Mercy

Apollo materialized in an eerie dimension, a grotesque creation of Nova's design. His powers were severed, nullified; his divine attributes, strength, speed, stamina, all the pillars of his godhood, locked away, leaving him frail, mortal, and utterly forsaken.

He sweated profusely, rivulets streaming down his brow as the dimension's heat surged like a relentless rollercoaster, climbing toward an unbearable zenith, teetering just shy of its climax yet agonizingly distant from relief.

The sky bled.

It was no metaphor; here, the concept of metaphor was obliterated. The heavens wept thick, viscous streams of crimson, each droplet hissing on contact with the ground, searing thin, smoking furrows into flesh, rock, and bone alike. No sun, no star, no moon illuminated this place, only a pervasive, sickly glow, as if an infernal furnace raged behind the clouds. The light, if it could be called that, was perverse: a pulsing red, wrathful and sentient, slithering over skin, clawing at eyes, branding its malevolence into every jagged contour of the landscape.

The ground beneath was no ground at all. It writhed, breathed, and groaned, as if the dimension were the entrails of some ancient, tormented beast. One moment, a vast plain of cracked obsidian flesh sprawled for miles; the next, it convulsed, erupting into jagged spires that twisted and screeched as they birthed themselves. Rivers of molten blood surged through the fissures, boiling and belching acrid steam reeking of charred hair and raw flesh. Nothing held fast. Mountains crumbled like ash; canyons gaped without warning, only to stitch themselves shut with sinew and barbed wire. It was chaos incarnate, motion devoid of mercy.

At its core, Apollo screamed. His guttural, primal wail echoed through the dimension, a place more harrowing than the Infernal Realm, its resonance swallowed by the relentless, churning void.

The God of Light, ensnared helplessly in this grotesque dimension crafted by Nova, could do nothing, think nothing; he was bound for eternity, all because his hubris and venomous tongue had invited karma's merciless retort.

As a Supreme God, Apollo had sundered countless civilizations, obliterating galaxies, tormenting the mortal realm, and blaspheming against the Lower Heaven Gods. He was an unworthy deity of light, his radiance tainted by cruelty, and thus, his punishment was just.

The acidic rain had devoured half his face, leaving a grotesque tapestry of raw muscle, shredded sinew, and festering sores that oozed with a sickly sheen. His right eye had dissolved—days ago, perhaps years; time here defied reason, stretching seconds into centuries, agony unyielding. It felt like an eternity of torment.

Every breath was fire. The air bore weight, heat, and malice, invading his lungs like shards of glass, tearing with each ragged inhale. He coughed, spewing blood thick as tar, flecked with fragments of bone and ash. Yet he crawled, not to escape, such a concept was void here, but to evade the shifting terrain that hungered to crush and consume him, like a moth drawn to a flame's ruin.

The ground groaned and split, a maw lined with serrated teeth of fused bone and iron snapping shut a fraction too late, snaring only the tattered remnants of his cloak. He didn't scream this time; he'd learned the dimension fed on sound, each cry summoning fresh torment.

Above, the rain returned. Fat, crimson droplets fell like a vengeful god's tears, splashing onto his ruined face. The pain was immediate, all-consuming, not merely chemical but spiritual, burrowing past nerves into his soul. His cheek bubbled, flesh sloughing off like molten wax. He pressed his head to the ground, hoping its heat might cauterize the wound.

But the ground had its own will.

It pulsed beneath him like a dying heart, slick with an unnameable fluid. With a wet lurch, the terrain split, peeling open like rotten fruit to reveal twitching nerves and glassy, lidless eyes staring with blind accusation. They blinked in unison; he recoiled, but there was no refuge. Every direction led to the same madness.

A shriek tore through the distance, not a creature, for no true creatures existed here, but the sky itself, ripping along a new seam. The world tilted abruptly; gravity inverted, hurling his broken body skyward. He tumbled through the viscous air, firelight flickering across his half-eaten skin, before crashing onto a jagged slope of ribbed rock. Something snapped in his arm, again, but screaming was futile.

He had screamed once, for what felt like eons, until his vocal cords shredded, forcing him to learn silence. This place had no use for words, only actions. Its language was pain; its love was agony.

A high-pitched, mechanical whine echoed through the burning valley, like feedback from a shattered intercom. Then came the machines.

They weren't wrought by hands or logic. Towering, insectile constructs rose from the molten ground, half-organic, half-metal, their rusted scaffolding veined with pulsing arteries, exhaling clouds of black steam. One turned toward him, an orb-like sensor blinking open like a malevolent eye, a long needle unfurling from its core with surgical precision.

He tried to run, but his legs betrayed him. He could only crawl, desperate, scraping his limbs raw across jagged stone. The machine didn't pursue—it didn't need to. A hooked chain launched from its side with a sound like tearing cartilage, screaming through the air to wrap around his ankle, biting deep into tendon and bone, dragging him back like carrion.

Hoisted upside down, he dangled like butchered meat as the machine's limbs closed in. The needle stabbed into his chest, shallow, slipping between ribs, targeting nerves, not organs. The pain wasn't fire or knives: it was memory. The needle pulsed, flooding his mind with the faces he'd destroyed: planets he'd incinerated, children whose screams had haunted the night. The machine fed him his sins, looping them like a relentless reel while his body convulsed, nerves screaming under the onslaught.

Without ceremony, it released him.

He plummeted into a pool of blood so deep it threatened to swallow him. He thrashed, but the fluid was viscous, adhesive. Faces rose from its surface, pale, eyeless, slack-jawed, moaning softly, whispering curses in tongues long extinct, their voices a chilling litany of his crimes.

The rain returned again, heavier now. It came in sheets, falling so fast it looked like red lightning slashing from the heavens. Each drop pierced the surface of the blood pool with a his, releasing smoke and screams. His skin peeled, boiled, melted. The flesh of his fingers sloughed off like old bark. Exposed bone cracked under the chemical onslaught. 

And yet, he did not die. 

That was the worst truth of all.

Here, death was a mercy denied. 

The sky flickered, and the terrain twisted again. The pool drained beneath him, sucked away into some unseen maw below. He tumbled into darkness, long, hollow, and endless, until he struck a new surface. The one was smooth, cold, metallic. 

He was inside something. 

Walls surrounded him, pulsing with light. Not red, but blue, a cruel, clinical blue, the kind found in operating rooms or interrogation chambers. Dozens of mirrors lined the walls. Not real mirrors, these showed him as he once was: tall, proud, armored in black steel, a conqueror. 

And then they morphed. His reflection began to rot, crack, and melt. In each image, he decayed a little more. His eye socket collapsed. His teeth fell out. Maggots burrowed through his tongue. Every mirror told a different version of his disintegration, playing it back with intimate, relentless detail. 

Then, one by one, the reflections turned to face him. 

And smiled. 

He backed away; a wall met his spine, one that hadn't existed a moment before. It pressed inward, soft and spongy, like the surface of breathing lung tissue. The floor throbbed in sync with his heartbeat, or perhaps with the heartbeat of the dimension itself. He curled into himself, trembling not from cold, but from the certainty that this torment would never end.

Because this place was not just a prison;

It was punishment: a sentence, a living and bleeding verdict passed down by something older and crueler than any god.

And he had earned it.