There was no descent—only surrender. As if existence itself had opened its mouth, and the gods had stepped willingly into its fire.
—THE UNSPOKEN REALM—
There was no sky.
No floor.
Only weightless void.
Suzuro stood suspended in a place beyond time—where thought echoed like thunder and silence gnawed at the soul. The blackness wasn't absence. It was presence—alive, aware, hungry.
Then—
a voice.
Not spoken, not heard.
Imposed.
A vibration through the essence of being.
"Have they bloomed as we desired? Or are they still crawling—like all things that believe they matter?"
Suzuro's lips parted, breath shallow, but he didn't answer right away. Even his voice felt borrowed in this place.
"…No. They are not like him. Even with your… interference, their growth comes as it should. Naturally. Painfully. If they ascend—it will be because they suffer for it."
The darkness… laughed. But it didn't sound like mirth. It sounded like the unraveling of galaxies. The collapse of concepts.
"Do you remember the age when you thought this timeline was yours?
When your throne still cast a shadow?
When your name echoed like it meant something?"
A pulse rippled through the void.
Suzuro choked—his heart arrested mid-beat, a divine aneurysm rupturing through his mind. Every cell on the verge of implosion. He clutched his head but couldn't scream. There was no self.
"Do not mistake our curiosity for equality. You will make sure Takagi molds the boy of flame and the girl of space—just enough. No more. No less.
Their suffering is sacred. Their rise is… entertainment."
And then—
Light.
Creation peeled itself open like skin, reality slithering back into order.
Suzuro collapsed into his throne, gasping like a man dragged up from drowning in infinity. His veins pulsed with fire. His soul crackled like broken glass inside a jar of lightning. The shadows evaporated. The silence faded. The throne room returned.
But the echo remained as Suzuro exhaled—harsh, ragged.
"…Damn it…"
His hands trembled.
They were still watching.
THE FALL BEGAN
No warning. No transition. Just speed.
The air howled past them, but it wasn't wind—it was suction, as if reality itself was inhaling their bodies. Space folded inside-out. Stars blinked into nothing. Color died.
Xenos twisted in the air, eyes wide.
"Uh, Union…?"
Her voice strained through the pressure warping her face.
"This isn't a fall. It's a pull. Something is dragging us down!"
Her hands flared, summoning spatial anchors—tiny rings of glowing energy meant to slow their descent. But they shattered instantly, crushed under the weight of the realm itself.
"NGH… It's rejecting our powers!"
And then—
IMPACT.
The gods struck ground—emitting a vast shockwave.Xenos and Union rose up slowly as they groaned.
The two stood at the center of a vast, shifting labyrinth of fire—but not flame as they knew it. This fire did not illuminate. It consumed light. The exact essence being, Primordial.
Black heat rippled through the walls like breath through a furnace, and the floor pulsed with veins of molten bone. The walls twisted with every breath, alive and watching. The sky was gone. Above them: only a churning ceiling of smoke, glowing embers swimming like lost stars.
From the walls, they came.
Beasts of flame.
Twisted mockeries of divine anatomy—some with too many arms, some with none. Hulking quadrupeds made of slag and ash, their limbs fused with scorched weapons and broken halos.
Their eyes glowed—not orange, not red, but void-white—as if fire itself had stared into the abyss and gone mad. They didn't walk. They lunged, they dragged, they slithered—leaving behind trails of heat so intense it warped the fabric of space.
Xenos stepped forward instinctively, fire roaring up his arms—
But his flames dimmed.
"What the—?"
Union's spatial aura bent the ground beneath her feet—but instead of stabilizing, the labyrinth mimicked it, warping her own powers against her.
"This place doesn't just resist us," she whispered. "It understands us. It adapts."
Another roar tore through the air—deeper now. Older. It didn't sound like a beast.
It sounded like the furnace of a god.
Xenos's jaw tightened, his fire returning with a snarl.
"Guess we're in too deep now. Literally."
Union's eyes narrowed, her posture sharpening with focus.
"Let's not waste time."
From deep within the shifting inferno, the center of the maze stirred. Something immense. Bound in chains of ember. Breathing like a dying star.
A voice—low, guttural, burning—echoed from every wall:
"You have entered the Labyrinth of Pyraeth…
Where gods are tested through suffering…
And devoured if they fail."
The flames drew inward. The beasts closed in.
Trial Three had begun.
And for the first time, the question wasn't can they survive it?
It was—
Will their divinity be enough?
For somewhere deep in the flame-warped stone, something watched—not as a creature, but as judgment incarnate. The Labyrinth of Pyraeth didn't test strength.
It tested worth.
The walls rippled—flame shifting like an eye blinking open. Not to trap them, but to observe.
To remember.
