CHAPTER 80: CHAPTER 80: STILL INSANE.

Victor’s voice dropped to something far quieter. "He won’t be around much longer."

Ashwin didn’t comment on that. He just studied Victor’s face for a long beat, then glanced back at the bed, at Elias, still asleep, still too vulnerable in a world that had never stopped trying to break him.

"How about Matteo’s friend?" he asked quietly.

Victor didn’t answer right away. The room stretched quiet around them, save for the sound of Elias’s even breathing and the faint hum of residual ether still clinging to the seams of the windowpane.

Then, softly, Victor exhaled through his nose.

"He’s still screaming in the city. Samael’s doing an excellent job pretending to muffle the fallout... while making sure it spreads even faster."

Ashwin set the tablet back on the table with a quiet click. "Do you actually trust him?"

"No," Victor said, a low chuckle curling under the word. "Samael will serve whoever wins, me or Theobald. He’s that kind of man. Opportunistic. Calculating. Too bad for him that I’m not interested in winning anything but Elias."

He tilted his head slightly, eyes still sharp, voice quieter now, colder in its certainty.

"Let the next god rise, if they want. I won’t stop them."

A beat.

"But they’ll follow the same rules I did. I’ve killed gods before." His fingers flexed once, idle, as if remembering the feel of it. "I know how."

His gaze flicked toward the window, then back again.

"The rest of them don’t."

Ashwin exhaled like the weight of Victor’s words had struck bone. "So there isn’t even a game to win?"

Victor’s gaze didn’t waver. "Depends," he said, fingers drumming once against the armrest. "New gods draw most of their strength from their followers. The greater the name, the louder the worship, the stronger they become."

He let the pause settle like ash.

"But they don’t need it. Not really. They could survive quietly, without temples, without offerings. Just exist. But "gods"... his mouth curved into something more like a sneer than a smile, "are greedy creatures. They want to be seen. Loved. Feared. You name it."

Ashwin shivered from the realization that Victor wasn’t lying. He hadn’t been, not once.

He didn’t need to.

Victor didn’t posture. He didn’t beg. He didn’t even care. There was something terrifying about that kind of strength, calm, absolute, and detached from the approval of mortals or their rituals. He could destroy cities if he wanted. He simply didn’t find it worth his time.

Ashwin’s voice was quieter now, more uncertain than before, though he tried to bury it in formality. "Then... why did you help? Every time someone prayed. Every time the old rites were spoken, a life was hanging by a thread. You answered."

Victor’s gaze didn’t shift, but the line of his mouth softened, almost imperceptibly.

"Because it costs nothing," he said. "To be merciful."

Ashwin stared at him. No argument came. Just the weight of that answer curling into the silence like smoke. He wanted to believe it was as simple as it sounded. That Victor, the god-killer, the soulbreaker, the thing Elias had somehow survived, chose mercy when he could have chosen anything else.

Ashwin was silent, his arms still folded, but now it looked more like a shield than a habit. "And you? Won’t the gods that you kill come back? Their name is everywhere."

Victor’s red eyes glinted in the dark, no light strong enough to reflect, but they gleamed anyway, the way deep things sometimes did when you got too close to the abyss.

"They are me," he said simply. "Every time someone speaks any of those seven names, I get stronger."

He tilted his head slightly, expression unreadable.

"This is why I never bothered to get a name for myself."

Ashwin wanted to leave, to get away from the intensity of this... creature, but moments like this, when Victor chose to speak, to explain, were rarer than blood moons. You didn’t interrupt them. You listened. And if you were bold, you asked again.

So he did.

"But why the seven?" he asked, voice steady despite the instinct telling him to back off. "You could’ve chosen anything. Taken one name and ruled through it, like the others did. Why become all of them?"

Victor didn’t answer immediately.

He stood instead, the movement unhurried, elegant. As if his body remembered battle but had long since abandoned the urgency of it. He moved to the window, the faintest rustle of fabric brushing the edges of still air, and gazed out where city lights shimmered like fireflies caught under glass.

"When you kill a god," he said at last, "you don’t just end them. You take the weight of what they were. Their fears. Their rage. The things people whispered when they were desperate."

He glanced down at the street below, where a siren wailed in the distance, faint, distorted by wind.

"I never wanted to be a god," he added. "But people prayed to what worked. And I... worked."

Ashwin swallowed. His arms, still folded across his chest, tightened—less from tension now and more from some distant sense of awe he didn’t quite know how to name.

"You carry them all?"

Victor’s lips curved faintly. "I am them all."

"You never talked about this until now. Why?" Ashwin asked cautiously.

"You never asked," Victor said simply, then added with the kind of quiet finality that turned air brittle, "and I never cared to tell. But, Ashwin... Elias is mine. Keep that in mind."

Ashwin scoffed, dry and sharp. "Do you think I’d try to fight a god for an omega?"

Victor turned, fully now, that faint smirk never reaching his eyes. "No," he said. "But I’m a greedy creature, Ashwin, and Elias was more comfortable with you than me."

Ashwin’s brows lifted. "You have to be kidding me. Elias was relaxed with me because I’ve never told him to be my soulmate after knowing him for two weeks."

Victor’s expression didn’t shift. He stood still, red eyes unreadable, like they’d seen the inside of too many centuries to bother with justifications.

"And you think time matters to creatures like me?" he asked, voice low—not defensive, just distant. "I’ve watched empires collapse in the same breath it took him to laugh at something I said. What’s two weeks, Ashwin, when I’ve waited lifetimes to feel something?"

Ashwin dragged his hand over his face, muttering, utterly exasperated. "Victor..." he tried his best to be polite, but he couldn’t. "Are you fucking nuts? He is human, like me. Honestly, I’m surprised he didn’t run away already from the sheer pressure you put on him."

Victor didn’t flinch. Didn’t argue. He just looked at Ashwin for a long moment, his expression the kind of still that made even silence feel too loud.

"I know he’s human," he said, voice softer now, but no less intense. "That’s why I’m still here."

Ashwin’s hand fell back to his side. His mouth opened, ready to push, to bite, to get some goddamn sense through, but the look on Victor’s face gave him pause.

Victor exhaled slowly. Tired, almost. "I don’t want to own him. I don’t even want to be worshiped. I want..." He stopped himself, jaw tightening. "I want him to look at me and not see the end of the world."

Ashwin snorted faintly, but it lacked real mockery. "And declaring him your soulmate two weeks in helps with that?"

Victor smiled, thin, self-deprecating. "No. But I didn’t lie either."

Ashwin stared at him. For a beat, there was nothing to say.

Then he muttered, mostly to himself, "Shit."

Victor’s gaze flicked toward the bed, toward the still form wrapped in blankets, unaware of the war being fought in whispers around him.

"I can be patient," Victor said. "But not passive. The world won’t give Elias time to find himself again. So I will."

Ashwin rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "You’re still insane."

"I know."

"...But you love him."