(Marvel, DC, images, manhuas, and every anime that will be mentioned and used in this story are not mine. They all belong to their respective owners. The main character "Karito/Adriel Josue Valdez" and the story are mine)
The sky screamed.
Rifts yawned wide above the Rodnick Estate, fracturing the clouds like shattered glass. Through them poured the enemy—not an army, but an infestation. Shadow-born creatures twisted into parodies of flesh and armor, remnants of corrupted realms and dead gods.
Adriel didn't wait for a strategy.
He hit the earth like judgment itself, the ground shattering beneath his boots. The symbiote armor pulsed with rage, gleaming black, gold, and red, alive with writhing embers of bio-energy. The mask split slightly across the jaw, vents opening to release a sound that was half-exhale, half-growl.
And then he moved.
Fast. Too fast.
A blur of crimson across the battlefield.
His reflexes, pushed beyond mortal comprehension, bent time itself. His body weaved between claws and teeth and steel. Every creature that swung at him missed. Every monster that roared died mid-breath.
Adriel spun low, claws slicing out. Retractable stingers gleamed in the light before tearing through two armored torsos like wet paper. A third creature leapt overhead—he twisted mid-air, kicked off its spine, and sent it crashing into its kin like a flaming comet.
The air was thick with ash.
And he wasn't done.
One swipe of his hand ignited a Venom Thread, electrocharged and razor-taut. He whipped it like a chain, wrapping it around a darkling's neck, pulling it toward him—and punched. Venom Punch detonated into its skull with enough force to crater the dirt.
He didn't stop moving.
Didn't stop killing.
But inside—
He felt it. The parasite. Slowing him.
The Void corruption sapped his strength—not enough to cripple him, but enough to make each movement fractionally less perfect. And for Adriel, who lived on the edge of precognition and precision, those fractions mattered.
His body screamed at him with every impact. Not pain.
Memory of a strength he no longer had.
Still, he fought. Not like a god. Like something older.
Like a principle.
He ripped a blade from a fallen soldier's grasp and hurled it like a missile. It spun through three enemies before slamming into the far wall, impaling the fourth.
More came.
Good.
The magnetic field around him flared. He raised his arm—and the iron-laced blood from the dead snapped upward like a whip. He pulled every dropped weapon into orbit, floating behind him like a spinning halo of death.
Then—
He pushed.
The field exploded outward. Blades. Axes. Spears. All rocketed into the approaching swarm.
Metal through bone. Screams. Silence.
He surged forward again, grabbing a massive beast by the neck. Its flesh writhed, whispering names it shouldn't know.
He burned them from it with a Mark of Kaine.
The searing handprint glowed white-hot against its skull—and then its body collapsed in on itself.
And still—they came.
From the rift above, more and more spilled forth.
Too many.
And yet, they didn't overrun the estate.
Because Adriel was the wall.
He threw himself into the next cluster, spinning mid-air. Energy threads lashed out like whips, entangling three, four, five bodies in electrified snares. His Venom Beam fired from his palm, blasting apart a creature that tried to flank him.
And still he felt the parasite twitch.
Feeding on his focus.
Pushing exhaustion into the cracks of his mind.
But he pushed back harder.
His spider-sense rang in his skull—danger approaching fast. He didn't even blink. He dropped into a crouch, planted one hand into the dirt—and let Lateral Repulsion kick off.
Boom.
He launched thirty feet into the air, corkscrewing as he did—and saw the battlefield from above.
The estate burned at its edges.
Soldiers fought in clusters, barely holding.
The rift pulsed wider.
But Adriel didn't look at the rift.
He looked past it. At something still crawling through.
He landed hard.
And for the first time since he'd transformed—
He exhaled. And muttered.
"This isn't the assault."
This was the herald. A trial run.
He could hear Sentry laughing.
Somewhere across the rift.
Somewhere deeper.
"You bastard," Adriel snarled.
A beast roared behind him—he spun and drove his stingers through its eyes without even glancing.
He had to push further.
He had to end this before the real army arrived.
But first—
He needed to keep his people alive.
And that meant more death.
More destruction. More of him.
The night had not yet fallen, but the battlefield was already drowning in shadow.
Adriel moved like a living storm—half lightning, half gravity. Crimson-gold energy flared at his joints as the symbiote molded tighter around him, the suit responding to thought as much as instinct.
Every movement was calculated, his strategy changed to preserve. Every strike was meant to buy time. Every step designed to position his soldiers for one more breath.
They weren't supposed to face this.
At least not yet.
And yet they stood. Zhcted's finest. Hardened veterans and raw recruits alike, shoulder to shoulder, forming ragged lines at the estate's fractured edge.
And they were being torn apart.
Because the enemy wasn't meant to be fought with normal swords.
Adriel landed hard beside the western flank just as a soldier was flung through the air, screaming. His spider-sense had buzzed a second too early, but his reflexes still caught the man mid-flight. A web snapped out, reeling the body back toward safety—seconds before a beast lunged where he would've landed.
The creature hit the ground—and never got back up. Adriel's stinger punched through its skull like a bolt of divine fury.
"Eyes forward! Shields up!" he barked, voice cutting through the chaos. "You hold until I say otherwise! Don't break ranks! I don't care if you're bleeding—get back in the line!"
A chorus of affirmatives rang out.
But their formation was buckling.
He could see it. Not yet a collapse—but close. The corruption warped terrain under their feet. The temperature had dropped, and the air was thicker now—like breathing through smoke and ink.
He activated his barrier field, projecting a half-dome of glowing energy around the squad nearest him. Arrows clattered against it, fired by humanoid shadows with jagged limbs and hollow mouths. He counted seven of them.
He took five steps.
And eliminated all seven.
He didn't use brute force—he used magnetism, yanking the iron cores of their own weapons through their chests. Before the bodies hit the ground, he was already weaving through another battalion, re-coordinating their position, adjusting their spacing.
"Commander Rauth!" he shouted across the din. "Pull your second squad to the ridge! Reinforce with spear units from Echelon Three! Clear the southern line!"
The commander blinked—then obeyed, shouting orders with renewed speed.
Adriel knew where to move them, how to angle them, how to keep them from being out-positioned. And when to sacrifice ground to buy seconds.
That's what he needed now.
Seconds.
A full unit was retreating from the southeast breach. He vaulted across the field with a Lateral Repulsion burst, landing directly between the soldiers and their pursuers.
Twelve Darkspawn. Spear-class. Fast and coordinated.
No time to draw their attention.
Instead—
Decoy Shift.
He blurred forward so quickly he left an afterimage—one the creatures fell upon like hungry hounds. By the time they realized they were attacking smoke, he was behind them.
His claws came down.
Three fell.
Two more stunned by Venom Beam. The last seven turned to him with shrieks.
He didn't hesitate.
"Blessing Field—Zone Nine!"
His voice activated the latent enchantments he'd embedded in the terrain earlier.
Every soldier's blade within thirty meters flared white-hot with divine charge.
And the soldiers charged.
This time?
They weren't overwhelmed.
They cut through.
Adriel turned, his symbiote already repairing damage along his left side where acidic claws had grazed him. Luckily, it did not pierce his suit.
He was slowing down.
The Void Parasite was leeching.
He could feel it—static along the edges of his senses. Thoughts heavier than they should be. Instinct dragging by milliseconds.
Too much of that, and he'd start making mistakes.
And he couldn't afford one.
His foot hit the next ridge. He skidded to a halt, scanning the field again. The battlefield's tempo was holding—but just barely.
The Darks shouldn't still be up.
Their presence should've unraveled minutes ago under this level of resistance. But they persisted. Cohesive. Synchronized.
Which meant—
"...They're being fed," Adriel muttered under his breath.
A hand raised. He felt the threats that connect this fictional story. He stretched his perception.
There. In the cracks of space—a pulse. Faint. Just outside the estate's core boundary.
Something holding the Darks in place. Sustaining them.
"Not here..." he whispered. "But close."
A Pure Dark.
Not fully manifested.
But present enough to tether the army to this world.
His fists clenched.
That was his real target.
But first—
"Hold the line!" he shouted again, voice ringing out across the chaos. "You hold, and I'll find the one keeping this hell alive!"
They shouted back with conviction.
He leapt forward again, racing toward the source to cut the thread.
Rodnick Estate – Guest Room
Tigre POV
A Few Minutes Earlier...
My skin still hadn't stopped crawling.
Even after the scream died in my throat—even after the words left my mouth—I felt wrong. Not just shaken. Not just scared.
