Ryder McCoy—whispered of in criminal corridors and spoken of with awe in black-market backrooms—had just concluded another mission with his signature precision. To those who trafficked in blood and secrets, his name was synonymous with death delivered silently. His reputation walked ahead of him like a blade in the dark, earning reverence from clients and dread from those foolish enough to become his mark.

  As praise poured through his secure line, Ryder remained unmoved. His voice was steel wrapped in velvet.

  "To me, it's just another job," he murmured, eyes scanning the skyline through floor-to-ceiling glass.

  "Ah, Uncle Ryder, greetings!" trilled a voice of aristocratic flair.

  Charlotte Ashford lounged like a duchess from a forgotten age, her every movement languid and deliberate. The scent of lavender oil hung faintly in the air as her maid weaved her elaborate coiffure with the care of a jeweller setting a crown.

  "I must say, your latest work was exquisite!" she said, her emerald eyes twinkling with mischief. "All matters financial have been squared away with the usual diligence, so not a sovereign out of place. Let us most certainly keep the door open to future collaborations, shall we? I daresay I'm positively eager!"

  "Much obliged," Ryder said, tipping the brim of his Louis Vuitton baseball cap—worn not for vanity, but as a habit of quiet defiance against the old world's grandeur. "With this payout, Old Betsy's finally getting her upgrade. That top-tier scope I've been eyeing? She'll be dancing death from even farther next time."

  He glanced at his phone, ensuring the encryption held steady. Charlotte's laughter sparkled like cut crystal.

  "Splendid! With a scope like that, you'll be popping skulls from halfway across the globe. Not even a ghost could outrun your aim." With exaggerated flair, she formed a telescope from her hand and mimed aiming a rifle, her gaze scanning the horizon for invisible prey.

  Ryder allowed himself a low chuckle. "You always know how to keep things light, Charlotte."

  "Miss Charlotte, if you would be so kind—please hold still," came the quiet admonishment of her maid, Mary, whose patience was an iron rod wrapped in silk.

  Charlotte offered a sheepish smile. "Terribly sorry, Mary. Do carry on."

  But levity soon gave way to gravity.

  The latter half of their encrypted call turned sombre. A new assignment. Riskier. Deadlier. A mission stitched together with threads of uncertainty and peril. As the Signal call ended with a soft click, Ryder tucked away his phone, the gears in his mind already grinding.

  'That reckless girl,' he thought, his expression hardening. She always sends me the impossible. It's as if she wants to see how deep into hell I can walk and still crawl back alive.

  He stood alone in a suite that dripped luxury, atop one of the city's most exclusive towers. Marble beneath his feet glowed like moonstone. Masterpieces lined the walls, their frames gilded and obscene. A crystal decanter of Highland whiskey glinted beside a tray of cigars, the air tinged with the faint aroma of cedar and smoke.

  But the room's soul resided in one corner—where sunbeams kissed steel and shadow. There stood Old Betsy.

  The sniper rifle, custom-forged to Ryder's demanding specifications, looked almost sacrilegious amidst the grandeur. Its matte black frame bore delicate, hand-etched runes—a forgotten language from a war long buried by silence. The barrel, polished until it gleamed like obsidian, caught the light with a deadly shimmer. The scope, though soon to be replaced, still held godlike precision.

  To Ryder, it wasn't just a weapon. It was the companion. The only soul that never lied, never failed, never flinched.

  He approached the window, letting the view wash over him. Below, the city pulsed—alive, restless, uncaring. Skyscrapers like titans of glass and steel jutted into a bruised sky, their mirrored surfaces reflecting a world that spun regardless of who lived or died in its shadows.

  His eyes, now locked on his own reflection in the glass, narrowed.

  The years had etched themselves onto his face with merciless artistry. Hair, once the colour of midnight, now bore streaks of ash and cloud. He wondered absently if the silver threads in his fringe were paler than the drifting vapours above.

  The assassin sighed, the weight of countless kills pressing down like an unseen hand on his shoulder. In this palace of indulgence, Ryder remained an outsider. A hunter in a glass sanctuary. A storm wrapped in a man's skin.

  Still, he turned to Old Betsy and rested a hand upon her cold steel.

  There were plans to be made. Blood to be spilled. Ghosts to be summoned and silenced.

  And Ryder? He would walk the path alone.

  Again.

  Despite the city's restless brilliance, Ryder's reflection in the glass seemed tethered to another realm—one marred by ghosts, regret, and the slow corrosion of the soul. The skyline shimmered with electric life, yet he stood apart, as if exiled from the world below.

  From the depths of his coat, he retrieved a crushed cigarette, fingers trembling slightly—not from fear, but the cold realisation that his hands had long forgotten how to do anything but kill.

  Lighting it with a flick of his thumb, he took a deep drag, then exhaled a curling plume that veiled his face in smoke.

