The dome of Sky City vanished beneath a shroud of dark clouds.
They were slabs of lead hanging so low it felt as if they might crash down at any instant. Deep within the oppressive mass, thunder rumbled, causing a sound that didn't just warn of a storm but heralded the awakening of a power far too ancient for the present age.
Vicious, violet lightning slithered like celestial serpents across the black-robed wizards' floating fortress. High above, suspended amid the tempest, Sky City itself looked ready to shatter.
"Such laughable power!"
The Titans, completely oblivious to the doom gathering around them, stood like monuments on the ruins. Their rocky skin shimmered in the dim light, and they gazed down at Ian with nothing but contempt, as if he were a speck of dust on their massive boots.
"You believe you can harm us with trinkets copied from our own designs?" The voice of the Titan King rolled across the sky with a mocking thunder in its own right. A sneer twisted his lips as he spoke. "What a delusion. I truly cannot fathom how a weakling like you could ever inspire fear."
His voice echoed through the valley. Behind him, the eleven other Titans unleashed derisive roars, their laughter so potent the very air around Ian rippled from the sheer force of the sound.
"Perhaps those wretched mortals never learned the meaning of courage!"
"They trapped us with cheap tricks, yet they are still nothing more than ants. This 'magic'... such a feeble power for any individual to wield."
"A mere swarm of worms!"
Their laughter shook the ground, causing a deep, reverberating sound like the roaring of ancient beasts. It was almost absurd, after all those centuries of imprisonment, they still remembered how to be a perfectly choreographed cheering chorus for their leader.
Well, at least their social awareness was intact.
But the irony was stark: their wrists and ankles still bore the unshakable shackles of their long captivity. For all their arrogance, they were prisoners, and their mockery only made that single, undeniable fact more pathetic.
"Laugh. Go ahead and laugh. Let's see how long you can hold onto it."
A few black-robed wizards watched secretly from the shadows, muttered a quick curse, and hurried back to their main group. Not one of them held any expectation that the Titans could withstand the horror that had haunted wizard-kind for countless ages.
"Let me crush him… at least it will ease my fury a little."
The Titan King, easily a hundred meters tall, raised both hands and made a mocking gesture of placing a crown upon his head, a crown forged from roaring molten lava. Very spiritually enlightened of him.
Then, he took a step toward Ian and the earth beneath them quaked.
A violent wind howled from every direction, setting the entire landscape into a resonant tremor. The gale whipped and tousled Ian's carefully combed hair.
"This is unforgivable… messing up my hairstyle."
Standing on the edge of the floating city, wand gripped tight, Ian's gaze hardened into razor-sharp focus as he faced the towering figures.
"Crush me? You're not even qualified." His voice cut through the wind, clear and steady. "Soon, you'll understand why you… and they… all have reason to fear me."
Ian slowly raised his wand. His tone was calm, yet it carried an unmistakable weight of malice.
Hiss…
He'd only meant to complain about his hair, but now that he'd delivered that line, he realized how utterly villainous he sounded.
"..."
'Damn it, it's all Voldemort's fault!'
Ian felt utterly contaminated. He'd spent a little too much time with Tom lately so some of those bad habits must have rubbed off.
"Whatever, villain or not… this is the ancient age. Once I'm back at Hogwarts, I'm a model student again."
The tip of his wand began to flare with a ghostly blue light… not the familiar glow of regular magic, but something deeper, darker, and distorted: the very manifestation of the Authority of Paradox beginning to surface.
It was a power that did not belong to this world.
It was a law that should not even exist here… a fragment born from the loophole Herpo had exploited on his path toward godhood. When Ian killed him, his Legendary Trait had greedily absorbed that residue.
Ian couldn't unleash its full, world-shaking force, but against most beings, it was devastatingly effective.
Just as the Titans had boastfully claimed…
To this world, even the Titans were merely a small, insignificant part of the whole. Ian could not shake the very fabric of this world itself. But to shake the essence of the Titans for a brief, shattering moment… that was well within his power.
The air began to distort. Ripples spread outward, as if time and space had twisted and coiled around him.
Magic energy swirled around Ian, but it was no longer the power he knew. It was something far darker, far more dangerous… a force that poured out of him like a curse from beyond existence.
"You possess immortality. That, in itself, is a paradox."
His voice was quiet, yet it seemed to pierce the fabric of time, echoing clearly inside the mind of every Titan present.
An invisible power began to spread.
The instant his words landed, it was as if an unseen thread holding their world together had been silently, irrevocably severed.