—ABOVE | THE CELESTIAL BALCONY—
Takagi stood in silence, the divine wind parting around him as he stepped away from the Abyss. Without hesitation, he lowered himself into Suzuro's vacant throne—the very seat once reserved for the God-King to judge the Crucible of Gods.
A beat of stillness.
Then—
Eres moved.
His eyes snapped open as he strode toward Takagi, each step resounding like a warning bell.
"You mock the divine order," Eres hissed. "That throne is sacred. Stand down."
From across the platform, Unagi stifled a snort, his back still turned toward the Crucible.
He didn't speak. But the smirk curling his lips said enough.
Takagi didn't rise.
He leaned back lazily, head tilted, silver eyes glowing beneath half-lowered lashes—bored, unimpressed. Then he sighed, the sound heavy with disdain, and stood slowly, brushing cosmic dust from his armor.
"Don't be so afraid, Eres," he said, approaching the railing with deliberate calm.
"Maybe if you stepped into the chaos once in a while, you wouldn't walk around like a dog on a leash."
The insult landed like a blade.
Reality cracked.
And the center of creation held its breath.
The divine platform trembled as Eres' aura exploded outward—raw, frigid, suffocating. Time shuddered. Space folded. The sky wept light as his Godhood surged in response. Cracks spread beneath his feet like fractures throughout infinity.
And then—Takagi felt it.
Something massive coiled around his soul. Cold. Crushing. A sinister force that dug into his being like divine claws—a grip meant to humble gods.
Eres took a single step forward. The stone caved under his heel.
"One more word," Eres growled, his voice rumbling like a dying star, "and I swear I'll—"
"…Do what?"
Takagi wasn't in front of him anymore.
He was behind him.
No sound. No flash. Just presence.
His back touched Eres's. His voice was a whisper wrapped in iron.
"What exactly do you think you can do here?"
Eres froze.
The grip on Takagi's soul tightened.
And yet—
He didn't move.
His aura didn't flicker.
His breath didn't hitch.
He didn't even care.
Veins pulsed along Eres' clenched fists. His jaw tightened. His divinity screamed to be released. Rage surged.
Unagi finally turned, eyes locking with Eres.
He shook his head. A single warning.
Silent. Deadly. Final.
Eres' aura began to spike again—until…
He vanished.
With a sound like a thousand souls being ripped from their bodies, Eres imploded into a burst of screaming light—erased from the platform.
Takagi leaned forward slightly, the space where Eres had stood now cracked and empty. Unagi approached, brow raised.
"I don't usually see you get under the others' skin like that. What was that about?"
Takagi smirked, brushing pushing his hair back, his voice playful but distant.
"I saw something," he said. "Just a glimpse. A few seconds into the future. Let's just say…"
He turned toward the Abyss, silver eyes glowing once more.
"…I prevented a small feud that would've ended badly. For both of you. Had to get rid of one headache."
Unagi laughed—genuinely, a low, feral chuckle that echoed across the divine sky.
"Well. Looks like you made the right call."
Takagi glanced over his shoulder, smile sharpening into something dangerous.
"…Meh. Maybe I'll get rid of you too."
They laughed—two gods on the edge of infinity, watching their students battle far below.
But the air never fully settled.
Because something was still watching.
Something worse than Eres.
This trial wasn't just a test.
It was a prophecy.
—THE BURNING LABYRINTH—-
The beast circled them, its molten hide dripping embers like blood from a dying sun. Six limbs dragged against the scorched ground. A seventh—jagged and clawed—scraped the air as if taunting fate itself.
Union and Xenos stood back to back, their auras igniting in perfect discord—flame and space, destruction and control. Union's voice was low, a blade beneath calm.
"Ready?"
Xenos didn't look at her. He cracked his neck once, fire licking up his gauntlets like hungry tongues.
"Let's break 'em."
He launched.
Xenos shot into the air like a blazing comet, spinning mid-ascent. His right arm cocked back, coated in living flame. As he came down—
He struck.
His fist crashed into the center of the beast's back, and the impact echoed like a gong of judgment. A fiery shockwave exploded outward, searing through the creature's scales and igniting the very air. The beast screamed, its molten skin cracking—but it didn't fall.
It adapted.
Four more emerged from the haze—twisting, skeletal horrors with eyes like suns in eclipse. They charged. But Xenos was already moving. He drove forward with feral speed—flame trailing his strikes like the tail of a solar storm. He didn't dodge. He didn't wait.
He devoured.
The first beast met his fist and shattered like overheated glass.
The second lunged—Xenos ducked low, twisted, and erupted upward with a flaming kakuto punch that cracked its jawbone skyward.
The third he caught mid-lunge—its teeth inches from his throat—he redirected its movements and countered nukite strike to the center—followed by a nakadaka punch straight through its head.