Like I'd been peeled back. Exposed.
I don't know why I said it. It wasn't mine. It wasn't even a voice in my head. It was a truth that had clawed its way through the dream, through me, and demanded to be spoken aloud.
And when Adriel heard it...
It was like the air changed shape.
The way he looked at me—like he wasn't seeing me, but the end of something. Or maybe the beginning of something worse.
That was the first time I saw him afraid.
Not worried. Not calculating. Afraid.
Then came the screams.
Outside the estate.
Far away—but not far enough.
Mila moved first, storming to the room. Elen followed. I barely managed to sit up. My limbs were heavy. My breath was shallow. It felt like something had gripped my heart and squeezed.
Then Adriel's voice again—quiet this time.
"...No."
I don't even remember seeing him move. One second he was beside me, the next—symbiote. Armor. Mask.
Everything I didn't understand about him finally made sense in the worst possible way.
He leapt out the window without hesitation. Not even a look back.
And for one second, I thought: We're safe now.
But I was wrong.
Because he left us behind.
Because the moment he vanished—
The house shuddered.
It wasn't an earthquake but an impact.
Something landed.
No—someone.
Lim and Sofya burst through the hallway seconds later, both already drawing weapons. Lim's expression tightened the moment she saw me.
"You okay?"
"No," I croaked.
Sofya glanced out the window next. "They're flanking the estate."
"Adriel's engaging," Mila added. "He didn't say anything. Just... dove."
Lim cursed under her breath. "Of course he did."
Then another sound. Not the screams. Something closer... Inside.
My blood froze.
"What is that?" I whispered.
It was a tapping. No—scraping. Wood against steel. Floorboards creaking where they shouldn't have been.
Lim took the lead. Sword drawn. Every muscle in her body tensed.
The rest of us followed behind her down the hall.
And then—
It stepped into view.
A thing made of burnt armor and meat. Its body pulsed with veins of violet light. Its limbs bent wrong. And its head—
It didn't have one.
Just a jagged, circular maw where a face should be. Dozens of narrow, vertical slits opened and closed like breathing.
It hadn't noticed us yet.
Or maybe it had—and didn't care.
I couldn't breathe. I couldn't think. Every instinct screamed to run, but I knew what would happen if we did.
It moved fast. Not fast for its size—just fast.
Like space bent around its legs.
Lim struck first. A precise blow aimed for the core.
Her sword passed through it—
And did nothing.
Like slicing mist.
Then it reformed and swatted her into the wall.
"LIM!" Elen lunged, catching her before she hit the ground. She was alive, with a fractured cheek.
Sofya stepped up next, launching a glyph-powered blast from her palm.
The creature absorbed it.
Mila and Elen moved together, not even needing to speak.
But I wasn't moving.
I couldn't.
It turned toward me.
That hollow face split open wider.
And I swear—
I heard it laugh. Like paper tearing.
Then it moved—
A blur. Straight for me.
Mila intercepted it mid-charge, her axe meeting its claws. Sparks lit the air. The floor cracked under the weight of their collision.
"MOVE, TIGRE!" she screamed.
I stumbled back. My legs weren't working right. My heart was screaming, but my body didn't listen.
Elen grabbed my shoulder and yanked me out of the way just before a black claw split the air where my throat had been.
We crashed into a side room.
Barricaded the door.
But we could still feel it out there. Hunting.
And the worst part?
That wasn't even the strongest one. That was a scout.
I looked around.
Mila was bleeding from her temple. Lim was out cold. Elen's hand was trembling as she held her sword—whether from adrenaline or fear, I couldn't tell.
And me?
I wasn't shaking anymore.
I was angry.
Adriel left us behind.
But I'm the one who let it happen.
And somehow...Somehow, I knew this was only the beginning.
The door exploded inward like it was made of paper.
Wood splinters whipped past my face as the wall cracked behind us, and the Dark Scout stepped through—slowly, deliberately, like it knew no one inside this room could stop it.
Its skin rippled like oil over steel. The light in the room dimmed around it.
I grabbed my bow.
My hands were still shaking.
Behind me, Mila was yelling. Elen was helping Lim up, eyes locked on the monster. Sofya tried another glyph—but the energy fizzled the moment it touched the Dark's skin. Useless.
"Get out of here," I said.
Mila turned. "You're joking—"
"Go!"
There wasn't time to argue.
I leapt out of the broken doorway, drawing an arrow from the quiver slung on my back. The Dark's faceless maw followed me with that horrible twitching pulse—like it didn't need eyes to know where I was.
I landed in the hallway and fired.
The arrow sparked on impact—then dissolved into black mist.
No effect.
I gritted my teeth. "Okay. So we need to get creative."
It lunged.
I barely rolled to the side in time—my shoulder slammed into the wall with a crack, and something popped. Pain flared. I screamed.
It swiped again—jagged claws tearing gouges in the wood. I threw myself back, not aiming, just moving.
I needed distance. Time. Space to breathe.
I fired again.
Missed.
Another arrow. Clipped its leg.
It flinched—but didn't bleed. It didn't even react the way a normal body would.
But it noticed.
Its steps slowed.
The air thickened again.
"You felt that one," I muttered.
It turned toward me with renewed attention. The slits in its head widened.
Right.
I wasn't supposed to hurt it.
But I just had.
Perhaps it's because I'm the Anchor.
And it doesn't matter how that works.
What matters is I just became its only threat.
It charged again.
I rolled, pulled my knife mid-dive—the one Adriel made me carry, made me train with, made me swear I'd use if I had to.
The blade sang as it scraped across the Dark's leg.
It stumbled—momentum skidding it past me—and when it stopped, it did so violently, cracking the stone with its claws as it turned.
Another arrow at point-blank. Straight to its chest. And it screamed.
A horrible, warped reverse of a sound—like it was inhaling the scream instead of releasing it.
I took the hit anyway. Flew back into the wall. My ribs lit up like fire.
I coughed. Something inside shifted wrong.
But it didn't matter. I stood up again. And I only had one arrow left.
It surged forward— I fired.
It broke the shot mid-air with a claw.
I drew the knife again. No clever strategy left.
Just one shot.
I feinted left. It lunged. And that was my opening.
I ducked and spun.
Slammed the knife into its side with both hands, screaming as I pushed every ounce of weight into the blow.
The blade pulsed.
The edge lit—briefly—with the same kind of gold shimmer Adriel's weapons used.
A reaction. I could kill it.
It screamed again—and this time, the sound came from its core.
It tried to pull back, but I didn't let go.
It lifted an arm—ready to skewer me clean through—
And then Sofya's voice rang out.
"Duck!"
I dropped.
A bolt of freezing lightning ripped through the hallway, a glyph-enhanced blast aimed not at the monster, but the wall behind it.
The impact cracked the foundation—stones rained down from above, crushing the creature beneath them in a roar of dust and splinters.
Silence followed.
I coughed. Coughed again.
Staggered back to my feet.
The hallway was a mess. Cracked stone, scorched wood, broken ceiling—and a twitching Dark corpse under the rubble, slowly dissolving into smoke.
I looked at my knife.
Still warm and glowing.
Elen ran over, checking my side. Mila followed. Sofya leaned against the ruined wall, exhausted.
"You hurt?" Elen asked, her hands trembling against my ribs.
"Yeah," I managed. "But it's dead."
She blinked.
"You killed it?"
I nodded, barely.
Mila raised an eyebrow. "How?"
I looked at the knife.
Then at the fading smoke.
"I didn't miss," I said.
The moment the smoke cleared, I knew we couldn't stay.
Sofya was gasping, braced against the wall, her magic clearly strained. Lim woke up dazed, but quickly came to reason. Elen was still checking me like I was going to collapse any second—and honestly, she might not be wrong.
But it was the sound that made the decision for us.
A hum.
Low. Wrong. Like a string on a broken instrument vibrating inside my skull.
Elen heard it too. Her head snapped toward the west wing.
Mila whispered, "...More of them."
"Three," Sofya said quickly, eyes shut. "Maybe four. Coming fast."
Lim looked toward the hallway, sword already drawn.
"We're not fighting those," I said. "Not again."
No one argued.
We moved fast.
I grabbed my bow—my knife still wet with whatever passed for blood in those things—and followed Elen as she pushed open a servant's passage behind the hearth. Narrow stairs led downward, and I didn't question it.
Mila moved like a ghost ahead of us, blade ready, checking corners.
