The Guardian gods Chapter 943

"To answer your question," Ikenga rumbled, his tone heavy with disappointment, "we waited to weed out the bad from the good. If we had intervened earlier, many of you would not have shown your hand or revealed your true colors."

"Freedom was granted to you, and you have shown precisely what you are capable of when given that latitude. You have proven that you care little for this world and its people, and so it was long past due that we made our appearance."

Hearing his words, the paragons who had remained neutral and uninvolved simply shook their heads. In truth, the sudden arrival of the Origin Gods wasn’t entirely shocking once all the pieces were put together.

The real surprise for many had been the prolonged silence, earlier when the first fundamental laws were shattered and the first few hundred thousand lives met their untimely ends, everyone had instinctively expected the wrath of the Origin Gods to strike down instantly.

After all, they all knew the laws by heart. They knew the unyielding consequences that followed the moment those boundaries were crossed, even for those who had shifted alliances or changed factions. Endangering the innocent lives tied to the Origin Gods domains was the ultimate catalyst, the exact threshold required to awaken their freedom and compel them to act.

For generations, the golden rule of Nana was absolute. Endangering the innocent masses and the world was the one line no faction dared cross, a line the paragons had always meticulously avoided breaching. But the temptation of the Tower changed everything. Its sheer promise of ultimate transcendence warped their priorities so thoroughly that many were willing to completely overlook the ancient laws and gamble recklessly with whatever consequences loomed on the other side.

Worse still was the agonizing silence of the Origin Gods. As days bled into weeks of unchecked slaughter, the origin gods remained dormant, offering no warnings, striking down no transgressors. To the emboldened masses, their absence felt like apathy or worse, tacit approval. Many began to entertain the intoxicating idea that the Origin Gods were intentionally allowing the chaos and massacre to unfold, treating the bloodshed as a natural byproduct of their own freedom.

Emboldened by that perceived indifference, the paragons grew progressively bolder. Their actions turned reckless and cruel, wiping out millions with a casual wave of their hands, entirely devoid of care for the collateral damage tearing Nana apart.

So, when the terrified paragon had screamed into the empty sky, asking why they chose now to finally appear, his fury and confusion weren’t unjustified. After all the silence, after all the blood spilled in the shadow of the Tower, his question echoed the bitter thoughts of everyone watching "Why wait until the damage was already done?"

With a deafening tear of reality, the two trapped paragons burst free from Ikenga’s grasp. Their bodies expanded violently, swelling outward until they towered over the landscape in their true, giant astral forms. The moment their scale shifted, the maddening, floral itch that had plagued them abruptly ceased.

Ikenga stood unfazed, his massive arms folded across his chest as he looked up at the two towering figures glaring down at him with unadulterated malice.

"My fight was never with you," Ikenga said casually, pointing a single finger toward the earth beneath them.

Instantly, the ground convulsed. Before the two giants could strike, thick, binding grips locked around their ankles. Both paragons looked down in horror and saw what appeared to be two colossal purple hands erupting from the soil to hold them fast.

Yet, as they looked closer, a freezing wave of dread and goosebumps rippled through their hearts. These were no ordinary hands. The limbs were formed entirely of weeping, mourning faces, interwoven corpses, and the haunting visages of children, countless souls completely unknown to them.

From the flesh of these terrifying appendages, a cacophony of quiet, weeping whispers rose into the air. The sound was overwhelmingly unbearable, scraping against their minds like raw steel. And just as the whispers pierced their consciousness, the maddening, torturous itch returned with a vengeance, blooming across their gigantic bodies once more.

"Their souls have moved onto the underworld, to Keles’s realm. But their whispers remain, their curses at their fate, their curses at the unfairness of it all, asking what they did wrong to deserve this, what they did wrong for their insignificant lives to be crushed at will," Ikenga said, a flicker of deep annoyance crossing his features. "They have been babbling all of this into my ears, so now i give them their answer. I hope you have answers ready for their questions."

No sooner had the words left his mouth, the psychological weight and whisper broke the resolve of one of the colossal giants. In a desperate bid for peace, the paragon blew his own head off, an instant wave of profound relief washing over his expression as absolute silence finally took hold. The second giant fared no better, he began frantically clawing at his ears, refusing to listen to another second of the torment. He wanted his hearing gone, he wanted his mind scrubbed clean, he just wanted silence.

Ikenga’s grim display served as the catalyst that set the rest of the pantheon into motion. Across the world, his siblings moved to enact their own form of punishement.

Keles, however, possessed no cruel desire to derive amusement from their prolonged suffering. For her, this was a matter of grim reclamation. Any paragon who crossed her path was met with a swift, mercifully quiet descent into an inescapable sleep. Her primary targets were those who still harbored stolen law shards and the displaced souls that rightfully belonged to her domain, gathering them back into the dark fold where they should be and serve better purpose.

While Keles gathered her lost souls and Ikenga delivered his quiet, psychological reckoning, Jaus was indulging in a very different kind of torment within his domain.

A group of panicked paragons had been dragged down into the abyssal depths of his endless sea. Trapped in their colossal astral forms, they thrashed violently, desperately clawing their way upward toward the surface. But their frantic efforts were entirely futile, no matter how high they climbed, they were surrounded by an endless, crushing expanse of dark water.

Occasionally, Jaus permitted them a cruel glimmer of hope. Allowing them to break through the surface of the sea, they gasped for air, only to find a sky choked with violent lightning. Bolts of lightning relentlessly rain down upon their bodies. Yet, this lightning carried no destructive fire or pain, its entire nature had been perversely altered for a single purpose, absolute, unyielding paralysis.

Stunned into complete immobility, their massive bodies drifted helplessly on the surface of the sea. And as the sea smelled the blood of the trapped paragons, the true residents of the deep awakened. Leviathans, krakens, and all manner of old nightmare-inducing sea life surged upward to begin nibbling at their evolved flesh.

Though their conceptual laws instinctively flared, fighting desperately to push back the onslaught, it proved entirely useless. For reasons beyond their comprehension, their powers were utterly suppressed. They could no longer bend reality to their will. The moment one of them managed to fight through the paralysis and twitch a muscle, another volley of lightning crashed from the sky, locking their limbs back into place.

And so, in horrifying, agonizing awareness, the paragons caught by Jaus found themselves being slowly eaten alive. They were stripped of even the mercy of a scream, left completely paralyzed and wide-eyed, forced to endure every agonizing second of their torture without a single outlet for their suffering.

As for Crepuscular, his raw power was simply too absolute. His sun divinity was so overwhelming that it left little room for prolonged, intricate games, the solar fire was a pure, untamable force of annihilation. The moment he took action, the landscape beneath a group of fleeing paragons warped instantly.

Without warning, he hurled them straight into the heart of his realm. But solar fire brooks no half-measures, it is an absolute end. Within minutes, the paragons flesh blistered, boiled, and was completely reduced to harmless dust that are quickly burnt away too.

Their agony was mercifully brief, and Crepuscular quickly grew bored of screams that ended far too soon.

If they were to truly pay for their defiance, he decided, they had to be kept alive long enough to feel the crushing weight of what they had broken.

And so, for those unlucky enough to survive the initial purge, he altered his approach. He showered them in light, not the burning light of destruction, but a light redefined to heal. As these suffering, half-melted paragons writhed in agony, they suddenly found instant relief as their flesh magically knit back together, their burns vanishing entirely.

Yet, that sweet relief lasted only a heartbeat. Crepuscular was just getting started, and he was about to get creative.

He then severed a portion of the sky. The sky was the realm of breath, perspective, and transition, the vital space that allows things to move, to fall, or to finally find an end.