he silence after Abraham's warning was heavier than the concrete around them.
There was no time to recover the survivor.
No time for plans.
Only time to react.
A scorching, dry, unnatural heat fell over them like a mantle. The very air vibrated, heavy and oppressive. The rubble around them began to glow faintly red, as if about to melt.
"What is that?!" Melanie screamed, clutching her head—not from pain, but from the overwhelming spiritual pressure crushing her senses. Her pink aura, already weakened, instinctively contracted around her body like a defensive shell.
Rivka collapsed to her knees, a muffled groan escaping her lips.
"It's not a whisper… it's… a roar…" she stammered.
Despite their wounds, Samuel and Miriam instantly fell back-to-back into a combat stance, their faces tight.
"It's not an Erelim!" Samuel roared, his bond-bracelet flashing with an irregular golden light. "It's something worse!"
Samuel, ribs bruised where the energy mace had struck him, stifled a gasp of pain as he squared himself, pale but unyielding.
Elyion said nothing. His Sight was already active. The Bond-stone hanging from his neck burned with an almost searing heat, a silent and belated warning of the divine catastrophe materializing before him.
The world dissolved into a storm of energy. He saw the survivor's fading aura inside the building, the painful flickers of his comrades, the lingering corruption of the fallen Erelim. And then—he saw It.
It was a core of raw, unfiltered power. A walking spiritual sun.
To normal eyes, it would appear as a colossal lion woven from white and golden flames, eyes of molten lava, its mane flowing like a crown of solar fire. But to Elyion's Sight, it was a walking cataclysm, a torrent of divine energy so dense and chaotic it bent the fibers of reality around it. One of the Holy Creatures. A herald of the false God.
And it was materializing right before them.
"Retreat! All of you!" Elyion ordered. His voice wasn't a shout but a cold, cutting command, laced with urgency that allowed no argument. "Samuel, get them out! Now!"
"And you?" Melanie's voice cracked with terror.
"I'll keep it busy." Elyion lit another red Marlboro with a snap of his fingers. The gesture was so calm it was obscene. "Not up for discussion. If we stay together, none of us make it out."
Before anyone could protest, the Holy Creature—the Lion of Fire—roared.
The sound didn't just strike their eardrums. It struck their souls. Rivka screamed, blood spilling from her nose. Melanie staggered as if punched in the gut. Samuel and Miriam covered themselves instinctively.
Elyion didn't flinch. He exhaled smoke and stepped forward, placing himself between the beast and his companions.
"Run!" he barked over his shoulder. For the first time, there was something more than cynicism in his voice: absolute, desperate authority.
Melanie staggered, the weight of maintaining her net against the Erelim still dragging her soul like lead. Every heartbeat reminded her of the precious minutes already lost.
Rivka, pale and trembling with the Sheol's cold that never fully left her, could barely stand.
Samuel cursed, grabbing Rivka by the arm and hauling her up. "Move! That's an order!" Miriam, torn with fierce conflict, seized Melanie—who struggled against her grip—and dragged her toward the truck.
The Lion of Fire ignored those fleeing. Its lava eyes fixed on Elyion. On his cigarette smoke. On the tiny spark of human will opposing it.
"JUDGMENT." The voice boomed in Elyion's mind, not like the Erelim, but like the crackle of a burning universe.
"You'll judge me later," Elyion muttered, drawing hard on his cigarette, crushing the butt under his boot.
He slipped off his beige trench coat and let it fall carefully to the ground. Distractions had no place here.
The beast charged—not with an animal's speed, but with the inevitability of an asteroid. The heat in its wake melted asphalt.
Elyion sidestepped. Not a flashy leap, but a precise, Sight-guided stride, placing him just outside the point of impact. Fire scorched his hair and clothes. The stench of burnt hair filled his nostrils. He ignored the pain.
His power, Precision Spiritual Manipulation, wasn't built for wide-scale destruction. It was a scalpel, not a hammer. As he dodged another swipe that carved molten grooves into the ground, he extended his hand. Not to block, but to redirect. He wove razor-thin blue threads of energy, invisible to anyone else, and latched them to the beast's flows, guiding its strike away—into an abandoned building. The wall vaporized on impact.
It was inhumanly precise work. Every redirection, every micro-dodge, drained him in brutal focus and a steady trickle of life-force. Seconds. He was spending seconds. But they piled up.
"Come on. Is that all you've got?" His voice carried over the crackling flames, calm but sharp. "God should've given you a better instruction manual."
