Chapter 455: The Beginning Of The End [CXVII]

Swooooo~~

The battlefield was silent.

The frozen ground stretched outward in every direction, painted in broad ugly strokes of gold and dark red, the blood of gods who had been, until very recently, among the most powerful beings in the Divine Realm.

Wings lay scattered across the ice like fallen leaves after a storm, some still attached to their owners, most not.

Divine bodies in various states of ruin covered the ground in every direction, frost creeping slowly across them, the absolute zero residue of the seventh move still bleeding outward from the center of the battlefield in faint colorless waves.

And in the middle of it all, Aestrea stood.

“Haa… fuuu…”

His snow-white hair hung at his shoulders in a ruined mess, the usual clean lines of it gone entirely, strands plastered to his jaw and his neck and his forehead by sweat and blood both.

Most of it had stopped being white, mainly because of the golden blood from the gods and the dark red from himself.

It clung to the ends in heavy, matted clumps, dripping occasionally onto his shoulders with soft sounds that the silence of the battlefield made impossible to ignore.

His eyes burned intensely.

The Lunar Dragon Void Right Eye was still glowing faintly, although the white light seemed to be dissipating slowly.

Odin’s eye had completely disappeared as he couldn’t muster any energy to activate it.

His clothes were gone in any meaningful sense.

What remained was fabric.

Strips of it, hanging from his shoulders and his waist in torn sections, the rest having been burned away or shredded or simply lost to the accumulated violence of the last however long it had been.

The tears ran in every direction, clean cuts from wind authority, ragged burns from divine fire, impact splits from the earth gods’ strikes, and through every gap they left, his body was visible in full.

At this moment, anyone could see Aestrea’s physique.

He was pretty lean, the kind of lean that comes from years of conditioning rather than deprivation, muscle sitting close to the surface with nothing unnecessary between it and the skin, the lines of his arms and his chest and his shoulders defined not for appearance but because everything his body was made of had been used.

For exactly this kind of thing.

And the scars.

They covered almost every part of his body.

Wide ones across his chest and his ribs that had clearly been serious when they were made, pale and slightly raised against his skin, sitting alongside thinner lines on his forearms and his shoulders that told quieter stories.

Some ran parallel.

Some crossed each other at angles that suggested the same area had been reopened more than once.

His left side carried a cluster of them near the ribs that looked like they’d come from something that hadn’t intended to leave him walking away.

Fresh blood ran over all of it.

From the cut on his cheekbone, tracing the line of his jaw before dropping.

From his shoulder, soaking slowly through what remained of his sleeve and running down his forearm to drip from his elbow.

His arms were still trembling.

The Heavenly Swallowing Sword was in his right hand, its blade painted gold and red both, tip angled slightly downward because keeping it fully raised had become an investment rather than a reflex.

Midnight was in his left, held with the same tired certainty, its perfect edge catching the pale, colorless light that still drifted across the battlefield in faint waves.

He didn’t move and simply stood in the center of everything he had made in the last several hours.

The frozen wings and the scattered gold and the bodies of gods who had come down from the sky, certain of the outcome.

“HAHAHA!”

A sudden laugh came from above.

Wide and slow and genuinely, deeply amused without a mocking undertone at all.

Just the specific laugh of someone who has been watching something unfold for a very long time and has finally, at the end of it, found exactly what they were looking for.

“PWAHAHAHAHA!”

And then it opened fully, rich and enormous, filling the empty sky above the battlefield the way thunder fills a valley, bouncing off nothing because there was nothing left standing to bounce off of.

“BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

The air pressure changed.

A single pair of boots touched the frozen ground thirty meters from where Aestrea stood, and where they landed, the ice didn’t crack.

The leader straightened to his full height.

Six wings spread behind him, not aggressively, not as a threat display, simply open.

The outermost pair caught the pale light of the frozen battlefield and threw it back in broad, cold sweeps.

His eyes moved slowly across the ground around him.

The bodies.

The wings.

The gold-painted ice stretched in every direction as far as the battlefield.

He looked at all of it with an expression that was neither grief nor satisfaction. Then his gaze settled on Aestrea, snd he smiled widely.

“…I sent four hundred gods down to kill you,” he said.

His voice was calm, something strange for someone who had gotten his whole army killed, but from the looks of it, he didn’t care about his army at all.

“Four hundred gods.”

He briefly looked around the battlefield once more before turning back to Aestrea.

“And here you stand.”

Another short laugh escaped him. He shook his head slightly, as if disagreeing with something he himself had just thought.

“Bleeding. Barely upright. Shaking like a leaf in the wind.”

His eyes found Aestrea’s crimson ones across the frozen distance between them.

“And still… surprisingly holding both swords.”

Caelid’s expression didn’t change immediately.

He simply stood there for a moment, looking at Aestrea the way someone looks at a painting they weren’t expecting to find interesting.

Then he reached up and adjusted the cuff of his sleeve with two fingers, unhurried, and began to walk forward slowly across the gold-stained ice.

“Since we’re going to be here for a moment, allow me to introduce myself properly.”

He stopped ten meters away.

“Caelid.”

He said the name simply, without decoration, the way someone states a fact rather than offers a greeting.

“Second-in-command of the Primordial Court. One of its seven key pillars.”

A brief pause.

