Chaos’s Daughter: Sweet But Psycho

Chapter 43: Paradoxical Immortality

Rebirth’s eye twitched. “You did what.”

Chaos didn't stop giggling. “I mean… she was already an unpredictable disaster. Might as well make it canon.”

Rebirth’s voice dropped into a growl. “What did you do this time? No—what did that little you 2.0 do this time? She died. Which means catastrophe when she resserects! So fess up!”

Death tilted her head, her voice smooth and amused like wind through grave moss. “No wonder the System’s been so quiet lately. She used it once or twice… then it fell dormant. She wasn’t using a tool…”

“She was the tool,” Chaos hummed gleefully. “Or rather, a vessel. I wrapped the fragment in that lovely recycled divine code you both said was ‘too rigid’ for proper memory retention. Hid Pandora’s soul crystal inside like a surprise egg.”

Rebirth’s eyes widened. “Wait… you’re telling me—”

He pointed, jaw clenched, wings flaring with sacred fire.

“You disguised the final soul crystal of Pandora—the Powers’ last forbidden creation before they wiped their own slate clean—within a half-functional stat interface… and gave it to her?”

Chaos smiled, proud as a parent at a talent show.

“Technically… yes.”

Death chuckled behind one black-gloved hand. “Of course. She wasn’t carrying a system. She was carrying the ultimate myth.”

Rebirth slumped back into his seat, dragging both hands down his face. “You absolute ancient moron. Do you know what she’s about to become?”

“Oh, I do,” Chaos beamed. “And isn’t it just delicious?”

They all turned their gaze toward the distant spiral of Olympus—where divine laws now trembled under the weight of something older than Olympus itself.

Something reborn.

Something inevitable.

Hespera was no longer just Blessed.

She was becoming Pandora Rewritten.

And nothing the gods prepared would be enough.

"I can't wait!"

~?~

Back at the Olympian feast,

The wine goblet fell from Hespera’s fingers.

It hit the marble floor with a chime—too soft, too final.

The room stood frozen.

Then, all at once—chaos erupted.

“HESPERA!!!” Kuroka’s scream ripped through the silence like a blade.

The nekomata lunged forward, her claws out, her twin tails bristling, eyes blazing with primal fury and anguish.

The Hesperides surged next.

Aigle’s calm shattered into unfiltered grief as she fell to her knees beside her mother’s body, magic flaring wildly in golden spirals.

Khrysothemis screamed, rose-gold wings flaring out like firestorms. “You bastards!”

Erytheia snarled, already summoning her dusk-forged weapon as thunder cracked in the distance.

But it wasn’t thunder.

It was Zeus.

He stood above the dais, arm raised to the heavens, lightning twisting in his fist like a living thing.

His expression was not triumphant.

It was frayed. Shaken.

Afraid.

“She’s too dangerous,” he growled, voice trembling beneath the weight of his fear and arrogance. “Even dead—she’s a threat.”

The bolt pulsed—brighter, sharper—carved from the heart of Olympus itself.

And he hurled it.

It struck the center of Hespera’s chest.

Right where Artemis’s arrow had landed.

A blinding detonation erupted.

The hall was consumed in searing white-gold light, laced with magenta flickers and black static like reality tearing at the seams.

When the light died—

There was only ash.

No body.

No blood.

Just a charred crater where Hespera Eveningstar had once lain.

Smoke curled upward in lazy spirals.

A hush blanketed the gods like frost.

Kuroka dropped to her knees, shaking. Her claws scraped the stone, breath ragged. “No… no, no, no…”

The Hesperides were silent.

Utterly still.

Until Aigle slowly, shakily stood.

She turned toward the Olympians—her glowing eyes unreadable, her aura a whisper of what was to come.

“You’ve made a mistake,” she said, her voice deathly calm.

Khrysothemis’s lips curled into a snarl. “You think that was enough to kill her?”

Erytheia, lips trembling with restrained fury, finished for them. “She warned you.”

And somewhere in the depths of the marble…

A spark flickered faintly magenta.

~?~

The Void was silent.

Not the silence of peace.

The silence of judgment.

Of pressure.

Of rage so cold it calcified the stars.

And in the center of it, Hespera floated—her body reduced to nothing, her form no longer bound by flesh, but by the sheer, unrelenting force of her will.

She opened her eyes.

They did not glow—they consumed. Amethyst and emerald burned like dying stars collapsing into themselves.

And her voice, though barely above a whisper, shattered the stillness.

"They dared."

She wasn’t screaming. Her voice was soft. Even gentle

But underneath, there was undisguised wrath.

She was cold.

Her rage had crystallized into something far more terrifying than fury—focus.

