Sunlight stabbed through Ren’s eyelids, flooding his vision. He gasped awake, his back arching involuntarily. The ocean rocked beneath him, salt water lapping at his sides as he drifted, stinging his open wounds.

  “Under the same sky…”

  A shadow crossed his face. Evelyn hovered above, her body carving a silhouette against the merciless light. The sacred blade hung at her side. “Are you making your peace?” she asked.

  Water cascaded from his tattered garments as he rose, suspended in air, facing her across the emptiness. “It’s something the old man used to say,” he replied. “That it didn’t matter where I came from, so long as it was under the same sky.”

  The effort drained what little strength he had left. Each second hovering above the waves cost him, muscles trembling beneath his skin.

  Evelyn’s voice carried across the water. “I don’t hate you anymore. You might feel I do, but I don’t.” The holy blade at her side whispered through the air, threads of light tracing along its edge. “Once, I lived only to slay you.” Her eyes hardened. “I know the truth now. Renfield used us both. You as his shield, me as his sword.” Her fingers tightened around the hilt of her blade, knuckles whitening beneath sun-bronzed skin. “I do not hate you, but if you had never been, Renfield would have stood exposed. I would have killed him. Ended it all. On that day, I would have gone for him next. But your companion intervened, and now, here we are, stranded in a rotting world that isn’t ours.”

  “Should I beg forgiveness for existing? For Leon choosing to save me? Those days are behind me.”

  “Save your breath.”

  Ren studied her, the way she adapted to this foreign world’s aesthetic, her hair cut differently, the nearly imperceptible shift in how she carried herself.

  She’s changed.

  And so have I.

  “If you want blood instead, so be it. You wore the Demon King’s mantle—false or not. Our realm fell to ruin in your shadow. Those I loved perished. That debt remains.”

  “Your Saint razed everything I knew. My mother. My father. Their faces blur with each passing year because of him. Don’t lecture me about debts.”

  Something flickered across her face then—a fracture in her certainty. “I am aware,” she answered. “So I too must atone. My oath shattered.” A faint tremor passed through her voice. “And here, in this place… where I found someone who I l—” Her voice broke; the confession withered unspoken. “We contaminate,” she said flatly. “A toxin beneath the skin. How can we know our presence hasn’t poisoned this world? How can we be certain nothing followed us through that tear? I’ve grown weary,” she concluded. “Weary of pretending.”

  “Back home,” he said, “I could have consumed every well of power, every current of mana that flowed, and still… you would have cut me down.” Something like a laugh escaped him. “No one terrified me the way you did.”

  The void returned to him in fragments, less memory, more sensation. First came the tearing, as if reality itself had grown teeth and was chewing through him. Then that terrible stretching, his essence drawn thin across an endless dark. His screams had lasted until they couldn’t. Death would have been mercy.

  “You don’t scare me anymore.”

  “Then embrace oblivion.”

  Evelyn vanished from beneath the sun, reappearing before him in the space between heartbeats. Her sword transformed, its golden glow compressing inward until only a terrible white remained.

  Three years dissolved in an instant as his mind overlaid that first confrontation onto this one—the same merciless arc cleaving through air, the memory of his blood staining the sky, the sensation as his severed arm fell away.

  Her blade carved toward his throat. His palm met divine wrath. The impact detonated through him. Where the Sword of Saint Luciann touched flesh, his skin split open in a perfect line. A single command crystallized in his mind.

  Mana Drain.

  An avalanche—a cataclysm of heat and light and the very sun—poured into his flesh. His veins ignited, carrying liquid fire through pathways never meant to channel such power. His throat tore open with a scream as brilliance devoured him from within.

  In his world, mana flooded into him. Battles became massacres of the land itself; verdant meadows shriveled to dust beneath his feet as he consumed everything around him. The whispers followed him everywhere; cursed, they called him.

  In that space between realities, drawn thin across nothingness, something fundamental had shifted. The mutation that once devoured everything without distinction had been reforged. Where once there had been only consumption, now there was control.

  The sea beneath them recoiled, waves buckling under the percussion of power that rolled outward for miles. The force hurled them to opposite ends of the sky. He tumbled through salt-heavy air, seawater lashing his face, each breath stolen, yet the inferno within him only intensified. It consumed him utterly. He was filling—expanding from a shallow pool into something deeper, vaster. Not the bottomless ocean he once commanded, but enough.

  Enough to fight.

