Four angels remained.
Four pillars of golden light that, in the dark and scorched sky, were like four nails driven into the wounded body of the world.
Four hands — simultaneously — rose toward the sky.
Fingers extended.
Palms open.
And the sky — that sky which was no longer a sky, that sky which had become a curtain of chaos and roar and hurled magma —
Not with sunlight.
With swords.
Thousands of swords.
From the torn clouds, from amidst the black smoke, from behind that curtain no one knew what lay behind — the swords appeared.
One by one.
Two by two.
Ten by ten.
A hundred.
A thousand.
Each one made of cold, golden light.
The swords spun in the sky.
Like stars fallen out of their orbits.
They had no sound.
Only presence.
The presence of thousands of blades, all aimed at a single target.
Ignaras raised his head.
He looked at the sky.
At all that light and fire and blades raining down from above.
And he smiled.
“Ah…” he murmured.
“This is better.”
He spread his wings.
The assault.
Thousands of swords, simultaneously, were released.
They were not in the sky — they were in the trajectory.
They were not in the trajectory — they were in the chest.
So fast the eye couldn’t follow.
So heavy the air compressed.
Ignaras lifted off the ground.
His vast black wings beat once — and he was in the sky.
Like thunder.
But the swords were in the sky too.
Everywhere.
Front, back, left, right, above, below.
As if the sky itself was collapsing blade by blade.
And Ignaras — with his bare hands — caught the swords.
Not with a shield — with his fingers.
A sword would come, he would extend his hand, catch the blade — and shatter it.
He would break it in his hand, like glass.
Fragments of golden light burst from between his fingers and vanished into the air.
But there were too many.
A thousand.
You couldn’t catch them all.
So Ignaras found another way.
From his shoulders — from the very place where the wings emerged — hellfire erupted.
Not a pillar, not a flame — clones.
Hundreds of Ignaras.
Each one his own size.
They scattered across the sky, like a flock of birds of prey that have spotted their quarry.
The swords struck the clones.
One.
Two.
Ten.
A hundred.
Every time a sword struck a clone, the clone vanished — like smoke.
But the sword vanished too.
The blade would sink into the clone’s body, and both — blade and clone — would disappear.
And the real Ignaras — amidst all this chaos, amidst all these swords and clones and light and fire — spun.
Dodged.
Like a snake, like water.
A sword passed by his ear — it cut a strand of white hair and it burned.
Another sword from under his arm — he folded his wings, the blade passed behind him and struck a clone that was behind him.
A third, a fourth, a fifth — he saw them all.
He predicted them all.
He calculated.
As if time moved slower for him.
And then — he stopped.
Not because he was tired.
Not because the swords had run out.
He saw something.
Something that disrupted his calculations.
He said to himself — in his mind, where no one could hear: “Interesting… why does Heaven want this mortal so badly? They’ve even broken the laws of the universe… sending several angels to capture a single mortal? What’s going through the King of Angels’ head?”
A voice came from among the swords.
Not loud, not soft.
The same voice — a whisper and a roar at once.
The angel who was taller than the rest, whose armor bore the most vivid cracks, who still held his hand toward the sky and rained down new swords:
“Because he is your host.”
A brief pause.
“Heaven does not permit the prime world to be destroyed.”
Ignaras was silent for a few seconds.
The swords, for a moment — just a moment — slowed.
And then — he shook his head.
A calm movement, almost respectful.
“That is logical.”
And the war began anew.
But this time — the angels came themselves.
Not swords, not light, not a miracle from afar — themselves.
At the speed of light.
They surrounded Ignaras on four sides.
Front, back, left, right.
There was no way out.
No dodging.
The purest form of encirclement.
They attacked.
Simultaneously.
The angel in front — a fist of light that bent space.
The angel behind — a spear born of their very presence.
The angel on the left — a twin sword, two blades cutting from above and below at once.
The angel on the right — arms that moved like spirals toward Ignaras’s throat.
Ignaras didn’t fall.
He didn’t flee.
He didn’t retreat.
He opened his hands.
Left and right.
He caught the left angel’s sword — between two fingers.
Black fire burst from his nails and the sword cracked, but didn’t break.
The angel pressed.
Ignaras pushed back.
He deflected the front angel’s blow with his forearm.
His bone cracked — but didn’t break.
Black fire burst from beneath the red skin and filled the wound.
It healed.
He slammed his foot hard into the empty air — and answered the blow the rear angel had launched with the heel of his foot.
The angel was hurled backward.
Fifty meters.
A hundred meters.
He didn’t go far, he stopped, ready for the next attack.
And the right angel — the spiral arms — reached Ignaras’s throat.
They coiled.
They pressed.
The neck bone cracked under that pressure — a sound that, in the silence of battle, was like wood snapping.
Ignaras opened his mouth.
He breathed.
Not an ordinary breath.
A breath of burning fire.
From his mouth — from the depths of his being — a fire burst out that did not resemble fire.
