The God's Hand Shattered
The fire in X's veins burned colder now. The deep X sigil in his eyes was no mere mark — it was a command, a pressure that bent the world itself. Wherever X looked, time hiccupped and air grew heavy; trees stopped their whispering, stones held their breath, and the wind folded as if afraid to move.
From the palace of Godhra, alarms screamed. The ruling god of this realm — Jainsa — arrived wrapped in centuries of pride and divine certainty. He stood like an unchallengeable law. But laws break when something beyond them arrives.
Jainsa moved to strike, to invoke cosmic decrees no mortal could touch. X reached out and took his hand.
That instant the universe snapped.
Flesh and grace heaved and ruptured — Jainsa's hand tore apart into twenty pieces, scattering like shattered relics. The god's roar became a broken chorus; his divine lines dimmed into ragged smoke. Jainsa stared in disbelief. He had never been touched by a being who could unmake him. He had never imagined touch could end him.
"You… how?" he gasped, voice cracking with a new, foreign pain. "I am a god. You cannot defeat me. You are an ant beneath the sky."
X didn't answer. The look in his eyes did the talking — a ledger of loss and a promise of erasure. He flung Jainsa aside, and the torn pieces of the god fell, some turning to stone, some to ash, fragments of a power that no longer held meaning.
Around them, the other gods watched, frozen. They understood in an instant what the Void had already taught X: this place — this black, breathing nothingness — was not for gods or men. The Void's air itself devoured divinity. Magic failed there, war craft failed there; knives, spells, and ancient honors were meaningless in its embrace.
X felt the pull of that darkness again — the Void's gravity tugging at the new god within him. He had tasted a truth no one else could: inside that void, monstrous things prowled — not "masters," but predators that bowed to nothing and consumed everything. Their presence warped reality; a god who entered was unmade by the air, the silence, the absence of rule.
Jainsa's remains lay scattered, and the court understood what X would become. He was no longer a child birthed by a Pill; he was a force forged in a place where even gods bled. He turned away from the ruins and walked toward the shadow-mouth of the Void, where the monsters hunched and the void-wind whispered of endings.
His voice, when it came, was steady and final: "You burned my home. You burned my mother and sister. I will return every debt in fire and silence. Every planet, every god, every memory — I will erase them."
The Void welcomed him back, and the monsters within stirred, as if tasting the future. X stepped deeper, and the air swallowed him like a vow.
(Next chapter coming soon.)