Chapter 144 What He Is
Nobody moved for a moment.
The battlefield was empty behind Armageddon, his armies gone, Malachi dead in the dirt, and he stood in the middle of all that absence like it meant nothing to him, like losing everything he had brought to this field was simply the part of the plan that came before the part that mattered.
He looked at Lilith and he waited.
She walked forward and the brothers came with her and spread out behind her in a loose line with their swords drawn, and Armageddon watched them come and did not reach for a weapon because he did not appear to need one.
Azrael went first.
He came in fast with his light driving through his blade and threw the strike that had ended every fight he had ever been in, and Armageddon moved and Azrael’s sword found air and then Azrael was on the ground and the soldiers watching from the line had not seen what happened between those two moments clearly enough to describe it later. Just Azrael going in and Azrael on the ground and the distance between those two things happening faster than it should have been possible.
Azrael got up. His face said something had changed about what he understood this to be.
Cain went in with fire, full release, the way she had fought on the first day of the battle, and the fire hit Armageddon and moved around him like it had somewhere else to be, and Cain came through her own fire with her sword and he caught the blade with his bare hand and held it there while she pushed with everything she had and the sword did not move and his face did not change and then he let go and stepped back and Cain stumbled forward from the sudden absence of resistance.
Lucian threw the full shimmer at him, complete spatial distortion, the ground not where it appeared, the air around him unreliable, every sense feeding wrong information, and Armageddon walked through it and his silver eyes found Lucian through the distortion without any difficulty at all and Lucian had enough time to look genuinely unsettled before he was on the ground.
Mammon pulled every piece of metal on the battlefield toward Armageddon simultaneously, every sword and every piece of armor from the fallen dead and every iron fitting from the destroyed constructs, all of it converging from every direction at once, and it hit and it hit with real force and when it cleared Armageddon was standing exactly where he had been and he looked at Mammon and Mammon took a step back before he could stop himself.
Then Mammon was on the ground.
Asmodeus hit him with everything, charm and disorientation at full force aimed at one target, and Armageddon turned and looked at him and Asmodeus felt his own power come back at him like it had been returned unopened, and he went down hard.
Beelzebub reached for the force inside Armageddon the way he had reached into the dead armies and pulled the animation out of them, and what he found had no bottom to it, it just kept going, deeper than anything Beelzebub had ever reached into, and when he pulled it pulled back and Beelzebub went down to one knee and stayed there.
Six brothers down, and on their knees.
Belphegor had not rushed in with the others.
He had stood back and watched all of it and when the others were down he walked forward alone and spread the shadow fully across the battlefield, the complete extension of his power, and the air around Armageddon went cold and heavy and Armageddon slowed, just slightly, the way everything slowed in Belphegor’s full extension.
Armageddon looked at him.
Belphegor came in with his sword, patient and precise, using every fraction of slowness the stillness bought him, and he fought longer than any of the others had managed, reading Armageddon the way you read something genuinely dangerous, carefully and without assumptions.
He landed one strike. Clean across Armageddon’s arm.
The first thing that had touched him since he stepped off the rise.
Armageddon looked at it.
Then he looked at Belphegor and something came out of him that was not a strike and not a power in any way Lilith had a name for, something that hit Belphegor in the chest and Belphegor went down and the shadow went with him and the battlefield was just cold ground and morning light and silence.
Six brothers down.
Armageddon turned and looked at Lilith.
She was the last one standing and they both knew it and they both knew she had always been going to be the last one standing, and she looked at him across the empty ground between them and felt the Seraph power moving in her chest and felt the marks on her wrist and she felt the brothers down around her and stepped forward.