**Chapter 98: "Blood Gospel"**
*Volume 5 – Exodus*
*Log Date: March 19, 6079*
**Kruger National Park – Crash Site**
Tommy Watson had been quiet through the entire ugly aftermath, which was how anyone who knew him understood something terrible was about to be said. He was a compact, methodical man who kept sample vials in his chest pocket the way other soldiers kept cigarettes. While everyone had been bleeding or burning or losing limbs, Tommy Watson had been collecting.
He held a vial up to what remained of the daylight.
"Hades is mentally ill," he said.
The crash site went quiet. Even the burning wreckage seemed to hold its breath.
"Not strategically unhinged," Tommy continued, turning to face the assembled Guardians. "Not arrogant. Clinically, structurally, medically ill. His blood reads like someone who has never once processed reality the way the rest of us do. Every biochemical marker points to a delusional disorder so deeply wired into his neurology that it has become load-bearing. He genuinely believes he is invincible." He let that land. "Not metaphorically. Not as a philosophy. He believes it the way you believe the sun will rise. It is the foundation of his entire existence. Remove it and there is nothing underneath."
Cody Diamond uncrossed his arms. "You're telling me that monster out there is sick."
"I'm telling you he is the most dangerous kind of sick. The kind that is never afraid."
Dilles pressed a rag to the wound in his side that had come out of someone else's memory. "And the Pillar?"
Tommy lowered the vial. "The White-Blue Heart Pillar buried in the dam. If Hades touches it, it will evaporate him. Completely and instantly. Whatever resonance lives inside that fragment is the precise opposite frequency of what he is. His biology, his Glimmer, everything that makes him what he is—the Pillar will unmake all of it the moment contact is made."
The silence stretched long enough that the burning fuselage started to feel like a campfire.
Pierce Lumberjack spoke first, voice rough with dried blood. "So he's spent twenty years hunting the one thing on Earth that can kill him."
"While believing," Tommy said, "that nothing can."
Cain let out a short, involuntary laugh. "That's the saddest thing I've ever heard."
"It's also the most dangerous," Tommy said. "Because he will not hesitate at that water's edge. He will not sense the danger. He will walk into that dam and touch that Pillar with both hands and when reality finally refuses to bend around him, he will not understand why." He pocketed the vial. "Which means we need someone at that Pillar before he reaches it. Someone the fragment will actually accept."
The silence took on a shape. A name-shaped hole nobody standing there could fill.
"Kevin Leister," Tommy said quietly. "Only Kevin can touch it. The Mythical Matrix he carries and the Pillar share a resonance I have never seen before in any recorded Glimmer pairing. If the Pillar is a lock, Kevin is the only key that has ever existed."
Dilles looked at Miki. "Your bird still on Hades?"
Miki's eyes had gone white. She was somewhere above the canopy, riding borrowed wings. "He's at the dam," she said from the back of her throat, her voice thin with distance. "Standing at the edge. Looking down."
"Time?"
"Minutes."
Dilles turned to what remained of his unit. Two men short an arm between them. One commander with a psychic wound still leaking at the edges. A wood-controller with splinters in his own palms. He looked at all of them and set his jaw like pouring fresh concrete.
"Then we run."
---
**Kruger National Park – The Dam**
The water was bronze and ancient and perfectly still.
Hades stood at its edge the way men stand at the end of things they have spent their whole lives walking toward, and he felt the Pillar below the surface the way a compass feels north—inevitable, intimate, older than choice. He had killed through four continents to reach this water. He had torn through Wrathborn and Guardian alike, through armies and myths and the screaming protests of people who had believed they could stop him.
None of them could stop him.
He was invincible.
He stepped off the concrete edge and let the water take him, sinking slowly through cold and dark toward the light building at the bottom, and he did not feel afraid. He had never felt afraid. He wasn't certain he possessed the architecture for it.
The light grew warmer the deeper he fell. White and blue braided together in the black water, pulsing like a second sun sleeping at the bottom of the world.
He reached for it.
---
**N4 Highway – Mpumalanga, South Africa**
The Highveld opened around the bus like a breath finally released—golden grass that caught the afternoon light like wire, red earth the colour of old brick, a sky so vast and blue it felt like a personal affront to every indoor space any of them had ever occupied.
"Ofentse's country," Matthew said quietly, watching it through the window. Something in his face got old for a moment and young again. "Dad used to describe it exactly like this."
"Lovely," Dixon said from the front, feet on the dashboard, monitoring approximately six different screens strapped to his forearms. "Now someone find the catastrophe because in my professional experience there is always—"
Tanaka Chivera stood up.
