CHAPTER 247: CHAPTER 248: AZEZAL

There was carnage.

Unavoidable, chaotic carnage — not the kind of beating where a body could still be called a body afterward. This was the kind of violence that tore through definition, through dignity, and left only red, steaming ruin.

The wasteland around them didn’t stir. The air hung thick, unmoving, yet it pressed on the skin like a weight. It wasn’t silence exactly — it was an absence that hummed in the bones.

Above, somewhere beyond the haze and sky’s blackened shroud, shapes moved — brown-feathered beasts drifting like carrion birds too patient to land.

Their wings barely shifted, but their eyes tracked Atlas’s party. Watching, waiting.

They weren’t here to save anyone. They weren’t here to stop this. They were here because the smell of blood would one day be theirs to claim.

"Aaaaaa—!"

The scream cracked midway, the fallen’s voice splitting into a wet gargle.

Azezal moved in, finally acting like the thing he was born to be. There was no ritual here, no grand demonic flourish. He simply reached, gripped the angel’s wing at the joint, and wrenched.

The sound was worse than the sight. A shuddering rip of sinew parting from bone, tendons snapping like rope in the heat. Steam rose from the wound where flesh and white feathers had been seconds ago.

Blood sprayed in a thick arc, warm and metallic. The stink of it hit first, sharp and coppery, but riding under it was something fouler — a stench like burnt feathers and bile, the scent of divine matter being reduced to meat.

And the fallen’s body... it voided itself in its death throes, the feces mixing into the blood in a stinking slurry that ran down Azezal’s arm.

The wasteland took it all in without a murmur. Not even the wind bothered to scatter the smell. It hung there, settling into the lungs.

Azezal didn’t flinch.

To him, stripping the wing from the fallen was like undressing a chicken. The muscle memory of butchery. The pleasure of tearing apart something delicate with hands that had been made for ruin.

Somewhere behind him, Atlas’s jaw locked. His eyes didn’t close, but the slow way his breath left him gave him away.

A flicker — just for a second — of another place, another field, bodies heaped so high the flies made a living cloud.

His fingers had been just as red then. He had told himself it was survival.

Aurora turned her face slightly, not in disgust, but in a weary, disappointed silence. Veil’s tail swayed once, the motion sharp as a knife-edge.

Azezal walked to another fallen without wiping his hands.

The second one tried to crawl backward, legs digging grooves in the dirt, eyes wide with holy terror. Azezal smiled, all teeth, and crouched.

{...I know what you are feeling. I don’t enjoy this either.}

He lied so smoothly, even the air seemed to believe him for a heartbeat. The tone almost sounded humble — if you didn’t notice the gleam in his eyes.

Atlas, Aurora, and Veil couldn’t see what the Fallen angels saw. They didn’t see the way Azezal’s smile reached wider than any being should, stretching toward his ears. They didn’t see the flicker in his gaze, the way the pupils narrowed to slits and then widened with each scream.

Of course he was enjoying this. No — not enjoying. That word was too small. He was drinking it in, deep as breath, letting it run through the hollow places inside him until they overflowed.

For a sick moment, he thought he might actually climax right there, not from lust but from the perfect, intoxicating domination of the weak.

’Ohhh... how I looovvveeee to torture the weak,’ he thought, dragging out the syllables in his mind as if savoring a piece of fruit.

The fallen beneath him choked on their own spit as he drove two clawed fingers into their left eye. There was resistance — a jelly-like pressure — and then the pop.

He pulled the eye out slowly, letting the optic nerve stretch until it snapped with a wet snap, and held it up to the angel’s remaining gaze. Then he pried their jaw open and pressed the eye into their mouth.

{Kneel it.}

The angel gagged, teeth cutting into the soft orb. The bitter, bloody fluid ran down their chin.

Azezal’s own jaw flexed once — and then, without warning, he jammed the orb between his teeth and forced him to swallow it whole.

"...Fuck..." Atlas muttered, the word half-breathed, as if it might keep the scene from searing itself into his memory.

Azezal stepped back, his chest rising and falling faster now. His skin was slick with angel blood, black feathers stuck to him at random, plastered against the crimson in ugly, matted patches.

He smiled like a man who had just eaten a fine meal.

{...Sorry. I kind of hate Fallens. But I’m not a racist. Don’t worry. I don’t do that between races. I murder them equally.}

The words dripped casual, but there was something underneath — a truth so twisted it didn’t need hiding.

Atlas’s nod was mechanical. That was done, then. They could move forward.

But Veil’s voice slipped into his ear like smoke. "...I think... you should leave that guy... behind." His clawed finger pointed lazily toward Azezal. "...He’s bonkers."

Atlas’s gaze lingered on the demon for a second too long. He nodded again — this time, less in agreement and more in quiet acknowledgment of a fact that was becoming harder to ignore.

Up above, the dark-feathered beings shifted slightly, still watching. Still waiting. And in the way their heads tilted, Atlas could almost swear he felt their judgment — not for the dead, but for the living who had walked away from this.

Azezal was still watching him. Still smiling. And somewhere in that look was a promise.

Not a threat.

Not yet.

But a promise that one day, Atlas would not just tolerate his doings — he would understand them. Appreciate them.

Azezal could see it already, clear as prophecy. The moment when Atlas would open his eyes, dripping with the blood of his one and only GUIDE, and finally see the world the way Azezal did — stripped of its illusions, carved down to bone and truth.

He knew it. He could feel it vibrating in his marrow. He wasn’t here by accident. He hadn’t been spared all those wars, betrayals, and purges just to fade into obscurity. No — he was reborn for something special.

Atlas didn’t know it yet. Couldn’t. But Azezal did.

And when the day came, he would be there — the shadow at Atlas’s back, the blade in his hand, the whisper in his ear when everyone else’s voices had gone silent. He would help him, guide him, shape him. Together, they would carve their way into history.

Not just history — legend.

The next great epic of the avatar of GUIDE. And his name, too, would be bound into that tale like steel folded into a god’s sword.

Because in Azezal’s mind, this wasn’t Atlas’s story alone. It never had been. It was theirs.