CHAPTER 464: THE LAST DAWN 4

"By the abyss," Luna breathed, her voice barely audible over the sound of clashing titans. "Garduck, how is this possible? Those statues... they’re holding back an entire pantheon."

Garduck’s silver hair was matted with sweat and divine ichor, his frame trembling not from exhaustion but from recognition of power that dwarfed his own colossal strength. His green eyes were fixed on Ozymandias, who stood atop his wall like a conductor orchestrating a symphony of destruction.

"We thought we knew his strength," Garduck said quietly, his voice carrying memories of the second event. "But this..." He gestured at the monuments, at the city that seemed to pulse with its own heartbeat. "This is beyond anything we witnessed."

Luna’s gaze followed his to where Ozymandias stood, unmoved by the chaos raging around his domain. The pharaoh’s expression was one of casual amusement, as if watching children play at war rather than witnessing combat between divine forces.

"Adam called him the ultimate support," Luna whispered, the words carrying the weight of remembered conversations. "He said Ozymandias could turn any battle, defend any position, outlast any siege..."

Her voice trailed off as Ozymandias’s head turned toward them, his ancient eyes meeting theirs across the battlefield. Even at this distance, his gaze carried such weight that both demons instinctively shuddered.

The pharaoh’s lips curved in a sneer that held ancient contempt. His voice carried across the battlefield despite the chaos, each word falling like a hammer blow on the ears of gods and demons alike.

"And he was severely mistaken," Ozymandias declared, his tone dripping with disdain for the very concept. "Support? A king takes what he wants for himself!"

The true terror had yet to awaken.

Ozymandias raised his arms to the heavens, his golden necklace blazing with captured starfire as his voice boomed across the battlefield with the finality of prophecy itself: "Monument One—arise and eclipse the sun!"

The desert floor cracked like an eggshell as something impossibly vast stirred beneath the sands. Ancient stone groaned against the weight of millennia as the greatest of all monuments began its ascension from the tomb of ages. Sand cascaded like waterfalls as a form larger than pyramids, more magnificent than mountains, tore itself from the earth’s embrace.

Monument One rose with the majesty of a newborn god.

Like its brothers, this colossus bore the weathered scars of countless millennia, its surface cracked and pitted by time’s relentless assault. But as it rose, something miraculous began to happen. The blood that had been spilt across the battlefield—divine ichor from wounded gods, demonic essence from Luna’s flames, the life force of destroyed constructs—began to flow toward Monument One like rivers seeking the sea.

Where the crimson streams touched the ancient stone, cracks sealed themselves with veins of liquid gold. Missing chunks of carved muscle regenerated with the slow majesty of geological time compressed into moments. The monument’s weathered features sharpened and refined themselves, drinking deeply from the spilt vitae until it stood not pristine, but renewed—a fusion of ancient craftsmanship and fresh power.

But this was only the beginning of its transformation. As Monument One reached its full height, the three other monuments began to move with purpose that transcended their individual programming. Monument Four, still locked in combat with the Egyptian front lines, suddenly disengaged from battle. Its massive form blurred as it leapt toward its ascending brother, stone flesh beginning to dissolve into streams of liquid architecture.

Monument Three’s barrier flickered and died as the construct abandoned its defensive position, its priest-like form flowing like molten gold toward the central colossus. Even Monument Two, dancing through the sky with Horus, broke off its aerial ballet and streaked downward, its falcon wings dissolving into component energies.

The fusion was a sight that defied mortal comprehension. Four massive constructs, each one a masterwork of impossible engineering, began to merge into something greater than the sum of their parts. Monument Four’s warrior essence flowed into the arms, gifting them with combat instincts honed across eons of battle. Monument Three’s defensive matrices integrated themselves into the barrier systems, creating shields that operated on principles beyond divine understanding. Monument Two’s flight capabilities and solar collection arrays spread across the fused form’s back like mechanical wings of unparalleled sophistication.

And through it all, the spilt blood continued to flow, healing ancient wounds and binding the fusion together with crimson threads of stolen life force.

Four mighty arms sprouted from its torso, each one inheriting the specialised essence of its component monuments. The first arm, positioned on the upper right, gripped a sword that seemed forged from crystallised lightning—Monument Four’s warrior spirit made manifest, its edge crackling with electrical fury enhanced by the blood of countless battles. The second arm, lower right, wielded a staff crowned with a sun disk that pulsed with the rhythm of a dying star—Monument Two’s solar mastery concentrated into a weapon that could channel the fury of newborn suns.

The third arm, upper left, bore a massive ankh that had been carved not from stone, but from compressed time itself—Monument Three’s defensive wisdom transformed into an offensive weapon, its surface rippling with temporal distortions that could age enemies to dust or trap them in loops of eternal moments. The fourth and final arm, lower left, held a khopesh whose curved blade seemed to cut through the very concept of distance—the fusion’s own unique creation, its edge existing in multiple dimensions simultaneously, a weapon that transcended the individual capabilities of its parts.

But it was the monument’s back that revealed the true genius of its creator and the perfection achieved through fusion. Solar collection panels, inherited from Monument Two but refined through combination with its brothers’ essences, spread from between its shoulder blades like the wings of a mechanical god. These were not mere decorations—they were conduits for solar energy, designed to drink deeply from any source of light and transform it into pure, devastating power amplified by the blood that continuously flowed through its stone veins.

As Monument One’s form reached its full height—easily dwarfing even the Great Pyramid—those wings began to beat. Not with the biological rhythm of Horus’s divine pinions, but with the precise mechanical perfection of a device engineered for a single purpose: flight that defied every natural law.

The colossus lifted from the earth, its ascension accompanied by a sound like reality tearing at the seams. Stones that had witnessed the birth of civilisation trembled in its wake as Monument One achieved what no structure of its size should have been capable of—it soared.

Ra’s solar disk flared with sudden intensity as he beheld what approached. "What blasphemy is this? No mortal creation should—"

His words were cut off as Monument One’s sun-staff pulsed, and a beam of solar energy erupted forth that made Ra’s own flames seem pale and sickly. This was not the disciplined fire of order, but something far more primal—the raw fury of stellar birth, unrestrained by divine law or cosmic balance.

The beam struck Ra’s pyramid, and for the first time in eons, the sun god’s perfect construct cracked. Fissures spread across its golden surface like spider webs, each crack bleeding light that painted the sky in impossible colors.

"My pyramid," Ra whispered, his falcon voice carrying a note of genuine shock. "Nothing should be able to damage my perfect monument."