The snow had stopped falling.

  James stood there, chest heaving, fists still clenched, staring at the man who had once been everything to him. His lord. His teacher. His father in all the ways that mattered.

  "Why?" James's voice cracked, raw from screaming. "What happened to you? What could have possibly been so important that you left us all behind?"

  Aron opened his mouth. Then closed it.

  The answer sat on his tongue like bitter medicine. He could say it. He could tell James the truth. That he'd been selfish, that he'd been afraid, that he'd run from the weight of their expectations because he didn't know how to carry it anymore. But the words wouldn't come. They were too ugly. Too small for the suffering they'd caused.

  "Let the past be the past," Aron said quietly. "It should no longer control us."

  James's eyes widened. Then they narrowed into something sharp and hateful.

  "Let it be the past?" he repeated, his voice trembling. "Let it..."

  The divinity inside him surged again, wild and unstable, cycling through different charges like a broken engine trying to find traction. His body lit up with golden cracks, veins of stolen power splitting across his skin.

  He lunged.

  The first punch took Aron in the ribs. The second in the jaw. The third drove straight into his chest with enough force to crater the ground beneath them. Aron staggered, blood spilling from his mouth, but he didn't fall. He steadied himself, planted his feet, and raised his hand.

  Golden light bloomed around James, sinking into the cracks, stitching them closed.

  "Stop!" James roared, swinging again. "Stop healing me!"

  Aron healed him anyway.

  Another strike. Another wave of light. James's body kept breaking, and Aron kept putting it back together, over and over, refusing to let him fall apart.

  "I said stop!" James screamed, tears streaming down his face now, mixing with blood and sweat. "Let me break! Let me..."

  His fist connected with Aron's face, snapping his head to the side. Blood sprayed across the snow. But when Aron looked back at him, his expression hadn't changed. Calm. Steady. Unshaken.

  James faltered.

  He hit him again. Harder. And again. And again. Each blow landed with devastating precision, guided by karma, drawn to every fault line in Aron's being. But no matter how many times James struck, no matter how much damage he dealt, Aron never went down. He bled. He staggered. But he never fell.

  James pulled back, panting, staring at him in disbelief. How was the man before him still standing?

  "You're stronger," he said, his voice hollow. "A hundred years... were you training? Is that what you were doing while we waited for you?"

  Aron didn't answer.

  James studied him, taking in the way he moved, the way he stood. Dexterity. Constitution. Strength. All of it had been refined to a terrifying degree. But that alone didn't explain it. James was using everything he had, every stolen miracle, every ounce of divinity he'd hoarded, and all it did was make Aron bleed.

  "Training doesn't do this," James said bitterly. "So what did you do? What changed?"

  Aron's silence was answer enough.

  "Hahahaha... selfish to the very end, huh." James said, letting out a broken laugh, shaking his head. Then he clenched his fists, and the divinity inside him began to twist again, cycling faster, harder, pulling from reserves that shouldn't have existed.

  "Fine," he muttered. "Then I'll use everything."

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  "DIVINE DOMINION."

  The air around him warped. His Dominion began to manifest again, golden hands stretching out from his back, each one crackling with unstable power. His karma plummeted, dropping to dangerous levels, but he didn't care. He pushed harder, forcing every last fragment of divinity to the surface.

  "James, don't..." Aron started.

  But James wasn't listening.

  His body began to change. The cracks in his skin deepened, spreading like roots, and the light bleeding from them shifted in color, gold to red to something sickly and wrong. The Olympian divinity inside him was mutating, reshaping him from the inside out.

  "You'll die," Aron said, his voice sharp now, almost desperate. "That power is already killing you. Stop!!!"

  James smiled, and it was the saddest thing Aron had ever seen.

  "Good. If I can hurt you, that's all I need."

  He activated his Dominion fully, pouring everything into a single strike. His entire being concentrated into one devastating blow.

  [Charge: 156% > 999%]

  [1000%]

  Aron's eyes widened.

  For the first time in the fight, he reached inward, calling on something he'd kept sealed. A fragment of the Gospel's page, ancient and boundless, responded to his will. He invoked it.

  'Equivalent Exchange.'

