[Charge: 10%]
Aron charged his speed tight, blowing toward Hermez once more, but he didn't attack. He stopped right before him with precision using his brutal strength, with that he released a sudden pressure of wind, blowing Hermez away.
'This is the moment,' he thought, pushing the god of legs into the air. He ran, leaving afterimages, crossing the ragged terrain, reaching the flying body of Hermez. He attacked him with all of his strength from every angle, punching him higher and higher. When he reached the sky, he did not hesitate. He pushed all the charge back into his fist, ready to obliterate him.
But Hermez's eyes changed a bit, turning green from yellow.
'James?' he thought. His hand hesitated at the last second, but those green eyes flashed back to yellow. Hermez grabbed that hand, pulling it downward as they fell and fell. He placed his knee against Aron's throat.
"You thought you got me, huh, immortal? No, I got you!!" he bellowed as they landed hard on the ground.
Aron's windpipe was shattered, his breath catching in a painful hitch. He swung at Hermez, but the god simply backed away. Aron slowly stood up as blood spilled from his lips. He tried to speak. He knew he had seen it—those green eyes. He wanted to call his name but… he could only cough out his own blood.
The pause felt stretched, thin like frost on glass, fragile enough to break with a breath.
Hermez sensed it first. He noticed the momentary flicker in Aron's golden gaze, the subtle hitch where that relentless, radiant energy usually burned steady. Low karma. The world had finally turned its back on its favorite child. No more borrowed luck, no hidden hand nudging the immortal to victory. He was just a man now, bleeding from too many open wounds.
Hermez's lips curled slowly. 'If I can end this, end an immortal… Father would be pleased,' he thought. He waved his hand. A mysterious weapon appeared in his grip. Father has his bolt, Poseidon has his trident, Hades has his bident.
And him—he finally had his own now. The treasure he had been searching for decades, finally found here. He had thought of hiding it until the very end. But this was a perfect chance: an immortal broken down in karma. If he struck now, he would be dead for good.
The treasure took shape in his hand: a golden staff with two winged snakes spiraling around the top.
Aron saw it too late.
[Warning: Divine Artifact Detected – Staff of Infinite Transit]
The system pinged in red across Aron's vision, almost embarrassed by its delay. He cursed under his breath, the sound lost in the wind.
Hermez laughed in joy.
"You really thought speed alone was my limit? Naive, Golden One. This little gift lets me step between moments. Not just faster—but beyond. Beyond anything anyone has ever seen." He beckoned.
He vanished.
Not blurred. Not teleported with any flash of light or ripple of space. Simply not there, then there, fist already cocked beside Aron's left kidney.
The strike landed like a piston wrapped in sheet lightning.
Aron staggered, ribs screaming in wet protest. Before he could pivot, Hermez was gone again, appearing at his right side, elbow driving into the base of his skull with clinical precision. Vanished. Left shoulder. Vanished. Throat. Each hit was surgical, impossible to track, impossible to brace against.
Blood filled Aron's mouth. His health bar bled red in stuttering pulses. Hermez didn't stop. He beat him again from the back, from the left. The staff poured something more than divine into Hermez that let him pass through air with little to no resistance.
[Health: 17%]
Aron defended and defended. The treasure, the thing he didn't want Hermez to have, he had been too late. He didn't know Hermez had already achieved it. Now he couldn't even sense where the attacks were coming from. His eyes were no longer helpful as he was hit by thousands and thousands of punches from everywhere.
[Health: 14%]
"Hahahaha!" Hermez laughed. "I will end the era of immortals. I will end the nuisance that held us down. A new era will rise, where Olympians will rule!" He beckoned, ready to pierce Aron with his staff.
Then something shifted inside Hermez. The storm paused.
James.
The body lurched, not from pain, but from within. Hermez's control flickered for a heartbeat. James's voice came through, quiet, hoarse, barely louder than the wind.
"My lord…"
Aron, who had been ready to take the chance, paused. His fist froze mid-swing, golden light stuttering along his knuckles.
One word. No theatrical flourish. No pleading crescendo. That single word held Aron's attention.
"Kill me," James beckoned.
"Kill the body," James continued, his voice cracking only once, like thin ice under too much weight.
Hermez snarled somewhere deep in the shared skull, claws of will scrabbling to regain control.
James pushed harder, words spilling like blood from a fresh cut.
"My lord, do it!" he beckoned.
Aron moved his hand, wondering if he should. He felt he couldn't defeat the present Hermez with that weapon, not when he was already down to ten percent health. For many reasons, he should use his remaining divinity and finish it.
'…'
"Please! What happened to the cold-hearted lord who burned cities without blinking? The one who left no survivors, no witnesses, no loose ends? Do it. Please, my lord."
Aron stood frozen. One beat. One heartbeat where the golden fire in his eyes flickered low enough to show the man beneath the mantle as his mind flashed: Michael's voice, telling him about that war-torn future, grim and certain.
If you falter, everything ends. No exceptions. Just death and destruction.
The thought of ending James surged again, quick and necessary. A mercy wrapped in steel.
Aron raised his hand to deliver the final blow.
