ch.24

The second chapter of this week!

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"You look like shit," I said, looking Constantine over. And he really did. His eyes were red and had dark circles under them like he hadn't slept for days.

"Ah, thanks, mate," Constantine drawled out sarcastically, "and how have you been these past 3 years?"

I grimaced slightly when I still couldn't sense the cocky bastard, even after upgrading my sensing ability multiple times over the years.

The amulet of Bast was fucking ridiculous. But that is a Goddess for you. Being a goddess of cats and other sneaky members of the cat family, Bast's amulet had the ability to make its user blend in with nature to help them ambush their prey. Instead, Constantine had been using it to hide from the numerous enemies he had made over the years.

And it was really effective unless your sensing and tracking spells were better than Bast herself was in hiding, you had to search for Constantine the old fashion way by using your eyes.

You couldn't even sense for blank spots in your sensing field because there were none. The amulet made it so that its user blended perfectly with the background around them. Sensing abilities would just harmlessly pass over him and ignore his presence.

"I'm doing good," I replied, "would have been better if I wasn't currently in your presence. I thought we agreed to stay as far away from each other as we could after that whole fiasco in the tombs of Egypt?"

"I'm not the one that teleported to you, mate," Constantine said as he strolled around the perimeter of the temple, doing who knows what, "besides that mummy thing wasn't my fault."

"I distinctly recall it screaming your name as it tried to kill us!" I glared incredulously at him.

Constantine paused at that before shrugging, "so what brings you to this little piece of paradise?" He asked, waving his hand at the creepy-ass temple looming above us.

I sighed at the obvious change of subject.

"A woman sold her soul to me to save her kid from a demon," I explained, "the demon was sucking out the kid's lifeforce to do who knows what with, I followed the connection here."

"What about you?"

"I have been hunting a being that has been leaving bodies in his wake all over the world," Constantine replied as he moved his hand around like he was drawing something.

"It seems we have the same enemy," my eyes started to glow with a red inner light as I inspected Constantine's movements, "and it brought us to the same creepy temple."

"It seems we do," Constantine thought about that for a moment before pausing what he was doing and taking something out of his pocket.

"The kid didn't happen to have one of these on him, did he?" He asked, showing me the little figurine he took out of his pocket.

"Yea," I answered as I scrutinized the same Icon that Samuel had played with before falling into a coma. Only this one had protective sigils painted on it, no doubt to stop the being it belonged to from spying on us, "I'm gonna guess the kid wasn't the only one then."

"Not even close," Constantine went back to drawing sigils into the air, "kids and adults are in comas all over the world, and they have all come in contact with one of these Icons one way or another."

"I thought only higher beings like gods used Icons?" I asked when Constantine confirmed that those figurines were indeed Icons.

"What makes you think this thing isn't a god?"

I paused at that. I had just assumed it was some kind of demon, "that thing looked like no god I have ever heard of before. It looked more like a demon than anything else."

"Not as you imagined them, huh," Constantine smirked, "not all gods look like the beautiful idols people believe them to be, especially not the old ones. Some look like the most gruesome monster you could imagine."

Gods aren't human, and thinking that they look like more beautiful versions of ourselves was kind of narcissistic. And precisely something a human would do. Our fragile egos can't grasp the notion that a being so much stronger than us, a being we worship, could look like an ugly monster.

"Where is your little shadow, by the way. What was her name again...Cassie?" Constantine asked, glancing around as if he had somehow missed her, "she is usually not more than a few feet away from you."

"Cassandra," I corrected him, "and she had other things to do."

"Good, this isn't going to be a cakewalk, I can tell you that much."

"If I end up dead because of your luck, I will kill you."

Constantine had really fucked up luck. It made him survive shit he really shouldn't, but it also made everyone around him die the most gruesome deaths or wish that was all that had happened to them.

When he was nothing more than a character on a page, I always thought how horrible it had to be for him to know that the people around him died because of him. But now, I just wanted to be as far away from him before I became one of those people.

"Yea, Yea," Constantine answered unconcernedly.

