The sky did not merely open.
It inverted.
The tear above the Hellbound widened like an eyelid forced apart by unseen hands, and through it descended the first of the Behemite.
Gravity flinched.
Trees tore from the rainforest floor without wind. Roots ripped free in wet, screaming clumps of soil. Entire sections of jungle lifted sideways as if yanked by invisible hooks and then slammed back down at wrong angles.
The volcano in the distance guttered.
Its red throat dimmed to a sickly orange, then to something bruised and uncertain, as though flame itself felt ashamed to burn in the presence of what came through the wound in the sky.
The artificial suns suspended above the arena flickered.
One went dark for a full second.
The crowd of Fragments recoiled in unison, a subtle but unmistakable shifting of cosmic bodies and borrowed forms. Murmurs rippled like wind over grave markers.
Six shapes descended fully into view.
They were not creatures so much as impositions.
Each Behemite towered like a cathedral torn free from a dying galaxy and hurled into another universe out of spite. Their bodies writhed between solidity and smoke—fibrous strands of muscle exposed to vacuum, threaded with veins of smoldering crimson light. Tendrils unfurled from their torsos, vast serpentine limbs that moved slowly, tasting the air as if sampling flavor.
Dozens of eyes burned across each mass—molten red, unblinking, aware.
And beneath them, maws opened.
Not mouths.
Tears in reality.
Within each abyss churned viridian radiance—lime-bright annihilation coiling like a storm waiting to be exhaled.
The air pressure dropped.
Several Griefspawn staggered under it, their hunched frames bending lower as if existence itself pressed down on their shoulders.
Qaritas felt it in his teeth.
A vibration—low, subsonic, like the heartbeat of something that had died and refused to stay that way.
The Behemite did not roar.
They resonated.
The sound passed through bone, through lava, through stone.
The river running black with mud stilled.
Then reversed direction.
Water crawled backward up its own current, dragged toward the nearest Behemite's gravitational distortion.
A Griefspawn too close to the epicenter lifted off the ground, screaming, limbs flailing as its massive body stretched lengthwise before snapping like wet rope and unraveling into red mist.
The mist spiraled upward and vanished into a tendril.
Even the Griefspawn hesitated.
Ecayrous's smile thinned.
Ascendants in the stands rose from their seats.
Some in awe.
Some in terror.
Hydeius stood slowly, Cree still in his arms. His corrupted blade hummed, etched names flickering like stars seen through smoke.
Cree's fire sputtered, but their eyes were sharp.
They did not blink.
On the battlefield below, Xheavend did not move.
She looked up at the descending Behemite as if assessing weather.
Qaritas felt the predictive sight flicker at the edges of his vision—overwhelmed by scale, by too many variables, too much destruction.
The first Behemite descended fully, its tendrils brushing the upper canopy of the rainforest.
Every tree it touched blackened instantly.
Leaves curled inward and liquefied.
Trunks split and collapsed into fungal-smelling ruin, sap boiling into sticky vapor.
The second drifted lower, and gravity warped visibly around it.
Lava in the trenches pulled upward in glowing threads, forming arching bridges of molten rock that hung suspended midair before being sucked into its open maw.
The third's eyes flared.
Not at the battlefield.
At the stands.
One molten pupil rotated—slow, deliberate—until it fixed on Hydeius.
Then on Cree in his arms.
The viridian light in its maw brightened.
Recognition.
Not of them.
Of what they had once survived.
One tendril swept lazily through a cluster of remaining Griefspawn.
The creatures did not explode.
They unraveled.
Skin peeled back from muscle in long, wet ribbons. Bone separated from marrow as if carefully dissected by invisible surgeons. Blood atomized into glittering red spray.
They were stripped apart molecule by molecule while still screaming.
The screams bent.
Warped.
Cut off.
The fragments fell silent.
Even they understood what these were.
Xheavend exhaled once.
Then she raised her hand.
"Goro."
The word did not echo.
It settled.
Reality rippled behind her.
