Jimena felt her soul shudder—an instinctive recoil—as the amorphous, fetid water began to take shape. Before her, the mass rose and swelled, forming a grotesque echo of Tomas's latest monstrous form. The arm Jaime had once severed had regrown, thicker and more vicious than before. The creature—over three meters tall—condensed slowly, its shape hardening as the two chosen stared in stunned silence.
Jimena's skull mark was the first to respond. Its glow intensified until it burned like a miniature sun on her forehead. It laughed, wicked and triumphant, its tongue jutting mockingly as it drank in the death saturating the cavern. A spiraling vortex of air formed around her, clearing the miasma in a roaring whirl.
The surge of death power hit her like a storm.
Jimena's eyes turned pitch-black. The gem in her chest ignited, burning with a heat that felt alive—a sacred pyre consuming everything impure. Her skin sizzled as she fought to contain the divine fire, her body becoming a living furnace ready to burst.
Only when her armor formed did the searing energy stabilize. Obsidian enveloped her in molten rivers, acting as a heat sink, channeling the inferno along her veins. Each limb erupted with flame, magenta claws unfurling like talons of a newborn star. Her hair streamed behind her in weightless tendrils of violet plasma.
Xolo howled from within her gem—a cry of warning, of readiness, of hunger for the battle to come.
Jimena snarled. Molten obsidian slid over her face, forming a feral mask. A deep, bone-rattling howl shook the cavern, and the corruption recoiled from her light and heat. Like mycelium to fire.
Marisol, choking on the overwhelming death energy, staggered back. Even at a distance, Jimena's aura crushed the air around her. She braced herself, separating from the battle-crazed girl before she was choked out entirely.
The black mass finished forming just as Jimena's divinity exploded outward.
When it lifted its head, she froze.
Staring back at her were Tomas's green eyes.
But not the lively revenge filled ones she had seen.
These held a cavernous grief—an abyss of sorrow drowning behind their familiar color. For a single heartbeat, the beast was almost human.
Then the eyes changed.
The green rotted into a sickly, venomous hue. Slitted pupils snapped into focus on Jimena as the creature finished condensing—an eight-foot monster draped in glistening black scales. They drank in Jimena's light, and each reflection showed flickering visions of faraway hellscapes. Screams echoed in the flashes—ragged, tormented, countless.
There was no warning.
They collided in a shockwave that shook the underground. Their energies rejected each other violently, blasting cracks through the ceiling and sending debris raining down.
The creature remained eerily silent—except for its scales. Each time Jimena's claws or jaws tore through them, they wailed. The sound was a chorus of agony—screams upon screams, as though each scale imprisoned a soul.
Jimena ripped away chunk after chunk of rotting flesh, but the mass regenerated with obscene ease. They were locked in a brutal war of attrition.
The monster was clumsy. Slow. Nothing like Tomas. Its tail—too thick, too short—thrashed uselessly. Its shriveled wings, mere decorations. It lunged and missed again and again as Jimena carved it apart with surgical savagery.
Like a lumberjack cutting down a diseased tree, she worked it relentlessly.
But her flame was fading.
Even as she devoured the ocean of death saturating the cavern, she felt her power lagging, burning faster than it replenished.
And the monster showed no sign of slowing.
Marisol tried her best to push back the death around her—to purify it, to cradle it with life. But her efforts dissolved as soon as they surfaced. The miasma drank her life energy greedily, thickening as it fed. The smog clung to everything, seeping into cracks, corrupting, draining, devouring.
Only her obsidian armor—pulsing with divinity—kept it from swallowing her whole.
The gem in her chest throbbed quietly, Axochi's presence steadying her. Their bond was unwavering—firm, bright, and ready whenever she called.
It wasn't until she focused on Axochi that she realized something was changing.
The small pink axolotl inside her heart had grown—twice its size, its once-soft body beginning to sprout toned, powerful limbs. The pulse in her chest intensified, vibrating through her bones.
Then she heard it.
A whisper—no, a chanting—carried on the air. A phantom choir with no source, echoing from nowhere and everywhere at once. It wasn't divinity. It wasn't death. It was something older. Something gentler.
Faith.
Its power filled her, warm and enduring, moving through every corner of her being.
Her obsidian armor began to shift, its black stone transmuting into a shimmering rose-colored danburite. Blue energy surged from her legs, latching onto the miasma. It weighed the smog down, thickening it into a foul, sticky tar that could no longer drift freely.
Then, like the first cool breeze of spring, life erupted.
Grass unfurled across the ground. Flowers burst open in radiant clusters. Taller shoots rose, thickening into saplings. The annihilated vegetation returned with vengeance, feeding on the tar as if it were rich soil.
Ceiba trees towered upward—young soldiers marshaling themselves defiantly. Their bright green trunks stood firm, shielding the fragile life budding beneath their canopy.
A soft pink mist curled around them. It shimmered with hints of sentience, supporting the growing ranks like a guardian spirit.
As the ceibas swelled in size, their trunks thickened, and their branches pressed upward. They reached the cracking ceiling and held it aloft like ancient pillars. Still they grew—branches spearing through stone and rooting into the rock itself.
Once they connected, the space shifted.
This dark cavern became her domain.
The pink mist thickened, weaving through every leaf, vine, and sprout. The plants devoured the lingering death eagerly, cleansing the air with each breath they took. Every purified breath fed back into Marisol, and her circle of life expanded like a heartbeat blooming outward.
Her chest throbbed—life thrumming like an angry storm.
