“What now?” Antonias asked, as angelic as he was demonic, fair and foulness intermixing, his essences in pure opposition to each other.

“We need to prepare to leave.” I said, my scorched muscles slowly being covered with thin membranes that would develop into skin.

Godly power left marks that were not as easy to wipe away as injuries made by normal force, the Dominium’s technological sciences, or Path related abilities. The damage seethed and lingered with toxic disdain, even on the one who wielded it if they weren’t themselves the source. Divinity did not like to be ignored by those lesser than it.

My friend sniffed the air and then cocked his head to listen, his red and Gold eyes searching the ruined buildings beyond the molten sea, the structures reshaped by my heat into something like half melted candle wax that had hardened.

“Adrias, the other one is still alive.” He warned me.

“I know, I massacred him in the Cognitosphere, but his body still no doubt lives even as the mind does not.” I said proudly.

“No, I think he’s still alive. Like, alive. I can smell his blood.” Antonias insisted.

“What the hell does that mean?” I said, annoyed. I had killed Vespasias with bitter truths seeding in a mind already rendered unstable by imprisonment and millennia of boredom.

That was the Golden Imperators’ great weakness, much as it was so of the Blurred, Brights and Blessed in the Underworld, a life without agency and without motivation rusted like common iron, even if it didn’t appear so from the outside.

“Animated blood smells different than the blood of the sleeping or the stilled fluid of the dead. Listen. Look and listen.” Antonias said.

Like crawling spiders, my senses spread invisibly through the catastrophic wreckage, over broken bodies and shattered homes, seeking the distant makeshift burial of the other Gold.

When I had split the signet ring that held the Scholarium and sent mountains screaming out of that narrow slit in reality straight into Vespasias, it had hurled him into the upper atmosphere and then down in a long arc. The mountains and whatever remnants of the floating castle and the grounds had landed with him halfway across the planet and covered him. Mere physical matter could not stop a Gold’s flesh from regenerating and their spirit reattaching to a repaired body, but I doubted it had been pleasant.

When I had entered the astral plane, he had come too, leaving his body to continue to fix itself just as I was letting mine work. And then I had killed him. Made him into less than a comatose person and just slightly more than a corpse. I had reforged him into a monument to commemorate what happened to those who faced me. I had won.

Or at least, I had thought I did.

My sensory capabilities and enhanced perceptions were fantastic at giving me a broad and sweeping sense of all that was around me in a set radius, or of zeroing in on something close and seeing it down to the molecules and atoms, or of detecting distant threats like how I had known when Nero and his comrade had first arrived.

They weren’t very good at picking out something as small as a body buried under mountains halfway across Iulius and being sharp enough to let me see anything more than a grainy image of humanoid shape covered in rock.

“Your Leechling powers are something.” I commented, shaking my head. “You can really smell him this far away?”

It was impossible in a literal physical sense, but then again so was hearing things in the soundless void of space. The Paths did not merely defy nature, they routinely bullied the laws of physics and mundane reason into tears.

“I think the sense of smell has more to do with the Order of the Seraphs.” He said. “But the blood part is the bloodsucker within, yes.”

“Clodias- or rather, Nero in Clodias’s body, once told me he could smell my DNA.” I said, mulling the idea over. “Why would his possessed descendant have a Fourth Rank’s attribute though?”

“Maybe-” My friend said. “Okay, Vespasias is definitely moving.”

I squinted, mostly out of habit, it did kind of look like the distant body was shifting around. Then the mountain’s mass on top of him started to shake and split apart.

“Alright, you were right.” I said, levitating upwards and then accelerating high into the sky towards the enemy I thought I had dealt with.

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Antonias followed but slower.

I turned my head back to him. “Still getting used to flight? I’m surprised, you’re the one with wings.”

“What part of these wings makes them look aerodynamic?” He shouted back to me, and I laughed.

By the time we reached the site, Vespasias was rising up out of it, clad in black fire. There was something disturbing about his expression. Something unhinged.

“I. Am. Not. Going. Back. To. That. Cage!” Vespasias Flavion howled.

I considered that perhaps instead of beating a rusted opponent by forcing him to confront his own decay, I had knocked the rust off and made him into an animal backed into a corner with nothing to lose.

“Don’t worry,” Antonias said pleasantly. “We’re going to kill you, not capture you!”

Then my friend darted through the air, his canine teeth lengthening in anticipation of yet another drink.

Vespasias flung his right hand out at my friend and dark flames lanced out, spraying all over Antonias’s face and chest.

Where the pyrokinetic blast had touched, it annihilated like a razor-sharp scalpel cutting away at a subject. I could see parts of his brain and the insides of his lungs without anything more than a mortal’s vision. The blaze had given my friend an open chest cavity and a sudden lobotomy.