The fourth—he didn't even look. He spun with a roundhouse so violent it bent the air and split the creature's skull open with a sonic boom of heat.
But he wasn't focused.
He was consumed.
Technique after technique spilled from him—not chosen, not timed, just unleashed. A blur of aggression. A god in freefall, mistaking fury for form.
Then—
A whisper of movement.
Something slithered.
From beneath the ashes, a beast rose like a nightmare crawling through memory.
And Xenos didn't see it.
It moved like liquid wrath—undulating along the ground, its form serpentine, wrong, impossible. In the chaos, Xenos charged again—but this one didn't meet him with rage.
It wrapped him.
Tight.
Its body coiled around his midsection, then his arms, then his throat. His flames sputtered against the pressure. It tightened.
CRACK.
Xenos gasped. Bones shifted. His arm twitched, crushed inward.
"G-GAH—DAMN IT!"
Its jaw unhinged—opening wider than anything natural, lined with rows of obsidian teeth that glowed from within like a kiln meant to swallow gods. It lunged for his head—
And in that moment—
Xenos stopped thinking.
He reached into himself, where fear met fury. Where discipline cracked and instinct surged. He drew not from anger—but from need.
His body ignited.
AURA RELEASE.
The platform trembled. Flame burst from every pore of his being—not wild, but frantic, desperate. The coils around him seared, bubbled, snapped open. The serpent reeled back, shrieking as chunks of its molten flesh vaporized in the blast. Xenos fell to one knee, panting. The heat around him simmered, unbalanced.
He grinned—barely.
"Thought you had me, huh?"
But he was careless.
From the smoke, another serpent—twice the size—descended from above.
Its mouth already open. No roar. No theatrics.
Just death.
Xenos looked up and his smirk dropped. Too fast. Too late.
And then—
Space cracked.
A shimmer of silver, a glint of gravity folded tight—
Union arrived like a judgment.
Union's palm met the beast's skull like a celestial verdict. With a gravitational command, she bent the creature's trajectory—not with force, but inevitability. Moving with the momentum, she spun herself mid air to land a falling roundhouse that blasted the creature backward into a wall of flame.
She landed beside Xenos, eyes locked ahead, her voice calm as winter steel.
"You nearly died."
Xenos coughed, his flames flickering low.
"Yeah. But it looked cool, right?"
Union didn't answer. But the silence said everything.
Above them, the labyrinth twisted again—new beasts gathering, the trial far from over.
Xenos rose slowly, his fists reigniting.
Union's gaze stayed on him a moment longer before facing forward.
"We need to be smarter."
Xenos exhaled sharply, smirking despite the blood at the corner of his mouth.
"…Then lead the way."
As they began to move, the walls of the maze twisted and reshaped themselves, blocking paths and creating new ones in an ever-changing pattern. The ground beneath them radiated heat, and every step felt like walking on the edge of a volcano. The oppressive silence was broken by a deep, guttural roar that echoed through the maze. From the shadows of the shifting walls, a monstrous creature emerged—a hulking beast made entirely of cosmic dust and molten rock. Its glowing eyes locked onto the duo as it let out another deafening roar, its molten jaws dripping with liquid flame.
"Of course," Xenos said, rolling his shoulders. "What's a maze without a guard dog?"
The beast charged, shaking the ground with each step. Xenos smiled and charged forward into action without a thought.
"XENOS!" Union called out. Trying to stop him. But the flames bursting around him were too scolding as he met the creature head-on.
He dodged its fiery swipe, countering with a stream of fire that struck the beast's molten chest. The flames collided, but instead of harming the creature, Xenos's fire was absorbed into its molten form, causing it to grow larger.
"Of course. Then how about this!"
Xenos, dodged another attack and countered with an uppercut from his heel in an Au Batido position. Flames roaring up the beasts face.
Xenos flipped back and followed up with a fierce—scorching tornado kick.
But Union saw it.
Not just her. But both Eres and Unagi—Takagi as well.
Above, Takagi's posture tensed.
Eres smirked and closed his eyes.
Unagi spoke.
"Looks like that's the end of him."
What they saw that Xenos didn't through his blindness—was that the beast was absorbing his flames the entire time—waiting for the right moment to fire it all back.
Its body lit up in a celestial blaze that began to devour Xenos' until…
FWUUUM—
Union's hands glowed as she manipulated the space around the beast, creating a gravitational distortion and controlling the beast.
CRASH!
Lifting it off its feat, Union slammed the beast into the cosmic floor before it could counter fully.
Xenos's flaming punch struck only air. Before he could react, Union pulled him out of harm's way with a spatial tether, dragging him across the battlefield to her side.
She was heaving—power dimming. Not from weakness, but strain.
Her powers haven't yet to fully manifest.
She turned and sneered at Xenos.