I walked up next to him and immediately felt the foul miasma seeping out of the temple and caressing my skin. I have spent enough time around Constantine to recognize the foul stink of dark magic.

"Do you think it's a trap?"

"I know it's a bloody trap," Constantine replied before finishing drawing the last sigil in the air.

All at once, all the sigils he had drawn gained a golden light and became visible to the naked eye, the sigils sped at the temple before impacting a black barrier that appeared around it.

The barrier held for about a second before shattering into a thousand pieces.

"Bloody dark wards," Constantine cursed as the barrier pieces turned to miasma and started to rot and eat at the surroundings, "they always leave a mess."

Reaching out, I snagged all the miasma with my metaphysical fingers, gathered it all in a ball, and snuffed it out before it could do any more damage to the surroundings.

Constantine whistled, "you are a handy guy to have around, you know that."

"Don't get used to it," I said as I walked up the black stairs leading to the temple, "let's get this over with."

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The moment my foot passed the threshold of the temple, I felt a savage gaze settle on me.

"He knows that we are here," I informed Constantine.

"It would have been bloody impressive if he didn't."

The inside of the temple looked just as you would expect of a place of worship. It was clean and tidy, the furnishings were well taken care of, and the room was nice and bright because of the torches lining the walls.

All-in-all it did not fit with the whole ancient abandoned temple in the middle of nowhere theme it had going on.

As we walked further into the temple, I noticed that the torches were illuminating pictographs and an ancient language my All-Speak automatically translated to English engraved on the walls.

Seeing as I may have to deal with more Aliens, I had given myself the ability to speak and understand all languages, or at least most of them. I'm sure that I will encounter a few languages that are too alien to the human mind or magical for me to understand without beefing up the ability with a few more souls.

Fortunately, this wasn't such a language.

The inscriptions told the story of the surrounding tribes that used to live in this area and how they used to worship a god that was both compassionate and merciful. The Deity would bring with it the dawn of a new day and bring an end to the night of the previous day and all the dangerous creatures and human debaucheries that came with it.

At the same time, they worshipped the unforgiving and vicious demon that brought dusk, and with it the end of civilization and the masks that kept it running. They threw off the masquerade that separated them from the animals and drowned themselves in their deepest and darkest desires.

Depictions of rape, murder, and horrible human sacrifices filled the walls. Shamans ripping out the hearts of sacrifices on an altar before presenting it to the demon, people being boiled alive in cauldrons before being offered as food, and everything in between.

The story ended with the same painting as the one on the Icon, symbolizing the merciful god changing into the vicious demon just as day would ultimately change into night.

I read the story to Constantine as we continued walking.

"Shit," Constantine cursed, "we are dealing with a god of duality."

"They didn't happen to mention the god's name, did they?" Constantine asked hopefully.

"No," I answered, looking over the engravings again.

Constantine grimaced, "most religions have a God and Devil character. The ultimate good and the sinister evil that fight each other for all eternity," Constantine explained when he noticed my look, "a god of duality is both at the same time, it's God and Devil, Light and Darkness, making it twice as powerful as it normally would be."

"I haven't really seen much mercy and compassion going around," I said, confused, "and the sun is still shining outside shouldn't it be a god of light right now?"

"It seems stuck in his night form for some reason," Constantine agreed, "which, if we are lucky, will limit it to using only his abilities from that form."

"I just don't understand why it's suddenly awake," I said, "It just seems too fucking convenient."

"Someone has been spreading its Icons all over the world for people to find," Constantine replied, "and when they did, it started feeding on the lifeforce of the ones that came in contact with its Icons to power itself."

"Its worshippers?" I asked.

I wouldn't really be surprised if this thing still had worshippers hiding somewhere. DC had a shit ton of cults worshipping the craziest of beings out there, from gods and demons to horrors residing outside of reality.

"I very much doubt any of them are still around. If they were, we would have noticed them taking a more hands-on approach, sacrificing innocents and themselves to their god," Constantine answered confidently. He hasn't heard anything about the god Alexander had just described, not even whispers in the dark. Which means that it had been gone for a long time, "no, this is the work of someone else, someone that works from the shadows."