“They actually did it,” she said softly, her voice echoing through the void like broken lullabies. “They actually attempted to kill me.”

The stars above her blinked out.

One by one.

Snuffed like candles in the face of her gathering power.

“I warned them.” Her lips curled, her emerald-amethyst and voidfire eyes glowing like twin dying suns. “I gave them every chance to treat me decently.”

She raised a single hand.

The void around her shuddered.

[Skill: Eternal Pyre — ACTIVATED]

The void ignited.

Magenta fire screamed into existence, forming a halo of cosmic rebirth around her.

But these weren’t flames of destruction.

They were transcendence.

Flames that devoured failure. That incinerated weakness. That reached into her very soul and rewrote her existence at the foundational level.

Her former body?

Gone.

Her new form?

Unfolding like a divine equation — rewritten by truth, rage, and legacy.

She spread her arms as the inferno stormed outward, reshaping the throne of her soul into a burning monument of impossible power.

[Skill: Paradoxical Immortality — TRIGGERED]

Her form flickered—

Once a corpse.

Now reborn.

Once reduced to ash.

Now resurrected from concept.

Existence attempted to resist—rules, laws, fate itself straining to hold her down.

But Paradox laughed in the face of rules.

“I don’t die,” Hespera whispered, stepping onto a platform of crystallized nothing. “I evolve.”

And then—

A pulse.

A shiver in time.

[Skill: Paradox Genesis — TEMPORARILY UNLOCKED]

All of creation froze.

And Hespera breathed in.

With a single thought, she reached backward, to the feast.

To the moment the goblet touched her lips.

She erased the poison.

To the second the arrow pierced her chest.

She rewrote Artemis’s aim—into the floor.

To the instant Zeus called lightning.

She burned his intention into non-action.

And just for fun?

She rewrote the past so that every glass of wine he’s ever had now leaves him mildly constipated.

The void laughed with her.

Then she turned her gaze to the present.

A crater.

Ashes.

Grief.

Fear.

“Unacceptable.”

She raised her hand, and all of it reversed.

The crater filled.

The ash coalesced.

The sparks snapped back into flame—

And she returned.

A pulse of magenta tore the air in Olympus as Hespera reappeared.

Whole.

Radiant.

Transcendent.

She stood in the center of the feast hall, clothed in the armor of rebirth, twelve wings of rewritten divinity flared behind her.

And her voice, when it came, was quiet.

But it cracked marble.

“You tried to kill me.”

Zeus stepped back.

The Olympians froze.

Her smile was bloodless.

“Your mistake.”

And the fire behind her… was still growing.

A second heartbeat of silence rippled through Olympus.

Then—

BOOM.

Magenta fire exploded outward in a ring of divine force, tearing through the illusions of peace and civility like paper. And from its center rose her—

Hespera Eveningstar reborn once again.

Not as she was.

But as she was meant to be.

Her new form stepped from the inferno like a goddess sculpted from paradox and flame.

Twenty-four wings unfurled behind her in slow, divine sequence—twelve of burning cosmic starlight, twelve of shifting abyssal void laced with anti-light. Each wing shimmered with layered symbols of every domain she touched—Life, Death, Rebirth, Flame, Chaos, Nihility—and beyond.

Her silver-violet hair was longer now, flowing like galactic rivers threaded with veins of emerald, magenta, and obsidian, dancing in a gravity that bent only for her.

Her heterochromatic eyes no longer shimmered with just color—but with truth.

Her right eye, once a cold amethyst, now glowed like a dying universe—etched into its iris was the symbol of Nihility, a spiraling ring consuming all within.

Her left eye, vibrant emerald before, now blazed with the living sigil of Chaos, a fractal spiral forever shifting and impossible to follow with mortal logic.

And her beauty—

It shattered the old scale.

She no longer looked like something that could exist in a single myth or pantheon.

She looked like the reason myths were born in the first place.

Even Aphrodite—goddess of beauty herself—gasped. And for a breathless second, felt jealousy.

Every god present felt it.

The pull.

The fear.

The awe.

It was all delicious.

And at the center of it all, Hespera simply stood.

Calm.

Smiling.

Transcendent.

“You tried to erase me,” she whispered again, voice like gravity laced in silk. “But you forgot…”

Her wings fanned wide, casting the chamber in rippling shadows and light.

“I am the daughter of Chaos, the bride of Death, and the descendant of Rebirth.”

She stepped forward.

The marble beneath her melted into stardust.

“I am fire that cannot be extinguished. I am truth that cannot be unspoken. I am the end… that rewrites itself.”

Her hands lifted.

The air screamed.

And Olympus, for the first time in a thousand eternities…

Knew absolute fear.