[Oliver’s PoV]

  Oliver didn’t understand what happened after the lance landed.

  For one heartbeat, the weapon had been solid in his hands. Bronze shaft humming, Unique cores screaming with contained power, and then reality itself seemed to break.

  There was no clean explosion, no shockwave.

  It felt like the world had been torn open from the inside.

  The blast threw him across the ballroom. He flew through blood-thick air and shattered furniture, slammed hard into the far side of the hall, and skidded across marble slick with iron. The impact rattled his vision into static. For a moment, all he could hear was a thin ringing.

  Fragments rained toward him. Splinters of bronze, shards of crystal, glowing embers of Energy that hissed as they cut through the air.

  Oliver forced his eyes open, trying to focus through the blur.

  Before his mind caught up, his body told him something was missing.

  His right arm.

  The arm that had held the lance.

  Was gone.

  Not torn. Not broken.

  Erased.

  Where it should have been, there was only an obscene spray of blood and exposed bone. The sight should have stolen his breath. It should have dragged a scream out of him.

  It didn’t.

  The scream stayed trapped behind clenched teeth.

  Oliver bit down so hard his jaw ached. His entire body shook with the urge to howl, but training held the sound inside him.

  His left hand moved on instinct.

  He conjured his Energy Pistol and pressed the barrel to the ragged end of his arm.

  He fired.

  The blast burned the wound shut in a flash of white heat. Pain tore through him like electricity, so sharp it whitened his vision. The smell of seared flesh filled his nose, and for a second, he tasted bile and copper.

  Yet the bleeding stopped.

  He breathed once and forced his mind back to the battlefield in front of him.

  The room wasn’t whole anymore.

  The ballroom, its chairs, its chandelier, its ring of dead Imperial Guards. It all still existed on one side. But the other half had been replaced by something impossible: a vast, featureless white hall, bright and sterile, as if a completely different world had been stitched into this one mid-explosion.

  The seam between them wasn’t a door or a wall.

  It was a fracture. A jagged boundary where architecture and reality no longer agreed on what should exist.

  Oliver’s vision swam as he tried to comprehend it.

  Suspended in the air at the center of that fracture was Odin.

  Not standing.

  Pinned.

  Chains were forming around him. Four enormous links that appeared as if they had grown out of nothing. They wrapped around his limbs one by one, snapping into place with a sound like metal biting into bone. Each chain hummed with a pressure that didn’t feel like Energy. It felt older. Heavier. Like the universe itself had decided Odin needed to stay exactly where he was.

  Beneath him lay Mordred.

  Or what remained of him.

  His body was shredded, broken into a brutal, twisted ruin against the blood-smeared marble. Black armor plating lay cracked and scattered. There was no motion, no rise of breath, no twitch of a hand.

  Oliver’s stomach turned hard.

  His remaining hand shook, whether from pain or shock, he couldn’t tell.

  Odin’s skin began to crumble.

  Not like flesh decaying, but like a surface layer being peeled away by invisible hands. It flaked into fragments of pure Energy that drifted, then disintegrated into dust before they could fall. Layer after layer, as if the god was being stripped down to something underneath.

  [Return to your domain denied]

  Oliver blinked, trying to process it through the fog of pain and exhaustion.

  The message appeared again.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  [Return to your domain denied]

  Again.

  Again.

  Again—each time pulsing in angry red, as if the system itself were warning him.

  Oliver didn’t understand the phrasing at first.

  Then the memory surfaced. About the way the System enforced its rules.

  This is the punishment Athena mentioned.

  Odin couldn’t flee. He couldn’t slip away into some protected layer of reality, some sovereign-like retreat.

  He had to remain here.

  On mortal ground.

  The System wouldn’t let him run.

  Oliver wanted to speak, but his tongue felt heavy. His thoughts were slow, sticky.

  In the broken ballroom, Odin’s chained body began to lower.

  Odin drifted downward until his feet touched the blood-slick marble again.

  When he looked up, his eyes were no longer amused.

  They were furious.

  Not anger like a soldier’s. Not rage like an Ork’s. It was an offended divinity, a wounded ego, an ancient being realizing the insects had drawn blood.

  “You worms,” Odin snarled, voice shaking the fractured air. “You—you! You dared to touch a god. Dared to stain my image.”

  Oliver’s visor flickered. Another notification appeared, clean and clinical, as if the System were reporting a change in weather.

  [Sovereign Myth Level reduced: 7 ?? 6]

  Oliver’s breath caught.

  For the first time since the lance detonated, something like hope sparked in him—thin, dangerous, but real.

  He’s closer. He’s almost within reach.

  But he didn’t get the chance to act on it.

  Odin vanished.

