An absolute, ringing silence fell over the God’s Wake.

  The Red God’s inflated, mangled corpse remained jammed firmly between the chasm walls, forming a plug of vitrified flesh and shattered metal directly beneath the precipice.

  The Bone Ship used its bone tail and paws to pull out of the ravine.

  Trenn knelt on the tilted timber deck. His breathing was ragged. His golden tail hung slack against the wood. He was coated in the sticky, gold blood of the Red God. In his hands, he held the ivory stock of Zeen’s soul-bound musket.

  As the physical ringing in his ears faded, it was replaced by a hollow, suffocating quiet in his mind. Trenn closed his eyes and instinctively reached out through his empathic web, hunting for the familiar, jagged hum of the gnome's soul.

  He found nothing.

  The tether that had connected them since the Wayrest was severed, leaving a gaping, psychic crater that hit Trenn harder than the explosion. Zeen was just... gone.

  “No…”

  He tuned his Mana Radiation. In his gold tail, he felt the discordant hum of the Necrosis Element… and there it was. Zeen’s soul, next to Gil’s. They were looking at each other, holding hands over the musket, refusing to move on from the World Between Worlds.

  Trenn stared down at the wedge of crushed Red Metal beneath them. The tomb of the Red God. The tomb of his friend.

  "Zeen..." Ezy whispered from the cockpit, her broken voice drifting through the lingering smoke.

  Her grief pierced through Trenn's paralysis. He gripped the cold ivory stock in his hands. Not gone. Not yet.

  Trenn slowly climbed to his feet. He remembered the dying wish.

  “Bind me to the musket when I'm done.”

  His eyes, bleeding gold and rimmed with soot, burned with a terrible, absolute focus. To perform the ritual, Almitad had used an emerald gifted by the Gem-Croc.

  Trenn pulled the musket’s hammer. The perfectly cut gemstone was there. He traced Gil’s tether, from his ghostly form to the green stone.

  He’d become a master of binding, of tethers. Was that all he had to do? Create a bond between Zeen’s soul and the emerald, while attuned to the Necrosis Element?

  The cold, discordant hum flooded his veins, freezing the fire in his chest. He threw his awareness into the World Between Worlds.

  I've got you, Trenn projected, his mind a steel trap closing around his friend’s spirit.

  Trenn poured his mana into the stone. A profound, resonant chime echoed across the deck. The musket shuddered in Trenn’s grip.

  For a fraction of a second, the two translucent figures flickered into existence over the weapon—a broad-shouldered gnome in a cook's apron, and a smaller, soot-stained gnome with a manic grin. Their clasped hands met the stone, and their spectral forms dissolved into a dual-toned pulse of silver and warm orange light that settled deep within the ivory stock.

  Trenn collapsed back against the Crusher’s treads, his chest heaving, the musket clutched tightly to his chest.

  They were together.

  The rumble of engines broke the silence.

  From the far end of the God’s Wake, the surviving Wolf Kin riders had returned.

  There were only a dozen of them left. They idled their heavy motorcycles a hundred yards away, their engines a low, uncertain growl.

  They looked at the massive skeletal galleon. They looked at the geyser of ichor pooling around the wedged, dead mass of the Red God.

  And they looked at Vavnaar. The exile was covered head-to-toe in a mix of Wolf Kin and god blood, holding a greatsword that hummed with violence, standing protectively in front of his three pups.

  The riders dismounted. They didn't draw their weapons. Instead, they dragged a figure from the back of the lead motorcycle.

  It was a massive Wolf Kin in blue-painted armor. He was bound in heavy iron chains, his snout bloodied, his eyes darting frantically.

  “Tribane,” whispered Vavnaar.

  The riders hauled their former Alpha through the dust and threw him at Vavnaar’s feet. They didn't say a word. They simply stepped back and bowed their heads, exposing the back of their necks in absolute submission to the victor.

  Tribane looked up, baring his teeth in a pathetic, desperate snarl. "You were exiled! You have no claim—"

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Vavnaar didn't let him finish. Silver Flash moved in a fluid arc.

