The Talon edge spaceship receded into the distance as Verlin continued his journey towards the yellow star. Verlin wasn't sure about his distance from the star, but he knew it was take hours to reach it.
Within a few minutes, the Talon edge spaceship disappeared from the star system, it seemed that the protocol didnt stop even after the chaos ensued, but this didnt matter to Verlin as he kept approaching the star, the closer he got the star, the more solar energy he asbsorbed, the faster he got.
After a few hours of flight Verlin was now only about 1.5 million kilometers from the surface of the star. By this point he had already recoverd about 1% of his original strength. Although it didnt seem like much, it was enough power to shatter a continent and move slightly faster than the speed of light. Despite the fact, Verlin didnt stop as he dived directly into the star.
Waves of heat and radiation crashed into his body as his cells greedily absorbed the energy, and has his strength was rapidly recovering, his once foggy memory started to clear up and become detailed. Far too detailed.
He had never forgotten about the events that transpired on Earth, but now he could remember everything so clearly, every single detail, the minute change of static in Desna's last message, the sobs of Chloe as she watched her city washed away down to the hundred thousandth decibel, the slow dislodging of electrons from Chloe's atoms as she was wiped from existense.
Every microsecond of the event started to play in his mind, as if he was reliving the moment and was getting more detailed with each passing moment his strength recovered. The helplessness and anger he felt towards Radae, it all came crashing down on Verlin.
Verlins hands flew to his head, gripping his skull as if trying to physically contain what he was feeling. A literal earth shattering wail escaped from his mouth. The sound tore through the star's photosphere and out into the void of space, a raw expression of grief that had been buried for eight years beneath geothermal energy and survival instinct.
But there was nothing to contain it.
His eyes fell to the dagger.
Still embedded in his chest. Once dormant, now pulsing faintly with its rune-etched light. Resuming its draining.
This was the cause of all his pain.
The reason Earth had perished. The reason Chloe was gone. The reason Desna had been destroyed. If not for this blade, he would have never been rendered unconcious. He would have been there for the enhanced humans. He would have been there for Desna. He would have been strong enough to change what happened.
Emotion blinded him completely.
His hand moved without thought, fingers wrapping around the hilt.
He remembered what it had felt like the last time he'd tried to remove it. The agony that had torn through his entire being and shut his body down completely.
He didn't care.
He pulled.
The pain was immediate and catastrophic. Every nerve in his body ignited simultaneously. His vision went white. The sensation of the blade dragging through cardiac tissue sent waves of anguish radiating through his entire frame.
But it couldn't compare to what was already weighing on him.
The tears threatening to escape his eyes were vaporized instantly as heat vision erupted from him—involuntary, uncontrolled. The rays burned outward, piercing through the chromosphere of the star and continuing into the void of space beyond. Beams of concentrated energy tearing through the solar atmosphere like needles through silk.
His hand didn't stop.
He kept pulling.
The dagger retaliated. Its runes flared with blinding intensity, sending waves of suppression through his cells, attacking his nervous system, trying to shut him down the same way it had eight years ago.
He pulled harder.
The pain escalated with each centimeter. His body convulsed. Plasma erupted around him from the disturbance his struggle created in the star's interior.
He didn't stop.
He wanted the dagger's pain to overshadow the other pain. The grief. The guilt. The eight years of unaccounted loss that his recovering memory was forcing him to experience in perfect, devastating detail.
But no matter how bad the dagger got, it wasn't enough.
Nothing was enough.
With one final pull, the blade came free.
Verlin held it in his hand for a moment—the object that had kept him buried for eight years. That had stolen his strength. That had locked him into that mantle while the world burned above him.
He hurled it into the void of space.
It tumbled silently into the darkness, catching the light of the yellow star one final time before disappearing into the infinite black.
Gone.
Verlin dove deeper.
Past the convective zone. Through the radiative layer. Further and further until the pressure and heat became incomprehensible. Forces that could unmake entire worlds pressed against him from every direction.
None of it hindered him.
He reached the core and stayed.
As if hoping the heat would burn the pain away.
It didn't.
His cells had long since reached their former peak. There was simply no more room to absorb what the star was producing. So his body adapted the only way it could.
He grew.
Not dramatically. Not instantly. But steadily, as his cells expanded to accommodate the excess energy, his frame increased in size. The star's core, already impossibly dense, felt the presence of something it couldn't compress.
But even that wasn't enough.
His cells were producing more energy than they were receiving. Solar radiation came in, but far more poured back out. Heat and light bled from his body in waves, radiating outward through the star's interior. He was getting stronger by the second, and yet the energy spilling out of him was enough to destabilize the star's internal pressure gradients.
He didn't notice.
His attention had shifted entirely.
