Kazuki watched Vareon with the cool, unhurried patience of someone who'd already anticipated the scream. Rain still traced cold lines down the ruined stones; even the sky seemed to hold its breath.
"When you first shifted into that demonic form," Kazuki began, voice quiet and steady, "you brutalized me. You nearly killed me outright. You left me broken on the ground… and yet you didn't use your Absolute Spirit Ability Copy."
He let the sentence hang. Vareon's single remaining eye burned with furious confusion; shards of energy stitched and then unstitched across the dying titan's frame.
"There was a reason for that," Kazuki said. "A single, stupidly obvious reason that your arrogance and superstition blinded you to. The prophecy—Fate's Chosen Path—speaks of me dying to a surprise strike. If I truly am that child, then the story demanded a death that I could not foresee."
Kazuki's mouth curved—not a smile, but a practiced line of triumph.
"You didn't copy me then because you needed to be sure. You wanted to test whether I matched the prophecy. And if I was the child… you planned to finish me and steal everything I held. That was your intent from the start."
Vareon's breath hitched; a sound like stones grinding together. He opened his mouth to answer, but the words stuck. His chest trembled as the last remnants of his soul frayed—what little autonomy remained fighting against entropy.
Kazuki continued, voice colder now, precise as a blade through silk. "When I looked ahead with my foresight, I saw the exact second this would happen. I saw you hesitate, saw you reach for your copy. I knew the Demon King's betrayal before your hand ever twitched. So when you did use the Absolute Spirit Ability Copy—when you tried to swallow my force—you didn't take a safe vessel. You took more than even the Demon King could process. The overflow burned you from the inside."
Vareon's head turned slowly; the movement was more reflex than will. He tried to grasp at memory, to clap his hands over the panic in his chest, to refute. Instead he rasped, "Just—shut—" The sound broke into a choked roar, then silence, as the last thread of anger dissolved into a ragged plea.
Kazuki took a step closer. The rain washed clean the blood on his boots; his eyes were bright with something like pity—then contempt. "It is a shame you never understood. You were useful to him—until you weren't. You were a tool that fitted his larger plan: raise chaos, cultivate greed, make men so hungry for power they will hand themselves over. The Demon King used you to fray my lines, to bait me into exposing myself. But you never saw the web. You never felt the threads pulling back."
Vareon made no answer now. His form hunched; his breathing slowed. He looked less like a man than the husk of one. Whatever alchemy had once stitched him to the Demon King now unraveled; the stolen force that had swelled his chest and arrogance slipped away like smoke. Pain contorted his features, then weariness. His eyes had a distant, hollow glare—an animal's last glance before sleep.
"You don't even realize," Kazuki went on softly, almost gently, "how deep this conflict runs. There are things the Demon King cannot bargain for. There are rules he cannot circumvent. He used you to break the surface; I used you to reveal the depth. And the threads he wove to manipulate you—those very threads were the paths I walked to trap him."
Vareon's lips trembled; his jaw unhinged in an attempt to speak, but there was nothing left in him to form words. His whole will seemed to be thinning, dissolving into the rain-soaked ground. Whatever of his identity remained clung to him with a final, fading effort as if afraid to go.
Kazuki watched the decay quietly, not triumphant but inevitable. "You were always half-envious, half-proud," he said at last. "You tried to fill what you lacked with worship. It bought you power, yes—but not control. Not freedom. And in the end, that's what betrayed you."
Vareon's head slackened. Not a scream, not a confession—simply the slow, final relinquishment of hold. He was unraveling: body, spirit, purpose. The rain continued, indifferent, and somewhere beneath the steady fall the empire seemed to sigh.
Kazuki turned away when the last of Vareon's resistance dissolved—partly because his work was done, partly because witnesses might come and he wanted to hide the look on his face. He had not wanted this to be easy; he had wanted the whole terrible truth to be seen. The Demon King's puppet was finally only a puppet.
And in the quiet, Kazuki let himself feel the smallest notch of exhaustion—physical and moral—and then set his jaw. There were far darker threads to pull, far larger calculations that had begun to shift. This was merely one knot undone.