Chương 126: 125. The God in the Broken Vessel

Do you remember what happened the last time you made the atmosphere like this?" Kelly was about to ask what he meant. She came to learn why a few seconds after. She deactivated her time-bubble as the answer violently introduced itself to her face. The ceiling didn't so much leave as get removed—peeled away by something that had decided architecture was a personal insult. What came through was approximately seven feet of angel, which is to say: too much of everything.

Oversized muscles on an elongated frame that looked like someone had taken a muscled Ken doll, stretched it on a rack, and then convinced it to become a weapon. Wrapped in a single robe of shifting silk that gleamed under the hall's emergency lights, its wings were metallurgical nightmares, sharp enough to make swords feel inadequate. Chains wrapped around it glowed a light that suggested they were holding something back, and doing a mediocre job of it. The eyes were two flames. Actual flame. In actual eyes.

The halos floating above its head—there were several, stacked in a configuration that organized geometry with a hammer. They floated and spun with patience circles. Things orbiting something that had never questioned whether it deserved to exist. It was Verrimisir, which meant "the angel of order," which meant the universe had decided Kelly's casual theft of time was untidy, and had sent something to file a complaint.

The angel threw the ceiling away like a man discarding a napkin, and stood in the hole it had made in a way that gave Kelly the distinct impression it had practiced this in front of a mirror for several thousand years. Kelly looked from the gaping hole in the roof, to the angel now standing amid the debris of her training hall, to Ren's stoic face. Her brain, still buzzing with the aftertaste of compressed time and stolen mana, served up a single, dry observation.

"Oh," she said, her voice a flat, with a nervous edge.

"That." The light of a dying star shoved its way through the new hole in the ceiling and flooded the combat hall, cutting through the mana-thick air. It was more hostile than sunshine could ever be. In the middle of this theatrical display, Verrimisir the angel—or perhaps archangel—descended. And "descended" was the word for it, the way "visiting" was the word for when crumbling ceilings above one's head.

Its trajectory was a line drawn deeper to the matted ground, a guillotine blade's slow, deliberate hover straight down into the combat hall… Headed right toward them. Before the dust from its entrance could even think about settling, before Ren could finish the thought forming behind his eyes, the thing was occupying the space right in front of them.

One second was all it had taken, a monument of muscle and metaphysical threat that had simply decided the intervening distance was a formality it couldn't be bothered with. Kelly's breath hitched, a sharp, involuntary pull of air that felt like glass in her lungs. Her blood took a vacation to her feet. The Verrimisir stood before them. The Order God's champion. His personal avatar. The idiot deadly not-pigeon. He was different this time. Not like any version from any past loop. Verrimisir had changed.

A being trying to contain something vastly larger than itself, a teacup holding an ocean if the ocean agreed to fold very small and very angrily. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. His feathers—once the burnished metal of something divine—now looked like they'd been left out in the rain for several centuries and had developed rusted decay. They fell from his frame in lazy spirals, each one trailing light like a comet robbed of trajectory.

His skin had developed a texture that suggested it was being worn by something that didn't quite understand how skin was supposed to work. Cracks spiderwebbed across him, glowing faintly from within, not like damage, but like the places where something else was showing through. The power coming off him itched. Literally. It itched like bee-stings, a psychic static that made her teeth feel foreign in her gums. This was a thing being used—a champion not expected to survive whatever it was channeling.

'A suicide bullet with wings,' she thought: and it had just landed in her living room. The god himself, Illvyr, wasn't fully in the room. Kelly could tell. The way reality wasn't completely unraveling, the way the air was only mostly glitching instead of coming apart entirely was a big hint. If the god were present, her brain would probably be trying to exit her skull through her ears. This was just his avatar. His echo in a cracking shell.

Its presence messed with peripheral vision and left a metallic tang on the tongue, but it didn't make her ears well with blood. The aura was merely incomprehensibly powerful, not universe-endingly so. Then the angel shifted. It was a small movement. Similar to one a chair makes when someone sits on it wrong. Except the chair was reality and the someone was a god and the sitting down involved a storm of mana that turned the air into something thick and electric and wrong. Reality glitched.

The fire in Verrimisir's eyes changed. It went from the orange-gold of something burning to a white so pure and absolute that Kelly's eyes immediately questioned whether she'd been seeing color her entire life or just assuming she had. One moment Kelly was looking at a cracked angel, the next she was looking at a storm of mana vomited into the environment, a pressure spike that flattened the remaining dust into the floor. Its skin peeled back in more places in curling strips, leaking that same painful light.

Razor-sharp feathers burned to ash mid-fall. The possession was complete. The voice that boomed out rattled her molars." I sensed the mana of a worldbox here," the voice came—and it wasn't Verrimisir's voice anymore, it was the sound of Order itself deciding to speak, which turned out to sound like teeth rattling in a skull, or a thousand precise mechanisms clicking into place at once." Instead, I find the stream of time in disarray. Tangled and Disrupted..."

The head tilted, and the white-fire eyes fixed on Ren with the focused intensity of noticing a stain on its otherwise perfect marble floor." And it all originates from here." The burning white eyes locked onto Kelly.

"You. Girl."" Which god do you serve? Who among them blessed you with such a powerful Skill?" The air vibrated with each word.

"Tell me. Which of my kin was foolish enough to grant a mortal from the first wave a Mythical blessing?" The question hung in the air like it expected an answer. Like it expected the answer. The singular, definitive one that fit neatly into the order-god's taxonomy of how all worlds were supposed to work. And Kelly? Kelly was ready to check out, naturally. But she was waiting for once specific thing, a point of data she absolutely needed to confirm before pressing her beloved soul-saving 'Kaboom.'

And while receiving confirmation, she had a thought. Which god do i serve? The thought, when it came out, was surprisingly steady, edged with a fatigue that had nothing to do with mental or physical tiredness. Let's say I'm self-employed. Ren's voice cut through the her microsecond thought and the air, all urgent gravel.

"Kelly." He wasn't looking at her; his eyes were locked on the empty space where the angel had just been.

"Kelly, whatever failsafes you have… use them now… reset." His words were a stripped bolt, rough and final. Then he was gone. Not a blur. He straight up vanished from her sight. A complete and utter cancellation of a person from the space he'd been standing in. Her mana sense and scanners saw... nothing.

Her sense for the seconds of living things—the personal time that clung to a body like weighted wet drops of sand—caught only faint smears of distortion zipping away at a speed that made her thoughts feel slow and stupid. His stealth suit was one thing. The fact he was moving so fast her trait could only give her a vague, queasy impression of direction was another. The man was a ghost assisted by a ballistic launch. A ballistic launch that shot him straight at the god.