Empty Victories
The absence of Heaven created space.
Space invited ambition.
At first, it was almost admirable.
City–states formed councils. Mortal champions rose to protect their people. New philosophies tried to articulate morality without divine reward or punishment. For a time, Delta watched from the distance and did nothing.
That restraint lasted less than a century.
The first threat came wrapped in reason.
A coalition of ascended beings—former demigods, archmages, engineered immortals—claimed stewardship over "unguarded reality." They spoke of stability, of preventing another Heaven, of guiding mortals gently.
Delta listened.
Then he asked one question.
"Who dies when you fail?"
They had answers.
They always did.
He killed them all.
Not because they were weak.
Not because they were evil.
Because they were comfortable deciding for others.
Nyx watched from afar as entire citadels collapsed into silence. No screams. No prolonged suffering. Delta had learned efficiency far beyond god-slaying.
Cleaner.
Colder.
"You didn't have to erase the whole structure," Nyx said later, when she found him sitting alone at the edge of a broken world.
"They would have rebuilt," Delta replied.
That was new.
He didn't say might.
He said would.
The universe took note.
The Weight of Being Right
Threats multiplied.
Without Heaven, power no longer flowed downward—it boiled upward. Those who could take, did. Those who could not, prayed to things that did not answer.
And when the prayers found Delta instead—
He felt it.
Not worship.
Expectation.
He crushed cult leaders.
He dismantled empires.
He erased lineages bred solely to rule.
Each victory made the next easier.
Each decision took less time.
Nyx began noticing the changes long before Delta did.
He stopped sitting with the dead.
Stopped saying names.
Stopped hesitating.
"You're drifting," she warned once, standing beside him amid the wreckage of another would-be pantheon.
Delta didn't look at her. "I'm finishing the job."
"There was no job," she snapped. "There was a moment."
He turned then.
His eyes were harder now—still lucid, still aware, but insulated.
"You think Aurora died so the universe could try again?" he asked calmly.
"You think Ray gave everything so the next tyrant could pretend they're different?"
Nyx fell silent.
Because part of her understood.
And that terrified her more than anything else.
Power Has a Taste
Delta didn't seek power.
He just never refused it.
Artifacts fell into his path—constructs once designed to bind gods, engines meant to rewrite causal hierarchies, remnants of systems older than Heaven itself. Delta dismantled them, absorbed knowledge, repurposed functions.
Piece by piece.
"You're becoming what you hunt," a surviving immortal accused him once, trembling before execution.
Delta considered that.
Then erased him anyway.
"Wrong," Delta replied. "I'm becoming what ends it."
Nyx watched as Delta began choosing solitude deliberately—leaving before she woke, stepping beyond layers she couldn't follow without pain.
When she confronted him, his response was simple.
"It's easier alone."
That was when loneliness stopped being a consequence.
It became a preference.
The First Berserk Event
The first time Delta lost control, it wasn't dramatic.
No scream.
No roar.
Just silence.
A threat emerged from beyond indexed reality—something vast, consuming, entirely uninterested in morality. Delta engaged it without consultation, without pause.
He didn't calculate.
He unleashed.
Reality tore.
Entire dimensions folded inward as Delta abandoned precision for certainty. The mask burned white-hot. Concepts unraveled at his touch. When the threat finally ceased to exist, so did everything near it.
Worlds.
Histories.
Names.
Nyx arrived too late.
She found him standing alone in a crater of erased possibility, blood steaming off his skin, eyes unfocused.
"Delta," she whispered carefully.
He looked at her.
Didn't recognize her at first.
The berserk state faded slowly—but what remained was worse.
Shame didn't follow.
Only justification.
"It worked," Delta said.
Nyx's hands shook. "At what cost?"
He didn't answer.
Because he hadn't counted.
The Quiet After Screams
After that, the universe feared him differently.
Not as a savior.
Not even as a weapon.
As a natural disaster that chose targets.
Threats began striking preemptively, desperate to end him before he noticed them. Delta responded with overwhelming force every time.
Less talking.
Less context.
Just resolution.
Nyx stayed—but barely.
She saw the pattern forming and hated that she couldn't stop it. Every time she reached for him emotionally, he stepped further away functionally.
"You don't sleep anymore," she said once.
"I don't need to."
"You don't talk unless it's operational."
"I don't have time."
That wasn't true.
Delta had all the time in existence.
But he no longer knew what to do with it unless something needed to die.
The Hunger
The truth finally surfaced when there was nothing left to kill.
A long stretch of peace followed one of Delta's exterminations. Civilizations stabilized. Power structures hesitated to rise.
And Delta felt—
Nothing.
No relief.
No satisfaction.
Just a hollow pressure in his chest.
He went looking for threats that didn't exist.
When Nyx confronted him, voice cracking with fear, he said the words that made her step back.
"If the universe won't produce enemies," Delta said quietly,
"then maybe it's lying again."
That was the moment Nyx realized:
Delta no longer trusted peace.
And worse—
He didn't trust himself without war.