The sky wasn't bleeding. It was *screaming*. Crimson lightning tore rents in the fabric of Kaelos's celestial realm, revealing the chilling, infinite dark beyond. Below, mountains forged from star-metal groaned and shattered, plunging into seas of liquid mercury that boiled and hissed. The air reeked of ozone, spilled ichor, and the cold, metallic tang of inevitability.
Kaelos, the War God, stood amidst the ruin, a titan etched in agony. His once-impenetrable armor, forged in the heart of dying suns, hung in scorched and shattered pieces. Divine blood, molten gold and impossibly bright, wept from a dozen mortal wounds that pulsed with a sickly, violet light – the mark of the **Aethelgard**. They moved through the destruction not with triumphant roars, but with chilling silence. Figures woven from starlight and shadow, their movements precise, emotionless, utterly efficient. They were the end of things.
One stood before him now, taller than the others, its form shifting like smoke constrained by geometry. No weapon was visible, yet Kaelos felt the pressure building, a cosmic vice tightening around his essence. This wasn't conquest. This was *erasure*.
"Your era concludes, Kaelos," the lead Aethelgard intoned, its voice the grinding of dead galaxies. "Chaos yields to Order. War is… inefficient."
Kaelos spat a globule of golden blood onto the fractured obsidian at his feet. It sizzled. Pain was a white-hot forge within him, but beneath it roared a deeper, colder fury. Not for his own end – a War God understood endings – but for the *void* they would leave. A universe balanced on the edge of a knife, tipped towards sterile, crushing control. War was brutal, yes, but it was also *change*, *struggle*, *survival*. It forged heroes and shattered tyrants. Without its brutal crucible… stagnation. Death by suffocation.
*Not like this,* the thought thundered through his fractured divinity. *Not without a spark left to ignite the tinder.*
He couldn't win. The Aethelgard were too many, their power too alien, too absolute. But a god, especially the God of War, doesn't fall without leaving a scar, a trap, a final, desperate stratagem. His gaze, burning with the last embers of a supernova, swept past his implacable executioner, past the crumbling spires of his fortress, out into the screaming, dying sky. Out towards the teeming, fragile realms below.
He needed a successor. Not an heir of blood, but of *spirit*. Someone who understood that true strength wasn't just the power to break, but the will to endure, to rise, to *fight* against the crushing tide of oblivion. He needed… a system. Not a legacy, but a crucible. A path forged in conflict, demanding everything, promising only the chance to become *more*.
The Aethelgard raised its hand. The pressure intensified, threatening to unravel Kaelos atom by atom. Time crystallized, shattered.
**Now.**
With a roar that shook the foundations of dying stars, Kaelos didn't lash out at his killer. Instead, he turned his immense, failing power *inwards*. He ripped a shard of his own divine core – not his strength, not his rage, but the *essence* of conflict, the relentless drive to overcome, the cunning strategy, the burning will to survive. It was agony beyond comprehension, the equivalent of tearing out his own screaming soul.
He compressed it, shaped it with the last shreds of his titanic will, into something… else. Not a weapon. A seed. A sentient, demanding, utterly ruthless **System**. Its purpose burned within it: *Find the Worthy. Forge the God. Prepare for the War Beyond Wars.*
As the Aethelgard's obliterating force finally descended, a silent wave of annihilating light, Kaelos hurled the condensed spark of the System not into the void, but *through* it. He channeled the last dregs of his power, not to shield himself, but to punch a microscopic, undetectable hole in the fabric of reality itself, aiming the spark towards the distant, chaotic cradle of mortality.
The annihilating light hit.
Kaelos, the God of War, ceased to be.
The lead Aethelgard observed the point of impact, the space where a primal force had existed for eons. Now, there was only the sterile hum of their imposed order. A flicker, almost too insignificant to notice, like a dying ember spat from a forge, seemed to wink out near the periphery of the destruction. It registered as background entropy. Irrelevant.
The Aethelgard turned, its task complete. Order reigned.
Far, far below, across the unimaginable gulf between the dying heavens and the vibrant, fragile mudball of a world called Erebos, reality *twitched*. A single, impossibly bright spark, no larger than a grain of stardust, flared into existence high in the planet's turbulent atmosphere. It pulsed once, a heartbeat of pure, distilled conflict and potential, tasting the air thick with the scent of mortal strife, ambition, and untapped fury.
Then, like a divine bullet forged in the death throes of a god, it streaked downwards. Its trajectory wasn't random. It sought heat. It sought struggle. It sought a heart where the embers of defiance still glowed, however faintly. It arrowed towards a sprawling, war-torn city choked with smoke, towards a district reeking of desperation and cheap ale, towards a narrow alley where a lone figure, battered and bleeding but eyes blazing with unbroken fury, was desperately fending off three attackers with a broken chair leg.
The spark didn't slow. It pierced the grimy city air, unseen, unfelt by mortal senses, zeroing in on the struggling figure. It hovered for a nanosecond above the sweat-slicked, blood-streaked hair…
**...And plunged downwards.**
High above, in the sterile silence of the reclaimed heavens, the Aethelgard continued its work, utterly unaware that the final act of the War God had just begun.