The air split vertically, not with violence but with inevitability, and something vast and coiled slid through.
Goraxian.
Two hundred feet of amethyst-black scales that shimmered like shattered nebulae forged into armor. Each scale broad as a tower shield, etched with ancient gold runes that flickered awake as he emerged.
His twenty eyes opened one by one.
Pitch-black sclera.
Molten gold irises.
Vertical pupils narrowing as they measured the battlefield.
The temperature dropped.
Not from cold.
From authority.
Even Ecayrous took a single, unconscious step back.
Fragments recoiled in the stands, perception sliding uselessly over the serpent's form.
Goraxian did not thrash.
He coiled with precision, his massive body looping through space like a drifting constellation.
When he spoke, his jaw did not move.
The stars above flickered instead.
Xheavend.
Her lips curved.
"Miss me?"
A pause, long enough to feel like judgment.
You return to war.
"Of course I do."
She gestured toward the Behemite.
"Help me kill them."
All twenty eyes focused on the descending horrors.
With pleasure.
Goraxian moved.
Not fast.
Instant.
One heartbeat he was coiled beside her.
The next he was above the first Behemite, body cutting through warped gravity like a blade through silk.
The Behemite reacted, tendrils snapping upward, viridian light swelling in its maw.
Too slow.
Goraxian's coils wrapped its upper mass.
Runes along his scales flared gold.
All twenty eyes opened fully.
The Behemite froze.
Not immobilized.
Petrified.
Its writhing shadow-flesh hardened into asteroid-black stone mid-motion. Tendrils solidified in grotesque arcs.
Its burning eyes dimmed to dull embers trapped in rock.
It began to fall.
Goraxian released it.
The petrified Behemite crashed into the forest, shattering into continent-sized slabs that crushed hundreds of Griefspawn beneath them.
The impact shook the Hellbound to its foundation.
Another Behemite opened its maw.
Viridian annihilation erupted.
A beam of searing lime radiance tore downward, shearing through air and space alike.
Xheavend jumped.
Not away.
Toward it.
The beam engulfed her.
For a fraction of a second she vanished in green light.
Then she punched through it.
Her skin blistered instantly, peeling away in sheets. Muscle exposed, then bone visible beneath.
Her eyes turned completely black.
She bit the Behemite.
Not metaphorically.
Her teeth sank into its shadow-flesh.
A sound like acid poured onto metal erupted.
The Behemite convulsed.
Where her teeth pierced, its vast body began to liquefy. Shadow-flesh sloughed off in viscous chunks, tendrils dissolving into smoking sludge that rained down and burned through the forest floor.
She tore a chunk free and spat it aside.
The wound spread like infection.
The Behemite shrieked—a sound like collapsing stars.
Xheavend dropped, skin regrowing mid-fall, and landed atop Goraxian's back.
He surged sideways, avoiding another beam that carved a molten trench across the battlefield and narrowly missed the stands.
Fragments flinched.
Hydeius shifted his stance, blade rising.
Cree's fire flared weakly.
Goraxian snapped around the second Behemite.
Twenty eyes flared.
Stone again.
The creature froze mid-blast, beam cutting off abruptly.
It toppled sideways into the riverbed, crushing the reversed current beneath its weight.
Xheavend leapt from Goraxian's back toward a third Behemite.
Its tendrils lashed, catching her midair.
They wrapped around her torso, limbs, throat.
The tendrils constricted.
Her ribs cracked audibly.
Blood sprayed from her mouth.
She did not scream.
Her eyes stayed black.
She touched the Behemite's flesh.
The air split.
From the wound crawled things.
Cosmic insects the size of wolves, chitinous and gleaming with abyssal sheen. Mandibles clicked. Wings buzzed with subsonic hunger.
They poured from the Behemite's body like a living infestation.
They burrowed.
They chewed.
They tore into tendrils, ripping chunks free, vanishing into shadow-flesh and erupting elsewhere.
The Behemite thrashed violently, smashing into the forest, flattening acres of trees under its writhing mass.
