Chapter Six: The Eternal Struggle: Immortality and its Consequences
"Soon everything will be back to normal, and we will still... well, we will still be." The borders between good and evil became a neutral zone of action and reaction, cause and effect. There were no sides in actuality, and this was winner-take-all.
The opposed bit his lower lip till it bled. Regenerating instantly, he clenches his fists. He asked the man, mulling it over in his mind while not letting the degradation take over entirely.
He said, "What about the ones already gone?" He said it as a sort of advocate. Indifferent to the original idea.
Lucifer may survive this unscathed, living to fight another day, but his hood will be hooded away. The pride he was so proud of, the rebellion, the war. What would it all have been for if he had given up now? He had asked the question as a question for a thousand others.
The young man stepped closer and pointed out his injury. "You're bleeding for one," he said. It was not an act of quarrel but of aid. Lucifer deeply inhales just to keep the distance between them.
The man stops to show his hands, as he did before. "Okay, I get it," he said. The man appeared to have scoffed; staring at his opponent, he agreed. "I'll answer you this one question." He closes both fists limply. "There is nothing to be done about the dead. We move forward, take what we can, and run. I'm running too, you know?" He paused, then emphasized. "It was the best I could think of. This isn't just about YOU."
Lucifer could not stand for such hypocrisy. "I know this!" He said it offendedly: "The ones who are dead... that's... it was everything. Our home is everything, and you're letting it all go to waste as if it were trash. Not me, you. You imbecile!" He began to rant. "I knew about the void far before even you. I've known about the unnamed fundamental components of the heavens and the universe and proposed the very theories that are accepted as facts today!" He poked at his chest, knocking on it like a door, and quickly said it with even more aggression: "I was the one who brought to light the wish inscribed in the vestiges of the 9th circle. It was me! Not you!" He used all the energy he had gained. He finished with, "And I know, oh, I know your dirty little secret."
The man shook his head in confusion and replied, "What are you on about? You've finally lost it, haven't you?"
Lucifer spoke inaudibly through the memory. At that singular moment, the man choked Lucifer, picking him up by the neck with his right arm before a reaction could ever be made. He struggled, kicking his legs and attempting to pry with his two hands, the one. His face became overcome with the blood that rushed out and locked in his head. Warm red hemoglobin squirted from the nose. The hand charged its power, and in overheating, it turned the water molecules within the air into a sauna-like steam that barricaded over the appendage. It was a geyser of condensation, a chimney producing smoke.
The hand is imprinted on Lucifer's neck. Lucifer struggled further, punching the man out of desperation. He could not be budged. A dark, septic green blade, rigid and battered, was stabbed through the man's stomach from behind. His hand charged to completion, clasping the neck and breaking it. The blade ran up the stomach and passed the chest, cutting the throat vertically and the head like half an apple. The man struggled to stand up the way he was now. He waddled side to side, back and forth, his movement similar to that of a toddler's. His organs and head, which were hard to fall out of, stayed intact, spilling minimal amounts of blood.
Lucifer wielded a katana. He admired the blade, putting it close to his face, and licked the man's blood from the Yaibi (the cutting edge).
Lucifer: "I didn't think you fell for things like that anymore, not ever since reaching the level of perfection you have."
The man turned around like a penguin would. Squared off with Lucifer, the man quickly began to heal from the stomach up, stitching himself back together. He gave himself no time to rest, dashing to slice his head off. In the same instance, the man pointed his index finger at the weapon, turning the blade floppy.
"What the fuck, how did he do that?" Lucifer cursed in confusion.
This surprises Lucifer, changing his course of action. He jumped above, spinning and flipping in such a way that the floppy blade tied a noose-like knot around the man's neck. Lucifer pulls on the handle of the Katana, dragging him to the ground. The weapon stretched longer. Thinning kept its integrity. Lucifer opened a considerably large portal, tossing the hilt of the sword inside. The noose around his neck tightened and pulled only the line he was dragged upon. Like a fish hooked and reeled.
Lucifer consoled the man as he kicked and ripped at his neck for release. He now struggled to breathe as Lucifer did, but in a different way.
He said it to him softly yet sternly. "Did you ever think, when we were younger, it would've ever been like this?"
The man wheezed. "Stop."
His right hand motioned up, fluttering a bright blue before dimming back down to its natural state. He looked at his hand and, with the other, tried to release the tie. He raised his back again, but this time Lucifer kicked his hand away.
Lucifer explains, "The commandments won't work. Your healing factor is being zapped away at a hundred different angles. Your super-analyzing right hand, or whatever that thing is, can only do so much. I've killed you approximately a dozen times."
The man approached the portal. Lucifer glanced at the right hand of God like he had a thousand times before. In deep thought, Lucifer revised a new hypothesis. The right hand of God wasn't a "gift" or an angelic power. It was possibly a sentient hand that could combat any endeavor.
"I just mean, did you ever stop to think that it would be me? Who defeated you? And if you didn't, then it is you who are the ignorant one, is it not?" The man entered inside. "Goodbye, Jehovah," he said.
The tunnel was slowly sealed. Jehovah pierced back through the other end. His right hand separated the noose, but it did not detach it completely. He brought with him a large, dark hand that pulled on his face from behind. His hand steamed over, supercharging itself to the point that all there was to be seen was smoke coming from the appendage. He freed himself from the noise, but whatever was on the other side threw him back.
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Before closing, a large monstrosity came running out of the portal. In his hands, Jehovah was being squeezed in the face. He stood about nine feet tall. As the dark black skin of the hand may have suggested, he was made of pure muscle. Stocky and gorilla-like were his two definitive features, nothing else. He was an animalistic, crazed, and sadistic person. He was untamable. Lucifer was not his master; he was merely a manipulator.
