Chapter 7: Mount Gahena
"Human… thou art strong. What is thy name?"
Solos's voice hung in the sulfur-choked air of Mount Gahena, eerily calm despite the volcanic steam curling around them like grasping fingers.
With slow, deliberate motion, the angel reached up and lifted the blood-soaked white veil from his face.
What emerged was no divine visage, nor the serene glow of celestial perfection—it was a grotesque abomination of flesh melted and reformed in uneven layers. His eyes were sunken into pits of writhing veins, and his mouth stretched impossibly wide around jagged teeth that dripped ceaseless crimson. The face pulsed like a living wound, beautiful only to those who worshiped decay.
Quite a sight. Dax tilted his head, studying the ruined face with clinical fascination rather than revulsion.
"I am the Black Researcher, Dax Godfall." His lips curled upward as a high, fractured laugh slipped through his teeth; unable to contain his delight, he pressed a hand over his own face. "And you… hihihihihi…"
Solos stared at him unblinkingly, a dark, fanatical recognition flashing across his sunken eyes. "That wretched clan… the fools who dared look down upon the gods! Good!" Solos whispered, tears of warped joy spilling down his ruined cheeks, carving fresh crimson trails into his flesh. "Then let us kill each other! I shall sacrifice every drop of thy blood to appease the heart of my God!"
Solos turned his palm upward, his fingers splaying like claws.
In an instant, the flesh of Dax's right arm peeled away—unzipped by an invisible authority and sliding off like a discarded glove. Tendons unraveled in neat coils, and muscles sloughed free in glistening ropes until only pitch-black bone remained, gleaming unnaturally in the volcanic light.
Dax tilted his exposed skeletal arm for a better look. "How neat."
Above Solos's head, the stripped flesh reappeared. Opening his jaw grotesquely wide, Solos siphoned every drop of blood from Dax's peeled flesh into a shimmering orb of pure, concentrated crimson energy, his aura swelling as he drank in the stolen vitality.
{Stupid Master!} Inerous shrieked inside his mind, her robotic voice sharp with rare panic. {Don't let him drink your blood!}
"Inerous, you've gained an independent consciousness," Dax noted aloud, ignoring her warning entirely as he marveled at her evolution. "How wonderful."
He raised Cil, the scythe humming eagerly in his left hand and his skeletal right grip. In a single, clean motion, he unleashed an unrestrained slash.
A crimson-black arc tore through the sulfur haze, devouring light and sound itself—a void-slicer that warped the volcanic peak beneath their boots.
Blinded by his hunger as he drank the glowing orb of Dax's blood, Solos didn't even glance at the incoming arc until it was already upon him. Without an ounce of resistance, the black edge passed cleanly through his neck in dead silence.
His unveiled head slid free of his shoulders, tumbling lazily onto the ash-strewn stone as silence descended over the crater, broken only by the distant rumble of magma flows.
Mmm… interesting. Dax stepped toward the fallen corpse, his eyes alight with scientific hunger. I must study this thing.
Before he could reach the severed head, a resonant, divine voice boomed across the entire mountain range, shaking loose avalanches of superheated rock down the slopes.
"Thou hast trespassed upon the holy lands! Depart—or die!"
A mile away in the smoke-stained sky floated a radiant figure—golden hair flowing like liquid sunlight, golden eyes blazing with unyielding judgment, and a spear-like blade of world-cleaving light aimed directly at Dax.
"Another one?" Dax's eyes gleamed, his pupils dilating with predatory interest. "Are you backup for this thing on the ground?" No—their auras don't match at all. A different faction entirely.
As Dax observed the distant celestial figure, he noticed a faint flicker of flame dancing inside the angel's free grasp—small and dying. Narrowing his newly evolved eyes, Dax saw that the flame was an old man in battered golden armor, hanging unconscious by his collar.
"I've seen a flame like that before—just like the one inside that mad priest, yet different," Dax whispered, his voice barely stirring the ash, though his predatory grin made him look completely unhinged. "I want it."
In the next instant, Dax no-clipped through space.