Hearing that, my mind immediately went to the Light, but I wasn't certain. I just couldn't see the end goal here. What would be the point of waking a forgotten god from its slumbers?

Before long, we arrived at a split in the corridor, leading to two different doors. One was painted white and the other completely black. You didn't have to be a genius to figure out what each door signified and where they led.

To be sure, I looked down at where my trusty compass was pointing and motioned for Constantine to follow me to the black door.

Which made him roll his eyes before taking a cigarette out of his pocket and lighting it.

Opening the door, I looked at what I could only call evil.

In the center of the room was a pile of gory remains of death and decomposing humans, filling the room with the stench of blood and other bodily fluids. Four gargoyle looking statues of demons crouched at the four corners of the room.

As we watched, a body at the bottom of the pile liquefied into a bloody slurry before filling the two channels in the floor and flowing out of the room.

"Holy fuck," I think I'm going to be sick, "that is fucking disgusting!"

"Is this the kind of shit you deal with every time you fight a demon?" I asked Constantine when I noticed his unfazed face.

"Demons aren't really all that original. They feed on the pain and misery of other living beings," Constantine said, his voice indifferent, "this is still tame compared to some of the more sadistic demons I have encountered."

"How the fuck are you still sane?" I couldn't imagine having to see shit like this on a weekly basis, let alone knowing that I was about to see some fucked up shit and still going.

Fuck that, I would let someone else clean that shit up. Which is probably why I'm not Hero material.

"Who said anything about me being sane," Constantine scoffed, taking a long drag from his cigarette.

Before anything else could be said, the demon statues we both had been keeping an eye on unsurprisingly came alive and jumped off their pedestals.

As if we hadn't predicted that. We weren't born yesterday, you know.

Constantine and I stood back to back, each taking two of the demon statues. At the same time, I made sure to stay as far away from the piss and shit covered pile of bodies as I could.

Two red magic arrows materialized in front of me and started to spin at high speed to increase their penetration before each shooting at the head of one of the gargoyles, only for them to harmlessly splash against the stone skin of the gargoyles.

Surprised, I dodged away as my opponents lunged at me, cracking and cratering the floor where they landed.

"You will have to do better than that, mate," Constantine told me as he dodged around his own opponents, a dagger suddenly appearing in his hand from who knows where, "these things have magically and physically resistant bodies."

A grin formed on my face, interesting.

It has been a while since something forced me to use a stronger attack than a magic arrow. Of course, I could simply ramp up the power behind my magic arrows but that would be boring.

I dodged around the attack of the gargoyles, hitting them with wind blades strong enough to cut through stone and fireballs hot enough to burn a human to ash to test their defenses. After a few seconds, the gargoyles were completely covered in thin cuts and had scorch marks all over their bodies.

Keeping away from their attacks was easy enough even when limiting my speed to human levels because while they were strong and durable, they weren't all that fast with them being made of stone and all that.

Having learned the limit of the gargoyles defenses, I waited till both were lunging at me before lifting my hand above my head. A black ball shot out my hand and into the air before turning in a black vortex that started to suck in everything around it. A quick shield around our fighting position made sure that the rest of the room wasn't affected.

Already off the ground and mid-lunge, the gargoyles were immediately sucked into the artificial black hole, which started to crush them with its gravity.

I frowned slightly as I felt the gargoyles resist and chip away at the force holding my artificial black hole together.

Reaching out, I powered the spell further and watched as the gravity of the vortex doubled. The gargoyles struggled to get out of the black hole, but there was nothing they could do.

A second later, their stone bodies were ground into a fine dust. Having completed its purpose, the vortex flickered back out of existence.

Looking over at how Constantine's battle was going, I was just in time to see him point his strange blue dagger at the feet of his last opponent. His other opponent had already taken the appearance of a pile of rubble.

A moment later, a blue beam of cold shot out the tip of the dagger and froze the gargoyle's feet to the ground.

Taking advantage of his momentarily trapped opponent, Constantine rushed at the gargoyle, spoke an incantation, and stabbed his dagger into its chest.