  The hum of the blade was followed instantly by the dull thud of Tribane’s head hitting the vitrified glass.

  Vavnaar shook the blood from his sword and sheathed it. He turned to Yetran, Arenlys, and Manalee, the tan pup. His scarred snout softened for a fraction of a second.

  "We are done running," Vavnaar told them. "We are home."

  He turned back to Trenn. The Wolf Kin approached the edge of the chasm, pulling heavy iron canteens from the saddles of the abandoned bikes. He waded into the pooling ichor, filling the flasks with the warm blood of the Red God.

  The other Wolf Kin followed, and collected more of the precious liquid.

  He looked up at the Wild Mage resting against the Crusher.

  "We have our kingdom, and we have our bounty," Vavnaar rumbled, bowing his head in a gesture of profound, hard-earned respect. "We are even, God Slayer. May the mist never hide your prey."

  Trenn nodded slowly as the Wolf Kin pack mounted their Black Liquid-powered bikes and rode back toward the tree line, leaving the ruins of the God's Wake behind.

  Ezy sat in the cramped, oil-scented cockpit of the Crusher.

  In her living hand, she held the skull of the Shepherd of Loss.

  Zeen had carved and painted it beautifully. The marigold vines, the gilded spiderwebs. And set perfectly into the right eye socket was the cracked, hollowed-out obsidian sphere of the One-Eye.

  You were always the smartest one in the class.

  A tear carved a clean track through the soot on her cheek. She traced the carved bone with her thumb. She had lost so many pieces of herself. Her hand, her eye, her ear, her foot. She had bolted scrap metal and dead bone to her body just to keep moving.

  But Zeen wasn't scrap. Zeen was family.

  Ezy lifted the death mask. She took a shuddering breath, the smell of stale calcium and old magic filling her nose, and lowered it over her head. She cinched the leather strap tight.

  She opened her eye.

  Her left eye saw the interior of the Crusher’s cockpit, rendered in the dull, grey light of the overcast sky.

  But her right eye—the eye she had lost to the Fire Elemental, what seemed like a lifetime ago—opened into a world of vibrant, violent color.

  The One-Eye amulet, positioned perfectly over her empty socket, acted as a lens. The shadow magic trapped within the shattered sphere resonated with her own neural pathways. The blindness vanished, replaced by a high-contrast thermal and magical overlay.

  She could see.

  Through the right side of the mask, she saw the residual heat bleeding from the Crusher’s manifold. She saw the ambient, glowing radiation of the Red God’s ichor pooling in the chasm. She saw the warm, steady heartbeat of Mara standing on the deck.

  The fluttering wings of Bomber, circling above, with Skate in its furry paws.

  Ezy touched the cold bone of the mask, a watery smile breaking across her face.

  "You stubborn, brilliant idiot," she whispered, her voice echoing with a hollow, resonant rattle from within the skull. "It fits perfectly."

  The winch of the Crusher shrieked as Ezy hoisted the last of the heavy wooden Ratling barrels onto the Bone Ship's deck.

  They had spent hours harvesting the Red God’s ichor. They had enough liquid gold to buy an army. Or, more importantly, to buy the ultimate favor from the Grimoire Mages.

  Trenn sat on the edge of the timber deck, his legs dangling over the massive white ribs. He stared at the twice-bound musket resting across his lap, his thumb tracing the fused emerald.

  Footsteps approached. Mara sat down beside him.

  She looked exhausted. The black Husk armor was gone, replaced by a simple canvas tunic that hung loosely over her. She smelled of pine needles and dried Wolf Kin blood.

  "We have the ichor," Mara said, looking at the rows of sealed barrels. "The Anurys Mirror is only a few days' march from here."

  "Yeah," Trenn said softly. "I can finally go home."

  He looked at her, the weight of the impending goodbye suddenly heavier than the golden scales on his back. "Mara, I... I don't know how to thank you. For not giving up on me, even when... For everything."

  Mara turned to him, her amber eyes narrowing in genuine confusion.

