The sky tore open.
Like fabric being rent in reality.
The clouds, which had been a curtain of smoke and ash, suddenly began to spin.
Slowly at first, then faster, then so fast they were no longer clouds — they were a vortex.
A colossal vortex, black and white and gray.
And from the heart of this chaos — from that very eye that watched the earth and judged it — light came.
Five pillars.
Golden.
Pure.
And at the center of each pillar — forms.
Angels.
But not the angels of churches, not the angels of old paintings with white wings and beautiful faces.
These were something else.
Something that early humans had seen and, out of fear, carved into stone in caves, thousands of years ago, before dictionaries were invented.
Elongated limbs.
Taller than any human.
Up to the shoulders, up to the chest — they were covered in armor.
Armor of light.
On their shoulders, there were no wings — at least, not wings.
Something like cold flames that burst from their backs and swirled in the air.
Their faces.
You couldn’t see them.
The more you looked, the less you understood.
As if their faces were made of that same light — a white, uniform radiance that revealed no details.
Pressure.
The moment they descended — the moment the pillars of light touched the earth and melted and the forms stepped out from within them — pressure came.
Pressure that wasn’t on the shoulders, but on the soul.
John was on the ground.
Not from fear — from weight.
The weight of the beings standing up there.
His breath was ragged.
Henry was still standing.
He didn’t know how.
His knees were trembling, sweat was dripping down the back of his neck, but he was standing.
No one spoke.
Not the police, not the soldiers, not the helicopters.
Everyone just watched.
And Ignaras — Ignaras turned his head.
Slowly.
His void eyes — which until now had been only black, only empty — now held something else gleaming in their depths.
Perhaps it was fire.
Perhaps the memory of a war that had begun before the birth of Earth and was still not over.
Rage.
Fire beneath ash.
It didn’t blaze, but it could be felt.
In the heat that suddenly burst from his body, in the waves that made the air around him tremble, in the cracks that deepened beneath his feet.
And he spoke.
His voice came from the depths —
“You… the five of you… what are you doing here?”
One of the angels took a step forward.
Taller than the rest.
The light of his armor more vivid.
The cold flames behind his shoulders, taller and calmer.
His face — that same uniform white radiance — but now it seemed as if two eyes had opened within that radiance.
They had no pupils, no color — only brightness.
And the voice came.
Not from a mouth.
From his entire being.
A whisper and a roar at once.
“We seek that which you have plundered.”
A pause.
The angel looked at Ignaras’s body — at the very body that had once belonged to Lloyd, with the same height and build, but now transformed.
It had turned red.
It had grown horns.
It had sprouted wings.
“That unstable boy… he does not belong to you.”
The angel’s hand rose.
Open.
Fingers extended.
Inviting.
Not a threat, not a plea — a statement of truth.
“We have not come for war.”
Ignaras only watched.
The angel’s hand opened wider.
“…and return to the depths of darkness from which you came.”
Silence.
A silence whose weight could be felt on the shoulders.
Henry held his breath.
John moved his hand to the hilt of his sword.
The encircling forces, the soldiers, the police — all waited.
They didn’t know for what, but they waited.
Ignaras lowered his head.
He looked at his hands — the same hands from which black fire had erupted.
At his chest — where the heart chain still coiled beneath the skin.
At his wings.
And then — he raised his head.
He smiled.
Not a smile of joy.
Not a smile of pleasure.
The smile of the last sign of tolerance.
The smile that comes before the explosion.
“Entrust?”
His voice was no longer a roar.
It was calm.
But every word was heavy.
He raised his hand.
He opened his palm.
And in his palm — fire.
Not a flame.
A void.
A void of nothingness that had opened at the center of his palm.
Round, black, lightless.
But it devoured the light around it.
Dust particles within a meter of it were sucked in.
They vanished.
Anything that had light or mass or existence — it wanted to consume.
And it compressed.
The void was shrinking — not filling, but concentrating.
Compressing.
Thickening.
Until it was no longer a void — it was a point.
A black point at the center of his palm.
