Global Gods : Skill-Resonance Awakened

Chapter 355: Ch 355 : A Failed Experiment

The Spire of Sins sat at the heart of the Demonic Capital, a towering obsidian needle that pierced the clouds of the Abyssal sky.

Inside the Great Hall of the Seven, the air was thick with the scent of malice and demonic Miasma.

"What do you mean, you can’t find him?!" Belial roared, his voice echoing off the vaulted ceilings like a thunderclap. His handsome face was contorted with a frantic fury.

"He is a single Demon God! Where else can he hide? The Abyss is our domain!"

The high-ranking Demon Gods standing before the throne trembled, their knees hitting the floor. Just as the General was about to offer a stuttering excuse, the massive, iron-bound doors of the hall groaned open.

Six pairs of footsteps resonated through the chamber. The temperature in the room plummeted.

Belial stood up abruptly, dismissing the messengers with a sharp wave of his hand. "Go! Scour every shadow, every rift, and every forgotten dungeon. Spread the word: whoever brings me the head of Lom will be blessed directly by the Lords. Move!"

The messengers vanished into the gloom just as the remaining six Demon Lords stepped into the circle of light.

At their head was Deimos, the Lord of Discord, whose very presence seemed to bend the surrounding space into an uncomfortable geometry.

"Belial," Deimos said. His voice was not loud, yet it carried a weight that made the marrow in Belial’s bones feel like ice. "Explain this emergency. We were anchored at the rift, waiting for Cosmos to make his move, only to be summoned back here by your frantic calls. I hope for your sake that the distraction is worth the potential escape of our prize."

"Lom," Belial hissed, his eyes darting around the circle of his peers. "That rat has been plotting against us since the beginning. He didn’t just stumble upon the City of Gods; he was a double agent. He leaked our entire ambush strategy to Cosmos. He told him about your positions at the rift, and he told him exactly how I would strike."

Belial’s voice was smooth, a masterpiece of the Semantic Authority he possessed.

In reality, he had no proof that Lom had betrayed them, but he needed a shield. He needed to bury the shame of his retreat beneath the narrative of a grand conspiracy. If he had lost because of a traitor, it wasn’t a failure of power.... it was a failure of security.

"You mean to say," Deimos asked, stepping closer until he was inches from Belial’s face, "that you, a Lord of the Abyss, lost a confrontation to an unknown ’Emperor’ because of a single spy?"

"It wasn’t just Cosmos!" Belial countered, his aura flaring in defense. "Adam was there. The God of Growth has likely consumed a Pill of Life; he was at his absolute peak, stronger than he was during the First Era. He used a forbidden technique to increase his powers And Cosmos... Cosmos was even more terrifying."

"Even at his peak, Adam shouldn’t be a match for your Paradox," Maledictus, the Lord of Curses, interjected. Her voice was a raspy whisper, her eyes glowing with a sickly green light. "How did you lose the conceptual ground?"

"Because instead of two enemies, I faced eighteen," Belial explained, his hands gesturing wildly to illustrate the scale.

"Cosmos has mastered a soul-splitting technique that defies all known logic. He manifested sixteen clones, and each one was a perfect duplicate of the main body. They shared a single, synchronized soul-network. I wasn’t fighting a man; I was fighting a hive-mind of Gods."

The hall fell into a heavy, contemplative silence. The Demon Lords exchanged looks of growing unease.

"We understand the tactical disadvantage," Beelzebub whispered, his voice buzzing with a thousand insectoid undertones. "But raw numbers do not explain a Lord’s retreat. Explain the nature of his power. What is his fundamental Law?"

Belial took a deep breath, his hands shaking slightly, a detail he didn’t bother to hide, as it added to the truth of his fear.

"He is... frustratingly immortal," Belial whispered. "I killed those clones. I disintegrated them, erased them with the Law of Lies, and crushed them with raw force. I killed them thousands of times over. But they returned. Within a second, the particles would reform and the clone would be back in the fight. It was as if he had no limit to his revives."

Deimos’s eyes narrowed. This was a direct challenge to their own authority.

The Demon Lords could revive, but it required an immense expenditure of Abyssal essence and time. If Cosmos could do it instantaneously and without apparent cost, the war of attrition was already lost.

"If you are shocked by his endurance," Belial said, his voice dropping to a low, mysterious register, "then you are not prepared for what I saw beneath his robes."

"What?" the Lords questioned in unison, their collective voices making the obsidian pillars groan.

"His hands," Belial said, his eyes unfocused as he recalled the sight of the swirling dark matter. "They weren’t flesh. They were made of the same texture as the reality itself. A cluster of stars trapped in skin, shimmering with the light of the Void Mother."

The mention of the Void Mother acted like a physical blow. The Demon Lords stood like statues, the weight of their history pressing down on them.

"Is he her offspring?" Malakai asked, his voice trembling. "Or a specialized creation intended to replace us?"

"Perhaps you are overthinking it," Deimos said, though his own composure was fraying. "He could be a failed experiment, a discarded prototype that found a way to stabilize. And you know the Laws: the void Mother does not interfere in the struggles of her creations. She is a silent observer. If we kill him, she will not descend to save him."

"A failed experiment?" Belial sneered. "Maybe. But that experiment is evolving. The cosmic skin was spreading even as we fought. I estimate that within a few centuries, his entire form will be converted into that star-matter. He is shedding his humanity like a snakeskin."

"But why does it matter?" Ichor, the Lord of Corrosion, said, looking for any shred of hope. "Beauty doesn’t win wars. A cosmic body is still just a body. It can be bled."

"Can it?" Belial asked, looking directly at Ichor. "Because during our battle, my Laws worked perfectly on his flesh, right up until the moment I tried to target his hands."

"My Lies slid off the cosmic matter like water off a diamond. I tell you now, brothers: once he is fully converted, our Laws will have no purchase on him. He will be a Truth that we cannot deny."

The silence returned, deeper and colder than before. The Demon Lords realized they were no longer looking at a rival God; they were looking at a timer. Every second Sunny spent Harvesting the multiverse was a second closer to their total obsolescence.