Ife-Nkewa had never known fear.
It had been designed that way.
Its streets were straight, its towers precise, its people disciplined into believing fear was a leftover weakness from the age of gods. Nothing prayed here. Nothing begged. Everything functioned.
Until the wall broke.
Adaeze did not enter the city.
She arrived.
The sky tore open as her colossal serpentine form crashed through the outer barrier, god-bone shattering like rotten teeth. The scream that followed did not come from the city's people.
It came from the city itself.
Stone warped. Towers bent inward as if trying to hide. The ground convulsed, rejecting foundations built on stolen divinity. Rivers of serpent-fire poured through streets, burning logic, melting scripture, undoing equations that had held reality stiff and obedient.
"Contain it!" someone screamed.
But there was nothing left to contain.
Inside the Severance Chamber, Chukwudi felt it.
Not relief.
Pressure.
The machines around him spasmed as Adaeze's presence disrupted the false laws holding him. Tubes shattered, spilling glowing god-essence across the floor like luminous blood.
The tall man staggered back.
"This wasn't calculated," he whispered.
Chukwudi lifted his head slowly.
His shadow had returned—but it was wrong. It stretched in multiple directions, flickering between boy, serpent, and something unrecognizable.
"You built a city on silence," Chukwudi said, voice layered. "Silence doesn't stay empty."
The Correction rose.
Not fully.
Not yet.
But enough.
The streets buckled as compacted soil and bone burst upward, forming vast limbs beneath the city. Faces appeared briefly in the ground—villagers, gods, children—before being erased again.
The Continuum panicked.
Weapons fired uselessly into the mass, swallowed and repurposed. Towers powered by harvested alụsị flickered violently, then collapsed inward, crushed by the absence they fed.
The city's lights went out.
For the first time, Ife-Nkewa was dark.
Chukwudi screamed.
Not in pain.
In memory.
Names poured out of him—villages erased, gods killed, children lost. Each name struck the chamber like a hammer, cracking sigils, unraveling anchors.
The chains around his meaning snapped.
He fell.
And the ground caught him.
Not lovingly.
Reluctantly.
"You again," the earth whispered faintly, exhausted. "You never stop."
Chukwudi pressed his forehead to the floor.
"I never asked to begin."
Above, Adaeze fought the Correction.
Serpent coils wrapped around soil-limbs. Fire met absence. Divinity clashed with inevitability. Where they touched, the land simply ceased—not burned, not broken, just gone.
Idemili appeared on a fractured tower, blood streaming from her mouth.
"This is it," the river goddess shouted. "Choose now, child!"
Chukwudi looked up.
At the city.
At the people who had tried to erase him.
At the thing beneath them that would erase everything.
He understood then.
Killing gods was not enough.
Destroying humans was not the answer.
Someone had to stand between.
Chukwudi rose.
The earth groaned.
He reached not for power—but for burden.
He stepped into the space where the Correction's will pressed hardest and anchored himself. The absence recoiled, confused, meeting resistance not from belief, but from responsibility.
"I will not replace gods," Chukwudi said, voice echoing across broken streets.
"I will not rule."
"I will not be worshipped."
The Correction paused.
"And I will not let you erase what still chooses to live."
The city shook.
Adaeze screamed his name—not in warning, but in grief.
The Correction withdrew—partially.
Enough.
Ife-Nkewa did not survive whole.
Half the city sank into dead earth, entombed forever. The god-harvest towers collapsed, releasing screams that would never finish echoing.
Those who lived crawled from the ruins, sobbing, changed.
They would never build another city like this again.
They would remember fear.
When the dust settled, Chukwudi lay in the crater where the Severance Chamber once stood.
Alive.
Barely.
Adaeze collapsed beside him, her vast form shrinking, cracking, exhausted beyond divinity.
"You're tearing yourself apart," she whispered.
Chukwudi stared at the ruined sky.
"I know," he replied.
Far away, other cities watched.
Other gods stirred.
Other humans took notes.
The world had learned something new that day.
That gods could fall.
That cities could scream.
And that somewhere between belief and oblivion walked a boy the earth could not claim—
and could not escape.