  "Thank me?" she scoffed. Her ears twitched in annoyance. "Trenn, if you think you're walking through that portal alone, the gold has finally rotted your brain."

  Trenn blinked, stunned. "What? Mara, Earth is... It's a warzone right now. It's dangerous, it has no natural mana, it’s—"

  "It's where you’re going," Mara interrupted, her voice leaving no room for argument. She rested her hand on the hilt of her kris knife. "I broke my oaths to the Mana Forest to follow you. I have no home here anymore. My pack is you, the gnome, and whatever weird pets you collect on the way. Where you go, I go."

  "And somebody has to maintain the heavy artillery," a hollow, resonant voice called out.

  Trenn turned. Ezy leaned against the Red Metal leg of the Crusher. She wore the skull mask, the black obsidian eye gleaming with an eerie, violet inner light. Her massive skeletal hand tapped against her metallic leg.

  "Going to another world through a magical mirror to fight Wild Mage Warlords?" Ezy let out a sharp, rattling laugh. "That is exactly the sort of Wild Mage Song nonsense I signed up for when I left the Hive."

  A flutter of pink and yellow descended from the grey canopy. Bomber’s legs opened, dropping Skate onto the timber deck. The slime flowed forward, ascending Trenn’s boot to settle in his lap beside the ivory musket. Trenn rested his butchered hand on its yielding, purple surface.

  A deep, rhythmic purr vibrated through the gel, transmitting a simple, unburdened contentment. The paralyzing dread of the One-Eye no longer stained their tether.

  Trenn’s gaze rose to the fox-kin warrior who refused to leave his side, and the cyborg-looking gnome wearing a death mask who had just rebuilt her life from scrap. He felt the musket in his lap, holding the soul of the Shepherd of Vengeance.

  He wasn't bringing a monster home to his mother. He was bringing an army of monsters.

  Trenn smiled. The scar on his cheek pulled tight, but for the first time in a long time, the expression reached his eyes.

  He closed his eyes and reached for the cold, necrotic tether in his mind.

  Walk.

  With a seismic groan of bone and black sinew, the Bone Ship lurched forward. The giant undead crocodile pulled itself away from the shattered mountain, carrying its crew of broken, unyielding survivors toward the Anurys Mirror.

  Toward Montreal.

  THE END OF BONDS OF RUIN: SCRAP THE GODS, BIND THEIR SOULS

  (Please read the Author Note below for the first chapter of my next book, Mana Bomb: Warlords of Montreal.)

  The End of an Adventure, and the Beginning of an Apocalypse

  And so ends Bonds of Ruin: Scrap The Gods, Bind Their Souls.

  If you made it this far, thank you. Writing Trenn, Mara, Ezy, Zeen, and Almitad has been an incredible, brutal journey, and knowing you were reading along made every chapter worth it. Seriously. I wouldn't have done it without you.

  If you enjoyed this completed trilogy, please consider leaving a Rating or a Review! It is the absolute best way to help new readers find this story now that it is finished.

  But the story of this universe is far from over.

  Trenn is bringing an "army of monsters" back to Earth to fight the Warlords of Montreal. But who are these Warlords? What happened to Earth while Trenn was hunting gods, lost in the Morning Mists?

  I am taking a two-week break to prepare the launch of my new parallel series, Mana Bomb: Warlords of Montreal.

  This new series will start as a separate fiction on Royal Road. It follows Rom and Natalie—two Wild Mages who were not Isekai'd when the Mana Bomb hit. It is a gritty urban apocalypse story that follows them as they try to survive the initial destruction of Montreal, navigating the rise of the Warlords Trenn is currently marching to face.

  Mana Bomb: Warlords of Montreal will launch on a new fiction page with a four-chapter mass release on March 26, 2026!

  To give you a taste of the story, I have attached Chapter 1 of the new series right below this note.

  Thank you for everything, and I'll see you in the ruins of Montreal.