The Lion roared, enraged. Its mane erupted, flinging dozens of bolts of pure spiritual fire. Impossible to dodge them all.
Elyion frowned. This was where it got ugly.
"Damn it," he muttered.
Instead of dodging, he planted himself. Crossing his arms, he condensed all his power. A massive hexagonal shield of crackling blue energy formed—thicker, denser than the one he had conjured against the Erelim.
But it wasn't perfect.
The fiery projectiles slammed into it like a divine jackhammer.
BAM. BAM. BAM-BAM-BAM!
Each impact was an explosion of light and pain that rattled his bones. Each one cost minutes of his life. Heat seared through the shield, blistering his skin. The scent of burnt flesh mixed with smoke. His teeth ground together. Blood dripped from his nose, hot and metallic.
The shield cracked. Then shattered.
The final projectile smashed into his shoulder, throwing him back like a ragdoll. He hit the rubble, clothes smoking, shoulder charred and throbbing. Gasping, he fought for breath. His Sight flickered—the normal world and the spiritual plane blinking in and out.
He couldn't keep this up. It wasn't enough. The beast was too strong. Efficiency wouldn't win this fight.
He needed to do something reckless. Something costly.
Struggling to his knees, Elyion faced the advancing Lion, moving with the slow arrogance of a predator already victorious.
"All right," he whispered, staring at his hands. "Let's gamble, then."
He closed his eyes—not in prayer, but in calculation. How much? How much life would it take to repel it? Not to kill it—that was impossible. But maybe, just maybe, he could force it back into the plane it came from.
When he opened his eyes, they burned with calm, terrible resolve.
"Melanie, if I survive this, you'll kill me yourself," he murmured.
He raised both hands to the sky.
No longer a scalpel. Now a dam bursting open.
Every ounce of life-force left, every brutal fragment of efficiency, every shred of rage, guilt, and stubbornness keeping him alive—he channeled it into a single, colossal act of will.
The blue veins around his eyes lit up like lightning. His hair stood on end. The air buzzed with static. The ground split beneath his feet.
For the first time, the Lion of Fire paused. Tilted its head, as if unable to comprehend the tiny yet ferocious wellspring of power before it.
"You don't belong in this world!" Elyion roared, his voice no longer his own but the tearing of reality itself. "Return to the void that spawned you!"
And he pushed.
Not a beam. Not an explosion. A wave of pure, conceptual force. An absolute negation of the beast's existence in this plane. The spiritual equivalent of using a cosmic lever to dislodge a stone.
The impact was silent. Devastating.
The Lion blurred, its edges dissolving. A roar of fury and confusion echoed, muffled as if behind thick glass. Then reality fractured around it like a mirror, and it was sucked into the rift with a pitiful suction before the gap snapped shut in a thunderclap that shook the earth.
Silence returned.
Elyion collapsed to his knees, then forward onto the ground, gasping. His body burned. Every nerve, every cell screamed in agony. His Sight was gone, leaving him in sudden, terrifying darkness. He had burned away days. Perhaps weeks of his life in that one act. He felt the hollow cold in his chest—a void that would never fill.
In the distance, he heard the truck's engine revving. They had seen everything. They were coming back.
But before relief could take root, a new sensation washed over him. Not heat. Not cold. Presence. A vast, ancient consciousness, awakened by his unleashed power. As if the entire planet had opened an eye for an instant and stared through him.
In the approaching truck, Rivka sat bolt upright, orange eyes wide in fresh terror.
"What… what was that?" Melanie whispered, holding her.
"Something… woke up," Rivka gasped, trembling violently. "It's not Him… it's something else… Something that slept far away… and he…" She pointed a shaking finger toward Elyion's collapsed figure. "…he was the one who woke it."
The truck skidded to a stop beside Elyion. Miriam looked at him with an expression that, for the first time, wasn't distrust—but awe.
"How the hell…? None of us could have…" Her voice trailed off. The reality of what Elyion had done—and the price it demanded—was too overwhelming for words.
Samuel and Miriam leapt out, lifting him urgently but carefully. He was unconscious, burned, bleeding. But alive.
Melanie looked at him, her heart torn between agony and admiration. He had driven back a divine creature. And he had paid the price.
But as they loaded him into the truck, none of them—not even Abraham's ancient wisdom—could grasp the truth.
Elyion hadn't just repelled a herald. He had rung the cosmic doorbell of something far greater.
And now, it too was watching them.