“The being your friends, your colleagues, and everyone else in the Divine Realm with any sense of self-preservation chooses not to make angry.”

His eyes moved across Aestrea’s ruined figure slowly.

“When the order came down to deal with you personally,” he continued, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly.

“I laughed.”

A genuine exhale of amusement left him at the memory.

“I genuinely laughed. I thought whoever had filed the report had made an error somewhere. A True God. A single True God, barely past his seventh star, requiring my personal attention.” He shook his head.

“I laughed for quite a while.”

He paused.

“And then I looked at the faces of my superiors.”

The slight smile faded into something more neutral.

“They weren’t laughing.” His tone didn’t shift dramatically.

“Not even slightly. So I stopped laughing as well, and I scoffed, and I accepted the order.” He tilted his head a fraction.

“Expecting nothing particularly remarkable.”

His gaze swept across the battlefield one more time.

“And then, I saw you!”

He let that sit for a moment.

“A mere 7✯ Late True God… moving through my secondary army like they were an inconvenience.”

As soon as those simple words reached Aestrea’s ears, he almost froze.

Secondary.

’…It wasn’t his main army… Fuck.’

Caelid laughed again.

“But business is business,” he said, and his tone changed into something almost casual.

He spread one hand outward to his side, palm up.

“So here is what I am offering you.” He looked at Aestrea directly.

“Join me. Second-in-command of my army. I will personally bring your case before my superiors, and I will argue, convincingly, for your life to be spared and your actions today to be…” He considered the word briefly.

“Forgiven.”

His extended hand didn’t waver.

“You are, without question, the most interesting thing I have encountered in longer than I care to calculate.”

Something in his voice that might, in different circumstances, have been respect.

“That is not a compliment I extend carelessly. Join me, and that quality gets pointed at our enemies rather than wasted here on a battlefield that no one will remember.”

The hand remained out, waiting for Aestrea to take it.

Aestrea looked at it, and the first thing that surfaced in his mind wasn’t calculation or strategy or the odds of surviving whatever came next.

It was a face.

Octo.

Standing in that same posture of confident extension, that same certainty that the offer being made was generous enough to be irresistible.

That same expression of someone who had decided the conversation’s outcome before the conversation had started.

Octo… who had died at his hands.

Remembering that, Aestrea’s bloodied lips slowly curled up.

“Ooohhh…” His voice came out loose and warm and entirely wrong for someone standing in his condition.

“…Caelid!!!”

“I know you.”

“Oh?” Caelid’s chin lifted slightly, a hint of satisfaction moving across his face.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Aestrea’s bloody smile spread wide, suddenly animated in a way that was absolutely insane given that he was standing in the middle of four hundred corpses barely held upright by stubbornness alone.

He even pointed, as if greeting an old friend across a crowded market.

“You’re THAT guy!”

“…That guy…?” Caelid repeated slowly.

“The one whose wife left him for a mortal!” Aestrea clicked his fingers.

“No wait, sorry, sorry! She didn’t leave you.” He tilted his head.

“She just slept with everyone else and came home to you after! My bad, completely different situation!”

Caelid’s extended hand lowered by about three inches.

“Watch your next words very carefully.”

“I’ve heard SO many stories about your marriage, honestly!” Aestrea continued, his tone warm and genuinely delighted, as if recounting fond memories.

“The guys downstairs wouldn’t shut up about it! There was this one story, and forgive me if I get the details wrong—… u-uhh, where she showed up to a divine banquet on another god’s arm and you just… sat there!” He gestured expressively with Midnight, gold blood flicking off the blade.

“Just sat there eating your food!”

“I am warning you—”

“—They called you ’The Dinner God’ for three centuries after that, right?!” Aestrea gasped with theatrical realization.

“THAT’S YOU! You’re the Dinner God! I can’t believe I’m meeting you in person, this is honestly such an honor—”

“—THAT IS NOT…” Caelid stopped himself, and took a deep breath, calming himself down.

His jaw was tight enough to crack stone.

“That title does not exist, and you are going to stop talking right now.”

“Right, right, my apologies.” Aestrea waved Midnight slightly in a gesture of concession, still grinning.

“Back to what I was saying though. Your wife.”

He paused thoughtfully.

“They say she’s an absolute beauty. Like, genuinely stunning. Which honestly makes the whole situation even funnier because she could have done so much worse than you, and she still chose to—”

“Choose your next word carefully,” Caelid interrupted.

“—explore her options so thoroughly!” Aestrea finished brightly.

Silence.

“…I’m going to kill you.”

“Yeah, probably.” Aestrea nodded agreeably.

“But real quick, before that, do you think she’d be interested in—” He gestured vaguely at himself, especially at his handsome face.

“—all of this? I feel like I have a real shot, honestly. I’ve got a good personality, and I’m pretty confident in my appearance as well!”

“SHUT YOUR MOUTH.”

“I’m just saying, she clearly has a type, and the type is apparently NOT you, so statistically speaking—”

“—SHUT IT!!!”

“I feel like I tick most of the boxes she’s looking for, and I’d love to get in contact with her, maybe after we finish up here, you could—”

“—FUCKING SHUT UP!!!”

THRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!!!

A huge amount of killing intent instantly leaked out of Caelis’s body, causing multiple spatial fissures to appear across the sky.

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