Oak-haven was no longer a village; it was a dying memory being thrust upright by a godless force. The Colossus, a petrified titan from an eon when the earth trembled beneath the footsteps of deities, shook three centuries of dust, ash, and human arrogance from its massive shoulders. The ground beneath Silarias’ heavy boots was no longer familiar soil, but the cold grey epidermis of a creature vast enough to devour the firmament.
The world tilted a violent ninety degrees. Houses of solid marble and ancient oak, nestled for generations in the stone folds of the giant, slid away like loose teeth from a rotting gum into the yawning abyss. The bone chilling shriek of shattering masonry mingled with the gale force winds whistling through the giant’s hollow, cathedral like ribcage. Silarias inhaled the scent of approaching extinction: a heavy, suffocating cocktail of pulverized marble, scorched ozone, and the cloying, rancid aroma of the Parasite Antings pulsing in the villagers’ necks like bloated black veins.
“Hold on, Nyx! If you let go, you’re history!” Silarias’ voice was a hoarse snarl, raw from the dust scouring his lungs. I didn’t crawl out of the gutter just to be a stain on a dead god’s shoulder, he thought, his jaw aching from the strain. With a brutal, desperate motion, he rammed his black gauntlet, Freya, deep into the giant’s scapula. The black steel plates of the glove shrieked against the stone as blood red runes ignited with a stifling, dark radiance. He served as a living anchor in a world literally tearing itself apart. Nyx clamped her fingers with white knuckled intensity into his leather belt, her silver hair whipping like a tattered banner in a storm of ash. Her eyes, usually the epiphany of calm, reflected the total unadulterated chaos of the moment.
In the heart of this vertical hell, a scene unfolded that froze the very soul. The villagers did not scream. As the ground vanished beneath them and they plummeted toward their end, they continued their mechanical labors with a possessed horrific precision. An old baker kneaded invisible dough in the thin air while falling hundreds of feet, his face a wrinkled mask devoid of emotion. A young mother clutched a bundle of firewood as if it were her firstborn, her eyes milky white and completely hollow as she slid over the edge of a fracturing terrace.
“Bernard!” Nyx screamed, her voice sharp as a whetted ice crystal cutting through the roar of the collapsing city. “Stop this! You’re not saving them; you’re feeding them directly into the maw of hell!”
Upon the edge of the Colossus’ chin, suspended hundreds of feet above the bottomless depth, stood the monk. His face was a ruin of guilt and madness, his fingers bleeding onto the holes of his bone flute. “I cannot stop!” he wailed, as a discordant shrill note escaped the instrument. “The Prince promised rest! If the music ceases, their souls will shatter into a thousand shards within the void. I would rather give them a beautiful dream than the raw truth of their own graves!”
The Cursed Elites of the Federation, clad in black plate armor that seemed to consume the meager light, moved nimbly across the giant’s back. They ignored gravity as if it were a mere suggestion. “The Liberator and the Architect,” the leader sneered, his blade sparking with black corrosive energy that made the air hiss and curl. “Your names will be the last words to echo in this abyss before the titan grinds you to pulp.”
Suddenly, a rhythmic void fell over the storm. It wasn’t silence, but a vibration so deep it hijacked Silarias’ own heartbeat. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Atop a severed spire, now jutting like a horizontal spear from the giant’s flank, a silhouette appeared. A heavy poncho, stained with oil and old blood, whipped violently in the gale. A broad sombrero cast an impenetrable shadow over the stranger’s face. He stood there with a nonchalance that was an absolute insult to the death and ruin surrounding him.
The Stranger raised his hands. His fingertips glowed with an unnatural hissing blue light, pulsing at a BPM faster than a human heart could endure. Beneath the brim of his hat, a pair of eyes ignited: wild, anarchic, and utterly unpredictable.
“The vibe here is… off,” the stranger’s dry, gravelly voice rasped from beneath the hat, sounding like sandpaper over rusted metal. “Too much wailing, not enough tempo. Let’s correct the Situation with some real current.”
Without so much as a glance at his targets, the Stranger began to fire. Not bullets, but compressed discharges of static electricity flowed from his fingers like venomous blue lightning bolts. Each shot landed with the brute precision of an executioner upon the Elites’ weak points. “Voltage Verse: Staccato Shots!”
The Elites were hurled backward, their bodies jerking in a grotesque dance as their blood nearly boiled from the immense voltage. The Stranger moved like a glitch in reality; one second he was atop the spire, the next he was sliding at an impossible angle down the vertical wall toward Silarias. He landed with the lightness of a raptor upon Silarias’ golden gauntlet, Frey.
The Stranger did not look at Silarias, but the raw, hungry grin visible for a split second beneath the sombrero’s brim said everything. It was the grin of a man who knew the world was going to burn and had already prepared the bass-line for the apocalypse.
The Stranger planted his heavy, mud caked boots firmly upon the warm, pulsing gold of the gauntlet. The heat of the solar energy seared the soles of his boots, but he did not flinch. He pointed with a lazy, almost bored gesture toward the Colossus’ neck, where the Mother Parasite grew like a throbbing fleshy boulder from the stone skin, encircled by arcs of purple lightning.
“Up,” the Stranger commanded curtly. The authority in his voice left no room for debate. “Throw me.”
Silarias grinned, his teeth white and predatory against the black soot and dried blood on his face. Finally, someone who speaks my language, he thought. He asked no questions; in this world, madness was the only currency left with any value. The solar energy in Frey exploded with a force that ignited the surrounding oxygen into a corona of golden light.
Silarias braced every muscle in his scarred body. His back arched under the immense pressure of the God burden. The gauntlets howled from the stored kinetic energy. With a brute, world shattering swing, he launched the Stranger into the heavens, through the rain of ash and debris.