"You are nothing more than a lesser creation of our kind!" one Titan roared. "How dare you claim our immortality is false? Pitiful creature… you will never understand how supreme our existence truly is!"
"Understand? He cannot even imagine it. I never granted their kind the ability to imagine such things," The Titan King scoffed. "So how could they possibly comprehend what it means for our life to be eternal?"
"Perhaps that is why they dared to rebel against us. But… it doesn't matter. Time washes away everything. When they are all gone, that will be the day we return to the world."
"Yes… We can afford to wait."
"Enough talk… let me laugh at this fool."
The Titans were still laughing… at first.
They felt no magic surge, no spike in power, no shift in energy. But in the very next instant… their connection to the world was abruptly, completely cut off.
Without warning.
"Hmm?"
One Titan looked down at his own arm. His skin was losing its luster at a speed visible to the naked eye. No… more than that, something was being forcibly stripped from him.
The fading color of his flesh was merely the outward sign of a deeper theft… his very power was being peeled away.
"What… what's happening…?"
Another Titan pressed a massive hand to his chest. The flesh there didn't knit itself back together… instead, it began to rot.
The bodies that had been indestructible were now peeling apart like corroded iron. Of course they were.
Ian's curse magic carried within it the essence of Transfiguration. Whatever infection or disease Ian could conjure in his mind, his curse could make it real.
Now that the Titans had lost their immortality and self-healing, they could no longer withstand the overwhelming force of Ian's imaginative magic.
"No… impossible!!"
A roar of rage and terror exploded across the battlefield as the Titans finally realized the horror before them, their so-called immortality was being devoured by a power they could not comprehend.
"How can this be?! How… how is this happening?!"
Another Titan raised his mountain-sized fist and roared in fury, but his stiffening fingers suddenly drove straight through his own palm.
The laughter on the Titan's face twisted into an agonizing grimace as his colossal body froze midair, a statue caught in the impossible moment before collapse.
"I told you… Your bodies can't handle a little honest magic. Looks like I was right."
Ian lowered his wand. He had merely hit the nearest Titan with a simple Body-Bind Curse (Petrificus Totalus).
Stripped of their false immortality, disconnected from the natural world, the Titans' true magic resistance was laid bare. Without the anchor of nature, it was functionally nonexistent.
"You stole time itself to sustain your 'eternal' lives. You styled yourselves the masters of creation and crushed all life beneath you. But the greatest irony of all," Ian paused, his voice utterly devoid of sympathy, "is that even time mocks your arrogance."
He noticed that several Titans he hadn't even targeted were beginning to visibly decay. He couldn't help but let out a quiet, appreciative sigh.
"What… what is this power?! This is not magic!"
The Titan King's furious roar shook the heavy sky, and for the first time, a flicker of genuine, naked fear crossed his eyes.
Above his head, the makeshift molten Diadem shattered with a sharp kacha!
He appeared to be suffering the most violent backlash of all.
The purple blood surging through his colossal veins began to crystalize… the transformation was so swift he couldn't react. Even his desperate, wounded roar was caught in his throat, frozen there.
"No! What is this?! He's not… he's not some mere bird!"
The Titan King violently jerked his massive head around, looking back at the spot where the black-robed wizards had stood moments before. Now, on the far edge of the floating island, there was only emptiness. A few drifting scraps of torn black cloth were the only proof they had ever been there.
They had fled. Vanished without a trace.
Their immortality was gone.
And the Titans' bodies began to collapse.
This was the backlash. The terrible, inevitable price of false life.
Their skin split apart, their flesh dried and cracked; the once-indestructible bodies were now as fragile as rotted wood. They struggled, they roared, they tried desperately to rally the last flickers of their legendary strength.
But it was far too late.
"It seems your 'creations' were wiser than their masters." Ian's cold laughter echoed through the storm. He still didn't quite understand why those wizards feared him so much but he wasn't about to stop enjoying the Titans' panic.
"What have you done to us?!" The Titan King forced himself upright, his forehead veined and bulging, his once-solid flesh now a terrible web of cracks, like shattered stone.
"I merely proved that your lives were never meant to last this long. You were not born immortal, you were just using a stolen law to devour time that wasn't yours."
Ian's suspicion was confirmed. The devastating potency of his Paradox Authority was the ultimate proof: their immortality truly was an error that should not exist.
"Repent… within the Fiendfyre!"
Ian's wand slashed downward.
A torrent of ghostly blue fire erupted like a tsunami, raging skyward to blot out the heavens. Wherever the magical inferno passed, the air warped, the earth charred black, and even the heavy thunderclouds above were dyed an eerie, unnatural blue.
