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Chapter 16 - Chapter 16: The Weaponization of Divinity

The conference room beneath Area 51 smelled of recycled air and old fear. Screens lined the walls, each a pale eye showing the world burning in a dozen different languages. Military liaisons, black project directors, and a handful of brittle politicians argued over diagrams of fallout patterns and satellite swaths. On the long steel table lay something that did not belong to any catalogue: a schematic of a device that looked like an instrument of god and punishment combined—the prototype for the most terrible bomb the planet had ever conceived.

"Nolan," Ryan said quietly, leaning forward until his voice scraped like a blade, "do you think we have a chance against that beast? Leviathan is—"

"—a force beyond our usual parameters," Nolan interrupted, the German president already harboring the weary look of a man who had watched his continent drown. "Yes. Which is exactly why we have to do something unprecedented."

Dylan, eyes still rimmed with exhaustion, tapped his tablet and brought up a series of classified blueprints. "We do more than something unprecedented. We escalate. We weaponize the only thing that can change the balance—divine energy."

They all turned when Dylan said it, the room tightening like a noose.

"Divine energy?" Ryan repeated.

Dylan's hands did not tremble. "Metatron's DNA. The sword's core. The blood of celestial things. We have access to fragments, to data from old raids and sealed recoveries. The technology here—what some call alien, what others call forbidden—has always been built around energies that hum with something other than matter. We can scale. We can replicate. We can concentrate. We are close to an antimatter cascade design that does not merely explode; it erases. It erases space from existence. Nothing left. No Leviathan, no cities, no fallout."

A long breath left the room. The word erased hung there like a sacrament.

"You want to create a bomb that removes whole swaths of existence?" Ryan asked, incredulous. "That's—what would that do to us? To the fabric of space?"

"You ask as if we have waited for permission," Nolan said. He shrugged. "Our ancestors did worse. They sacrificed and bargained, handed up blood to Azazel and other names they did not understand, and they paid in faith and flesh. The materials, the sacrifice, the rituals—those are why the tech exists. We can use it now."

Ryan's hand closed into a fist. "You mean: we barter humanity for a weapon. We become what we fight."

Mikey, a man whose job it was to pretend he had hope, said: "We may have to. If Leviathan becomes a king of the seas, then all coastal nations fall. Starvation, flood, ecological collapse. The choice is ugly but simple: act or be consumed."

Silence pressed on them. A satellite map blinked—an overlay of possible targets. On the left a small blue dot: a school in a nameless city. On the right, a grainy thermal signature tracked like a migrating star. They had it: the locus they believed would give them what they wanted—Metatron's DNA. The door to hubris had been sized by fear.

Word had ripple effects. Satellites traced the signal. Soon the schoolyard that had once smelled of chalk and pizza felt like the center of a net closing. Police units stitched themselves across the streets. Armored vehicles grew like tumors along the perimeter. A hundred uniforms, then two hundred, then a regiment of men with orders that did not have room for hesitation. Overhead, drones clipped like mechanical dragonflies. From a command bus, a man barked through a throat mic: "Evacuate the campus. This is a federal operation. Everyone out now."

Ernest—his name still a small, stubborn thing—stood at the top of the high school steps, sneakers scuffed, a backpack sagging with textbooks and the brittle weight of unremarkable days. He had learned to live in the margins. He had learned to vanish. Now metal and authority filled the lawn like an accusation.

"Ernest Acura," called a voice through a bullhorn. "You are requested to come out quietly."

He stepped aside and watched the line of faces—angry, frightened, iron. There was no mercy here. The captain in the matte jacket watched him with the bored cruelty of civil servants who had been handed orders that would stain them.

"Come quietly with us," the captain said when they finally closed the gap.

Ernest swallowed. His pulse was steady. "Or what?" he asked.

The captain smiled without humor. "Or we clear the building. We'll remove every block. We'll send a message."

The message was a promise, and the promise smelled of gasoline. The world outside had learned violence as a language; now it would translate it into a sermon. The captain pointed at three officers. "If you run, we'll take measures."

Ernest locked his jaw. "I'm not running."

He could have surrendered. He could have let them drag him to labs, strapped him onto a table, watched them take what they wanted. He thought of the burned coasts, of children he could not save with a whisper. He thought of the voice—of promises he had not yet kept. He chose neither surrender nor flight. He chose to fight.

When the first rifle cracked, he moved like a shadow unbound. Bullets met nothing but air. He stepped, vanished between gun muzzles, slipped like water down the length of a uniform. The first officers tried to tackle him. He turned his shoulder and they collapsed as if a storm had passed through them.

A gas canister hissed, filling the air with an iodine smell designed to disorient and paralyze. Ernest ducked beneath the plume and punched through the cloud, his motion a blade of intent. A taser pricked the jacket at his back; he felt the bite and kept moving, the electricity stepping off him like rain.

They escalated—flash grenades to blind, smoke to choke, concussion to disorient. They lobbed stun grenades, tried to net him in restraints that said the world had learned how to cage angels. Ernest spun and danced through their tactics. He moved with a speed that blurred sleeves and a precision that made them stagger.