  MANA BOMB: WARLORDS OF MONTREAL

  Chapter 1: Day Zero

  The world ended on a Tuesday, which was just as well. What’s the point of surviving Wednesday if you don’t get one last weekend? For Rom, it started when he tripped through a coffee shop door into the roar of a crowded Montreal sidewalk.

  He salvaged his balance by juggling his keys and coffee cup, but his shirt got hit. A dark bloom of coffee spread across its white cotton.

  Shit.

  He had a meeting at ten, meant to put the final nail in his team's coffin. Now he had to watch the execution in a stained shirt. At least that would break the routine.

  They had stopped giving him projects to manage. He’d somehow become the corporate Grim Reaper; he wasn’t there to lead, he was there to euthanize. Like a spreadsheet coroner, sent in to perform the post-mortem and officially sign the death certificate.

  As he dabbed his shirt, an unexpected flash of violet light erased the world. Pressure buckled the air, squeezing his lungs until his eardrums throbbed in the vacuum. A hum resonated from his molars, a vibration that flooded his mouth with the taste of pennies and bored into the base of his skull.

  He closed his eyes. The moment passed. The world returned.

  His eyes darted around as a cold sweat ran down his temple.

  What the fuck?

  Nearby, a stunned man in a suit had frozen mid-stride, his phone slipping from his grasp.

  A woman leading a child by the hand stopped, her head cocked, listening to a frequency only she could perceive.

  Beside him, a girl’s laughter caught, then twisted into an uncontrolled gurgle. Her hands flew to her temples, fingers digging into her scalp as if to hold her skull together. A wet gargle rattled in her chest. "Head," she choked out, "burns—"

  Rom dropped his coffee and keys and lunged to help her, but halted when she choked on translucent mucus frothing from her lips.

  It dripped from her chin, striking her blouse with an audible sizzle. A yellow-tinged smoke, stinking of burned socks, coiled from the dissolving fabric.

  Rom stumbled back, his breath catching in his throat.

  He couldn’t avert his eyes.

  Before him, folds of slick, jellied flesh peeled from her skull. Her skin sloughed off in a sluggish wave that stripped muscle from bone as it rippled down her skeleton, releasing a stench of ammonia and scorched meat that flooded his sinuses. The ripple of tissue and organs collapsed into a smoking, quivering slurry.

  A gag convulsed his stomach, bringing the bitter taste of coffee to the back of his throat.

  Her skeleton, stripped clean, stood for a heartbeat before clattering into the pooling ooze.

  The chemical reek filled Rom’s lungs.

  He gagged, stumbling back from the hissing puddle of human gelatin that crept toward his feet.

  What—a chemical weapon? Am I hallucinating?

  The pool of hissing human goo was creeping towards him. He retreated, but something poked hard at his spine.

  He spun.

  A man, petrified from his shoes to his neck, with his granite hand outstretched.

  A tide of gray stone climbed his face and poured into his eyes, replacing pain and terror with two polished grey tones.

  Rom recoiled.

  She melted. He turned to stone? What the hell is happening?

  A storefront window to his left vomited fire and glass across the sidewalk. The eruption was followed by a delayed, gut-punching BOOM that echoed off the nearby buildings.

  The street erupted. A human wave pressed and pushed against him.

  A patch of asphalt ahead developed a thick layer of frost, sending dozens of fleeing people tumbling in a single, unified crash of limbs.

  Before Rom could change direction, the brick facade of a building to his right bulged outward as mortar-dusted hands clawed at screaming pedestrians. They pulled them to the wall, breaking limbs in a cacophony of screams and snapping bones.

  Rom threw his shoulder into the crowd, fighting to retreat, but an entire block—skyscrapers, stores, even the sky above them—vanished. In its place was a pillar of void. A wound in reality. A column of perfect, light-drinking emptiness.

  A collective animal wail was erupting from the city.

  The air, once thick with perfume and exhaust smoke, soured with the tang of panicked sweat.

  An elbow dug into Rom’s ribs, stealing the air from his lungs. He struggled for footing on the slick pavement. He reached out, catching his balance on the man-turned-to-stone beside him.

