I may finally need to use soulsmasher, Sparrow thought through gritted teeth as the God-Scientest’s concoction blew Sparrow’s body in two.

His legs hit the side of the arena, the lower part of his skeleton impaled itself into the wall.

He gasped as he flopped forward. Roots spread from the bottom of his torso into the ground just as the god splashed another potion across Sparrow’s face. His face became rubbery and dripped onto the ground leaving a puddle of pink dye.

No, I cannot use soulsmasher - I cannot put him through what I went through.

The rest of Sparrow’s body melted as his roots spread deeper and deeper seeking shelter in the earth beneath the stadium.

An explosion rippled through the sand leaving a large crater and a pair of shrivelled roots.

The God-Scientest grinned, and bowed to applause from the crowd.

That was until a fireball arched up from the ground and hit him in the jaw, sending him wheeling backwards onto the arena floor.

A swarm of roots wrapped around the God-Scientest’s arms and legs, pulling him deeper and deeper into the sand, while also scorching marks into his skin.

The God-Scientest yawned, ‘Come on buddy, you know what the outcome of this fight’s going to be.’

With a blink he was back hovering above the stadium. He drew a length of sand into two rods and smashed them together at near the speed of light.

The rods’ chemical composition changed and then changed again. He formed the atoms into genetic sequences that replicated into a swarm of locusts which dropped like waterfalls of wings towards Sparrow’s roots.

Fire flamed up the roots and singed the wings of the flying pests, but for every one that fell in a burning fiery mess, there were three that took its place, battering out the flames with their wings and gnawing on the woody flesh that remained.

The God-Scientest pulled beakers from nowhere. Liquid nitrogen froze and cracked Sparrow’s roots and with a deft flick of his wrist, the God Scientist neutralised the poisoned barbs Sparrow was growing.

A steaming volcano rose up from the centre of the arena.

A volcano!? A bloody volcano? The remnants of Sparrow thought, I’m doomed.

‘Listen, I’m not really good at this whole killing people thing… not my style. Is there any way you could just like, lay over and die?’

A tiny mouth appeared on the end of one of Sparrow’s roots, ‘Not good at ending people huh? What about the millions your creations are slaughtering as we speak?’

‘Yeah, but that’s not me…’

‘You built them, your responsibility.’

‘Is it really?’

With a flick of the god’s hands the volcano exploded. Boulders hurtled across the stadium. Magma flowed from the ruptured top and burnt away Sparrow’s roots at ground level.

The God-Scientest pulled out a notebook and murmured to himself as he scribbled a series of figures in it. The figures turned into diagrams for a new type of solar system with an improved cohesion across the very small and the very large…

‘Brilliant!’ he muttered to himself, ‘by combining the forces that act across scales both large and nuclear perhaps I’ll be able to create a unified theory of-’

A boulder the size of a car smashed the God-Scientest across the head.

The boulder hurt - of course it did - but the fact the god became detached from his train of thought hurt even more than the fact it scraped his ear off the side of his head.

The God-Scientest gave an angry grunt and changed the atoms around the remnants of Sparrow’s body to become radioactive. Sparrow screamed as his cells burst and mutated.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

The God-Scientest gritted his teeth.

‘Seen as you’re so insistent on staying alive I’ve got a deal, I’ll give you a portal anywhere in the universe that you want, I’ll throw you in, but it’ll look like I won. How does that sound?’

‘That sounds like I’ll be letting my friends down and all the people that I care about. Like I’m abandoning my people to the Horde.’

‘Yes. But you’ll also stay alive. I’ll kill you eventually Sparrow. We both know this is true. I’ve just got more important things to do with my time. This is your chance to stay alive.’

‘As a coward.’

‘Some people might call you a coward, others would see you as rationalist. What’s the point in dying for a cause you’d never succeed in anyway?’

Sparrow’s arm, which had mutated to become a boiling growth picked up a locust which had also mutated to become a slice of cheese and threw the cheese at the God-Scientest.

The God-Scientest caught the cheese, stared at it for a few seconds then put it in his mouth.

‘Okay. Deal.’ The rapidly mutating Sparrow said from the mouth between his toes.

‘What?’

‘I get to choose a portal anywhere right? I accept your offer.’