Lim guarded the rear.
We passed through cellars, storage rooms, another collapsed wing that smelled like mold and smoke. I thought we were clear until—
Another scream, it wasn't human. And it was close.
We reached a shattered corridor at the far edge of the estate. One of the walls had crumbled from the earlier invasion—exposing a steep slope that led down into the forest behind the manor.
Freedom or a trap.
"Go," Elen ordered.
Lim pushed Sofya forward. Mila was already sliding down the incline.
I hesitated at the edge and looked back.
The estate still burned behind us. The sky above it was bruised with swirling shadows.
Adriel's out there, I thought.
All Alone.
Holding all of that back.
And he left us here, because he had to.
"Come on!" Elen shouted.
I jumped.
Hit the slope hard. Rolled twice. Kept my grip on the bow by pure instinct.
When I landed, Elen was right behind me.
We regrouped at the tree line—breathing hard, watching the estate from behind the cover of thick roots and twisted trunks.
The hum faded.
For now.
I leaned against the bark, hand still trembling.
"We need to move," Lim said. "Head east. Find horses. Get to the fallback post."
Elen nodded, but didn't take her eyes off the distant tower.
Neither did I.
Because whatever was coming next... Adriel was going to face it alone.
Please... be okay, Adriel.
Rodnick Estate – North Battlefield Perimeter
Adriel POV
The battlefield was chaos. Cracked earth churned beneath boots and blood, fires scattered like fallen stars through the treeline. Screams blended with warhorns, the sound of steel meeting something not-quite-flesh. Not-quite real.
But I couldn't afford to let it collapse.
"Barrier: Cast."
A dome of crimson-gold flared around a unit of Zhcted soldiers just as a warped tendril shot through the smoke toward them. The impact rang like a church bell—blunted, denied.
I surged through the haze, motion blurring. Steel flashed. A curved blade met me mid-air, but I twisted, magnetism pulling it off-course, my stinger slicing its wielder's arm clean off. The Dark shrieked—then imploded in a burst of black static, dissolving into motes of corrupted code.
Another tried to flank. Didn't get far.
I hurled a soldier out of its path with one hand, web-thread latching him to a safe ledge, then launched myself forward, venom punch sparking with a thunderclap across the abomination's chest.
Its body crumpled into pieces of mangled physics.
"Fall back to Formation Theta!" I barked over comms. "Prioritize civilian evac zones. Don't break rank unless I signal."
I could hear them now—my troops, battered but moving.
The barriers I placed earlier still held, but they were cracking. And the pulse—that sickening, constant hum of Darks' existence—was getting louder.
They were here.
The reason the others hadn't already collapsed. Someone strong enough to anchor the breach without help. That meant one thing.
The Pure Dark, I could feel him now.
Like a bleeding star hidden behind the mountain fog. A gravity that bent emotion and will. Unlike Sentry—who used decay like a paintbrush—this one carried purpose. It was calm, centered and focused.
It was a storm in meditation.
And it was close.
I leapt over a collapsing outpost tower, web-lines yanking two wounded scouts out of the falling rubble behind me. A barrier bloomed mid-air, shielding their descent. Another soldier screamed below—pierced through the thigh by a twisted spear—and I landed beside him.
"You're not dying today."
My hand flashed. Venom surged through the corrupted metal, overloading it. It exploded. I caught the soldier as he fell, and launched him back toward the med-surge field like a ragdoll made of feathers.
My breath came short. The Void Parasite in my ribs twisted.
Still holding me back.
A ripple in the shadows above me snapped my gaze up.
Sky fissures—dozens of them—like fractures across a mirror. But one stayed still, anchored.
And at the center of it—barely visible—a figure. Cloaked in gray. Standing. Watching.
Tall. Calm. One eye dimmed with age. The other glowing like a sun buried in ash.
He wasn't attacking. Not yet.
He was waiting.
A Pure Dark with patience.
"Daewi Han," I whispered.
And he heard me.
Even from miles away.
His head tilted slightly.
Then the gravity changed on a literal sense.
All around me, the trees bent.
Soldiers stumbled.
The battlefield warped.
Well, fuck. Was my most intelligent response to seeing him in my current weakened state.
I didn't even get a second thought out before the pressure spiked.
The ground cracked. Not from a stomp. Just from the weight of his presence—Daewi had begun adjusting the gravitational constant like he was adjusting the volume on a song.
Soldiers cried out. Metal creaked. A few levitating Darks were slammed into the dirt as Daewi focused the distortion only where he wanted.
Precision. Control. Dominance.
And me? I was choking on air that suddenly had mass.
I fought to stabilize myself midair, magnetizing against the molecules themselves. The symbiote responded sluggishly—slower than it should have. The Void parasite inside me pulsed, feeding off the dimensional bleed like it was wine.
"Stay upright, dammit..."
I didn't land. I descended with intent—adjusting my own polarity to cancel the downward crush enough to move.
Daewi didn't follow. He waited.
A man who had already won too many times to be in a rush.
I landed in the broken courtyard of a once-proud watchtower. The stones crumbled under the redirected force of gravity like brittle teeth.
And then—he descended too.
Effortlessly.
Step by step, as if the world lowered him like a throne descending from the sky.
Daewi Han. The Sage of the East. The King's Successor.
The man who watched his world burn and decided to become the match. At least, that's what his narrative corruption says.
We stood ten meters apart. The wind had no courage to blow between us.
His voice was soft. Almost kind.
"You're holding back."
I smirked. "Yeah, no shit Sherlock."
He didn't return the humor.
"You're dying," he said. "The parasite inside you is slowing your cells, your reactions, your thought speed."
"Yeah, well," I lifted my hand and summoned a crimson thread of symbiote that crackled with venom. "Good thing I never relied on fair fights."
He finally moved—just his shoulders crackled the air.
And suddenly he was there. Not across from me. In my face.
His hand wrapped around my forearm before I could finish forming the barrier.
And then he whispered—just loud enough for me to hear it:
"You smell like guilt."
And he threw me through a tower.
My back hit stone. My body went horizontal. My barrier formed half a second too late, absorbing the last third of the impact but not the first two.
Cracks exploded through the outer wall of the estate. I twisted mid-air, skidding across the inner ramparts, using my magnetism to hook onto the wrought iron railing and swing myself to a halt.
Pain throbbed through my ribs.
He's faster than he should be.
Faster than even my spider-sense had tracked.
No. He wasn't faster. I was slower.
I exhaled, purging static from my lungs. The parasite was latching tighter.
But I wasn't done.
From my position on the rampart, I looked up again.
He hadn't chased me. Not yet.
He was walking. Again. Step by step.
As if he didn't care if I recovered.
"You've got soldiers out there," Daewi said, not looking back. "Still fighting. Still dying."
"You could end this by staying down."
I growled, voice low and seething:
"Yeah? You could've stayed dead."
He paused. Finally, he turned to face me fully again.
One eye a black void.
The other—glowing with the stolen sun of his old world.
"I did," he said.
He moved first. But I arrived faster.
One moment, the world held its breath.
The next, an Impact.
Flesh and force collided with the sound of a star screaming.
The shockwave was a detonation.
Raw kinetic fury roared out from our clash, ripping open the forest in concentric waves. Trees didn't bend—they splintered mid-air, vaporized at the core. The sky cracked white with friction. The very laws of motion flinched.
Daewi's fist was layered in gravitational compression, the weight of collapsed planets coiled behind it.
Mine met it—symbiote blazing, magnetic fields screaming, electricity crackling out in lightning veins across the ruined sky.
We didn't fly back. The air did.
Miles of terrain were blown open. The earth shattered into canyons. Valleys became craters.
Mountains bowed in the distance—cracked at the crown from the ripple alone.
And at the epicenter?
We stood—feet digging trenches in the ground, arms locked, barely budging.
Daewi exhaled slowly, eyes narrowing.
"Still standing?" he said.
"Barely," I answered, my voice gravel.
He was testing me.
And I still hadn't shown him what came after restraint.
Sofya's POV
Eastern Forest Line – Minutes After the Clash
The blast had stopped. But the earth hadn't.
The ground still shivered beneath our boots as if Adriel and that thing—Daewi—had cracked the spine of the continent.
We were alive. Barely.
I couldn't hear much. Not over the ringing in my ears. But I felt Mila's hand on my arm pulling me up, and that was enough.
The smoke was still clearing across the ridgeline, though it wasn't smoke. It was like the world itself had gone pale. Faded. As if color had been scared out of the air.
