Zeke hit the man in a shoulder tackle that should have shattered a mountain. But to his immense surprise, he rebounded as if he’d hit an immovable wall. He stumbled backward, a flood of divine energy flowing through him, and narrowed his eyes. The accuser looked upon him with a mixture of pity, disgust, and eagerness that his bland features couldn’t hope to hide.

  More importantly, he blazed with divine energy of his own.

  “Did you truly believe you could tap into the divine without consequence?” the accuser demanded. “I am Justice. I am the Accused. And I am the Accuser. You will bow before my judgement and be grateful I allow you to atone for your many, many sins. Do so, and I shall ensure that –”

  Zeke didn’t let him finish. Instead, he launched himself into an uppercut that took him in the chin. However, instead of flying away as Zeke had expected, the man burst into blue flames, growing with the momentum of the blow. In the space of a second, he was twenty feet tall.

  But that wasn’t the only change.

  No – he’d also encased himself in sleek, onyx armor. The only part of him that was visible were his eyes, which blazed with the azure fire of unchecked divinity. In his hand was a gavel. A tiny thing in comparison to the rest of his body. He brought it bear in a mighty swing that hit Zeke with the full force of a god at the height of his power.

  He crumbled.

  Every bone in his body shattered, and his body burst like a balloon. He was utterly and completely destroyed, save for a wisp of blue fire that fueled [Hand of Divinity]. He reformed only a second later.

  Cracking his neck, Zeke said, “You’re going to have to do better than that. Just ask your buddy Greed about getting into a battle of attrition with me. It didn’t go well for him, and I don’t think it’s going to go any better for you.”

  “Insolent fool.”

  “I’ve been called worse.”

  “Not you. Greed. He was ever an idiot. Defeating him is no great conquest. I am different.”

  “You’re a special snowflake alright,” Zeke said, testing his body. It was almost completely healed.

  “You know not of what you speak. I am the Judge of the Damned. I spent my mortal life in that pursuit. I was so devout that deification was my reward. The innocent needn’t fear me, but the guilty will be judged.”

  “Do you always monologue? Or is this just for me?” Zeke asked, still stalling for time. He knew that he could endure countless more attacks and rebuild himself from whatever was left, but the longer he could delay the inevitable, the better off he’d be. Or so he hoped. But he was working with incomplete information, so he couldn’t truly make plans.

  “Do not fight it. For acceptance is repentance,” the Judge announced. “Only through that shall you be remade in perfection.”

  Zeke had no intention of doing that. Obviously. So, the second he felt that he was entirely reformed, he once again attacked. The gavel descended, but Zeke dove to the side, avoiding the tiny weapon. It shattered reality in his place, sending cracks to spiderweb their way through the air. They mended only a moment later, but Zeke barely saw the phenomenon. Instead, he rammed his shoulder into the judge’s knee.

  But he didn’t do so without a little extra oomph behind his attack. Full of divine energy, he hit the joint like a cannonball, and he fully expected to hear the thing crack.

  It did not.

  But nor did Zeke bounce away, leaving the judge entirely unharmed. Instead, it was something in between. There was a slight give to the joint, and Zeke went tumbling to the side, cartwheeling across the now-abandoned village until he hit the wall belonging to one of the poorly constructed homes.

  By the time he picked himself out of the rubble, the Judge was once again standing over him.

  “You resist.”

  “What do you expect? That I’d give up?!” Zeke growled, spitting blood into the pile of stone. “That’s not going to happen! I refuse to give up!”

  The Judge gave a minute shake of his head. Using that as a distraction, Zeke once again attacked the godly man. He was met with the gavel, which unmade him the second it made contact.

  Zeke felt his soul twirling away until the flame of his divinity snatched it back into place. He regrew his body only a moment later, though he could scarcely muster the strength to look up at his tormenter.

  “Stop.”

  “Never,” Zeke growled.

  He attacked again, and to similar results. Over and over, the cycle completed. The Judge could not completely destroy him, but Zeke could hardly lay a finger on the empowered man. Indeed, even if he did manage to levy an attack in his direction, it would do little good. The man was nigh invulnerable.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  But Zeke had never met a challenge he couldn’t overcome through sheer perseverance.

  Not in this life, at least. On Earth, he’d encountered just that when he’d been injured. No amount of work could ever have rebuilt his arm. It was entirely out of his control. And it had nearly killed him.

  If he hadn’t died saving Tommy, he might have gone on to do something truly stupid. It was such a difficult thing to contemplate now, but at the time, it wouldn’t have taken much to send him spiraling into a deep depression from which he could never recover. And he wasn’t so na?ve that he didn’t know what came after that.

  So, in a way, he’d been saved by his own death.

  More importantly, he’d regained his agency. From that moment on, he’d chosen his own path. But now, the judge wanted him to surrender what he’d worked so hard to maintain.

  Now, it felt like all of that was being yanked away. With every failure to harm the judge, with each instance of that gavel’s fall, he knew he could not win. Yet, he fought on, and as he did, he felt something within him stir. It was divine energy, as he might have expected. Rather, it was a self-loathing so intense that it felt like a solid thing.