'I… can't,' he thought, stopping mid way.
"Do it n—" James spoke, but it was only for a moment. Hermez reclaimed control with a violence that snapped James's neck backward.
The god's laughter rang out, loud and victorious, echoing off ice walls like breaking glass.
"Naive! How so painfully naive!"
The staff whipped forward. A pulse of distorted space erupted from its winged tip. Aron tried to sidestep; the blow caught him anyway, shearing across his chest. Flesh parted in a hot line.
He crashed backward, boots carving deep grooves through ice and frozen earth.
Hermez advanced slowly now, savoring each step.
'Michael warned me. Lose here and the world falls… Am I truly naive?' Aron thought.
Then he slapped himself. Hard. The crack echoed across the cratered plain like a gunshot.
"No," he muttered, voice rough. "I was naive. In the previous timeline. But not anymore."
He rose, remembering who he was. Remembering his own promise. Things would change in this timeline, no matter what. He would make it happen. He will save his hearld.
"I am Aron. The Slayer. The Immortal."
The words weren't shouted. They were stated, right here and now.
"Enough thinking about consequences. Enough guilt. Time to act."
He calmed down and zoned in, like the time he had fought at the end of the universe. He let instinct take over.
He stopped calculating trajectories, stopped measuring karma debt, stopped weighing. He simply moved.
Hermez sensed the change immediately. The hesitation vanished; what replaced it was cold, predatory certainty. The air around Aron thickened, gold bleeding into the wind like ink in water.
Far away, in the realm of the dwarves, in a shadowed prayer room lit only by flickering candle stubs, Elyon knelt before the ancient armor stand. The plate mail, Aron's first relic, forged in Eden's fading light, began to vibrate. A low thrum built inside the chest piece, insistent, almost angry.
Elyon frowned, reaching out. "What…?"
His fingers brushed the latch. The chest plate sprang open on its own.
Something shot free.
A hammer. Massive. Utterly brutal with stains of blood. Its head forged of blackened star iron veined with molten gold, its haft wrapped in leather worn smooth by centuries of violence. It didn't fly gracefully. It tore through the air like a cannon shell, shattering stained glass, crushing stone, ripping a screaming tunnel through the atmosphere as it rocketed toward the battlefield half a world away.
Back on the ice.
Hermez pressed the advantage, his voice dripping with contempt.
"You can't protect anyone. Not Peter, my sons are tearing his body apart even now, layer by screaming layer. Not James. You should have ended him when you had the chance." He said, smacking him once more.
"It's the end for you. It's a miracle how my father was defeated by a weakling like you."
Aron absorbed the next strike deliberately. The staff's head slashed across his forearm; bone cracked audibly but He didn't flinch.
"You will go down," Aron said quietly.
Another hit. Ribs shattered with a wet snap. He accepted it. He accepted it all.
[Health: 6%]
"Like how your father once did."
Hermez sneered. "Useless threats."
The environment had become a graveyard of their making: craters pocked the snow, jagged ice walls rose like broken teeth, boulders lay scattered like dice thrown by a drunken god. Space itself had tightened. Hermez's infinite transit had less room to move.
He sensed it—a flicker of unease crawling up his borrowed spine.
No matter. Aron was bleeding out.
"Let me end this charade."
Hermez feigned left, then committed fully. The edge of his staff morphed sharp in a killing arc, aimed to sever Aron's neck in one clean stroke.
'Now.' Aron thought as he took the opening. Knowing it was just a feint, he let four more strikes land, brutal, bone-deep, spraying blood across white, then countered with one.
He aimed for the jaw.
Hermez twisted, laughing. "Too slow—"
Aron's fist passed through empty air.
But his body language had lied. His strike went low. Hermez already saw it coming and smiled, but he couldn't back away. The terrain behind blocked him. All around, there was no step he could take to dodge.
And in that millisecond, the real strike came low. A crushing stamp slammed into Hermez's foot—not at the knee, but just the foot—dealing less damage. Hermez smiled, thinking of the immortal's naivety, but he couldn't move. His foot was pinned beneath the immortal's.
In that brief moment of distraction—
The sky tore open.
The hammer arrived like judgment incarnate. No gentle descent. It screamed down, trailing fire, shattered the atmosphere, and crashed into the ice beside Aron with a force that hurled snow skyward.
Aron caught the haft one-handed. The impact should have shattered his arm. It didn't. Gold surged through his veins like wildfire in dry grass.
[Insufficient Karma Detected]
[Warning: Sacrificial Conversion Initiated]
He burned it. Every last scrap of karma points he had earned, every lingering thread of borrowed luck—he fed them to his skill tree.
[Cleave – Unlocked]
The hammer glowed. Not prettily but brutally, like it had come to destroy and dismantle. Golden veins pulsed along the head like living arteries.
Hermez pulled his foot free, breaking apart and regenerating at high speed with the help of his treasure.
"A toy won't—"
Aron moved. All those wounds he had taken, all the damage, had been for this one decisive second.
"It's over," he said.
Before Hermez could regenerate fully, he slammed the giant hammer down on him.
BOOOOOMMMM!