Time slowed to almost a complete halt, and space started tearing apart as the fabric of reality struggled to restrain the wild animal that was unleashed.

The only word that could describe what happened was rabid.

Eris, the Saintess, and the majority of the city suddenly disappeared as if they were erased from reality, and blood splashed as high as the dark outer void. When Arad moved, not even the crust of the universe could endure the sheer destructive force unleashed.

One by one, and millions in a single second, Arad ripped every single being that Vars had summoned like they were nothing. Heads flew, guts spilled, and bodies burned to ash upon contact with his massive, unstoppable hands.

A weak elderly man was evaporated. A begging woman, torn in half, a child, disintegrated, and an ancient and all-powerful hero, torn from head to ground like a doll. When Vars noticed that his thralls were being massacred left and right, he was already drowning in their torn innards.

Arad was out of control, going around at a 120% of his power, making sure that the entire forces of Murder were violated to the core and driven back to the ground with as much violence and merciless carnage that he could muster.

It didn’t matter who he faced; the exchange barely lasted a fraction of a millisecond, and the opponents always met a violent, swift death. This wasn’t the same Arad who fought with purpose, who only used his power for a clear goal; this was Arad at his most basic state, killing for the sake of killing and leaving Vars alone.

Arad had two reasons for going all out. The first was that he only wanted Vars out of everything that emerged from Murder, and the second was that if Eris really lost control of Murder, then he had better deal with it quickly before it overrides her consciousness with something else.

Before anyone could even start thinking, it was already clear that anything weaker than a god cannot hope to even be more than thin air in front of Arad. No mortal hand was going to stop such a being from going on a rampage, so the gods of Murder moved.

Their oldest, a gaunt old man with bloody red eyes, long white hair, and beard, burst in front of Arad, killing his fair share of Murder’s thralls. At this point, the only people who mattered were Vars, Katal, and the two old gods of Murder that came before them.

The blade that could easily murder even the gods, a living, cursed treasure lost to time, one whose worth couldn’t be measured even if the lives of gods were put on a scale. It held far more power than Eris herself had, probably three times more, and could easily split the mortal world in half.

But when the sword was about to cleave Arad’s head in half, it got bitten instead and shattered into a million tiny shards. Arad himself had bitten so hard that his teeth shattered, but that didn’t matter as he could always heal them back.

The old god froze for a second, unable to even fathom what had just happened, and Arad didn’t even give him time to think about it, since in the next blink, Arad’s entire body, and everything around them, had been torn apart with his void, and made to explode into a titanic burst.

The old god got washed away by the incandescent white flames, and he was burned to ash before his soul got swallowed whole by the darkness. He was killed even before he could engrave Arad’s face into his memory, and all that he knew before death was a face of pure darkness and cold nothingness that swallows everything.

The other old god was a woman, and when she saw what had just happened, she realized that Arad wasn’t like anything she had ever faced in her life. She could feel a deep sense of fear eating at her very soul, telling her that she had no chance of survival.

She had always been the predator, but today, she was the prey. She couldn’t reason with her coming demise, she couldn’t overpower it, she couldn’t trick it, and couldn’t even seduce it; nothing would work. She had murdered a lot, and knew the feeling far too well, and still refused to die without resisting.

That old god Arad just killed, she had managed to take him down and steal his throne. She seduced him and slowly chipped away at his life before swallowing him whole. But she didn’t have the luxury of time against Arad, and so, had to create it on her own.

Her time magic rushed forward like an endless net of entangled webs, aiming to both slow Arad down and regress his age, making him younger and weaker. Everyone starts as a weak, helpless baby, and those are the ones she loved to feast on the most.

But then, the moment her time threads touched Arad, her eyes, ears, and nose burst with blood. He was already violently tearing the fabric of space around himself to move, and thus, fatally damaging the fabric of time as well, to a level that should’ve brought the entire pantheon of gods down to slay him, yet no one seemed to care. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

Arad was violating both the universe and the Fates, yet was unharmed, and in fact, she sensed something even more terrifying.

"They... enjoy being abused by him?" As she thought that, Arad was already ripping her open from chest to ground with both hands, and before she could even feel pain, her soul was already sinking into oblivion.

But what scared her the most, was that getting murdered by him felt so good that she wished he could keep killing her forever, and so, she disappeared with a sad soul, begging to be killed again.

With two gods down, it had become obvious that Arad wasn’t just out of control, but unshackled by the universe. Forget being rabid; this was far worse than that. Vars didn’t even know if that was Arad anymore, and he started to think that he was someone else entirely. It didn’t matter how strong someone became; they shouldn’t be able to wound a lesser god, let alone blitz two gods of murder like they were nothing.

But that in and of itself didn’t matter, since the strongest still remained alive. Katal had killed that previous goddess and had ruled longer than her and the old man combined, and he was far more powerful than they both looked like mere children in front of him.

Katal was a tall man with a thin build, silver hair and eyes, and wearing a well-tailored suit, looking more refined than a nobleman, yet, in his black heart, he held an insatiable, sadistic hunger for pain, suffering, and pleasure.

If he wasn’t a god of Murder, than even hell won’t have a place for a man as vile as he was, and living up to his name, his power rivaled that of older gods and surpassed many as he had optimized the domain of murder to leech off war, conquest, fighting, violence, and countless other portfolios, turning him into a divine that grows stronger even without doing anything as everything in this world fed into his endless cycle of murder and hatred.

And today, he was going to have the chance to kill one of the people responsible for his downfall. He can’t touch Vars since they were both bound to Murder, but he can use his all to make Arad suffer, to tear him piece by piece, and then hunt everyone else who participated.

While everyone was terrified by the rampaging Arad, he was elated and thrilled beyond belief, and jumped at him on his own. "I’m going to make you cry! You draconic bastard!" He slashed Arad’s face in half with his bare hands and even forced the fabric of time and space to stabilize, robbing Arad of all of his mobility and speed.

"Those two were weaklings compared to me. If you think you can stand up to me, then I’ll make you watch as I..." But before that sentence could even finish, his soul was shattered into a thousand pieces, seared away with the golden radiance of an unstoppable spear.

The last thing Katal could hear was a demonic, eldritch void shaking the fabric of the universe. [If you call yourself Evil, then you’ve forgotten I exist, that we demons exist.] He was violently consumed by the abyss, digested and turned into demon food, eaten, and shat out to be eaten by lesser demons until he was nothing.

As the blood settled, it had only been a minute and a half since Arad went into a rampage, and now, only Vars remained standing in the endless sea of corpses, screaming as Arad’s voice consumed him whole.

When Vars disappeared, Arad fell to his knees in the blood, gasping for air. He had used all of his energy, all of his magic and stamina to suppress the entirety of murder and single out Vars’ vestige to seal away.

He had nothing left in him and felt so much exhaustion that he could die from it just by standing up. At that moment, a foot landed on his kneeling head. "I can’t believe you killed them all... I expected Katal to at least give you some trouble."

Eris was there, looking down at him with a smile.

"So... it was all an act?" He smiled and giggled. "I had to exhaust you somehow... Vars only had the portfolio for a second or two, he can’t possibly will control out of me. Thinking that he was in control was stupid."

Arad looked at her, "You’re one good actor. To even modify your own thoughts."

"To deceive you, I had to deceive myself and hope for the best." She smiled from ear to ear, "And, with this massacre you caused, my power had been amplified by several folds."

She was now far stronger than before, and Arad is exhausted to death. Their fight seems to be over, and she didn’t even need to pull the third act.

Then, in the next moment, Eris’s eyes exploded, her ears burst, and her nose gushed with a flood of blood.