Chapter 870: My strongest version.

Vergil’s crooked smile had barely finished forming when Odin moved. There was no visible preparation, nor any dramatic accumulation of energy that would allow the attack to be predicted. The old king merely adjusted his stance slightly, Gungnir shone in his hand, and in the next instant, reality between them was crossed by a golden line too thin to resemble a real strike. It was so fast that, for a brief moment, Vergil thought nothing had happened.

Then his body gave way.

From the waist upward, the entire left side simply ceased to exist.

Half of his torso vanished along with his arm, ribs, lung, part of his heart, and an entire section of the demonic structure supporting his form. Black and red blood exploded backward, dragged away by the pressure of the strike, while fragments of vaporized flesh and bone disappeared into the air as though they had been erased. The sensation was not only pain.

It was interruption.

It was as though the existence of that part of his body had been denied for one absolute second.

Vergil fell sideways, his right leg sinking into Asgard’s cracked ground, and the impact opened another crater among ruins, shattered trees, and what remained of his battle with Thor. For a fraction of a second, everything around them seemed to stop. Odin’s ravens remained motionless, watching. Mjölnir vibrated in his remaining hand. Yamato gave a low chime, as though she had sensed the attack before he did. In the distance, the last Valkyries who had not yet crossed the portal looked back and turned pale.

Odin did not advance immediately.

He merely watched.

It was the posture of someone who already knew the outcome of a battle before the first strike. There was no cheap arrogance on his face, nor the shallow pleasure of someone humiliating a weaker enemy. There was only calculation. He looked at Vergil’s mutilated body the way a king watches a piece moving across a board, evaluating whether the strike had already ended the play or whether further effort would be required.

Thor, supported by his father’s runic energy several meters behind him, remained unconscious. His disfigured and blood-covered face contrasted with the terrifying serenity of the All-Father. That image alone explained the difference between them. Thor was impulsive destruction.

Odin was administered destruction.

Thor punched mountains until they collapsed. Odin looked at them and decided which part of the world should disappear first.

At the bottom of the crater, Vergil’s flesh began reconstructing itself.

Threads of demonic energy and the Authority of Death emerged from the open wound like black roots searching for their proper shape. The bones returned first, raised and woven together by brutal force. Then muscles, nerves, and vessels closed in successive layers, stitching the void together with obscene speed. The skin came last, dark for a second before returning to its normal color, while his left arm reformed all the way to the fingertips.

The entire process took only a few moments, but it made something Odin already suspected perfectly clear.

Killing Vergil would not be simple.

Vergil slowly rose from the crater and wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth with his thumb. His gaze remained fixed on Odin throughout the entire process. There was no panic in his expression.

There was no excitement either.

There was analysis.

That strike had resolved one thing immediately. Against Thor, he could afford to play, provoke, and allow the battle to become a humiliating lesson about the relationship between a god and his weapon. Against Odin, every mistake meant instant amputation, and every opening would be punished with surgical precision.

He took a deep breath and spoke mentally without taking his eyes off the old man.

"Crimsaria. Nivara. Can you measure his strength?"

Inside him, both dragons reacted almost at the same time. Crimsaria’s voice came first, warm, direct, and filled with an irritation that sounded more like violent excitement.

"Compared to us? Weak."

Nivara answered next, colder, more objective, and precisely because of that, more useful.

"Compared to you, he is approximately twice as strong. Perhaps slightly more in technical refinement. Far more dangerous with that spear."

Vergil exhaled through his nose without looking away.

"Excellent. That only improves my mood."

Crimsaria laughed inside his mind.

"Are you finally going to stop playing?"

Nivara continued before he could answer.

"If you keep hiding your power, he will tear you apart again. And next time, he may aim for your head."

Vergil silently agreed.

He had truly wanted to save this for later. He wanted to keep certain cards hidden from Asgard, from Odin, and from every divine gaze capable of spreading news about what he had become. But the problem with facing a God-King was simple.

Reserves lost their value when the alternative was dying while holding secrets.

Odin finally spoke, breaking the tense silence over the ruins.

"Impressive regeneration. But it does not change your position."

Vergil raised his face, and a small, cold smile appeared.

"You talk too much for someone who just watched his son get beaten."

Odin’s expression did not change. Only Gungnir shone a little brighter in his hand, and that was more threatening than any verbal answer. The old man’s divine pressure spread across the area again, compressing the air and making the surrounding ruins groan. The ravens stirred. The clouds above Asgard became heavier. Even the space cut apart by the absence of the Bifröst seemed to react to that man’s will.

Vergil closed his eyes for an instant.

When he opened them again, he decided to stop hiding.

The energy inside him exploded in layers.

It was not a single aura rising all at once like a simple display of power. Multiple presences rose at the same time, one over another, crushing together, merging, and finding a new balance through the monstrous will he exerted over himself.

The Authority of Death came first, covering the ground in dark and inevitable pressure.

Then the six Authorities of the Deadly Sins emerged one by one, each coloring the air in its own way.

