The moment their hearts tore free, the Homans did not die immediately. They stood swaying in the half-light, their faces slack, mouths split wider than human anatomy should allow.
Blood poured down their chests, steaming in the cold air, bubbling as if alive. The hearts in their hands still beat, twitching in rhythm with something unseen above.
Then the spasms began. Their bodies convulsed, bones cracking like branches in a storm. Some fell to their knees, others bent backward until their spines snapped but none screamed. From their open mouths, black vapor poured, shaping itself into strings of glyphs that hovered like dark prayers before evaporating.
Rosario staggered back, trembling. One woman near him, her eyes were gone, only sockets left, laughing with a childlike giggle as her skin peeled away in ribbons. Her laughter turned to gurgling, and she lifted her heart higher as if offering it to a god only she could see.
Across the desert, the transformation spread like a plague of devotion. The Homans' blood soaked the ground, but it didn't sink fulky. It moved, crawling like living ink toward a central point in the page.
Their shadows detached, writhing along the sand, merging together into an enormous circular pattern that pulsed faintly under the eclipse's glow.
The hearts in their hands fused to their palms, beating harder, glowing faintly gold. They were no longer human but hollow vessels animated by the presence of the Sun Presence.
Grace fell to her knees in the distance, her breath caught somewhere between prayer and sob. Her sickness, her exhaustion, none of it mattered anymore. The sky itself seemed to bleed.
Rosario turned slowly, eyes wide with disbelief as thousands, hundreds of thousands. All marched across the dunes. No coordination, no emotion. Only purpose. Each step synchronized with the eclipse's pulse, every movement a heartbeat of cosmic insanity.
When the wind shifted, he finally heard it: a single sound that rose from every throat in unison.
the world itself was worshipping its destroyer.
Rosario understood, the reality itself is its slave.
The Sun Presence floated above Elior like the concept of divinity torn open and made existence.
Its body was no body, it was a vast geometrical paradox, a lattice of molten halos revolving around a burning core that pulsed like a second sun behind the eclipse.
Tendrils of liquid light hung in the air, dripping radiance that devoured shadow instead of casting it. The world around it bent, sky trembling as though reality itself was holding its breath.
Elior's mouth was dry. His hands trembled around the hilt of his blade. The sand beneath his boots was glowing faintly yellow, not from heat, but reverence. Every grain seemed to kneel.
Then, the voice reached uo. It didn't talk; it vibrated through existence.
"DO NOT FEAR, LITTLE LIGHT. I AM NOT WHAT YOU SEE. THIS IS BUT ONE PERCENT OF MY TRUE FORM."
Elior's knees almost gave out. One percent? His mind flashed back—legends, whispers of the Fragment, a story told by cults of madness about the last time the Sun Presence tried to descend. He remembered when Radahn somehow managed to confront and sent it back. That was not even a fraction?
"WHEN I WALKED YOUR WORLD BEFORE, I WAS BUT A FRACTION OF A FRACTION, A SHARD OF MY FRAGMENT. EVEN THEN, YOUR STARS WEPT. HOW WEAK YOU ARE TO LIVE."
Elior's heartbeat faltered. His face was pale, eyes frightened with the weight of that truth.
One percent of the Fragment had nearly ended the reality and this, standing before him, was the true body's one percent.
"I AM NOT HERE FOR YOU, CHILD OF DUST. I SHALL SEEK THE BASTARD'S VESSEL!"
Elior gritted his teeth. "If you want it, you'll have to go through me."
The Sun Presence's laughter was like sunlight rotting crops.
"YOU STAND AGAINST THE INFINITE AND THINK YOUR TINY SHADOW MATTERS? DO YOU EVER THINK OF PRAYER UNTIL YOU NEED SOMETHING? DOES NOT MATTER IF THOSE GODS LIVE OR NOT IF THERE IS NO PRAYER."
The world turned white. A pulse erupted from its form, flattening dunes miles away. Elior raised his arm, the sand around him coiling into a defensive sphere.
The impact shredded it instantly. His body was hurled through air, bones rattling, but he rolled and forced himself upright.
He countered with sand blades. Hundreds of them, storming forward like a desert storm. The Sun Presence raised a single radiant fang of it. The blades stopped midair, dissolved into golden dust.
"MATTER OBEYS MY PRESENCE."