The dagger cut through the gargoyle's body like a hot knife through butter, ignoring its magically and physically resistant skin like it wasn't even there. Blue ice mist started to seep from where the gargoyle was stabbed, freezing it from the inside out and shattering it into a pile of icy rubble.

"Let's go," Constantine said, putting his dagger away and taking one last look at the fast diminishing pile of human bodies, "something is telling me that we don't have much time to stop whatever this god is planning."

We followed the blood-filled channels to the next room and arrived in a room in the middle of the temple. The room was huge and had no roof, allowing the sun to shine inside right on top of our target.

The god, demon, or whatever stood 12 feet tall and had light-absorbing black skin, like someone had spilled ink in the form of a humanoid on the pages of reality. He had four eyes and two horns that were pointed upwards before curling into a crown.

All four of the god's eyes were closed, and all its attention was on its ritual.

Behind it was an altar. Once upon a time, the altar used to be white, but the countless sacrifices that had taken place upon it had dyed it a permanent bloody red. Once in a while, the faces of those sacrificed men, women, and children would appear on the altar, screaming in pain and horror, begging for someone to save them.

Black soil and half-withered trees surrounded the altar and the throne the god was sitting in, forming a circle. Inside that, naturally formed circle was another circle, this one made of the channels of blood. Inscribed between the two circles were ominous glowing runic scripts with dark swirling mist constantly seeping out of them.

Tens of invisible lines were connected to the runic scripts, feeding them with a constant stream of lifeforce. Every drop of lifeforce causes the dark swirling mist to grow thicker and darker.

As I look into the dark swirling mist, I feel something gaze back at me with hate-filled ember eyes. I feel my mind falter like a broken record, all the defenses around my mind shattering like glass as I see something I couldn't and didn't want to comprehend.

For that split second that feels like an eternity, I'm completely defenseless. At the back of my mind, I could feel my numerous defenses fight to keep the invading presence out of my mind, fight to keep my heart beating, but most importantly, fight to keep my mind from shattering into a thousand pieces as it tries to protect me from seeing something no human mind should ever see.

And then I'm back in my body, biting back a scream of horror, my heart beating frantically in my chest, and sweat streaming from my body like a faucet.

"I am going to guess that that isn't good," I quipped, trying to hide the fear I was feeling.

But I wasn't fooling anyone with my act and certainly not Constantine. The eyes of a veteran that had seen far too much looked back at me, making me remember the conversation we had a few minutes ago, which felt like forever ago now, and what he had said about being sane.

At first, I thought it was a joke, but now I wasn't all that sure anymore. There is no way that someone that had seen shit like this and still willingly came back for more was in their right mind.

"It is bloody awful is what it is. It's trying to open a gateway to its real body," Constantine swore, "what we are currently seeing is just a fake body that it created to interact with this world. It has its own mind and everything."

What Constantine just said was both a relief and a scary at the same time. What was a relief was that the thing we are about the fight wasn't truly whatever the fuck I just saw, but at the same time, I knew it was only a matter of time before that thing breaks free of its prison if Constantine and I don't stop it.

My face paled noticeably at that. There is no fucking way I'm letting that thing get into my world.

Taking hold of a good amount of soul-energy, I snap my fingers to cut off the lines feeding the gateway with lifeforce, only for my soul-energy to harmlessly splash against something and do absolutely nothing for the second time today. This time because of a barrier around the magic circle.

Well, it did do one thing, I guess. And that is catching the attention of the fake body sitting on its throne. All four of the fake god's eyes snap open, glowing red with rage.

"You," it screamed as he caught sight of us and recognized me.

"Me," I agreed arrogantly, but I wasn't really feeling it. That split second meeting I had with this thing's real body had scared me more than I was willing to admit. My everything was screaming for me to run as fast as I could and not look back, "how have you been since I had you fleeing, scared?"

"You dare!" he screamed, releasing a bit of his power, black soil, withering trees, and stones flying in all directions from the force.

"Who the hell are you anyway?" Constantine interrupted, fishing for information.

