Chapter 103 – When the Gods Descend

The sky split.

Not like lightning, not like storm—this was a wound. A tear in the heavens, from which poured light too sharp for mortal eyes. Across the fractured marshland, the air bent under the weight of their arrival.

Figures emerged, colossal and radiant, each stride reshaping the broken horizon. Their forms weren’t flesh and bone but embodiments of belief itself—burning halos, wings wrought of scripture, armor carved from the prayers of millions.

Aria staggered back, her staff shaking in her grip.
“The Pantheon…” she whispered. “They’ve broken their silence.”

Kael’s gaze locked on the foremost of them—a towering god crowned in fire, his presence like a sun condensed into a man’s shape. The god’s voice thundered, each syllable echoing like law itself:
“Kael, anomaly of fate. The flaw born of betrayal and false rebirth. You are not the Hero. You are the fracture. You will be unmade.”

Kael did not bow. He did not flinch. His sword, dark with Tsuyoi’s stain, hung at his side like a blade waiting to devour light itself.
“Unmade? You already tried that once. It didn’t stick.”

The gods stirred, their radiance flaring in outrage. The fire-crowned god raised his hand, and the air collapsed into a torrent of flame—a sun-born inferno meant to scour Kael’s existence from the realm.

But Kael moved.

Tsuyoi bled from him in black arcs, twisting, rewriting. The inferno struck, but instead of consuming him, the flames bent sideways, erased from their path as though history itself declared they had never been cast.

Aria’s eyes widened. “You… you just erased a god’s will.”

Kael smirked faintly, though his grip tightened, veins of shadow crawling higher along his arm.
“Then maybe gods aren’t above rewriting after all.”

The fire-crowned god’s voice shook the air:
“Blasphemy. You wield not power, but corruption. For every stroke, the fabric of existence frays. You are not rewriting—you are eroding.”

Behind him, more gods descended—each embodying storm, ocean, earth, sky. The Pantheon itself, all converging upon the lone hero who should not exist.

Aria’s heart raced. She saw what Kael didn’t: every time he used Tsuyoi, the world shivered, crumbling further. Yet the gods’ wrath gave no room for hesitation.

Kael lifted his blade, shadow roaring around him like a second storm. His words cut through the divine thunder:
“Then come. Let’s see whose story ends first—yours, or mine.”

And with that, the battlefield was written anew: gods against the flaw they could not erase.