  Evelyn stared at him, her composure splintered, her features strained. The blade, once blinding in its holy splendor, now bore only the faintest outline, a memory of divinity. “Impossible,” she breathed.

  The putrid glow beneath his skin had vanished completely. He drew a breath that filled his lungs fully. “Your power,” he said. “I’ve taken half of it. At least.”

  Her face twisted, fury unmasked. She erupted into radiance. Her amber eyes burned into white-hot cores. Light spilled from her parted lips. The air around her head shimmered, condensing into three ascending arcs resembling a shattered diadem.

  “Once, your blade would have found its mark. That time has passed.”

  Invisible ripples unfurled through reality as his will extended outward into the world, mana flowing not to devour, but to command. The ocean stirred, the surface fractured as immense columns of water defied gravity, surging skyward. Each pillar climbed higher than the last, twisting into writhing spires.

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  The fabric of existence warped, dimensions folding inward as gravity splintered along impossible vectors, until the horizon bent into something that made the eye ache to follow.

  In that terrible moment, as his very essence unraveled across time and space, change found him. Too late to undo what had been done, yet precisely when needed to survive.

  World of Mana.

  Evelyn struck without warning, her form dissolving into light at the edge of his vision only to reappear before him, holy sword already sweeping through its fatal arc. He held her gaze. Reality ruptured between them, the collision sent shockwaves rippling outward with such force that the towering columns of seawater bent away as if in reverence.

  The blast hurled Evelyn backward through open sky, her body tumbling until she arrested her own momentum through sheer divine will. Regaining control, she hovered at a distance, her assault stilled, eyes narrowed in wary calculation.

  Here, within the bounds of his World, they stood as equals. “Now we’re both on a time limit,” he said.

  Her hands tightened around the hilt of her sword. The blade flashed once, twice, again and again—each swing releasing crescents of pure light. Radiance carved molten paths through the twisted pillars of water, hissing where sanctified energy met the ocean.

  The sea surged upward in defiance of nature itself, a vast wall of gravity rising to intercept her assault. When light collided with water, the impact birthed a detonation of steam that swallowed everything in blinding white. The vapor thinned to reveal a barrage of light-spears racing toward him with Evelyn herself blazing at their center.

  Ren launched forward instead of retreating. They collided in the heart of the storm. As her sacred blade descended, Ren dipped beneath its arc, chambered his fist, and drove it into her core with the full weight of his awakened power.

  Blood burst from her lips in a dark spray. The blow sent her coiling through the air until she caught herself once more, hovering in rigid stillness. She dragged her fingers across her mouth, studying the crimson smear with something between disbelief and grim fascination even as it healed.

  “Within my territory, you bleed like everyone else.”

  Her lips peeled back in something almost primal. They collided again and again with thunderous force. Light sheared through clouds. Water towers shattered into vapor. The very atmosphere compressed beneath his will, unleashing invisible projectiles that detonated against her luminous barriers. His fingers reached for her throat.

  The pommel of her weapon slammed between his shoulder blades. Something gave with a sickening crack. He roared and flung himself at her exposed flank before she could recover. One strike landed. He seized her and wrenched her back toward him. Another blow connected. He dragged her in again. Over and over.

  The resulting detonation consumed him, his senses battered by spiraling vapor and shrieking wind. Her sword burned through the haze, just as gravity warped before him, coalescing into a barrier when she struck. The impact left him exposed to the barrage of light-bullets spilling from her outstretched hand.

  They punched through muscle and bone in rapid succession. Pain detonated behind his eyes. His vision narrowed to pinpricks, yet somehow he found her and drove his skull into the bridge of her nose. His sight swam, he seized his mangled leg, channeling mana to seal ruptured vessels and bind splintered bone.

  She ascended above the battlefield, her form shrinking until the clouds swallowed her whole.

  Daylight dimmed.

  Fire fell.

  A thousand stars plunged toward him. Darkness condensed between his fingers, a sphere no larger than his fist. He hurled it skyward. As it rose, it devoured the surrounding space, swelling, starving.

  The falling lights faltered in their descent, then bent inward. The ocean spiraled upward to wrap around the expanding void, shaping its terrible symmetry. His focus narrowed to a single razor point, sharper than anything he had ever attempted. The boundary between control and annihilation trembled. If he allowed it to find equilibrium—true, flawless equilibrium—nothing would restrain it. It would burrow through the crust of the planet and end everything.

