I Level Up by Killing Gods-Chapter 42: A New Man

The sun rose, its pale fingers clawing through the ashen sky, and with it came the morning light.

It spilled across the battlefield like a reluctant witness, its rays sharp and unyielding as they carved through the haze.

The light fell first on the remnants of the old war—shattered blades half-buried in dust, ribcages picked clean by centuries of wind, helmets rusted into grotesque masks.

These were the bones of a forgotten conflict, a graveyard of ambition left to rot. But the sun did not linger on the past. Its glare sharpened, relentless, as it illuminated the aftermath of a newer, crueler war.

Here, the ground was not cracked by time but split by violence.

Craters smoldered, their edges glistening with molten stone. The air stank of ozone and charred flesh, a miasma that clung to the throat.

And there were bodies.

Not the clean skeletons of ancient warriors, but the mangled, oozing carcasses of the Others.

Their forms defied reason—limbs twisted into barbed hooks, mouths split into jagged maws, eyes like pools of liquid rot. They lay in heaps, some still twitching, their unnatural flesh resisting death even as it claimed them.

Their blood was not blood but a thick, iridescent sludge that hissed where it met the light.

And among them, standing ankle-deep in the mire of his enemies, was the Victor.

Kael breathed in the Blight as though it were the freshest of air.

It should have choked him.

Afterall Blight was a living thing, a parasite that gnawed at the lungs, seared the nostrils, turned vitality to decay.

He had seen strong men in the outskirts crumple after a single gasp of it.

But Kael inhaled deeply, his chest swelling, his blood singing as the corruption threaded through him.

It was a perverse communion.

In the last sixty days the Blight whispered more insistently, promising power, dissolution, madness—but he had long since stopped listening.

Let it rage. Let it burn. His body was a map of scars, his veins a lattice of old poison. What was one more toxin?

The sunlight warmed his face, a fragile contrast to the rot in his bones. He closed his eyes, letting the heat press against his eyelids.

For a moment, he could almost pretend he was back in the fields of his childhood dreams—the only escape he had from the rot of the outskirts, the wheat golden, the air sweet with rosemary.

But the illusion shattered as he shifted, the pain in his ribs flaring like a blade’s kiss. His body was a ruin. Blood, thick and clotted, crusted his tunic, the fabric fused to his skin by dried gore.

Dark sinew clung to his arms, remnants of the Others’ final, desperate strikes. Their ooze still sizzled where it had splattered him, eating tiny pits into his flesh. He welcomed the sting.

Pain was real.

Pain meant he’d survived.

Aether’valis trembled in his grip, its black blade humming as if in protest. The weapon carried the residue of butchery.

He thought back to his past life.

How many times had this blade saved him? How many throats had it opened? He tightened his hold, feeling the hilt’s familiar grooves bite into his palm.

Then, with a slow exhale, he uncurled his fingers. The weapon dissolved into motes of light, its song fading into a hollow sigh.

He turned away.

The battlefield stretched before him, a wasteland of carnage and crumbling relics. Somewhere in this hellscape lay the final idol pieces.

The thought should have exhausted him. Instead, it kindled a grim focus. He walked, his boots crunching over brittle bone and squelching through alien viscera.

The Others’ corpses watched him pass, their lifeless eyes still gleaming with residual malice. He ignored them. Their hatred was nothing now, as impotent as the rusted anf broken weapons beneath his feet.

---

It was the glint that caught him—a shard of silver winking from a mound of debris. Kael froze, his pulse sudden and loud in his ears.

He had walked deep into the battlefield, a great distance from the temple.

The ruins here were older, a collapsed watchtower, its stones blackened by fire.

He approached, each step slow, his breath held. He kicked aside a splintered beam, shoved a slab of cracked masonry aside with a grunt.

There.

The idol piece was in the rubble. Its surface was unnaturally smooth, cold even under the sun’s glare.

This was the final remnant, having found the other idol piece some hours ago.

He straightened, clutching the two pieces in his bloodied palm. The temple awaited.

---

Kael reached the temple.

The sacred chamber was deep within the temple’s bowels. He knew the path by rote, his feet carrying him through corridors slick with mildew, past depicted gods with hollow eyes and bleeding palms.

The mad monk’s voice reached him long before he arrived.

"...shatter the sky, chew the roots, the gods are blind but the hunger sees, the hunger sees...They are not real...none are true."

Its head snapped up as Kael entered, milky eyes bulging.

The idol sat on a pedestal behind the monk, a thing of fused bone and pulsating crystal. Missing pieces marred its surface, gaps like screaming mouths. Kael stepped forward, the fragments heavy in his hand.

The monk scuttled aside, its joints popping, breath wheezing in a wet chuckle.

The pieces slotted into place with a sound like breaking glass.

Kael staggered as the air twisted. The chamber’s walls rippled, reality fraying at the edges. The monk’s laughter rose to a shriek—then cut off abruptly.

When Kael turned, the monk was gone. Vanished. The entrance, too, had disappeared, replaced by a void.

Words materialized in the air:

> ◇ Trial Completed.

◇ You have been rewarded.

◇ You have received 3 echos: Idols of The Blind Gods

◇ You may Exit The Trial.

Kael stared into the void. It stared back, formless, hungry. He knew better than to hesitate. The Nexus did not reward doubt.

He stepped forward—

He took a deep breath and clenched his fists and he walked out of the chamber into the void.

> ◇ Exiting Trial.

He left the trial a new man, one born from a type of desperation only the Nexus could afflict in a person.

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