The god paused bewildered before reigning back its power and opening its mouth, "I have had many names over the eons, but two stayed with me, Shalim and Shahar. Of course, the humans who worshipped me at the time thought I was two different gods instead of two sides of the same coin," He paused for a moment, his eyes looking into the past, "they didn't understand that there can be no dusk without dawn, no light without darkness, no good without evil. I taught my worshippers to be grateful for the dawning of a new day and to fear the darkness of the night."

I guess not even gods are exempted from evil monologues in this world.

I yawned, "you have a fancy way of saying that you hunted your worshippers when night fell so that they would be even more grateful to you when a new day came."

"I was loved and worshipped by thousands, and thousands more were sacrificed in my name. Until they were all massacred for their unholy beliefs," Limhar(the combination of Shalim and Shahar) glared at me, "for thousands of years I have slumbered, cut off from this world and its worship but soon I will be back, and I will take what is rightly mine!"

"Thank you for the history lesson no one asked for," I said, grabbing hold of all my souls and releasing their power around me, "now, kindly fuck off to where you came from and save me the effort of kicking your ass!"

Limhar eyes widened in slight concern as he felt the number of souls powering me. While the real him could pop me like a balloon, this wasn't the real him. It was just a puppet with some of the memories of the original.

His eyes glowed red with anger at both the disrespect I was showing him and the fear I made him, a god feel. A dark aura of power appeared around his body, matching mine blow for blow with its intensity.

We stopped our dick measuring contest at the same time, both of us ready and waiting to see who would make the first move.

Even though I was expecting it, Limhar's attack still caught me flat-footed. The only thing saving me being the training sessions I had with Hei Jiang and Saphira. I hastily conjured a shield in front of me to intercept the bolt of darkness that blasted out the dark soil in front of me.

The bolt of darkness struck my shield with enough force to crack it instantly, making things worse the miasma the darkness bolt was releasing was eating at my shield and seeping into the cracks furthering the speed of destruction of my shield.

While I was busy trying to stop the bolt of darkness from breaking my shield and striking me in the face, a claw of darkness reached out of my shadow and tried to impale my stomach.

A thought had a flash of light explode from my body, destroying my shadow and cutting the claw off.

I narrowed my eyes in confusion when I noticed that the claw of darkness itself was still there, instead of being destroyed like most darkness and shadow based abilities would have been when hit with a light spell.

That moment of confusion cost me, however, when the claw transformed into miasma before shooting at my shield, seeping into it and destroying it instantly. Taking its chance the bolt of darkness that my shield had been holding back struck me right in the face. Throwing me back into and through three trees before finally slamming me into the reinforced walls of the room.

Standing up from where Limhar's attack had blasted me, I touched my bloodied cheek in surprise. Like the claw, the darkness bolt had transformed into miasma upon impact and had eaten through the manashield around my cheek and into my face. Rather than trying to break my manashield, the miasma had eaten through only a little piece the size of a penny, trying to burrow inside my head and kill me.

I felt an excited grin form on my face. It has been years since someone broke my shield and forced me to rely on my skintight manashield, and even that wasn't enough to stop the attack entirely.

This guy was the real thing.

Looking up, I saw Limhar slapping Constantine's fireballs away with disdain before getting enough and transforming into a beam of darkness that traveled next to Constantly in an instant before transforming back.

Limhar's clawed hand was inches from Constantine's chest when Constantine conjured a white-hot fire tornado around himself, burning Limhar's arm and making him jump back hastily before the tornado could burn him any further.

Not giving him time to gather himself, I blew up the ground under Limhar's feet, throwing black soil and dust into the air around Limhar, blocking his vision.

Teleporting in front of him, I made multiple magic circles before stacking them on each other in front of me like lenses. Grabbing hold of my souls, I gathered a shit ton of energy and converted it into light before shooting it into the first magic circle. The light became bigger and stronger with every magic circle it passed before it was dozens of times stronger than it had been in the beginning.

Limhar has just enough time to look surprised after he finishes removing the soil and dust blocking his sight before he gets blasted in the chest with a deadly laser.

The laser encounters a split second of resistance when it touches Limhar's skin before blasting a hole right through him and the reinforced temple walls before continuing in the distance, showing no sign of stopping anytime soon.

