The King's remaining hand shot up, clawing weakly at Rehan's wrist — a final, instinctive act of survival from a body that no longer had the strength to back it up.
"Wait," he gasped, voice fracturing. "If you tear it out like this — raw, unsealed — the backlash will — it'll take everything with it—"
"I know," Rehan said.
He didn't slow down.
His hand plunged forward, black-gold aura parting flesh and obsidian plating like it was mist, sinking past ribs fused from stolen divinity, past the last defensive wards the King could barely maintain, until his fingers closed around something that pulsed — not like a normal heart, but like two heartbeats layered over each other, one demonic, one divine, fighting for the same rhythm and never quite achieving it.
Scarlet's stolen essence and the Ghost Demon's original core, fused together in one final, screaming knot of power.
The King's eyes went impossibly wide.
"NO—"
Rehan tore it free.
The sound that followed had no true equivalent — not an explosion, not a scream, but something in between, a wet, resonant crack that echoed backward through every dimensional tear the two of them had ripped open across two hundred chapters of war, all at once, simultaneously, as if the wound in reality had been waiting specifically for this moment to fully collect on its debt.
The heart pulsed once in Rehan's fist, blindingly bright, crimson and gold light bleeding between his fingers — and then it simply detonated, a small, contained supernova erupting outward from his closed hand in a sphere of pure divine backlash.
Rehan didn't let go. He held it as it burned through his palm, through his forearm, cauterizing flesh even as it unraveled, absorbing the raw overflow of stolen godhood directly into his own already-overloaded body rather than let it scatter unchecked into the void.
The Scarlet King's body, no longer anchored by the heart that had sustained his fused form, began to unravel in real time — obsidian plating crumbling to ash, crimson antlers dissolving, the towering silhouette of the King collapsing back down, smaller and smaller, until what remained hanging in the void was barely more than the original Lord Ghost Demon had ever been. Hollow. Diminished. Dying.
"You..." the King — barely a lord now — whispered, staring at his own disintegrating hands. "You just absorbed a goddess's death directly into your own body. No seal. No preparation. That should have killed you instantly—"
"Maybe it will," Rehan said, and for the first time, his voice wavered — not from fear, but from the sheer, staggering cost finally catching up to him all at once. Cracks of blinding white light split along his arms, his chest, his throat, each one a fault line in his own physical form threatening to give way exactly as Earth's crust had. "But you'll be gone first. That's all that matters to me right now."
He closed the remaining distance in an instant, no longer bothering with strikes, with technique, with anything resembling a fight — simply pressing his glowing, cracking palm flat against what remained of the demon lord's chest.
"Goodbye," Rehan said quietly. "I hope wherever you go next, it's colder than anything you ever gave the people you devoured."
The light consumed everything.
Far below, Earth's fractured crust reached its breaking point precisely as the final detonation rippled outward from high orbit — the last catastrophic overflow of divine backlash slamming into the planet's already-devastated eastern hemisphere like a hammer finishing what two hundred chapters of war had already started.