Materializing directly beside the golden angel a mile in the sky, he plucked the unconscious old man from the angel's grasp as effortlessly as harvesting ripe fruit from a low branch. A heartbeat later, he stood back on the volcanic ridge where he had started, holding the limp old man by the collar of his heavy armor like a casual thief sauntering home with his prize.
A mile away in the air, the golden angel froze mid-hover, his blade still extended over empty space, his golden eyes wide with shock as they locked onto Dax's white hair across the chasm.
Just then, a dry, ugly laugh echoed across the volcanic stone at Dax's feet—rasping, infectious, and laced with madness.
"Hehehehe…"
Blood surged upward from Solos's decapitated head, accompanied by a crushing wave of pressure that slammed down across the peak like a collapsing mountain.
"Ah. So you didn't die," Dax said, deep amusement dancing in his dark eyes.
Solos's severed head floated upward, wrapped in writhing strands of crimson hair that lashed the air like living whips. Arteries burst outward from the neck stump, weaving frantically into a new torso, new limbs, and new wings—flesh bubbling and reforming in grotesque acceleration.
Within seconds, a newly regenerated body stood tall—a twisted echo of Vabon's earlier frame, yet far bloodier, with translucent skin stretched over pulsing organs and crowned by a blazing crimson halo that wept droplets of molten red.
"Forgive me for showing thee an uglier side… and I thank thee for thy blood! Thy blood hath given me true life!" Solos's voice trembled with masochistic ecstasy, his eyes manic and dilated as he licked his newly formed lips, staring at Dax's veins with ravenous, maddened greed.
His crimson halo erupted. An endless river of blood poured forth, cascading over the volcano's edge and sizzling violently against the magma below.
At the same time, the golden angel in the distance snapped out of his stupor. Wings flaring with blinding fury at having his prisoner stolen right out of his hands, the golden angel lunged forward at terrifying speed, his blade carving trails of holy fire across the sky toward Dax.
Dax frowned faintly, irritation flickering across his features. "One tastes a single drop of my blood and believes himself unstoppable. Truly, what is happening, Inerous? Why did my blood make him stronger?"
{It is because Insatiable Hunger evolved into Origin Eater, Master. Because you do not yet understand the full nature of your newly forged Origin Body, you carelessly allowed him to consume your flesh.}
Origin Body?
Dax drove the shaft of Cil upright into the scorched volcanic earth, then gently laid the unconscious old man beside her blade.
"Protect him," Dax told her softly.
Stepping forward, Dax spread his arms wide. So my blood itself has become special? There is still so much to understand about what I have become.
Above his head, a single halo materialized—a swirling fusion of pitch-black and arterial red, studded with drifting stars like a microcosm of devoured galaxies. It rotated slowly at first… then faster… emitting a low, gravitational hum that rattled bone and bent the light around the peak.
Dax rose from the ash, levitating effortlessly into the sulfur sky.
The pull began subtly—a light suction—before erupting into a world-breaking vortex that clawed at everything possessing mass or energy.
Blinded by their fanaticism—Solos lunging forward with his mouth watering for another taste of Dax's blood, and the golden angel diving down in righteous fury—neither of them slowed until the full weight of the vortex slammed into the mountain.
Mount Gahena cracked under the strain, massive fissures spidering outward across the rock. Boulders shattered into gravel. Even the molten blood dripping from Solos's halo defied gravity, tearing away from him and spiraling inexorably toward Dax at the eye of the storm.
Mid-charge, Solos suddenly staggered in the air.
His manic expression fractured, his eyes flying wide in sheer terror as his own hand clamped around his throat.
"Impossible!" Solos shrieked, his voice splitting into two overlapping tones—his own divine cadence warring against the primal, animalistic scream of Vabon's mortal soul clawing up from within the blood. "No—get out! This is MY body!"
Before Solos's divine will could suppress the terror of the mortal vessel he had stolen, Vabon's survival instinct seized control of his limbs. Without a shred of hesitation—just as Vabon had done back in the forest—the blood-angel whipped around in midair.
Beating his blood-drenched wings desperately against the devouring pull of Dax's star-studded halo, he fled screaming toward the horizon as the event horizon of Dax's hunger closed in behind him.