“Toni!” I screamed as he dropped downwards. He would still be alive as a Gold, but he would need to heal. And I was on my own now.

Vespasias slammed into me, tackling me and locking his legs around me before hammering his diamond scaled fists into my recovering face.

“I! AM! NOT! GOING! BACK!” He screamed, his violet eyes wild and frenzied. “Do you hear me, Augustas??”

I hit him in the face, crunching his nose. We tumbled through buildings, the frightened survivors unlucky enough to be in our path pulping against my back, their blood like paint.

“I said, did you hear me?!” Vespasias growled. “I will kill you today, Augustas. I! WILL! TRIUMPH!”

I realized with shock that I had given him enough psychological damage that he was hallucinating that I was my grandfather.

I cracked one of his ribs and in return he pushed one of his thumbs into my eye socket, popping my eyeball. Half my vision went black.

I roared, wrenching open his jaw and gripping his tongue. It felt like wet rubber in my hand as I ripped it out.

My eyesight in my right eyeball was returning and he put it out again. An eye for an eye was a bit of a cliché, so I pulled his right ear off with my left hand and then dug my diamond encased thumb into his eardrum.

Wham!

The two of us had plummeted through the skyscrapers and subterranean dwellings of the Iulians and had just smacked into the deep earth of the planet, far below the constructs of humans. Trying to levitate against the Gold was a constant battle. Panic had given Vespasias what fury and arrogance never could- true desperation and unrestricted fear. A determination that outweighed mine.

The problem was that I was still healing, Flavion clearly wanted to win against the foe he thought he was battling than I could muster against a complete stranger, and neither of us could fully use fire against each other which cut away my key way to inflict permanent damage.

“Die! Die! Die!” Vespasias said, his tongue regrown, as he was straining against my grip on his arms.

The man was insane. There was nothing of the sneering man who had mocked me calling myself Heaven’s Spawn, only a creature of tormented terror possessing that person’s face.

His hands still locked in mine, Vespasias headbutted me over and over, cutting his forehead on my teeth. The salty taste on my tongue gave me a half-baked thought even as tiredness and exhaustion swept through me.

When he pulled his head back a third time to prepare another hit, I leaned forward and bit into his neck, excising out a meaty chunk. Vespasias tried to speak, the air whistling through the hole I had made.

As he abandoned one of my hands to reach for the wound in shock, I spit the meat and blood out of my mouth and jammed my free hand into the hole, widening it before it could fully close.

What I needed was a way to finish him off, but what? Without Heracles’s pyre and lacking whatever unnatural thing Toni had done to Nero to make a Fourth Rank Imperator into a mummified husk, I was nothing more than any other Golden Imperator…

An image of Persias Fulvion with eldritch electricity flickering around his Keenblade popped into my mind.

Vespasias was too maddened to use it now but before Nero and him had been using the sacred lightning of Zeus that one gained upon Silverhood, commonly applied to swords. I never used it because I had something much more potent from my acquired bloodline, but just like my Servus legacy in growing vines, just because something seemed unimportant did not mean it was useless. Merely not applied in a useful way by its user.

Holy sparks of heaven danced between my fingertips. I needed to damage his brain repeatedly with both physical and sacred force, but Vespasias’s skull was in the way.

I knew what to do, no matter how disturbing it was.

Through the hole in his throat I was holding open, I pushed up the inside of his neck with a lightning-kissed hand, straining to jam it through flesh and cartilage and into his head through the bottom of his skull.

The Gold was fighting like the devil he claimed to be, but in the end, I felt my fingers swim through cerebrospinal fluid to brush his brainstem. My fingertips rubbed against his brain.

I clenched the seat of his consciousness and crushed it with a hand channeling the domain of the Skyfather himself, crushed it over and over, his soul and augmented physiology regenerating it with a valiant but futile effort.

I didn’t know how long it had taken to finish the deed, but when I felt the life finally leave his superhuman cells, I realized Antonias was standing over me and that there were tears on my cheeks.

“Do you weep for him?” Antonias asked curiously, his face and chest skinless.

“No.” I replied honestly.

“Then for who?”

“I don’t know.” I said, lost.

I felt a tugging sensation on my soul. Augustas. A summoning once again, this time his demand instead of mine.

“Bring your pet abomination as well.”

I tried to drag Toni’s mind with me, attempting to draw his consciousness with me.

“Not his mind, his soul.” My grandfather said impatiently.

“How?” I replied.

“You’re connected. You called his coffin to yours when you returned to life, call him to you as I pull.”

This time when the Regent of all mankind called for my presence, Toni came with me.