  "Ants," he muttered, voice hollow. "All of them. Scurrying... chasing shadows."

  The ember glowed faintly against the encroaching dusk, its warmth no match for the chill creeping through his chest. I thought I didn't want to kill anymore... but what else is there?

  Killing was no longer a job. It was the only language he spoke.

  Then, as though reality itself rejected the stillness, the heavens ruptured.

  A burst of white exploded across the sky—no thunder, no warning, just light. Blinding, divine, and wrong. Fireballs tore across the firmament, incandescent trails slicing through the ether like wrathful comets. The ground trembled. Car alarms blared. Screams erupted from the streets below.

  Ryder froze, his cigarette slipping through his fingers and falling to the marble floor, forgotten.

  He had seen hell.

  But this—this was myth made manifest.

  Descending amid the celestial devastation sat her—a figure wrought from frost and fire, perched upon a throne of levitating ice shards. The chaos parted around her presence, afraid to touch her. Time bent. Sound warped.

  She was both apocalypse and miracle.

  Niflheim.

  Purgatory incarnate.

  Though carnage reigned, she exuded a sublime tranquillity, as if the annihilation around her were but raindrops on glass. Her skin, fair as moon-bleached bone, contrasted starkly against cascades of teal hair that rippled like silk underwater. Twelve wings, ethereal and vast, unfurled behind her in an iridescent array of shimmering blue, each feather trembling with divine power.

  Her right arm burned with white flame—the flame of beginnings and endings. Her left, wrapped in smouldering black bandages, bore wounds that never healed. Blue nails gleamed like sapphires, and from her shoulders flowed a mantle of emerald silk that caught the last light of the sun like royal fire.

  And she watched.

  Watched as humanity buckled and broke.

  Watched with the eyes of a god... or something far colder.

  Ryder couldn't breathe.

  Who is she? Why is she doing this? How can she look so calm... while so many die?

  As if summoned by his silent awe, her voice echoed inside his skull—deep, dispassionate, and ancient beyond reckoning.

  '...Mortals. This is the cost of your existence.'

  She turned—so slowly, so deliberately—and her icy blue gaze passed through him, not as if seeing him, but as if weighing his soul against a scale only gods could read. Emotionless. Inexorable.

  He took a step back.

  His hand found its way to Texan Thunder, his first-ever sidearm, the weapon that had saved him more times than he could count. His fingers hovered near the grip, the instinct to draw burning through him.

  His voice cracked under the weight of disbelief.

  "Are you... a goddess?"

  Niflheim tilted her head.

  "Chilled distortion." Her tone was neither cruel nor kind. It was factual, as if reality had glitched to accommodate her words.

  And then—

  —the building imploded.

  Without effort. Without gesture. Without mercy.

  The world shattered.

  Ryder was flung into oblivion, caught in a maelstrom of debris, glass, and light. In those final, fleeting instants, faces flickered behind his eyelids—faces of those he'd slain. Some had deserved it. Others... hadn't.

  I'm sorry, he thought, though the words were lost to the storm. If heaven takes pity on me, I'll say it properly next time.

  And yet, even as death loomed, a crooked smirk tugged at his lips.

  Charlotte's gonna be pissed. Good luck finding someone else to take on your suicide gigs, kid. Let's hope this mean goddess doesn't pay you a visit.

  Above it all, as the final embers of the building's ruin fluttered like dying fireflies, a new vision unfolded.

  From the heavens, a rider descended.

  Odin, astride the spectral form of Sleipnir, his eight-legged steed. Wrapped in swirling winds and divine wrath, the All-Father's presence radiated with cosmic gravity.

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  His voice boomed across the Nine Realms.

  "Almighty Niflheim! I owe you a debt for averting Ragnarok—a miracle none believed possible. Your power transcended prophecy. You emerged from Ginnungagap as a force of salvation..."

  His voice darkened.

  "...Yet your absence unbalanced the Nine Worlds. Now you stand upon Midgard once more, wielding death like a scythe. Why? What compels you to bring ruin where once you brought deliverance?"

  Niflheim blinked slowly, as though time meant nothing.

  "Odin, was it?" Her voice was curious, but empty—like a child poking at a dying flame.

  "You are inquisitive. Unusual, for a god."

  She lifted her left hand.

  Upon her palm, the impossible: Yggdrasil—the World Tree—miniaturised into a glowing, verdant blossom, no larger than a bridal bouquet.

  "Then share your perception," she said, voice flat as snow under moonlight.

  A tremor passed through Sleipnir. The great steed tossed her head, unnerved. Odin laid a hand upon her mane to calm her, though his heart hammered in his chest.

  His Raven Eye activated. Reality peeled back—layers folding inward to reveal secrets unseen by mortal or divine. And yet... he saw nothing.