  [2% of all stats > 5000 Karma]

  His stats drained away in an instant. Strength, speed, durability. All of it sacrificed in a heartbeat. In return, his karma surged upward, letting his dormant divinity access the world, and then finally his charge ignited.

  [Charge: 1%...9%]

  [Charge: 10%]

  That was all he needed.

  When James's fist came down, Aron met it with his own. James saw it. The familiar heavenly power, the same charge skill that he had taught him when he was a child. That single memory made his fist loosen.

  DOOOOOOOMMMMM!!

  The impact didn't make a sound.

  Instead, the world seemed to stop. The Dominion shattered like glass. The thousand percent charge evaporated, torn apart by the overwhelming difference in their divinity weight. The shockwave that followed carved a trench through the snow, splitting the earth for miles in every direction.

  James's body convulsed. His skin blackened like burnout coal. His veins lit up with searing pain, and then, all at once, his strength gave out.

  He collapsed.

  Aron caught him before he hit the ground.

  "I've got you," Aron whispered, pulling James close, wrapping his arms around him. James was utterly down, his body weak and charred like ash.

  "I knew... I knew I could never beat... you," he weakly muttered, tears falling from his bloodshot eyes. "And I knew... no matter what, I could never kill you."

  James tried to push him away but he didn't have the strength. His body was failing, shutting down piece by piece, but he could still feel it. The warmth of Aron's embrace, the steady rhythm of his heartbeat, the weight of a promise he'd waited a hundred years to hear.

  "I'm sorry," Aron murmured.

  Those words... listening to them up close, something inside him broke.

  Not his body. Not his power.

  Something deeper.

  James teared up more.

  Maybe he was sorry. Maybe he did came back to them. Finally. He sobbed into Aron's shoulder, clutching at him like a child, like someone who'd been lost for so long he'd forgotten what it felt like to be found. All the anger, all the hatred, all the pain he'd carried poured out of him in waves, and Aron held him through it, silent and steady.

  "My lord... please, don't leave us again. Don't leave me again," he said, those words that had felt locked inside his heart finally pouring out. Aron couldn't help but hold him tighter, his own golden eyes turning moist.

  "I'm here and I'm back. And I'm never leaving again. I promise."

  James didn't respond. He just cried more, the coldness he had brewed for so long melting away in an instant.

  For a moment, the world was quiet.

  And then, from somewhere deep inside James's mind, a voice spoke.

  "Thank you."

  James froze.

  The voice was smooth. Polite. Familiar.

  "Thank you for your divinity. It was... delicious."

  James's blood went cold.

  "Don't worry," the voice continued, and there was something almost playful in its tone now. "I'll take it from here."

  "No..."

  James tried to push Aron away, panic flooding his veins. "Go," he gasped, his voice breaking. "Go away. Get away from me..."

  But his body wasn't listening anymore.

  His arms went slack. His legs buckled. And when he looked up at Aron, his eyes were no longer his own.

  They flickered. Shifted. Changed.

  Aron's expression hardened.

  James's lips curled into a smile that didn't belong to him. He straightened, standing with an ease that shouldn't have been possible given the state of his body. The cracks in his skin didn't heal, but they stopped spreading. The chaotic divinity inside him settled, no longer wild but controlled.

  Calculated.

  "Hello," James said, but the voice that came out wasn't his.

  It was colder. Sharper. Older.

  Aron's eyes blazed gold.

  "You...Hermez."

  The smile widened.

  "The famous Golden Immortal," Hermez said, tilting James's head slightly, as if examining Aron from a new angle. "It's been a long time, hasn't it? Though I suppose for you, time is... relative."

  He took a step forward, and the air around him shifted, humming with stolen power.

  "I must say," Hermes continued, his tone almost conversational, "I didn't expect you to return. I thought you'd learned your lesson about playing hero." He glanced down at James's hands, flexing the fingers experimentally. "But here you are. And here I am. How fortuitous."

  Aron didn't move. His gaze was locked on Hermes, unblinking, his mind racing through a thousand possibilities, a thousand counters, a thousand ways this could end.

  None of them were good. But that didn't matter. What mattered was his rage.

  "Let. Him. Go," Aron said with quite wrath.