Chapter 325 – My dear broken angel

There was a primordial tingle, a sense of danger, that even Thana felt, and the cause of it was aiming directly at her.

“His punishment is mine to decide,” Romulus told the beast, towering over her. In his right he was holding a gigantic golden sword, his left was armed with a silver shield of perfect roundness. The hole where his heart had been was filled with a formation of roots and crystals pulsating within those roots.

“You threaten my empire and its people, monster,” Romulus declared; “Cease now and I will be merciful.” The answer came in the shape of Thana’s tail heading for his head. Romulus smacked it aside with his lunar shield.

“You have cast your die, then,” the emperor’s voice was grave, and he reached for all the powers in his arsenal. Armour grew around him made from plants, stones, metals and all manners of manifested energy weaving together into a seamless shape that emulated perfect human physique.

The human anathema dropped the still living skull and jumped away, realizing that this was going to be dangerous even for it. Romulus was immediately upon her, slicing open its chest. “RAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” the abomination’s pain was apparent as it countered the attack.

Truthfully, it was just as fast, but it lacked the mind to control its strength.

All it did was claw at Romulus in a flurry of hateful emotions, who deflected them skillfully with his shield, giving ground where he had to. Instinctively, it tried to attack the side that held the sword. The emperor let out an amused grunt at that.

The sword became a blazing golden disk that functioned just as well as a shield as her sister’s form. The lunar shield switched similarly, now taking the form of the blade. Where the solar blade had been golden and heavily loaded with intricate designs and decorations, this one was the antithesis to that. A simple, straight-blade, grey and silver, with a black guard only there to protect the hand as effectively as possible. A sword made only to cut and nothing else.

The defence of the goddess of genocide was wide open now, and so Romulus brought his blade down on it. A barrier as thin as a sheet of paper ravaged out into the world, splitting whatever it came across.

This cut once more severed her body completely, from one shoulder to the upper edge of her opposing leg. The impact and pain caused Thana to stumble backwards as the wound healed only slowly, compared to the other display of instantaneous regeneration.

The aggressively formed barrier didn’t stop there, it travelled beyond, only widening as its energy lost its original density, until it eradicated part of the colosseum and even the grounds outside it. There wasn’t even any material left, it was literally eradicated.

But even healing slowly meant that Thana’s body was kept together. “I thought the touch of a goddess of death would do more damage to you,” Romulus engaged Thana again. A short series of blows followed. Then, like the arms of a praying mantis, its skeletal wings were brought downwards on the emperor’s shoulders. One screeched along the material uselessly, but the other managed to find a miniscule gap and sunk in..

“This body is but a shield for humanity,” Romulus grabbed that lowered wing and snapped it off with some effort. The goddess of genocide jumped back and watched this seemingly unclimbable obstacle in front of her. “I thought it a fluke of my powers when I failed to rip any energy from you at first,” the heartless emperor said, “but I realize now, you are a human goddess like she is. I see it in those eyes of yours.”

The abomination of blood, bone and soul just screamed at Romulus.

“Are you trying to intimidate me?” The idea seemed to amuse the emperor. “I am the defender of humanity. I will give everything of myself to it, and I shall feel afraid of nothing, even if it is a monster like you. If you had more experience, you might actually be a threat to me, but like you are now…” he had Sol assume her form as the decorated claymore again, wielding both his bonded goddesses as twin blades, “…you are but mindless destruction without tactics!”

They engaged in a flurry of blows, the emperor in his armour with a thorn still stuck in his shoulder and missing his heart against the goddess with the bleeding line across her torso. Their blows created gusts so strong that them crashing and cutting along the halfway intact shape of the colosseum created a sandstorm around them.

Back and forth they cut and slashed over the scar of molten ash where hydrogen atoms had fused. Romulus lost an eye to a slash he didn’t manage to dodge, destroying half of his helmet and digging deep trenches through his face, but in return he rammed his golden claymore through the goddess’ chest.

Pure energy rose like mist from the blade as it flooded the goddess’s insides with golden fire that spewed out from the gap in its mask as every inch of it was scorched from the inside. Romulus dodged her tail by distancing himself, pulling out Sol in the process.

He was right back on the offensive the moment his feet hit the ground. Ramming the much smaller form of the abomination with his shoulder, he catapulted it forwards. In the beginning of her flight backwards, Romulus grabbed her leg. Tendrils of blood and tormented souls the shape of angry wraiths covered his form, ripping his armour, forged from a myriad of powers, apart and covering him in small wounds.

Nothing would stop the emperor, however, as he slammed Thana to the floor, making her the centre of a crater several metres deep. Before she could recover, Romulus bundled her wings together at the roots with his gauntleted hands. Even the ephemeral burning blood wasn’t made an exception to the unrelenting grip.

“I WILL CAST YOU BACK INTO THE ABYSS FROM WHENCE YOU CAME!” Romulus shouted as he ripped the wings off the goddess. Animalistic, agonized screams echoed over the city as the emperor cast them aside and then raised Sol in both of his hands, ready to cut the head off the beast.