  Only an aching void where revelation should have been.

  His fingers curled.

  She's cloaking the truth. Or worse—there is no truth to see.

  With a grim scowl, Odin invoked his armament.

  Gungnir.

  The spear of kings. A weapon of finality.

  It burst into his hand, its shaft inscribed with runes that spun in orbit, whispering incantations in tongues older than creation.

  With solemn breath, he began his chant, imbuing his body with raw primordial essence. Muscles swelled. Power cascaded like waterfalls of starlight. His divine pressure twisted the air itself.

  "...Victory. Fate. And the Nine Realms stand with me."

  The sky dimmed, and even gods held their breath.

  With honed precision borne of millennia, Odin hurled Gungnir, now engorged with the full might of his divinity, across the firmament. The holy spear pulsed with primordial wrath, its trajectory carving a path from realm to realm. As it flew, the divine lance synchronised with the essence of J?rmungandr—the World Serpent itself—its girth and power magnified until even the original Yggdrasil seemed dwarfed in comparison.

  Around this spear of extinction spiralled the phantasms of god-slaying relics: Mj?lnir, Gram, Laevateinn, and countless other mythic arms, each echoing the battles and bloodshed of forgotten epochs. Together, they forged a celestial meteor of divine vengeance, descending upon Midgard with the fury of gods long betrayed.

  Odin watched its descent, the weight of fate heavy in his soul.

  "It's truly regrettable... that it had to come to this," he murmured, his voice grave as a funeral hymn. His black eyepatch, worn like a crown of penance, slipped from his face, revealing the withered scar of sacrifice beneath. Sleipnir reared, a cry of anguish and defiance tearing from her throat as if sensing the toll yet to come.

  As the cosmos trembled, Odin raised his voice in declaration:

  "BEHOLD! THE ULTIMATE LANCE OF RAGNAROK!"

  Below, Niflheim stirred.

  Her gaze lifted—not with alarm, but with the serenity of inevitability. She remained enthroned, the embers of Yggdrasil—now reduced to ash in her palm—falling like dying stars between her fingers. Then, with a casual grace that defied the apocalypse descending upon her, she unfurled one vast, glacial wing.

  The moment it met the descending catastrophe, reality cracked.

  A ripple of untold force pulsed outward—enough to unmake worlds.

  Yet she remained unmoved.

  "That was... mildly diverting," she said, her voice as serene as the heart of a glacier. With a soft sweep of her wing, she deflected Gungnir—not just redirecting it, but hurling it back toward Odin with contemptuous ease.

  But Odin had foreseen this.

  He etched a final rune into the air with shaking hands—Algiz, the rune of fate's protection. Gungnir shrank, its divine mass compressed to pierce only one target: himself.

  With a laugh born of madness and ancient memory, Odin opened his arms and allowed the spear to strike.

  "Ahhh... it returns to me, the echo of a choice long made," he rasped, blood welling in his throat. "Now I see why my past self orchestrated this wretched play."

  As blood bloomed like crimson blossoms across his tunic, he gritted his teeth and channelled the sum of his accumulated knowledge—centuries of war, wisdom, prophecy—into his Raven Eye. The enchanted orb glowed once... then shattered, its essence consumed by Gungnir.

  Dizzy, half-divine, he grasped the spear lodged in his chest, yanked it free, and raised it one final time.

  "Niflheim! You wicked witch of Ginnungagap! Your cure is death and nothing less! Now... behold the wrath of this—"

  He hurled the weapon again, now transformed by his final rite:

  "SACRED SACRIFICIAL TREE OF THE ALLFATHER!"

  His body withered. His bones cracked. His flesh crumbled away like rotted parchment. He became little more than a silhouette cloaked in smoke and regret.

  Niflheim did not flinch.

  "Like moths drawn to flame," she said softly, more to herself than to the dying god.

  Gungnir twisted mid-flight, as though it now possessed a soul—driven by vengeance, by madness, by the shattered will of its creator. It screamed through the void, a dying god's requiem given form.

  Yet with a single flick of her index finger, she altered its path.

  Downward.

  Earthward.

  The spear pierced the veil of Midgard like a falling star, its trajectory carving through realms. And then—

  —it changed.

  Its surface crystallised, luminous with frost. Feathers of rime erupted from its shaft as its form unravelled, reconstituting itself into something alive.

  A phoenix, wrought not of fire, but of ice. Sublime. Silent. Terrible.

  From the hollow ruins of the city, geysers of snow surged upwards like inverted waterfalls, erupting from the earth as if the underworld itself had begun to mourn. White fire mingled with the frost—burning and freezing, dancing with elegant, impossible fury.

  For the first time, Niflheim leaned forward, her interest piqued.

  "How... intriguing," she murmured, watching the frozen rebirth.

  Above, Odin rode alone in the storm.

