Chapter 464: The Last Dawn 4
"By the abyss," Luna breathed, her voice barely audible over the sound of clashing titans. "Garduck, how is this possible? Those statues... they’re holding back an entire pantheon."
Garduck’s silver hair was matted with sweat and divine ichor, his frame trembling not from exhaustion but from recognition of power that dwarfed his own colossal strength. His green eyes were fixed on Ozymandias, who stood atop his wall like a conductor orchestrating a symphony of destruction.
"We thought we knew his strength," Garduck said quietly, his voice carrying memories of the second event. "But this..." He gestured at the monuments, at the city that seemed to pulse with its own heartbeat. "This is beyond anything we witnessed."
Luna’s gaze followed his to where Ozymandias stood, unmoved by the chaos raging around his domain. The pharaoh’s expression was one of casual amusement, as if watching children play at war rather than witnessing combat between divine forces.
"Adam called him the ultimate support," Luna whispered, the words carrying the weight of remembered conversations. "He said Ozymandias could turn any battle, defend any position, outlast any siege..."
Her voice trailed off as Ozymandias’s head turned toward them, his ancient eyes meeting theirs across the battlefield. Even at this distance, his gaze carried such weight that both demons instinctively shuddered.
The pharaoh’s lips curved in a sneer that held ancient contempt. His voice carried across the battlefield despite the chaos, each word falling like a hammer blow on the ears of gods and demons alike.
"And he was severely mistaken," Ozymandias declared, his tone dripping with disdain for the very concept. "Support? A king takes what he wants for himself!"
The true terror had yet to awaken.
Ozymandias raised his arms to the heavens, his golden necklace blazing with captured starfire as his voice boomed across the battlefield with the finality of prophecy itself: "Monument One—arise and eclipse the sun!"
The desert floor cracked like an eggshell as something impossibly vast stirred beneath the sands. Ancient stone groaned against the weight of millennia as the greatest of all monuments began its ascension from the tomb of ages. Sand cascaded like waterfalls as a form larger than pyramids, more magnificent than mountains, tore itself from the earth’s embrace.
Monument One rose with the majesty of a newborn god.
Like its brothers, this colossus bore the weathered scars of countless millennia, its surface cracked and pitted by time’s relentless assault. But as it rose, something miraculous began to happen. The blood that had been spilt across the battlefield—divine ichor from wounded gods, demonic essence from Luna’s flames, the life force of destroyed constructs—began to flow toward Monument One like rivers seeking the sea.