The air didn't just feel heavy; it felt wrong. It had a physical weight, an unseen pressure watching from the cracks in the sky. Every breath tasted like shattered glass and ozone, like I was inhaling the fragments of a world that had finally given up.
Vescarion was losing his grip.
For the first time since I had encountered him, he looked unstable. The radiance surrounding him wasn't merely illuminating his form—it was invading it, forcing its way through him, unraveling whatever unnatural structure held him together. His outline flickered violently, edges dissolving and reforming in irregular waves, like ink being dragged across water by an invisible hand. Even so, he resisted, his body twisting against the pressure as though defying something inevitable.
"You…" His voice dragged itself into existence, strained and distorted, as if reality itself refused to carry it properly. "You cannot possibly—!"
He never got to finish his sentence.
A column of absolute light slammed into him. No sound. No explosion. Just a sudden, terrifying emptiness where a god-killer had been standing a second ago. I stared at the void, my heart hammering against my ribs, waiting for the dust to settle.
Then he returned.
The angel hovered above, unmoving and absolute. Its wings spread wider, and along their edges, points of light began to form—small at first, then rapidly intensifying until I realized what I was looking at. Stars. Not illusions, not mere energy, but something that carried the weight and presence of actual stars, each one radiating a power that felt impossibly ancient.
Before I could fully process it, they went supernova.
One after another, they collapsed into violent bursts of light that consumed everything in their path. The explosions distorted space itself, tearing through Vescarion's presence wherever they struck, leaving behind nothing but searing light. The ground trembled beneath the force of it, and the air screamed with the strain of something being pushed beyond its limits.
And through the fire, Vescarion smiled.
And then, against all reason, Vescarion smiled.
It was subtle at first, but unmistakable. There was no desperation in it, no madness—only a quiet, terrible certainty. The kind of expression that didn't belong in a situation like this.
The space around him fractured.
Thin lines appeared in the air, intersecting at incomprehensible angles, forming shapes that refused to remain consistent. My vision blurred as I tried to follow them, a dull ache forming behind my eyes as if my mind was rejecting what it couldn't understand. The shapes folded into one another, collapsing and expanding in ways that defied logic.
Then he split.
One became two, then several, then more than I could count. Within seconds, the sky was filled with him. Dozens, then hundreds of Vescarions stood suspended in the air, each identical, each carrying that same unsettling smile.
Laughter followed. It echoed from every direction, overlapping, distorting, until it became something more than sound—something that pressed against my thoughts, invasive and repulsing.
"You can't say I broke the laws of physics," one of them said, his voice dripping with amusement, "if there were no law."
"You can't hold reality together," another added, quieter but far more unsettling, "if reality itself obeys me."
I tightened my grip, forcing myself to stay grounded as the world below shifted into something unrecognizable. The city had lost all sense of structure, its streets and buildings twisted into warped patterns that resembled a broken grid. It looked less like a place people had once lived and more like something reduced to a distorted game board, set ablaze and abandoned.
The angel responded without hesitation.
More stars formed along its wings, brighter and more numerous than before. They launched forward in rapid succession, detonating as they collided with the mass of duplicates. Each explosion erased clusters of Vescarions, tearing through them with overwhelming force.
But it wasn't enough.
For every one that disappeared, another replaced it. The sky remained filled, the laughter unbroken, the pressure mounting.
Then a voice cut through everything.
"יִתֵּן יְהוָה אֶת־אֹיְבֶיךָ הַקָּמִים עָלֶיךָ נִגָּפִים לְפָנֶיךָ בְּדֶרֶךְ אֶחָד יֵצְאוּ אֵלֶיךָ וּבְשִׁבְעָה דְרָכִים יָנוּסוּ לְפָנֶיךָ׃"
I turned immediately.
The Arch-Exorcist stepped forward, his staff blazing with shifting script that seemed to rewrite itself with every movement. Each word he spoke carried weight—not metaphorical weight, but something tangible, something that pressed against the world and forced it to respond.
