Chapter 6: Solos
The air thickened, heavy and oppressive, as though the sky itself had begun to bleed. A violent spiral of wind erupted across the Plains of Vabos, whipping up a storm of crimson petals—billions upon billions—until the entire landscape drowned in a churning sea of red. Each petal glistened wetly, carrying the heavy, metallic tang of fresh blood.
With eerie, unnatural grace, the petals converged around Vabon's towering stone pillar. They wove together, layering and fusing until they formed a blood-soaked tree towering meters into the air, its bark slick and pulsing as veins of crimson throbbed beneath the surface like living arteries.
Along the pillar's surface, the petrified golem figures stirred. Their stone bodies cracked and bled, shedding their rocky husks in wet chunks as they rose into the sky, transforming into mocking likenesses of Solos himself—perfect in form and blasphemous to the eyes.
Each clone bore three tormented faces: one weeping endless tears of blood, another stretched wide in a grotesque, lipless smile, and the last contorted in pure animal rage.
Their combined aura detonated outward, climbing at a terrifying, suffocating pace.
Solos lifted his hands as glowing threads of crimson energy tore from his back, anchoring him to the bloody tree and to his newly birthed clones. The threads hummed with power, binding master to creation.
Reality shuddered as the distant roars of forest beasts fell dead silent. The wind died mid-gust. Even the insects ceased their chirping, as if the world itself were holding its breath in terror.
Solos spread his vast, blood-drenched wings wide.
"I welcome thee to my domain. As my lord commands… so shall I act," he declared, his voice resonant with ancient authority.
Behind him, the three clones dropped to their knees in perfect synchronization, their multi-faced heads bowed in solemn prayer.
Dax remained utterly still, calculating his next move.
He stroked the flat of Cil's blade with slow, reverent fingers, studying Solos the way a surgeon studies a rare and exquisite specimen laid bare upon the operating table.
"You're strong… Please, let me cut into you. Let me understand you, you majestic creature." His lips twitched as his madness began to surface, his dark eyes gleaming bright and sharp. "How you'll look under my scalpel… . I've never dissected a high-dimensional being before."
Dax wasn't called the Black Doctor for nothing. In the next heartbeat, he vanished.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The world blurred as thousands of blows collided in mere seconds, each impact a detonation that threatened to tear open space itself. Shockwaves rippled outward, flattening ancient trees and carving deep furrows into the earth.
Dax paused mid-motion, staring down at the blood trickling across his knuckles. No pain registered—only an electric, intoxicating exhilaration. Deep inside him, something cruel stirred, uncoiling like a predator scenting prey.
"Killing Series, First Form: Covered in Blood."
Killing intent erupted from him like a bursting dam, so dense it became tangible, carrying the writhing visages of dead souls struggling in the dark. His aura flooded the plains, twisting the air into a suffocating miasma. Phantom corpses materialized in the haze—wailing, drifting, and reaching out with skeletal hands around his silhouette. He stood like the embodiment of death, true to himself.
Across from him, Solos hesitated for a fraction of a second, his formal cadence cracking.
"Thee… thou canst not be human… What art thou?"
Dax moved, the air detonating in his wake. He reappeared directly before Solos, sweeping Cil in a vicious arc toward his neck.
The angel reacted with godlike swiftness. His wings hardened instantly, the flowing blood-feathers condensing and fusing into sheets of crimson metal that parried the strike with a resonant clang that shook the ground.
Behind him, the three summons mobilized in perfect unison: the archer soared high above the clouds with its bow drawn and aimed at Dax; the second—now shifted into a mage—fell back behind Solos, its lips moving in a rapid, arcane chant; and the warrior charged straight forward without fear, raising a colossal greatsword of condensed blood.
What is this? Is he so useless that he has to hide behind lifeless puppets? Still, I can't overlook them.
Dax flickered again, appearing directly before the charging blood-warrior, though the massive winged golem matched his momentum, closing the gap with impossible speed.
"Just because you can't feel pain doesn't mean you can't be destroyed."
Dax squeezed his open palm. An invisible telekinetic vice clamped down, freezing the golem mid-swing. The warrior released no sound—only a deafening series of cracks as its frame buckled under unseen pressure, crushing stone and bursting blood into a tightly compressed sphere.
Solos froze, his crimson eyes widening in disbelief as he stared at the crushed golem in Dax's grip.
Dax opened his palm and launched the compressed mass of stone and blood forward like a cannonball, hurtling straight at Solos.
