The silence of the Ninth Layer wasn't just the absence of sound; it was a physical pressure that tried to crush King's lungs. There, at the end of everything, solitude was the sharpest torture tool.
But King was not a man of silences.
He rose slowly, the ice cracking in his joints. Every fiber of his body ached, but the humiliation inflicted by Samael acted like volatile fuel. He didn't look back, to where the Kyton had disappeared. He looked at the emptiness ahead.
"IS THAT ALL?" King's cry tore through the darkness, an affront to absolute nothingness. "YOU THROW ME INTO THE DARK AND EXPECT ME TO LEARN TO CRAWL?"
He pounded his clenched fist against his wounded chest, the sound echoing like a war drum.
"SHOW YOURSELF, DEMON OR SHADOW! I'VE ALREADY DIED ONCE!" WHAT MORE CAN YOU TAKE FROM ME?
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the darkness began to stir, but not ethereally. The icy ground vibrated with the impact of heavy paws. The sound wasn't a growl, but a dissonant chorus of whimpers and gasps coming from all directions.
From the black mist, the first pairs of eyes emerged: orbs red as dying embers. And then, the silhouettes revealed themselves.
It wasn't just one creature. It was a pack: Cerberus.
But these weren't the majestic guardians of myth. They were void-distorted versions of the Ninth Layer. Their bodies were made of dense shadow and flayed muscle, with three heads on each torso, each fighting for space, drooling a black liquid that melted the ice beneath their feet.
They didn't bark. They advanced in a perfect semicircle, encircling the Goliath. There were six, maybe seven of them—a total of nearly twenty hungry heads, all focused on King's immortal flesh.
The largest of the beasts, a mass of bristly fur and obsidian teeth, stepped forward. Their heads moved independently: one snarled, another sniffed King's blood, and the third emitted a high-pitched, almost human sound of anticipation.
King smiled. A bloody, savage, genuine smile.
"Finally..." he murmured, clenching his fists, feeling the adrenaline burn the cold. "Something I can punch until it stops moving."
Without weapons, without magic, and without chains, King was back to basics. It was the pinnacle of brutality: a Goliath against the packs of hell.
The central beast leaped. King did not retreat. He dove forward, shoulders down, bracing for impact against the first of the three heads.
King advanced with the certainty of one who had already felled titans and crushed mountains. To him, those Cerberus were merely larger hunting dogs, and he was the hunter. He lowered his guard, confident that his legendary resilience would absorb any impact while his fists did the dirty work. But the Ninth Layer does not forgive arrogance.
The instant King delivered a devastating punch to the central head of the leader beast, he realized his mistake. The impact didn't sound like bone breaking, but as if he had struck a mass of frozen pitch. His hand sank into the creature's shadow, and the cold emanating from it wasn't merely thermal—it was a soul-paralyzing cold.
King's self-confidence blinded him to the pack's tactics. While he focused on the leader, the other Cerberus didn't attack like wild animals; they attacked as extensions of a single dark mind.
Two Cerberus simultaneously leaped onto his legs. King tried to kick them away, but the triple jaws closed on his calves with the force of a hydraulic press. He felt not only the teeth tearing through immortal flesh; he felt the emptiness of the Ninth Layer being injected into his nervous system.
King faltered. As he tried to pull his arm away from the head of the first beast, the monster's other two heads closed on his biceps and forearm. He was pinned to the ground.
A fourth Cerberus leaped onto his back, digging its claws into King's shoulders and forcing him to kneel on the eternal ice.
King the giant was now immobilized, surrounded by dozens of red eyes that gleamed with cruel intelligence. He realized, too late, that Samael hadn't sent him here for a "fair fight," but to be devoured alive by something that didn't care about his physical strength.
The beasts began to pull in opposite directions, attempting to tear the Goliath apart. The sound of King's tendons stretching to their limit was the only noise in that icy desert.
Samael's voice seemed to echo in the frigid wind: "Survive... if you can."
King was being literally dismantled. His brute strength was useless against beings that seemed made of the very substance of nightmare. For the first time in ages, the Goliath's unwavering confidence gave way to a cold realization: he was losing. And this time, there was no Queen to interrupt the fight.
The Cerberus' jaws closed like vises on King's limbs. The pain was an icy fire, and each time the Goliath tried to strain his muscles, the beasts bit harder, as if feeding on his own resistance. King, the indomitable, was being held on his knees, his face pressed against the black ice, while the blood of his soul stained the void.
But then, suddenly, the pack stopped.
There was no command, not a sound. The growls of the eighteen heads ceased instantly. The Cerberus released King, but not out of fear of him. Their ears drooped and their tails tucked between their legs as they began to retreat, whimpering softly, trembling in a way King never imagined possible for infernal beasts.
An impossible weight fell upon the Ninth Layer. The air—if it could be called air—became as heavy as lead. King, still trying to stand on trembling arms, gazed at the icy horizon.
In the distance, darkness itself began to rise. It wasn't just a creature; it was a monument to the end of all things. The eternal ice beneath King began to crack not from the impact, but from the mere presence of what approached. A Fenrir.
The Wolf of the Apocalypse emerged from the shadows, and its size defied logic. Its paws were like hills of gray fur and destructive static. Its eyes weren't red like Cerberus's; they were two abysses of a pale, cold gold, which seemed to see not King's body, but the day of his death.
Each of Fenrir's steps made reality vibrate. The broken chains that still hung from its neck—the remnants of Gleipnir—clinked with the sound of galaxies being crushed. The saliva that dripped from its colossal teeth didn't melt the ice; it evaporated it, leaving holes of pure nothingness in the ground.
The Cerberus, now reduced to mere frightened rats, vanished into the shadows, leaving King alone before the entity that should have been chained until Ragnarök.
Fenrir stopped a few meters from King. The wolf's breath struck the Goliath like a storm of ice needles, carrying the scent of ages of isolation and contained fury. The wolf tilted its head, observing the small, broken giant before it.
To Fenrir, King was neither a warrior, nor a hero, nor a Goliath. He was merely a spark of consciousness in a place that should have been purely empty.
The wolf opened its maw wide. The sky of the Ninth Layer seemed to disappear within it.
A low growl emanated from its chest, a sound not heard by the ears, but felt at the base of the spine:
"So... this is what remains of the will of the living?" Fenrir's voice was like the landslide of a mountain. "Samael sent a worm to entertain me?"
King, tiny before one of Fenrir's paws, felt for the first time the true magnitude of what Samael meant. Before the Devourer of Gods, his self-confidence was not only wrong; it was ridiculous.