The crushed bedrock of the dimensional rift still sizzled with white-hot residue.
Rehan stood at the epicenter of the crater, the lingering stellar aura dancing around his boots like miniature solar flares. His breathing was disciplined, deep and even, though the raw strain of releasing that sudden burst of compressed power still hummed beneath his skin. He didn't drop his stance. His fractured blade remained loosely pointed downward as his gaze locked onto the shattered pile of rubble forty meters away.
Deep inside the crater, covered in black blood and pulverized stone, Morgath lay motionless.
"It's over," Rehan said softly, his voice cutting cleanly through the absolute silence of the void.
Slowly, Rehan took a step forward. The fragments of floating asphalt drifted away from him, repelled by his sheer density of presence.
"You looked down on me," Rehan continued, his eyes cold and unblinking. "You looked down on Li Wei, on Ishita, and on every human fighting for their survival. You claimed that weaklings can never stand against the strong. You believed power gives you the absolute right to decide who lives and who is crushed."
Rehan paused, stopping just a few paces before the demon's broken body.
"You're wrong, Morgath. Strength without purpose is just hollow arrogance. The weak don't stay down forever. And a weak person... can tear down the strongest entity if they have a reason to fight."
The moment those words left Rehan's lips, Morgath's mangled fingers twitched violently.
Thump.
A heavy, sickening sound reverberated directly inside Morgath's consciousness.
Thump. Thump.
It was not the sound of a normal pulse. It was an ominous, deafening heartbeat that rattled his demonic core like a bronze war-drum. The entire dimensional rift seemed to freeze around the frequency of that terrible rhythm.
"...A weak person can defeat the strong..."
An ancient, distant voice echoed inside Morgath's head—the exact same phrase, spoken by a shadow buried deep within his long-forgotten past.
"NO!"
Morgath's eyes snapped open, bloodshot and veins bursting with vile green ichor.
"GRAAAAAAAHHHHHH!"
A blood-curdling roar erupted from his throat, carrying enough raw kinetic force to blast the rubble off his body in a violent explosion. The sound tore through the void like thunder, shaking the very fabric of space until tiny dimensional cracks spiderwebbed across the air.
He scrambled upright, coughing out dark fluid, but as his gaze locked onto Rehan, his twisted face contorted into an utterly unhinged, sadistic devil's smile.
"What? What?! WHAT?!" Morgath chuckled, his laugh rapidly degenerating into manic hysteria. "I lost?! You won?! You dared to reveal your true power while I was holding back like a fool?!"
His grin stretched unnaturally wide, showing rows of razor-sharp, jagged fangs.
"You think this is victory, brat?! You think your little punch settled reality?! Fine! Let's fight with everything! Life and death! I will show you what true power actually means! I'll show you what happens to a pathetic weakling when a genuine sovereign decides to stop playing!"
The green-black storm around Morgath did not just flare—it detonated.
The void began to bend violently around his body as space ruptured. His physical frame began an agonizing, horrifying metamorphosis. His spine snapped and extended, growing massive and imposing as he planted his two legs firmly into the bedrock like steel pillars. From his skull, two colossal obsidian horns curved upward toward the dark sky, crackling with green spatial lightning.
His mouth tore open into a nightmare of elongated devilish teeth, while a tattered, radiant green-black phantom mantle unfurled behind him, defying gravity and dancing like ghostly hellfire in the vacuum.
Two additional, muscular demonic arms tore straight out from his torso. In his primary hands, two serrated, venomous daggers materialized, dripping with corrosive temporal decay. In his upper-left hand, he summoned a towering, black-iron Death Scythe that emitted the wailing cries of lost souls. In his upper-right hand, he gripped the Death Wolf Weapon—a jagged, beast-headed flanged polearm that snarled with feral, red-tinted bloodlust.
His eyes had completely transformed—no pupils, no sclera, just two bottomless spheres of absolute, pitch-black void aura that seemed to swallow all incoming light.
The pressure descending from this monstrous form made the entire battlefield groan. Even Rehan felt a cold shock ripple through his spine. The creature standing before him was on a completely different existential tier than the entity he had been trading blows with moments ago.
Rehan did not hesitate. He knew that waiting even half a breath would be fatal.
Channeling every ounce of his burning golden radiance into his cracked sword, the weapon blazed like a falling meteor. The light was blinding, screaming with the absolute resolve to end this nightmare in a single, decisive cleave.
"Phantom Severance: Horizon Cleave!"
Rehan vanished, crossing the space between them in zero time, driving the full weight of his blazing blade straight toward Morgath's transformed neck.
Flash.
There was no battle. There was no exchange.
There was only a single, imperceptible blur of green-black lightning.
Before Rehan's sword could even make contact, Morgath had already closed the distance. His movement defied the laws of acceleration—he simply appeared on Rehan's flank, the black Death Scythe tracing a microscopic, elegant arc through the air.
Snap—Clang!
A clean, metallic ring echoed through the stillness.
Rehan froze mid-motion.
A split second later, a deep, bloodied laceration ripped open across Rehan's chest, tearing through his aura and flesh alike. Fresh crimson blood sprayed into the void.
And then came the sound of falling steel.
The top half of Rehan's glowing sword spun through the air before embedding itself into the shattered stone behind him. In Rehan's hand, only a jagged, broken hilt remained. The golden light flickered violently and died out.
Morgath did not even turn his entire body. He stood tall, towering over the boy with his four arms poised, his green mantle drifting lazily in the dimensional draft.
With an icy, mocking sneer, the demon cast a sideways glance down at Rehan's broken weapon and bleeding chest.
"Tell me again, boy..." Morgath's voice dropped into a calm, bone-chilling whisper.
"...What was that nonsense you were spewing about the weak defeating the strong?"