Fire.
Not on his skin.
In him.
It erupted from the point of contact, a white-hot lance of pure agony that tore through muscle, bone, and marrow. Doom's back arched violently, his spine bowing like a drawn longbow, tendons standing out like cables under his skin.
A silent scream locked in his throat, choked off by the sheer, overwhelming intensity of the violation. This wasn't healing; this was reforging. His very essence was being unmade and remade in the image of the chained god's hunger.
His skin split. Not in wounds, but in seams, like clay cracking in a kiln, revealing glimpses of incandescent light beneath, not warmth, but the cold fire of the void. His bones moved with wet, grinding pops, elongating, reshaping, denser, harder, humming with contained power. He felt his ribs reknit, not just mended, but armored with something darker than bone.
The devastating wounds sustained in the warehouse reasserted themselves, the shattered arm, the ruined eye, only to be violently remade.
His shattered arm snapped back into alignment with a sickening crunch, the bone thickening, the muscle fibers coiling like steel springs infused with shadow. His swollen eye pulsed, the pressure building until the bruised flesh tore slightly at the corner, revealing an iris that flickered, for a terrifying instant, with the same abyssal hunger as the chained god's voids.
His blood sang.
It roared through his veins like molten metal, carrying not oxygen, but raw, destructive potential. Every nerve ending shrieked, overloaded, then fused into conduits for this new, terrifying energy.
He felt the limits of his flesh straining, tearing, then expanding to contain the impossible power flooding him. It was agony beyond any torture Kael had devised, beyond the cold betrayal of the knife. It was the universe pouring into a vessel too small, reshaping it with brutal, indifferent force into a weapon of primordial hunger.
The creature watched, its head tilted with rapt, horrifying fascination. The bottomless pits of its eyes drank in Doom's transformation, reflecting the internal inferno. It saw the ruin being reshaped into something sharper, deadlier. It saw the spark of humanity, already so dim, gutter and threaten to be extinguished by the rising tide of divine violence.
A low, rumbling sound emanated from its chest.
Satisfaction.
Pure and primal. The fractured sigil on Doom's chest blazed, the cracks seeming to writhe like live wires, drinking in the power.
When the fire finally receded, leaving behind a trembling, steaming husk, Doom collapsed forward onto his hands and knees, gasping. Sweat and blood-streaked gore slicked his skin. But he was whole.
More than whole.
He felt the concrete-like density of his bones, the coiled, hydraulic power in his muscles, the hyper-acuity of his senses, he could smell the iron in the blood pool, hear the individual groans of each massive chain link, see the minute fluctuations in the blood-red flames atop the pillars.
And beneath it all, a cold, deep, hungry well of power, waiting to be unleashed. The sigil pulsed steadily now, a corrupted brand, still fractured but thrumming with dark energy. He felt the chain attached to it, stretching across dimensions to the entity before him.
He looked at his hands. They were still human-shaped, but the knuckles seemed heavier, the tendons more pronounced. When he clenched his fist, the air crackled faintly around it. Obsidian claws, mirroring the entity's own, slid effortlessly from beneath his fingernails and retracted. Monstrous. Effortless.
The creature leaned back, the chains slackening slightly with a groan of relief. The predatory satisfaction radiating from it was palpable, a pressure against Doom's newly heightened senses.
"Go," it whispered, the sound slithering directly into Doom's mind, bypassing his ears. "Break them. Kill them. Be what you were always meant to be. Be more."
The vortex, the whirlpool of blood and darkness that had brought him here, reappeared before him on the obsidian floor. It pulsed with the same malevolent energy as the chained god, a doorway back to his prey.
Doom didn't hesitate. He didn't look back. He stepped into the screaming vortex.
He fell and landed back on the warehouse floor.
Alive.
Whole.
Hungry.
---
The Aegis operatives standing over the spot where his broken body had lain froze. The professional calm shattered, replaced by primal, gut-chilling terror. The air, thick with blood and gunpowder moments before, now crackled with something other.
Something deeply wrong. He stood naked amidst the carnage, coated in drying gore like a second skin. Steam rose faintly from his body in the cool air. His eyes, when they opened, held no pain, no fear. Only a flat, chilling emptiness that reflected the abyss he'd just visited. And beneath that emptiness, a furnace of pure, focused hunger fixed on the men who had shot his father. The fractured sigil above his heart pulsed with a slow, sickly light.
They died screaming.
Not because he was faster, though he moved with a speed that blurred, a flicker of shadow between the weak overhead lights.
Not because he was stronger, though when his hand closed on the first operative's rifle barrel, the hardened steel crumpled like foil with a shriek of tortured metal.
But because he was wrong. An abomination against flesh and physics.
He moved like liquid shadow given lethal intent. Physics seemed a suggestion he no longer heeded. A controlled burst of fire stitched the air where he had been a microsecond before. He was already among them. His hand, fingers now tipped with claws like obsidian shards, plunged through Kevlar and ceramic plate as if they were paper, ripping out a spine with a wet, tearing crunch. He discarded it like garbage and was on the next.
He didn't just kill them. He unmade them. Tactical vests offered no resistance; flesh parted like rotten fruit under his touch. Bones shattered into dust or splintered into jagged shrapnel that tore through others. He moved through the disciplined formation like a scythe through wheat, a whirlwind of impossible angles and brutal efficiency. There was no rage, no frenzy. Only a cold, methodical application of his new, ruinous gift to the task of extermination. He was violence incarnate, a walking blasphemy. The sigil flared with each kill, drinking in the spilled life-force, the cracks within it seeming to throb.
A strangled sound came from the generator. Kael.
Doom paused, mid-motion, a dying Aegis operative dangling from his grip like a broken doll. He turned his head, the movement unnaturally smooth.
Kael was propped against the rusted metal, his face ashen, blood frothing at his lips. His eyes, dimming with approaching death, were wide. Not with fear of the end, but with raw, disbelieving recognition.
He saw the impossible speed, the effortless brutality, the obsidian claws, the eyes holding the abyss.
He saw Ainar's terrifying grace fused with his own ruthless efficiency, then twisted and amplified into something monstrous and divine. He saw the hunger perfected.
A wet, rattling cough shook Kael. He tried to speak, managed only a whisper that cut through the dripping silence. "...Ainar..." It wasn't a question. It was an acknowledgment. A confirmation. The fire, the chaos, the devouring void, it was hers, reborn and perfected in this abomination he had forged. A grim, final understanding.
A flicker of something passed over Kael's face, not pain, not regret. Something colder. Darker.
Triumph.
His blood-slick lips twitched upwards, the ghost of a smile, the final expression of a man who saw his terrible legacy not just endure, but ascend. His head lolled back against the generator, the light fading completely from his eyes, fixed forever on the impossible thing his son had become.
Doom stared at his father's corpse. The hunger within him pulsed, a deep, satisfied thrum, but it didn't extend to the still form. Kael was... done. A chapter closed. The only thing left was the carnage, the silence, and the power singing in his veins. The sigil pulsed steadily, a cold brand. He felt the chain attached to it, stretching into the void, anchored to the chained god. He was no longer just Kael's weapon. He was bound.
---
Far away, in the darkness bound by fire and chains, the massive links groaned.
One link, the damaged one, weeping its iridescent fluid onto the dark floor, shuddered.
A hairline fracture, fine as spider silk, snaked across its pitted surface.
Just a little.
Just enough.