The battlefield was a wasteland of shattered sky and fractured mountains. Smoke curled like serpents, and every echo of battle lingered as if reality itself feared to move.
Ben staggered backward, battered and bleeding. His armor glowed weakly, glyphs flickering in desperation. Neroth's obsidian claws struck again, tearing through stone, earth, and Ben's defenses.
"David… help…!" Ben screamed, his voice breaking as another blow slammed him into the jagged ground. Pain flared along his spine, and the Omnigene on his wrist struggled to compensate, sparks of magic leaping wildly.
"You cannot stop me!" Neroth roared, his laughter a thunderclap that cracked the air. "Even your god of speed cannot outrun eternity!"
Ben gritted his teeth, pushing through the agony. "I… I can't… hold him… much longer!"
Then the world itself shifted. A streak of silver light tore through the battlefield. Kinetic and chronal energy braided together like a living storm. Reality trembled as the air shimmered and the horizon bent.
David had returned.
From the center of the devastation, his body reformed, glowing brighter than a supernova. Armor shattered moments ago reconstituted in threads of pure time and energy, each plate humming with divine power. His eyes glowed with white-gold light, reflecting not just the present, but the flow of countless potential futures.
Neroth froze. For the first time, fear touched his obsidian heart.
"You… you should be dead," the God of Evil hissed.
"I was never gone," David replied, his voice low and resonant. The air vibrated with the promise of annihilation.
He moved.
Faster than thought, faster than light. His strikes tore through Neroth's obsidian flames before the God of Evil could even react. Mountains shattered, rivers of molten energy erupted from the ground, and the sky itself screamed in response to the collision of divine forces.
Neroth tried to counter, swinging his massive void-blade, summoning armies from shadows, twisting reality around him. But David was everywhere and nowhere at once — phasing through time, bending causality, rewriting the battlefield with every step.
Ben, still wounded, watched in awe. The Omnigene pulsed steadily now, syncing with the storm of energy that was David.
The final strike came in a pulse that shook the cosmos. David's hands crackled with condensed chronal energy as he struck Neroth's core, erasing the God of Evil completely. Mountains collapsed, skies tore apart, and black ichor dissolved into nothingness. Neroth's laughter was silenced forever.
Victory was absolute.
But then… David felt it: a weight pressing down from the far edges of the multiverse. A pulse of cosmic law — the curse.
The power he had just unlocked was immense, limitless… but in Dimension X, his home dimension, using it fully would collapse the world itself. The curse did not restrain him here, in Dimension Prime, the realm of gods. But the warning was clear: his new powers were a weapon he could not freely wield on his own world.
David's aura dimmed slightly as he absorbed the truth. Even in victory, the stakes had changed.
He looked at Ben, whose expression was a mix of awe, relief, and lingering fear.
"You held longer than I thought possible," David said quietly. "Now… we prepare for what comes next."
Somewhere beyond the horizon, echoes of existence trembled. Somewhere, hidden in the void, the Cosmic Hierarchy took notice. David was no longer just a god of speed — he was an Awakened God, and his return to Dimension X would reshape reality itself.
And so, the battlefield lay silent, a monument to power, victory, and the promise of storms yet to come.