Kara closed her eyes for a moment.
Because it was already too much.
Lusian could barely remain conscious.
The darkness around him was dissolving into unstable fragments.
His breathing was irregular.
His left arm hung motionless at his side.
It should have ended.
Artereus thought so too.
That's why he remained watching in silence.
Waiting for him to finally stop moving.
But then…
Lusian placed a hand on the ground.
It trembled.
His fingers sank into the broken rock as he tried to push himself up.
Slowly.
Like someone dragging a body that no longer belonged to him.
Artureus frowned.
Because it made no sense.
Lusian was weaker.Slower.More fragile.
The fight had been over from the beginning.
So…
why was he still moving forward?
Lusian managed to rise halfway.
His legs trembled violently.
He breathed.
The air barely entered his lungs.
He coughed blood.
And fell back onto one knee.
Kara felt her heart break watching him.
But Lusian tried again.
Once more.
No pride.No rage.
Only… because he didn't know how to do anything else.
Artereus watched him from above.
Unmoving.
His mere presence still sank the crater. The rock cracked under that monstrous pressure.
—"You should already be dead," he said.
His voice made the world vibrate.
Lusian did not respond.
He placed his hand on the ground again.
This time he managed to stand fully.
Not firm.Not stable.
But standing.
Blood slowly ran down from his mouth.
His eyes were tired.
Not full of rage.Not full of defiance.
Just tired.
Like someone who had survived too many times to remember how to give up.
And then Artereus felt something strange.
Discomfort.
Because it broke all logic.
He had pierced him.He had crushed him.He had left him without air.
That should have been enough.
It had always been enough.
But Lusian kept moving forward.
One step.
Then another.
Dragging his broken body centimeter by centimeter.
And for the first time since the beginning of the battle…
Artereus hesitated.
Not because Lusian was defeating him.
But because he was not accepting the end.
And for a god who only knew absolute victory…
that was impossible to comprehend.
Then the God of Strength advanced again.
Each step of Artereus compressed the world as if reality had to move aside to let him pass. He did not run, he did not prepare, he did not hesitate. His body simply imposed the idea of strength over everything else. The mountain did not resist him: it accepted him.
Lusian had learned to resist. Sometimes too late, sometimes on the edge of the end.
The next strike came without warning. There was no preparation or visible intent, only the immediate result of something that did not need to announce itself. The fist pierced space with the certainty of something that had never been stopped.
But it found nothing.
Lusian was no longer where he should have been.
There was no movement to follow, no technique to track. Only a brief void in the exact point of impact, as if the world had forgotten to hold him there.
Artereus stopped for the first time.
Not much. Just an instant. But enough.
Because it was not normal.
And gods are not used to what is not normal.
Darkness appeared beneath his feet without announcement, without clear form, without visible intent. It was not a stretched shadow or a deployed energy. It was something more unsettling: a negation of the world's natural behavior.
Artereus took another step.
The ground did not respond as it should.
His weight did not find immediate resistance. It did not hold with the same certainty as always. For a fraction of a second, his body moved further than intended.
And that should not happen.
The colossus corrected himself instantly, forcing what the world did not give him. But the adjustment found nothing to anchor to. Every attempt to stabilize met the same absence. There was no real surface to bind his authority to.
His balance failed.
He did not fall, but his posture broke for the first time.
The air exploded around him as he forced his position back into place, as if the world were late in protesting its own mistake.
—"What have you done?" Artereus's voice came lower, heavier. Not threatening. Incomprehension.
Lusian appeared beside him.
Too close.
There was no sound of arrival. Only presence.
—"Not change you," Lusian replied. "Just fight in your world."
Artereus turned immediately. His arm came down with everything he was, without measure, without restraint. A strike designed to end anything too close to him.
Lusian did not retreat.
He entered.
He slipped into the motion as if he already knew its end. Darkness condensed in his hand without defined form at first, as if it were still learning to exist in that instant. Then it stabilized, not as a perfect weapon, but as something inevitable: a dark, silent line that reflected nothing.
Artereus tried to invoke his full power.
The world did not respond.
Something did not connect. Something did not hold. The authority that had always been instant found a void where obedience should have been.
For the first time, the god was not being resisted.
He was being ignored.
And that was worse.
Lusian took a single step.
He did not seek strength. He sought precision.
The blade of darkness did not pierce Artereus's body like a normal attack. It entered exactly at the point where his power stopped being pure strength and became dominion over the world.
A point he had never needed to question.
Until now.
The impact made no sound.
No explosion.
No light.
It only stopped something.
Artereus looked down.
The blade was in his chest, with no blood, no visible rupture, but something inside him stopped behaving as it always had.
Strength was not being damaged.
It was losing continuity.
—"This…" he tried to say.
He did not finish the sentence.
Because for the first time, there was no clear result.
The darkness did not consume him like an enemy. It expanded inside him like an absence of response, like a space where his power could no longer maintain itself.
Artereus fell to his knees.
Not from pain.
From lack of system.
The world around him stopped reacting to him as before, and that was the last thing his existence could withstand before breaking.
The body of the god began to dissolve into energy.
It was not an explosion or an immediate destruction. It was something stranger: his form became unstable, as if the very idea of his existence could no longer hold together. The strength that had sustained him for eons began to leak outward, falling in fragments of heavy light that spilled onto the crater floor.
Artereus tried to remain whole.
But there was no longer a "whole" to hold.
Darkness had interrupted him at his core, and now his divinity could not recombine itself. Every attempt to reassert himself only accelerated his dispersion.
Then he fell.
Beneath the mountain, the roots of the Mother Tree began to move.
At first it was slow, almost imperceptible. Then the ground cracked, not from destruction, but from growth. Massive roots emerged from the depths as if they had been waiting for this moment since the beginning of the world.
And when they reached Artereus's divinity…
An absolute, instinctive absorption, as if it was the only thing it had ever desired since its birth. The god's energy disappeared upon contact with them, without resistance, without escape, without possibility of return.
The ground trembled.
The tree reacted.
Its trunk, hidden beyond the mountain, began to pulse for the first time in centuries. The roots spread faster, searching for every fragment of that scattered divinity.
And then the change occurred.
The leaves of the Mother Tree began to transform.
Deep green broke into golden tones, then into more intense shades, as if light itself had learned to live within them. The tree grew without pause, expanding toward the sky with a new force, denser, more conscious.
It was not just growth.
It was evolution.
As if it had tasted something that
The gods did not speak.
Not because they had no voice, but because they had no explanation.
What they had just witnessed did not fit into any law, any war, or any order they had built over eons.
A god had not been defeated by something superior.
He had been surpassed by someone who should have died and did not.
Lusian remained in the center of the field, breathing with difficulty.
His body still trembled from the effort.
Blood marked his mouth and slowly ran down his shattered chest.
But he remained standing.
He had not allowed himself to fall.
Then he looked up.
And he saw them.
He wanted to move forward.He wanted to raise his sword.He wanted to end them.
But his body did not respond.
He had no strength left.