God of the Damned

The pain was a holy fire, an agony unlike any he had ever known. It was a searing, purifying torment where Archangel Michael’s blade of light had pierced his side, a wound that did not bleed but burned with a golden, cauterizing flame that was actively at war with his very essence. Ren could feel it, a divine, sentient poison spreading through him, its purpose not just to kill but to unmake. It was the absolute, unwavering order of The Most High fighting against the chaotic, desperate truth of the Void that now resided in his soul, and the battleground was his own dying body. His Second Form armor, which had felt invincible, a shell of solidified night, was cracked and smoking around the gash, unable to contain the celestial, corrosive energy. He was dying. He knew it with an absolute, chilling certainty. The countdown that had begun with Akari’s sentence was now a frantic, final race measured in heartbeats.

He staggered to his feet, one hand clutching the wound, his breath coming in ragged, painful gasps that felt like inhaling shards of glass. Across the devastated square, Michael stood, a figure of perfect, pitiless, and terrifying light. His sun-forged sword was held ready, its brilliance undimmed. His wings of white, celestial fire blazed with a calm, terrifying intensity, casting a warm, golden, and deeply insulting glow over the carnage Ren had wrought. The Archangel had not moved, had not even seemed to exert himself in striking a fatal blow. He was a being of absolute, perfect order, waiting with the patient certainty of a god for the inevitable collapse of the chaos before him.

Ren had only minutes of life left, if that. The knowledge, which should have been terrifying, was instead a profound and sudden liberation. With nothing left to lose, there was nothing left to fear. The careful strategies, the cold calculations of the King, the desperate need to control the abyss within him—it was all a pointless luxury he could no longer afford. With a raw, guttural roar that was more beast than man, more despair than sound, he abandoned all defense, all pretense of control. He launched himself forward, no longer a king, no longer a strategist, but a dying, cornered animal fighting for its mate, with nothing left but its pain and its teeth.

His power, once a tool of cold, precise terror, was now a maelstrom of raw, chaotic rage, fueled by his agony and his singular, obsessive focus on the girl trapped somewhere in this burning, holy city. The square became a hellscape of warring absolutes, of light and shadow tearing at each other’s throats. Ren’s attacks were no longer controlled; they were lashes of pure, undiluted Void. Great, writhing tendrils of absolute darkness erupted from the cracked marble floor, trying to ensnare the Archangel’s feet. Bolts of devouring shadow, no longer precise pinpricks but chaotic, explosive blasts, shot from his hands, each one a scream of his pain given form.

Michael met it all with an effortless, perfect, and infuriating grace. He moved like a dancer in a hurricane, his sword of light a blur of impossible speed, parrying every chaotic blow, his fiery wings beating back the encroaching, grasping darkness with casual, dismissive flicks. He was the embodiment of order, and Ren was the embodiment of a messy, beautiful, and ultimately doomed chaos.

During a brief moment where they stood apart, separated by a newly formed crater of smoking, blackened marble, their voices, the very philosophies of their worlds, clashed. “Your struggle is pointless, Abomination,” Michael’s voice chimed, a perfect, multi-tonal, and harmonious chord that vibrated in the air, a sound of creation that was a physical pain to Ren’s unmaking essence. “You are a cacophony in the perfect song of creation. You are a stain of chaos upon a flawless canvas. The Most High has decreed that you be unmade, and I am its will.”

Ren laughed, a harsh, painful, and broken sound that ended in a wet cough, spitting a glob of black, Void-tainted blood onto the pristine white stone. “Your Most High,” he snarled, his voice a raw, human growl of pure, unadulterated venom, “is a god of hypocrites and butchers.” He pointed a trembling, armored finger in the direction of the city below, towards the world outside this sterile mountain. “I have seen the truth of this place. I have seen what your ‘holy’ knights do to children for sport in villages like Bethany! You speak of order and purity, but you are a cult of death, hiding your depravity behind a mask of light! You are a lie!”

Michael’s flawless, beautiful face did not change, but his eyes of white flame seemed to burn brighter, hotter, with a cold, divine fury. “The Fallen are a blight upon creation. A chaotic error that must be corrected. Cleansing a blight is not a sin. It is a holy duty. A concept your heart, steeped in mortal affection and profane darkness, cannot possibly comprehend.”