He had felt it three seconds before it arrived—a wrongness in the weight of the ground, a pressure shift that his Glimmer registered the way ears register dropping altitude. The hillside to their left was coming apart. Not from earthquake, not from erosion, but from a Veil fracture that had spread through the bedrock this far from the park, rupturing an underground reservoir sideways through red earth and quartzite.
The flood came down the hill and across the highway in a wall of brown and white, moving too fast and too committed to be reasoned with.
"FLOOD!" three people shouted, which was accurate and completely useless.
Ito Lancelot was already moving.
He had occupied the back row for four countries, eleven words, and zero explanations, and he now walked the length of the entire bus with the calm of a man who had calculated all possible outcomes and accepted every single one. He pressed open the emergency door and stepped out into the road to face twelve metres of oncoming water bare-handed.
The flood hit him and stopped.
Not gradually. Not with visible effort. It stopped the way a sentence stops at a full stop—clean, absolute, total. The water rose above Lancelot in a frozen arch, caught mid-crash, and then it began to move inward on itself, compressing, pulling, taking on dimensions that water was not supposed to have. Limbs formed from current. A torso gathered from redirected mass. A head assembled itself from the top with the patience of something that had once been a hill and remembered the shape of living things.
The waterman stood on the empty highway, fourteen feet of structured flood, regarding Lancelot with eyes made of crosscurrent.
Lancelot pointed at the ground once.
The waterman moonwalked.
The bus lost its composure entirely. Ignis screamed with a laughter so complete she scorched the headrest. Tanaka folded sideways out of his seat. Wyatt put his face in his hands, shoulders shaking. Even Dixon, who prided himself on being unmovable, turned around in his seat and watched with the expression of a man whose fundamental assumptions about the world were being quietly renegotiated.
The waterman moonwalked back.
"Sixteen years," Lancelot said, walking back toward the emergency door, water dissolving harmlessly into the roadside ditch behind him. "Sixteen years and I have never once understood why I can do that."
He sat down. Folded his hands. Said nothing further.
Diego Ramirez began to applaud.
Then a piece of his hand fell off.
Not wound. Not blood. A strip of skin detached from the back of his knuckles cleanly, dry at the edges, dark, the way bark separates from a tree that is changing into something it used to only dream of being. It drifted to the floor of the bus and lay there while Diego stared at it with the specific stillness of a man who has known something was wrong for hours and has just been proven right.
Another strip peeled from his forearm. Then his wrist. Slow, painless, bloodless, and absolutely wrong.
"Diego," Wyatt said carefully.
"I feel it," Diego said. Not panic. Not even fear. Acknowledgement—the voice of a man who had faced things worse than his own transformation and had come out the other side. "Started three hours ago. Just small pieces at the edges."
The Sandman rose without touching the floor and moved down the aisle in his particular way, which was less walking and more deciding to be somewhere else. He crouched in front of Diego and studied what lay beneath the peeled skin. Not flesh. Not muscle. Something faintly luminescent, dark gold at the surface, like an ember that had been sleeping inside him for years and had finally decided the time for sleeping was finished.
"Your Glimmer is surfacing," the Sandman said. "The bonding is completing itself. Forcing upward through the body."
"Is that dangerous?" Matthew asked from across the aisle.
"Extraordinarily," the Sandman said pleasantly.
Diego pressed his exposed palm flat against the metal wall beside his seat. The metal indented under his hand like soft clay, deep and immediate, then slowly returned to its original shape when he pulled away.
He looked at his hand.
His hand looked back.
From the rear seat, Bennett the Baku made a sound that in a lesser creature might have been a whimper. Tanaka turned around to look at the dream eater, because Bennett had been the most consistently terrifying person on this bus for the entire journey and a whimper from him was a significant event.
"What?" Tanaka asked.
"What is coming out of him," Bennett said, zip ties straining as he leaned forward, eyes wide and genuinely rattled in a way that no amount of hostage-taking had achieved, "I have never seen in a dream. Not in any dream I have ever consumed. Not from soldiers. Not from Wrathborn. Not from anything that has ever slept." He paused. "And I have eaten the nightmares of gods."
Diego flexed his hand once, slowly. The window beside him cracked from corner to corner without him touching it.
"Right," Diego said quietly, and looked out at Bandile's country rolling past under a sky gone copper and strange at the edges where the Veil infection was beginning to colour the horizon like a bruise moving through living tissue.
Kevin Leister pressed the Mythical Matrix against his chest through the fabric of his shirt. It pulsed once beneath his palm—slow, certain, the rhythm of something that had been waiting a very long time and had finally run out of patience.
The dam was close.
*End of Chapter 98*