The Scarlet King — what remained of him — did not scream as he ended. There wasn't enough of him left to scream with. He simply dissolved, layer by layer, divine energy unspooling from a body that had spent ten thousand years stealing what was never his, until nothing remained in the void but drifting ash and the fading echo of a crown that no longer had a head to sit upon.
Rehan floated motionless above the ashes, his outstretched hand still smoking, the light of the extracted heart's detonation only now beginning to fade from his skin.
He had won.
He didn't feel it.
The cracks along his arms and chest hadn't closed. If anything, they'd spread — thin fractures of blinding white light webbing outward from his palm, up his forearm, across his collarbone, threading toward his throat like a system slowly failing from the inside. The backlash of absorbing a fused divine heart raw, without seal or preparation, hadn't finished collecting its price. It was still collecting it.
Below him, Earth was dying.
The fracture that had split the eastern and western hemispheres apart during the fight's final exchanges had not slowed — if anything, the last catastrophic detonation of the extracted heart had slammed into it like a closing fist, accelerating a collapse that had been building since chapter 194's very first dimensional tear.
Zahir, still standing on the one continent that hadn't yet begun to fracture, watched in silent horror as the horizon itself seemed to bow inward, the curve of the planet visibly warping under stress no world was built to survive.
"Rehan," Zahir whispered, though there was no way for his voice to carry that far, "what did you do..."
High above, Rehan finally looked down — truly looked, for the first time since the fight had spilled out into open space — and saw it. The scarring. The fractures. Oceans draining into open dimensional wounds. An entire hemisphere beginning, slowly, irreversibly, to separate from the whole.
For a moment, something like the old Rehan flickered back to the surface — the boy who had once carried the sky on his shoulders without asking for help, who had never once, in one hundred and ninety-nine chapters, let a battlefield claim more than it had to.
"...No," he breathed. "No, no—I didn't mean—"
He moved on instinct, diving toward the planet, hands outstretched, golden-emerald light flaring weakly around fingers still smoking from the heart's backlash, some desperate, exhausted part of him trying to hold together a wound that was already far beyond holding.
It didn't work.
The cracks in his own body flared brighter in protest, his Life-Reversal Authority sputtering, overtaxed past any reasonable limit after absorbing raw divinity with no preparation at all. Every attempt to stabilize the planet's fracture cost him strength he no longer had to spare, strength that had already been spent completely across two hundred chapters of grief, fury, and unrestrained war.
He caught himself just above the fracturing crust, hovering, shaking, watching helplessly as the deep planetary wound continued to widen despite everything he threw into slowing it.
"I killed him," Rehan whispered, voice hollow, the adrenaline of vengeance finally, completely spent, leaving only the wreckage behind it. "I killed him, and it still wasn't enough to stop this."
Below him, the fracture reached the planet's core.
A soundless flash of white lit the entire dying world from within, visible even from orbit, even from the shattered remains of the battlefield where it had all begun.
And Rehan, weightless, broken, utterly emptied of everything he had left to give, began — slowly, inevitably — to fall.