The god scientist smiled, ‘I thought you’d never… in fact I must say I’m a little disappointed in you.’

‘What was all that about being rational?’

‘That’s true, but there is something beautiful about a figure show goes to their death despite knowing the end result is hopeless. Anyway… where do you want to go?’

‘I want to go to the northern shore of Lake Stormwater.’

‘Really?! Back there?’ The God-Scientest pulled the cheese, which had now become a lump of coal, from his mouth, ‘I’m offering you a portal to the entire universe, a billion realms no human has ever laid eyes on and you want to go to some slimy lake on the planet Teo Aeo. Eww.’

The god spun his hands creating a vortex of rippling blue light that spread out through the arena to form a door of glowing blue light. Through it, Sparrow could see the trampled mud and scorched hillsides that surrounded the lake. In the distance, a hundred pairs of glowing eyes turned to gaze at him through the portal.

‘You ready?’ the God-Scientest said, grabbing hold of the remnants of Sparrow’s body. ‘I’ll toss you through and we’re going to make this look like I’m killing you.’

‘Hold on,’ Sparrow said, ‘just one moment.’ Through the hole the horde was starting to shift, their lion-headed steeds were sprinting, full gallop towards the portal while their riders stuck swords into their sides to make them go faster.

‘Come on, come on,’ the God-Scientest was saying, ‘I’ve got work. Important work. And not enough time.’

‘Time’s always the problem isn’t it?’ Sparrow mumbled, the pupils on his roots growing larger as they fixated on the heaving, iron-flashing forms of the horde, ‘Sometimes not enough… sometimes too much.’

The horde burst through the portal into the arena, the God-Scientist went to close it but Sparrow wrapped his roots covered in stone around the god’s arms. The scientist was panicking, a blubbering filled his lips as he tried and tried again to close the portal. The Horde were closing in on him and he only had time to marvel at their brutal gracefulness, their uncompromising bloodlust, and their inability to be deceived or distracted for a moment before they chopped his head from his shoulders.

The squelch of the God-Scientest’s head landing on the arena floor rang out through the stadium. His mouth and eyes were still open, seemingly marvelling at the sight before his eyes.

Sparrow sank into the sand, gathering all he could from the ground as his roots slithered towards the edges of the stadium.

The Horde flowed from the God-Scientest’s body to the edges of the stadium, they climbed over eachother to get to the railings. Their steeds ripped through eachother’s backs as they climbed.

The twin Gods of Literary Criticism turned up their noses at the sight.

‘Disgraceful,’ said the female twin, ‘where was the setup?’

‘I don’t even know what those Horde-things do.’ snooted her brother, ‘either way, it's hardly original.’

And then the Horde had their hands around the god’s throats, hoisting them backwards over the wall screaming as they fell. Their ink-stained hands groped at the air as their hearts fell upon the Horde’s flashing spears.

The God of Lightening drew a bolt from the sky, caught it in his palm and threw it directly into the face of one of the Horde. The creature accelerated to the speed of light and blew straight through the edge of the stadium.

But by the time the god had drawn a second bolt the horde were dragging him into their midsts. Flashes of lightning rocketed out from the mass, then it all fell into darkness.

On the other side of the stadium Piggy was shouting at the gods.

‘You see! You see! You were quite happy to let these beasts run around on earth because they weren’t your problem. You were quite happy to watch and to laugh as they murdered people in their beds. But now you have no choice but to face it.’

Sparrow who was nothing more than a collection of roots and mutated limbs dragged Piggy and Rhino-Xi backwards out of the stadium. His friends picked him up and carried him between them as they ran through the ambrosia-lined streets. Grand palaces whizzed by in a patchwork of marble, stone, and clay while behind them screams and warcries echoed out from the stadium.

They reached an intersection. At each end stood giant palaces - one black, with fountains of blood and giant stone statues clutching swords between their hands - the other painted white with red crosses on its flags and clean water running from the palms of a pair of angel statues that stood guard over the doorway.

‘Which way?’ Rhino-Xi shouted.

‘You see those fountains of blood?’ Piggy said between gasps of air, ‘...let's run away from them.’

The pair carried Sparrow along the pathway of white sandstone through a pair of gleaming white arches and into a bright, well-lit palace that smelled a lot like an apothecary.