A huge crescent of Aether tore through the space between Arthur and Theia, sharp as a honed blade, and Theia's eyes widened for the first time since the battle had begun as she realized the trajectory left her with no clean path to dodge.
The air around her seemed to conspire against her escape, constricting and thickening in a way that made even slightly shifting her position difficult, Arthur's Divine Domain quietly working against her without giving her time to counter it. She ran the calculations in the span of a heartbeat, measuring the crescent's speed against her own, and the answer that came back left her with only one viable option.
There was no time to construct a proper defense, or time to gather enough light to form a barrier strong enough to withstand that much concentrated energy. So she made the only choice available to her, she sacrificed her right arm.
Blinding light erupted from the limb, gathering with terrifying speed until an arm thick beam shot outward, meeting Arthur's crescent head on in the empty space between them. The collision detonated with a sound that rattled every floating island for kilometers, a shockwave of pure light and Aether canceling each other out in a blinding flash that forced even the watching Godkings to shield their eyes.
When the light finally faded, Theia remained standing, her right arm gone entirely, reduced to nothing more than smoldering light dissipating from a cauterized stump at her shoulder though she wasn't fazed by the pain. Arthur, having just executed the attack, found himself without a means to dodge what came next.
Her remaining hand rose and in an instant the floating motes of light from her right arm gathered in front of her palm, and another beam of light lanced forward, faster and more focused than the one she had used before, and it found its mark squarely in the center of Arthur's chest.
He felt it pierce through his skin, bone, and through the muscle of his heart, for a second he just looked at the fist sized hole in his chest with wide eyes. Theia allowed herself a faint, weary scoff despite the exhaustion written across her face, cradling the ruined stump of her shoulder with her remaining hand.
"You are too young to fight against us," she said quietly, more resigned than triumphant, as though the victory brought her no particular satisfaction.
She never finished whatever thought came next, because the Godkiller erupted from her chest, the black blade punching clean through her sternum from behind, before its tip emerged glistening in front of her.
Cough!
She coughed with a wet, startled sound, staring down at the sword now jutting from her own body with a puzzled expression that indicated she had yet to catch up to what was happening which turned into a horrifying one the next moment.
Slowly, she lifted her gaze toward Arthur, fully expecting to see him already collapsing due to the beam that had torn through his heart moments earlier and his attack as a last ditch effort to take her down with him. But Arthur hovered before her, his chest whole and unmarked again, not a single wound betraying the fact that a beam of concentrated divine light had supposedly killed him only seconds ago.
Blood drained from her face at once. "H... how...?" she managed, the words barely more than a whisper, her voice cracking with something that sounded almost like disbelief bordering on fear.
Arthur didn't answer, he simply used Telekinesis to wrench the Godkiller free from her chest, the motion smooth and unhurried, as though he had all the time in the world despite eight other Godkings frozen in horrified silence around them. The next moment Theia closed her eyes forever.
The truth was simpler than any of them could have guessed, and considerably more calculated than Theia's pride would have allowed her to consider. From the very first exchange, the instant she had dodged his opening strike with barely a step, he had recognized she was faster than him or anyone else on the battlefield.
Outpacing her through speed alone was never going to work. So instead he had planned a different kind of trap entirely, one that relied on her underestimating exactly how far his survivability extended. He had thrown himself forward with visible recklessness, letting his rage and his intent read as desperate, allowing her to believe she had genuinely caught him with an unavoidable, fight-ending blow.
She had taken the bait completely, sacrificing an entire arm to guarantee the kill, certain that a beam capable of piercing a heart and restricting regeneration would end anyone foolish enough to charge her so carelessly. But Arthur used Energy Absorption to remove the influence of Theia's energy on his wounds, thus regenerating the wound instantly.
In the half-second where her guard dropped, convinced the fight was already over, Arthur had teleported the Godkiller directly behind her, guiding it with Telekinesis rather than his own hand, and driven it straight through her sternum before she ever registered the danger.
None of the watching Godkings had imagined he could survive losing his heart, and that single miscalculation, shared by every god present including Theia herself, had made the sneak attack impossible to see coming.
"Noooooo!" The raw and desperate cry tore from one of the Godkings, and the remaining eight surged forward as one, closing the distance toward Arthur and Theia's falling body with expressions twisted somewhere between fury and disbelief.
