The moment the Seven Deadly Sins tore free, Nicholas moved. His target was Lucifer alone. The Warden, boosted by the authority of the Greek Gods, acted. Hercules focused his spatial authority on the Adversary's blazing signature. He tore Lucifer from the material plane and hurled him across space. The other six Sins remained on Earth, suddenly isolated.
Zeus, Athena, Ares, and Apollo formed a burning ring around Europe. The Warden planted his Pillar. Together, they wove a prison of storm and distorted space around the lesser demon lords. The Sins raged against the celestial quarantine, but they were contained. The true battle would happen elsewhere, in a void Nicholas had prepared, a lightyear away from the solar system.
In the grey arena, Nicholas faced his enemy. He shed his mortal disguise. His divine form stood woven from a billion stars. The Cupbearer, the Witness, and the Keeper stood with him. Lucifer manifested in his terrible glory, a being of a thousand black wings weeping with blood, and of a thousand blood red eyes, each crying black corruption.
"You are so predictable," Nicholas said, his voice calm in the void. "Your hatred is a script. Your rebellion is a tired story. You saw a prophecy about a child of heaven and earth and thought to make your own, how cliche."
Lucifer's form shuddered. A sound like breaking crystal filled the nothingness. It was his laughter but hidden under a hint of fear at the ambush, sharp and furious. "You dare speak to me of stories, you ignorant scribbler. You are a footnote. A temporary stain on the world, an upstart!"
"I am the weaver of fate and destiny," Nicholas replied. "And I read your plans in its threads the moment your son took his first corrupted breath. The ritual murders. The serpents. The desperate gamble to force Heaven's hand and crack your cage. It was all so obvious."
The Adversary stilled. The hatred on his face flickered with something raw. Confusion. "You saw... but you did not interfere. You let my son rise. You let the serpents form. You let the angels descend."
"Of course I did," Nicholas said. "I needed the distraction. I needed Heaven looking at your magnificent, crumbling theater. I needed you to feel clever. I needed you to pour everything into that petty escape so you would be right here, alone, away from your pit, when the trap closed."
Rage, pure and incandescent, erupted from Lucifer. "You used me. You used my design as a stepping stone."
"I used your nature. Your nature is to rebel. Your nature is to be so consumed with spiting your old master that you cannot see the new one standing before you."
Lucifer surged forward. The battle was joined. It was not a fight of brute force. It was a war of concepts. Nicholas wove strands of Inevitable Convergence into the void around them. Lucifer shattered the pattern with a wave of his hand, replacing it with Infinite Divergence, a storm of chaotic possibility.
The Cupbearer sent forth a river of flaming blood to burn away the chaos. Lucifer grew a Garden of Uncreation from his cracks, its roots drinking the vital flow. The Keeper spoke a secret name, and the garden withered.
They fought across layers of reality. Space tore. Time bled. Nicholas forged a spear from the Certainty of Death. Lucifer raised a shield of Eternal Torment. Their clash erased the idea of silence for billions of kilometers around.
As they fought, Lucifer's livid voice cut through the cataclysm. "The Olympians. Their arrogance is a mountain. They would never help you cage me. They would cheer my war on you. What did you offer them? What price could buy those proud fools?"
Nicholas rewound a micro-realm of pain Lucifer had gifted him, reducing it to nothing. "I offered them fear," he said, his tone cold and analytical. "They have a prophecy. One that spells their end. I told them I could pause it. In exchange, they would help me contain the collateral damage from this little dispute. They are not here to help me defeat you. They are merely janitors, cleaning up the mess so the world does not break while I remove a thorn."
The truth was a deeper blow than any physical strike. Lucifer recoiled. He was not the center of a grand war. He was an inconvenience being managed. A thorn is being pulled so a rival could deal with a different threat. The humiliation was exquisite.
"You think you can take my domain?" Lucifer roared, his power flaring. "Magic is mine. Its shadow, its fire, its rebellion! You are order and stone. You cannot hold it!"
"I am the god of fate and war. I am order and strategy," Nicholas agreed, weaving Chronological Certainty into a temporal wound. "But magic is a tool. A weapon. And I am very good with weapons."
He pressed his attack, his newly born control over a fifty percent share of Fate allowing him to edit the narrative of the fight itself. He imposed stories of flaw and failure upon the Adversary. Lucifer fought them off, but each one cost him focus, each one chipped at his fury.
The observing Olympians maintained their quarantine in stunned silence. They heard the dialogue through the divine strain. Athena understood the full scope of the manipulation. Nicholas had incentivized it, used it as bait, and then hired them as cleanup crew with their own terror as currency. The sheer, brutal chess move of it left her cold.
Nicholas, the Shaper, finally began to get serious. He opened his will, and from the threads of his being, he wove a command into the substance of the pocket dimension. The grey plain erupted.
It became the Loom of the Atrium Made Manifest, a special attack Nicholas created for this very occasion, a demi-world created to give him an edge. On his side of the battlefield, geography exploded into being. Mountains of crystallized time, their facets reflecting every possible past and future, thrust upwards. Rivers of the Cupbearer's burning, iridescent blood carved glowing canyons. Forests of silver trees, each leaf a tiny scroll of law and prophecy, spread their branches. Above it all, a false sky shimmered with the Keeper's secrets, constellations formed from shifting, runic equations.
