A few days later, Maze was starting to hate the inside of her own head.
Avoiding John should have been easy. Hell was massive, and John had enough work to keep ten gods busy until the universe collapsed from exhaustion. All Maze had to do was stay away from the throne room, ignore the training sectors, and pretend she had something better to do than think about the idiot who had dragged her into a peaceful dimension and let her sleep against his shoulder.
The problem was that she kept thinking about him anyway.
Every time she walked through a corridor, she remembered his hand closing around hers beneath that stupid tree. When she saw red fabric, she remembered the way he looked at her in that dress. And the moment she closed her eyes, she imagined that peaceful moment. Her face heated with irritation, and since she had no one nearby to blame, she kicked a chair hard enough to send it cracking against the opposite wall.
The dream had been worse than the date.
In the dream, she and John stood side by side inside a punishment chamber, working together with brutal rhythm while damned souls screamed around them. He smiled at her through smoke and lightning, and she laughed as they turned judgment into something almost playful. The violence was familiar enough to feel comforting, yet beneath it had been something heated and intimate that made her wake up gripping the sheets with her heart pounding like she had just survived a battle.
Maze had stared at the ceiling afterward for nearly ten minutes.
Then she punched a hole through the wall beside her bed.
“That was pathetic,” she muttered while pulling her fist free from the cracked stone. “Absolutely disgusting behavior from a demon of my reputation.”
The wall gave no response, which was smart because she was already in a terrible mood.
For the next few days, Maze threw herself into anything that kept her moving. She hunted down two minor demons who had been stealing condemned souls from assigned punishment loops. She dragged a rebellious accountant demon through three separate departments until he corrected centuries of corrupted records. She even spent six hours threatening an entire archive staff because one of John’s clone reports had been delayed by seventeen minutes.
None of it helped.
She still felt strange.
The worst part was that John never chased her.
He did not summon her, question her absence, or appear in her room with that calm face and infuriating patience. He gave her space like he already knew exactly what she was doing, and somehow that made her want to stab him even more than if he had cornered her.
Maze found herself standing outside one of the training sector entrances, arms crossed and mood getting worse by the second.
She hadn't meant to go there.
That was becoming an annoying pattern.
A shadow clone stood near the entrance, reviewing a floating stack of reports while black lightning flickered beneath his skin. He looked up before she could decide whether to leave, and the familiar eyes made her stomach tighten in a way that immediately pissed her off.
“Mazikeen,” the clone said calmly. “You have been avoiding...”
Maze pointed at him with narrowed eyes. “Finish that sentence in the wrong tone, and I’ll find out whether clones can scream independently.”
The clone gave her the same faintly amused look John used whenever he knew something she did not want spoken aloud.
“That means yes,” he said.
Maze moved fast enough to blur.
Her blade appeared against the clone’s throat before the last word fully left his mouth. The clone did not flinch, which irritated her almost as much as the fact that she had pulled the blade instead of cutting immediately.
“Tell him nothing,” she said.
“He already knows.”
“Then un-know it.”
“That is not how shared consciousness works.”
Maze stared at him for several seconds before slowly pulling the blade away. “I hate all of you.”
“We are aware.”
“Especially that calm voice.”
“We are also aware.”
Maze turned away before the conversation could get worse, but she only made it three steps before stopping. Her fingers tightened around the handle of her blade while her eyes drifted toward the sealed training space behind the clone.
“What is he doing in there?”
The clone’s expression changed slightly. It was still calm, yet something sharper settled beneath it.
“Training.”
Maze looked back at him. “He is always training.”
“Today is different.”
That was all the clone said, and for once, Maze did not push for more.
“He says I look gorgeous, kisses me, takes me somewhere quiet, lets me sleep on him, and now he just goes back to training,” Maze mumbled to herself as she walked toward her tower. “Of course he does. Stupid responsible bastard.”
While Maze fought a war against her own pride and emotions, John stood inside an isolated space and tried to tear his power apart without tearing himself apart first.
The dimension around him had already changed beyond recognition.