  He reached for Gungnir, but his body refused him. His senses were unravelling—his sight stolen by the blizzard, his hearing swallowed by the howling void. Tears traced the ravines of his face, freezing before they could fall.

  "Will fate always elude me...?" he asked the snow. No answer came.

  Sleipnir, panicked by the overwhelming divine clash, shrieked and bolted.

  The sudden motion unseated Odin.

  He fell.

  And fell.

  A thunderous crack heralded his landing upon the ice-bound ruins below, his ancient frame contorted in grotesque angles. Bones shattered. Divine flesh sloughed away.

  He reached out, clawing at the earth as if to rewrite destiny with fingernails alone.

  But the world had no mercy left to offer.

  The crowd—those rare mortals who had survived—fled in droves, their stampeding feet crushing what remained of the Allfather beneath their panic. A scream tore from his throat—

  —only to be drowned out by the deafening roar of an approaching vehicle.

  A garbage truck.

  Its lights blinded. Its horn wailed.

  Then, impact.

  Steel and refuse and fire.

  Pinned beneath the monstrous wheels, Odin choked out his final words, barely a whisper through the blood and snow:

  "Just as hope began to dawn... perhaps... in the next round."

  The truck, burdened by divine entropy and the unseen weight of fate, exploded—engulfing the scene in a vortex of molten fire and shattered memory.

  And from amidst the flames, her voice emerged.

  Soft. Final.

  "Rest in peace. There shall be no other iteration."

  Odin's world burned around him. No sanctuary remained. No redemption. No rebirth. Only consumption.

  The god who had once suspended himself from Yggdrasil to learn the secrets of death...

  ...was now bound beneath its ash.

  The Soulless Seraph drifted skyward with imperious grace, her silhouette cutting a divine figure against the backdrop of a world collapsing into incandescent ruin. Below her, the once-proud city melted into slag and cinder, alchemised into an Eternal Conflagration—a mockery of civilisation and a mirror of her dominion: the Realm of Purgatory.

  With a final flourish, the throne of ice upon which she once reigned dissolved into flames. There was no need for symbols of power now. She was power incarnate.

  Her emerald mantle billowed in slow, celestial cadence, dancing like starlight caught in the pull of a dying sun. Each movement of her tall, commanding form evoked the grace of an angel and the dread of a death god. She raised her scorching right arm, its flames wreathing her fingers like divine tendrils, reaching upward—beseeching not the heavens, but something beyond them.

  And the cosmos answered.

  The air itself convulsed, crackling in ecstasy and horror. White fire ignited from the empty firmament, spiralling into a vortex of unfathomable heat and light. Bursts of gamma radiation erupted within the blaze—like fireflies of nuclear oblivion—twinkling in quantum syncopation.

  Her arm, aglow with Aequiskotos, merged into the gathering storm.

  From that sacred confluence, a sun was born—not the celestial torch of mortals, but a devouring orb of uncreation. It swelled with impossible force, its core pulsing with the luminous wrath of countless hypernovas. Stars paled before its radiance. It expanded—not as an explosion, but as an act of divine will.

  And she did not flee it.

  She welcomed it.

  The flames curled around her in reverent embrace. Instead of scouring her away, they surrendered to her sovereignty, becoming a vessel through which her essence magnified.

  In this moment—this cosmic convergence—the line between divinity and the unknown ceased to exist. Matter and meaning, soul and flame, self and star... all merged into the same ecstatic truth.

  Niflheim was no longer simply a being.

  She was becoming a force.

  A Morning Star, not of light, but of transcendental devastation.

  As she vanished into its incandescent core, her will catalysed the star's expansion. Galaxies bloomed and died within its pulse. Omniverses—nascent and embryonic—were birthed and consumed in the span of moments, each one fuelling the infernal cycle.

  The Nine Worlds—once the totality of the divine cosmos—now seemed a dying ember within the greater inferno. Her radiance pushed past their boundaries, outstripping even the concept of realm. Gods fell. Demons disintegrated. Time itself curled into a spiral of whimpers as cause and effect collapsed.

  And amidst this apocalypse, she found peace.

  Niflheim, Sovereign of Purgatory, closed her eyes.

  Her voice, almost too soft to be heard over the roar of eternity, slipped into existence:

  "I have found you."

  No one knew who she addressed. Perhaps not even she.

  Suspended at the heart of the burgeoning star, she became the still point in the spiral—a soul that had no soul, yet felt the echo of something lost, or longed for.

  And thus, she transcended.

  Her body became pure. Her consciousness folded into the Morning Star, now no longer a weapon, but an extension of her eternal being.

  A new force entered the void—neither god, nor demon, nor destroyer.

  But something far more terrifying.

  A truth.

  A new law of unbeing.

  And somewhere in the infinite silence that followed, the void whispered back.