  Oliver’s instincts screamed a fraction too late.

  Odin reappeared directly in front of him, so close Oliver could see the faint fracturing of Energy along his skin.

  Odin kicked.

  The strike hit Oliver in the chest, fast and cruel, carrying a force that ignored armor and went straight through bone and breath. The impact lifted him off the floor like a doll.

  Oliver flew backward, crashing into broken chairs, skidding across bodies, his remaining arm flailing uselessly as his armor screamed warnings. The ballroom’s dead shifted under him, uniforms catching on his plating, blood smearing across his visor.

  His lungs seized.

  For a moment, he couldn’t inhale.

  Odin’s footsteps approached—calm, measured, unstoppable.

  “I’m going to erase you,” Odin promised. “Not just destroy you. Not just kill you. I’ll torture you for years. I’ll kill everything you love, everything you want. Until you understand what I lost today, boy.”

  Oliver could barely force air into his lungs.

  Odin stepped in again.

  A kick landed in Oliver’s chest.

  Oliver lifted off the blood-slick marble, slammed into broken chairs and the slack weight of bodies, and skidded across the floor. The ballroom spun. His vision blurred, then sharpened just long enough to see Odin walking toward him with the casual patience.

  “I lost centuries,” Odin continued, almost conversational, as if explaining a lesson. “I lost civilizations I built and destroyed to reach my level.”

  Another impact.

  Odin didn’t fight like a warrior. He treated Oliver like an object. He grabbed, yanked, flung—lifting him by armor and momentum and throwing him as if Oliver weighed nothing at all. Each time Oliver hit the floor, the shock traveled through his ribs and spine, turning the air in his lungs into fire.

  Oliver tried to rise with his remaining arm. The world swayed.

  Odin shook him once more and hurled him.

  Oliver struck the wall hard enough that the stone shuddered. Pain flashed white. His gauntlet scraped the floor and snapped open with a metallic clack, its compartment lid popping loose.

  Something inside spilled out.

  Crystals clattered across the marble.

  The Bronze fragment hit first, bouncing once before rolling away. Oliver felt it immediately. The bronze plating that had layered over his armor faded. [Combat Mode] collapsed with it, leaving his Red Armor alone.

  The Blue Crystal tumbled after, its glow smearing across the floor as it rolled and settled.

  Then the Purple Crystal slid farther than the others, scraping across stone with a faint violet trail before stopping at the edge of a dark blood pool.

  Oliver’s throat tightened.

  Odin’s boots entered his view, stepping through blood without urgency. He walked with the calm certainty of a predator that knew its prey had nowhere left to run.

  A smile returned to Odin’s face, smooth and pleased.

  “You?” Odin said, voice rich with amusement. “You were carrying one of my seeds? One of my Crystals?”

  He laughed softly, as if Oliver had just revealed a final joke in the middle of his own execution.

  “Boy,” Odin murmured, “you’re an endless surprise.”

  Odin crouched near the blood pool and reached for the Purple Crystal. His fingers closed around it with effortless ownership, lifting it from the floor as if he were plucking a prize from a garden.

  The violet glow lit his hand.

  Odin held the Purple Crystal between his fingers as if it were something fragile and precious.

  “This is our essence,” Odin said. “It’s how we feed you and get Energy back. But we can reabsorb it—recover everything we invested… and far more.”

  Odin tightened his grip.

  The Purple Crystal burst into a cloud of violet brilliance, a cloud of fine, glittering dust. For a moment, the particles hung in the air around Odin’s fist, drifting and swirling as if caught in an invisible current.

  Odin inhaled slowly.

  The dust obeyed. It streamed toward his mouth and nose in delicate spirals, drawn into him.

  Odin’s eyelids lowered a fraction. His expression softened into something like satisfaction.

  “Delicious,” he murmured, tasting the word.

  The violet glow around his hand dimmed as the last motes disappeared.

  Oliver’s gaze stayed fixed on Odin, on the place where the dust had been, on the way Odin’s posture seemed to settle as if he’d just completed a meal.

  Oliver smiled.

  It wasn’t wide. It wasn’t triumphant. It was only a small curl at the edge of his mouth, the kind of expression that didn’t belong on a man missing an arm and lying among corpses.

  Odin noticed.

  His purple eyes sharpened, snapping toward Oliver with irritation. In the same heartbeat, something changed in his face.

  Surprise flared, followed by a sudden, strained stillness. His pupils tightened. The amusement drained out of him so quickly it looked as if it had been cut away.

  His hands rose to his face.

  Fingers pressed hard along his cheekbone and the corner of his eye as if he were trying to wipe away something he refused to believe could exist.

  Then a single droplet formed at the edge of his eye.

  Red.

  Real.

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