The Stranger tore through the sky like an electric comet. As he flew, he flung his poncho back, revealing the shimmering Tesla rings around his wrists. They began to scream: a high pitched, mechanical wail that simply erased the monk’s flute from the air.
“Time for the drop!” the Stranger bellowed above the hurricane’s roar. “CIRCUIT BREAKER: 808 OVERLOAD!”
He slammed his hands together above the giant’s fleshy neck. A wall of purple lightning, thicker than the foundations of the Citadel, crashed into the Mother Parasite. The shockwave of the discharge was so powerful that the Colossus froze mid motion, its stone jaws locked open in a silent scream while the electricity short circuited its petrified nerves.
The Stranger landed after the immense discharge, crouching on the bridge of the giant’s nose. His sombrero remained perfectly in place, while smoke from his overloaded rings curled around him in thick tresses. As the dust cloud from the impact slowly cleared, two other shadows landed beside him with a thud that made the giant shudder.
Aurelius, his massive sword resting on his broad shoulder, his gaze ice cold and impenetrable. Beside him Jane, the Wraith, her blades gleaming with a poison blacker than the Prince’s own nightmares. They stood there, three silhouettes against a blood red, ashen horizon, atop the head of a petrified god.
Silarias pulled himself up and took his place, his breathing heavy and fiery, while Nyx landed beside him with lethal grace. The five now stood in an unshakable row: a wall of flesh, metal, and untamed willpower against the Federation’s corruption. Let them look, Silarias thought as he looked at the horizon. Let them see the monsters they created.
Galahad, who had crawled from beneath a pile of rubble with bloodied hands, stared open mouthed at the five figures dominating the sky. “Who… who in god’s name are you?”
Silarias balled his fists. The golden solar energy and the black gravity of his gauntlets mingled into an unstable lethal aura that cracked the stone beneath his feet. He looked down at the remaining Elites, the weeping monk, and the distant, cold towers of the Citadel.
“The time for rules and begging is over,” Silarias said, his voice low and threatening like the vibration of an approaching earthquake. “We are the voices of those you trampled into the mud. From this day forth, we bow to no one.”
The stranger in the sombrero tapped his finger against the brim of his hat, precisely to the beat of the final, dying note. “We are… The 5 Commandments.”
The silence following the Stranger’s lightning strike lasted but a fraction of a second. Bernard, the monk standing on the precipice, let out an ear piercing laugh that sounded entirely inhuman. His eyes rolled back into his skull while the bone flute in his hands began to glow with a sickly pulsating purple light.
“Did you think this was a song of salvation?” Bernard roared, his voice distorting into a demonic growl. “This is a marriage! A covenant in blood!”
With a brute motion, Bernard rammed the bone flute directly into his own chest. The sound of snapping cartilage and tearing flesh was sickeningly detailed. The flute did not break; it fused with his heartbeat. Thick, black tentacles of the Mother Parasite exploded from Bernard’s back, boring deep into the Colossus’ neck.
The giant began to undergo a gruesome metamorphosis. The stone skin burst open, giving way to fleshy, throbbing muscles that coiled around the rock. Bernard’s body was absorbed by the stone until only his gargantuan grotesque face remained visible within the titan’s chest.
“LAUGH ALL YOU WANT, NOBODIES! FIGHT ME ONCE MORE!” roared the fused titan. The shockwave of his voice alone blew the remaining houses of Oak-haven into splinters. The giant was now a living mountain of meat and stone.
The 5 Commandments did not flinch. Silarias glanced toward Aurelius and Jane. Years in the Ward taught us how to survive. Now we’re going to teach this world how to bleed. The weeks of training in the shadows of the Ward had not been for nothing. They were no longer children hoping for a miracle; they were the architects of their own destruction.
“Aurelius. Jane. End it,” Silarias commanded, his voice cold and unwavering.
Aurelius stepped forward. His enormous sword began to vibrate until it became nearly invisible to the naked eye. Suddenly, his entire silhouette exploded. “Photon Form: Judgment of the Sun!” His body transformed into pure, white hot light. He no longer walked; he teleported in flashes across the giant’s back, each footstep melting stone into glass.
Beside him, Jane let out a raw cry. Her knives fell to the ground, but she no longer needed them. Purple lightning danced across her spine as her bones cracked and elongated. “Beast Form: Electric Lynx!” In a fraction of a second, she transformed into a predator of pure static energy. With the speed of a glitch, she lunged forward, her claws of electricity tearing through the titan’s fleshy muscles like a hot blade through butter.
While Aurelius sliced through the giant’s chest like a beam of light and Jane tore the parasite’s tentacles to shreds, the rest of the team kept their eyes on one figure.
The Stranger still stood there, motionless on the giant’s nose. The wind tugged at his poncho, but his sombrero remained low, the shadow over his face impenetrable. He had already used his 808 Overload, but the way he stood, relaxed, almost bored while the world ended, revealed he hadn’t even truly begun.
Silarias and Nyx looked at him, their breathing heavy from the fray. They knew what the others were capable of, but this stranger was the great unknown. In the distance, the Golem Bernard roared again, his power only mounting from the fusion.
“Hey, hat man,” Silarias grunted, as the golden energy of Frey began to surge once more. “I hope you’ve got another card up that sleeve of yours. Because this giant just caught a second wind.”
The Stranger very slowly tilted his head up. He’s waiting for the bass to drop, Silarias realized, watching the stranger’s calm. A small spark of purple electricity jumped between his fingers, clicking perfectly to the beat of a bass-line that made the very ground beneath them shudder.
