Leon's blade crashed against Damien's club with a thunderclap that split the battlefield.
Damien moved like sothing unchained, like a bloodhound finally loosed from its leash. He surged forward with terrifying montum, each step carrying the weight of a stampeding herd. The ground fractured beneath him, his charge capable of flattening mountains, of crushing anything foolish enough to stand in its path.
And yet… Leon did.
Seventy-two blazing suns ignited behind him, their radiance pouring into his strike. Golden flas roared to life, eting Damien's corrupted blue mist in a violent collision that tore the air apart.
The clash sent shockwaves rippling outward, blasting everything in their vicinity away as fire and corruption devoured the space between them.
Demons that strayed too close to Leon's blade were reduced to ash in an instant, their forms unable to withstand the purity of his flas.
At the sa ti, the knights of Eldorin were forced to retreat, their ranks breaking as Damien's suffocating demonic aura spread like a plague. To remain any closer was to risk collapse—the corruption alone was enough to strip them of consciousness.
But amidst the chaos, the most shaken were the two at its centre.
Leon's eyes narrowed. He had grown, evolved far beyond the man who once struggled against the Apostles. Even then, he had believed—no, known—that he could face them one-on-one.
And now, standing at this height, he had expected nothing less than dominance.
Yet Damien… matched him.
Blow for blow. Force for force. There was no overwhelming advantage. No clear superiority. Only raw, equal violence.
Across from him, Damien's crimson eyes flickered with frustration. This was not how it was ant to unfold. He had intended to crush Leon in a single strike. To leave him broken on the ground, gasping like a wounded animal.
But instead, Leon stood firm—unyielding, unbroken—eting every attack head-on without faltering. It was absurd.
After the baptism… after the descent of the Demon King… the Apostles had been reborn. Their power had surged, their limits shattered. Each of them had grown exponentially—no, monstrously. Their strength had, at the very least, doubled.
Yet, Damien could not overpower him.
The realisation gnawed at him, twisting his expression into sothing darker.
Because this battle was never ant to stall here. Their objective lay beyond Leon. The dragon behind him.
If they couldn't defeat Leon… how were they going to enact their vengeance against Amon?
Damien refused to believe that they were inferior. Ever since the Prophet had saved them from their wretched fate, the Twin Brutes were destined to stand at the apex. To bring all of humanity under their feet. And once he destroyed Leon… he would be one step closer to achieving that dream.
"Die!!!"
A greyish-blue mist bled into existence, swallowing Damien whole as the Apostle of Vengeance unleashed an aura that defied all prior asure.
Lightning coiled around his massive, demonic fra, writhing like living serpents drawn to the chaos within him. His club trembled under the sheer weight of power forced into it, its surface wreathed in an aura so imnse it distorted the air itself.
Veins along his body pulsed violently, swollen with surging demonic mana, as though his very blood had beco a raging current too vast to contain. The ground answered in kind. It quaked, fractured, scread beneath his presence.
Within his aura, energies clashed like feral beasts—violent, untad, tearing into one another in a storm that resembled a hurricane given form.
The battlefield itself seed to recoil, as if bracing for sothing it knew it could not withstand. The chaos condensed. The storm drew inward. Damien swung. There was no technique. No restraint. Only annihilation.
The mont his club cut through the air, the world answered with a deafening roar. The battlefield convulsed, the earth splitting apart as a shockwave detonated outward. The scent of ozone flooded the air, sharp and biting, as lightning carved through everything in its wake.
And when it was over, Destruction remained.
Around Leon, the land had been reduced to ruin. Craters yawned open in every direction, the ground scorched black as if the heavens themselves had struck it down.
"Tch, I can't hold back then."
Seeing the destruction one swing wrought, Leon knew that he couldn't pull his punches. Ascalon glead with a transcendent might as the whispers of the two predecessors echoed within his mind.
'To fight like a Solaris ans to forget the limitations of mankind.'
The Solaris Founder's words rang deeply in his psyche.
'Fight without fear… for there are none above you.'
The Solaris Saint's advice pierced his heart.
It was through both of their guidance that Leon had been shaped into the monster he now stands as. Every trial. Every lesson. Every fragnt of power they had entrusted to him had forged sothing far beyond what either of them might have first envisioned.
And now, after purging the Goddess's lingering divinity from Ascalon, Leon no longer stood as a re wielder of the blade.
He claid it…. And beca its sole owner.
With that, the ability that had been locked since the Goddess's holy power was suppressing it was finally unlocked.
