Chapter 456: The Beginning Of The End [CXVIII]

CRAAAACK!

The ice directly beneath Caelid’s boots simply stopped existing, a perfect circle of nothing spreading outward from where he stood, the frozen battlefield dissolving into fine particles that scattered sideways in the shockwave of his presence, finally, fully releasing.

Six wings snapped open behind him.

FWOOOOOM!

The air displacement alone hit Aestrea like a wall, sliding him two feet backward across the ice despite his planted feet.

’…Yep. Time to run.’

His divine energy flooded into his legs and launched him skyward a half-second before Caelid’s fist came down onto the exact spot where he’d been standing.

BOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The ground where Aestrea had spent the last several hours fighting simply ceased to exist.

The entire frozen battlefield, the bodies, the wings, the gold-stained ice, the residue of the seventh move, all of it, dropped away into a crater of absolute destruction that went down further than light reached.

A perfect circle of obliteration three hundred meters wide, carved into the Divine Realm like a signature.

Aestrea looked down at it from two hundred meters up.

’…He did that with one punch.’

’Okay…’

“COME DOWN HERE!!!” Caelid’s voice came from below, stripped of every shred of the composure he’d been carrying for the entire battle.

Six wings drove him upward like a launched projectile, both fists igniting with destructive authority that didn’t look like fire or lightning or any element with a clean name.

He crossed two thousand meters in less than a second.

Aestrea was already somewhere else.

FWOOOOSH!

He twisted sideways in the air, Caelid’s right fist passing close enough to his ribs that the destructive authority grazing the edge of his torn clothes simply removed that section of fabric from existence.

’…Shit. He’s too fast!’ Aestrea groaned inwardly.

’Just… Don’t think about that.’

“You know what I just realized!” Aestrea called out, spinning in the air to face Caelid mid-dodge, his white hair streaming behind him, blood trailing from his cheek in thin red lines against the sky.

“Your wife’s title! Goddess of Whores!” He pointed.

“Does that mean she’s the goddess who IS a whore, or the goddess who RULES OVER whores?!” He faked a genuinely curious expression.

“Because those are very different career paths and I want to make sure I understand your family situation correctly!”

“I WILL UNMAKE YOU—”

Caelid’s left hand swept sideways in a wide arc, and the space to Aestrea’s left simply collapsed.

It was pure destruction applied to a section of reality, a twenty-meter stretch of sky folding inward on itself and compressing into nothing.

Aestrea dove below it.

KRRSSSSHHHHH!

The collapse passed over his back close enough that he felt the pull of it, the spatial vacuum trying to drag him inward before he cleared the edge of it by about four inches.

’…Phew. That was a close call.’

He leveled out below the collapsed space and looked back up at Caelid, who was already repositioning above him, six wings driving him into a dive, both hands raised, destructive authority building between his palms into a concentrated mass that was making the air around it simply stop being air.

’He’s going to throw that… if that hits me, I’ll evaporate from existence, so I need to be extremely careful with his movements.’

“Also!” Aestrea continued, angling sideways and downward simultaneously, watching the mass between Caelid’s palms with his white eye tracking its growth rate and probable release angle.

“I was thinking about your offer! The second-in-command position!”

“THE OFFER,” Caelid snarled, still building the mass between his hands, “IS RESCINDED—”

“No, no, hear me out!” Aestrea called up to him.

“I’d actually reconsider! But I have one condition!”

The mass between Caelid’s palms reached critical density.

“THERE ARE NO CONDITIONS—”

“I want your wife’s address!”

“—DIE!!!”

KROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The compressed destruction left Caelid’s hands and crossed the distance between them so fast that Aestrea’s combat instincts registered it approximately half a breath before it arrived.

He moved.

『 Third Move! (✦ Moonlight’s One Flash ✦) 』

FWIP!

He reappeared forty meters to the left, the attack passing through where he’d been and continuing downward, striking the terrain far below with a sound that was less like an explosion and more like the concept of that terrain being formally removed from existence.

The shockwave hit him anyway.

KOOM!

It caught him mid-air and sent him tumbling sideways, end over end, both blades gripped tight by reflex alone, the world spinning past him in alternating flashes of destroyed sky and the vast empty space of the Divine Realm before he caught himself, spread his arms, and found his orientation.

His left side was screaming, especially his shoulder, which had a new and very specific complaint.

’Damn… still alive, phew.’

But unfortunately for him, Caelid was already above him again.

Caelid was already above him again.

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

They were not the eyes of someone who had ever been the Dinner God.

They were the eyes of the second-in-command of the Primordial Court.

The God of Destruction.

And he was, without any question, done being mocked.

“You think this is funny,” he scoffed, and his voice had gone somewhere past anger into a register that was quieter and significantly more frightening.

Destruction authority began bleeding off his body passively, not directed, not aimed, just present, the air around him darkening at the edges wherever it touched.

“You think everything is a joke.”

He began descending slowly. Deliberately.

“Let me show you… What do I do to jokes!”

Both hands rose.

And the sky above Caelid’s head began to come apart.

Reality itself peeling back section by section, the Divine Realm’s fabric separating like pages being turned, each layer revealing something darker underneath until what sat above him was no longer sky at all but a yawning, lightless aperture of pure destructive potential, the distilled essence of a god who had spent eternity perfecting the art of ending things.