Falling to his knees, Limhar spits out a mouthful of darkness before roaring in pain and rage as the hole in his chest closes back up.

Faster than I anticipated, his clawed hand reached out and grabbed hold of my head before slamming me into the floor next to him hard enough to shake the earth, dazing me briefly.

I grunted in pain as his claws burned through my manashield like it wasn't there and into my head. I tried to teleport only for my sight to go dark and my body to flicker away and back into Limhar's claw.

I grimaced as I felt my stomach acid rise into my throat. What the fuck was that?!

Lifting me back up, Limhar went to smash me back into the ground.

Taking a page from Cassandra's playbook, I gathered as much soul-energy around my right arm as I could and transformed it into a blade made of light before slashing it at the arm holding me with all my strength.

The blade cut a few inches in Limhar's arm before stopping in its tracks. Miasma started to pour out the wound, corroding and eating away at the energy of the blade.

"Haaaaa!" I screamed, putting even more power in the blade until it was lighting up the whole room. The light dispelled the miasma around the blade before cutting and burning through Limhar's arm at the same time.

I dropped onto the ground with the cut off arm of Limhar still attached to my head. Ripping it off, I threw the crumbling arm away from me before immediately teleporting away.

"You will pay for that!" Limhar spat out as he watched his arm turn to ash, a new arm already growing from his stump.

The whole time Constantine was taking potshots and cheap shots at Limhar when he was distracted with me while making sure to keep his distance.

Having had enough of Constantine's antics, Limhar suddenly expelled an omnidirectional blast of darkness from his body, making Constantine stumble and almost fall over.

"Got you!" Limhar grinned with malice as his clawed hand reached out of Constantine's shadow and shot him with a point-blank beam of darkness. Only for the beam to go right through the illusion of Constantine, I had been controlling this whole time, dispelling it. Much to the surprise and chagrin of Limhar.

It took only a second for Limhar to understand what had happened, making him glare at where the real Constantine had sneaked inside his barrier, disabled it, and was currently standing over his altar.

Growling, Limhar shot a bolt at the real Constantine.

A giant reinforced hand raises out of the earth and intercepts the bolt of darkness. Instead of trying to stop the bolt of darkness and risk it going through, I make the stone hand slap the bolt away before stretching and following Limhar, keeping him busy.

Reaching the altar, Constantine started summoning the spirits of those who were sacrificed on the altar. Their hate and suffering clinging to the bloody altar even now after a thousand years.

"You who have been butchered and sacrificed to an unfeeling god by your own people."

"You who have been shackled to this cold earth for an eternity without a way out."

"With the blood in my veins, I call you!" grabbing hold of his switchblade, Constantine cut his forearm.

"With the cleansing fires of Purgatory, I call you!" midair, the drops of blood caught ablaze with white fire.

"From the darkness, I call you, into the darkness, I call you!"

"Come and get your retribution!"

A white flame appeared around the altar, fighting the darkness surrounding it from centuries of sacrifices. Just as it looked like the miasma of the altar was going to win and the flame was about to flicker out, it came back with a vengeance blazing into the clear sky. Completely cleansing the altar of all its hatred and suffering.

A 12 feet tall being made completely out of white fire stepped out of the blazing pillar. It was neither a man nor a woman, neither young nor old, its hands were around the pommel of a flaming sword, and flaming angel wings spread out majestically behind it.

Two flaming eyes met four perplexed ones from across the room.

"You!" the flaming angel roared in rage. It flapped its wings before appearing before Limhar, crossing the room instantly before slicing at him with its flaming sword.

Limhar met the charge of the flaming angel head-on, a sword made from darkness appearing in his hands. The force of their blows clashing, shook the building and the surrounding area. Both swords trying to devour the other, one with miasma and the other with cleansing fire.

"What the fuck is that?" I know Constantine said he had a plan, but I wasn't expecting him to pull this out of his ass.

"It's all the spirits that were sacrificed on that altar that still hold a grudge against Limhar," Constantine explained as we watched the giants clash, "We have to hurry and help it defeat Limhar before the fires of Purgatory finish cleansing all of their grudges and with it the source of their power."

