceive as a sequence of events rather than an indivisible flash.

The Breaking of Divine Protection

The few grams of antimatter moving at relativistic speed carry the force of a tactical nuclear weapon. Yet the first impact does not kill Nikhil. A strange shimmering shield covers the Bismuth’s body and strips the projectile of its lethal momentum, somehow nullifying its extraordinary velocity. The plasma sheath strikes the immutable shield, disperses, and deposits the anti-hydrogen directly onto the patch of fur while the atmosphere rushes back into contact with it.

That contact reaches beneath the System’s altered physical order. Anti-electrons and antiprotons annihilate their ordinary counterparts through a process described as deeper than physical impact or chemical reaction, at a level of physics below what the System has changed. Atoms vanish into energy. The annihilation violates the System’s decree and breaks the shield of immunity coating Nikhil from head to toe. The protection seems to protest before shattering, revealing that divine invulnerability is not absolute when confronted by an interaction the System cannot fully suppress.

Everything disappears in a universe-eating flash. The attack therefore turns the apparent values of the scene inside out: Nikhil’s divine authority becomes exposure, Cato’s captivity becomes the firing position, and the weapon intended to shell Cato’s own position becomes the means of victory. The ambush is not simply a stronger attack overcoming a weaker defense; it is a demonstration that the System’s deepest protections can be forced into contact with a physical process outside their effective jurisdiction.

Aftermath and Consequences

Cato’s satellites record a mushroom cloud rising over the meeting site. Exotic radiation flashes through the surrounding area, and active sensors search the roiling inferno for survivors. They find none. The detonation leaves a crater around the still-lingering entrance to a dungeon, with little else remaining at the point of impact. Although railgun rounds may possess greater total energy in technical terms, the irradiating antimatter blast produces the more dramatic battlefield effect.

The consequences extend beyond Nikhil’s death. Sparse foliage burns for miles, the walls of Arene’s compound tremble under the shockwave, and wind rushes into the rising thermal bloom. Arene suddenly appears above the compound with her fiery wings spread, free of the chains that had bound her. The blast thus functions simultaneously as assassination, rescue, and battlefield signal: Nikhil is removed, Arene is released, and Cato immediately transmits to Raine and Leese that the Bismuth is dead and orders them through the portal.

The event’s decisive significance lies in its reversal of the divine System’s assumed monopoly on force. Nikhil arrives as an executioner convinced that rank, divine protection, and the Scepter of Annihilation make resistance irrational. He dies because Cato accepts the cost of attacking his own position, conceals the true nature of his weapons, preserves the sisters’ experiences before firing, and exploits a physical interaction capable of breaking the System’s immunity. The God-Poking Round turns a theatrical victory for Nikhil into proof that even a Bismuth can be made vulnerable when certainty becomes part of the trap.