The Realm of Death no longer deserved the name "realm."The sky frayed like rotten fabric, eaten thread by thread by the abyss.The ground crumbled like moldy biscuits into an infinite trash bin.
Every sound—collapsing stone, screaming souls, cursing reapers—flattened into a single low drone, like a broken fan.
And still Ethan stood.On a scrap of debris, his stage.Before him: the Void, eternal audience that never clocked out.
Ronan—his "friend"—was now fully its vessel.Suspended above the abyss, body swollen, twisted, stitched together from millions of screams and shadows.Souls circled him like ribbons at a festival, except every ribbon was stuffed with corpses.
Ethan laughed.Not madness. Not despair.But the kind of laugh that slips at a funeral when the sound guy plays the wrong track.
"So that's it," he said, voice slicing the silence."This was always just humanity's self-entertainment nightmare."
The words pierced the quiet like a needle.
The Void froze.Impossible, but true. Its tendrils stopped. Even its background hum skipped like a stuck tape.
Then it surged, offended deity that it was.Thousands of mouths howled one question:
——"A joke? You dare call our cycle a joke?"
Ethan spread his hands."What else is it? Look at us—reapers, agents, mortals—all dancing on your stage. Some scream justice. Some scream sacrifice. Some scream order. And the finale? Stage collapses. Cast dies. Audience wants a refund. Tell me, isn't this just a bad comedy?"
A reaper, halfway swallowed, burst out laughing.Soon others joined. Laughter sharp and brittle, like bones rattling in a tin can.The apocalypse sounded like open-mic night.
The Void screeched."You are but specks of fear! Scraps of nightmare! How dare you mock the womb that bore you!"
"The womb?" Ethan smirked."More like a busted nightmare factory. Churning out lunatics and corpses.If this were Earth, the Bureau of Commerce would've shut you down years ago."
The survivors clapped—hesitant, sarcastic, tragic applause.
For a heartbeat, Ronan's face flickered in the Void's swirl.Still hollow, but something trembled. A crack where the joke hit.
The curtain fell for real. The realm was gone.
But Ethan's voice lingered in the dark:"Void, what you fear most isn't destruction. It's being treated as… a bad joke."
The words hammered into the abyss.The Void boiled in rage. The apocalypse quickened.But in its fury, a faint, absurd awkwardness spread.
Like a self-styled philosopher clown, unmasked by a heckler.
The dark closed in. Sound collapsed.And what remained wasn't the boom of annihilation.
But Ethan's sardonic verdict:
——"In the end, it was just humanity's nightmare of self-entertainment."
The world vanished.But the laughter didn't.