The room dissolved into chaos; picking out a single opponent became impossible. Seraphina and Valerius pressed on with the ritual to connect with the god of deception. Neither could afford a mistake — it was still impossible to tell who'd end up chosen as apostle. Zephyr stood in front of Aurelion, challenging him in a fight he couldn't win — for him, this was about pride, nothing more. Kaelen stayed at the center beside Aurelion, locked in heavy mental disturbance, unable to control anything. All he could do was watch.
The gods struggled and stalled, losing ground with every second. Aurelion stood at the center of it, checking his watch, adjusting his coat, watching it all unfold.
Time had stopped mattering to him. He'd already secured most of what he came for — blessings and information enough to suppress other gods for decades. Taking their identities outright had never actually been on the table; he'd known that before he ever stepped into the room. The gap between the outcome he wanted and the one he was getting wasn't as wide as it looked.
Zephyr raised his hands to shoulder height and waited, searching the fight for an opening. When he found it, he reached for it from a distance, hands sliding back into his pockets. Turning some of Aurelion's own identities into gladiators — thin, lethal — was the only real move he had left against him.
Then Aurelion's vision collapsed inward, shrinking until he could see nothing past the center of the room. Darkness swallowed the rest. No one beneath him in authority should have been able to do that to him.
"A curse," he guessed.
His soldiers vanished without a trace. The identities he'd sent to track Seraphina and Valerius met the same fate. For the first time in this fight, Aurelion felt genuinely tested.
Zephyr's gladiators closed in, swords already aimed before the gap between them had even shrunk.
The ones outside Aurelion's blinded field were untouched by his power — but the ones that stumbled into range turned on each other, and eventually on themselves.
Even Aurelion had never faced something that restrained him this completely.
One minute twenty seconds left.
Leaving the center meant risking Kaelen. He needed to move fast.
"Why waste your time on a Stage 4?" Zephyr called out. No answer — he didn't need one.
"Aurelion?" Zephyr pushed again.
"I don't need to borrow power for something this simple."
"Proud of something that was never yours to begin with."
"Aren't you the same?"
Somewhere in the exchange it had stopped being about the mission — it had become personal, a fight over whether Zephyr could prove he mattered.
Aurelion swept the room, trying to pin down Zephyr's location by feel alone.
"Right here, superior Stage 1," Zephyr said, deliberately throwing off his senses.
That was enough. Whatever masked a location that completely could only be something borrowed from a god. Aurelion seized the moment and shattered it.
The ritual took damage — more time lost. Two minutes left.
His vision returned. The messengers had taken human form now, which explained why the barrier around them had dropped earlier. Zephyr stood in front of them all, bleeding, barely upright, eyes struggling to stay open. He'd burned his own body to buy this moment.
"You're insane," Aurelion said. It came out sounding like a complaint, but it landed like a compliment.
The odds were bad. He still had to get Kaelen out alive.
He lifted Kaelen by the waist, ready to leave —
— and Seraphina, upgraded now, deceived Kaelen and tore their merged identities apart. Aurelion could no longer teleport them both together.
He burned one of the blessings he'd cultivated, summoning thralls — faster than the gladiators, carrying corruption in every hit. Each strike stripped something away from whoever it landed on. They existed only to buy time, uncontrollable even by him.
He corrupted Kaelen just enough to override Seraphina's deception and pull him back under his own control.
Then, using the god of identity's help along with Kaelen's raw authority, he reached past the surface of the world entirely — into the void.
He'd never been there before. Until now, he'd never had the authority, or someone like Kaelen, to make it possible.
From there he could see the origin of everything — each domain governed by a presence that could only be felt, never seen directly. Some had no owner at all; they drifted, reacting to whatever came near, shapeless potential that took form the instant he imagined something for it. Everything there ran on will alone — think it, and it happened.
But thirteen of the voids he couldn't even look at. Reacting to them risked erasing him outright. Those were the ones with human owners. It was almost too simple to accept: the gods he'd spent so long fighting were just people, too afraid to ever leave their own voids. How did they ever gain that kind of power in the first place? Even a Stage 1 like Aurelion couldn't hold their gaze directly, and yet they lived out there alone, inside nothing, forever. Maybe that was what drove them insane. Still — none of it explained what controlling Earth was supposed to get them.
He kept moving from void to void. A few reacted to Kaelen's presence — a weakness, rare but real. No one else could have found them. Aurelion gathered what he could into his rings, just in case.
Kaelen could still sense everything around him but couldn't act on any of it. Instinct alone kept him going — he was already pulling in ambient energy to heal himself, body and mind both. That was good; he'd learn to use his own power faster this way. Some of that energy pushed toward Aurelion, testing him, but did nothing. Whatever Kaelen wanted to do to him was still beyond his reach.
That left Aurelion with one question he couldn't shake: what could possibly be so extreme that someone capable of challenging gods still couldn't do it?