A tense silence descended in the flooded, ruined tunnel, broken only by the roar of escaping water and the distant screams of panicked civilians. Raziel, Dumah, and Lucifer were locked in a motionless standoff, a triangle of divine power with a terrified human at its center.
Lucifer's mind raced. She was pinned. Her every potential movement was anticipated and blocked. To lower her guard for even an instant would give them the opening they needed to snatch Cain. She could not fight freely with him here.
"Cain," she said, her voice low but clear. "I must relocate this conflict. I will attempt to draw them away from Earth. You must flee. Run and do not stop until I return for you."
Cain, pressed against the shuddering glass, managed a jerky nod. His eyes were wide with fear, but he held her gaze. "Can you promise you'll come back?"
Lucifer turned her head just enough to look at him. She gave a single, firm nod.
In that same instant, her perception of the world fractured. Time did not slow for the angels. It became a series of instantaneous, overlapping events.
Lucifer's eyes darted to Raziel. His lips were already moving behind his helmet, forming a silent, potent command. She could see the intent, but the sound of the words, the power itself, was somehow withheld, arriving a crucial fraction of a second late.
Behind her, she felt the shift in space. Dumah had already bypassed her defenses. A gauntleted hand was inches from closing around Cain's arm.
She tensed to intercept, to pivot, to slash.
Then Raziel's unspoken command landed.
Freeze.
The divine imperative slammed into her again, locking her joints, sealing her will in ice.
She was out of time. Out of options.
Her entire body ignited with a sudden, brilliant white light, a desperate surge of raw power.
Fwip.
A second later, Cain was stumbling on a sidewalk several hundred meters away from the Manila Ocean Park. He blinked, disoriented, the world tilting. Then, a soundless concussion hit him. He turned.
The entire central structure of the Ocean Park did not explode with fire. It erupted with a silent, expanding sphere of pure, compressed energy. The building seemed to swell, then vaporize from the inside out. A shockwave of invisible force radiated outward, shredding glass, twisting metal, and hurling debris like shrapnel in a deadly halo.
Cain didn't wait. He ran. He ran as Lucifer had told him, his legs pumping, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs, the screams of the panicked crowd a blurred soundtrack to his escape.
First responders arrived in chaos. Police scrambled to establish a perimeter, shouting for people to get back. Firefighters stared in horror at the unnatural devastation, calling for backup for a disaster with no visible flame.
Within the epicenter of the annihilated park, amid settling dust and vaporized seawater, Lucifer stood unharmed. Her six obsidian wings were spread wide, her twin halos spinning. Her eyes scanned the wreckage, searching for any sign of Cain, hoping her desperate gambit had bought him enough distance.
Then a voice spoke, not from the ruins, but from high above, piercing the atmosphere itself, meant for her ears alone.
"Fight without restraint, Murderer."
It was Gabriel.
"I will ensure the human's safety while you are occupied. Consider it a… courtesy between predators."
Lucifer's head tilted upward, as if she could see through the sky to the figure lingering in orbit. "Why offer such a boon?" her voice resonated back, a thread of thought across the void. "Did you not declare war upon me? Have you experienced a change of heart?"
From her vantage point in the high atmosphere, Gabriel watched, Raphael a silent shadow beside her. Four wings of shimmering starlight were manifest at her back.
"I have not," Gabriel's voice was cold, clear. "You are my prey. I do not share. Remove these interlopers. Clean the board."
Lucifer considered this. Then she asked, "If you wish them dead, grant me this. Allow me to take them far from this world. If I unleash my full strength here, the collateral will be every mortal soul on the planet."
A slow, cold smirk touched Gabriel's lips. "Consider it done."
Fwip.
There was no sensation of movement. One moment, Lucifer stood in the watery wreckage on Earth. The next, her boots crunched on the cold, grey regolith of a barren moon orbiting Saturn. The vast, silent majesty of the gas giant filled half the black sky.
She looked around, instantly assessing. Gabriel and Raphael were visible as two distant points of light, watching from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away.
She is observing me, Lucifer realized. Studying my capabilities. She is indeed serious.
The effortless, planetary-scale spatial displacement was a stark reminder of Gabriel's terrifying authority. Could she pluck someone from across the universe itself?
Lucifer shook off the thought. Her immediate problem was closer.
On a neighboring moonlet, Raziel and Dumah regained their footing. Their helmets were gone, revealing stern, ageless faces etched with fury. Their wings, no longer four, but six each, blazed with intensified holy light. Dumah's wings now crackled with veins of black, unholy fire.
Lucifer glared, clenching her fists. I must decipher his silent speech.
VVVVMMMMM.
The white halo above her head flared brighter. From her back, two more vast wings of pure obsidian unfolded, bringing her total to six, matching her adversaries.
She watched as the two Commandments tensed. Then, they were simply gone from the distant moonlet.
They reappeared instantly on her flanks, having crossed thousands of kilometers in the span of a thought. It was the same tactic. Attack from the blind spot. It had worked before.
This time, Lucifer was already moving. She pivoted, her fist a blur of dark energy, aimed not where Raziel was, but where she predicted he would materialize. Her knuckles were inches from his face.
But Raziel's lips had already moved. A command, uttered in perfect, soundless celestial language, had already taken effect.
Lucifer froze. Her fist halted in mid-air.
Raziel's mouth formed another silent word.
Between them, space convulsed. A sphere of impossible density and heat materialized, no larger than a baseball. It was a dying star, a miniature supernova contained in a pinpoint of space.
Seeing the trap sprung, Dumah altered his attack. Instead of striking Lucifer, his hand shot out and touched Raziel's shoulder.
The light from the nascent stellar explosion began to bleed out, illuminating the entire desolate moon with a hellish, growing glare. Lucifer, locked in place, could only watch as Dumah's touch activated some pre-arranged contingency.
In a motion so fast it left no trace in the fabric of reality, the two Commandments vanished from the immediate vicinity. There was no flash, no spatial ripple. They were simply gone, having escaped the blast radius by means Lucifer could not perceive.
From their distant observation point, Gabriel and Raphael watched the play unfold.
"Their synchronization is exceptional," Raphael observed, his voice analytical. "So that is what elevates them to the Commandments."
"Can an angel withstand a true cosmic event, even a miniature one?" Raphael asked, a rare note of uncertainty in his tone. He had never witnessed angels warring with each other at this level, using tactics reserved for the Aspects of the Void.
"We possess high innate resistance to energy," Gabriel explained, her eyes fixed on the glowing pinprick on the moon's surface. "But not to the unraveling of spacetime itself. Not to a real supernova, even in miniature." Her voice was flat, final. "She is taking it point-blank. She will die."
On the moon's surface, the miniature star reached critical mass.
It detonated.
A light brighter than a thousand suns erupted, swallowing Lucifer's frozen form.
HMMMMMMM.
"Divine Divide."
The explosion did not fire or smoke. It was pure, annihilating energy, expanding at a significant fraction of lightspeed. It engulfed the moon she stood upon, vaporizing it instantly. The shockwave ripped outward, obliterating nearby moonlets and asteroids, carving a temporary scar of pure radiation in the Saturnian system.
The silent, apocalyptic flower bloomed in the darkness.