  He tried to push his way to safety and ran into the street, but a sedan blocking his path groaned and buckled, causing the mass of people nearby to recoil in fear.

  He stopped, dumbfounded, as the driver began to convulse as a spray of green leaves sprouted from their mouth.

  People climbed over each other to put distance between themselves and the new anomaly.

  A thick branch erupted from the driver’s chest, punching through the windshield to whip Rom across the jaw with wet leaves. Bone and metal fractured in a simultaneous roar.

  A swelling trunk tore the driver apart and hoisted the sedan off the asphalt.

  The expanding wood buckled the vehicle's frame until the steel roof ruptured, blasting the street with shrapnel.

  Rom threw his arms over his face, weathering the shower of glass and jagged metal.

  A dense block of plastic and wiring—the car's stereo unit—tore through the debris cloud and slammed into his forehead.

  Light shattered. The sky and street swapped places.

  His back struck the asphalt, the blow driving the air from his lungs.

  Grit ground into his cheek as his mouth filled with the coppery warmth of blood.

  What? The single word looped in his mind, a broken record trying to make sense of the carnage.

  When he came to, the crowd had dispersed, fleeing the now giant tree like a plague.

  The ringing in his ears subsided, and a deep groan of tortured metal, followed by the sharp crack of ice on a warming lake, came from a nearby minivan.

  The vehicle and its three occupants were entombed in a thick shell of black frost. The source—a head-sized sphere of jagged ice—rolled across the hood. Crystalline needles blossomed outward from its base, encasing the steel in black rime.

  Run!

  Rom scrambled to his feet, grinding glass shards deeper into his palms. The anomaly reacted instantly. It pivoted on the warped hood and launched itself at him. He bolted.

  I need to get off the ground!

  The crystalline mass rolled after him, paving the asphalt with a slick trail of frost.

  If I could reach that branch…

  He used a large tree root as a stepping stone to climb atop a nearby pick-up truck. By the time he made it to its roof, the frozen ball was already rolling over the truck’s rear bed.

  The metal groaned as frost spread over it.

  Rom pushed himself up onto the truck’s roof, wincing in pain as pieces of broken glass tore his flesh.

  The tumbling core of black frost was at his heels when he lunged off the side of the roof, arms high above his head.

  His fingers strained, then clamped around a low-hanging branch of the erupted tree.

  He screamed as the glass in his palms ground against the bark, but instinct and fear held through the pain.

  Below, the black sphere circled down the truck’s hood and wheeled back to shoot up the windshield.

  Its momentum launched it into the air, striking Rom’s dangling boot. It exploded into a spray of inky frost that splattered the ground.

  From the impact point on his boot, crystalline needles bloomed and crawled up his calf.

  He screamed, his appendage going numb with pain.

  The black ice quickly encased his lower leg and foot. Blood vessels froze, ligaments tore, bones snapped.

  A sickening crack echoed up his leg.

  His grip faltered. His mind went blank.

  There was a muffled crashing sound, like breaking glass under a heavy blanket. He was on his back. The branch hung overhead, smeared with his bloody handprints.

  I fell? He tried to move, but one of his legs refused to follow.

  Wiggle your toes. Nothing.

  He pushed himself up on his elbows, ignoring the grating protest of his arms and the blood pouring from his hands.

  He followed the line of his own body: hip, thigh, knee, the shredded cuff of his pants…

  Asphalt.

  His boot lay a few feet away, his foot still laced neatly inside.

  Where’s my leg?

  The parasitic frost, having permeated the bone, had shattered on impact. His lower leg was a pile of dark, slushy ice.

  He tried to draw a breath to scream, but his lungs refused the command. They seized in a silent, shuddering paralysis.

  The high-pitched ringing in his ears was the only sound in the universe.

  His stomach revolted. He retched, the convulsion sending a spike of fire from the tip of his stump, all the way up his spine.

  The world narrowed to a pinprick of agony. There was no city, no fires, no tree in the middle of the street—the only thing left was the gaping hole where his leg used to be.