Arthur had no intention of letting them reach her in time. Even knowing the Godkiller's inherent power should theoretically guarantee her death permanently, he refused to leave anything to chance where a being as dangerous as Theia was concerned.
He drove the blade through her chest a second time, then a third through her skull, watching the last flickers of her divine aura sputter and die entirely before he sealed her body away inside the SOH.
"What have you done!!!" Pyrrhus roared, appearing at Arthur's side in the space of a single breath, claws raking toward his throat with murderous intent. Arthur deflected the strike with the flat of the Godkiller, the impact sending sparks scattering between them, before teleporting several kilometers clear of the enraged god.
He tucked the sword away, exhaling slowly as the last traces of adrenaline settled into something calmer and colder. Raising his right fist, he struck it once against the open palm of his left hand, the sound was sharp and deliberate in the silence that followed.
"Now," he said, his voice carrying easily across the battlefield, "let's start the actual fight."
…
Theron sat upon his throne with his eyes closed, the weight of centuries settling comfortably across his shoulders, when a peculiar sensation hit him without warning, a ripple through the fabric of the Divine Realm itself that made his eyes snap open.
"What?! How?" He straightened immediately, his instinct honed over countless millennia screaming that something fundamental had just shifted. A god had died, not weakened or banished to some forgotten corner of existence to lick their wounds for a few centuries. It was true death, in an age where such a thing had become little more than a myth whispered among the oldest of divine beings.
He sat in stunned silence for several long moments, turning the implications over in his mind, before a memory surfaced unbidden, his meeting with Augustus and that unassuming, unreadable stranger who had accompanied him.
"Is it him," Theron murmured slowly, almost to himself, "that killed Theia?" The thought settled uneasily in his chest. He couldn't fathom how such a thing was possible. Unless someone wielded a weapon carrying the same cursed authority as that Godkiller that had once surfaced hundreds of thousands of years ago, there existed no method to kill a god permanently, not while they remained anywhere near Thyrandel or the Divine Realm itself, where the very fabric of existence favored their survival.
He shook his head slowly, allowing a tired sigh to escape him. "Perhaps this is for the best," he said quietly, addressing no one in particular, his gaze drifting toward the distant ceiling of his throne room. "When the sealed gods discover that those responsible for their imprisonment have already died, it might quell some of their anger."
He closed his eyes once more, settling back into stillness, though the unease lingered somewhere beneath his composed exterior, a quiet acknowledgment that the balance of power he had grown accustomed to was starting to shift in ways he couldn't yet fully predict.
…
In another dimension entirely, separated from both Thyrandel and the Divine Realm by folds of reality few beings could even perceive, Cyris stood before the tall windows of an ancient library, her gaze drifting across shelves that stretched endlessly into shadow.
"Who has the power to kill her?" she muttered, more curious than alarmed, the faintest smile already tugging at the corner of her mouth. She was known as the Keeper of the Vault of Oracle, guardian of the legacy left behind by one of the ancient Dragon Gods.
What no one knows was, Oracle had sensed the betrayal of the human gods long before those very gods had even fully committed to their treachery, and rather than intervening directly, he had chosen instead to place Cyris here, tasking her with guarding his vault and appearing within the secret realm of Thyrandel to await what he called the fated one.
She had been nothing more than a Minor God when she first accepted that duty, yet through the resources Oracle had carefully left behind for her, she had steadily climbed the long, arduous path toward Godking status, patient in a way only someone with hundreds of thousands of years to spare could afford to be.
She had waited that entire span of time, watching centuries blur into millennia, for the fated one to finally arrive. When Arthur had at last overcome every obstacle placed before him and entered the Vault of Oracle, she had felt something close to genuine joy for the first time in longer than she cared to remember, certain she had finally completed the task assigned to her so long ago. She had allowed herself to imagine the eventual revival of her Godking, patient and hopeful in equal measure.
But she had never expected, not in all her careful calculations, that one of their enemies would die so suddenly, this early in the unfolding of events. Cyris let the smile spread fully across her face now, her eyes reflecting the dim, ancient light filtering through the library windows. "The tide has started to change," she murmured softly, turning away from the window as the faintest note of anticipation colored her voice for the first time in longer than she could recall.
***
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