“My cause is not chaos,” Ren spat back, steadying himself against a shattered pillar, the world swimming in his vision. “It is love. A concept your perfect, sterile, and hollow heaven has clearly forgotten. And I will burn your perfect world to the ground to save her from you.”

Before Michael could respond with another perfect, infuriating chord of dogma, a new sound tore through the air, a sound of beautiful, glorious destruction. A deep, grinding roar from far below, followed by the splintering, explosive crash of ancient gates. The main gates of the Citadel of Zion, which had stood as an unbreakable testament to Zion’s might for ten thousand years, exploded inward in a shower of golden splinters and shattered stone. The full army of the Dominion of the Damned, a tide of black iron and shadow, poured into the city’s outer sanctums. Azazel and Lilith were at their head, their roars of triumph joining the chorus of a thousand demonic war cries. The full-scale invasion of Zion had begun.

The sound, the psychic shockwave of his army’s arrival, reached the square, and for a fraction of a second, Michael’s attention was diverted, his head turning instinctively toward the source of the new chaos. It was the only opening Ren would get. He knew, with the cold clarity of a dying man, that he could not win this fight. He was too wounded, his enemy too perfect, too powerful. A normal attack would not work. He had to do something absolute. Something final.

He stopped fighting. He stood still, lowering his hands, his body trembling with the strain of just remaining upright, a broken king in a ruined city. Michael, sensing the shift, paused, his head tilting in what might have been curiosity. “Have you accepted your annihilation, Blasphemy?”

“I have,” Ren whispered, the words meant only for himself. He closed his eyes. He let go. He let go of his control, his focus, his anger, his love, his very sense of self. He opened the floodgates of his soul and unleashed the Absolute Void completely, holding nothing back.

Just as he did, Azazel, having fought his way through the city’s panicked and disorganized defenses, burst into the public square at the head of a cadre of his personal guard. He saw his King, wounded and bleeding, his armor shattered, standing before the radiant, terrifying, and impossibly powerful Archangel. He was about to roar, to charge, to lend his own considerable, ancient power to the fight, but he froze. He was a being of immense power, an ancient lord of Sheol, but what he was witnessing was beyond him. This was a battle between two absolute beings, two fundamental, opposing concepts of creation, and he was nothing more than a speechless, terrified observer.

The world went silent. A wave of pure, unmaking nothingness flooded out of Ren, not as a beam or a blast, but as an expanding sphere of anti-existence. It did not rage or burn. It simply was. It was the final, perfect silence that predated creation, the absolute zero of existence. Michael’s eyes of white flame widened in something that looked, for the first time, like divine shock. He, a being of pure creation and absolute order, was caught in this wave of absolute anti-existence. He raised his sword of light, a final, defiant, and beautiful act of holy rebellion, but the light was devoured. His form, cast from polished sunlight, began to dissolve, to fray at the edges like a photograph burning from the inside out. His wings of celestial fire were extinguished into black smoke. He was being unmade, erased from the perfect song of creation.

The wave receded as Ren's last ounce of strength, of will, of life, was spent, his consciousness pulling the Void back into himself just before it could consume the entire mountain. Michael was gone.

The square was utterly, profoundly silent. Azazel stared, his mind unable to process the terrible, self-destructive victory he had just witnessed. Ren’s Second Form armor, shattered and smoking from the impossible, suicidal strain, cracked and fell away from him like shattered, black glass. He was left as just Sasaki Ren, a boy in a simple, tattered, and blood-soaked tunic, his body now riddled with black, smoking wounds from his own uncontrolled power, the great, glowing gash in his side a fatal, internal sunrise.

He collapsed to his knees, victorious, but with only moments left to live. His head was bowed, his strength gone, his journey over. He had kept his promise. He had defeated heaven. But he had lost himself. Then, slowly, with an effort that seemed to take all the will left in the universe, he lifted his gaze. He looked past the silent, terrified Azazel, past the defeated, buried form of Gideon, and fixed his dying eyes on the golden doors of the High Temple. The place he had last seen her. The final object of his entire, broken, and now-ending existence.