A sniper behind glass steadied a rifle, found a target through the school's broken auditorium window. The crack of the shot poured like a bell. Ernest flinched but did not fall. Blood blossomed at the temple. He staggered, hand to face, and something infinitely small and infinitely fierce knit itself at the wound. Flesh regrew, hair sealed the rent. The round lodged and oxidized as dust. It was not a miracle human science accounted for. It was the stubborn grammar of a thing made of different light.

"Yes!" Dylan shouted from the command bus, fingers flying over a console. He watched vital signs blink and the body sensor drone shout numbers. "This is exactly the data we needed. Keep firing!"

Outside, the attackers switched tactics. A laser cutter, a green line of terrifying precision, sliced through metal where it had no right. The beam found Ernest's shoulder and cut like sunlight through fabric. Pain, hot and sharp, poured across him. He roared—a sound of something ancient—and then the world bucked under him as he stepped into command.

"Enough," a voice resonated not like a sound but like force. Gravity bowed to it. Soldiers, drones, even the heavy vehicles seemed to want to collapse into themselves. Men dropped to their knees, bodies hitting concrete as if an invisible tide had swept them. Hands reached for guns that dropped like toys.

The command was a divine cut. For a heartbeat, the world held its breath.

Then—silence thick as wool. And with that silence came a stillness: eyelids heavy, bodies slack, a ballet of collapse. Men who had sworn to the state sank where they stood, sleeping as if the day had become night.

Ernest breathed. He moved through the fallen as though walking through the remains of a dream. No triumph swelled him. Only a hollow ache where the teeth of the world had found him. He rose above the school field, a figure of ragged light. He took flight.

Three blocks away, Dylan's console exploded in alarms. "No—no—control override!" He frantically tapped keys until a shadow fell across the monitor.

Azazel stepped out of the shadow like a man who had always belonged in darkness. His presence did not carry the thunder of an army but the sickly comfort of a whisper. He folded his coat over an expensive suit and smiled at the chaos like a man admiring a ruined garden.

"You thought to bargain with forces you did not understand," he said, to no one in particular.

Dylan staggered to his feet, panic twisting his face. "You—you can help us. If you provide—"

Azazel's eyes were small coals. "I can assist," he said, and his voice was a promise wrapped in snake-silk. "But not for the reasons you imagine. Your plan is crude and would unravel the fabric around you. The antimatter concept? Child's play dressed in equations. You propose erasure; I offer control."

"How?" Dylan asked, voice frayed with calculation and fear.

"You have access to what you want," Azazel said. "Metatron's blood, the fragments in your vaults. But you lack leverage and comprehension. His essence is not a battery you can siphon. It is pure energy, yes—an echo of the divine—but it resists subjection. Force will fail. Coercion will fail. You need cunning. A bargain. Faith. Fear."

Dylan, flushed with the aftertaste of hubris and loss, spat a laugh. "We will not be lectured by a demon."

Azazel leaned closer. "You already made bargains. Your ancestors bled into the soil and called my name when they had no other remedy. You built a temple of secrecy because you feared being found. Now you must decide: commit or crumble."

"You can't capture him," Dylan said after a breath. "We tried. We failed."

Azazel waved a hand, and a small projector bloomed in the smoky air of the command bus, images flickering—fragments of Metatron's life, a schematic of his DNA, a smear of energy like sunlight seen through blood. "Of course you failed. You did not bargain. You thrashed. I can teach restraint. I can give you leverage. And in exchange—what would you give me?"

Dylan swallowed. Above the monitors, the image of a school, the sleeping bodies frozen in arc light. The cost loomed. "Why would you help us?" he asked.

Azazel's smile became a blade. "Because I hunger for the ruin of those who would make order from my freedom. Because the Leviathan swam and the world burned and Heaven looks away. Because the game is far more interesting when men play with gods."

He stepped back into the shadow as if folding himself into the fabric of a broken room. "We shall see if you bargain well." Then he was gone.

Dylan's mouth hung open. The alarms continued. Outside, the sun's light had dimmed under an ash sky. The sleeping officers began to stir, some with fear in their eyes as they awoke to a world that had tried to seize the heavens and been sated instead.

In the quiet aftermath, the building held its breath. Men who had planned to alter the universe looked at one another and found the courage to name it—a fear so simple it felt obscene.

"We have become apocalyptic architects," Nolan said softly at last. "We stand here and would erase to save. There is no saving in that."

Ryan, still pale, wiped his hands on his trousers. "If Azazel is involved, we are all in deeper than we thought. He will not be an ally. He will be a predator. He will chew whatever conscience we have left."

Outside, children walked home under a sky that looked tired. Somewhere down the coast, the Leviathan curled, claiming territory like a king trimming hedges. The world's leaders made their choice in small acts: which to hide, which to confess, which bargains to seek.

Dylan sat back down and whispered to no one, a prayer that had nothing to do with gods he trusted. "We will get what we want. We will fix this."

But the truth lay like a stone in the center of the desert: the more they reached for absolute power, the less they would remain human. And when a demon waits at your bargaining table, the price is never paid in what you planned to spend.

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