Chaos began to panic. It was not the careful, calculated fear of strategy or retreat, but a raw, guttural, bestial emotion of a wounded animal. His burning pools of endless wrath focused solely on Kaiser now. The others no longer mattered. The Phoenix, the Princess, the Frozen Knight, the snake girl? They were all shadows in his periphery. His mind, once honed like a blade for centuries, now cracked under the weight of a question it could not answer. "How?"

  Kaiser stepped forward slowly, his bloodied form barely holding together, his right arm still wreathed in crimson fire, trailing smoke and molten embers like a comet made of fury. Chains still hung from him in ragged coils, remnants of the binding that Chaos had believed would crush him. He did not walk like a victor. He walked like death. "What is wrong?" he asked softly, his voice raspy, calm, deliberate. "Why are you running? Why does a monster flee from a man?"

  The words pierced something deeper than flesh. Chaos’s molten eyes flared, his teeth grinding against one another with such intensity that sparks burst from his maw. The idea—no, the insult—burned hotter than any flame. A human. A human had hurt him. A human he had never heard of. A name he did not know. A face that did not belong to any list, any prophecy, any archive of threat or myth. And this human, this nameless insect, had struck him with the flames of Tartarus.

  "How dare you," Chaos growled, his voice deeper, lower, layered with wrath and disbelief. "How dare you stand? How dare you speak to me as if we share breath, as if your bones are made of more than clay. How dare you exist in my sight!"

  The scream that left his mouth was not of this world. It split the air in two. His remaining chains whipped wildly around his form, then tore free, shaping his new arm in midair. First steel, then shadow, then form. The darkness bent and twisted, coalescing into a monstrous claw of jagged shadows and steel sinew. Then he dropped to all fours, the glass cracking beneath his limbs. In a breath, he vanished.

  He reappeared directly in front of Kaiser, the floor beneath him exploding from the sheer weight of his presence. His monstrous hand swung down in a vicious, precise arc, the intent clear: to bisect the man who had defied him. From shoulder to hip. From arrogance to silence.

  But it was not Kaiser’s body that met the blade of his fury. It was fire. Pure, burning fire. In the instant Chaos struck, Kaiser moved, barely, just barely, but enough. His hand, still burning with the cursed flames, scraped against the edge of Chaos’s hooded face—no, not a face, not truly, but the pulsing shadow that slithered and flickered beneath it. The flame ignited on contact, spreading up the hood like oil meeting a match.

  Chaos screamed again, not in rage nor triumph, but pain.

  Nevertheless, Chaoses blow still landed. It tore through Kaiser with devastating finality. His body split, the two halves twisting away, one to the left, one to the right, a grotesque silhouette painted against the still-burning flames behind him. Blood poured like a river. Yet even as his form fell in pieces, his burning hand reached forward, as if still chasing the impossible.

  The darkness screamed in victory. But it was not over. Chaos, staggering backward, clutched at his ignited face, clawing at the flames with hands not made to feel. The flames of Tartarus did not just burn the flesh. They burned identity, they burned memory, and they burned the very soul.

  And behind the curtain of agony, half of Kaiser still smiled, only to be widened once he saw that Chaos dropped to his knees.

  But he stopped screaming, instead he chose to screech, the sound piercing through the cavern like the cry of something not meant to live. It wasn’t human. It wasn’t beast. It was the sound of ancient fury being undone, of something primordial meeting a pain it had not known could exist. His molten shriek echoed off every wall, shaking the stalactites above, fracturing the sand-glass beneath him. His mouth opened wider than it should have, far too wide, and from it poured not just that same ungodly sound, but his very face—melting, drooping like wax under a sunless heat. His teeth tumbled out one by one, great jagged things more akin to forged blades than anything biological, each one clattering onto the floor like discarded weapons, cracking the glass they struck.

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  What followed was worse.

  Shadows, dense and living, poured from his mouth in clouds, writhing and snapping like smoke that hated the air. Then came the unnatural and volatile flames that poured from within him as if he'd been hollowed out and stuffed with raw hell. The fire spilled across the cavern floor in a mad swirl, instantly remelting the already scorched terrain. Chaos coughed, staggered, and spat the last of it from his throat, his body quaking as if something inside was revolting.