Molten material, toxic gases, heat that vaporizes stone — all in a single moment, from the throat of one being, onto the face of the angel before him.
The angel screamed?
But his voice wasn’t heard.
It was lost in the explosion of fire.
In the heat that melted his light armor.
It didn’t crack — it melted.
It dripped.
The angel pulled back.
But too late.
The fire had covered his face.
His chest armor was split in two.
From his back, the cold flames — those invisible wings — one went out, the second flickered and fell.
And the fire — like when a volcano erupts — was hurled outward.
In the desert — it became a bath of hellfire.
And in the midst of all this fire — Ignaras vanished.
One moment he was there, his wings open, his hands bloody, his white hair burning in the wind.
The next moment — nothing.
Only smoke.
Several kilometers away — he appeared.
His breaths were fast and short.
He had folded his wings.
Blood — no, magma — dripped from the right side of his waist.
It was a wound.
Deep.
And the angels — two of them — had not disappeared.
The same two.
The front angel and the left angel.
Their armor was cracked, their light dimmed, one of them was holding his arm with his other hand and black magma dripped from between his fingers.
But they stood.
They pursued him.
They attacked at the speed of light.
Ignaras didn’t have time to flee.
Didn’t have time to dodge.
Didn’t have time to breathe.
But he had time to create his swords.
From hellfire — the void that had opened in his palm — he drew two swords.
Not golden light, not gleaming metal.
Blades of black magma, with edges that cut light itself.
Their hilts were of bone — the bone of a creature whose name no one knew.
And he fought.
With the left angel — he spun his right sword, three strikes in succession, so fast his hand couldn’t be seen.
The angel answered with his twin sword. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
Blade met blade — and made no sound.
No clash of metal, no spark, nothing.
Only black light and golden light devouring each other.
With the front angel — he raised his left sword, a strike from below to above.
The angel caught it with his forearm.
The sword struck the armor and the armor cracked, but didn’t break.
The angel returned the blow — a fist to Ignaras’s stomach.
Ignaras doubled over, but didn’t fall.
His breath burst out.
He stood again.
And the swords — still in his hands — spun once more.
With incredible speed.
Speed the eye couldn’t follow.
Speed that Lloyd’s body — a mortal body — shouldn’t have been able to endure.
His muscles screamed, his bones cracked, his brain was melting from the sheer acceleration.
But Ignaras didn’t stop.
He couldn’t.
If he stopped, the angels would take him.
And if they took him — he didn’t know what would happen.
But it wouldn’t be good.
The third angel — had withdrawn from the battle.
Not fleeing, not retreating.
He went to the sky.
Higher.
Higher.
Until he was just a dot from the ground.
And up there — he took his sword.
The same sword he’d had from the beginning.
Not a twin blade, not a spear, not a fist — that same slender, long sword of golden light.
He raised the sword — and released it.
But the sword didn’t fall.
It grew.
It grew in the air.
Not approaching the earth, but growing itself.
The blade stretched, became wider, became longer.
From an ordinary sword, it became a pillar of light, from a pillar of light to a colossal sword.
A sword that, if it struck the earth, would no longer split the earth in two — it would erase the earth.
The other angels — the two angels fighting Ignaras — suddenly pulled back.
Not fleeing — dodging.
They leaped left and right, so fast that only a line of light remained of their movement.
Ignaras looked up.
The sword was coming.
He exhaled.
He ignored the pain of his broken bones.
He ignored the blood — magma — dripping from the wound in his waist.
He spread his wings, but didn’t leap.
He said to himself — not with sound, with exhaustion: “Damn this weak body…”
If it had been his own body — his original body, his hellish body, the body made of fire and shadow and rage — he would have caught this sword with one hand and shattered it.
But this body…
this body belonged to a mortal.
Its bones were made of calcium, not magma.
Its muscles were made of flesh, not fire.
And its soul — Lloyd’s soul was still somewhere down there, breathing, waiting.
But no.
Not now.
He vanished.
One moment he was there, beneath the colossal sword, his wings open, his void eyes staring upward.
The next — he was in the sky.
So high that the wind blew cold and the air was thin and breathing was hard.
The sword struck the earth.
Not an impact — it sank in.
The blade of golden light passed through the earth’s crust, like a knife through butter.
It didn’t get stuck, didn’t break.
It just sank in.
And the earth — that nameless desert, that point on the map with a red line — split down the middle.
Into two parts.
Not two halves — two fragments.
The edges weren’t smooth — they were burned.
Melted.
From the fissure, golden light bled out, like blood.
Like breath.
Like the last scream of something that was dying.
And Ignaras — in the sky — was breathing.
His breaths were fast.
Short.
They wouldn’t deepen.
The angels — some stood, some looked at the sky.
At him.
And he looked at them.
At the split earth.
At the scorched desert.
At a sky that no longer resembled a sky.
And under his breath — in a voice only the wind could hear — he murmured:
“It’s not over yet…”
But his breaths said perhaps it was.
To be continued…