CHAPTER 29- XORATH NEW FORM ! WHO R YOU ?
⟦Multiversal Battlefield — a cathedral of broken stars, orbiting dust and shredded light⟧
The air—if the void could be said to have air—tasted of static and iron. The remnants of Cleaving's undoing drifted like charred confetti; galaxies spun awkwardly on new axes as if embarrassed. Wukong stood amid the wreckage, staff balanced on his shoulder, grin wide and dangerous as a blade. He had seen death many times and skated past it with a shrug; this place had almost swallowed him whole and still he had that particular look: hungry, amused, altogether unrepentant.
Doomsday moved like a planet that had learned to throw tantrums. The hulking pig-god had closed the distance without ceremony, eyes burning with the private cruelty of the bereaved. His frame had already reshaped twice during the day—no mere flesh, but something like a ritual of becoming—and now he resolved into a new shape, an upheaval of mass and armor. This was not the same broad, careless destroyer who had tossed a galaxy like fruit. He had accepted the calculus of combat and adapted; his new form was carapace and spike and a crown of radiating plates that hummed with raw radiation.
Wukong's grin widened. He spun his staff once, a golden blur, and cocked it like a pistol. The collision that followed was inevitable and quick.
Wukong struck first.
The staff sang. It met Doomsday's flank in a crack that felt—by whatever physics governed these obscene encounters—like a bell rung inside a dying star. Metal against alien hide, a report that sent shards of artificial ring world skittering into new orbits. Doomsday's head snapped where it sat on that monstrous neck; for a blink the skull-less stump bled smoke and light. Wukong did not wait to admire the spectacle. He cut clean—an arc, precise, practiced. His staff flashed and the head tumbled into the void, spinning like a ruined moon.
Wukong lowered his staff, smug and theatrical, as if expecting applause. He deposited the point of his weapon into the broken crust and leaned on it like a man who had just closed a particularly satisfying joke.
"Game over," he said, voice loose and bright with that peculiar confidence that had survived every near-death and insult in his long life.
The severed head fell, twisted slow, a grotesque satellite. Wukong let himself watch, cocking an eyebrow. He had an appetite for finality when it came to threats, a taste for closure he enjoyed as much as a meal. Then the head's eyes flared—a ruinous pulse—and reconstructed itself with a cruel, slow patience. Flesh wove back on bone, veins knitted like black string, the jaw reformed, and Doomsday's head snapped back onto his shoulders with a sound that was more grievance than bone.
If surprise could be measured in physical terms, Wukong felt it as a small chill. Doomsday's mouth opened. He did not sound enraged so much as amused; inside that amusement lay a promise that made the light around his grin look sharp as knives.
"If you want to kill me," Doomsday said, words rolling out with the arrogance of things that survived worse, "cut me down into two thousand pieces. It's impossible."
There was a peculiar finality to the statement. It was both arrogance and a declaration of immortality: impossible, unthinkable, an iron wall against closure. Wukong's grin turned predatory, his eyes narrowing like a hawk's. If someone told him something was impossible, his first instinct was to turn the impossibility into a challenge and then into a joke.
They surged.
The fight resumed with the terrible abruptness that had become the day's pattern. Doomsday moved with devastating momentum; a shoulder strike unmade a small moon's crust, an elbow swing adjusted the gravity of two shattered planets at once. Wukong danced between those cataclysms like a mad acrobat, staff whistling arcs that scoured the air. He struck with the kind of precision that made larger things err; he peppered Doomsday with blows that tested, prodded, and found small points of irritation. Doomsday answered with raw power, each return blow a policy of obliteration in practice.
At one point Wukong sprang and landed a blow so clean and violent that the staff sheared through bone and sinew. It cut across Doomsday's neck with the exquisite cruelty of a blade that knew its job. For the second time that day a head fell, and for the second time that head resembled a black, tumbling star. Wukong spun, a cocky pirouette of victory, raised his staff to punctuate the moment, and delivered the line as if he'd been saving it for months.
"Game over," he intoned again, the grin now almost smug.
But the floating head's eyes flamed with the same unnatural light. Tissue uncoiled and knit; the head returned, jaw snapping into place. Doomsday's voice filled the empty reaches once more, not vexed but amused, demonstrating a patience that was almost monstrous. "If you want to kill me, cut me down into two thousand pieces. It is impossible."
There are few experiences in the cosmos quite like being told that nothing you can possibly do will ever end a thing—and then being offered the chance to try anyway. Wukong's mouth twisted into a thrill of a grin that looked feral. He had made worse bets and always found the math in his favor. This one, too, seemed like it might amuse him.
They traded strikes in a tempo that made the face of the battlefield blur. Wukong favored footwork and misdirection; Doomsday favored mass and ruin. The pig-god's new form had odd adaptations—plates that reflected energy back into attackers, joints that whistled combustible dust—but Wukong found seams despite the armor. He rapped the staff against Doomsday's elbow, then the back of the knee, and finally, in a daring flick, he caught the base of Doomsday's neck with an undercut that sent the hulking god reeling.
Doomsday's anger built like a storm. He shifted his weight and drove an elbow into Wukong's chest. The blow landed with a force that made the very fabric of the nearby vacuum buck. The Monkey King flew—not merely pushed but hurled—through the wreckage of a tiny, newly-fashioned galaxy. He punched through rings and astral debris, spun once, and came to a stop atop a shard of world that glittered with the remains of old civilizations.
Wukong rose. He gathered himself on that fragment, shook particles of dead light from his fur, and laughed—quick, sharp, and infuriating. The sound carried: irony and challenge, the kind of sound that makes enemies into entertainers.
"It's not enough for this pork chop!" he called, flinging his staff and getting ready to charge. The phrase had landed somewhere between bravado and warning, a line that would be repeated in fights to come.
From a distance, beyond the field of flying shards and the steam of colliding auras, Xorath watched. He stood with the composed stance of someone used to counting casualties and measuring outcomes. His wings were singed, his armor spattered with cosmic soot, but his gaze kept to the scene like a general monitoring a skirmish. He had been a king, he had been a soldier, and even now he kept the space for the small, cunning moves that separate death from victory.
But as the fight unfurled, a voice — not Xorath's and not any voice present in the heat — slipped into the field like a cold thread.
It came behind Xorath. Close enough that it could have been breath on the back of his neck. A figure, unseen by Xorath in the moment, crooned the words with a familiarity that tasted like old knives.
"Hello kiddo."
The voice hung there, easy, small against the cold and the ruin. It carried a note of mockery and invitation, a tone that suggested a history and a promise both at once. It was neither a taunt nor a greeting so much as an invocation—a presence that claimed intimacy by the shape of its words.
The last thing the battlefield received before the chapter ended was that voice, and the implication of someone's arrival behind a king who had been watching everything with an old, grim patience.
The chapter stops there. No more action, no resolution beyond the abrupt arrival of that small, intimate voice—"Hello kiddo"—spoken into the ruin.
"🔥 Debate time! Doomsday vs Wukong — who do you think takes the win? Drop your answer in the comments!"