  Then he stopped.

  He froze in place for just a breath—a breath of silence so sharp it felt like the entire world was waiting to see if it would collapse. And then his eyes lit anew. Two great orbs of blazing fire ignited within the ruins of his face, flames rising and wrapping around the hollow sockets, pulling the shadows back in, consuming the chaos he had expelled. His melted features did not fully heal, but what returned was worse. Disfigured. Distorted. A cruel imitation of his former monstrous visage, now twisted by rage made shadow.

  He stood, shakily at first, then straighter, forcing his limbs to obey. His hands trembled—not from fear, not from pain, but from something older and far more destructive. Rage. The kind of rage that scorches memory, that drowns all reason, that leaves nothing behind.

  He took a step forward, then another, his ruined boots cracking the molten stone beneath them with each impact. Kaiser, split in two on the far side of the cavern, didn’t move. He didn’t need to, and he wasn’t sure he even could. Chaos’s fury didn’t need provocation anymore. It had taken root.

  The Liberator’s head twitched, an erratic, broken motion, like a puppet jerked by unseen strings. His jaw hung loosely, twitching at odd angles, his disfigured face still leaking threads of darkness that slithered like worms along his scorched flesh. And then, in a voice that sounded like fire dragged across bone, he spoke.

  “I will tear you out of existence…”

  Each word cracked like molten steel plunged into ice.

  “I will erase your name from the breath of time.”

  He stalked forward with a weight that made the ground hiss beneath him, his silhouette flickering in the lingering glow of evaporated light. His hands, once refined weapons of death, now trembled—not from weakness, but from the kind of rage that no longer served a purpose. The kind of hatred that just wanted something beautiful to die.

  Kaiser, despite being torn in half, was already beginning to reform. His torso, once a shredded ruin, had begun the impossible—stitching sinew, pulling tendons taut, bones writhing and knitting themselves back together in slow, grisly rhythm. Blackened muscle clenched. Ribcage rebuilt. The ragged stump of his legs lengthened inch by inch. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t fast. But it was inevitable.

  His breath came before his body fully did, ragged, uneven, but focused. And when his crimson eyes opened again, they were still locked onto Chaos with unflinching clarity. He didn’t look afraid. He looked aware. Chaos stopped above him, looming like judgment made flesh. That disfigured face, now half-shadow and half-flame, gazed down at the man who refused to die. His voice came as a rasp, edged with disbelief.

  “So this is how you survived me…” he muttered, as if tasting the realization for the first time. “Not just stubbornness. Not luck. But something… wrong.”

  His eyes shifted as crimson flickered to violet and back again, flames narrowing with dawning comprehension. “No Sol unit. No artificial core. No divine engine. This isn’t magic, nor is it some kind of invention. This… you were born with two powers?”

  A thick silence swallowed the battlefield, broken only by the hiss of molten glass underfoot. Then Chaos knelt beside him, slowly, deliberately, one monstrous claw hovering just above Kaiser’s heart. His voice was quiet now. Almost soft. “You don’t understand what’s happening to you. But that’s all right,” he said, and his words carried a terrible, practiced calm. “I’ll teach you. There are fates worse than death. And if your body refuses to die, then I will teach your soul how to scream.”

  Across the shattered battlefield, Regulus stirred. Bloody, broken, but not beaten, he pushed himself upright with one final cry of raw, helpless defiance. “Don’t—don’t use that on him!” He barely finished the words before a black chain shot out like a serpent, coiling around his body and slamming him to the ground with a sickening crunch. The echo of the impact silenced him completely.

  Celestine, her golden armor scorched, her blade lost somewhere in the rubble, watched in horror. Her light flickered dimly, barely a whisper of its former brilliance. Her lips parted, but no sound came as her entire body refused to move.

  Chaos leaned closer. Close enough that Kaiser could feel the heat rolling off him in waves, could see the flicker of teeth behind the veil of flame. His burning eyes locked with Kaiser’s, and this time, his voice held something ceremonial.

  “Tell me,” he whispered, “have you ever heard the word… Origin?”

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