The Guardian gods Chapter 942

Panic finally shattered discipline. Stripped of their domain spaces and blinded by the absolute night, raw terror seized every paragon. With ferocious, guttural roars, they began hurling their most devastating attack and spells blindly into the encompassing dark. Fireballs, lightning, shockwaves, and conceptual shock-pulses ripped outward from them in every direction.

Yet, the darkness proved an insatiable maw. Nothing survived within it, every spell, no matter how powerful or reality-bending, was swallowed whole, extinguished without a whisper or a spark.

Just as despair threatened to swallow them entirely, the surrounding world changed once more.

A blinding, artificial sun manifested violently in the suppressive darkness. With its sudden appearance came an immediate, staggering wave of heat, causing the air to shimmer and the global temperature to spike dangerously across Nana.

From the heart of this blazing orb, a voice resonated. At first, the mere presence of light and a familiar sound brought a rush of desperate relief to the trapped paragons. But the words that spilled from the sun instantly froze that relief, replacing it with a jarring, surreal horror.

"Unfair sister, why do you get to have all the fun?"

The question hung heavy in the scorching air, leaving the paragons stranded in absolute absurdity.

"Fun?"

They murmured the word to themselves in disbelief, the concept echoing mockingly in their minds. To them, this was a desperate struggle for survival, a terrifying descent into helplessness. Yet, to whoever or whatever wielded this power, their excruciating fear, their blinding panic, and their systematic eradication were nothing more than a game.

From a distant corner of the suffocating world, a voice fractured by raw panic tore through the heat-warped air.

"Who are you, name yourself?!"

The desperate plea echoed across the silent, mist-choked planet. There was no defiance left in the tone, only the hollow weight of defeat.

"Why do you derive fun from our pain and suffering? Why this torture?" the voice roared, cracking under the crushing pressure of the unknown.

Silence answered. A heavy, suffocating stillness hung in the air as the artificial sun continued to pump out waves of punishing energy. The temperature climbed relentlessly. throats grew raw and parched, and the sweat springing from the paragons skin instantly vaporized into thin, useless mist.

Stripped of their domain spaces, they were forced to resort to desperate measures. Unable to expand their domain around them, they tried to warp the domian space around themselves, creating a protective cloak that acted as a distance between their bodies and the creeping, unbearable heat. But the relief was agonizingly brief. The unnatural heat bypassed their defenses, aggressively encroaching upon their personal space and forcibly melting away their barriers as if they were nothing at all.

As the tension reached a breaking point, with the paragons on the verge of physical and psychological collapse, the blazing sun finally spoke.

"How quick you have forgotten? It saddens me, it truly does... but fear not, as today I am here to remind you."

"You measure your lives by the flicker of hearth-fires and the rotting of wood, while I am the furnace that forged the iron of your plows and the heat that blistered your first fields. You look up and see a lamp hung in the ceiling of the world, rather than the wound left behind when the dark was torn apart."

"You build your little walls and call yourselves masters of the dust beneath your feet, forgetting whose breath dries your tears and whose gaze bakes the salt into your skin. Every shadow you cast upon the world was because of me, every breath you draw is stolen from my noon."

As he spoke, realization finally dawned on many. The pieces fell into place with a sickening clarity, connecting the suffocating heat, the impossible dominion over the light, and the casual cruelty of a god treating an existential crisis like a game.

But with that realization came a terror far deeper than the blind panic of the darkness. They understood now what they were fighting, and how utterly futile every war, every throne, and every domain had ever been. Yet, Crepuscular did not stop. The sun flared brighter, its blazing corona pulsing with the rhythm of a heartbeat as he drove the final nail into the coffin of their arrogance.

"You speak of the dawn as a beginning and the dusk as an end, as if time belonged to you. You forget that before there was a name to call upon, before the first eye opened to squint against the glare, I was the expanse that held the ceiling up and the fire that kept the cold from devouring your thoughts. You walk upon my floor and breathe my breath, yet you ask who stands before you. Fear not, today I am here to remind you."

All paragons understood immediately. "It was the Origin god, Crepuscular." Looking at the retreating darkness that still hemmed in the horizon, they could easily guess to whom it belonged to.

As that chilling thought settled into their minds, the surrounding darkness suddenly gave way and began to shrink. From all sides of the world, the stranded paragons watched as the inky blackness rolled backward, gathering itself neatly into the hem of the veiled goddess of darkness, Keles.

"You all must be parched. Let me help with that," another deep voice suddenly spoke breaking the short silence.

The sky was suddenly replaced by a massive body of water. It was a surreal sight, as though the sky had cleanly switched positions with the sea, and the entire ocean was now hanging directly over their heads, held up by invisible will.

Before the paragons could even react, multiple tendrils of water shaped like colossal hands emerged from the hanging sea. In a flash, the watery appendages scooped up a large cluster of paragons before they could muster a defense.

Just as quickly as it had appeared, the strange ocean vanished. The normal sky was back in its place, leaving the scene looking almost like a fleeting, impossible illusion, except for the paragons who had just been snatched away into the depths.

"Jaus."

The name echoed effortlessly into the minds of many paragons. As the Origin Gods began to make their appearances one by one, the high kingdoms and godlings found themselves relaxing. They recently had a dealing with the origin gods and it was easy to make the quick connections and understand what was truly unfolding.

However, for the panicking paragons about to be consumed by this catastrophic realization, sheer terror took the wheel.

Two paragons abruptly launched themselves into the sky, rocketing upward with the intent of piercing the upper atmosphere and fleeing into the safety of the void. One of them screamed out loud, the voice cracking with sheer desperation.

"Why now? Why did you choose to make an appearance now?!"

"You have stayed silent this whole time! Rules were broken and countless lives were lost, but you all never stirred... so why now?!"

Yet, even as they pushed their flight speed to its absolute limits, a creeping wrongness set in. They should have broken through into the cold expanse of space by now. Instead, it felt as though they were frantically running in place. Worse still, the rushing winds and open blue of the sky abruptly vanished, replaced entirely by mountains and unyielding stone ridges towering all around them. They hadn’t escaped upward at all.

From an outside perspective, the exact moment the two paragons launched themselves upward into the sky, the sky itself was replaced.

What looked like the open sky was actually a colossal titan. A gigantic hand, a limb so vast and rugged that the very crust of the earth seemed merged into its flesh, descended slowly from above. Blinded by their panic and desperate flight, the two unsuspecting paragons flew straight into that open palm like moths to a flame.

The moment they landed, they shrank into microscopic specks against the titan’s skin. A sudden, violent itch overcame them. Before they could even process the sensation, vibrant plants and exotic flowers began to sprout directly from their skin, bursting through armor and flesh alike. Though their conceptual laws instinctively flared to purge the growth, the maddening itch only intensified, spreading like wildfire until they threw back their heads and roared in agonizing pain.

For some terrifying reason, the voices of those two paragons were unnaturally amplified. Their raw screams of suffering echoed across the entire globe, felt and heard by every living soul. Worse yet, because of their immense abilities as Paragons, no maater where they were, they were able to view it all in it’s entirety.

Across Nana, all eyes were locked onto the third Origin God, who now held the two screaming, flower-choked paragons effortlessly in the cup of his hands "Ikenga"

Ikenga glanced down at the two screaming figures writhing in his palm. When he spoke, his voice did not roar, yet it carried effortlessly across the entire world, ringing clearly in the ears of every living being.