Chapter 337: Chapter 336: Take it
The bottom layer of Heaven was not what Atlas expected.
No pearled gates, no radiant choirs—only mist and stone. The air tasted faintly metallic, like iron filings in his mouth, and the ground beneath him was rough with veins of crystal that pulsed faintly, as though the entire realm was alive and listening.
Atlas pressed his back to the cold surface of a broken column, his chest rising and falling with shallow breath.
He could still feel it—the echo of that force. That god. His skin prickled with leftover arcs of golden lightning.
His jaw clenched, not from courage but from the raw knowledge that he could not stand against it. Not now. Perhaps not ever.
’You are powerless,’ the thought formed, but it was not his.
The voice. The Guide. It reverberated not through his ears but inside his marrow, a resonance that made his bones ache.
{{{{{If you let me possess you, the virus that you call a god....He will crumble before us.}}}}}
The words came with a hunger, an urgency. Like fire pressing against locked iron doors.
Atlas froze. A storm of questions battered his skull.
If he said yes, would the Guide return his body after? Or would Atlas vanish—swallowed, erased, a vessel emptied forever?
He remembered stories of demons, parasites, spirits that promised strength only to consume the fool who accepted.
But this was different. Wasn’t it?
Or was that what it wanted him to think?
He stared at his hands. They trembled faintly. He hated that. Hated that he was afraid. He was Atlas.
He had endured the weight of Hell itself. Yet here, at the threshold of Heaven, he felt small. Smaller than he had since boyhood, since the nights he had hidden in the ash-wastes while gods waged wars above.
"Damn it," he muttered to no one, voice hoarse. "Damn it all."
A silence fell, heavy, expectant. The Guide did not press again. It waited. Waiting, as though it knew the weight of silence was the sharpest blade.
Atlas clenched his fist. His mind spun. ’If I give you control, will you give it back? Will I even remain me?’
But he did not dare speak the question aloud. To voice fear was to give it shape.
A sudden ripple tore the mist. The world itself seemed to fold.
And then—
Impact.
A fist like thunder drove into his jaw. Bone cracked with a wet, snapping sound. His teeth shattered against one another. The ground rushed up, and he rolled, vision doubling, tripling. The taste of copper flooded his tongue.
He hadn’t even seen the movement. Only the result.
He looked up, blood dribbling from his lips.
The god was there. Seven and a half feet of storm incarnate, veins of lightning crawling beneath his skin.
His eyes burned gold, his breath shimmering with heat, each exhale sounding like distant thunder. He had not even drawn a weapon. His fists were weapon enough.
Atlas tried to rise, but the weight of the god’s mana bore down on him like a collapsing sky. His knees buckled. His vision pulsed black at the edges.
Another step. Lightning cracked against the stone as the god advanced. "You do not belong here...mortal," the voice boomed, not spoken but reverberated, like judgment.
Atlas wanted to spit, to curse, to fight. But his jaw hung broken, his breath rattling. He was nothing. Nothing before this being.
And in that instant—when despair pressed hardest, when even rage flickered low—he felt it again.
The Guide.
{{{{{Say the word, and you will not fall. Say the word, and he will crumble. Say the word, and I will devour him for you....}}}}}
The god’s shadow fell over him. Atlas’s body trembled, not from fear, but from the sheer pressure of divinity pressing on mortal sinew.
He wanted to resist. Wanted to hold onto the last scraps of self.
But he felt his consciousness slipping, reality fracturing at the edges. The mist thickened. His pulse slowed. Darkness gnawed at his sight.
And in that last trembling heartbeat—
Atlas chose.
’Take it.’
Atlas sank. Darkness pulled him down like a sea with no bottom. His body broke under its weight, and his mind flickered once, twice, then went black.
.
.
.
And then—
Light.
Not gentle dawn-light, not firelight. A blinding afterburn, like the world itself had been split open and forced back together. Atlas’s lungs seized as air tore into him.
He gasped, choked, then dragged in another breath, heavy, ragged, like he had sprinted for days. His ribs ached. Every muscle screamed as if flayed and sewn back wrong.
He lifted a trembling hand.
Golden.
Not red, not the deep mortal crimson of his blood. But molten, luminous gold streaking from his palm, dripping down his wrist in glowing rivulets. God’s blood.
His veins pulsed with it, bright against his skin like cracks in stone that glowed with inner fire.
His heart hammered. ’That’s not mine. That’s not human. What did you—’
He swallowed the thought, scanning. His head spun as he turned, vision trembling between clarity and blur. All around him was ruin.
The crystal floor—if it had ever been crystal—was fractured into jagged shards, glowing faintly where cracks ran deep.
Entire columns had been split in two, toppled and crushed into rubble. Crystal walls once flawless were gouged and blackened as though lightning had burned scars across them.
The air itself stank—ozone and ash, and something far fouler: the sweet, rotting stench of divinity undone.
Atlas’s gaze locked forward.
Three figures sprawled on the ground. Gods. Or they had been...
Their forms were colossal, each one a giant compared to him, flesh radiant even in death. One lay crumpled with half his chest missing, light sputtering like a dying star where his heart had been.
Another was twisted, neck bent too far, jaw shattered, gold light leaking like tar from every orifice. The third was torn outright in half, viscera shining with divine ichor, steaming against the cold air.
Atlas staggered back, bile rising in his throat. His mind reeled.
"I... I didn’t fight them. I couldn’t even lift a hand. I should be dead."
His chest heaved. His palms dripped that golden blood. His blood, their blood—he couldn’t tell anymore.
"What the fuck happened?" His voice rasped like dry stone breaking.
Silence.
No whisper. No chuckle. Not even the Guide’s eerie resonance that always hovered like breath on the back of his neck.
For the first time since it had spoken, Atlas felt ’alone’.
His breath quickened. He turned, desperate, searching for something beyond the corpses.
And then he saw it.
The crystal wall. No, not a wall—a barrier. Clear, towering, refracting light into shards of color that cut across the ruin like phantom blades.
He had seen this from afar—the pyramid glinting on the clouded hill. Somehow, impossibly, he was ’inside it’.
But the crystal was not what stole his breath.
It was what it held.
A cell.
And within—
Atlas’s knees nearly buckled.
A body hung cruciform against the barrier, chained in six directions, wings splayed wide. Not feathered white, but ash-grey, torn, ragged, every quill stripped of its purity.
Six wings. Black veins crawled down them like rivers of rot. His wrists and ankles were bound in crystal thorns that pierced straight through flesh, pinning him like a specimen.
And his face—hollow with starvation, eyes sunken yet burning dim with something unkillable. His head hung forward, crown of broken light around his brow.
A Fallen. An Arc angel . Or something greater....
Not just any—’a six-winged Fallen’
The sight slammed into Atlas harder than any god’s fist. His breath caught, words stumbling raw from his lips.
"really...What the fuck happened here?"