Chapter 54: The Rebellion Of The Devil

“You can’t get far with that incomplete state!” The Entity screamed, his form flickering as he watched Aden’s consciousness slowly dissipate.

A mocking, blood-slicked smile registered on Aden’s face as the silver sand began to swirl around his disappearing legs. “Watch me.”

“You!” The Entity pointed a mercury-coated finger, fury etched into his divine features. “I’d like to see how far you’d get before coming crawling back here! You think you can use the fire without the furnace?!”

The last fragment of Aden’s spirit vanished, and the vivid anger on the Entity’s face immediately shattered to reveal a cold, neutral mask.

The Entity rested his back on his rusted throne slowly, his hand tucked under his chin as he watched the space where Aden had been. The silver wind blew, causing his hair to sway and revealing a small, jagged scar at the top of his eyebrow.

“Just as planned,” he whispered.

****

Aden’s eyes snapped open.

He didn’t see the dark of the tunnel, he saw lines.

Thousands of silver and gold threads vibrating in the air. The Unstable Marrow hadn’t given had given him an increased sensitivity to the frequencies that existed around him.

He tried gasping for air, but his lungs felt like they had been lined with crushed glass, making every breath a jagged, agonizing labor.

He was encased. The Holy concrete had hardened around him, a glowing, white tomb that was vibrating against his skin with a predatory, scorching heat.

Beside him, or rather, beneath him, he felt the frantic, dying pulse of Lorelei. She was buried to the chest, her ribs groaning under the weight of the setting stone.

[Adaptive Resonance: Warning—Frequency Mismatch]

[Status: Marrow Contamination (12%)]

Aden tried to move his arm, and a white-hot agony flared through his nervous system. The shards weren’t just on his skin; he could feel them scraping against his muscles from the inside.

By rejecting the complete loss of his humanity, he had kept his human senses, and now those senses were reporting every micro-second of his body being shredded by the incomplete power.

“Master…” Lorelei’s voice was a wet, thin thread of sound.

Aden didn’t speak. He couldn’t. His vocal cords were currently vibrating at a pitch that would have shattered his own teeth if he opened his mouth.

’He said it would be a cage,’ Aden thought, his mind burning with a cold, desperate rage. ’But I swear I’ll turn the cage into a weapon.’

He reached into the Sync and transferred most of the pain he was feeling to them and drew on their strength simultaneously.

It was a parasitic move, one unbefitting of a true god and leader, but Aden didn’t care for that.

The silver shrapnel protruding from his skin began to glow with a sickly, unstable violet light.

The concrete touching him began to vibrate. The molecular bonds of the Holy stone were being vibrated apart by the raw dissonance of the Unstable Marrow.

Aden officially became a detonator.

He let the mismatched energy build in his chest, refusing to let the metal coat him, instead forcing it to compress until it reached a critical mass. The pressure in the tunnel spiked and the remaining air ignited.

[Adaptive Resonance: Overload—Breach]

The Sinking District erupted.

A pillar of silver fire and pulverized white stone shot three hundred feet into the air, punching a jagged hole through the center of the district. The force of the blast sent a shockwave that rattled the golden carriage hovering in the sky.

Aden tumbled out of the smoke, his body hitting the glass-charred surface of the desert with a heavy, metallic thud. He wasn’t standing, he was on all fours, coughing up a mixture of black bile and silver mercury.

The jagged shards of metal sticking out of his shoulders hissed as they hit the air. He looked like a nightmare half-formed, a creature caught between a man and a broken machine.

Behind him, Lorelei was thrown clear of the blast, landing roughly in the dust. She was alive, her skin reddened by the heat, but she stared at her Master with a look that wasn’t just devotion anymore.

It was terror.

Aden forced his head up. His vision was a blurred mess of gold and silver.

Standing less than fifty feet away was a woman wearing a golden armor that oozed suffocatingly with divinity. Her head was covered halfway by a metal helmet painted a darker shade of gold.

Aden currently couldn’t see any faces, but he was extremely sure she had a neutral expression.

The Saintess stared at him, her hand frozen on the hilt of her blade.

She had expected a God to emerge, a perfect, silver-clad King of the Void. Instead, she was looking at a bleeding, jagged glitch that looked like it was held together by pure spite.

Aden spat a mouthful of silver-tinted blood. Every nerve in his body was screaming, begging for him to give in and let the metal finish the seal.

“It would seem the Princess has a personal grudge with me,” Aden rasped, his voice echoing with the resonance of twenty stolen heartbeats. “And it would seem… I have developed a grudge of my own.”

The Saintess in the gold-and-dark-gold armor didn’t move.

The suffocating divinity she radiated acted like a physical weight, pressing down on the scorched earth and making the dust settle instantly.

To Aden’s frequency-vision, she was a blinding, stabilized sun.

His new enemies.

“A grudge?” Her voice came from behind the half-helmet, melodic yet devoid of any human heat. “To have a grudge, one must have a soul. You are merely a defect that refuses to be recycled.”

She didn’t draw her blade with a flourish. It was a slow, deliberate movement, the metal singing a high, holy note as it left the scabbard.

“The Princess does not care for your grudges, Anomaly. She cares only for the silence that follows your erasure.”

Aden’s knees buckled for a second as a fresh wave of shrapnel pain sliced through his thighs.

The Unstable Marrow was reacting to her divinity, the silver shards in his skin vibrating so violently they were carving new wounds.

’She’s stronger than the others,’ Aden thought, his vision flickering. ’Her frequency… it’s solid. No cracks.’

He looked back at Lorelei, who was struggling to breathe under the weight of the Saintess’s aura, then he looked at his own hands: raw, silver-veined, and trembling. He couldn’t win a prolonged fight. He had maybe three minutes before the Marrow-poisoning forced his heart to stop or the Entity took over.

“Defect, am I?” Aden whispered.

He didn’t take a combat stance. He let his arms hang limp at his sides, his fingers twitching as he manually redirected the pain through the Vassals.

Miles away, Zero’s nose began to bleed, but the silver pressure in Aden’s arm stabilized just enough for one move.

“Your Princess is more defective for seeking me out.”

Aden lunged. Using a localized explosion of Resonance from the soles of his feet. He moved so fast the air cracked, leaving a trail of silver-tinted smoke.

The Saintess’s neutral expression didn’t change, she easily dodged the attack with a side step and attempted to slash at the nape of Aden’s neck.

Aden felt the annoying wave of divinity against his neck and bent quickly.

He rolled forward and jumped to face her before lunging once more, but her blade moved in a blur of gold, meeting Aden’s jagged, metallic forearm with a sound like a hammer hitting an anvil.

[Adaptive Resonance: Kinetic Absorption—FAILED]

[Warning: Holy Interference detected]

The impact sent a shockwave through Aden’s marrow. He didn’t pull back. He leaned into the blade, the gold edge biting into the silver shards in his arm.

“You’re loud,” Aden hissed, his face inches from her gold visor. “Your light… it’s blinding. I think I’ll dim it.”

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