I looked back.
A whole section of the forest was just... gone. Like someone had scooped it out of reality.
And in the center—still locked midair—two shapes tangled in motion and impact. I could barely see them, but I didn't need to. The damage spoke loud enough.
"We cannot be around here," Mila said, voice low, focused. "That explosion should be evidence enough."
No argument.
Elen stood at the edge of a shattered tree, her eyes fixed on the chaos, mouth set in a tight line. Her hand was trembling slightly, just barely—but she clenched her sword tighter to stop it.
Lim scanned the path east with sharp precision. "This way. We need to move—fast. Before the next wave lands."
I nodded, heart pounding in my throat.
Tigre didn't move at first. His eyes hadn't left the crater. Not since Adriel dove into it.
"Hey," I said, stepping closer. "We'll be no good to him if we die standing here."
That got through. He blinked, nodded once, and turned.
And we ran.
Through brush and under broken branches. Over shattered stone and uprooted trees. Every few seconds, another deep rumble rolled through the air—far off, but close enough to keep us moving.
The forest was no longer a haven. It felt like a hollowed-out cage.
"Keep low!" Lim snapped. "If any Dark's made it out of that blast, they'll be hunting."
She wasn't wrong.
We moved in a staggered line, Elen taking rear guard, Tigre and I in the middle, Mila on point with Lim. The sounds of battle had faded, but the tension hadn't. It wrapped around my lungs, coiling tighter the farther we got from the estate.
The sky looked wrong now.
Split at the seams in places. As if whatever Adriel and Daewi unleashed had bruised the atmosphere itself.
"Over this ridge!" Mila shouted, pointing to a rocky incline thick with brush. "We can rest and reassess from higher ground."
By the time we reached the top, I could finally breathe again. Just barely.
Below us, the devastation was visible from miles out—like a meteor had struck the land. Trees flattened. Earth shattered. Fires flickering in unnatural colors.
Elen stared in silence.
I did too.
Because no matter how far we got—
It still wasn't far enough.
And the worst part?
That wasn't over.
That was just the start.
No Pov
The land was still smoking. Cratered. Skinned raw from the first collision.
But neither of them had fallen.
Adriel slid back across the cracked dirt, boots gouging trenches into the stone as he caught himself mid-skid. His armor steamed, heat rippling from the impact points along his chest and shoulder.
Daewi landed lightly across from him, one hand in his pocket.
His eye—what remained of it—burned like a dying star. The wind bent around him unnaturally, tugged by invisible forces that bent gravity itself.
Then Daewi moved vanishing from sight.
Adriel's spider-sense screamed—and he spun just in time to block a punch aimed for his jaw.
BOOM—!
The ground beneath Adriel's feet cratered from the force of the block alone. He flipped backward, twisting mid-air, and retaliated with a high-velocity Venom Kick. Daewi ducked under it effortlessly, his foot sweeping out in a low arc—Phoenix Kick.
Adriel caught the tremor half a second too late. The ground ruptured beneath him, throwing his balance off. Daewi followed up—Basaltic Fist, right into Adriel's ribs.
CRACK—!!
Wind blasted out in all directions.
Adriel didn't fly back. He rebounded, anchoring himself midair with magnetic manipulation—metal from the battlefield debris spiraling to his hand as a makeshift shield.
It shattered the moment Daewi punched through it.
But it bought time.
Adriel surged forward, stingers extending. He unleashed a flurry of strikes—martial precision honed with divine instinct. Daewi caught each blade between his knuckles, redirecting them with minimal effort.
It was hand-to-hand chess played at lightspeed.
Daewi's foot lifted—another stance. White Tiger's Dance.
Adriel ducked, spun, and countered with a Venom Blast uppercut. The explosion behind it sent both men flying backward in opposite directions, carving out twin trenches in the dirt.
They landed—and ran again.
But the land couldn't hold.
When Adriel and Daewi clashed again, it wasn't just fists meeting skin—it was forces colliding that weren't meant to exist in the same plane.
Daewi slid his foot back—gravity collapsed inward. Entire sections of the hill around them folded in on themselves, pulling trees from their roots, yanking boulders into orbit like they were weightless.
He threw a punch through the vacuum he'd created—Strong Force-augmented, inertia turned into a weapon.
Adriel blinked forward, dodging the strike by milliseconds. His armor flared crimson, webs latching onto the shredded terrain behind Daewi. He yanked, pulled himself through the air like a missile, and struck Daewi in the back with a Venom Beam that sent the Pure Dark smashing through a cliff face.
The cliff detonated, the mountain edge breaking apart in a wide arc that collapsed half the ridge.
A forest nearby caught the blast radius. The flames consumed nature. Smoke covered the land. And then silence.
Then Daewi stepped out of the rubble, his sleeve torn, eye glowing brighter.
He lifted one hand.
And the sky dropped.
A localized gravitational field hit the battlefield like a hammer, flattening trees, pressing Adriel into the dirt for just a moment. Birds fell mid-flight. Rivers bent sideways. The estate's outer walls in the far distance cracked from the stress.
Adriel roared, igniting a Limit Break surge—his symbiote flared out like a wing of blades and he sliced through the gravity, momentum cracking the crust beneath his feet.
Shockwaves.
Wide as lakes. Deep as ravines.
Each time they moved, a new scar tore across the world.
The sky had cracked.
Not metaphorically—no, that happened earlier. Now, reality itself trembled as Adriel and Daewi collided again and again with the force of dying stars.
Daewi's fists distorted inertia. Every swing bled weight into the air, rupturing the ground beneath them. Mountains crumbled like wet sand in the backwash of their motion. And the world protested.
Adriel answered with defiance.
His foot pivoted through the air as Daewi surged forward, and they clashed at a midpoint too fast for mortal eyes. Their impact erupted in a thunderclap that vaporized everything within a five-mile radius—soil, trees, cliffs, vapor trails hanging in place for moments before being swallowed by the void.
Adriel didn't retreat.
His movements became more fluid, more surgical—each strike a solution to Daewi's evolving chaos. His symbiote shifted with his rage, red-hot tendrils arcing behind him like thunder-fed whips, striking like the limbs of wrathful gods.
Daewi pressed forward regardless, his one glowing eye burning through the dust, gravity funneling toward his body like a collapsing star. "You're weakening," he growled.
"Still enough to kill you," Adriel replied coldly.
He let Daewi advance.
He let him believe.
And then—
Adriel vanished.
A blink was too long to track. He was just gone from the battlefield.
Daewi barely had time to react before something collided into his side with a crack of space distortion. The air itself folded in half as Daewi flew sideways into a rock spire. It didn't shatter—it disintegrated into particle foam as his body passed through it, skipping like a thrown godstone across the forested ridges.
Adriel followed without touching the ground.
Above. Beside. Behind.
He appeared in all directions like a fragmented shadow, boxing Daewi in with bursts of energy-thread strikes and concussive blasts laced with Venom force. Each impact twisted the landscape further. Rivers ran backward. Gravity buckled. Wind screamed in directions it was never meant to.
Daewi spun midair, absorbing the hits, but they were stacking now. Chipping away. Not at his flesh.
At his certainty.
"You're not a Guardian," he spat between strikes. "You're a storm pretending to have a soul."
Adriel landed beside him mid-flip and grabbed his arm. "And you forgot," he said calmly, "what a storm is for."
Daewi's gravity spiked instinctively—trying to break free.
Too late.
Adriel's symbiote flared red. A field of magnetic dominance ignited around them, halting Daewi's manipulation with an equal and opposite force.
Then Adriel launched upward—dragging Daewi with him.
Through clouds.
Through static storms.
Through layers of the atmosphere that shouldn't have survived the ascent.
And as they breached orbit, the world grew small beneath them. Burnt. Scarred. But distant.
Daewi's eyes widened.
Adriel's grip never faltered.
His voice was low, final.
"This world isn't yours."
And then he spun.
Crimson energy spiraled down his legs, through his spine, igniting the symbiote like an engine of wrath incarnate.
Adriel whipped Daewi in a rotational arc, airless sound screaming through his armor as he pulled in enough kinetic force to make gravity beg.
And then—
He hurled Daewi.
Daewi's body became a spear of pure impact, tearing through the void like a comet born from wrath. His form burned white-hot as frictionless acceleration turned his descent into a weapon. A trail of collapsed stardust followed in his wake, reality bending behind him like a snapped rubber band.
The Moon didn't have time to brace.
