The moment Ares' Arcanum awakened, every god in Orario snapped their gazes toward the exact same direction.
Clouds overhead ripped apart. Gravity seemed to intensify tenfold; air felt more heavy, more sacred, more oppressive than it ever had. Tower of Babel in the distance started to shake with relentless tremors.
A Rakian soldier felt the sword in his grip tremble. He looked down and glanced around, a chill running down his spine. Every weapon surrounding him, whether in another soldier's hand or lying on the ground, whether a sword or a shield, or any other weapon, all of them were trembling on their own, their trembling increasing in intensity with each passing moment.
In Ryuu's arms, Goddess Astraea snapped her gaze back toward Ares. Her composure shattered, her eyes blazing with divine fury.
"How. Dare. You. Ares." Each syllable was forced from clenched teeth.
She thrust her arm out, her own Arcanum flaring to life with violent intensity.
Before she could unleash it, a singular sound overpowered everything else.
Clunk
A sonic boom unlike any other followed. The air itself was annihilated. Thousands of soldiers lost their footing; Ryuu's eyes had just begun to widen when Orario's massive city wall ahead of her shattered. Dust and debris rained down like a colossal curtain.
Someone had crashed into that wall before she could even react, obliterating it completely.
A moment later, a wet cough echoed from within.
Ryuu and Astraea felt their hearts drop into their stomachs. Then, heavy footsteps thudded from inside the obscuring dust.
Bell emerged with unsteady steps. His breastplate was shattered, his ribs exposed and visibly knitting themselves back together. With every step, an agonizing crack echoed from his undeniably broken spine. White-hot pain flared up his back, his body screaming in protest with every movement.
Yet, with every breath, he could also feel his spine mending, the shattered bones realigning into an even more complex structure.
Clunk
By his fifth step, his spine had fully straightened. He turned to Ryuu and Astraea, taking in their devastated expressions, and mouthed a single word.
Trust.
Bell tensed his legs. Every bone in his body locked into place, every muscle coiling against one another like a wound spring.
Clunk
Embers ignited beneath his skin, beneath his dermis, beneath his stretched muscles.
For a fleeting moment, the distinction between Bell and a living flame blurred.
BOOOOM!
A flaming trail tore through the earth for a kilometer straight, golden paths to victory raced right behind him, keeping pace. His surroundings blurred into a mere palette of smeared colors as he closed the distance to Ares.
Bell's abyssal black knuckles drove upward from below. Ares' fist was already howling down from above.
A fraction of a second before they collided, golden paths raced around Ares. Hundreds. Thousands.
They wound around him like an inescapable net, closing in as a revolving mesh of victory.
Ares glanced around.
"Interesting."
The god took a single step and vanished.
He can see them?
BOOM!
Before the realization could even settle, a fist was buried in his abdomen. Bell spat out a mouthful of blood and chunks of organs, launched backward. His back collided with hundreds of soldiers, crushing them into a bloody mist upon impact alone.
Clunk
A fraction of a second hadn't even passed before Bell materialized at Ares' side. His arm was cocked all the way back, golden paths superimposing over golden paths upon his fist. Hundreds of intersecting futures overlapped one another, forcibly twisting this moment into an inevitable victory.
Ares scoffed and raised a single finger into the path of that inevitable victory.
It stopped Bell's fist dead in its tracks.
He pushed forward, straining. Ares didn't even tremble.
"Victory, huh? The goddess of victory herself taught me a thing or two about it. How about this?" Ares made a pulling gesture with his free hand.
Bell watched with narrowed eyes as his golden paths ripped away from him, racing toward Ares' hand. They twisted and turned, reassembling into a blade forged entirely of his own futures.
Ares swung the golden blade. Bell tried to pivot away. He couldn't.
That sword reached him in an instant—faster than his mind could form a single thought. All Bell saw were countless visions of his own defeat gleaming along that golden edge as it tore into his chest.
It didn't damage him physically. Instead, his [Instinct] went dead. It was as if his connection to the skill had been cleanly severed. Golden paths vanished from his sight, as if the ability to perceive them had been erased entirely.
He didn't get a moment to breathe. Acting purely on reflex, Bell crossed his arms over his chest. Ares' armored boot collided with his guard. A sickening crack rang out as both his forearms shattered, his heels digging into the dirt as he skidded backward for hundreds of meters.
His shattered bones twisted back into place. Torn muscles mended at a terrifying rate, his bone marrow replenishing lost blood in seconds.
Bell looked ahead. Ares was gone.
"Boo."
BOOM!
Bell punched backward without looking. Ares caught the blow with two fingers. Bell violently twisted his body, deliberately breaking his own elbow to pivot, and pummeled his other fist toward Ares' face without a pause.
Ares moved laterally, yet his fist reached Bell first, burying itself in his chest.
A shockwave flattened the dust in their surroundings as Bell was sent flying. He flipped mid-air and landed on his heels, his back bare, his Falna visible to all of Orario behind him.
Crack.
His elbow snapped back into alignment with a ruthless brutality that bordered on unfeeling.
Somewhere beneath the pain, beneath the roar of blood in his ears, a voice surfaced. Not his own. A man's, filled with blind faith.
No! Argonaut is real!
Bell took a breath. Weapons of ember began to materialize in the sky behind him. Broadswords. Machetes. Javelins.
An army of flaming steel forged by his will alone.
"Oh?" Ares' eyebrow rose. He made a beckoning gesture with a single finger.
Countless weapons ripped up from the battlefield, some wrenched violently from their owners' grips. They flew up and lined up behind Ares like an army roaring for war.
The sky was cleaved in two.
On one side, an army of flames. On the other, an army of steel.
Below the flames stood a mortal. Below the steel stood a god.
Bell and Ares took a step forward simultaneously.
Weapons clashed upon weapons, cascading down like an avalanche of flaming steel. The dome of the sky shattered. The earth wailed without end.
And right in the center of that apocalyptic destruction, Bell met Ares.
So... this is a god.
...
..
.
***
[300 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[8 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Authors Thoughts]
Between immortality and mortality. Between limbo and nothingness. Between infinity and eternity.