Hitman With A Badass System

1344  Truly Accepting Diana as his mother

Meanwhile, back in the heart of the unfolding carnage, the seven-headed cobra continued its rampage. The monstrous creature, its scales a sickly green under the dim light of the dying stars, ripped through the ranks of Michael's army. Venom, like liquid moonlight laced with poison, painted gruesome arcs across the battlefield, leaving trails of disintegrated bodies in its wake.

Michael, watching his forces fall, felt a cold fury build within him. He'd allowed this charade to play out long enough. It was time to remind Skyhall who they were dealing with.

"You want to dance?" he growled, his voice barely audible over the din of battle, yet somehow carrying to every corner of the pocket dimension. "Let's dance."

He then moved with pure, primal speed. One moment he was a shadow against the backdrop of stars, the next he was a thunderbolt, a black streak of pure kinetic energy aimed directly at the heart of the colossal serpent.

The Ancestors, despite their combined might, despite the arrogance of their borrowed power, weren't stupid. They'd seen what the God of Darkness could do, had witnessed the casual brutality of his attack on Lorian's flagship.

Staying put? That was suicide.

"EVADE!" Eldrin's voice, amplified a thousandfold by the serpent's monstrous form, boomed across the battlefield.

The serpentine creature twisted, bucking through the air with surprising agility for its size, its seven heads snapping this way and that as it tried to anticipate Michael's movements.

But Michael was a blur. He moved like something out of a nightmare, a whirlwind of shadows and crackling energy. As he closed the distance, his hands crackled with power, bolts of black lightning, lancing out to sear the air where the serpent had been a heartbeat before. The monstrous serpent, despite its size and power, was clearly outmatched, its movements growing increasingly frantic as Michael herded it, a spider playing with its food.

And below, watching the chase unfold, both armies seemed to forget their own petty skirmishes.

"By the gods, he's actually fighting it!" a skyhall angel breathed, his voice a mixture of awe and terror. His words were echoed a thousandfold across the ranks of the angels, their earlier confidence replaced by a chilling certainty: they were witnessing a battle between titans.

On the decks of a dozen Skyhall warships, cannons roared back to life, their celestial energy aimed not at the monstrous serpent, but at the God of Darkness himself. Blinding white beams lanced through the air, seeking to intercept Michael, to drive him back from his prey.

But this was a tactical error. A fatal miscalculation.

Because the moment those cannons fired, the moment they revealed their true target, something shifted in the demeanor of the dark army.

The demon army, their primal instincts honed by millennia of warfare, needed no further encouragement. With a guttural roar that shook the very foundations of Skyhall, they surged forward, no longer fleeing, but attacking. Their wings beat the air, carrying them towards the nearest Skyhall vessels. Their goal wasn't to fight, not in the traditional sense. It was far simpler, far more brutal: tear the ships apart, cripple their ability to fire, and let the God of Darkness deal with the stragglers.

And beside them, inspired by the ferocity of the demons, the remnants of the dark army surged forward. They'd been outmaneuvered, outgunned, but they weren't broken. Not yet. They'd tasted Skyhall blood now, and they were hungry for more. But as Michael harried the colossal serpent, a new threat emerged from the chaos.

Thorfinn Borgersson, fueled by a potent cocktail of dwarven ale and burning rage, had finally snapped. The humiliation of their previous encounter, the way Michael toyed with him – it was all too much.

He roared and charged. Even as Michael moved with that terrifying, blurring speed, a part of him registered the dwarf's movement. Thorfinn wasn't just blindly charging in a rage; there was a cold, calculating fury driving him, honed by centuries of battlefield experience.

He moved with a speed and agility that belied his stocky frame, his axe—a monstrous weapon that had tasted the blood of a thousand enemies and elves—whistling through the air in a deadly arc.

Time seemed to distort, the roar of battle fading to a dull murmur as Michael registered the threat. Thorfinn's axe, a blur of rune-etched steel, was aimed not at his chest, not at his legs, but at his neck.

A clean decapitation. Ambitious…But Michael activated Silenes as the world around him slowed to a crawl. He watched, a detached observer in his own personal time warp, as Thorfinn's axe, moving at a snail's pace now, arced towards him.

Michael simply chuckled, a low rumble in his chest, and sidestepped.

The axe, robbed of its momentum, passed harmlessly before him. He reached out, his hand a blur even within the time dilation, and casually plucked the weapon from the air, halting Thorfinn's charge as surely as if he'd hit him with a mountain.

The dwarf, caught mid-swing, stumbled, his momentum carrying him forward. Michael simply tightened his grip on the axe, letting the weight of Thorfinn's charge pull the dwarf off his feet.

He lifted him, holding him aloft by the neck, as the time dilation faded, the roar of battle rushing back in to fill the void.

"You little shit!" Thorfinn sputtered, his face rapidly turning purple as he dangled in Michael's grip. "Let me go, you bastard! I'll rip your goddamn head off!"

"Wrong move, Shorty," Michael chuckled, shaking his head in mock disappointment.

"What did you expect?" Michael chuckled, his grip tightening fractionally on Thorfinn's neck. He held the dwarf at eye level, the tip of his dark sword hovering tantalizingly close to Thorfinn's throat. "Did you think you could just swing your little toy axe and lop my head off? Heard of something called… godhood, Short Round?"