What began as an empty white expanse had become a wasteland of cracked ground, floating stone, burning storms, and black lightning scars carved across the sky. Mountains had been created, shattered, repaired, and shattered again until even the pocket dimension seemed exhausted by him. Gravity shifted every few seconds, pressure multiplied without warning, and the air carried so much magic that weaker beings would have dissolved after one breath.
John stood at the center of it all with his shirt burned away, his body covered in sweat, ash, and glowing lines of power that moved beneath his skin like living veins.
Golden Living Lightning surrounded his right arm.
Black infernal energy coiled around his left.
The two powers hated each other.
That was the first thing he had learned.
Living Lightning was divine motion, judgment, life, command, and will given shape through the ancient gods who empowered him. It moved like a storm that wanted to rise, purify, and strike everything dark. Hell’s power moved differently. It sank, consumed, bound, punished, and remembered every sin that ever gave it weight.
Every time John tried to force them together, they rejected each other violently.
The first attempt had blown apart three mountain ranges.
The second attempt had destroyed his left arm up to the shoulder before his healing restored it.
The third attempt had punched a hole through the dimensional ceiling and forced two shadow clones to spend six hours stitching reality back together before the entire space collapsed.
John considered that progress.
He flexed his fingers while golden sparks crawled across his right hand. Across from him, a shadow clone adjusted a floating circle of runes that measured divine output, infernal resistance, soul pressure, and body stability.
“Again,” John said.
The clone looked at the unstable readings. “Your body has suffered internal collapse seventy-three times across the last four hours.”
John rolled his shoulders while black fire gathered around his left hand. “So I’m getting faster at surviving it.”
“That is one interpretation.”
“The useful interpretation.”
“The reckless interpretation.”
John grinned faintly. “Those overlap more often than people admit.”
The clone sighed in a way that sounded exactly like John being disappointed in himself. Then it lifted one hand, and the runes around the training field ignited.
Pressure slammed into John from every direction.
He did not move.
Golden lightning rose first, bright and violent, twisting around his body in thick arcs. Then Hell answered from beneath his feet. Black energy climbed his legs like chains made of smoke, digging into his skin, pressing against his soul, trying to claim space inside a body already filled with divine power.
John inhaled slowly.
The Wisdom of Zehuti and Solomon unfolded the problem in his mind from hundreds of angles at once. Force would fail. Domination would create rejection. Separation would keep both powers stable, though stability was not what he needed anymore.
He needed evolution.
He needed something powerful enough that Azazel, Blaze, Beelzebub, and every ambitious demon hiding inside Hell would understand rebellion as a fantasy that ended in erasure.
His eyes narrowed as the two energies clashed inside his palms.
“Living Lightning judges,” he muttered. “Hell punishes.”
The clone’s gaze sharpened. “You are trying to build a bridge through function.”
“Exactly.”
John brought his hands closer together.
The dimension screamed around him as gold and black power pressed against each other. Stone rose from the ground and shattered midair. The sky twisted into spirals. Every rune around the training field flashed warning signs that would have made any sane magician stop immediately.
John ignored all of them.
“Judgment without punishment is incomplete,” he said through clenched teeth. “Punishment without judgment becomes cruelty.”
The two powers buckled.
For half a second, they stopped fighting.
John seized that moment.
He stopped trying to make Hell’s power pure. He also stopped trying to make the Living Lightning cruel. Instead, he gave them a shared purpose. Judgment would decide. Hell would bind the consequence. Lightning would strike the truth. Infernal authority would make escape impossible.
The energy between his hands condensed into a single unstable spark.
It was gold at the center, black around the edges, and dark red veins pulsed through it like something alive had awakened inside the storm.
Then it exploded.
The blast swallowed the field.
Floating mountains vanished instantly. The ground split open in every direction, and the sky turned white with pressure before collapsing into darkness. John’s body hit the far side of the dimension hard enough to crack the spatial wall, and for several seconds, everything inside him forgot how to work properly.
His heart stopped.
Then it started again with a sound like thunder trapped inside a cage.
John coughed, pushed himself out of the crater, and laughed through the smoke curling from his body. "Damn! I sounded like one of those cultivation protagonists who's trying to break through their levels."