Solaris flas roared to life within the ancient sword, no longer restrained, no longer borrowed. At the sa ti, a current of heavy, sacred water spiralled around the blade—dense, deliberate, and unyielding.
Fire and water, opposites by nature, should have clashed… should have rejected one another. But in Leon's grasp… They harmonised.
Like Amon's Eclipse, the two forces did not cancel out—they fused.
Twisting together, evolving, reshaping into sothing that no longer belonged to either origin. The result was an aura that defied categorisation.
It was not Solaris.
Not the ocean.
Not even the vestiges of holy power that once clung to the blade.
It was sothing new.
Sothing that belonged to Leon alone.
And as if the world itself bore witness to this awakening, his aura took form. A creature erged from the convergence of fla and tide—a noble white lion, vast and regal. Its body glead with streaks of gold, each strand of its existence radiating an overwhelming, almost divine presence. Its mane flowed not with fire, but with water—endless, shifting, alive—cascading like a living current that obeyed no law but his own.
This was no borrowed divinity.
No blessing from a false Goddess.
This power was unbound—free from the constraints of heaven and earth, untouched by doctrine or decree. It was raw, embryonic… the birth of sothing that had never existed before.
A new divinity. And at its centre… Leon. The God of…
❖❖❖
In the middle of Hyarum, the Goddess inhabiting Ellahan's body looked to the sky. No, she looked south. Towards Morzerth, the place that should have been captured by the Demons. Her gaze wasn't out of anger or sadness, but caution.
A new energy… one that shouldn't have existed since she had monopolised the mandate of heaven.
Although her face showed indifference, Hyades could feel the emotions burning in her chest. Perhaps it was because she was now occupying a human body that the emotions that a Goddess shouldn't have were now resurfacing.
First ca anger… then acceptance… and finally urgency.
"The new Pantheon… It's erging."
All her life, she had been desperately holding onto the mandate of heaven. She refused to let it go, even going as far as preventing the world's desire to evolve just to monopolise her spot. Aeons passed, and she had prevented the rise of multiple species.
Titans… Dragons… Demons… And an untold more before recorded history.
But now… she was unable to stop humanity's rise.
Hyades raised her arm, divinity gathering at her fingertips as though she were about to pass judgnt upon the world itself.
If she could not halt the rise of this new Pantheon… then she would erase its architects.
Light answered her will.
Not the gentle radiance of faith—but sothing vast, suffocating, absolute. Holy power surged beyond anything Hyarum had ever witnessed, swelling to a magnitude that bent the very fabric of the world.
The ground trembled as if it could no longer bear her presence. The sky split open, cracks of brilliance tearing through the heavens as though reality itself was being forced apart. The world groaned under the weight of her divinity as Hyades reached further, drawing upon everything she was, everything she ruled.
And then, the Church fell.
One by one, every mber of the Holy Church crumpled to the ground.
Not in pain. Not in resistance. But in emptiness.
It was as if sothing had been taken from them—sothing fundantal.
Their bodies remained, but their souls… flickered, thinned, as though on the verge of being extinguished.
Holy power was not separate from Hyades.
It was hers—her mana, her domain.
And in calling upon it, she claid what was rightfully bound to her.
Every being across the world who possessed even the faintest trace of that power was stripped of it, their essence drawn toward her like tributaries feeding a single, insatiable ocean. Even if it ant draining them dry. Even if it ant their deaths.
And still… It was not enough.
For what stood against her was no re mortal force.
To destroy a Divine required more than the power of the world. So Hyades reached higher. Beyond the mortal plane. Beyond the limits imposed upon existence itself. She reached for the heavens. And in that mont… She erred.
Because even a Goddess was not exempt from law.
The power of the heavens was absolute, untouchable, and never ant to manifest within the material plane.
And the mont Hyades tried to draw it down, to force that infinite authority into a finite world…
The balance shattered. Her control slipped. The vast ocean of gathered energy turned unstable, writhing beyond her grasp.
The heavens did not answer—they rejected her.
And in that rejection, the power she had stolen, seized, demanded…
Was torn away from her.
It surged back. Rushing violently into the bodies it had been ripped from. The fallen clergy convulsed as their stolen essence returned, leaving Hyades standing alone, her arm trembling under the strain of what she had nearly unleashed. Even control over Ellahan's body wavered, the vessel threatening to collapse under the backlash of her own overreach.
Silence followed. The sky sealed. The ground stilled.
The world, though scarred, endured.
Hyades lowered her arm, her expression blank—devoid of fury, devoid of panic.
Only the calculation remained.
Without a word, she turned and departed, her presence vanishing as she returned to the Holy See.
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