Pharai
Time did not merely slow down; it stopped entirely.
The executioner's heavy, black-iron axe hung suspended an inch above Anubis's neck, the sickly green Underworld flames licking along its serrated edge frozen like jagged glass in the stagnant, suffocating air.
In the span of a single, agonizing heartbeat, the frail mortal frame of Professor. Pharai Alya was completely consumed, shattered, and rewritten by the ancient, primordial architecture of Ruthor's true divine form. The suffocating weight of my scholar's mind burned away in a blinding, roaring flash of copper-gold light. My vision narrowed into sharp, lethal clarity through glowing, golden serpent slits that pierced through the monochrome fog of the shadow realm. The heavy, bronze-copper skin of my hands hummed with a terrifying, raw physical density—a mass so absolute, so impossibly dense, that the surrounding space-time fabric of the shadowy corridor bent around my shoulders like thin, fragile silk.