Lust pulsed in deep pink before being crushed into the greater flow.

Greed shone with a sickly gold.

Envy brought a cold green.

Gluttony burned in heavy orange.

Sloth drowned everything in a suffocating dark blue.

Wrath, the most aggressive of all, appeared like an invisible red moon opening behind Vergil’s soul.

His body changed along with the explosion of power.

His white hair grew violently, flowing down his back to his waist like a thick cascade of living snow, carrying violet reflections and thin shadows between the strands. His demonic horns broke farther upward, lengthening into brutal arcs colored in a violet marked by Death, as though the bone had been bathed in divine poison. The sclera of his eyes became completely black, and his irises shone at the center like cutting points of murderous intent.

From his left shoulder, the shadow began to harden.

First as dark smoke.

Then as plates.

Armor was born from the union of darkness and authority, descending from his shoulder to his hand in aggressive, angular lines, marked by ridges that looked carved from solidified grief. His left hand became completely covered, the fingers lengthened by subtle claws of condensed energy. Parts of his chest and the side of his neck were also touched by the transformation, creating an asymmetrical and threatening appearance, as though the concept of Death itself had chosen to clothe him without caring for human aesthetics.

The air around him trembled.

The nearby ruins began to disintegrate at the edges, corroded by the mere presence of his new form. Cracks raced across the ground. Odin’s runes lost their glow for a second. Thor, still unconscious, reacted instinctively with an involuntary tremor, as though even without awareness he sensed that the thing standing before his father was no longer the same man who had beaten him minutes earlier.

The Valkyries still watching from a distance froze.

Brynhildr, holding Gjallarhorn against her chest, widened her eyes slightly. Sigrun took a step backward without realizing it. Freya, pale, felt her stomach turn. This was not merely an increase in power.

It was a complete reorganization of combat identity.

The man who had previously appeared to be an abnormally powerful Demon King now assumed a presence that touched the domain of true gods.

Inside his mind, Crimsaria whistled.

"Now that is better."

Nivara confirmed it without hiding her renewed attention.

"Now the two of you are almost equal."

Vergil released a short, low laugh without any trace of relief. It was the laugh of someone who had finally stopped restraining himself and therefore knew the next step would be far worse for everyone involved.

Odin watched everything in silence.

For the first time since the confrontation began, the God-King’s single eye narrowed in a real reaction. It was not fear. Odin was not the kind of being who retreated because of a powerful transformation.

But there was recognition.

He understood in that instant that the opponent before him was not merely a bold demon, nor a collector of stolen powers, nor an irritating grandson of a celestial bloodline. This was something undergoing accelerated mutation, something combining authority, sin, death, and a combat instinct that could no longer be treated as lesser.

"Gungnir," Odin murmured, almost as a warning to his own spear.

Vergil raised Yamato.

The sword answered before being called by name. The blade vibrated, not with childish jealousy as Mjölnir had, but with absolute familiarity. Yamato recognized that form. She recognized that level of commitment. Above all, she recognized that Vergil had finally stopped lying to himself about the size of the enemy.

The weapon’s transformation began immediately.

The sheath dissolved into black and violet particles. The blade itself lengthened, thickened in certain places, and became more refined in others, losing the elegant simplicity of the dimensional-cutting sword to become something far older in meaning and far higher in rank. The guard expanded, gaining noble, almost sacred contours, while golden and black inscriptions appeared along the metal. The edge began releasing silver light with blue depth, as though a piece of frozen sky had been forged inside it.

Demonic, divine, and deathly energy aligned in an impossible coexistence, not fighting each other, but obeying the central identity of the weapon.

Excalibur.

Not a copy.

Not a metaphor used out of vanity.

The Divine Weapon awakened from Yamato as a direct response to Vergil’s new state, rising from perfect companion to a higher-level symbol of war. The mere fact that it existed in his hand caused the surrounding space to twist again, this time not only through cutting, but through conceptual recognition.

A weapon destined for kings, gods, and judgment.

Vergil raised the transformed blade before his face for a second and watched the dark reflection of his own eyes across it. Then he lowered the point toward Odin.

"Divine Weapon," he said, and Asgard itself seemed to listen. "Excalibur."

The name fell heavily over the battlefield.

Odin’s ravens opened their wings at the same time. Gungnir shone brighter. The wind changed direction. The absence of the stolen Bifröst seemed to scream at the edges of the realm, and the clouds above began turning in slow circles, as though even Asgard’s sky were trying to decide which monster it should answer first.

Vergil smiled.

It was not empty arrogance. It was not the youthful madness of someone excited by his own transformation.

It was pure recognition.

Finally, the battle had become worthy of what he carried.

"Now," he said, adjusting his stance while the new armor of shadows groaned softly and six Authorities and Death compressed into brutal harmony around his body, "let us see whether a God-King can make me kneel."

Odin tilted Gungnir slightly.

The answer came dry, carrying a weight as ancient as his throne.

"Come."