The shadow clone reformed nearby with half its face missing and several runes still orbiting its damaged arm. It looked at the ruined dimension, then at John.
“That was an improvement,” the clone said.
John wiped blood from the corner of his mouth while golden and black sparks danced across his knuckles. “See? Useful interpretation.”
The clone looked toward the center of the field.
A tiny spark still floated there.
It should have vanished after the blast. Instead, it remained suspended above the shattered ground, flickering between gold, black, and dark red. The air around it bent inward. Loose stones rose from the ground and circled it slowly, as if the spark had gained its own gravity.
John’s smile faded.
He walked toward it carefully.
The closer he came, the more he felt its nature pressing against his senses. This was not just Living Lightning mixed with infernal power. It carried judgment, punishment, authority, and consequence in a single unstable current. It did not simply destroy what it struck. It marked, condemned, bound, and punished according to the weight of the target’s own corruption.
John lifted his hand toward it.
The spark rushed into his palm.
Pain shot through his arm immediately, sharp enough to make his knees bend, but he did not let go. Black veins crawled up his wrist. Golden cracks spread across his fingers. Dark red fire burned beneath his skin while his divine power and Hell’s authority fought for ownership of the new current.
John gritted his teeth and forced both powers to kneel.
The spark expanded across his hand, forming a thin layer of black-gold lightning that hissed like a living verdict.
For several seconds, John simply stared at it.
Then he closed his fist.
The entire dimension went silent.
The clone took one step back.
John looked at the new lightning wrapped around his arm and spoke in a low voice. “Infernal Living Lightning. Humm... I gotta think of a better name for this new power.”
The power pulsed once and spread out of the isolated dimension and washed over hell.
Across Hell, countless demons suddenly stopped whatever they were doing. Some looked toward the throne sector. Others fell silent without knowing why. Even hidden things in sealed chambers turned their attention toward the pressure spreading through the underworld.
John felt all of it.
He felt fear ripple through domains that had pretended loyalty while planning rebellion. He felt Azazel’s territory go still. He felt Blaze’s damaged essence react violently somewhere beneath the old borders, the fragment of his lightning inside her soul trembling as if it had heard its master call.
John’s expression hardened.
“Good,” he said. "That'd buy me a few more years of peace."
The clone studied him carefully. “This version remains unstable. Repeated use may damage body and soul."
John lifted his arm as the new lightning crawled over his shoulder and across his chest. “Then we stabilize it.”
“How?”
John looked at the ruined dimension around them, then smiled with the kind of calm that made even his own clone uncomfortable.
“Again.”
The clone stared at him for a long moment.
“You are aware Maze would call this obsessive.”
John’s smile changed slightly at her name.
For the first time in hours, his focus drifted away from the power in his hand and toward the woman who had spent three days pretending she was not avoiding him. He could feel her presence near one of the dimensional gates, pacing just beyond the threshold like a predator arguing with herself.
“She’s still outside?” John asked.
“She has passed the entrance twelve times.”
John chuckled quietly. “Sounds about right.”
“Should we invite her inside?”
John looked toward the gate for a moment, then shook his head. “No. Let her decide when she’s ready.”
The clone gave him a flat look. “You are applying emotional patience while conducting suicidal magical experiments.”
John raised his hand again, and the unstable black-gold lightning roared around his arm.
“I’m a complicated man.”
The clone sighed again and reignited the runes around the training field.
Beyond the sealed gate, Maze felt another tremor roll through the dimension. The pressure brushed against her skin, carrying a taste of John’s power that made every instinct inside her wake up at once. It was hotter than before, darker too, and somehow more terrifying than the lightning she already knew. And that made her really excited and horny.
Maze stood still with one hand hovering near the gate.
A slow smile tugged at her lips as she finally decided to accept these new feelings.
“Idiot,” she whispered, though the word carried something dangerously close to affection.
Another explosion shook the gate hard enough to send cracks of light across the frame.
Maze rolled her eyes, stepped forward, and finally pushed the gate open.