The gem drank everything—death, life, faith—funneling it into Axochi. The little axolotl grew, filling every corner of the gem until Marisol could feel its limbs pressing against its edges.
Golden eyes blinked open… and turned to jade.
Axochi's new, muscular body shifted restlessly. The transformation wasn't done.
Marisol's helmet slid over her head as her armor finalized its shape. Her jade eyes overflowed, tears streaming down and pooling around her. Orbs of water floated leisurely at her side.
A rainforest blossomed.
Luminous pink mist drifted like spiritual fog between colossal ceibas and thick undergrowth. Ferns unfurled, flowers glittered, vines wrapped stone, and every living thing feasted ravenously on the death that had once suffocated this place.
The cavern was no longer a tomb.
It was rebirth.
Salutaris narrowed his venomous eyes, a ripple of pain twisting through his forming body. The chosen girl continued her relentless assault, refusing to give him even a heartbeat to stabilize. Death had been too widespread—too scattered—forcing him to gather it in agonizing fragments instead of swallowing the whole region in one divine gulp.
Every moment she drained the miasma, every breath she consumed of his carefully cultivated death, sent a tremor of rage through him. That a mere child—this insignificant, flaming gnat—could force a god into a direct confrontation was unthinkable.
Humiliation burned like acid down his throat.
This chosen would suffer for daring to stain his rebirth.
He called death toward himself with greater urgency, forcing it through his half-solid flesh. A hardened shell began to form across his body where her blazing claws hadn't yet torn him open. A god had no physical weaknesses she could exploit. Venemaris' agony through their connection was irrelevant; the avatar's suffering meant nothing. Only the ritual mattered.
He only needed to finish what those meddling priests had disrupted.
But the longer this dragged on, the weaker he became. The insufferable girl siphoned death faster than he could reclaim it. Every pulse of her cursed power drained his reserves.
Its scales wailed and released a resonant wave that rattled the cavern. Salutaris then shifted tactics. loosening his hold on the death he had gathered. Focusing all his malice on swatting down the pest circling him in blazing loops.
This was a mistake.
Moments later, a forest erupted into existence—devouring chunks of his corrupted divinity. His rage spiked, but the fire-chosen's barrage forced him back as more and more of his domain was consumed.
Enough.
He funneled power into the writhing black scales coating his body. As the ceiba trees pierced the ceiling—severing part of his underground realm and claiming it as their own—he unleashed the scales in a vast explosive wave. Cursed scale fragments whistled through the cavern, finally stunning the flame-chosen just long enough for him to turn.
He lunged at the burgeoning forest that dared to drain him.
His maw stretched grotesquely wide, swallowing half the treeline in one monstrous venomous breath. Belching a black fog across the foliage. It should have withered instantly. It should have died in silent screaming.
But the effect lasted only a moment.
The ceibas slowed… wavered… then surged again, pink mist swirling between their branches as they pushed back against him—against his corruption—against his domain.
Salutaris clawed feverishly at the trees and creeping vines that tried to entangle him. Each strike shredded swaths of greenery, but every wound he dealt filled with new life moments later.
The battle had become a slog—infuriating, shameful, beneath him.
How dared these pathetic insects stagger his ascension?
How could mortals—children—bar the path of a god?
With every frenzied strike, every collapse of plant or stone, fury and humiliation coiled tighter around him.
This world should have been his to torment.
Instead… it resisted.
Jimena recovered in a burst of momentum—shooting straight toward the scaleless black mass. Her claws carved burning arcs through the corruption, tearing it apart with newfound ease. Marisol's growing domain couldn't restrain the creature completely, so Jimena kept it occupied—darting in and out, forcing its attention on her while the forest drained its strength.
They fell into a brutal rhythm:
Attack. Dodge. Purge. Repeat.
Whenever the monster locked onto Jimena for too long, Marisol snapped vines around its limbs or neck, staggering it. Jimena then burned through its putrid claws, cleaving away the black venom clouds that threatened to smother the forest.
Like a cornered beast, the creature was forced into their pace—dragged into a deadly tempo that would, inevitably, lead to its doom. Its scales, long lost, had regenerated, returning to their constant wailing. The only sign of the suffering within—besides the brief, hollow flashes of Tomas' face swimming beneath the corruption.
With Marisol cooling Jimena and occasionally tanking the creature's frenzied lunges, they finally shoved it into a weakened, pitiful state. The last of the ooze coating its frame solidified into a hard, chitinous armor—dark and slick, glowing with venomous light.
A sign that the fight was far from over.
Marisol's forest had nearly swallowed the entire underground domain, supporting their power like a living fortress of life and mist. But now that the corrupted divinity of death dwindled, their surge of strength flickered—its peak already passed.
And beneath all of that… another fear stirred.
Tomas.
Or what remained of him.
His body reeked of divinity—an oppressive weight in the air, invisible but unmistakable. A phantom presence clung to him, sitting on his shoulders like a parasite made of shadow and godhood.
He unfolded slowly from his curled state. Dark green scales glistened wetly along his torso and limbs, coated here and there in clumps of fetid slime. Each movement felt deliberate. Controlled. Wrong.
Now free of the ooze's constricting weight, Tomas stretched out his limbs… his wings… everything still intact, still monstrous. He gazed at the underground rainforest—at the miracle Marisol had birthed—then flexed something deeper.
Something divine.
A sickly green wave rippled outward from his body.
All life bowed.
The ceibas groaned.
Shrubs bent flat.
The pink mist trembled like frightened breath.
Marisol staggered.
Jimena snarled.
And Tomas—
or the god perched within him—
finally stood tall.