With the dagger gone, his mind was no longer divided between grief and physical pain. And in that silence, one thought surfaced above everything else.
Radae.
He should be dead.
But to make sure, Verlin's eyes activated.
His vision tore through the suffocating environment of the star's core—through millions of kilometers of plasma, through the chromosphere, through the void of space itself. Light years of distance compressed into nothing as his gaze traveled outward.
His memory providing the information of where Radae should be residing.
He was scanning.
In less than microsecond, he found his target planet.
It orbited a red giant star, swollen and dim, casting a dull crimson light across a world that had never known anything brighter. The planet itself was smaller than Earth, roughly seventy percent its size, with a thin atmosphere that clung close to the surface. Continents were fewer here, broken up by shallow seas rather than deep oceans.
Verlin's vision swept across the surface, cataloging without effort.
Settlements. Small ones. None of the sprawling megacities Earth had built before its destruction—nothing here exceeded a hundred thousand people in any single location. Villages and modest towns dotted the landscape instead, connected by unpaved roads and terraced fields cut into hillsides. Agriculture appeared to be the primary means of subsistence. No visible industry. No electrical grids. No aircraft in the skies.
A population that had never reached beyond its own world.
Thirty-five million lives, scattered thin across a planet lit by dying red light, some clustered in the more temperate zones near the equator, others living in isolated communities near the poles where the red giant's warmth barely reached.
At the center of it all—carved into a mountain range in what would have been the northern hemisphere—sat a cave.
And within it, Radae.
Weakened. The energy fluctuations in his body were a fraction of what they had been during their confrontation on Earth. His divine energy reserves were almost completely depleted. He was barely a shadow of what he'd been.
While one billion humans were dead.
While Chloe was dead.
While Desna was dead.
While an entire planet had been reduced to ash and magma and toxic atmosphere—
Radae was sitting in a cave.
Alive.
Verlin disappeared from the core of the star.
The displacement he created sent shockwaves through the star's interior—ripples of force radiating outward through millions of kilometers of plasma. But before those ripples could even reach the surface, before the photosphere could register the disturbance, Verlin had already cleared the star system entirely.
357 light years.
At his original strength, that journey would have taken months. Possibly longer.
At his current speed, it wouldn't even take an hour.
On the planet Verlin was headed to, Radae sat on a throne carved into the dark heart of a mountain cave.
Eight years.
Eight years of sitting in this darkness, recovering his divine energy like a dying flame in a storm.
Five millennia worth of divine energy. Gone.
The weight of that loss never left him. Every waking moment was colored by it. Five thousand years of accumulated power, reduced to nothing. He now had to wait for atleast a century to gain enough divine energy to retrieve the shards.
Fortunately, from the last moments of the battle, he knew that no fitting living being would have survived the destruction from the last explosion. So the divine shards should remain on the planet, ownerless. As long as he could get back there, he would be able to retrieve them.
As for the kryptonian, he concluded it was dead. The rune dagger was still in the creatures chest, and that last explosion must have drained the rest of its energy. Given that there has been no movements for the past eight years, he didnt worry too much about it.
Now, he just needed enough energy to get back there.
That was the only obstacle between him and everything he wanted.
It had taken eight years to recover even this much. A fraction of what he'd once been. Barely enough to sustain his physical form, let alone travel between worlds. But his reserves were growing. Slowly. Steadily.
He could wait.
Patience was something an incarnate of a god understood better than most.
His thoughts drifted to what came after.
Technically, strictly speaking, his next move should be clear . As an incarnate of the Radae, he would be expected to deliver the shards to the true Radae.
But what if he didn't return the shards?
What if instead of delivering them to the original, he used them himself?
The divine shards contained enough concentrated essence to elevate any being suitable to godhood. And with his constant harvesting of divine energy, it would only be a matter of time till he reached the heights of a true God.
Ascension.
Not as an incarnate. Not as a copy. Not as an extension of someone else's will.
As himself.
A true god. Independent. Sovereign. Answerable to no one.
Radae leaned back on his throne, letting the thought settle over him like a second skin.
It would take time. More recovery. Then the journey back to Earth. Then locating the shards beneath the devastation.
He was in no rush.
The shards weren't going anywhere. The Kryptonian was dead. Earth was dead. There was nothing left that could threaten his plans.
For the first time in eight years, something close to satisfaction settled over him.
Then it stopped.
Radae sensed something entering his star system at an impossible speed, he could sense a being with a excessive amount of divine shards to ascend.
'A god?' Radae questioned as he got up from his throne.
His eyes traveled through the ceiling of the cave and he almost failed to believe what he was seeing. A star was crashing down on his planet, with no signs of stopping!
In the next instant, the star hit.
