Aside from the power of Laws, gods possessed different divine abilities. So could cast devastatingly potent spells, while others wielded more peculiar powers.
Myria was among the latter.
Her divine ability was Fractured Persona, a terrifying gift that allowed her to look into a target’s emotions through her mirrors and isolate specific monts of intense feeling.
From those monts, she could extract a single emotional state and amplify it until it consud the entirety of that person’s personality.
And that was precisely what she had done to Aiden.
She had reached into his recent past and found the exact mont when his hatred for Lucina had burned brightest; which was when the goddess had nearly killed Laela, his wife.
That all-consuming desire for retribution against the god who dared threaten what was his.
Myria had taken that singular mont of pure fury and made it Aiden’s entire being.
——
On the battlefield, Aiden’s transformation was instantaneous and catastrophic.
His body expanded violently, black scales erupting across his form as his limbs stretched and reford. His neck extended, his wings unfurled and within seconds, a massive two-hundred-foot black dragon stood there.
The sheer presence of the fully transford dragon was overwhelming.
The ground beneath him cracked and split apart, and his red eyes blazed with pure, unfiltered hatred as he opened his massive jaws and released a roar.
The roar carried with it the dragon’s Ti Authority.
Ti imdiately froze around them.
Thera and Orion, caught mid-motion as they moved to respond to Aiden’s sudden transformation, were locked in place like statues.
The dragon’s massive tail swept forward in a devastating arc.
It first slamd into Orion’s form, and the impact sent the god hurtling backward through the air before finally crashing into the distant ground with an explosion of debris.
The tail didn’t stop.
It reversed direction imdiately, sweeping back around in another brutal arc toward Thera.
The goddess, still frozen mid-air where she’d been observing the contest monts before, took the full brunt of the strike directly to her midsection.
She was launched downward, her body slamming into the ground so hard it cratered the earth beneath her. Dust and rubble erupted upward in a massive cloud that blotted out the sky above her.
But even as the black dragon rampaged, there was sothing else.
A small voice.
Deep within Aiden’s subconscious, there was a flicker of clarity.
He hadn’t felt this way monts ago. The transition had been too sudden and extre.
One second he’d been sparring with Orion, even enjoying the challenge at so point, and the next mont, there was this.
Yeah, sothing was definitely wrong.
That small voice grew louder, and Aiden, even consud as he was by rage, instinctively used the destructive skill, zero effect on himself.
Unfortunately, the ability had been cast by a being at a level equal to or higher than his own, so fully reversing its effects would take so ti.
The effect of Ti Stop wore off as it couldn’t possibly hold both Archons in place past a full minute.
Orion groaned as he pushed himself up from the crater where he’d landed, several kiloters away from where they’d been fighting.
He blinked in confusion, trying to process what had just happened.
Thera had flown out of her own crater, and to Orion’s side. She muttered "I wonder why he is suddenly attacking this way?"
Her expression was one of genuine bewildernt mixed with alarm.
The black dragon turned toward them both, and opened his jaws wide.
A white light began forming, a a concentrated mass of destructive energy that grew with each passing second.
Both of them had their eyes widened slightly at the forming attack.
A colossal stream of white destructive energy erupted from the dragon’s mouth, tearing through the air toward them.
This was Oblivion Beam.
Orion’s body began to change. His muscles swelled rapidly as his size increased from just over six feet to nearly eight feet tall.
His glowing eyes blazed brighter than ever before as yellow lightning exploded outward from his form in wild arcs around him.
He took a step forward and raised his left palm toward the incoming beam, whilst Thera flew out of the attack’s range.
The Oblivion Beam slamd into his hand, and Orion scread as the beam’s power tore into him.
"ARGHHH!"
The force of it drove him backward across the ground, with his feet carving deeply into the earth as he struggled to hold his position.
The white light seared against his flesh, burning through his skin and muscle alike, with blood beginning to stream down his arm.
If he wasn’t an Archon, the beam’s damage could’ve done him in at that point.
But Orion didn’t stop. He gritted his teeth and began pushing forward.
One step. Then another.
His feet lifted off the ground as he flew forward into the beam itself, forcing his way through it inch by agonizing inch.
The range of the Oblivion Beam began shrinking as Orion pushed closer and closer to its source.
And then Orion was right there, directly in front of the black dragon’s massive jaws where the beam originated from.
He pulled back his right and drove it upward in a devastating uppercut that connected squarely with the underside of the dragon’s jaw.
The black dragon’s head snapped backward, with its entire body staggering as it stumbled several steps in reverse.
The Oblivion Beam cut off abruptly as Aiden’s concentration broke from the force of Orion’s strike.
Orion finally got a brief mont of relief, breathing hard as smoke rose from his charred, bloodied left arm.
The mont of relief ended almost imdiately.
The mont the black dragon staggered backward from his uppercut, the god of strength launched himself forward again, moving in a blur of yellow lightning.
His fist connected with the dragon’s scaled chest, and the thunderous impact drove Aiden back several more steps.
Orion pulled back for another strike, with his right fist cocked and ready to deliver what would surely be an even more punishing blow.
But his knuckles slamd into sothing invisible.
Orion’s eyes widened as he realized he couldn’t move forward anymore.
He’d been isolated.
An invisible barrier had ford around him so quickly he hadn’t even noticed it manifesting.
This was Aiden’s Space Lock skill, trapping Orion within a confined pocket of reality.
Orion glanced around for a brief mont, trying to understand the nature of the confinent.
Then he noticed it.
A faint crack had already spread across the space where his fist had struck, left behind from the mont he attempted that final punch.
Then he grinned. And started punching even more.
CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.
Each impact sent more fractures spreading through the invisible prison. The cracks grew wider, longer, webbing outward like shattered glass until the entire space around Orion looked ready to collapse.
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