Having survived the trial houses, the twins are subjected to a final series of tests and traps, including a rigged ballgame, from which they escape by cunning each time. In their decisive move against the death lords, the twins allow themselves to be burned to death voluntarily, have their bones ground and scattered in a river, and are then reborn from the water, first as catfish-like beings and then as wandering performers whose act includes sacrificing and reviving each other and other animals. Invited to perform this trick before the delighted lords of Xibalba themselves, the twins sacrifice one lord and then, when the others beg to experience the same trick, refuse to revive them, finally defeating the death gods by the same means the gods had used to kill their father.
Having avenged Hun Hunahpu, though without fully restoring him to life, the twins ascend into the sky, becoming the sun and the moon in most tellings, or the sun and the planet Venus in some readings favored by researchers working from the correlated Dresden Codex Venus tables. Dennis Tedlock's translation, working directly with a K'iche' interpretive tradition rather than treating the sixteenth-century manuscript as a self-sufficient text, is the standard modern English edition used to reconstruct the sequence summarized here.