Part 5: The God in Ruin
0 bit the rod in half.
Steel snapped between its teeth with a metallic shriek, shards embedding into its own face as it grinned through the impact. A stream of clear biofluid leaked from its jaw like drool.
Kairo didn't retreat. He drove his knee into 0's chest, shattering two ribs, then pulled back his mutated hand and plunged it again—this time through the thing's throat.
Blood and sparks erupted. 0 writhed, limbs flailing like a puppet on fire.
They rolled again, crashing into a bank of surgical arms. One activated mid fall and fired a scalpel blade into Kairo's shoulder, embedding deep.
He tore it out. Used it to carve through 0's abdomen.
Intestines weren't what spilled. It was tubing—fluid lines. Feeding mechanisms. A tangle of copper nerves and hardened glass veins. Kairo ripped them apart, yanked the entire lower spinal cluster free, and slammed it against the ground.
0 shrieked.
Not in pain.
In defiance.
It wrapped its remaining arm around Kairo's head and bit his ear off. Kairo responded by grabbing 0's jaw with both hands and snapping it sideways, cracking the skull at the hinge.
Then came the final blow.
Kairo stood, one leg dragging, mouth full of blood. He picked up 0 by the spine and swung him into a pillar. The wall cracked. Again, and again, and again—each strike bending the machine's body until it no longer moved.
Finally, he dropped him.
0 twitched. Its body didn't know how to die.
Its head rolled sideways, half detached, and began to laugh.
"Not enough."
The voice glitched. Mockery soaked in data static.
Kairo knelt slowly. His face was a wreckage. His body, a warzone.
He reached forward, took hold of 0's scalp. Flesh came away like peeling wax.
0 tried to bite again. Didn't make it.
Kairo shoved two fingers—black with burn, bones showing—into the sockets. Then pulled.
The skull cracked. He did not rush. He took his time, because he enjoyed it.
Tendons stretched. Wires popped. Bone split with a grinding squeal. 0's processor began to spit code:
PROTOCOL—R3WRITE// CORE-LINK FAILED DOMINANT GENE: NULL RUN—\IAM—\I-AM—\I—
The last line died in a stream of static.
Kairo tore the head in half. Threw one half into a broken vent. Dropped the other into a slop of clone viscera.
Then stood.
His chest was open. His heart exposed. His jaw hung in shreds. One eye gone. He was dying.
But he walked.
He walked into the open dawn, the air sharp against shredded muscle. Each footstep hissed. His blood, corrupted by Paragon's sin, boiled where it hit the ground.
He whispered through ruin:
"Not enough."
Then turned his back on Eden as the dome collapsed behind him.
Smoke. Ash. Sunlight. And the trail of a god in ruin.