  It rose within him, choking off any biting retorts he might’ve leveled in the Judge’s direction.

  And he knew the source.

  Zeke had made plenty of mistakes since being reborn. Even before he’d died, he was no stranger to missteps. He knew he wasn’t perfect. But he’d not truly accepted the consequences of his imperfection.

  “I am no god.”

  It was such a simple statement, and one that should have been obvious. Despite the divine energy racing through him, he knew it didn’t make him better or worse than anyone else. It just made him more powerful.

  But even more than that, Zeke realized that the Judge was right in his accusations. Memories of his many sins rose within him. Thousands upon thousands of deaths by his hand made up the bulk of that mass of misdeeds, but holding it all together was something far more ephemeral and harder to define. He’d pursued his goals without even a second’s thought about how they affected anyone else. Sure, he’d hidden by a wall of justification, telling himself that he was freeing slaves or righting wrongs through violence, but the fact of the matter was that he had committed evil deeds. That he’d sometimes done so for the right reasons didn’t matter.

  The ends did not justify the means.

  If he wanted to be truly just, the two needed to be commensurate, with equal weight paid to both pieces. He’d not done that, and because of that, he recognized his guilt.

  He slowed to a stop.

  “You see, do you not?” asked the Judge.

  Zeke could only nod.

  “Do you have anything to say in your defense?”

  Zeke shook his head. “I don’t,” he admitted. It wasn’t defeat. Rather, it was surrender to something more important than himself. Did he relish the notion of eternal torture? No. Not at all. But in that moment, he truly believed he deserved it, that it was the only way to atone for the wrongs he’d committed.

  He fell to his knees, continuing, “Render your judgement upon me. I won’t fight it any longer.”

  The Judge looked down upon him from his great height, and when Zeke glanced up, he saw a note of sadness there. It was gone in an instant, followed closely by a flash of light, and Zeke once again found himself nailed to the cross.

  Unlike his previous experience, he didn’t try to fight it when the crows descended upon him. They tore him to pieces, and he was once again reborn, only to endure that same treatment a second time. Then a third. A fourth. On and on it went, and Zeke simply took it.

  It was his penance.

  It was how he was meant to make things right. His agony wouldn’t bring back the people he’d killed. He knew that. Nor would it atone for his sins. That was obvious as well. It certainly didn’t make him feel better, either, and he knew that, given the chance, he’d likely repeat many of the same mistakes.

  And yet, the meaning lay in the surrender itself. The willingness to be judged, to accept his guilt, and to pay his penance.

  He gave in.

  Against every instinct in him, he stopped resisting. He no longer tried to tear free. He ignored the divinity in his core. He simply let it happen.

  Time had no meaning as he was plucked part, bit by bit. The pain of it ran through, unmitigated and undiluted. He erected no barriers. He didn’t try to ignore it. He reveled in the agony, in the cleansing effect that came with surrendering to his pain.

  And in a way, Zeke found peace in the unending agony.

  He had no idea when it started. Nor was he sure how it began. But at some point, even as the crows tore him apart, he felt something flowing through him. At first, he thought it was divine energy, but when, in his addled state, he tried to tamp it down, it refused to follow his directions.

  That’s when he discovered that, contrary to the corrosive effects of divine energy, this newcomer had the opposite effect. It healed him – not physically, but spiritually. It was like his own acceptance had opened the floodgates to something else, and it had begun to fill him with strength.

  Of course, it didn’t save him. Nor did he want it to. However, what it did do was give him hope that, after some indeterminate amount of time, shattered the spikes in his arms and legs. It also broke the cross itself, and when Zeke hit the muddy ground, the impact produced a shockwave that tore across the area in a fifty foot diameter.

  When he rose, Zeke was remade.

  The Judge tried to level an accusation at him, but the words flowed off Zeke like water over a duck’s back. They had no more power. The Judge couldn’t say anything that he hadn’t already said in his own mind.

  And in that way, the Judge was diminished. With every failed accusation, he shrank, losing his power until, after only a few moments, he was back to a normal sized man. He spat fire and brimstone with every following accusation, but it was useless.

  Zeke’s hand snapped out, closing around the man’s neck. He lifted him, pulling him close. Then, he croaked, “Thank you for making me see the error of my ways. I do not repent. I do not apologize. But I acknowledge my guilt, both for past actions and for what I intend for the future. I accept the consequences, fully and without reservation. I am a sinner. A killer. And I will be punished for it. That, I accept. I embrace my future.”

  “How? Why?” the man grunted.

  “Because I think it’s worth it.”

  Then, without further conversation, Zeke crushed the Judge’s throat. The man’s spine shattered a second later, and the force of Zeke’s grip ripped through what was left of his flesh. Soon enough, he only held a severed head.

  He tossed it aside like the trash it was. Even as it hit the mud and blood-soaked ground, Zeke felt a rumbling in the distance. He didn’t need to look up to know that the gate to the next circle had appeared.

  Taking a deep breath, he turned and walked in that direction, ready to finish his descent and embark upon the mission that made his every sin worthwhile.