CHAPTER 58: The Fifty-Eighth Fracture

Three days passed.

Kikyo didn’t sleep.

She and her team worked in rotations—rune stabilization, molecular synthesis, divine pressure containment. Oizys gave them two more vials of blood—no questions asked. Each had to be diluted across hundreds of test matrices, tuned to survive live combat entropy.

And finally—they succeeded.

The result wasn’t armor.

It wasn’t metal.

It was a liquid.

A shimmering, viscous serum, glowing faintly with silver-violet light. It pulsed in its vial like a heartbeat, alive with divine rejection. Not immune to curse energy—just fundamentally incompatible with it. Curses would still land. Flesh would still bruise. Bones would break.

But the disintegration—the body-and-soul unraveling—stopped cold.

Kikyo named it Project Aegis.

By dawn of the third day, they’d synthesized seven full doses. Injected into the bloodstream, it bonded beneath the skin—forming a protective aura. Not invincibility. But a chance to live.

I rolled up my sleeve.

“Alright,” I said. “Let’s find out if god-blood can keep me alive.”

After pulling my sleeve down, I looked at Kikyo.

“Can you make more? For the students?”

“It’ll take time,” she said. “But yes. We still have blood left from Oizys.”

“Perfect. Start immediately.”

Then I paused.

“Where are they, by the way? Alric and Oizys?”

“I don’t know,” she replied.

By the lake.

Alric sat alone, skipping stones. The water was still and glassy. Each flick of his wrist sent ripples across the surface. His thoughts were calm. His shoulders weren’t.

He heard soft footsteps.

He turned—and Oizys stood behind him. Her dark hair tousled slightly by the breeze. Her eyes softer than usual.

“You should rest,” Alric said. “You gave too much blood. Eat something. Please.”

“I’m fine,” Oizys said. “I’m a goddess.”

Alric gave a tired smile. “Doesn’t mean you won’t collapse.”

She didn’t answer.

Instead, she sat beside him—just far enough not to touch, but close enough for him to feel her presence like gravity.

They sat in silence.

“You come here often,” she said quietly.

“It’s quiet,” Alric said. “Lets me stop thinking.”

“But you still do.”

He looked at her briefly.

“I do.”

Another stone skipped. Then another.

“I didn’t want to be alone,” she said.

Alric’s hand paused mid-throw. The stone dropped softly to the grass.

He didn’t look at her. But he stayed.

Then—he felt it.

A touch. Barely there. Her fingers brushed his. Just a flicker of contact. Not holding. Not asking. Just reminding him that she was real. That she was still here.

He didn’t pull away.

They didn’t speak.

They didn’t move.

They just… stayed.

Cafeteria.

The atmosphere was quieter than usual. Tables half-full. Students recovering. Security drones hovered quietly.

Alric and Oizys sat together at the end of a long table.

Across from them sat Saaya, me, Yuuka, and Lyra—food half-finished.

“So,” Saaya said, glancing at the glow under my skin. “Project Aegis works?”

“It does,” Alric said. “We’re not invincible. But curse disintegration won’t kill us on impact anymore.”

Lyra looked at Oizys’s arm, where a faint bandage still sat. “Your blood did that?”

Oizys nodded. “It was necessary.”

Yuuka tapped the table. “We’ll need mass injections across the upper combat division. If another wave hits…”

“It won’t be like last time,” Alric said—firmer than he meant to.

Saaya raised an eyebrow, then looked between them.

“You two good?”

Alric nodded. “Yeah. We’re good.”

Oizys said nothing—but her eyes lingered, just briefly, on Alric’s hand under the table.

I looked to Oizys.

“So why are they attacking us now? The devil-users. What did you do to them?”

She turned to me—then to Alric.

“My only guess… is Thanatos. The god of death. Ruler of the Underworld. We never got along. He always stayed distant. But those other two gods? The ones always beside him?”

She paused.

“They never spoke. Never acted. Always just… followed. Lately I’ve wondered if they were ever real.”

Below the lower fractals.

Deeper than glyphs could reach. Beyond even devil sight.

The Underworld pulsed. Rotten. Endless.

Walls of fossilized screams. Rivers of ash running uphill.

No wind. No light. Only the stench of stillness.

At the center, beneath a sun that never rose, Thanatos stood alone.

Not as a reaper of flesh. But as a sovereign of silence.

Behind him, two gods knelt—glassy-eyed, blank-faced.

Puppets.

Lifeless constructs molded in the image of deities long dead.

He raised a hand. One flickered. Its skin glitched, exposing curse-stitched tissue beneath. It bowed deeper.

“Oizys suspects the truth.” Thanatos says in a low voice.

“She always asked the wrong questions. She thought this was about power. About blood. She never understood… it’s about memory.”

He stepped forward.

“The bridge to the lower fractals is gone. The mortals think they’ve survived. The gods think they’ve won. But they don’t know what death really means.”

His voice echoed wrong—like sound in a tomb still sealed shut.

Thanatos:

“With Set gone, and Oizys weakened, I am the last true god. I will erase every trace of resistance. And Oizys… you naive fool. You thought Earth was the only bridge?”

He raised both hands. The ground cracked—shadows spilling like veins.

“You know nothing of the Underworld.”

And behind him—

A portal opened.

Wide. Dark. Eternal.

It stretched down into the lowest fractal.

Where Sukara, Saaya, Alric, Yuuka, Lyra, and Oizys waited.