From the surface, there was only silence—
Then a flicker.
Then a flash.
Then a detonation that shattered the far side of the lunar crust.
The impact point imploded first—Daewi's body slamming into the stone like a divine artillery shell. The shockwave ripped across the Moon's surface in a perfect ring of devastation, launching kilometers of lunar dust into orbit. Craters collapsed. Mountains fractured. Valleys inverted. And then—
A luminous pulse spread outward from the epicenter, carving glowing fractures across the moon's hemisphere like veins of molten glass.
From the planet below, a single flare of white light pierced the night sky.
Like a second sun had winked into existence.
The Moon cracked.
Tidal shifts answered immediately. Oceans on the planet churned unnaturally. Weather patterns faltered. A low, cosmic groan echoed across the sky as if the Moon itself had cried out in pain.
Adriel hovered in the exosphere, still watching.
Breathing steady.
His armor steamed from his shoulders.
He didn't smile.
He didn't celebrate.
Because he knew what kind of monsters survived that kind of fall.
And Daewi Han wasn't done yet.
Elen's POV — Edge of the Forest, Near the Southern Range
We thought the worst had already happened.
The moon cracked.
The sky bled.
The ground beneath us hadn't stopped trembling since Adriel and that monster clashed above the clouds. Every second felt like it could be our last.
But then—
The sky changed color.
It wasn't magic. It wasn't divine. It was red. A bruised, burnt, apocalyptic red.
And it was moving.
Mila was the first to look up. She didn't speak.
She just stopped walking.
I followed her gaze, and—
I forgot how to breathe.
There, beyond the clouds. Beyond the orbit of our moon.
A different planet covered our skies.
And it was falling.
No—being thrown.
By that Dark.
Even from this far below, I could see the silhouette of that cursed creature. Hovering in space like a god carved from hatred. His hand was still extended. A gravitational tether still linked to the red giant now hurtling toward our world like an oversized cannonball.
The wind collapsed around us.
Birds dropped mid-flight.
Every soldier within earshot fell to one knee from the sheer pressure in the air.
I wanted to scream.
To curse.
To pray.
But all I managed was a whisper.
"...He threw a planet."
And in the back of my mind, I only said one thing.
Adriel... please save us...
No POV – Near-Lunar Orbit
The crimson-streaked surface of the planet glared brighter with each passing second, barreling through the cosmos with apocalyptic force.
Adriel's body trembled in the high atmosphere—void of oxygen, pressure, and mercy.
The Void Parasite inside him writhed, its corruption coiling through his nerves like static fire. Every second he delayed, his systems lagged. His senses stuttered.
But he did not falter.
Above him, the world-killer loomed.
Adriel's right arm surged outward—fingers trembling, spider-veins of energy webbing through his suit as his magnetic control ignited.
"Override sequence—Keter-class priority—Divert gravimetric pull."
A pulse shot through the void. A command across dimensions.
His hacking protocols ripped through layers of natural law like code—rewriting gravity's intent.
The planet slowed.
Not enough.
Adriel clenched his jaw, nanites bleeding from his mask, now glowing gold with heat and effort. His magnetism surged tenfold, bending the orbital lanes of every metallic element inside the celestial body. The planet screamed in molecular resistance—its core resisting the new law being coded into it.
"Too fast... not enough time—"
Then he roared. Bio-electric venom fused with the magnetic stream—amplifying it. His limiters shattered. Bones cracked. His vision blurred.
But the planet—halted.
Just a few thousand kilometers above the world.
The moon trembled.
Rings of shattered magnetic distortion spiraled across space like shockwaves, ripping apart nearby asteroids, disrupting satellite constellations, and forcing Daewi—hovering in the exosphere—to finally pause.
Adriel dropped to one knee in mid-air, coughing up golden static. The void parasite hissed inside him, punished by the overload.
But the world?
Still intact.
His voice barely a whisper: "Your move, Daewi."
And far above, Daewi's eyes narrowed—grinning for the first time.
"Not bad... Guardian."
No POV
Daewi's body pulsed with a new resonance.
The Book of an Old Deer floated behind him, pages scattering like glowing scripture across the void. Red and black wisps curled off his new form as the Robe of the Sage (Offense Mode) wrapped around him in ribbons of cosmic flame. His eyes locked with Adriel's—one blind, the other boiling with layered fury.
"Let's move this dance," Daewi said calmly, and before Adriel's spider-sense could even hum—
BOOM.
Daewi closed the distance.
In an instant, his shoulder drove into Adriel's chest like a comet ripping through reality.
There was no sound in space, but the impact cracked spacetime like shattered glass behind them as the two figures vanished in a streak of white light.
Mars Orbit — 0.3 seconds later
They hit.
At the speed of light.
A 175-kilogram combined mass impacted the planets' upper atmosphere with nearly 8×10¹⁸ joules of kinetic force. The red dust of the upper stratosphere ignited instantly, spreading firestorms into the thin sky. Plasma bloomed around their descent like a second sun.
The shockwave vaporized a thousand square kilometers of rock instantly. Craters erupted in rings. Tectonic plates—once thought inactive—rumbled like dying gods. The thin atmosphere screamed in silence as the force of nearly 2,000 megatons of TNT pulverized the surface.
A mushroom cloud of vaporized iron dust and molten regolith churned thousands of meters high—rivaling Olympus Mons in height. Red lightning arced inside the storm as gravity rippled unnaturally, distorted by Daewi's still-active field.
The red planet bled fire.
Daewi stood in the center of the scorched crater, his robes tattered and flaring with cosmic embers. The molten ground hissed beneath his feet, still glowing from the impact. The Book of an Old Deer hovered behind him, its pages rippling with unseen currents, whispering through the thin Martian air.
He cracked his neck.
"Get up, Guardian."
A fissure split the debris.
Molten rock parted as Adriel's hand tore from the rubble—no blood, no wounds. Just motion. Perfect and lethal. The black and crimson symbiote had hardened into jagged plates across his chest and limbs, pulsing with inner light. Despite the sheer kinetic force of the impact, the armor remained intact. Not a crack on its surface.
He emerged fully, body upright, breath even, eyes fixed on Daewi with surgical calm.
Adriel wasn't angry.
He was focused.
His left hand sparked with magnetized static. The swirling cloud of Martian iron dust, now suspended midair, responded to his will—forming spirals, spears, and arcs of shrapnel in slow orbit.
With a flick of his finger, he compressed them all into a field of interlinked blades—a satellite of steel hanging like a guillotine in orbit.
Daewi didn't flinch. Instead, he stepped forward, rotating his wrist.
The crater rumbled as plant roots burst upward—impossibly—through scorched Martian soil. Life bloomed for an instant before freezing, the plants now wrapped in icy mist as he layered elemental forces into their structure.
Adriel raised his palm.
The steel field fell.
Daewi stomped once.
Gravity inverted in a flash.
The metal shattered mid-fall, particles caught and repelled by altered gravity waves. Daewi blurred into motion, appearing behind Adriel in a single step.
But Adriel twisted—fluid and vicious.
Their fists met again.
The resulting shockwave split the canyon walls.
The planet groaned.
The storm hadn't passed.
It had only changed forms.
Dust clouds the color of scorched bronze rippled across the planets' sky, and in the center of it—two titans moved like myths etched into physics. One wielding the narrative of survival. The other, the weight of annihilation.
Adriel surged forward first.
The ground beneath him fractured from sheer momentum. He didn't step—he teleported through environmental instinct, Spider-Sense dragging him to the narrow space between Daewi's fists.
Two blows missed his temple by centimeters.
Daewi's eye narrowed.
"Faster."
Adriel didn't answer with words. His fist pulsed with bio-electric venom, slamming forward in a Venom Punch. Daewi blocked—but the discharge hit like a miniature sun detonation, lighting the landscape in a burst of crimson and gold.
Daewi flipped back mid-air, absorbing the shock with perfect martial fluidity. He touched down in a perfect Phoenix Kick stance—and stomped.
The ground buckled.
Adriel leapt as the concussive wave cracked the mantle beneath, but Daewi was already there, above him.
"White Tiger's Dance."
A flurry of punches faster than thunder cracked against Adriel's armor, pushing the symbiote past structural limits. But instead of retreating, Adriel twisted midair and activated Lateral Repulsion. A pulse of raw venomous force detonated from his spine, sending both of them hurtling apart like opposite polarities.
They hit the ground.
Then charged again.
Adriel vanished.