A point that, if you looked at it, you felt you were staring at the bottom of nothing.
Ignaras fixed his gaze on the angels.
On the four that remained.
On where the fifth had stood — before being destroyed.
“Take it, if you can!”
And he released the fire.
Explosion.
But it was no ordinary explosion.
No loud sound, no heat wave, no dust and rubble.
A black sun.
A sun born at the center of the field.
Round, colossal, so black that the whiteness around it spun madly and vanished.
Rays of absolute darkness shot out from it, like beams that devoured everything.
There was no sound.
Not that it wasn’t loud — it wasn’t.
Human ears couldn’t hear that sound because that sound was at a frequency that tore through reality itself.
The black light consumed everything.
The flagstones beneath Henry’s feet, beneath John’s feet, beneath the soldiers’ feet — softened.
Melted.
Turned into black magma that boiled and bubbled and smelled of sulfur.
And the heat — heat that didn’t settle in the skin, but in the bones.
Heat that cooked from within whatever the black light touched.
The helicopters — those that were too close — like insects striking a lamp, spun in the air and fell.
Not because of the impact of a wave, but because their pilots were no longer there.
Their eyes had burned.
Melted.
Their faces were imprinted on the cockpit glass, like traces of those who existed for a moment and the next — only memory.
The angels were driven back.
Even they — with their armor of light, with the cold flames behind their shoulders, with that heavy presence that covered the sky — were forced to retreat. Follow the newest chapters on novelping(.)com.
Waves of energy — if it could be called energy — crashed against their light armor.
It cracked.
Tiny.
Thin.
Like cracks in a car windshield after hail.
Light dripped through the cracks — not pouring out, dripping.
Slowly.
Like blood.
But one of them — the one who stood on the front line, the one who had spoken first —
The black light reached him.
His armor grew brighter.
The cold flames behind his shoulders grew taller.
For a moment — a single blink — it seemed he was resisting.
And then — he went out.
No scream.
No explosion.
No collapse.
His golden light — all that he was — faded.
Slowly.
Like a candle extinguished by the wind.
One moment he was, the next — nothing.
Nothing.
No armor, no flames, no unseen face.
Nothing.
But the effect of the explosion didn’t end there.
The earth trembled.
Not an ordinary tremor — a tremor that started from the depths, from a place no drill has ever reached, from a place where pressure is so high that even stone flows like water.
The cracks that had been on the surface before now became chasms.
Chasms from which magma oozed — black, not red.
Magma that gave no light, only devoured.
A radius of hundreds of thousands.
Everything in this radius — buildings, asphalt, police cars, fallen helicopters, even the remaining corpses of the organization’s agents — everything turned into a lake of molten, dark stone.
A lake that boiled and bubbled and smelled of sulfur and burned flesh.
And a storm.
A colossal storm of ash, fire, and chunks of molten rock rose into the air.
A pillar that went to the sky — not white smoke, not black smoke — smoke that had no color, because it had swallowed color too.
The clouds scattered, because of the heat.
A heat so intense the clouds evaporated.
One moment they were there, the next — vapor.
Vapor that vanished in the hot air.
The sky was no longer the sky.
It was a curtain of chaos and roar.
A roar that wouldn’t stop.
A roar that settled in the bones and wouldn’t let you breathe.
It was as if the world itself was tearing open at that point.
And at the center of all this devastation — Ignaras.
He stood.
On the lake of black magma.
His bare feet were on the molten surface, but they didn’t sink.
They didn’t burn.
He just stood, as if walking on an ordinary sidewalk.
His right hand was lowered.
His wings were half-open.
And his eyes — those two black voids — stared at the four remaining angels.
And at the world that had dared to stand against him.
Satisfaction.
A demonic satisfaction sat at the corners of his mouth.
A satisfaction that said: “This was only the beginning.”
And he spoke.
His voice rose above the chaos — above the roar of magma, his voice was calm.
Calmer than anything around him.
But everyone heard.
“Now…”
He paused.
He tilted his head.
That same birdlike movement.
That same human movement.
“…do you still want to ask something of me?”
To be continued…