The lance of divine light crashed into the balcony like a meteor slamming into the earth. Stone didn't just crack under the impact. It exploded outward in chunks, the entire structure vaporising on impact.
Fire swallowed everything in an instant. The shockwave tore outward in all directions, punching through windows across the palace, sending statues toppling from their pedestals, carving a deep crater into the courtyard far below.
When the blinding light finally died down, there was nothing left where Lucius had been standing, not even a rubble. Just blackened stone and drifting ash.
Aurelius hung suspended in the air above the destruction, his small chest heaving with ragged breaths, tears still running freely down his cheeks.
Golden energy churned around his tiny body, wild, unstable, surging and stuttering as it cycled between two things that didn't belong together: divine wrath and the raw grief of a child.
"I didn't want to," he breathed into the empty air. "I didn't want to kill anyone else…"
Then, slowly, he heard footsteps behind him.
Aurelius spun around, and Lucius stood on the opposite balcony, forty meters away. Alive and completely whole. As Aurelius watched, the damage was reversing itself in real time, wounds sealing shut, torn flesh weaving back together like thread pulled through fabric.
Broken ribs realigned with dull, grinding clicks before going silent. Burns faded from red to pink to nothing. The bleeding simply stopped, as if his body had forgotten it was ever injured.
The god-child's golden eyes went wide. "How…?"
~~~~~~~
~Moments Earlier~
The lance came down like divine judgement made physical. Lucius lay shattered on the balcony, his body refusing to respond to a single command, watching death descend toward him with serene, indifferent momentum.
Then….
[DING!]
[Combat Achievement: First Strike Against Divine Target]
[+10 MP gained]
[You grazed the surface of a god's skin]
The notification blazed across his vision in bright, impossible letters. Ten experience points, a trivial number, but it was exactly enough.
Lucius's hand flew to the system interface before his mind had fully processed what he was doing, fingers moving on pure instinct and muscle memory doing the work his conscious thoughts couldn't keep up with.
[SHOP — PURCHASE CONFIRMED]
[Moderate Healing Potion — 40 MP]
[Item received!]
The glass vial materialised directly in his bloodied palm. He yanked the cork out with his teeth and drank every single drop in a single desperate swallow.
The world turned white as the divine lance made contact.
But Lucius was already gone. The healing potion tore through his body system like a river breaking through a dam, bones grinding and snapping back into alignment, internal bleeding sealing itself from the inside out, and flesh rebuilding layer by layer.
Raw strength flooded into him from nowhere, filling every hollow space the injuries had carved out.
[HP: 12 → 112]
[Status Effects Cleared: Broken Ribs, Internal Bleeding, Divine Burn]
He flash-stepped, a movement technique he stripped from a blessed scout during a prior fight, now burning through his legs like compressed lightning, and vanished from the balcony in a single blur of motion, half a heartbeat before the explosion consumed every stone he had been lying on.
~~Back to the present~~
Aurelius stared across the gap between them, shock and confusion wrestling openly on his small face. "You….you survived."
Lucius rolled his shoulders slowly, methodically testing each part of his restored body. The pain was completely gone, and the bone deep exhaustion had lifted. He felt good, more than good actually, he felt dangerously good!.
A short, almost involuntary laugh escaped him despite everything. "Thought that one had me for sure. Guess I'm a bit harder to kill than I look."
Something shifted in Aurelius's expression. Then confusion drained away, replaced by something colder and more resolute. His golden eyes ignited once more, a cold smile streaking across his face "I guess so."
The god-child raised both hands.
Lucius grinned at him. "Bring it."
They moved at the same moment.
Aurelius launched himself forward, his small body trailing a comet-tail of golden light. His fist, barely larger than Lucius's palm, punched out with force that had nothing to do with its size
Lucius twisted aside. The strike missed his face by centimetres and hit the wall behind him instead, punching a crater straight through the stone like it was packed dirt. He came back immediately with Smite, holy energy blazing white hot from his open hand.
Aurelius threw up a barrier of solar flames to meet it. The two powers hit each other head on, and the collision detonated like a thunderclap, the shockwave rolling outward hard enough to rattle the entire palace to its foundations.
They separated, both flash stepping to new ground almost simultaneously.
Lucius touched down on a rooftop. Aurelius levelled out above the courtyard, hovering in open air. Fifty meters of empty space and rising smoke lay between them.
The god-child thrust both palms forward. "Solar judgment!"