Accelerated Decoy.
Daewi saw through it. He spun and kicked—not the decoy—but the very trail of residual air pressure it left. The force cracked space for an instant.
Adriel appeared behind him— launching with sword-length retractable stingers from both wrists.
Daewi caught one.
But not the second.
It slashed deep across his shoulder—corroding through muscle and robe, hissing as it met flesh.
Adriel twisted to follow up, but Daewi's other hand flared with borrowed power—Soul Erosion. The blow cracked against Adriel's chest. The symbiote reeled, screeching as a Dark-infused wavelength shuddered through its layers.
Adriel coughed blood.
Still—he laughed.
"You're bleeding into my story now."
He planted his hand into the red soil, triggering Hacker.
The terrain bent around them.
Code shattered. Space inverted.
Adriel rewrote the ground as if it were a combat script—turning rock into weaponized thread, which launched like barbed tendrils toward Daewi from below.
Daewi sliced through it with a flash of energy—but that was the trap. Adriel blinked across the battlefield, appearing above him, both hands glowing with Mega Venom.
He crashed both fists downward.
The impact cratered the planet again—sending shockwaves to the upper atmosphere. Dust flew like ash from a dying star.
Daewi exploded upward, shirt shredded. Blood streamed from his jaw.
His eye glowed hotter.
"I said FASTER!"
He threw Basaltic Fist—but augmented it with Strong Force Manipulation. The blow shattered magnetic resistance and tore through Adriel's left side. Ribs buckled. The symbiote held—but barely.
Adriel grunted—activated Limit Breaker.
Power surged 100-fold.
Daewi's senses screamed as Adriel blurred.
The Guardian blurred through twenty martial stances in a breath—channeling every fighting form he'd ever absorbed through Combat Adaptation. Fists slammed like synchronized earthquakes—each one laced with microbursts of electricity and nerve-paralyzing venom.
Daewi danced through it, barely deflecting.
One punch got through.
Then two.
Adriel's Mark of Kaine triggered, searing Daewi's chest with a burn that left reality warped.
Daewi coughed.
His grin widened.
He clapped his palms together.
The Book of the Old Deer opened behind him—glowing symbols swirling in orbit.
Vines of pure conceptual energy erupted, trying to entangle Adriel's arms and drain his vitality.
Adriel activated hacker instantly—burning the soul-manipulation down to dust.
Then he swung—webbing crackling with magnetic distortion, blades of polarized gravity riding its edge.
Daewi cut through with a reverse Blue Dragon's Storm, the raw wind-pressure slamming both of them apart.
Breathing heavy.
Adriel crouched low.
His hands scraped the ground.
A new skill activated—Environmental Adaptation.
He stopped holding back.
Venom-infused lightning arced across his skin, his symbiote adjusting, hardening with solar radiation absorbed from the surface. He cracked his neck.
"Alright, Daewi. Round three."
Daewi's robe shifted again—flames of corrupted creation rising.
"I'm still standing."
They moved.
Faster than thought.
Faster than light.
Adriel dove beneath a Phoenix Kick—countered with a spin-fist laced in venom. Daewi caught it—redirected using inertia manipulation—and flipped Adriel skyward.
Before Adriel could recover, Daewi grabbed the planet's magnetic field and spiked gravity to 900x.
Adriel was crushed downward, embedded into rock.
But he roared.
Magnetism surged.
Every speck of metal in the planets' crust answered him.
The battlefield erupted.
Mountains turned into blades.
Ores pulled upward in violent reverse gravity, forming a rotating shield.
Daewi dove in.
White Tiger's Dance.
Basaltic Uppercut.
Strong Force Echo.
Each strike hit like the death of a star. But Adriel adapted. The blows lost their edge. Combat Adaptation fed data into his bones.
He countered.
Sweeping his leg—Energy Thread wrapped around Daewi's throat.
He flipped over him—stinger out—drove it toward Daewi's back.
Daewi vanished.
Teleportation.
Adriel's eyes widened.
Then—BAM.
Daewi reappeared mid-spin, roundhouse slamming into his side, augmented with gravitational burst.
Adriel slammed into the ground hard enough to crater half the region.
The dust hadn't settled—when he rose again.
Eyes glowing.
Voice rasping.
"I am still a Guardian."
Daewi didn't respond.
He just nodded.
And raised both hands as planetary symbols orbited him again.
The Book pulsed.
Adriel cracked his knuckles—electricity flaring.
And they charged one last time.
Fist to fist.
Legacy to legacy.
God to god.
The battleground was barely recognizable.
What had once been a desolate scarlet basin was now a wasteland split by ravines carved from fists, craters widened by screams, and fault lines stitched with blood and broken stars. The atmosphere sizzled. Magnetism surged in waves. Gravity flickered as if the very laws of physics were unsure which of the two warriors deserved to bend them.
And floating above it all—Adriel and Daewi.
Both bruised. Bloodied. Yet burning with unrelenting will.
Adriel's symbiote armor flickered across his frame like liquid shadow and emberlight. It healed, reformed, shimmered with every breath, its will intertwined with his own, dragging him forward like a metronome of vengeance. But the parasite still gnawed at him. Slowing his mind. Dulling his edge. Making each movement cost more than it should.
Daewi's Robe of the Sage pulsed with golden heat, its trailing fabric scorched into whips of black flame. His right eye bled openly now, the strain of planetary manipulation evident. But his body remained coiled, balanced, every limb screaming disciplined destruction. The Book of the Old Deer, he had reached beyond even the divine—now commanding soul forces, plant life, elemental physics, and gravitational vectors with ease.
They had broken light. Shattered continents.
But this next moment...
This next moment would define something else.
"Why do you still fight?" Daewi asked, his voice quieter than the tremors that tore beneath their feet.
Adriel said nothing.
He just moved.
At the exact same time, so did Daewi.
They clashed mid-air.
Adriel's first blow was a spider-laced vault through gravitational pushback, flipping over Daewi's shoulder as he unleashed a magnetic pulse behind him—pinning Daewi's cloak against his own momentum.
Daewi countered mid-spin, foot hooking out with a Phoenix Kick amplified by inertia, detonating against Adriel's shoulder with enough force to shear a mountain. Adriel's barrier cracked—and immediately reformed—his healing keeping pace.
Adriel retaliated with twin Venom Blasts, firing them not at Daewi—but at the floating debris field behind him. The metal twisted, surged forward under his Magnetism, and struck like a thousand daggers from all angles.
Daewi roared, Blue Dragon's Storm igniting around him in a spiraling vortex that incinerated the entire wave in a single motion. The shockwave split the planets crust again, forming a canyon deep enough to swallow entire cities.
They clashed again.
Then again.
Each time faster.
Each time harder.
Adriel struck with ancient kung-fu rhythms.
Daewi responded with Kyokushin perfection.
Elbow. Knee. Strike. Dodge. Flip. Twist. Block. Kick.
It became less a fight and more a symphony of learned pain—where muscle memory sang in place of thought, and instinct reigned.
But Adriel...
He was waiting.
Each move wasn't just an assault. It was data. His Hacker Skill traced every pattern, every technique, every breath Daewi used. He didn't need to overpower him.
He needed to outplay him.
Finally, as Daewi reeled back for a Basaltic Fist meant to pierce Adriel's ribs, Adriel flickered out of sight—his Accelerated Decoy leaving a body-double to absorb the hit.
Daewi's punch passed clean through.
And before he could pivot—
Adriel was already behind him.
No flash.
No glowing aura.
Just raw, brutal silence.
"You were one of the best," Adriel muttered. "But you forgot the first thing every fighter learns."
Daewi turned—too late.
Adriel's hand came down.
Not with venom.
Not with hacking.
Not with any supernatural force or interdimensional technique.
Just a karate chop.
A perfect, focused, calculated strike—aimed straight at the gap between Daewi's shoulder and collarbone. The precise spot where his Robe of the Sage offered the least kinetic resistance.
The moment his hand made contact—
The planet split.
Not from the force of the strike alone.
But from the symbolism behind it.
Adriel didn't just hit him.
He undid him.
Daewi's body folded inward as the strike tore through flesh, bone, soul, and the construct that was keeping his body intact post-rebirth.
The planet cracked under them.
Like an egg.
The first fracture rolled along the equator.
The second raced across the poles.
The third—down the center.
And then, in silence—the planet opened.
Daewi's body fell between the halves.
His final thought wasn't pain.
It was acknowledgment.
