He stood amid the ruin of it all. The silence after battle was a strange, living thing—too vast, too heavy.
It pressed on his chest like the hand of a sleeping titan. Smoke curled from fissures in the broken ground, rising to join the blood-red clouds. The air tasted of iron and thunder.
Atlas did not know if he breathed or drowned. His lungs shuddered with every ragged gulp of air.
He could still hear the echo of his last blow—the strike that felled Asmodeus—rolling through his bones like a memory that refused to die.
"Did I… won?"
The words came out in a rasp, broken by pain and disbelief.
Then the adrenaline drained away, and the truth of his body arrived. The pain came like a tide—first at the edges, then all at once.
He felt his bones, every single one, like shards of molten glass beneath his skin. His hands trembled. The law he had bound into his fists—
He tried to rise, but the world tilted. The sky spun, and with a dull, wet sound, his knees gave out.