A beam erupted from his hands, three meters across, white at its core, so bright it burned afterimage into the air around it, hot enough to turn stone to slag on contact. It came fast, faster than he expected.
Lucius threw himself sideways. The beam carved straight through the palace roof as if the building were made of paper, slicing a burning trench across three structures before finally bleeding out and dissipating in the distance.
'Holy..!!'
[Survival Instinct (Passive) — Warning!]
[Environmental Destruction Level: CATASTROPHIC]
Far below, the palace guards scattered in every direction, shouting. Civilians who'd already been fleeing the chaos of the festival ran harder, no longer sure what they were running from. Whatever this was, it had left the festival far behind.
Lucius dropped to the surface of the streets, both hands igniting as he called up fire manipulation. He sent a concentrated torrent of flame straight at Aurelius. Of course, it was nowhere close to the solar level intensity that radiated from Aurelius, but that wasn't the point. The point was to make the boy move, disrupt his positioning, keep him from planting his feet.
It worked. Aurelius broke his stance and drifted sideways, floating higher to create vertical distance. Up close, his expression was tight with concentration, but beneath that, something else kept breaking through.
Flickers of something old behind his eyes, images surfacing and vanishing before he could hold them.
"Stop running!" The god-child shouted downward. His voice cracked mid sentence, divine authority seeping through his plain childish frustration, neither one fully winning.
He lifted both hands above his head.
The air changed around him. Hundreds of golden symbols materialised around Aurelius, expanding outward in every direction and locking themselves into overlapping geometric patterns, divine script that pulsed with a slow, terrible rhythm, each symbol feeding into the next like links in a chain being pulled taut.
"Radiant Reckoning!"
The sky went ablaze.
Pillars of solar flames came down across the entire district, not one, not a dozen either, but scores of them!. Each impact carrying enough force to flatten a building to rubbles.
Stone shattered into powder on contact, and the wood ceased to east. The eastern market district began to collapse inward on itself, structure after structure folding under impacts that didn't stop coming.
Lucius ran flat-out flash stepping between falling pillars in a continuous chain of short, frantic teleports. One struck close enough that the shockwave picked him up off his feet entirely and threw him sideways through the air.
[HP: -14]
He punched through the wall of a shop and skidded across the interior floor, already pushing himself upright before he had fully stopped moving. The ceiling began to come down around him in rapid crashes.
'He's no longer pulling punches. These are city scale attacks! If this keeps going, it will be terrible.'
Another pillar hit, and the entire building gave away from the impact.
Lucius burst through the collapsing exterior wall in a shower of rubble and immediately activated absorption, pressing outward against the residual solar energy still radiating from the impact zone. His skin lit up faintly as he drew the divine flames inward, converting them before they could do further damage.
[Absorption Activated — Residual Divine Energy]
[HP Recovered: 98 → 105]
He looked up through the smoke and dust. Aurelius floated above it all, blazing and small, power radiating off him in visible waves. But something about his movements had gone entirely wrong.
They were jagged and inconsistent, the smooth certainty of divine power interrupted by moments where the boy's focus seemed to slip entirely, his eyes going distant and unfocused for fractions of a second
The memories. The divine consciousness was fracturing, pulled in two directions at once, the present fight and something buried deeper, images surfacing through whether Aurelius wanted them or not.
Lucius started moving upward, using windowsills and crumbling ledges and the surfaces of buildings as a vertical path. He closed the distance fast, his fist gathered enough energy as he moved, sanctified strike charging with each step.
Aurelius turned toward the sound, eyes widening.
A village, cracked earth. Wells dug down to bare stone and still empty. Skeletal figures lying in doorways, a woman hunched over a small bundle that wasn't moving anymore, both arms wrapped around it, refusing to let go.
The god-child froze for a full, involuntary half-second where he simply was not present.
Lucius's fist connected to his face. Divine energy met flesh, and the detonation hit like a contained explosion at point-blank range.
Aurelius shot backward like something fired from a cannon, a small golden streak punching through two buildings in rapid succession before slamming into the central plaza fountain. Water erupted in a column that dwarfed the fountain itself, then came crashing down.
The god-child rose from the wreckage slowly, moving more carefully now. Golden blood ran from the corner of his mouth — vivid, and luminous, nothing like anything that should come from a wound on a god. His small hands were shaking at his sides.
"I remember, I remember it all..!!"