Free Web NovelChapter 10: Chapter 10: 999,999+ stats
"Buying time," Amon said. His eyes reflected the ring of fire climbing higher around him, the heat thick and hotter than ordinary. "You’re buying... time?"
He paced forward, each step more deliberate than the last.
"Did you forget who I am, Uriel?" His voice was calm. No, he forced it to be calm. Which was worse than if it had been loud. "Did you forget whose hands stopped the great holy war?"
The tone, she heard it, and she wanted to step back. She didn’t. Her duty compelled her to hold her ground. She raised her flaming sword between them and held it there, arms steady even though her chest wasn’t. She knew what she was standing in front of. She knew how this ended.
"No," she said, meeting his eyes. "Nobody forgot. No soul alive ever will, Amon. Hence I’m here, or should I say, we all are." She brought the sword down in a clean, committed arc, the sharpest blade in heaven, burning hot enough to split hell.
Tang.
The sound came out wrong. She felt nothing give, no flesh, no bone, no resistance at all. Her sword had not failed her in ten thousand years.
It failed her now.
Two golden eyes looked back at her through the fire of the sword.
Amon moved without hurry. His hand found her throat, fingers closing around the neck armor like it was simple cardboard. "I won’t ask how it came to this," he said quietly. "Just tell me where she is, Uriel. That’s all I fucking ask. Where is my wife?"
The heavenly steel around her neck buckled further under his grip. She felt pain for the first time in an age, the desperate kind, the kind she had almost forgotten the feeling of, and with that, fear followed, flooding in fast.
"It is..." She forced the words out. "For the greater good, Amon..."
He closed his eyes. Something moved across his face. Those words, which he had heard before, now sounded ever so irritating. Devilish, even.
"I see. You have chosen your fate," he said. "Then suffer it."
He closed his hand.
Golden blood struck his face in a single warm burst. Uriel’s eyes, still burning, still defiant and cruel, dimmed by degrees, like a fire running out of air.
Her body tilted slowly, and then she was gone, and so were the flames around him, all beginning to die.
He had thought the way forward was clear. Then the scent hit him, sulfur, dense and low, rolling in from every direction. When the last of the fire guttered out, he saw them all: red-skinned, horned, shoulder to shoulder in every direction he looked.
He exhaled through his nose.
Demons and angels working together. That’s new.
He didn’t need to look up to know what was above him. He could already feel it, the slow beat of wings, the pressure of golden light descending from above. Five main warrior angels hung in the air, encased head to foot in white-and-gold armor, each holding a spear of living light.
None of them looked happy about being there. Amon didn’t spare them much thought. All he wanted was the top of that mountain. He had felt her there. And that was all he needed.
But he couldn’t move. The fire had left something behind. He felt it now, etched into the ground around him, into the air itself, a binding. A binding activated by a sacrificial ritual. Not just holy, not hellish. Both. A marriage of dark and sacred magic he had never encountered in any war, any era, or any corner of creation.
Someone had prepared this specifically for him. He looked up. His patience, which had lasted centuries, finally ran out.
"Release me!!" The words came out like a breaking wave. The demons nearest to him stumbled back, scared, or simply from the wind pressure alone; nobody knew.
Even the angels backed away, and with that they understood, so they steadied themselves. One raised his spear. "Ready!" A beat. "Strike!"
Five beams of searing light hammered into Amon, his shoulders, his neck, his arms, and finally his legs, pinning him like a specimen. He couldn’t speak now. He could barely breathe.
But the ground was shaking. And the sky was not done with him.
Thunder split the air above. A storm’s eye cracked open in the clouds, and below his feet, the earth split red, a hellish light bleeding out through the rock like something enormous pressing from beneath.
He knew both signatures. He had fought them before. He had fought alongside them before, once, in another world.
Michael. And Lucifer.
The two brothers, who had spent eternity trying to destroy each other, were standing on the same side?
He kept his eyes on the mountaintop.
Not like this. Not here.
His status materialized in front of him, unbidden. His lips tore free from the binding, just enough. Just barely enough for two words.
"Unlock Everything."
[Status]
[Strength: 999,999+ (UNLOCKED)]
[Dexterity: 999,999+ (UNLOCKED)]
[Constitution: 999,999+ (UNLOCKED)]
[Intelligence: 999,999+ (UNLOCKED)]
[Wisdom: 999,999+ (UNLOCKED)]
[Charisma: 999,999+ (UNLOCKED)]
[Divinity: 999,999+ (UNLOCKED)]
[Tier 1 available. Would the user like to unlock it?]
The demons felt it before they saw it, something in their bones shifting, like a frequency too low to hear but impossible to ignore. The angels felt it too. All of them watched the golden immortal in silence as the light began to build inside him. A light and aura they were familiar with, fearful of, even.
The way pressure started to build around him. The trauma it brought, they remembered it all. They wanted to flee, but their lord had given the order.
They obeyed. Terrified, yes, but they still obeyed.
The demons swarmed on Amon. The angels threw spear after spear of light. And from below, the red bloom finally erupted, a hellish flower of pure cursed energy, vast enough to lift Amon off his feet, bathing him in Lucifer’s own scripture.
From above, the storm’s eye ignited into a golden sun, and that light came down too, crushing everything between it and the earth.
The demons and the angels caught between the two forces were gone before they could scream.
Amon hung suspended between heaven and hell. The cursed script of the underworld burned across his skin, crawling up his arms and neck in red letters, weakening him against the light from above, skinning him to his core.
Where it touched, his skin peeled back layer by layer. He had survived things that had unmade lesser gods. He had stood in the wreckage of a holy war and walked away.
He had never felt anything like this.
"AAAAAAAA!!!" He screamed in sheer, unbelievable pain.
The sound tore out of him, fully raw and totally unguarded. He had thought pain was something he understood completely.
He had been wrong.
[Tier 1 available. Would the user like to unlock it?]
But even this newfound pain wasn’t enough, as he labored one word. He forced it out through burning teeth, through a body that was coming apart at the edges.
"Yes!"
[Tier 1 – Mortal Transcendence (Unlocked – Eden Era)]
"Lets finish this, once and for all."