Radae had no time to react. No time to shield himself. No time to even fully process what he was seeing before the impact wave reached him.
The planet's crust shattered on contact. Massive fissures split across the surface faster than sound could travel, spreading outward from the point of impact like cracks in glass. The kinetic energy released was beyond anything the planet's structure could withstand.
The mountain range where Radae's cave had been simply ceased to exist.
Verlin punched through the crust, through the mantle, through the core, and out the other side without slowing.
Behind him, the planet began to come apart entirely.
Tectonic plates shattered. Molten rock erupted from a thousand points simultaneously. The planet's gravitational cohesion, already destroyed by the force of impact, failed completely within seconds. What had been a solid world became a debris field—chunks of rock and magma scattering outward, some pieces the size of continents, others no larger than boulders.
Radae's physical form had been obliterated in the initial collision, his divine energy scattered across the wreckage like embers thrown from a fire.
But he was still alive.
His consciousness clung to the fragments of his essence, pulling them back together amid the chaos of the destruction. Slowly. Desperately. Reforming from the scattered energy that remained.
His form began to take shape again—not from flesh and blood, but from divine essence reconstituting itself into a familiar silhouette amid the floating rubble.
His eyes opened.
And he looked directly at the source of his destruction.
"You..."
The recognition hit him first as disbelief, then as something closer to horror.
"You live?" Radae said, still reforming.
His eyes settled on Verlin, and what he saw didn't match anything from eight years ago.
Twenty meters tall now. Not the sub two-meter frame he remembered from their last encounter.
Gold light poured from beneath Verlin's skin, pulsing faintly with each passing second. His eyes burned the same color, twin points of light bright enough that Radae had to fight the urge to look away. Debris drifted through the wreckage around him—chunks of rock, twisted metal, fragments of what had been a planet moments ago—and none of it got close. Anything that entered within a kilometer of his body simply burned away, vaporized before it could travel any further.
He'd just destroyed an entire world. Millions of lives, gone in an instant.
And nothing on his face suggested he'd noticed. Or cared.
Radae's eyes dropped to Verlin's chest, an old habit, checking for the dagger that should have been there.
It wasn't.
The realization surfaced before he could stop it from reaching his voice.
"The shards," he said quietly. "They're inside you."
Verlin dismissed the words entirely.
In an instant, he was in front of Radae—faster than the incarnate could react, faster than the heat radiating off his body could even reach him.
"Chloe." Verlin's voice was quiet. "Desna."
He raised his fist.
"Join them."
As the word fell, Verlin swung.
Radae's half-formed body disassociated instantly, his divine essence scattering across the debris field like ash caught in a violent wind.
He didn't bother reform.
The civilization that had sustained this incarnation with worship was gone. Erased along with the planet.
There was nothing left to draw upon.
Only irritation remained.
"Do you think you can kill me?" Radae's voice drifted through the wreckage, carried by countless fragments of his scattered essence.
"I'm one of thousands of Radae incarnations in this galaxy alone."
Gold bled into white within Verlin's eyes.
"Then I'll find every incarnation."
His voice never rose.
"And rid the world of your existence."
The final word left his lips.
Power answered.
Pure energy burst from his body in every direction at once.
The wave raced outward at nearly a third of light speed. Every scattered speck of Radae's divine essence caught within it unraveled instantly, unable to withstand contact with power on that scale.
The debris field didn't fare much better.
Continent-sized chunks of the shattered planet, remnants of the destruction Verlin himself had caused, along with scattered asteroid fragments pulled into the system's gravity well over millennia—the wave slammed into all of it simultaneously. The thermal energy alone was enough to vaporize solid rock on contact, stripping electrons from atoms and converting millions of tons of matter into superheated plasma in the same instant.
Within seconds, the region that had once held a planet's remains was a sphere of radiant plasma forty thousand kilometers across, cooling and dispersing into the vacuum of space.
When it settled, there was nothing structured left. No rock. No debris field. No god.
Just an expanding cloud of dissipating heat and light, and Verlin, hovering at its center.
The light radiating from Verlin didn't seem to dim in the least.
Even after unmaking Radae completely, the hatred and anger inside him didn't lessen. If anything, it sat there unresolved, with nowhere left to go.
Verlin waited.
Nothing came.
Radae was gone.
Seconds became minutes.
He kept staring into the expanding cloud where Radae had ceased to exist.
Waiting for relief.
Waiting for satisfaction.
Waiting for something.
Nothing came.
He looked up.
In the distance, the red giant star this system orbited burned dim and swollen, nothing like the yellow sun that had restored him. A dying star, slowly burning out, indifferent to the devastation that had just occurred in its shadow.
Verlin looked at it for a moment.
Then he turned away and flew off, leaving the star system behind.