Silence.
Dylan's body lay motionless in the white ruins of the fractured realm. Shattered monoliths floated like bleeding constellations overhead. Time pulsed irregularly around him, folding and unfolding, struggling to reconcile his presence with the devastation.
He should've been dead.
Every breath came like glass through his ribs. His skin was split, peeled back from battle-born wounds. Bones cracked with every heartbeat. His vision was blackened at the edges, but one word repeated through his broken consciousness:
"Move."
Lightning arced overhead. He flinched.
A memory.
Flesh slamming against the ground. The sound of his own voice breaking. Zephyr's claws shredding his defenses. Mocking him. Tearing him down.
"You never had a chance…"
But Dylan was still here.
And pain was no longer the enemy.
It was fuel.
His fingers twitched.
The light inside him flickered, sputtering like a dying star—until a pressure deeper than spirit, deeper than memory, surged upward from the pit of his chest.
Spiritual pressure.
A presence beyond just mana, beyond glyphs or echoes.
It was will.
It slammed outward from his core, rippling the void around him. Fractured stone cracked. The weight of the realm bent toward him. The bleeding sky twisted.
His wounds didn't heal.
But his soul ignited.
He stood.
Slowly. Uneven. Blood dripping from his chin. But his eyes had changed. They no longer flickered like broken mirrors. They burned with clarity.
He was going to end this.
Zephyr loomed high above, suspended in sky-ripped entropy, his alien form curled like a raptor. His wings stretched across the horizon. His gaze pierced dimensions.
He saw Dylan rise.
And he smiled.
Dylan didn't give him time.
His foot cracked the ground—and the world ripped.
For a moment—a split-second sliver of perfect movement—Dylan's body surged with everything it had. Every hour he spent training, running through broken timelines, forcing his flesh to outrun collapsing reality, paid off.
His form blurred.
He broke sound. Broke light.
He moved faster than his own shadow.
To the eye, it was teleportation.
To Dylan—it was freedom.
His blade flashed toward Zephyr's exposed chest.
Zephyr didn't flinch.
He rotated slightly—an angle Dylan couldn't even comprehend—and caught the blade with two fingers.
"You really thought I wouldn't see that coming?"
His voice was everywhere.
Before Dylan could react, Zephyr rotated, grabbing Dylan's wrist and snapping it backward with a wet, violent twist. Dylan howled—but the scream was silenced as a backhand struck him with force enough to flatten a mountain.
He hit the ground. Again.
Blood flew in an arc. Ribs cracked open. His light-speed moment was gone.
And Zephyr wasn't done.
Zephyr descended like a judge.
He landed with such force the ground inverted briefly.
Then came the pain.
He grabbed Dylan by the neck, lifting him up effortlessly. Squeezing. Not enough to kill—just enough to choke the spirit out of him.
"You know, I admired you once," Zephyr said. "The child who shouldn't have existed. The final echo. But you're not a savior."
He drove his fist into Dylan's gut.
"You're an accident."
Another punch—this time to the chest. Something broke. Dylan couldn't tell if it was a bone or a memory.
"All that power. All that light. But you never learned what it meant to lose everything."
He slashed Dylan across the face, leaving a burning gash down his cheek.
"I did."
Zephyr hurled him across the void. Dylan smashed into a floating obelisk. It shattered, crumbling into a thousand screaming shards of memory.
Dylan lay on the edge of consciousness, barely holding on. Everything in him burned—his bones, his breath, his soul.
The void began to collapse.
Crimson cracks rippled outward across the white expanse. Zephyr's transformation had destabilized the dimension. There would be no third chance. No miracle recovery.
He was going to die here.
But as the blood poured from his chest, something whispered inside him.
A voice. Familiar and terrible.
"You killed me."
Dylan gasped, eyes wide.
"You fell into the black hole and tore my spirit apart. But you did not consume me."
The void above pulsed. A silver glyph appeared, etching itself into the air.
"You inherited me."
"You inherited the goddess."
Dylan's body spasmed. The glyph burned itself into his chest, pulsing like a second heartbeat.
And in a blink, he was elsewhere.
A spiraling ocean of stars stretched before him.
In the center stood a woman cloaked in divine flame—Aerith, the Goddess of Thresholds. Her eyes were wrath and sorrow. Her voice, a choir of storms.
"You took my life. But your spirit is open now. And the Gate no longer controls your fate."
Dylan dropped to one knee. "I didn't mean to—"
"Silence," she said. "You bled for this moment. I do not forgive you. But I see your soul. You want to stop him."
He nodded.
"Then take my curse."
"Take the final form I denied even myself."
Light exploded.
Dylan's body ignited in black flame.
His blood hissed against his skin as it evaporated. His bones reformed—not as human, but something more ancient, more divine in defiance.
Two massive wings tore from his back—one of molten shadow, the other of crackling red energy. Horns curled from his brow. His skin shifted to obsidian and crimson, streaked with glowing runes that pulsed with godfire.
And in his hand appeared a sword unlike any before.
A demonic blade, formed from the death of a goddess. Its edge bled red light and void matter.
His eyes were no longer silver.
They were abyssal.
Zephyr paused mid-air.
He felt it.
The pressure that slammed across the void like a collapsing star.
He turned as Dylan rose.
The world around them transformed. The last remnants of white were soaked in crimson red, as if the realm itself bled in response to Dylan's rebirth.
Zephyr narrowed his eyes.
"You… you killed a god."
Dylan's new voice rumbled like thunder:
"And I became one."
They hovered now, miles apart, but the gravity of their presence bent the realm.
Two titans in the ruins of fate.
Both no longer human.
Both the end result of impossible choices.
And both—ready to destroy.
The sky cracked.
The ground rippled.
Time stopped.
And they stared at one another.
TO BE CONTINUED...