Smoke choked the remains of Sector 17. Fires crackled through shattered buildings, and the stench of scorched metal and burnt blood clung to everything like a curse. The sounds of battle had died, but peace had not returned only silence. The kind of silence that follows something unholy.
Yellow lay in the rubble, half buried beneath twisted metal, gears still whirring faintly in his chest rig. His breath was shallow. The core reactor inside his body a prototype he forged to push past human limits was dying, flickering red. It pulsed slower... slower...
Above him, the air split with otherworldly pressure.
Where Juno had once stood now hovered something else.
The twisted figure spun in the air, tendrils of black and violet energy spiraling from its body like cursed ribbons. Its skin was like cracked obsidian, molten Will leaking from the fissures. The creature had six burning eyes, each shaped like a distorted soul fragment. Giant horns tore from its head, and behind it, wings of pure force neither feather nor flame unfurled and cracked the sky.
It screamed.
But it was not a scream of pain.
It was a scream of rebirth.
The ground shook as the Fragmented sibling completed his transformation. He was no longer human, no longer anything recognizable. He was now something the world had no name for.
Until the military sensors lit up.
ALERT: UNKNOWN ENTITY DETECTED.
CLASS: ALPHA-RANK CODE NAME: ARCH-DEMON
Far away, satellites went blind trying to observe the energy signature.
Yellow, barely conscious, stared at the monster above with a mixture of awe and grief. His voice was dry, like wind scraping over gravel.
"...Juno... you burned too bright."
He coughed, blood spurting from his lips. The reactor in his chest cracked.
Below the Arch-Demon, soldiers tried to engage. They opened fire with railguns, drones, suppression tech. It didn't matter.
Nothing touched it.
Everything disintegrated mid air.
And then it looked at them.
With one gaze, it turned half of the remaining units to glass.
Veyla stood frozen. Her brother was gone. Her protector, the one who trained with her under the frozen waterfall, who climbed mountains with her, who starved with her in silence... was gone. In his place was a god of death.
She took a step forward trembling.
But Yellow raised a shaking hand from the rubble, stopping her.
"Don't... go near it," he rasped. "That's not your brother anymore."
She turned to him. "You'll die if I don't fix you-"
He smiled, gears finally stopping in his chest. "I was already dead when I left... I just wanted to make sure you lived."
A tear slid down her cheek.
"Finish what we started. The world needs you. Not him..."
With those last words, the engineer who defied matter itself... closed his eyes for the final time.
And above them, the newly born Arch-Demon screamed again this time loud enough to crack the clouds.
The world would remember this day.
The day a rebel became a god.
The day an Arch-Demon was born.