When Paul smears his blood over the god's thumb a curtain of lightning falls across his vision, the world eclipsed in brilliance as he drops his shaking, bleeding arm to his chest and curls his hand into a fist. Vessels narrow, blood clots, but there is only so much compensation that even his physiology can make for what now slicks arm and thumb and hallowed blade.

Like a crysknife, he thinks, before she flips the sword and Izuku whispers into his ear. The universe hangs suspended between the two, divine retribution and mortal solace.

The blade strikes home, and so does the thunder.

Paul takes a shattered breath like the blow split his chest and not the starveling earth, curving around his leaping heart as silver pours from his stunned open eyes. The curse shivers ephemeral at the edge of his sight, ripples outward and onward into a future bisected. The moisture of his eyes, of his lips, weeps with the faint sting of acid, a brackish tide drawn forth by the gravitic tug of the Pthumerian's will.

"It is done," her voice says with his throat, and then he slumps against Midoriya's side bonelessly, teeth gritted against a strangled whimper as a cascade of sparks tumble agonizingly down every tender nerve in his mouth. It feels like catching a star on his tongue and swallowing, white hot annihiliation boiling in the stains of his guilt, pain welling up from soul more than body.

But nothing bleeds besides the slit wound on his palm as the shadow of the Pthumerian's sword falls across them as she pulls it free.