Chapter 522
The attack did not come like the previous ones. It was nothing like the spinning kick that had destroyed fifty clones, nothing like the flames that incinerated ninety-nine thousand existences at once, nothing like the seven counterattacks that caused Theo's fingers to fall off one by one while erasing thirteen percent of his memory. This attack came in succession.
First, the air around Theo became something he could no longer breathe. Not because it was poisonous, too hot, or too cold, but because the air no longer acknowledged that it was air. It no longer acknowledged that it was supposed to enter his lungs and deliver oxygen to his bloodstream. Theo's lungs expanded and contracted in vain, like a balloon leaking from both ends at the same time.
Then, before Theo could even adjust to the impossibility of breathing, the gravity around his feet reversed. It no longer pulled downward toward the ground but upward toward a ceiling that did not exist. The blood flowing through his already fractured body rushed into his head, filling his skull with a pressure that should have blown his brain apart from within. Yet his brain did not explode, because the reality surrounding him no longer acknowledged that explosions were something capable of happening.
One Sa replaced another, over and over without pause, like someone frantically switching radio stations with trembling hands so that every song lasted only two seconds before being replaced by another equally unfamiliar melody. The law of cause and effect was nullified, then the logic of space-time was twisted, then the very concept of pain was erased and recreated in a different form. Theo could no longer distinguish between wounds he was truly feeling and wounds he merely remembered because he had once experienced them in a past that might no longer exist.
"Sa... replacing Sa..." Theo whispered to himself, and his inner voice no longer sounded like a murmur but a cry. A cry born from the realization that he was no longer confronting a single absolute authority but an infinity, something that could not be counted because it had deliberately been made uncountable. Like the endless sands of a desert, like the inexhaustible waters of the sea, like numbers that continued increasing forever because nothing ever commanded them to stop.
Theo's entire body, from the tips of his unwashed hair to the two remaining fingers on his hand, was now enveloped by something he could neither see, touch, nor hear, yet could feel with every living cell. Layer upon layer of ever-changing Sa accumulated without space, without pause, without mercy.
Countless. Infinite. Beyond the limits of the human mind, which could process only seven pieces of information at once. For the youngest was no longer playing within the boundaries of human cognition. He was rewriting the rules of the game itself while the game was still in progress, and he smiled. No, he was no longer merely smiling. His previously straight lips curled upward into a grin, not the faint smile from before but something much wider, far too wide. It was the grin of someone who savored every second of what he was doing, like a child burning ants with a magnifying glass on a bright Sunday afternoon.
Fhaah!!
Far away within the layer known as the Land of the Gods, distant from the epicenter where Theo and the youngest continuously rewrote reality itself, the four races, the Rebels who relentlessly struck from the shadows, the Hypocrites who smiled while stabbing others in the back, the Deceivers who transformed every corridor into an endless labyrinth, and the Sinners who laughed with a thousand unforgiven voices, moved like an army of ants disturbed by the foot of a giant who had unknowingly stepped onto their nest.
Yet little by little, push after push, they began to be driven back. Not because the courage of the Gods had suddenly reached its peak, but because ten new figures descended from a ceiling that had never been visible before.
The Ten Greatest Gods. Their robes had not faded like those of lesser deities. Instead, they radiated a light born neither from the sun, the moon, nor the stars, but from an authority legitimized through thousands of years of blind devotion to the throne once abandoned by King Xavier XVII and now occupied by a child who had never been loved.
"You think you can disrupt the day of sacrifice?" one of the Ten Greatest Gods declared. His voice came not from his mouth but from his entire body, every pore vibrating at a frequency that made the surrounding air dance like water shimmering above a scorching pan.
"You are nothing more than dust that happened to be airborne before the broom arrived."
On the other side of the battlefield, the fourteen Distubers, Lilith HaRish'a, whose eyes never blinked; Asherah, whose hair grew like tree roots searching for water beneath dead soil; Mammon, whose body was made of rusted coins that were never enough; Ashmedai, whose laughter could make babies cry despite there being no babies in the Land of the Gods; Baal-Zevul, with flies crawling from his mouth whenever he spoke; Chemosh, as silent as a nameless gravestone; Apollyon, carrying locusts that fed not on leaves but on hope itself; Rahab, whose body was an eternally restless abyssal sea; Apophis, from whose eyes tiny serpents emerged whenever he blinked; Bes, who continued smiling despite having both of his tangis severed by the golden-robed god moments earlier; Enlil, whose surrounding winds had begun to weaken because he had died and returned to life too many times; Lamashtu, whose serpent hair had been reduced to half its former length; Ahura Mazda, whose surrounding darkness was fading like ink dissolving beneath the rain; and Mictlantecuhtli, the quietest among them all, who simply stood in silence while the gods around him fell one after another because they had forgotten why they were fighting. All fourteen of them were now forced to divide their attention, their wounds, and their exhaustion.
The Ten Greatest Gods did not attack like ordinary gods. They attacked like the hands of a clock that never ceased moving, from ten directions at once, within the same second, offering ten deaths wrapped inside a single gleaming package.
"We need a plan," Lilith HaRish'a whispered within her heart. And because she spoke from the heart, a place unreachable by the youngest's "Forget" or by prayers that were never answered, the other thirteen Disturbers heard her perfectly. They heard her with the unified consciousness they had gained after absorbing Theo's RWIA, after realizing that this world was nothing more than a game, after understanding that they themselves were merely characters written by someone sitting before a screen in another world they would never see.
"We can't keep fighting these ten Gods forever," Asherah continued within that same shared consciousness, her inner voice sounding like roots creeping beneath the earth.
"It isn't because we're weak, but because they never grow tired. They don't have flesh like we do. They don't have blood like we do. They don't have limits like we do. They're programs running on hardware that never dies."
"Then we change the hardware," Mammon interrupted, his inner voice ringing like a coin striking a marble floor. "Or at least make the hardware realize that it no longer wants to run this program."
To be continued…