Lucifer responded with equal grandeur. His scream was a transformative curse. The space around him corrupted. It became the Hellscape Unfolded. The ground melted into a seething plain of molten blasphemy, bubbling with half-formed faces and sulfur. The air thickened into a miasma of despair and thick plumes of ash.
Spires of black bone, carved with the history of every sin, jaggedly pierced the horizon. Rivers of frigid, whispering shadow flowed against gravity. From his obsidian form sprouted forests of thorned trees that wept acid and bore fruit that pulsed with a sick, green light.
The two divine realms collided in the center of the pocket dimension. It was not a slow encroachment. It was a violent, creative annihilation. Where the river of burning blood met the river of whispering shadow, the contact point did not steam. It screamed into a new form, birthing a temporary, chaotic ocean of conflicting purities that boiled away into raw potential.
Nicholas wielded his authority over Fate. He pointed at a charging legion of stone gargoyles that had formed from the Hellscape's mountains. He rewrote their origin. He decreed that they had, in fact, always been loyal guardians of the Atrium. The gargoyles froze in mid-air, their forms shimmering. Their stone softened, their demonic features melting into the stern, beautiful visages of the Warden's sentinels. They turned and lunged back into the Hellscape, crashing into a tower of bone.
Lucifer, the master of Magic, retaliated. He looked upon a majestic mountain of crystalline time and clapped his hands. He did not shatter it. He infected its causality. The mountain's flawless facets suddenly played not scenes of potential, but scenes of inescapable failure and humiliation tailored to erode the will of any who viewed them. The mountain itself groaned, its structure warping under the weight of poisoned time.
The Cupbearer, Marcus, roared. He raised his Chalice high and slammed its base down onto the Loom's ground. A wave of raw, creative vitality, the Life-Flame Unbound, radiated out. It washed over the infected time-mountain.
It did not heal the corrupted visions. It burned them away as impurities, fueling a violent, spontaneous growth. The mountain exploded with new, wild crystal formations, each one showing a moment of defiance and hope, a counter-narrative that pushed back against the Hellscape.
The Keeper, Julian, opened his Book. He did not read. He projected. A vast, shimmering page of absolute, immutable truth, the Wall of the Known, materialized and advanced like a glacier. It pushed into the miasma of despair. Where it touched, the ambiguous promises of the Hellscape solidified into single, terrible facts. A whispering promise of power became a contract etched in burning skin, its horrific terms now clear and unavoidable. The Wall forced Lucifer's domain to be truthful, and its truths were horrors.
Space itself became their weapon and their victim. Lucifer, enraged, tore a gash in the fabric between the two realms. He created a Wound of Howling Divergence. Through it poured not void, but a flood of chaotic, unrealized possibilities, worlds where gravity was a color, where thought was solid, where the very concept of 'battle' had never existed. This chaotic flux threatened to dissolve the structural integrity of both the Loom and the Hellscape into meaningless noise.
Nicholas responded by weaving. He pulled threads of Absolute Spatial Certainty from his own essence and the Warden's authority, which resonated through the dimension. He stitched the gash closed, keeping the Serpent contained.
Time was the next casualty. Lucifer spun, and a vast field of the Hellscape was drenched in Sloth's Eternal Moment. Within it, time stretched into an infinite, unbearable present. An advancing wave of the Life-Flame froze, not in ice, but in a single, eternal instant of combustion, its energy trapped and useless.
The Witness, Jonathan, had his authority woven into the Loom's foundation. The sands of the time-deserts reacted. Each grain absorbed and recorded a nanosecond of that eternal moment, defining it, numbering it, and in doing so, breaking its infiniteness. The frozen flame shuddered and resumed its advance, now captured in a trillion crystalline motes.
The battle escalated beyond the landscape. They began to forge and unmake realities within the pocket dimension. Lucifer cupped his hands and breathed into them.
He created a Micro-Realm of Perfect Torment, a beautiful, gem-like world where the sole purpose of existence was to experience one's own most tender memory endlessly, only to have it cruelly distorted at the moment of peak joy. He hurled it at Nicholas like a metaphysical grenade.
Nicholas caught the concept with his authority over Fate and War. He rewrote the core law of the micro-realm. He changed it from a tragedy to a war story, destroying it from within. The gem-world flashed with internal conflict and then shattered, not into nothing, but into a brief, glorious shower of defiant light before fading.
The cataclysm was total. The pocket dimension was no longer a container for a fight. It was the living, screaming record of the fight itself. Continents of order and chaos rose and were shattered. Skies of secret knowledge dueled with atmospheres of addictive lies. The very laws of physics were local and temporary, flaring into existence to serve a single attack before being overwritten by a rival's divine will.
Through it all, Nicholas pressed his advantage. His greater share of Fate allowed him to impose greater control stakes. He would isolate a particularly powerful infernal spire and declare, by the authority of the thread, that its structural integrity was contingent on the pride of its maker.
Lucifer's own towering pride would then become a physical weakness, causing the spire to crack under its own conceptual weight. Lucifer was forced to fight not just Nicholas, but the imposed logic of his own domain.
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