“Stop, please!” The emperor halted and turned his head just far enough to see John stand there. Unable to see Romulus’ expression under the helmet and the blood covering half of his face.

“What is it to you, John Newman? What do you know about this creature?”

“This is Thana… the actual Thana,” John explained; “I had no idea, I am…”

“I believe you,” Romulus interrupted him, and John could barely believe his ears. Stunned, he stared at the motionless Apex of the Abyss. The emperor didn’t look at him, but there was something in his voice. The grave understanding from having lived through a similar tragedy? The sheer knowledge of age? “Try what you must; I do not enjoy senseless slaughter, but I will not hesitate should you fail.”

With that permission given, John limped closer to the whimpering abomination.“Come back to me, please,” he pleaded with what was inside the monster that was pinned to the floor by the weight of a giant. He spoke her name, not Cecylia, her actual name:

“Eliza.” - The betrayed by all.

That was the title the Horned Rat had given the girl John Newman knew. The answer had been rather easy to come by once he knew that the sisters Eliza and Cecylia existed; he had just never needed to think about it before.

A god was born by Faith. Faith didn’t need to be directed at an object of worship, it needed something or someone that could act as its vessel. Whether that was an avatar claiming that might or a scapegoat that had it forced on them was just a matter of method.

When Josef Mengele, in an act of cruelty, had made Cecylia pick the first person to die and be used as fodder for his experiments, when he had forcefully pushed souls into her corpse and thus broken the natural boundaries of the human condition, he had accidentally created the conditions for the goddess to be created.

That power had healed the body it inherited while the deity’s consciousness formed, and with nothing else operating the body, a damaged brain resumed functions. Regeneration remade Eliza, but her memories had already been lost, for the most part.

The face asking for Eliza’s forgiveness had never been the girl’s bad conscience, it had been the soul of Cecylia herself. Two look-alike sisters with two numbers tattooed to their arms. One still forming goddess toying, deliberately or not, with her host’s mind and body to create the conditions to break out, given ample time in a vacuum of pain.

A goddess that now writhed under the emperor’s foot at the mere name of its host. A breath of hope filled John’s lungs, it was working in some way. “Come on, Eliza,” he kept urging the consciousness inside. She still had to be in there somewhere. If Thana had taken control for a few hours before, then she also had lost that control.

Despite clearly being able to, the goddess hadn’t just instantly killed John. She had engaged the communists in battle first, ignoring the retreating knights, only after having run out of other targets did she go after Romulus. There was a differentiation between targets that an entity dedicated to the universal destruction of humanity would not make.

“Eliza,” he invoked the name like it was a mantra. The mask and carapace of the creature started cracking. It clawed at the ground and screamed with its needle like teeth of blood stretching out of the shattered gap as its primal intellect tried to drown out his voice.

“El-“ he tried to say her name once more when the goddess mustered her last bit of strength to throw Romulus off. “Newman!” the apex of the abyss roared a useless warning. John didn’t even have anything close to resembling speed which would have allowed him to dodge even a weakened Thana’s attack.

Its claws sunk in his stomach. Its teeth were mere centimetres from his throat. Hand ripping backwards, his blood splattered over the floor. The lines in her eyes, glowing with infernal hatred, became dots again. They opened wide in shock as they looked at the Gamer’s quickly palling face.

“It’s good to have you back,” he faintly whispered, as Eliza took quivering steps backwards. The blank mask crumbled off her face, boneshard for boneshard. A miserable, crying girl became visible behind it, looking at his wounds, then her own claws covered in crimson, as the broken carapace still stuck to her.

“John, I…” Her back hit something gigantic, and the small body turned to see Romulus, whose own armour had disappeared to reveal the full grievousness of his wounds.

The memories of what she, her body, had done in the past half hour suddenly returned to her. She convulsed and bent over forwards, spreading the contents of her stomach on the floor. A clean yellow bile, all that which she had devoured had dissolved already.

“I… I remember everything… my life… all of this… everything,” she sobbed. John took a stumbling step forwards and, his body rapidly losing in strength, fell on Thana who barely caught him. “That was your last ‘get-out-of-berserk’ free card,” he joked. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” Eliza asked. “You have a hole in your stomach! ...I did this to you...” Her last words were nothing more than a tear-choked whisper.

“You tried to keep it in,” he told her, only able to whisper himself. “You had no idea. I will fight the world if they blame you. You are…” An agonizing ripple shook his body. “…you are my dear broken angel.”

His vision flared with darkness and distant voices in his head. He was vaguely aware of his body leaning not only on Eliza but being held up by others as well.

“I would be… happy to… throw some more compliments and insurances at you,” he said, lips trembling, “but I am… kind of… bleeding out… so if you could… could try to disable that magic that keeps me from healing that’d be gr…”

His lids were so incredibly heavy, his lips refused to form that last word.

“John?” the voice was incredibly far away. “JOHN?!” everything went black.

End of Season 2 Arc 2