The Titans screamed within the inferno. Their vast bodies were instantly swallowed by the flame, their so-called eternal lives crumbling under the twin assaults of their own self-devouring curse and the consuming magic fire.
The sky turned an unholy, apocalyptic blue beneath the Fiendfyre's light, and the floating city groaned under waves of warped, killing heat. The Titan King's body twisted, deforming in the blaze.
His skin cracked like a parched riverbed, exposing the muscle beneath, which was now burning. The flesh that had once been unbreakable melted like wax, dripping away piece by piece.
"Wretched thief!" The Titan King roared, his voice thunderous and raw. His vocal cords were scorched by the fire, each word rasping like sandpaper tearing through steel. Even engulfed in flames, he took a defiant, desperate step forward, his massive foot crushing a clock tower to rubble.
"You think this will kill us? We are eternal! We will return again!" He screamed the words with the last of his strength, battling against the inescapable fate that consumed him.
Ian stood utterly still amid the sea of fire. His black robes whipped and snapped in the scorching wind. He watched their futile struggle with cold calm, his wand spinning idly between his fingers.
"Eternal?" Ian let out a soft, mocking laugh.
"Then what, exactly, is it that's turning to ash right now?"
He glanced around.
The other Titans had become walking pyres, thrashing wildly at the flames that devoured them, only succeeding in fanning the inferno higher. One Titan tried to summon rain, but his power had utterly faded with the loss of immortality.
Another fell to his knees, clawing at the ground with burning hands and it looked as if it was trying to crawl back into the prison that had held them captive for countless ages.
"Even if I die… I'll take you with me!" The Titan King suddenly let out a horrifying, guttural laugh, his blazing eye sockets locking firmly onto Ian.
"Then let's be destroyed together!"
Truly worthy of his title… even as firewood for the Fiendfyre, his colossal body refused to burn away quickly. Wreathed in that ghostly blue flame, the Titan King roared and charged straight at Ian.
He raised both arms high, causing the remaining flesh on his body to swell violently. The veins beneath his cracked skin writhed like thick earthworms.
"In the name of the Titans… DIE!!"
His massive fist came crashing down toward Ian.
"You want me to die? Dream on." Ian sneered.
As the Titan King's body erupted in one final, desperate blaze of power, Ian's form blurred and transformed. In a flash of black, he became a jet-black raven that soared effortlessly skyward.
The Titan's punch detonated upon impact, leveling everything within several miles to rubble.
Amid the blast… chunks of molten flesh and burning blood splattered through the air like grotesque, scorching rain. The raven beat its wings elegantly, ascending above the clouds, its cold, predatory gaze fixed upon the burning ruins below.
"No! You monster! You destroyed our supreme race!"
The remnants of the Titans still burned. They reached out futilely, as if trying to seize the distant, impossibly small figure in the sky. One Titan, reduced to half a body, dragged itself from the sea of fire… only to crumble into ash the moment it neared the edge of the flames.
"Farewell, so-called Lords of Creation…" Ian's voice was soft, carried on the wind. "…You were the real monsters."
His words vanished into the roaring heat of the inferno. As the last Titan perished, Sky City itself began to collapse. Buildings caved in amid the flames, their fragments tumbling into the endless void below.
Ian, now having resumed his human form, stood silently amidst the ruin, his face illuminated by the brilliant, deadly firelight. Burning debris and the Titan's remains fell together into the abyss, and the scorching blast of heat scattered the clouds themselves.
The Fiendfyre did not fade… it grew stronger, fiercer, as if intent on purging the heavens clean of all corruption. When the flames finally shrouded the sky, the entire world below was bathed in an apocalyptic crimson glow.
Only Ian's silhouette remained, flickering within the blaze… like a god who had just declared a new order.
—
Far away, the black-robed wizards watched, hidden within a rift of distorted space. They gazed upon the burning sky with ashen faces, not out of sorrow for the lost city, but for something far, far more terrifying.
"The Titans… they actually died…" One of them murmured in disbelief.
"That Cursed Raven… what kind of power did he use?" Another black-robed wizard spoke, his voice barely a tremor.
"I felt that pulse of energy earlier," An elderly man said thoughtfully, his tone certain. "It may be… the final form of our magic."
"Truly, Zeus?"
"I swear it."
In that brief, terrifying exchange—
Perhaps, the true prologue of the Gods had already begun.
(End of Chapter)
You can read ahead up to 110 chapters on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darkshadow6395
Hey Guys I have picked up 2 new Fanfiction
New Novels- 1. One Piece- Maxed Out Conqueror's Haki!
2. One Piece- Master Of Devil Fruits