The battle erupted with a ferocity that tore my reason away for instants. The ground trembled with every blow; the air smelled of burnt metal, of flesh, and of broken oaths. Thalor descended upon us like a storm made flesh, and in his first sweep Rin's voice broke into a scream that still pierces my memory: I saw her fold, I saw her lose her leg, as if the light itself had been ripped from her in a single slash. Blood burst in an arc, red and cold, and Daichi—with wild eyes and rage tattooed across his face—caught her in his arms and hurled her into the rift.
For a heartbeat, the world became absurd. Why was Daichi throwing my brothers into the abyss? I thought death was the reason, but his gesture had another edge: it was a condemnation that was also an offering. I watched Rin vanish into smoke and stone as the rift swallowed her, and it was me who screamed then, some kind of broken animal that could not comprehend the orders of war.
Daichi was not coldness; he was fire. He hurled himself at Thalor with a wolf's howl. His sword clawed at the air, his body a whirlwind bent on devouring a god. But the cold truth soon revealed itself: Thalor was gravity and fate. Every strike Daichi landed was returned with divine indifference. I saw him fall, saw him lose the verticality of his soul as the white armor split him apart with the detachment of someone crushing ants.
"Bastard! I'll kill you!" he roared, a promise turned to a thread of blood. "Aaaaaah!!"
The scene was a painting of fury and defeat. Blood splashed across Thalor's face like rain; his white wings swept bodies aside like dead leaves. In the midst of it, Kurayami appeared beside me. He held out his hand, solid in the chaos; my wounds, which minutes earlier were maps of pain, had already stitched themselves closed. He handed me his sword. I accepted it with trembling hands. We had decided to join forces: Daichi and Ken behind, Aiko and Iko holding the line, and us striking where needed. Kurayami picked up another sword from the ground, still slick with blood; a tree of metal ready to keep growing in war's hands.
We threw ourselves at Draekon the way one throws oneself at the tide knowing it will break you. The pressure was a belt tightening around my chest; my breathing, a slow drum. Aiko, who had fought without respite, showed her cracks: her face pale, her breathing labored, her sword no longer a sure extension. Draekon, unhurried but with a predator's edge, dodged, bit, toyed with us. The summoned sword had not yet revealed its full reach; it was a monster containable, waiting for its moment to devour.
I saw Daichi face Thalor once more. His movements were pure fury, his legs twisted with exhaustion, but still he marched like one who has made sacrifice his craft. Then, the image etched into my memory: Daichi's sword snapped like an old branch. The sight was a cut itself: metal weeping. Thalor smiled with that terrifying calm of those who believe in inevitability. He never hesitated. The charge came, precise, and I saw the god's weapon pierce Daichi's belly as though it were cloth. The scream he exhaled was the final note of a song we never wanted to sing.
"Ken! Now! Cut off that god's head—go!" he cried, a last command.
But in the same heartbeat, Ken fell: Draekon slammed him to the ground and disarmed him with the ease of someone squeezing an overripe fruit. Helplessness tore open a new wound in me. It was no longer only physical pain; it was the feeling that the story was slipping out of our hands.
Aiko sank and rose again like a spring of iron. Every strike Thalor landed on Daichi was answered by another; their fight was not body against body but legend against legend. But Thalor bore the weight of the gods. His smiles were paths of ruin.
Kurayami, in an act I had no time left to judge, lunged at Draekon with the fury of someone who knows himself to be the last resort. He tried to cut its throat. Draekon activated the sword of the elements in a spark of light and sound. The blades clashed. Mine, again, cracked until it began to splinter. The metal, tired of being wielded by human hands, began to fail.
Fear stole my words. I felt fatigue turning to stone inside my muscles; the blood in my veins was a brine of decisions. In a drive that was not rational but visceral, I ran toward Aiko and Kurayami. I pushed them—yes, I pushed them—toward the edge of the rift to get them out of Draekon's next swing. Daichi and Ken arrived too, gasping, faces soaked in death and will. The five of us stood at the edge, our sight full of smoke and our mouths full of broken orders. It was a point of no return: resistance, salvation, absurdity.
And in that precise second when all lowered their guard—for a tremor, for a breath, for the certainty that there was still something left to do—I did what had to be done.
I pushed.
It wasn't a cold action; it was an act of war turned to a mortal caress. I pushed my four brothers into the rift. I watched them fall, not as one watches death but as one throws an animal into a cage so it stops tearing itself apart. Their eyes found me; in them I read confusion, reproach, and then a strange acceptance, as if through that fall they glimpsed a crack through which life might still escape.
I did it so they would live.
I did it so the story would not end that night with us as trenches of bone. The abyss swallowed them with a wet noise that followed me into my skull. The earth roared. Pieces of armor and blood slid down in a slow rain. The rift spat them into the unknown, into the possibility—whatever it was—that it would not kill them, that it might give them a hidden path away from Thalor's and Draekon's orbit.
When the dust settled, the edge was empty. My hands trembled; the sword I held had become a weight I could no longer match with conviction. Guilt struck me with the precision of a hammer: I had pushed my brothers into the void. But beneath the guilt burned something else: the brutal certainty that sometimes the only way to save is to let go.
Thalor did not wait to judge. With a single movement, he turned his wrath toward me and my act, as though I had dared defy his geometry. Draekon, for his part, laughed with that grimace he had learned not to show before: fury and surprise mingled in his eyes. Something had shifted; I knew it, though I could not tell whether for good or ill.
I walked to the edge. I looked down. I saw no bodies, only smoke and echoes. Perhaps it was the mist. Perhaps it was luck. Perhaps, perhaps, the truth was that war feeds on acts like this: impure, necessary, condemned.
I breathed. The air burned my throat. Outside, Thalor's hammer fell again. And as the world split once more in two, I knew I had crossed the point where men called heroes cease to be so and become something rawer: the final decision.