Chaos stood frozen in place, his monstrous body rigid with a tension he could not hide nor control. His molten grin had long since vanished, leaving behind only the bare, cracked grimace of a beast struggling to comprehend the impossible. The two wolves, those primal juggernauts, those walking calamities of Origin and divine power, had stopped, frozen mid-attack, not by force, not by battle, but by a simple word. A simple command. And not just stopped, but visibly shaken, trembling ever so slightly under an authority far greater than their own.

  The spheres of annihilation they had conjured still hung in the air, crackling with unspent devastation, yet neither beast dared move, dared breathe too deeply. The oppressive force of their pending clash hung heavy, but they themselves had submitted, cowed into silence.

  Then, Chaos heard something… A sound so mundane that it almost shattered the surreal nature of the moment. A click. Like a lock opening, or perhaps a chain snapping free. In the span of a single breath, the entire world shifted. The darkness that had once coated the stands, the ceilings, the very air itself, evaporated, pulled away as if sucked into some unseen void. Light, soft but absolute, flooded the ruins of the arena. For the first time, Chaos could see the surrounding stands clearly, could see the cracked stone seats and the ruined banners hanging in tatters, could see the strange and unnerving emptiness of the place.

  And then he saw it.

  His burning gaze locked onto a figure in the distance, high above the arena floor, where once only shadows had lingered. At the heart of the highest platform stood a throne, an unnatural throne, a construction of blackness itself, shaped like a giant hand reaching up from the earth, the fingers curved protectively around its occupant. The material was not stone, nor metal, nor anything Chaos could name. It was obsidian in color, but it drank light, pulling it inward like the void between stars.

  Seated upon that throne was Kaiser. Chains, translucent and shimmering like frozen air, wrapped around his limbs, binding him tightly to the throne. His head was bowed low, his long black hair spilling forward like a curtain over his lifeless features. It was clear, painfully clear, that he was unconscious, utterly unaware of the chaos unfolding around him. But it was not Kaiser who had spoken.

  Chaos’s eyes narrowed, scanning the throne, the air, the shadows—and then he saw her.

  Lying against the base of the throne, like a discarded weapon forgotten by time, was a woman. A creature of such terrible, breathtaking beauty that Chaos’s mind, for the first time in centuries, stumbled upon itself. She stirred lazily, her head lifting, her black hair cascading down her shoulders in rivers of night. When she rose to her full height, Chaos’s monstrous heart gave an involuntary shudder.

  She was wearing a beautiful black military uniform, its surface so dark it seemed to distort the light around her. Embroidered onto the shoulder was a symbol of an eye, made of glowing, pulsating white. She was also tall. Monstrously tall. Easily three meters in height, her presence towered even across the distance. Her body was powerful, almost sculpted from the very essence of existence, every movement radiating a terrifying grace. But it was her eyes that paralyzed him.

  They were pits of endless black, deeper than death, colder than the void of space, hungering without hunger. They drank everything—light, thought, even will itself—until Chaos could feel the edges of his soul recoiling instinctively, as if mere awareness of her was a threat to his existence.

  Chaos knew power when he saw it. He was power. He had devoured power. But standing there, witnessing her rise so casually from next from that throne of nightmares, he understood something. This thing was far stronger then him.

  Then his gaze slid, almost against his will, to her right arm. It was a monstrous, metallic claw, forged from some blackened alloy he could not name, crisscrossed with veins of molten red, as if it barely contained the inferno caged within.

  Chaos, the Titan of Shadows, the devourer of champions and The Kings Shadow, felt something rare… Dread.

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  He tried to think, tried to summon the many memories of faces he had known, of monsters and heroes and demons across the endless ages. There was something about her. Something that scratched at the locked vaults of his mind, familiar yet unreachable, like the last gasp of a dying dream. Someone he should remember. Someone important.

  He dug through the memories like a drowning man clawing for air. Kalia? No. She was powerful, fast, the best humanity could offer, but she was still human. This was not human. This was something beyond even them.