Waiting for just the right moment when Limhar was about to block a strike from the flaming angel that would cut him in two diagonally if it hit, I swung the light blade still around my hand with all my strength.

Distracted by the flaming angel's attack Limhar didn't notice the attack until it was already to late.

An air rendering sound was heard as the sword slash reached through space, ignoring the distance between us completely and chopped Limhar's sword arm clean off.

Constantine whistled, impressed as we watched Limhar roar in pain as his arm went flying before he got cut in two by the flaming angel's sword.

Distracted by the unexpected attack and unable to defend himself without his arm.

Grabbing hold of Constantine, I teleported us in front of Limhar. Unlike with my hits that did only superficial damage that he could regenerate from instantly, the fires of Purgatory were burning and cleansing his very being.

"You can't kill me. I'm the reason you little apes learned to make a fire to keep the darkness at bay. I'm the thing that makes you pray for a new day. I am the night!" Limhar bellowed, miasma pouring from his wounds unsuccessfully trying to fight the cleansing fires of Purgatory, "You can't kill me no more than you can kill the night, and once I'm back, I will find everything you two love and eradicate it!"

"No, you won't, mate," Constantine drawled out before reaching in the pocket of his trench coat and taking Limhar's Icon out of it, "we may not be able to kill your real body, but we don't have to. You are already forgotten, a god of days gone past. The only thing connecting you here to this world is your Icons."

"If you would do the honors," Constantine said, handing me the Icon.

Already knowing what he was planning, I took the Icon from him and grabbed hold of the link the Icons shared all over the world, and yanked them all to our location.

All around us, the Icons flashed into existence before turning to dust just as fast.

"Please," Limhar pleaded as he watched his only connections to the outside turn to dust.

"There is nothing more pathetic than a god begging for its life," Constantine motioned for the flaming angel to finish him.

The flaming angel lifted its sword before releasing a stream of cleansing fire from the tip, burning Limhar's body to ash before even that was burned into nothing.

"See you never, you miserable bastard!"

The flaming angel took one last look at the place Limhar used to be before breaking apart into embers. Its job complete, and its grudges taken care of. The spirits that made it could finally rest in peace.

"Not bad for your first time fighting a god," Constantine said as he looked the completely wrecked room over, "not bad at all."

I rolled my eyes at him. That was hardly a real fight against a god. We were both too limited to call it that, Limhar because of his body being a fake and me because of the things I was unwilling to show with other people around.

But it was still the most hard-won fight I had fought in a long while. I had no doubt that if Constantine didn't pull the flaming angel out of his ass and we were alone, we could have had a good fight.

Now to finish this whole fiasco, I reached for the tens of connections feeding the runic scripts and cut them off before filling them with soul-energy converted into lifeforce. I might as well help some innocent people out. I'm not a completely selfish bastard after all.

Next, I reached for the gateway and made it implode onto itself. There was one last madness-inducing roar of rage before the magic circle exploded, leaving nothing behind.

"I'm gonna search for some gold," Constantine stated casually after I was done with the gateway, "what about you?"

"I'm going to get as far away from you as I can. This day has gone far too good for my liking."

"More for me then. I will see you next time," Seeing my glare, Constantine smirked before shrugging, "We both know I'm right."

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I had a hard time writing this chapter. I wanted to capture Constantine's character and his witty comebacks as best as I could and even importantly I wanted to capture the powerful and gritty nature of the things he fights on a weekly basis.

This little adventure was also a turning point for Alexander he just got a huge fucking wake-up call when his mind almost broke trying to comprehend something meant to scare humans insane and at the same time that much stronger than him.

He may be the big bad reality warped standing at the top of earth but he just learned that he is nothing more than a speck of dust in the grand scale of things.

Now to make something clear Alexander won't be reacting to other gods or things stronger than him like this in the future, Limhar was a special case in that he was stuck in his devil form. A form specially made to scare and drive people insane.

He is, after all, all the things in the night that makes people pray for a new dawn.