That someone had used his own foundation—his own style—to end him.
A ghost of a smile played on his lips.
Adriel hovered, breathing hard, steam rising from his armor, eyes dimmed—but still sharp.
The planet beneath him groaned.
Mila's POV — Earth
That didn't just happen.
I blink. Once. Twice.
It's still there.
The planet...cracked.
Open like an egg under some cosmic hand. Two halves floating apart, with a wound that glows like a god's judgment cut through it.
My knees hit the ground and I didn't even notice. I can't feel my legs. I can barely feel my heartbeat.
It's not real.
It can't be.
No one can do that.
No human can do that.
A planet. Not a mountain. Not a forest. A planet.
"Mila," Elen's voice breaks through the static in my ears. She stumbles to my side. I hear the others arriving too—Sofya, Lim, Tigre. I don't look. I can't. My eyes are still locked on the sky. On that wound hanging in the stars.
"He—" Sofya's breath catches. "That planet..."
"No," I whisper, but my voice doesn't feel like my own. "It... can't be."
Silence stretches out around us like an executioner's blade.
"He's..." Tigre starts, but stops himself.
They're all thinking it.
They're all afraid to say it.
Was that Adriel?
Did Adriel do that?
Did Adriel die to that?
I want to scream at them. Tell them that he's alive. That of course he's alive. He's Adriel. The Guardian. The Immovable Blade.
But the words stay stuck in my throat like shards of glass.
Because I saw it too.
That flash of red and black streaking toward the stars.
That goddamn impact.
And then—
That.
I shake my head. "He didn't do that. That wasn't him."
I say it again. Louder this time.
"That wasn't him. He's... he wouldn't..."
I trail off.
He wouldn't what?
He wouldn't split a planet?
He wouldn't survive something like that?
Or...
He wouldn't let us see what he really is?
Because we've never seen him like that.
Not even close.
Not when he fought the Forest Assassins.
Not even when he blessed the weapons with his own power.
That wasn't power.
That was mercy.
And now?
Now we saw what he does when he stops holding back.
Or maybe...
Maybe that wasn't him.
Maybe that was the other one. The one he's fighting. The Dark.
The Pure.
I hug my arms around myself, trembling. "He's still alive," I whisper.
Lim kneels beside me. Her hand finds mine.
"He has to be."
I nod.
Because if I stop nodding, I'll break.
If that thing up there killed him...
If Adriel is gone...
Then we don't stand a chance.
The planet split. The sky changed. Our gods never did anything like that.
What we just saw...
That was beyond faith.
That was beyond war.
That was myth rewritten in real time.
If Adriel is still up there—still fighting—then we need to run. We need to get further away.
Because the next strike?
Might not stop with that planet.
Interplanetary Orbit – Near the Remnants of the planet
No Pov
The split was not the end.
It was the beginning.
The moment Daewi's body disintegrated into ash and fractured essence, the unstable energy they'd both unleashed—gravity, kinetic force, atmospheric collapse, tectonic backlash—reacted like a cosmic match thrown into a dry forest.
The planet began to detonate.
Cracks hissed open across its twin halves, and the glow from within surged brighter. The core—molten and chaotic—spun free of gravitational stability. Its collapse would birth a shockwave capable of eviscerating Earth's upper crust from halfway across the solar system.
Adriel hovered above the remains, the weight of planetary death vibrating against his armor like a scream caught in silence.
His vision—hyper-focused, flickering with layers of spectral overlays—confirmed it.
The explosion had already started.
"Damn it," he whispered, voice hoarse.
His body was battered. The Void Parasite gnawed through his divine nerves like acid through silk. But none of that mattered.
Because Earth would die next.
Adriel's arms moved. With one hand, he reached outward—and the world slowed.
With the other, he tapped directly into the fabric of reality using his Hacker skill. Strings of glyphs, codes, magical commands, narrative threads—they all surged into alignment. He wasn't just rewriting gravity.
He was cancelling causality.
The space around the two planetary halves shifted violently, as if refusing to exist in the same frame as the detonation. Then, like a god sculpting atmosphere, Adriel brought his other skill to bear.
Barrier.
It wasn't a dome. It wasn't even a wall.
It was a seal—infinite layers of compressed energy folded across each other like origami made from raw law.
It rippled outward, locking the planet inside a cocoon of translucent crimson and obsidian.
The explosion hit.
And it stayed inside.
The impact deafened the stars. The entire planet tore itself into plasma and stormlight, but not a single speck escaped. The void turned white behind the barrier's glow, and for a moment, even nearby space warped into spirals.
But Earth—Earth remained untouched.
Inside the barrier, molten veins coiled and vanished, collapsing into themselves under the weight of suppressed entropy. It took every drop of Adriel's control to keep the feedback from shattering the seal—and him with it.
His feet hit a floating asteroid.
His knees buckled.
Steam rose from his back as the symbiote spasmed. His pulse was ragged. His internal vitals barely stable. But his eyes—his eyes were clear.
He'd done it.
He had just contained the death of a planet.
And for the first time since the Void Parasite began eating at his essence...
He smiled.
Rodnick Estate — or what was left of it — no longer existed.
The rolling hills that once surrounded it were scorched black and broken. The forests that flanked the valley had been reduced to ash and glass. Where homes once stood, only skeletal frames smoldered. The earth itself was a scar.
Adriel descended through the smoke, boots skimming the ruined soil. He was still wearing the suit — red, black, divine — the same one that had just split a planet in half and caged its death in space. The symbiote hummed, still crawling with residual energy, wrapping his frame like living myth.
He was exhausted.
But they came first.
His eyes scanned the battlefield—sharp, calculated—until he found them.
Tigre, Elen, Mila, Lim, and Sofya were grouped around what remained of a collapsed villa wall. They looked battered, burned, tired, bloodied. But alive.
Adriel exhaled.
He walked toward them, a small breath of tension finally releasing from his chest. The ground beneath his steps cracked, even though he made an effort to suppress the weight of his power. The symbiote twitched, shifting back to expose more of his face as the armor partially melted away.
Mila saw him first.
She didn't speak.
Lim was next. Her hand drifted instinctively toward her blade.
Then Elen turned — and her eyes locked onto his.
Adriel's steps slowed.
They didn't run to him. They didn't call out.
They didn't move at all.
"I made it back," he said, softly. A half-smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. "You're all okay..."
No answer.
He looked from face to face.
Tigre's jaw was tight. Lim's eyes sharp. Sofya's fingers twitched like she couldn't decide whether to salute him or stab him. Mila avoided his gaze completely.
Only Elen met his eyes.
"Are any of you hurt?" he asked, voice more strained now. "I—I can patch you up. I have healing protocols and barriers if anyone's bleeding internally. Just let me—"
"You saved us," Elen said quietly. "We know."
Adriel blinked. "Then why do you look like you're staring at a monster?"
Still, no one spoke.
Adriel's mouth opened again, then shut.
He stepped closer—just a little.
They all tensed.
All of them.
Even Tigre.
Something cold cracked inside his chest.
"You're... afraid of me," he said slowly.
It wasn't a question.
It was a realization that hit like a delayed bullet.
"I fought for you. I bled for you. I nearly died—again. I stopped a planet from ending your world," he said, tone rising. "I saved your lives. I saved millions of lives."
"We know," Elen said, voice calm, but not kind. "We saw all of it."
"Then why?!"
The symbiote flared behind him, reacting to the spike in his pulse. It took effort to calm it down.
"You're not scared of the Darks," he muttered. "You're scared of me."
None of them denied it.
Adriel shook his head, stepping back like their silence had hit him physically. His eyes were wide. His hands trembled.
It was Mila who broke the silence this time.
"We watched you tear apart Mars."
"I had to."
"You split it in half."
"I had to."
"You killed a god."
"He was a Dark."
"You broke reality to stop him."
Adriel's throat tightened. "I was protecting you..."
"We know."
Lim's voice was a whisper. "That's why we're afraid."
His head snapped toward her.
"I—I don't understand."
And he didn't.
He couldn't.
He looked at Elen again, hoping—desperate—that she'd explain something that made sense.
But her eyes were still the same.
Not furious.
Not grateful.
Just... sad.
"You've never seen yourself the way we see you," she said. "Adriel... you've always been something more. Smarter. Stronger. Colder. But you were still you. You were still fighting for us."
"I still am."
"But now we've seen what you really are."
He flinched.
"We've seen you destroy something divine," she said. "And not with rage. Not by accident. You did it like it was instinct."