Fire erupted across the battlefield.
It didn't spread randomly. It carved through the chaos with purpose, forming precise paths that cut directly through Vescarion's duplicates. The clones caught in the flames didn't burn in any conventional sense; they destabilized, their forms collapsing as if they had never been fully real to begin with.
The ground shifted beneath the force of his words. Molten channels split open and extended outward in seven distinct directions, surrounding the mass of Vescarions and restricting their movement. The heat was intense, but beneath it was something deeper—a pressure that felt almost like judgment itself pressing down on everything within its reach.
More stars fell.
More flames surged.
The geometric distortions surrounding him began to fracture. The impossible structures he had forced into existence started to collapse under the combined assault, breaking apart in rapid succession. His duplicates flickered, their forms becoming unstable.
Then he roared in pure fury.
The moment Vescarion unleashed that roar, something fundamental in reality gave out.
It didn't break like glass or explode like fire. It simply… stopped functioning, as if existence itself had just hit a fatal internal error it could no longer interpret. The battlefield froze in an instant so absolute it felt unnatural, like a paused video game.
Then the sky changed.
A cold, sterile blue washed over everything, replacing the chaos of war with something disturbingly artificial. It was the kind of blue that didn't belong to nature or heaven—it belonged to screens, to systems, to failure.
A massive translucent panel slammed itself across the sky, and every single thing in existence was overlaid with stark white text.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
:(
YOUR REALITY HAS RUN INTO A PROBLEM AND NEEDS TO RESTART.
Collecting divine crash data… please wait.
0%… 0%… 0%…
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The silence was deafening.
"Huh?" the angel said.
"Huh?" the Arch-Exorcist echoed, still frozen in place, voice calm in a way that made it worse.
Even the air itself seemed to repeat it faintly, like reality was testing whether sound still worked.
Then Vescarion's eyes twitched.
"…Wha—"
"…WHAT?!"
Then it hit him fully. His face snapped into pure disbelief.
"WHAT THE F—"
A new prompt appeared in the sky:
------------------------------------------------------------------
SYSTEM INTERRUPTION.
UNEXPECTED DIVINE EXPLETIVE DETECTED: "WHAT THE F—"
Submit error report?
[YES / NO]
------------------------------------------------------------------
One of his duplicates slowly turned to another.
"…Do we report ourselves?"
"I'm reporting ALL OF YOU!" another screamed, his cool composure finally snapping into a full-blown meltdown. "I HAD THIS! I WAS LITERALLY WINNING!"
Amidst Vescarion's crashout, the Arch-Exorcist finally moved his eyes upward, slowly, as though it cost him everything to do so.
"This is the single worst divine operation I have ever been a part of," he muttered.
I stood there, completely aware, completely conscious, and completely unable to convince myself I wasn't hallucinating on a metaphysical level.
"This isn't real," I whispered, voice shaking. "This is not—this is not how reality works."
Beside me, Miru was still standing there for a moment longer than he should have. Or at least he was, until his eyes rolled back.
He made a tiny sound—something between a sigh and a system error—and collapsed instantly like his body had decided it was no longer qualified to process reality.
"Bro?" I whispered, looking towards his direction. "You good?"
He wasn't good. He was offline.
The blue screen flickered.
-----
1%…
-----
The Arch-Exorcist exhaled slowly, his voice barely holding together.
"…If I survive this, I think I'm going to retire."
The Unknown snarled. "I SWEAR—WHEN I GET OUT OF THIS—I'M UNINSTALLING THE WHOLE DAMN THING—"
Another clone struggles to raise a hand.
"…Can someone explain why we can still talk but barely move?"
"Because," another clone answered immediately, "we are suffering."
I looked up at the sky, watching that little percentage bar crawl forward with the speed of a dying snail.
-----
2%…
-----
"…We're going to die," I muttered. "…in a loading screen."