Elior dashed forward, teleporting through rifts of bent light, striking its core. His sword melted before touching it. The Overseer didn't flinch, it only looked at him with infinite patience, like a teacher watching a child's tantrum.
"YOU WIELD THE TOOLS OF CREATION BUT KNOW NOTHING OF THEIR PURPOSE."
A tendril lashed out, slicing through space. Elior blocked with both hands, his flesh burnt, eyes blurring from pain. His Face flickered behind him, absorbing some impact but even that divine entity trembled.
He gasped, sweat and blood dripping down his chin. "You think this is over?"
"THIS IS NOT A BATTLE, THIS IS OBSERVATION."
Then came the second wave. The Sun Presence extended its hand and light rained downward like judgment, turning the desert into glass. Elior screamed, forced his energy outward, sand rose up like tidal walls. They shattered instantly.
When the light faded, Elior was kneeling with scorched skin, still alive by will alone.
The Sun Presence looked down, voice almost.... curious.
"I WILL LET YOU GO, IF YOU BECOME MY BLESSED ONES."
Elior chuckled vividly, "Yeah.... get used to it."
The sand beneath Elior's feet had long since turned to molten glass. His lungs burned with the smell of his own cooked blood. Every breath was an argument against death.
Above him—no, around him, the Sun Presence unfolded further. The air split open in silent convulsions, showing glimpses of an ocean of eyes and geometries too cruel for human comprehension.
Its vast body twisted in dimensions Elior couldn't see but could feel it clearly. An infinite weight pressed on his soul..
"I GAVE YOU A CHANCE TO WORSHIP, NOW YOU SHALL UNDERSTAND."
A wave of molten radiance slammed into him. The light didn't burn his flesh, it peeled his existence apart, layer by layer, stripping him to the raw essence of fear. Elior didn't scream but gritted; the sound warped into static as his voice disintegrated midair.
He tried to turn sand into spears again, but his power sputtered as his arms trembled like wet paper. The desert had turned into a lake of molten heat, each ripple reflecting his broken form.
The Sun Presence tilted its shape. An action that wasn't movement so much as redefinition. It no longer had a top or bottom, it simply was, everywhere.
"YOU ARE TOYING REALITY LIKE A CHILD SHAPES CLAY ARROGANLY, BUT YOU FORGOT WHO MADE THE CLAY."
Elior barely registered the impact before the tendril hit him. A massive arm of condensed light and shadow slammed into his chest, sending him crashing through fused dunes. His bones cracked like dried branches. He rolled, coughing out blackened blood that steamed on the glassy surface.
Still, he rose. The world spun, but he clenched his fists, drawing every grain of sand, every speck of dust, into an orbiting storm. The desert screamed as the storm built.
He launched himself upward, blades of crystals sand roared toward the Overseer.
They hit and vanished. Just gone, erased, like they had never existed. The void between The Sun Presence and reality swallowed the attack whole.
"YOUR LAWS DO NOT BIND ME."
The voice alone sent vibrations through Elior's skull; his vision blurred with fractal colors. His thoughts began to fragment.
He felt memories being plucked away, stolen like leaves off a dying branch.
He tried to shape his sand, bend space, rift time, fold light. Nothing happened. His abilities sputtered, recoiling from the Overseer's sheer gravity.
Then came another blow, massive, careless, divine. It didn't hit his body; it hit his soul.
He convulsed. His eyes rolled back as his skin peeled in layers of radiant ash. His bones glowed through torn flesh. The sand screamed with him, echoing his agony.
"YOU WERE NEVER MEANT TO STAND." YOU WERE MEANT TO KNEEL."
The voice wasn't loud, it was intimate. It spoke from inside his veins, his blood vibrating with every syllable. Elior felt small, insignificant, reduced to dust in an ocean of meaning.
But even as he crawled helpless, he lifted his hand shaking. Barely attached to his will.
He whispered through blood, "I.... won't.... kneel."
The Sun Presence paused, the faintest flicker rippling through its monstrous shape.
Then it laughed.
"THEN I WILL BREAK YOU WHILE STANDING."
The next moment was pure annihilation.
A pillar of inverted light erupted, swallowing Elior whole.
When it faded, only a single silhouette remained in the molten desert.
Still standing, swaying, pseudo-dead, staring at the god that refused to let him exist.