Lucifer's plan unfolded with meticulous precision. It was a scheme to create a metaphysical leak to the foundational story of the faith that bound him.
The vessel was not born in a humble stable in Bethlehem, but in its direct antithesis, the lavish confines of a royal palace in England. The Antichrist entered the world not as a peasant's son, but as the firstborn heir to a European throne, his first cries muffled by silk and celebrated by a hidden cabal of bishops who wore inverted crosses beneath their vestments.
He was named Malthus, and his childhood was a curated perversion of the gospels. Where the Christ child was said to have amazed temple teachers with his wisdom, the young prince held private audiences where he dissected living songbirds with preternatural calm, explaining the mechanics of suffering to his horrified, enthralled tutors.
Where Jesus turned water to wine at a wedding feast, the twelve-year-old Malthus attended a state banquet and, with a touch, turned the finest vintage in the decanters to clots of cold, black blood.
His ministry, when he came of age, was a direct and brutal inversion. He did not preach to the poor and downtrodden. He held court in the decadent salons of the corrupt and powerful, his sermons extolling the virtue of absolute self-interest, the divine right of strength. He did not feed the multitudes with loaves and fish. He hosted a feast for a thousand of Europe's elite, where the main course was the publicly executed remains of a celebrated humanitarian, a meal his followers consumed with zealous fervor to prove their liberation from mortal sentiment.
He did not heal the sick. He conducted public miracles of selective plague, touching a beggar's hand not to cleanse leprosy, but to transform it into a contagious, weeping rot that spread through a poor quarter of London within a week, a demonstration of divine, uncaring power.
He did not raise Lazarus from the dead. He summoned the animated, shambling corpse of a saintly archbishop from its tomb and bound it as a silent, shuffling cupbearer for his profane masses.
His followers grew. They were not the masses, but a potent, fanatical core drawn from the hidden Satanic churches, from the ranks of the spiritually bankrupt aristocracy, and from those whose souls had been twisted by the war's horrors into receptacles for a darker hope. They saw in Malthus not a savior, but a liberator from the tyranny of a silent, judging God, and some of his darkest followers sought in him safety from the torture of hell, already knowing their deeds damned them. His every act was a sacrament, an antithesis to the acts of Jesus, drawing upon that same faith.
Then came the ultimate defilement, the anti-resurrection. It was not a single act, but a coordinated, continental horror. On a chosen night, under a blood moon, Malthus's most devoted acolytes, armed with rituals provided by their master, performed a synchronized sacrifice.
In the heart of London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, and Moscow, they did not raise a pure soul. They ritually murdered one. Each victim was a person of acknowledged, selfless virtue, a nun who ran an orphanage, a doctor who served the war-wounded without pay, a resistance fighter who sacrificed everything for others. Their lives were not taken quietly, but ended in elaborate, public ceremonies that were done in front of the hypnotized masses, their deaths offered as a focused connection to draw upon Lucifer's authority even through the lock that bound him.
The ritual was a key turning in a lock of cosmic spite. As the six pure hearts stopped beating simultaneously, the fabric of the Mist over those cities tore like rotten canvas. And from the ground of their great cathedrals, St. Paul's, Notre-Dame, St. Peter's, the Berliner Dom, St. Stephen's, and the Kremlin's Dormition Cathedral, the earth cracked open. From the fissures erupted a concept of primal corruption given serpentine form.
Each was a colossal, fiery serpent, its scales burning with black and crimson flames, its eyes pits of intelligent malice.
The veil was gone. Millions in those cities saw the monsters coiling around their holiest sites, saw the sky tear, felt the metaphysical shockwave of the ritual. The faith generated was instantaneous and cataclysmic.
It was the raw, terrified, and awestruck belief of a world seeing its nightmares realized. That faith, steeped in terror and dark revelation, flowed not to God, but to the source of the spectacle: Malthus. His power swelled, a tsunami of infernal devotion.
Heaven could not ignore such a direct, existential challenge. Heaven, usually so distant, responded with immediate, overwhelming force. The skies above the English countryside, where Malthus stood at the epicenter of his work, split open with a sound like shattering crystal. The legions of Heaven descended; They came as a wave of purifying light and divine wrath, a golden tide aimed at the fiery serpents coiling around the heart of the Christian nations.
And at their head was the Archangel Michael. He was a cataclysm of holy power. A being of concentrated, searing light that scorched the eyes and the soul, around which countless wings of flame and platinum beat in a harmonious, terrifying rhythm. Within the light, eyes opened and closed, eyes of judgment, of fury, of profound, sorrowful resolve.
He was the Sword of God made manifest, a vortex of celestial authority whose mere presence caused the geography of England to groan, the hills flattening and the rivers boiling away in his wake. His voice, when he spoke, was the sound of mountains grinding together to form a single decree: "CEASE."
The battle that followed shook more than the earth. It shook the layer of reality itself. Malthus, empowered by the faith of millions and the direct lineage of Lucifer, met the charge. He did not raise a sword.
He raised a hand, and the shadows of a thousand blasphemies congealed into a spear of absolute negation. He thrust it forward, and the very light around Michael dimmed, the angelic wings fraying at the edges as concepts of doubt and despair etched themselves into the holy manifestation.
Michael responded. A single, focused beam lanced from the central mass of eyes and light. It was not fire or lightning. It was the pure, undiluted concept of divine order, a command for existence to obey. Where it struck the ground near Malthus, the land did not burn; it became geometrically perfect, sterile, and silent, a tomb of absolute law.
Malthus screamed, a sound that was part human prince, part infernal engine, and the six fiery serpents across Europe roared in unison. Their flames lashed upward, not as mere fire, but as streams of corrosive heresy, tangling with the descending legions of angels. The sky above the continent became a kaleidoscope of warring absolutes, golden light against black flame, psalms of creation against screams of unmaking.
Space cracked. The battlefield in England was no longer simply a place on a map. It became a fault line in cosmology. The ground fell away into starless voids only to reform seconds later. Time splintered, with moments of the brutal trench warfare from the mortal conflict replaying like ghostly echoes amidst the divine clash. The very air became a solid, screaming thing.
And as the titanic struggle between the Michael and the Antichrist reached its crescendo, as Michael's light sought to pin Malthus down and Malthus's negation sought to unravel the archangel's very form, the trap sprang. Lucifer had not been waiting idly. The grand conflict, the focused faith, the violent bending of reality, it was the distraction, the pressure applied to the Seal's weakest point.
From the six points of the serpentine eruptions, from the pits of hatred opened in the holy cities, the authorities of the Seven Deadly Sins, not just their projected power, but their concentrated essences, were violently, temporarily expelled into the mortal world.
They were free. Lucifer's design had worked. The confrontation he engineered had forced a metaphysical loophole, and the Lords of Hell as well as Satan himself now walked the earth, their full, terrible presence unleashed upon a world already teetering on the brink of apocalypse.
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