The insects devoured.
In seconds, vast sections of the creature were skeletal frameworks of dark sinew and exposed crimson cores.
It lashed again—
Xheavend twisted free, bones realigning midair, and kicked off its face.
She landed on Goraxian's coiled body as the insects consumed the Behemite from within.
It collapsed inward, imploding into itself with a sickening crunch before dissolving into greasy vapor.
Four left.
Goraxian streaked upward, impossible speed bending perception.
He wrapped a fourth Behemite and petrified it in one fluid motion.
Stone cracked.
It shattered mid-fall into a rain of asteroid fragments that slammed into the forest below, crushing remaining Griefspawn into paste.
The fifth Behemite roared—if that vibration could be called a roar—and opened its maw wide.
Viridian radiance swelled brighter than before.
It fired.
The beam lanced across the arena toward the stands.
Time slowed.
Ascendants surged to their feet.
Hydeius stepped forward.
Xheavend moved faster.
She intercepted the beam mid-flight, arms wide.
War.
Conquest.
Famine.
Death.
The air around her split into four shadows.
One rode a pale horse made of bone and ash.
One carried scales that tipped toward starvation.
One wore a crown of broken cities.
One walked without feet, and where it stepped, the ground forgot to grow.
They were not illusions.
They were permissions.
The Behemite's beam slowed.
Not because it was blocked.
Because it had entered the jurisdiction of something older than annihilation.
The four aspects ignited in her veins.
She twisted.
The beam bent.
Redirected.
It tore sideways across the battlefield, sweeping through the remaining Griefspawn.
They did not scream.
They evaporated.
Hundreds.
Thousands.
In a single arc of green annihilation.
The battlefield cleared in an instant.
The last Behemite faltered, beam sputtering.
Goraxian struck.
Twenty eyes opened.
Stone claimed it.
It froze mid-roar and dropped.
The arena shook as the petrified corpse slammed into earth and fractured into ruin.
The last fragment of stone rolled to a stop.
No wind followed.
No lava burst.
No creature screamed.
The Hellbound did not breathe.
Even the fragments did not whisper.
The universe, for one impossible second, seemed to consider what had just happened.
Silence fell.
The forest was gone.
The river gone.
Lava pits cracked and steaming.
Shattered Behemite stone littered the field like monuments to extinction.
Not a single Griefspawn remained.
Only two figures stood in the wreckage.
Qaritas.
Void-black skin glowing faintly with galactic veins.
Silver hair drifting in heat-warped air.
Purple eyes steady.
And Hrolyn.
Still upright.
Still threaded.
Still silent.
The staff anchored him.
Blood still ran upward.
One frozen star trembled behind his left eye.
Xheavend landed beside Qaritas, and for the briefest flicker—
her gaze shifted past him.
To Hrolyn.
Not hatred.
Not fear.
Grief.
Her armor smoked.
Her stick returned to simple wood in her grip.
Goraxian coiled behind them, twenty eyes half-lidded now, watchful.
The predictive sight flickered in Qaritas's vision.
Fading.
Thirty minutes thinning like smoke.
He felt it slipping.
He glanced at Xheavend.
She gave him a small nod.
This part was his.
Eon's voice slid into his mind.
That's what I'm for.
Qaritas exhaled.
The void inside him steadied.
He looked at Hrolyn—not at the threads, not at the hooks, but at the trembling star in the Old God's eye.
This was not about killing him.
Not really.
This was about ending the curse woven into grief.
Ending the persistence.
Ending the tantrum that learned to walk.
Qaritas stepped forward.
Goraxian's coils tightened behind him like a silent promise.
Xheavend watched, ready but not intervening.
Eon's presence coiled in his chest, sharp and awake.
The battlefield was empty.
The war was distilled to two bloodlines facing each other across ruin.
Qaritas lifted his spear.
Void hummed along its edge.
He met the frozen gaze of the King of the First Universe.
And spoke.
"Finish it."
"Father."