Adriel's voice was small now. "I had no choice..."
"You had control," Mila said. "That's what's terrifying."
Adriel took another step back, his boots crunching in the debris. For the first time in his life—he felt like he wasn't standing on ground.
He was falling.
And then the surviving Zhcted soldiers arrived.
Their armor was battered. Their eyes wide. Their bodies still trembling from what they'd witnessed in the skies.
One by one, they dropped to a knee.
Bowed.
Worshipped.
"Guardian of the Worlds," one said. "We are yours."
Adriel turned.
And his heart broke.
"No..."
He stumbled back, shaking his head. "Don't call me that."
They kept kneeling.
"Don't kneel," he hissed. "I'm not a god."
"You are what the gods fear," said another soldier.
And that—broke something inside him.
Adriel stood at the center of it all—worshipped, feared, misunderstood.
His fists clenched.
His body didn't shake.
But inside?
He was crumbling.
The soldiers remained on their knees. Mila, Tigre, Lim, Elen, and Sofya—all still staring at him like he'd stopped being Adriel and started being something else. Something unrecognizable.
Something that didn't belong among them anymore.
The wrong word sat in the air, burning a hole in the silence.
God.
He didn't even remember walking away. His legs just started moving, feet dragging through ash and broken stone. The sky above him rippled, twisted from the planetary shock still echoing through space.
He couldn't breathe.
And that was absurd, wasn't it?
He'd survived light-speed trauma, split-molecule implosions, the laws of gravity turning inside out. He'd rebuilt his bones from vapor, hacked the structure of reality, and forced an entire planet's detonation to stay still.
And now?
Now his chest felt too small. His breath too loud. His heartbeat like an alarm on loop.
Stop looking at me like that.
He wanted to say it.
But he couldn't.
Not with that many eyes on him. Not when Mila flinched as he passed. Not when Sofya's gaze dropped to his feet, afraid to meet his eyes.
His mouth opened.
A sound came out.
It wasn't language. It was a growl—guttural, fractured. Like the scream of something that didn't have a throat to scream with.
The air bent around him. Energy spiked, wild and lashing.
The symbiote flared like fire caught in a storm, cracking outward in unstable, chaotic tendrils.
Adriel's back arched.
He didn't transform.
He didn't ascend.
He crashed.
Fists slammed into the ground.
The shockwave that followed blew apart a twenty-meter radius in a perfect circle, flinging dirt, metal, and broken stone in every direction. Barriers instantly wrapped the others before the debris could reach them.
He wasn't thinking.
He couldn't.
He was stuck—emotionally throttled, cognitively overloaded. His mind, built to analyze, to predict, to navigate complex logic matrices, was failing at one simple question:
Why are you afraid of me?
His voice finally broke through the static:
"I didn't ask for this!"
The earth cracked again beneath his voice.
"I never asked to be a guardian! I never asked to be a stabilizer! I didn't want this power—I didn't even want to exist in this world!"
More of the symbiote peeled off him, lashing like whips into the dirt around him—uncontrolled feedback loops triggering tremors beneath the ground.
"I broke my own bones for you! I died for you! I dove into the Dark's territory ALONE!"
He turned—half-feral, voice warping at the edge of a scream.
"And you look at me like I'm the villain?!"
Sofya opened her mouth.
Didn't say a word.
No one could.
The heat of his fury warped the air. His spider-sense was redlining, not from danger—but from emotion. From his inability to route the overload.
"I'm not a god," he whispered. "I'm not."
His hand trembled as it reached to his chest—pressing flat against the emblem in the center of his armor. The symbiote pulsed there, alive, confused.
"I'm still me," he whispered again. "I'm still Adriel."
But the silence screamed otherwise.
Then—
One of the soldiers behind him bowed lower, voice trembling.
"We would follow you into any hell, Guardian. Command us, and we will burn the stars for you."
Adriel snapped.
"I SAID STOP!"
The word wasn't shouted—it was released.
The sound warped the light.
The ground cracked again.
And every soldier fell flat, not from fear—but from gravity.
Adriel had accidentally spiked the field around him.
Elen stepped forward finally, eyes wide—but firm. Not afraid anymore. Just sad.
"You want to protect us, Adriel?" she asked quietly.
He looked at her like a wounded animal.
"Then protect us from this," she said. "From you."
And those words?
They were the killshot.
Adriel fell silent.
No explosions followed.
No magnetic pulses. No venom surges. No hacker overlays rewriting the land.
Just the faint hum of the symbiote retreating—pulling back from his limbs like silk sloughing from stone.
He dropped to his knees.
Breathing hard.
Not from exhaustion.
But from everything else.
The world felt hollow.
Adriel knelt in the crater of his own making, symbiote fading into a dull, ash-stained sheen around his shoulders. His hands hung limp at his sides, fingers twitching with invisible static. He couldn't bring himself to look up.
They were still there.
He could hear them.
Breathing. Watching. Judging.
He tried to rationalize it—tried to run the logic through every mental simulation he had. Protect them. Save the planet. Stop Daewi. Do not die. Do not let them die.
Mission accomplished.
So why... did it feel like failure?
"You're scared of me," he whispered.
No one corrected him.
Not even Tigre.
Adriel forced himself to his feet, slow and stiff. He didn't use his powers. He didn't reinforce his legs with magnetism or mend his spine with energy. He just stood.
Like a man.
Not a god.
"I see," he said.
Three words. Flat. Heavy. Like cinderblocks dropped onto glass.
Elen stepped forward. "Adriel—"
"No," he said, voice still low. Still level. "I understand."
He turned his head just enough to glance at her.
Not angry. Not accusatory.
Just... broken.
"I don't belong here, I never belonged anywhere in the first place."
Sofya's head lifted.
"What?"
Adriel turned fully now. The wind blew through the ruined forest and scorched soil, kicking up dust between them like ghosts trying to rebuild the past.
"I thought I did," he said. "I tried to. I gave everything I had. I held myself back so you wouldn't feel small next to me. I let myself take hits. I didn't use what I could. Because I didn't want to be a god. I wanted to be your equal."
Lim's eyes softened slightly. But she still said nothing.
"I guess that was a lie," Adriel said, more to himself than anyone else.
Tigre looked like he wanted to speak—but the words wouldn't come. He had no arrows left. And no defense for the truth between them.
"I'm not angry," Adriel continued. "I'm... sad."
That word.
It hung there.
Twisted and unfamiliar coming from someone who'd stopped a planet.
Sad.
Because he didn't understand how saving the world could make him feel so unwanted.
The soldiers still knelt behind him, too afraid to move.
Their reverence was worse than silence.
"I don't need your worship," he muttered. "I needed your trust."
He turned his eyes toward the mountains in the distance.
And the last pieces of the man they'd known seemed to go with them.
"I'll stay away," he said.
"No!" Sofya finally shouted. "You don't have to—!"
He smiled at her.
And gods, it hurt to look at.
Because it was the kind of smile someone wears when they've already decided they're not coming home.
"I do," he said softly. "You'll breathe easier without me here."
He turned fully now—his back to them. Standing at the edge of the crater that had once been a village. Once been safety. Once been home.
His cape caught the wind—torn, burned, frayed.
"I'll keep fighting," he said. "I'll hunt the Darks. I'll keep them away from you. From everyone."
The wind howled louder.
"But I won't force myself to stay in a world that looks at me and sees a monster."
Sofya took a step forward. "Adriel, please—"
He looked back one last time.
And in that moment, his voice cracked—not with rage, but something so much worse.
"I was happy," he said. "When I thought I belonged. That I could return here after I was finished with my work."
Everyone froze.
The symbiote curled back toward his chest as if trying to hold him together.
"Thank you," he said.
Another pause.
Then—
"For tolerating me."
He raised one hand.
A circle of glowing glyphs formed beneath his feet—red and gold and old.
Sofya lunged forward.
"No—wait!"
But she was too late.
He vanished in a flash of light and static.
Gone...
The wind died instantly.
Only the crater remained.
Sofya stopped, her hands outstretched toward the empty space where he'd stood.
"I didn't mean to be afraid," she whispered. "I didn't..."
Elen stood beside her.
Mila dropped her sword arm.
Tigre looked down at his boots.
And Lim?
Lim turned her face to the side. Silent. Ash drifting through her hair.
No one spoke.
No one moved.
Because for the first time since this war began—
They realized the guardian they feared...
Was the only one who ever feared being left behind.
To Be Continued...