God Ash: Remnants of the fallen.-Chapter 1273: Black Mountain (3).

Cain reached back and rested a hand on Eidwyrm’s hilt.

"I give them a choice."

The space between them collapsed.

One moment the figure stood distant and composed. The next, Cain was sliding backward across the road, boots carving trenches through asphalt as force slammed into him without impact. His spine hit a collapsed barrier hard enough to fracture concrete.

He rolled, came up on one knee, and drew Eidwyrm in the same motion.

The blade sang—not loudly, but clearly. The sound of something that remembered violence fondly.

"You mistake tolerance for weakness," the figure said, now closer. "We allowed anomalies while they were manageable."

Cain wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. "And now?"

"And now," the figure said, "you are a liability."

It raised one hand.

The world folded.

Gravity inverted, then doubled. Cain was driven into the ground as the air above him compressed into a crushing plane. His bones screamed. Eidwyrm flared instinctively, its edge biting into the invisible force with resistance that sent shockwaves rippling outward.

Cain pushed.

Muscle tore. Tendons strained. His vision narrowed—but he forced himself upright inch by inch, Eidwyrm carving a vertical line through the pressure until it split.

The release was violent.

Air detonated outward. The road disintegrated. Towers in the distance sheared at their bases and toppled, collapsing into clouds of debris. Cain was thrown clear, tumbling end over end before slamming into a skeletal overpass.

He caught himself on one hand, dropped to a crouch, and laughed once—short, sharp, humorless.

"Is that all?" he asked.

The figure regarded the destruction dispassionately. "You are eroding faster than you realize."

Cain didn’t answer. He stepped forward instead.

Eidwyrm moved with him, not swinging wildly, not glowing with theatrics. Just a precise arc aimed at the idea of the figure rather than its form.

The blade connected.

Reality screamed.

Not audibly—structurally. The strike didn’t cut flesh. It severed authority, shearing through layered permissions and divine assumptions. The figure staggered back half a step, its outline destabilizing.

That earned Cain something real.

Wrath.

The sky fractured further, seams spiderwebbing outward. Light bled through in colors that did not belong to this spectrum. The figure’s presence expanded, no longer content to compress itself for the sake of conversation.

"You presume parity," it said, voice now thunderous and overlapping itself. "You presume that resistance equates to relevance."

Cain planted his feet as the ground around him began to disintegrate, lifted into slow orbit by forces that did not care about mass.

"I don’t presume," he said. "I test."

He launched forward.

The clash was no longer localized. Every exchange warped kilometers of space. Cain was thrown, recovered, struck back. Eidwyrm carved through layered constructs, met counterforces that bent it off-course, adapted. Each collision escalated—not because either side intended spectacle, but because restraint was becoming inefficient.

Far away, people would later describe earthquakes. Sudden storms. Gaps in memory.

Up close, Cain felt only focus.

He took a hit that shattered his left arm and kept moving. He drove Eidwyrm through a pressure wall and used the recoil to pivot midair. He tasted ozone and blood and something older that did not belong in a human mouth.

"You will be erased," the figure declared. "If not now, then systematically. We will adjust."

Cain landed hard, skidding through rubble, chest heaving.

"Good," he said again. "That means I matter."

The figure raised both hands.

Something vast began to descend—not fully manifested, but enough. A silhouette forming behind the fractures in the sky. Bigger. Heavier. Less patient.

Cain looked up at it, then down at Eidwyrm.

"Yeah," he muttered. "That tracks."

He straightened despite everything screaming in protest, blood dripping freely now, stance imperfect but unyielding.

The scale was shifting. The destruction widening. Whatever came next would not stay contained.

Cain lifted his blade.

"Come on, then."

The thing descending from the fractures did not hurry.

It didn’t need to.

Cain felt its approach the way a continent feels the tide—inevitable, distant, and crushing long before contact. The air thickened again, not with pressure this time, but with weight. Every breath dragged. Every heartbeat felt like it had to push uphill.

The lesser figure—the one he had already struck—drifted backward, folding space around itself as if stepping aside for something more important.

That told Cain everything.

"So that’s how it is," he said, rolling his shoulders despite the pain flaring white-hot through his shattered arm. Bone shifted unpleasantly. He ignored it. "You escalate by committee."

The response was not immediate. The silhouette behind the sky fractures resolved further, layers peeling back like overlapping shadows. Not wings. Not limbs. Just mass and intent, condensed into a form that refused to be interpreted cleanly.

The sky screamed again as another seam tore open.

Down below, the city finally began to die properly.

Buildings that had survived decades of neglect simply collapsed as their internal supports forgot how to function. Roads split. Power grids flared and died. Somewhere far away, alarms began screaming—and then stopped, cut off mid-sound.

Cain took a step forward and nearly went to one knee.

Gravity surged, then twisted. Not stronger—misaligned. His balance vanished as down became a suggestion rather than a rule. He slammed Eidwyrm into the ground and used the blade as an anchor, knuckles white around the hilt.

The descending presence noticed.

The attention landed on him like a hand closing around his spine.

This time, there was no voice. No accusation. No explanation.

Just force.

Cain was ripped free of the ground and hurled upward, not thrown but claimed, dragged toward the fractures as space inverted around him. Wind tore past him hard enough to strip skin. His vision blurred, colors smearing into useless streaks.

He twisted midair and slashed.

Eidwyrm bit into nothing—and something answered.

The recoil slammed through his arm and shoulder, snapping tendons that had already been hanging by threads. Cain screamed, not in fear, but in rage, and forced himself to keep hold of the blade as he spun end over end.

The world flipped.

He crashed through a half-collapsed tower sideways, pulverizing steel and concrete in a storm of debris. Floors gave way beneath him in rapid succession until he finally punched through the base and cratered into the street below.

For a moment, there was silence.

Dust choked the air. Fires crackled. Bits of ruined city clattered down around him.

Cain lay there, staring up through the smoke at the broken sky.

Then he moved.