  And then she moved. Or rather, she did not move. One moment she was by the throne, standing idly like a queen bored of her kingdom, and the next, without the blink of an eye, without the flicker of a muscle, without even the faintest warning, she was gone. Chaos had not blinked. He had not faltered. Yet she was simply no longer where she had been. His burning, shattered gaze snapped around the arena with frantic movements, scanning for any trace, any echo of where she had gone, but there was nothing, nothing except the whisper of something impossibly faster than thought.

  Then, se found her standing between the two monstrous Wolves, between the twin maelstroms of pure destruction, standing as if she had always been there, arms extended outward at her sides, palms facing the beasts. Her left hand was pale, delicate, human in every sense of the word, beautiful enough to deceive lesser beings. Her right hand, however, was a monstrous black metal claw, a thing from nightmares, pulsing with burning crimson veins, every twitch whispering of murder, every subtle movement singing a hymn to extinction itself.

  She spoke then, her voice neither loud nor harsh, but carrying through the shattered, broken arena with a weight far heavier than any shout, far sharper than any scream, slicing reality itself to make way for her will. "Deimos," she said, her black eyes glinting with a terrible authority that left no argument to be had. "Phobos," she whispered again, her monstrous claw flexing once in a gesture of command.

  Chaos’s mind, ancient and wicked as it was, broke for a moment beneath the crushing realization of what he was hearing. Deimos. Phobos. He knew those names. Knew them as surely as he knew the taste of dying gods. The twin gods of Fear and Dread, the wolves who had once prowled the fields of the Divine War, who had torn through armies, broken the wills of other Titans, and feasted upon the hearts of demigods.

  He had heard the songs, warnings, the fearful mutters in the dying breaths of old Liberators who had seen them move across battlefields like living cataclysms. And he had heard, oh yes, he had heard, that they had died, slain during the final cataclysms that tore heaven from the earth, their spirits scattered like ashes on the wind.

  Yet here they stood. Alive. Breathing. More real than any nightmare. With powers far beyond the pale imitations mortals dared call miracles. His mind reeled, struggling to piece together a truth that should not have been possible, because gods should not have an afterlife, nor could they reincarnate. It was a law etched into the bones of the world itself, a law even Chaos had never dared dream of breaking. And yet here they were. Not only alive, but bound. Obedient. Tamed like beasts to the will of the woman who now commanded them with a word. Before he could think, before he could even catch his stolen breath, she spoke again, her voice a blade wrapped in velvet. "Fire," she commanded.

  And the beasts obeyed without hesitation.

  Chaos’s mind shrieked at him that she was mad, utterly and completely insane, to allow such power to be released at such close range, even if she was who he feared she might be. Even a Hope would have been hurt by what was about to happen.

  Roaring in pure, primal panic, Chaos summoned everything he had, pouring every fragment of shadow, every ounce of power into a barrier of blackened, screaming chains, weaving them into a dome of desperation. He braced himself for the world to end, for the agony to descend upon him like a second death.

  But no explosion came.

  Instead, Chaos dared to look beyond the trembling edges of his shield, and what he saw nearly drove him mad. She had caught it. The woman had caught the twin apocalypses in her hands. The black wolf’s molten sphere of death and the white wolf’s glacier of absolute zero had collided into her palms—and she held them there, effortlessly, as if she were cradling nothing more than dying stars. The full force of two gods. Trapped. Frozen. Reduced to nothing but helpless offerings before her.

  Her human hand squeezed the white frost sphere, her monstrous claw crushing the molten black sphere, and then, without effort, without visible strain, she turned them both into dust, letting the remains fall like forgotten ash through her fingers, vanishing before they could even touch the ruined ground. Chaos stood in stunned silence, the chains around him trembling, his monstrous frame shuddering with a primal instinct he could no longer deny. This was no mortal. No relic of the old wars. This was something new. Something worse. Something the world had not prepared for.

  Posting two chapters a day without a buffer is brutal, and honestly, it’s been showing in the writing quality to. As few people have pointed out, I messed up Kaiser's character in some places, and they're absolutely right. I appreciate the feedback, truly. It’s clear I need to take more time to make each chapter hit as hard as it should.