**Chapter 97: "The Bone Family Reunion"**
*Volume 5 – Exodus*
**Kruger National Park – The Black Heart of the Veil**
Hades moved like a verdict.
His fist crossed the distance before Thembinkosi's brain finished processing the first swing, and then there was a hole where a ribcage used to be. Thembinkosi hit the ground on his back, blood pouring upward out of him like his body had forgotten which way gravity went.
He should have died.
Instead, buried in the dirt beside his outstretched hand, something small and blue-white cracked open and screamed light into his palm.
*Energy Absorption.*
The wound sealed itself mid-breath, hunger where pain should have been. Hades tilted his head, curious the way a child is curious about an insect it's about to step on, and fired a beam of interdimensional force wide enough to erase a hillside.
Thembinkosi drank it.
He stood, arms trembling with borrowed apocalypse, and put it all back into the sky in a single column of light that tore the clouds open like wet paper.
Hades didn't blink. "Cute," he said, and walked toward the crash site instead, bored already.
**The Crash Site**
The Guardians were pulling themselves out of the wreckage when the ground began to shake with footsteps that weren't supposed to belong to anything human-shaped.
"Changeling, NOW!" Cody shouted.
The recruit beside him folded into gunmetal, barrel first, and Cody caught the shape mid-transformation and opened fire. Hades simply turned, unbothered, and let the rounds skitter off a hide gone hard as old sin.
Dynamitas charged in screaming and lost an arm for his trouble—Hades tore it off at the socket like pulling a wishbone, then wrapped a fist around his throat.
Dynamitas laughed through it, blood in his teeth. "Fuck you, dickhead."
He grinned wider and set the stump of his own arm alight.
"That's why they call me Dynamitas."
The explosion took off half of Hades's shoulder and sent both of them flying in opposite directions. Pierce Lumberjack was already moving, roots and branches tearing up through cracked earth, spearing Hades through the smoking wound before he could stand.
Dilles reached him a half-second later, palm to forehead, and vanished into the only place that mattered.
*Inside Hades's mind, there were only doors.*
Dilles chose green.
A woman knelt in a kitchen that smelled like woodsmoke and safety, and in front of her stood a boy no older than thirteen, chest puffed out with a child's certainty.
"I'm invincible, Mom."
"No, you're not," she said gently.
"Where is it, Mom?" Young Hades asked. "The white-blue heart. The Pillar."
"Somewhere special," she said. "South Africa. A place called Kruger Park. In its dam."
The memory froze mid-breath.
Dilles turned, and thirteen-year-old Hades was standing directly behind him, eyes gone black all the way through.
The knife went in before Dilles could scream.
He was thrown out of the memory bleeding from a wound that shouldn't exist outside a mind, gasping on the real ground while Hades tore free of Pierce's wood like shrugging off a coat.
Cody's skin went diamond and he came in low, kicking Hades across the jaw with enough force to crack bone that had no business cracking. For one bright second the Guardians fought as one machine—fire, roots, diamond, gunmetal, everything at once—
—and Hades put them all on the ground anyway.
A safari jeep came screaming out of the treeline and slammed into Hades from behind hard enough to fold the hood around him.
Cain leaned out the window, grinning like a man at a family barbecue. "Looks like the whole family is here! Ahahahahaha!"
Abel opened fire from the passenger seat. Hades turned, unfolded, and tore him apart with the patient cruelty of someone dismantling a toy—and then reached through the shattered windshield and snapped Cain's neck sideways with one hand.
Cain's eyes opened again a second later, blinking, rolling his shoulder. "Ow."
Abel's scattered pieces were already knitting back together on the dirt, muscle threading through muscle, bone finding bone.
Hades straightened, wiped blood from his mouth, and started to laugh—low, delighted, ancient.
"I've been looking for it for years," he said. "Now I know."
He turned and walked toward the dam without looking back, ignoring the wreckage of everyone who'd just tried to kill him.
High above, Miki released a single bird into the smoke-choked sky, her fingers glowing where she'd pressed the imprint into its feathers. *Sight Share.* Her own eyes fluttered white for a heartbeat as she settled into the bird's, watching Hades's back recede toward the water.
"He's headed for the dam," she called out. "Everyone—move, MOVE!"
The Guardians began dragging themselves upright, gathering the wounded, gathering purpose.
Back in the riverbed, Nathan Moya's eyes cracked open.
Thembinkosi knelt beside him, energy still crackling faintly under his skin like static that hadn't decided to leave yet.
"Sorry for choking you, mnawami," he said quietly. "But turns out I've got a superpower too."
Nathan managed a weak, blood-flecked smile. "Runs in the family, apparently."
**The Bus – Somewhere Past the Border**
The Sandman had barely finished settling back into the passenger seat when the road ahead simply stopped existing.
Not blew up. Stopped existing—a perfect circle of asphalt gone, replaced by churning grey static that hummed like a swarm of trapped wasps.
"Void pocket," Dixon said cheerfully, already climbing over three seats toward the front. "Cool, cool, we're all gonna die."
"Not today," said a voice nobody recognized.
A teenager near the back stood up—lanky, restless energy, a scar through one eyebrow, hands already sparking with a faint green shimmer like heat over asphalt.
"Tanaka Chivera," he said, like that explained everything. "Gravity's negotiable when I'm around."
He pressed both palms to the bus floor. The static-void ahead *bent*, warped sideways like light through a bad lens, and the entire bus tilted on an axis that shouldn't have existed, sliding around the hole in reality instead of through it.
Ignis whooped. Lancelot cursed in old French. Bennett, still zip-tied, made a small whimpering sound.
"Show-off," Wyatt muttered, gripping his seat.
"Absolutely," Tanaka said, grinning as the bus leveled out and the road reappeared behind them, whole and unbothered. "Someone's gotta be."
The Sandman turned his hourglass eyes on the boy with something that might have been approval.
"Kruger's getting crowded," he said. "Good. Hades hates crowds."
Ahead, the horizon flickered—black glass, golden light, and somewhere beneath it all, a dam that had just become the most dangerous piece of water on Earth.
*End of Chapter 97*