CHAPTER 1146: DRAFTING (2).

The storm never truly left. It only circled wider, dragging its weight across the horizon like a wounded god.

Cain walked through the fractured valley that had once been City Z’s eastern line. Every step sank into blackened mud. The air stank of ozone, burning oil, and blood turned sour under rain.

Behind him, the survivors followed in silence — Roselle, Steve, and a dozen others that hadn’t died when the conduits went up. They looked half-alive. Faces gray. Eyes glassy.

Susan limped beside a broken barrier cart, clutching her side. "We’re not heading back to base, are we?"

Cain didn’t answer. He only kept walking.

Steve trudged closer, his voice rough. "I saw the light from the heart of the city. Whatever’s there is pulsing through the Grid. They’re rebuilding fast."

"Not rebuilding," Cain said quietly. "Restructuring."

The road curved toward a ridge where the air itself shimmered faintly — a boundary, thin but palpable. Beyond it lay the ruins of the central temple, or what remained of it. What should’ve been rubble now pulsed with red light. The structure looked grown, not built — a cathedral of glass and flesh, its surface alive with veins of glowing Divinity.

Roselle’s hand went to her weapon. "That thing’s breathing."

"It’s feeding," Cain said.

The others didn’t need an explanation. The Divine didn’t die — it consumed. And where one Celestial fell, others gorged on its remains. The sight of it twisted something in Cain’s gut.

Susan spat blood into the dirt. "You thinking what I’m thinking?"

"Probably."

"Then it’s suicide."

"Probably that too."

He stepped forward anyway.

The closer they got, the thicker the air became. The faint hum of chanting rolled out from within the cathedral. Hundreds of voices, rising and falling like waves. The sound was wrong — not devotion, but desperation.

Cain signaled for the others to stop, then moved up the incline alone.

Inside the temple, torches burned with cold flame. Humans knelt in rows, their eyes rolled back, bodies twitching in rhythm. The floor was slick with blood drawn from their palms — offerings feeding into a central pool where a pulsing heart of light throbbed and swelled with each verse of the chant.

The thing wasn’t symbolic. It was literal. A living, beating core — the embryonic form of a Celestial rebirth.

Cain felt his pulse quicken. Baldur’s regeneration had been severed, but his Divinity hadn’t vanished. It had been redirected. Recycled.

"Mother of ruin..." Roselle’s voice came from the doorway. She’d followed him despite the order.

He didn’t scold her. "We stop it before it wakes."

"How?"

Cain studied the core, his mind sifting through a hundred dead possibilities. Magic was still sealed — the air was too saturated with Divine interference. But Divinity could bleed.

He gripped {Eidwyrm}. The blade hummed weakly in response, hungry despite its exhaustion. "If it’s alive, it can die."

The chanting rose into a shriek. The heart in the pool split open.

A blast of red light threw Cain back, slamming him into a pillar. Stone cracked. Steam hissed from the blood-soaked ground.

The core unfolded.

It wasn’t Baldur — it was something new, smaller, but sharper, its form fluid and incomplete. Wings made of glass and sinew unfurled from its back, and a face — human, almost childlike — stared down at him through the haze.

"Cain of the Blighted Sigil," it said in a voice that was both choir and scream. "You interrupt ascension."

Cain coughed blood, pushed himself up. "You bastards don’t waste time, do you?"

The creature’s smile was eerie. "Divinity is eternal. You are not."

Roselle moved before it finished speaking — a single clean strike. The creature caught her blade with two fingers. The steel hissed, melting like wax. A backhand sent her crashing through a wall.

Cain lunged, his blade tracing a crimson arc. The impact carved a trench in the floor, light and blood exploding outward. The creature screamed, the sound shaking the temple’s supports.

It countered. A tendril of glass shot from its palm, spearing the ground where Cain had stood an instant before. He rolled aside, boots slipping on slick stone.

He couldn’t match its speed. Not like this. Not without mana.

But instinct carried him where strength failed. He feinted left, baiting another tendril, then cut upward. {Eidwyrm} split the limb clean through, spraying molten ichor. The thing staggered back, shrieking.

Steve appeared at the entrance, dragging a heavy satchel. "Cain!"

Cain caught it mid-air and ripped it open. Inside — three grenades, jury-rigged from fallen conduit cores. Dangerous, unstable, and perfect.

He primed one, hurled it at the pulsing pool. The explosion tore through the chamber, vaporizing the kneeling cultists and shattering half the temple. The blast threw him clear through a collapsing wall.

He hit the mud outside, body screaming, ribs cracked. Roselle crawled out nearby, her arm broken but her grip on her blade unrelenting.

Through the smoke, the creature staggered out. Its form flickered, veins of light exposed, its wings cracked but still burning.

Cain stood, dragging {Eidwyrm} through the dirt. "You said Divinity is eternal," he rasped. "Let’s test that."

The creature hissed, lunging.

The clash was brutal — no grace, no rhythm. Just raw violence. Cain’s sword ripped through bone and light; the creature’s claws tore through steel and flesh.

In the end, they both fell.

Cain landed on top of it, {Eidwyrm} buried in its chest. He twisted until the blade cracked its core. Light erupted — a silent detonation that sucked the air from the world.

When the glow finally died, all that remained was smoke and rain.

Roselle dragged herself to her feet, staring at him through the haze. "You alive?"

Cain’s breath came ragged. He looked down at his arm — cut deep, bleeding freely. "Define alive."

Steve limped up, eyes wide at the ruin around them. "You did it. It’s gone."

Cain didn’t answer. He stared at the ruins of the cathedral — now nothing more than scorched glass and twisted metal. The rain hissed against the smoldering debris.

He sheathed his blade slowly. "No," he said at last. "This was just the first hymn."

The storm above flared white, lightning fracturing the sky like veins.

Somewhere in the distance, another voice began to sing.