Chapter Seven: We Were the Last of Them.
Jehovah blasted the beast in the chest with a beam that came from his right hand. He was released. Landing, he did the technique in repetition; this time he put his wrists together, hands open, and a much bigger energy blast disintegrated the beasts from the waist up.
"Level 3," he said.
In order for Jehovah to do this technique, he first put his wrists together, then extended his arms outward, and finally gathered energy between his hands, forming a sphere. The energy sphere appears as a pulsating, glowing blue orb, the same color as his hand.
The sphere reached its climax and could not grow anymore. Jehovah thrusts his hands forward, releasing the energy in the form of a concentrated beam or blast directed at the beast. The attack travels at high speed, leaving a trail of energy in its wake, and upon impact, it generates a massive explosion that inflicts significant damage to the surrounding area and any opponents caught in its path. The blast is able to blow a hole through a quarter of heaven.
The rest of the beast fell. Both the young man's palms were red and smoking from energies being released from them.
Lucifer, in a surprise attack, flies at high speeds, picking up Jehovah from the side of his head. He flies upwards past the skyline. Jehovah breaks Lucifer's levered-out arm, climbing on him and grabbing hold of Lucifer's left-wing side, ripping one of them off during the fall. Jehovah punches him in the face, sending Lucifer back to land. The ground rose, and debris flew up. A dirt cloud was made.
On top of that, Jehovah used the commandment, "Down!" His voice was amplified. It sounded as though there were a hundred of him saying that one word at the same exact time. The gravity in the area multiplied, smashing down the dust cloud. Rocks and mounds of dirt rained on Lucifer.
Lucifer forces himself to sit up, but the pressure is too much.
Jehovah, now enraged, yelled out from the sky. "I should have realized you wouldn't give up that easily!" He lowered himself saying, "There is one way to end this."
The black beast had regenerated and jumped, snatching the man out of the sky.
"I thought he'd never shut up." Lucifer spoke. The commandment ended with a distraction. He got up, cleaning himself off, before flying out of the hole he was in.
The beast hugged Jehovah tightly, trapping both arms and gnawing on his head just outside the hole. Lucifer summoned several dark matter spears around the two, sending them off and piercing both friend and foe. The beast was killed instantly from a stray to the head. The spear nailed his head to the floor.
They were eating shish kebab together. Jehovah was stabbed through both legs, both arms, and two spears that went in the opposite direction from the chest to the back and vice versa. He was pinned in place and to the black beast's body.
Jehovah screams. "Down!"
Lucifer was brought to his knees. The same commandant now affects Lucifer directly.
"Release me," he said, just to say words with the power behind them. He added, "Listen to me, Lucifer. This is your last chance. If you don't stop, give me the wish. I'll help you realize what the second catalyst of true power is. Do you think that toy on your chest is going to save you for long?" The man laughed hard to breathe, shallow and short. "You think I'm scared of you? You're powerless!" He puked out red, green, and black poisonous blood mixtures from his mouth in that staked position.
"The blade's secondary phase is kicking in, the Black Plague." Lucifer smirked with a big, bright snicker and spoke: "You need to stop talking. You're ruining this for yourself."
"PUSH!" Jehovah used his last commandment using the tidbit of oxygen left in his lungs; it was a screaming, weak wheeze of what was being said.
Everything repelled off Jehovah and was pushed out with excessive force.
Lucifer mustered up all his willpower not to listen. Putting his hands on top of each other, they faced different directions. The thumb lay over the pinky finger on one side, and on the other side, his pinky over the thumb was parallel. Flashbacks flooded into his head.
Through brimstone and fire, never-ending deserts, with Jehovah by his side, build brick by brick humanity's cathedral. But then, as the story goes, one of the two believes the other wasn't doing enough, that he could do better, and if this was the end of the world, he was the one who was going to save it. A flash showed a woman—so small and so sweet. He remembered what he was doing this for. Thy betrayal he was forced into, and how there was no excuse, but he had one. It fell on deaf ears, and Lucifer remembered that God did what he did too. He may have been wrong, but so was he. This was a clash of either two truths or lies.
And he remembers the promise he made to the sweet, small woman. He had told her while holding her. His finger was running down through their silky brunette hair and looking into her beady, dark brown eyes, under the moonlit and twinkled cosmos. He would not crawl. He was to serve no one, and it was to be he whom ushers in the New World.
"I refuse to listen to you," he said.
Searching deep within the Law Defyer, Lucifer found a new rule to add to his collection.
"THE RULES OF NATURE: #25 Ikigai, The Perfect Balance." He spoke aloud, word by word, slowly.
A hush came down through the valley in an abrupt silence. A swishing in the ear as things turned off in the distance, natural or not, just stopped. The spirit of the north wind dares not release his air over the land at this moment. It held its breath, for it had known this was a moment to be feared and nothing else.
The memory became hazy before it reached its climax.
"I needed this to play through. What happened next? Did he die?"
"It was quiet for a while. He and I, I and Him. It's been a long time since I've had clarity. I could tell him a little bit. A piece of mind: see where it all went wrong and how I could have fixed it. The traveler would not say anything. I thought he would've been antsy and restless after that fiasco. He was always ready to listen. The only thing that needed to be done was to talk."
"I met him by accident."
In this visage, Past, present, and future meet at a focal point. A place in time where a conversion doesn't matter, but a choice is made. There was no purpose, no pose. If it is in vain, then it abides by his unholy beliefs. A paradoxical brick wall he couldn't get over until now. He had to be set free in a way that he had to let bygones be bygones—the law in which the world worked. There was actually a place and a moment where those beliefs were different. Those days are so far removed. When they were only nineteen.