Hahahahahaha!
"Caesar, you are an absolute failure. It appears I landed ten spears, while you only managed eight."
Eris laughed at his brother. They sat in a circle with the rest of their siblings, having just impaled Oria with a barrage of spears, flooding the lunar surface with her blue blood.
Caesar stared at his brother with freezing, lethargic eyes. He offered zero genuine attention. Instead, he lowered his head, analyzing a holographic map projecting the metropolitan zones the Emperor had previously conquered.
A sharp fury seized the red-haired Eris. He clenched his fists, violently igniting them with raw flames.
"How... how dare you ignore me?"
Caesar possessed terrifying intellect. He calculated that Eris was highly volatile and easily provoked. Remaining silent to his insults would exponentially amplify his brother's rage.
"Cease your bickering. You are generating unnecessary noise. Altair's screaming is already sufficient."
The clinical reprimand originated from Victor. He remained entirely focused on his terminal, coding and upgrading a surveillance console to monitor their respective kingdoms per Malik's request.
Despite the warning, Altair's agonizing screams for his mother refused to cease.
"Is she not dead yet?" Dante asked, casually flipping a coin into the air.
"Hehehehehehe... hand me the toxin, brother Silas." Lilith giggled, placing a hand daintily over her mouth.
She secured the vial and swaggered back and forth. A malicious, unhinged smile permanently etched across her features.
She grabbed Oria's chin and violently forced the poison down her throat.
The absolute second the liquid toxin breached her lips, its effects activated. Oria's biological structure fought the venom surging through her veins with every ounce of its energy. But Lilith's concoction was far too catastrophic to resist.
Her pristine white skin—the very skin the Emperor had always cherished—began to crack and splinter. Her thick white hair detached from her scalp, floating around her face in the zero-gravity environment.
Oria coughed with apocalyptic violence. She vomited blue blood mixed with liquefied chunks of her liver and internal organs. The biological sludge scattered into the void like grotesque bubbles directly before Altair's eyes.
"Ugh, revolting!" Dante complained with extreme boredom. He wiped a stray drop of blood that had floated onto his luxury footwear.
"Lilith, could you not have synthesized a toxin with less disgusting side effects? I am deducting the cleaning fee for these shoes from Altair's inheritance."
Lilith struck a theatrical pose, covering her mouth with fabricated innocence. She released a spoiled, teasing laugh while observing her mother's death throes.
"Ara, ara, my beloved brother Dante. Certain masterpieces require sacrifices."
Ryu advanced slowly. He gripped a metallic crucible radiating a strange vapor... boiling mercury.
"Let us force her to swallow this as well. Perhaps it will cease the scattering of her entrails," Ryu stated with absolute apathy.
Eris gripped Oria's skull with brutal force, violently prying her jaw open. Ryu poured the boiling mercury directly down her throat and into both her ears.
Oria stretched her mouth and eyes to their absolute limits. She screamed... a shriek of agony that shattered cognitive comprehension. A roar of monumental cosmic despair.
But in the dark vacuum of the moon, zero sound carried. The sight violently shredded the heart of the crucified and paralyzed Altair. He watched his mother's veins threaten to rupture, entirely unable to hear her wails.
Oria finally surrendered. Her biological resistance flatlined. Her heart stopped completely.
Her corpse froze solid in a matter of seconds. She was transfigured into a humiliated ice sculpture, floating dead within the brutal void.
Altair witnessed it all. His pitch-black eyes bulged, engorged with blood. He choked on his own ragged breaths and the tears freezing instantly against his scarred cheeks.
*My father is murdered... My planet is annihilated... My siblings are monsters...*
*And my mother... my mother was tortured and butchered right before my eyes.*
Cosmic despair consumed him utterly. He questioned himself as his blood dripped onto the lunar ice.
*Where is it? Where is that supreme Akasha energy you promised me, Mother? Why hasn't it activated? What exact threshold of agony must I cross to unleash it? Did you lie to me, Mother?!*
**[ Axiom Anomaly: Spacetime Tear ]**
At the absolute zenith of his agony, Altair opened his mouth and roared.
A pure, unhinged fury hijacked his core. He severed all remaining hope for survival, calculating that the gaze of death was already upon him. He unleashed a soul-shattering scream that echoed clearly across the lunar surface—a realm entirely devoid of sound or wind!
An apocalyptic energy detonated from his chassis. It violently shattered the heavy iron shackles and the crucifixion frame as if they were fragile threads. The shockwave launched his eight siblings backward.
Right before his eyes, spatial reality distorted. The spacetime continuum ruptured, tearing open a massive, room-sized black wormhole.
A primal instinct screamed at him to breach it immediately. He sprinted toward the rift with every microscopic drop of energy remaining in his broken body. Lilith, Malik, and Silas struggled to their feet, attempting to intercept and execute him.
But he violently lunged inside just before the dimensional tear collapsed, shrinking and erasing itself into absolute nothingness.
---
**[ The Emperor's Palace — The Grand Harem Chamber ]**
Altair crashed violently onto solid marble flooring, rolling violently across the ground. His chassis was heavily mutilated with deep lacerations and blunt trauma. His rags were shredded. His eyes had mutated to pitch-black voids due to the recoil of the Axiom Anomaly.
He dragged his head upward, gasping for air with broken lungs. He found himself in a location he recognized perfectly, yet one that was chronologically impossible.
Standing directly before him... was the Emperor. And beside him stood his mother, Oria, completely alive and heavily pregnant.
*Is this the afterlife? Am I dead?*
*Or was all of this simply a terrifying nightmare while I was still in my mother's womb? And who dictates that the fetus is me? Could that be a younger brother?*
He registered that his biological reserves were entirely drained. Not a single atom of strength remained. He collapsed onto one bleeding knee. He stared up at them with hollow eyes overflowing with tears and cosmic despair.
He managed to compute only a single phrase, whispering through a shattered, tragic voice:
"F... F... Father... Mother..."
Then, he collapsed into absolute unconsciousness, delivering the terrifying reality of the future directly into the hands of the Emperor.