My command hung in the void, a desperate plea against the infinite hunger of the colossal being before us.
"Lamia! Send the others back! Now!"
Lamia, trembling, began to trace frantic symbols in the air. But the monumental form of Gluttony Raf only smiled, a tiny motion on his vast, round face. He took a step forward, a movement that shook the very foundation of the void. Towards them.
"Leaving so soon?"
his voice boomed, a tidal wave of casual malice.
"The banquet has only just begun."
The remaining Jinn, tiny before his immensity, understood. Their fiery forms flickered not with fear, but with resolve. Their allegiance was to their king.
They did not charge.
In a move of breathtaking, final sacrifice, they interlinked.
Their bodies of smokeless fire flowed together, weaving a massive, shimmering wall of primordial energy between the titanic Gluttony and my friends. It was a shield. A final, desperate barrier.
"Go!"
The psychic command from the collective Jinn echoed in our minds—a sound of cracking embers and ancient honor.
Lamia's portal flared to life behind them—a screaming, unstable rip in reality. Niran, his face a mask of anguish, didn't hesitate. He hauled a catatonic Preecha towards the light. Julia, with a strength I didn't know she had, half-dragged, half-carried a sobbing Dao through after them. With a final, concussive POP, the portal snapped shut.
They were gone.
Safe.
The Jinn shield held for a heartbeat longer, then dissipated, their sacrifice complete. Their light faded, leaving only Gluttony and me.
And Kephriel. He stood off to the side, his usual smirk gone, replaced by a look of stark, unprecedented shock. He was just a spectator to a power that even he seemed to fear.
Gluttony's placid smile vanished. His amusement turned to a vast, planet-sized annoyance. His snack had been taken away.
He turned his full, horrifying attention to me. The last course.
He raised a hand, large enough to crush a moon, to simply pluck me from existence.
I didn't think. There was only the echo of Dao's broken sobs and the memory of a hundred years of peace.
I lunged, a speck against his monumental form. I planted my feet and did the only thing I could think of.
I opened my mouth.
I pulled on everything—the Mindbreaker aura, the cold serpent of despair, the memory of wholeness—and I screamed it into a single, concentrated point, towards him.
It was an invitation. A wave of pure, undiluted self.
It hit him. And his vast eyes showed not hunger, but shock.
His own gluttony rebelled. He couldn't not consume. His massive mouth opened in an involuntary, reflexive response.
He inhaled.
And he consumed me.
My essence poured into him. For a single, terrifying second, our consciousnesses were one. I felt his infinite, vacant hunger. He felt my century of peace and the agony of its loss.
It was a paradox his colossal being could not process. The one thing he could not stomach was me.
He… rejected it.
With a sound that was the universe itself vomiting, my essence was violently expelled.
The backlash didn't hit me. It hit him.
My lived life, my love, my grief—it was a poison. The vacant smile on his huge face shattered into a rictus of agony. The jars containing the other versions of me exploded in a shower of crystalline light.
Gluttony Raf… unraveled.
His gigantic form distorted, stretched, and then imploded, collapsing in on itself with a final, silent scream. He dissolved into a swirling, chaotic storm of fading, confused energy.
Silence.
Utter, profound silence.
Kephriel and I were left alone in the void, kneeling, gasping, two normal-sized figures in an infinite blackness. The storm of power that had been Gluttony churned where he once stood.
And then, above us, the void moved.
A massive, scaly eyelid, large enough to eclipse a galaxy, slid open.
A single, colossal eye looked down. It glowed with cold blue fire, but it was wrong. It wasn't just Kephriel's eye. Swimming in its depths was the vacant, hungry satisfaction of Gluttony.
The storm of energy below—all that remained of Gluttony Raf and his collections—was sucked upward into that giant eye, fueling it.
A voice spoke. It wasn't a sound. It was the void itself vibrating. It was Kephriel's voice, but layered with Gluttony's wet, rumbling hunger.
"ENOUGH."
The eye focused on us. On me. On Kephriel.
The energy finished draining. The eyelid blinked once, slowly.
And then, from the spot where the storm had been, a new form coalesced. It was Kephriel's form, but warped, swollen with terrible power. He was now a giant, though not as vast as Gluttony Raf had been. His skin seemed stretched, his features blurred by the raging energies within. His chains were thicker, darker, pulsing with stolen power.
He simply shrank, to reach us.
Gluttony Keph looked at his own hands, flexing them as if unfamiliar with the new, horrific strength.
He then slowly raised his gaze. His eyes, when they opened, were no longer just cold blue fire. They were voids, bottomless pits of hunger, with pinpricks of Kephriel's cruel intelligence shining from the depths.
His gaze landed on me.
A wide, terrifying smile stretched across his face.