Thorfinn snarled, his face a mask of fury and something else… desperation. He kicked out, his boots connecting with Michael's chest plate with a clang, but it was like kicking a mountain. He was utterly outmatched, and they both knew it.

"Let me go, you overgrown bat!" Thorfinn spat, even as his struggles began to weaken. "I'll gut you like a fish, you hear me?"

But there was a tremor in his voice now, the fear he'd been trying so hard to conceal finally breaking through. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

Michael saw it, saw the moment realization dawned in Thorfinn's eyes. He wasn't walking away from this. This… this was it.

And something about that realization, about the raw terror in Thorfinn's eyes, must have struck a nerve. Because the dwarf, his face contorted in a mixture of rage and something colder, something more calculating, stopped struggling. He stared up at Michael, a chilling smile spreading across his lips.

"You know," he rasped, his voice barely a whisper now, but every word dripping with venom, "there's something you should know. Something about the day you were born…"

Michael frowned, a flicker of unease running down his spine.

"Spit it out, dwarf," he growled, his grip tightening instinctively on Thorfinn's neck.

"Twenty-eight years ago," Thorfinn began, drawing the words out, savoring the way Michael's eyes narrowed.

 "It was me who ripped you from your dear mother's arms. You weren't even an hour old, you little shit. Pathetic."

"What?" Michael stiffened, the amusement fading from his eyes to be replaced by a chilling emptiness.

"Oh, we had our fun with the bitch," Thorfinn chuckled, a wet, hacking sound. "Thirty days, we kept her alive. Thirty days of watching her break, knowing we'd taken everything from her. And in the end… she practically begged us to throw you into that portal, like the piece of trash you are."

The laughter died on Michael's lips, his amusement replaced by a bone-chilling certainty. Thorfinn wasn't lying. He could hear it in the dwarf's voice, see it in the cruel gleam of his eyes. This… this wasn't some pathetic attempt to break his concentration.

This was the truth. And the worst part? He recognized it. Deep in the recesses of his mind, behind the walls he'd erected to keep the pain and confusion of his earliest memories at bay cracked. Like a dam breaking under the strain of a thousand years of pent-up fury, those memories he'd suppressed, locked away in the darkest corners of his being, surged forward.

He saw her then as if through a haze of tears and fading light. Diana. Her face, so young, so much softer than he remembered, etched with exhaustion but still… beautiful. She was clutching two bundles close to her chest, her arms a protective cage around…

Two babies.

Him.

And Noah.

Michael's grip on Thorfinn's neck loosened, his own breath catching in his throat as he watched the scene unfold, a detached observer in his own personal hell. He saw the three elders, their faces twisted into masks of cold disdain, their hands moving in a blur of arcane gestures. He felt the tendrils of celestial and arch energy, dark and invasive, as they wormed their way into Diana's mind, twisting her thoughts, her memories…

He saw her fight back, and felt the raw, primal strength of a mother's love as she resisted their attempts to sever the connection, to turn her against her own flesh and blood.

Day after day, they'd tortured her, he realized, his stomach twisting into knots. But she never let go. Not once.

He saw the tears streaming down her face, tasted the salt of them on his own lips as she whispered words of love and comfort, a desperate attempt to shield them, to make them smile even as her world crumbled around her. They thought they'd broken Diana. Thought they'd crushed her spirit along with her defiance. But she hadn't given in, not completely. She'd fought them, tooth and nail, for him.

Thirty days. Thirty goddamn days she'd held on, enduring their torture, their manipulations, all to protect him, to shield him from the fate they'd planned.

In that moment of soul-crushing revelation, Michael understood. Those faces, etched into his memory since infancy, those bastards who'd ripped him from his mother's arms and tossed him into earth. The ones who did all of this were none other than Devdan, Erael, and Thorfinn. When Devdan and Erael realized Thorfinn had broken the news to the Dark Lord, Devdan's usual arrogance was replaced by fear. And Erael, her cold, calculating gaze finally cracking, revealing a sliver of something akin to… fear?

At that moment, a surge of raw, primal rage, unlike anything Michael had ever experienced, ripped through him. It was a visceral, all-consuming fury, fueled by years of suppressed pain, of betrayal, of the agonizing realization that everything he thought about Diana was wrong.

His eyes, usually a cold, steely gray, turned pitch black as black smoke began to snake out from beneath his armor, drawn to his rage like moths to a flame.

Despite his bravado, Thorfinn felt a jolt of primal fear run through him. The casual smirk, the air of amused detachment Michael had worn only moments before, was gone. Still, a part of him, the part that was fueled by spite and the bitter dregs of his dwarven pride, couldn't resist one last jab.

"Oh, she fought alright," Thorfinn rasped with a thin smile playing on his lips. "For a while. Screamed your name, begged us to stop. But in the end… she broke. Just like we knew she would. She even helped us toss you into that portal, did you know that? Couldn't get rid of you fast enough."

"You three are going to die in a way that no one has ever died…And you are going to wish you had never laid a hand on my mother," Michael said with cold furry and finally admitted with all his being that Diana was his mother…And he was truly prepared to go to any legnths to save her.