The angel tilted his head, dodging the projectile casually—yet the chanting mage standing directly behind him was not so fortunate. Like a struck star, the mage golem exploded on impact, spraying pulverized stone and blood across the canopy before dissolving into nothingness.
Before Dax could press the advantage, a piercing whistle tore down from the sky above.
Thunk!
An arrow as thick as a spear, forged of condensed blood, punched straight into Dax's chest—followed immediately by a second, and a third.
A storm of them rained down in an endless barrage, tearing through flesh and bone, lifting and tossing his body across the clearing like a broken puppet on strings.
"Combust."
Solos clenched his fist, and every blood-arrow embedded in Dax's body detonated simultaneously. The shockwave hurled Dax skyward, his blood spraying in bright, arcing fountains against the red sky.
Yet only hysterical, joyous laughter escaped Dax's torn lips.
"Hahaaaahhahhhhh! I can't control my body!" he shouted gleefully, his voice echoing across the plains as Solos materialized beside him mid-flight, his blood-blade already descending in a lethal arc.
BOOM!
Driven downward by the strike, Dax cratered into the earth, landing upright at the bottom of the smoking pit. A wide grin split his bloodied face as his muscles bulged unnaturally, power from his depths rippling across his skin like black lightning.
Cil hummed in his grip—eager and insistent, speaking in a frequency only her master understood. With a slow nod, Dax pressed the dull spine of the katana against the side of his own neck.
"Dominion over blood… I'm starting to understand your power," Dax murmured, his dark eyes locked onto the descending angel. "I felt it—I truly felt your presence inside my own veins, all because of an arrow you didn't even touch directly."
He raised the blade high as Solos dove toward him on sight.
"I am the Slaughterer—the one who will slaughter blood itself."
Killing intent surged into Cil, pouring straight from the core of his being. The blade devoured it greedily, reshaping as the surrounding air vibrated violently, followed by the roll of a deep, cosmic scream—terrifying in its deadly grace.
Solos halted mid-dive, glancing upward in sudden confusion. "A sonar?"
Nothing visible marred the sky above—until the space directly behind Dax darkened.
Hovering silently behind Dax was a whale. A colossal phantom whale, cosmic and abyssal, its immense outline etched into the void itself. Its presence alone bent the light and crushed the air beneath its belly.
Solos's blood-wings trembled involuntarily. "I do not understand… What is this creature? What is that human? Nothing is right about this!"
The suffocating pressure did not radiate from Dax alone—it poured from the weapon in his hand.
Cil's steel melted, elongating smoothly as her katana form dissolved and reforged into a sleek black rod etched with glowing runes—the mark of the World-Devouring Whale. At its tip, a crescent scythe blade bloomed, crimson as arterial blood.
Dax exhaled sharply, his eyes wide with quiet awe. "You are too beautiful, Cil."
High above, the surviving archer clone nocked another volley, waves upon waves of blood-arrows condensing across the clouds.
"You lack respect," Dax murmured.
He raised the scythe—and drew a single, perfect arc across the horizon.
Silence followed for several long seconds. Nothing moved. Even the wind obeyed the presence of the slash in dead stillness; even the pulsing blood-tree did not dare to throb.
Then the world convulsed.
The massive blood-tree parted cleanly down the middle, its trunk sliding apart with surgical precision before collapsing in two equal halves while its roots still clutched the earth. High above, the archer clone split in two and vanished into mist.
Cracks spidered across the crimson sky like fractures in painted glass. The Blood World shattered instantly, dissolving into nothingness as if its glorious terror had never existed, returning the plains to ordinary reality beneath a clear, indifferent sun.
Across the ruined clearing, Solos stared at the fallen halves of his domain in stunned silence, his wings flaring wide as his jaw tightened.
"Thou must die!" Solos hissed, his voice thick with sudden, fanatical dread. "Before thou canst bare thy fangs against my Lord!"
Dax glanced down at Cil, momentarily breathless at her raw destructive power—but there was no time to marvel. An angel still needed to be dissected.
He blurred forward once again.
The two collided—faster, fiercer, and more violent than before. Trees were uprooted in their wake and boulders pulverized under the shockwaves of their clash, climbing in intensity until the fabric of space itself rippled and tore.
Without realizing it, their collision shredded the dimensional barrier between regions—and in a blinding flash of displaced air, both combatants slammed down atop a jagged volcanic peak where steam and sulfur choked the sky.
Mount Gahena.