  A shadow engulfed him, not shadow, but absence of light. There hung a blade of impossible magnitude. It stretched across the firmament, poised to deliver its sentence. Desperate, he poured more mana into the dark orb. It swelled, its silent scream vibrating through dimensions as reality distorted at its edges.

  I’ll kill us all if I do this.

  She’ll kill us all if I don’t.

  The words tore from his throat. “We can stop this, Evelyn! I’m done with it. With all of it. I choose to live!”

  Her voice descended from the storm clouds in their mother tongue, ancient syllables rolling like distant thunder. “There is nothing left to try for. Nothing left to live for.”

  It fell, trailing a corona of flame that turned the darkness into violent dawn. The dark hole fed greedily on his mana, expanding. The ocean’s surface had become glassy and black, like obsidian. The heavens drained to bone-white.

  Horror seized. He knew she wanted this, and maybe, at some point, he did too. He imagined Reina’s smile, and in that moment of absolute clarity—he rejected her script. The dark hole imploded, compressing to a marble, collapsing into nothing. He launched himself skyward, a desperate plan forming. If the blade struck him high enough, if he could draw it away, push it beyond the shore.

  Heat tore through his mana barrier as he climbed, the sword’s radiance searing his skin. Hanamizu shrank to a speck, then the coastline and distant mountains unfolded beneath him. The atmosphere thinned, the sky deepening toward the black of space. Seconds more and he would cross that threshold.

  The bitter end.

  The sword halted mid-descent.

  Clouds peeled back like curtains.

  Evelyn hovered at their center, radiant tendrils unfurling from her shoulders in a warped echo of angelic wings. Above her brow, the fractured crown pulsed with waning brilliance.

  “Look at you. Clutching at the remnants of a world already lost. After all your suffering, all this ruin, how will you face yourself? What pitiful fragment of existence are you so desperate to preserve?”

  His gaze never wavered.

  “I just want to try.”

  Her lip trembled. Something flickered across her expression—bitter, exhausted. “As did I.”

  The celestial blade splintered. Particles of light drifted away like a hundred-thousand little fireflies. The storm winds quieted to a hush. Patches of blue sky emerged between torn clouds.

  “What future do you imagine?” she asked him. “Vanishing among ordinary people? Sharing your life with someone who might never understand what you are? Having a child inherit your curse, gasping its first and last breath in the same instant? Endangering everyone around you? You’re clinging to a fragile spark of hope.”

  His answer came steadily. “I’m not sure, but I’d like the chance to see for myself.”

  “You were never the Demon King,” Evelyn the Promised said. “Nor a devil.”

  “No.”

  “And certainly no Hero.”

  “That much has always been true…” Ren searched her face, catching the faintest tremor at the corner of her mouth. “Is there nothing left in you that wants to try?”

  She turned her face away. “I refuse to cling to half-lives like you.” A single drop broke from her jaw. Then another.

  A tear?

  No… only the rain.

  “Live on,” she said, staring into the distance. “If that is what your heart desires. But one day, you may come to hate that decision.”

  “Maybe,” Ren replied. “And if that moment comes, I’ll face it as best I can.”

  The fractured crown above her brow crumbled into drifting motes. The light-woven wings on her back dimmed, faltered, then vanished entirely. She remained suspended above the vast sea, rain threading through her hair. The ocean settled, its violent swells easing back into rhythm. Those towering columns of water, wrenched skyward by his desperate magic, sank once more into the dark.

  She descended toward the gap in the sea, as though crossing an unseen threshold meant only for her. In her hand, the divine weapon dimmed, its otherworldly radiance fading until only plain metal remained. Without ceremony, she released it, and it vanished into the depths.

  “Does it have to be like this?”

  “You made your choice. Do not take mine from me.”

  Her departure bore no grandeur. The sea closed over her, swallowing her without judgment. Rain stippled the water where she had vanished. He remained there as seconds stretched into minutes, as storm clouds unraveled into pale wisps.

  When he descended through rain-washed air, he landed with a wince on the soaked sand where airport tarmac met shoreline. Lilly reached him first. The force of her embrace nearly toppled him, fierce and desperate. For a moment he could not move, then, slowly, he wrapped his arms around her.

  Haruka stood apart. When their eyes met across the wet expanse of the beach, her expression softened. The smile she gave him carried sorrow and gratitude in equal measure.

  He returned it.