The gods kept perfect records.
Every soul was numbered.
Every prayer counted.
Every failure resolved.
This was the law of the world.
So when the final blow landed and the arena fell silent, the gods already knew the result.
The paladin knelt.
His sword had shattered three breaths earlier. His armor no longer shone. The divine sigils carved into his body were dim—fading, one by one, like dying embers.
Above him, twelve thrones hovered in the sky.
Eleven radiated certainty.
One… did not.
"The match is decided."
The voice descended without emotion. Not loud. Not cruel. Simply final.
"The champion of the Twelfth God has fallen."
No cheers followed. No gasps either.
This was expected.
The paladin lowered his head, not in shame—but habit. He had done so his entire life. Before prayer. Before battle. Before judgment.
Only this time, the presence he had always felt was gone.
No warmth.
No answer.
No command.
His god was silent.
A faint pressure brushed against his soul—cold, distant, procedural.
Authority Revocation Initiated.
He felt it immediately.
The strength that once flowed through his limbs receded, as if it had never belonged to him. His breathing grew heavy. The world sharpened, becoming painfully ordinary.
A paladin without authority was just a man.
From the stands, someone laughed.
"Failed."
The word spread quickly. It always did.
"Failed Paladin."
"False Champion."
"An offering wasted on a dying god."
The paladin rose to his feet.
He did not argue.
He did not plead.
He only looked up—once—toward the empty throne.
Where his god should have been, there was nothing but a fracture in the sky. A faint distortion, like a name that had almost been erased.
Something tightened in his chest.
Not anger.
Understanding.
-----------------------------------------------------------
The erasure did not happen immediately.
It never did.
First came exile. Then silence. Then the slow unraveling of a world no longer protected.
Cities burned without warning. Monsters crossed sealed borders. Priests prayed—and received no answers.
The gods were busy.
They always were.
When the first divine war began, the paladin stood on a broken wall, holding a sword that no longer glowed, defending people who no longer believed in him.
"Why are you still fighting?" someone asked.
He thought about it.
"I don't know," he answered.
That was the truth.
When the sky finally cracked and the world began to collapse, the paladin died as he had lived.
Standing.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Death should have been simple.
Registered. Processed. Reassigned.
But when his soul reached the threshold, the system hesitated.
Indexing Failed.
The Divine Ledger searched for a category.
Paladin — revoked.
Mortal — unresolved.
Faith — null.
Fate — incomplete.
The record returned empty.
For the first time since the world began, the Ledger encountered something it could not place.
Status: Not Required for Continuation.
And then—
Something moved in the gap.
Interesting, a voice whispered.
Not divine.
Not human.
You slipped through.
The paladin felt hands—not physical, not gentle—close around what remained of him.
The gods won't notice, the voice said.
They never look at errors.
Memory fractured.
Time folded.
And far away, in a world that had not yet ended, a young man opened his eyes with no memory of dying—
—but with the faint, unsettling feeling that the gods were already watching him.
-----------------------------------------------------------