"Time and time again, I have to save you," she snapped, tapping his forehead with her finger. "I get it—we're stronger than before. But don't let that get to your head."
Xenos snarled back.
"Tch. Don't mistake a setback for defeat. I was seconds from breaking him."
Xenos stepped forward as the beast rose from the ground.
"If you can't handle the chaos, Union…"
His body engulfed into flames once more. Fire emitting from his eyes.
"…then go back to Xeunus!"
With that—Xenos launched forward and sent a punch into the beast chest that blasted Union and all other surroundings away.
The labyrinth instantly shifted upon occurrence and Union was violently thrown through multiple mazes, structures, and corridors before crashing through the ceiling of a citadel. Slamming into the ground. Causing a shockwave that didn't even rumble the structure—but shakes the labyrinth entirely.
This all caught Xenos off guard.
"Union!?-"
WHAM!
The beast backhanded him across the battlefield. He crashed through multiple mirrored pillars, crumpling into a heap. His flames flickering like a dying light bulb. A shadow loomed above.
A blast of celestial flames were already barreling toward him.
Death.
Union wasn't here. Takagi wasn't coming.
But he remembered.
He remembered the demon from Xeunus.
The one who raised his blade above him and Union as he screamed for mercy.
Xenos's instincts screamed.
KA-THHHUUUUUUMMMMMM
The celestial flame struck hard. Disintegrating everything in its wake.
But as the stary smoke disappeared—
Xenos was no longer there.
From behind the beast, soft glowing embers floated past its face.
From a burst of flames behind it, Xenos appeared in a motionless stance. His feet planted as if they were fused to the planet itself. His body became utterly still—not from hesitation, but from absolute control.
His flames condense inward, wrapping around his knuckles like chains being wound tighter and tighter. His entire body vibrates slightly as if the fire is screaming to be released.
Then… Takagi's voice.
"Not all attacks come from motion—some come from the will to hold still in fire."
CRIMSON NULL.
At a speed only the three gods above could see—Xenos' inner rage turned into control. Instead of wild fire, it became the disciplined compression of fury—the sun choosing not to flare until it must. It was the stillness of a god who has endured the fall of his people, now weaponized in to a singular punch.
THRUMP—KSHHHHHH!!
The air behind the punch imploded rather than exploded—drawing in fire and atmosphere before bursting in a compressed flame detonation that scorches a perfect spiral behind into the center of the beast.
However—all of this…
Was futile.
The beast turned and snatch Xenos by the head, hurling him like trash into a pillar deeper in the maze.
His flames died down.
Confused. Broken.
Xenos slumped, his knuckles raw, his chest rising in labored gasps.
"Why isn't it enough? I hit harder than I ever have… so why does it still feel like I'm losing?"
His fists trembled, not with fear—but something worse. Doubt.
But the moment the words left his tongue—reality shimmered, then cracked like wet glass.
Unagi, The God Of Chaos, slid into existence sideways, as if the world reluctantly made space for him. Energy curled around him in spirals of ink and red lightning, eyes already locked onto the beast in the distance. He then looked down at Xenos and scuffed.
"I just had to see this sight up close."
Xenos growled, chest heaving.
"Who asked you…?"
Unagi didn't answer. He stood up, facing the beast.
It didn't move.
Not from fear of fire—but from memory. Unagi's presence had been felt before…
Like a trauma not yet healed.
"Wondering why your flashy power move ain't work? Because you've got no energy left. You poured it all into looking strong instead of being strong."
Xenos defensive expression dropped.
"What are you talking about—?"
"You fight like a spark. Not a flame," Unagi said calmly.
"All fury. No form. You burn everything in one roar, then wonder why your fire's gone the moment you need it."
Unagi's eyes were measured. Like a god who'd once stood in the same fire.
"I know what kind of Godhood you've got," he said. "Destructive. Unstable. Screams for violence even when you're still. Mine is the same. The essence that comes from the very destruction you cause."
He tapped his chest, just over his heart.
"It nearly consumes me. Every time I fight, it feels like I have to out-burn the world just to feel in control."
Xenos lowered his head slightly, listening despite himself.
Unagi leaned in, his voice cutting deep now.
"You think power is about exploding. But real power—divine power—is balance. It's when you can stop a battlefield with one breath, not ten roars."
He glanced once more at the beast, then back at Xenos.
"You've got the flame. And after this—I'm gonna show you how to forge it."
And just like that—Unagi vanished, his presence slipping back into the chaos like a blade returned to its sheath.
Xenos stood there, breathing hard.
Not with exhaustion this time.
But clarity as the words echoed.
"Stop fighting like fire out of control…
Start fighting like fire with purpose."
And with that, Xenos' stood… and his stance changed—just slightly. Enough to shift the entire battle.
But even fire with purpose cannot burn what waits in the labyrinth's heart.
To Be Continued…