---
Closer to the fractured edge of what had once been the domain, Lilith materialized in a sudden ripple of dark crimson light.
"Nick. Find your brother and leave this place with him quickly," she said without preamble, voice low, urgent, edged with sothing dangerously close to desperation.
"Why, Mum? What’s wrong?" Nick asked. A deep frown carved itself between his brows as he studied her face, the unusual restlessness in her posture, the faint tremor in hands that were normally stone-steady.
"Just listen to . I’m trying to save your life," Lilith answered.
Genuine concern etched every sharp line of her features; fear, a rare, unwelco guest, flickered briefly in her dark eyes.
"I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t want to leave," Nick replied stubbornly.
His gaze drifted inexorably back toward the center of the devastation, drawn like iron to a magnet.
The shadows Aaron wielded, or Jordan, as Nick still desperately wanted to believe, matched the exact descriptions survivors had once whispered about the Celestial Devourer: living black, endlessly hungry, feeding on fear itself.
The resemblance was no longer coincidental; it was damning.
A wild, dangerous suspicion ignited inside Nick’s chest and refused to be smothered.
If Aaron truly was the Devourer... the implications crashed over him in sickening waves.
He had sheltered the man.
Fed him.
Defended him.
The Sovereigns would not distinguish between knowledge and ignorance.
Negligence would be the verdict.
Complicity assud.
Doom would fall on him regardless of truth.
Lost in the spiraling horror of that thought, Nick barely registered Aaron’s next movent until it was too late.
"Is that... blood?" he whispered, voice cracking with confusion and dawning horror.
His entire worldview tilted violently as he watched the dark crimson tendrils twist and pulse like living veins.
Boom!
The word had scarcely left his lips before lightning ripped across the sky, ancient, furious, apocalyptic in volu.
The sound rolled through his ribcage like physical blows, rattling every bone.
It required no genius to understand: the god of Olympus had passed beyond anger into sothing far more lethal.
"Can you not hear ? You will die if you remain here!" Lilith shouted, voice rising to a near-scream of frustration and terror.
But Nick could care less.
His eyes remained riveted on the impossible, escalating progression of events, mind too stunned to move.
Lilith searched his face one final, agonizing ti.
Seeing the stubborn lock of his jaw, the refusal to yield, she exhaled sharply.
Words had failed.
With a last flare of crimson light, she vanished, knowing her aid was desperately needed by Aaron more than ever.
She could only pray, silently, fiercely, that her son would sohow survive the storm about to break.
---
Aaron, having glutted himself on every last drop of terror from the fallen participants and erased them without ceremony, decided the ti had finally co to shatter the entire facade and confront his true enemies head-on.
He rose slowly into the fractured air. Tendrils of pure shadow erupted from every inch of his body, weaving and braiding together with thin, deliberate streams of his own blood.
The fusion birthed sothing grotesque and beautiful, a dark red abomination that pulsed wetly, veins of crimson threading through inky black like corrupted arteries.
It carried the faint, nauseating scent of copper pennies mixed with night-blooming decay.
Face perfectly calm, almost ditative, Aaron extended both arms outward in a slow, graceful arc.
He released the attack.
The combined shadow-blood surged outward in a violent, unstoppable wave.
It tore through the domain like a blade through wet silk.
Invisible walls spiderwebbed with cracks that glowed sickly red.
Reality itself groaned, a low, tortured sound, as the entire constructed space buckled and scread.
Boom!
The next heartbeat brought lightning, deep, primal, ancient, roaring across the newly exposed sky.
Fury poured from it in tangible, crackling waves.
The air turned thick with ozone and scorched iron.
Aaron’s every instinct flared in urgent warning: this was no ordinary storm.
This lightning carried divine intent, destruction given conscious, wrathful will.
Boom!
A figure landed directly before him in a blinding white flash that seared retinas.
Lightning danced and snapped around the newcor in wild, violent branches, blue-white arcs thick as tree trunks coiling, forking, grounding into the blackened earth with explosive cracks.
The ground beneath his boots fused to glass in radiating patterns. The air itself trembled in reverence and terror.
"WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?" Zeus, god of lightning and undisputed king of Olympus, demanded.
His voice bood like thunder cascading through mountain ranges, deep enough to vibrate organs, loud enough to deafen thought.
Eyes blazing with pure, unfiltered divine wrath locked onto Aaron, each pupil a coiling storm promising imdiate, rciless obliteration.
"Oh wow. I pissed the big dog," Aaron murmured, the words rolling off his tongue with lazy delight.
His lips curved into a slow, fearless smile as he stared directly into Zeus’s blazing eyes, those twin storm-furnaces that could incinerate worlds with a glance.
Lightning snapped and hissed around the god-king in violent, living serpents, blue-white arcs as thick as ancient oaks, each crackle releasing bursts of ozone so sharp it stung the nostrils and left a tallic aftertaste on the tongue.
The air itself trembled with restrained power; the ground beneath Zeus had long since fused into blackened, glassy craters whose edges still glowed dull cherry-red.
Heat radiated in pulsing waves, warping vision and making sweat evaporate before it could form.
Yet Aaron stood perfectly still, unflinching, almost amused, like a spectator at a mildly entertaining street performance rather than a mortal facing divine annihilation.
"I won’t ask that question again," Zeus growled, voice dropping into a register so deep it vibrated through ribs and teeth like an approaching earthquake.
"Who the hell are you?"
Every syllable carried thunder. Lightning intensified in response, coiling tighter around his massive fra, illuminating every corded muscle, every battle scar etched across millennia, every vein pulsing with barely-leashed fury.
The god-king’s presence alone pressed down like a physical weight, oppressive, suffocating, ancient.
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