It was enormous… and it was also aimed directly at Aestrea.

’…’

’Okay.’

’That one I actually cannot let hit me.’

Aestrea looked up at it.

Then across at Caelid’s face.

Then back up at the aperture.

“…Your wife would not approve of this behavior,” he said, slightly more breathlessly than before.

“AESTREA!!!”

THRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!!!

Aestrea’s eyes narrowed at his.

’Now…!’

[Domain of Silence]

It expanded outward from his body in a single, soundless pulse.

One moment the sky around Aestrea was open and exposed and directly beneath the most destructive thing he had seen since arriving in the Divine Realm.

The next, the Domain simply existed, a perfect sphere of absolute silence surrounding him in every direction, its boundaries invisible to the naked eye, its interior cut off from the outside world as completely as if it had never been part of it.

Sound died at the threshold.

Light bent slightly at the edges.

Caelid’s enormous destructive aperture above continued building, and Aestrea could see it through the Domain’s boundary, could watch the layers of reality peeling back and the darkness deepening and the authority condensing into something that didn’t have a name in any language he knew.

But inside the Domain, none of it could touch him yet.

’It’ll hold,’ he thought, watching the aperture reach its peak above him. ’My domain is pretty strong… Even against a God of Destruction, it should be able to—’

Caelid looked at the Domain.

His head tilted slightly, but the fury in his eyes didn’t disappear.

But something else moved through them briefly.

The specific expression of someone who has encountered an obstacle and has already passed the step of being surprised by it.

He almost smiled.

“…Cute.”

And brought both hands down.

KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The aperture released everything at once.

His attack collided at the Domain’s outer boundary produced a sound that had no right to exist.

The Domain held for two seconds.

Two full seconds of Aestrea watching the boundary compress inward, the invisible walls of his own technique being pressed from every direction simultaneously by an authority that specialized in the removal of things that were currently existing.

’Holding…’

’…Still holding…’

KRRRRRRRR!

’…Not holding.’

SHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAATTTTTTT!!!

The Domain of Silence broke.

Not at one point. Everywhere simultaneously.

The entire sphere fracturing outward from every surface at once, the pieces of it dissolving before they’d fully separated.

The silence it had been maintaining released in a single compressed instant that hit Aestrea’s eardrums like a physical strike as all the sound that had been blocked outside came rushing back in at once.

The destructive authority followed half a breath behind it.

Aestrea was already moving.

He threw himself sideways with everything his exhausted legs had left, the Heavenly Swallowing Sword crossing in front of him in a reflexive guard that he knew with complete clarity was not going to be sufficient.

It wasn’t.

The edge of the released authority caught him across his left side.

Not the full force of it, but the outermost fringe of what Caelid had released, the part that was already dissipating as it spread outward from the center.

Just a slight edge of it.

KOOM!

It hit him like being struck by something that hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted him to exist.

He went sideways through the air for a long, uncontrolled moment, tumbling hard, the sky and the destroyed terrain below trading places several times before he spread both arms and arrested the spin through sheer stubborn application of whatever he had left.

“C-cough, kagh… fuuuuck!”

Aestrea coughed, seeing the dark-red liquid on the back of his hand.

’…The Domain is on a forty-eight-hour cooldown now.’

’That’s unfortunate.’

’Very unfortunate.’

’Extremely, critically, life-threateningly unfortunate.’

He hung in the air, hair plastered across his face, both swords still somehow in his hands, his left side now joining his shoulder and his back and his ribs in a comprehensive and loudly expressed committee of complaints about his current life choices.

He looked across the distance at Caelid.

Caelid looked back at him.

Six wings spread.

Both hands still trailing the residue of what he’d just released, dark at the edges, the authority still bleeding off his fingers in lazy curls that each individually could probably ruin Aestrea’s afternoon.

His expression said very clearly that he was not finished.

That he was, in fact, approximately as far from finished as it was geometrically possible to be.

Aestrea pushed his hair out of his face with the back of his sword hand.

Looked at the state of his own left side briefly before looking at Caelid.

“Okay.”

His voice came out slightly rougher than before.

“I’ll be honest with you.”

Caelid said nothing.

Destruction authority continued bleeding passively off his hands.

“That was pretty impressive,” Aestrea continued, with the tone of someone delivering a fair and balanced review.

“The aperture thing. The layers peeling back.” He made a vague gesture with Midnight. “Very dramatic. Very well executed. She’d probably have been impressed too, honestly.”

Caelid’s left eye twitched.

“Your wife,” Aestrea clarified helpfully, in case there was any confusion about who he meant.

The destruction authority bleeding off Caelid’s fingers stopped being lazy.

“I’m just saying,” Aestrea said, drifting backward slightly and entirely casually, watching Caelid’s hands with his white eye at full intensity, “that if you put half the energy you’re putting into trying to kill me into your marriage, she might not have needed to look elsewhere and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now.”

“…”

“Food for thought,” Aestrea added.

“…I’m going to destroy you so completely,” Caelid cursed him directly.

“That not even the concept of you will remain.”

“See, that’s the anger talking.” Aestrea pointed at him. “That’s exactly the kind of emotional unavailability she was probably—”

“FYOU FUCKING BASTAAAARDDD!!!”

THRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!

The sky came apart again.

And Aestrea, bleeding and broken and grinning despite every possible reason not to be, moved.

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