"Foolish human being," Nesmeranda sneered, her voice laced with absolute, chilling contempt. It was a tone reserved for a pest that had momentarily distracted a god from her grand design.
She leaned forward, her flawless face hovering inches above his ruined one, and casually spat.
The divine saliva landed on Damien's broken cheek. It didn't feel like liquid; it felt like liquid nitrogen. It burned, hissing against his torn flesh, a final, humiliating brand placed upon a defeated animal.
Even though Damien's face was already completely shattered—his orbital bone crushed, his nose pulverized, his jaw fractured in three different places—he was still conscious. He was still, miraculously, agonizingly alive. Amidst the relentless, systematic torture he had just experienced, his spirit refused to simply extinguish itself. He still struggled to survive, if only to deny her the satisfaction of an easy kill.
And yet, the immediate cost of that stubborn survival was the inability to even voice his hatred. His vocal cords were flooded with blood; his jaw hung at a grotesque, useless angle. He couldn't speak. He couldn't scream.
But Damien paid no mind to the humiliation. His single, remaining eye glared up at her, burning with a black, consuming fire.
"Ohh, you are still alive? Commendable," Nesmeranda noted, floating effortlessly a few feet into the air, crossing her pale legs as if sitting on an invisible throne. She looked down at him with an expression of mild scientific curiosity. "And here I honestly thought you wouldn't be able to distract me for very long. I was preparing to ascend, destroy this wretched world, and then turn my sights upon the Constellations and the Administrators who dared to cage me. But you... you possess a remarkable elasticity for a mortal."
Damien's throat worked, producing a wet, gurgling rasp.
"Ohh, do you want to say something?" Nesmeranda teased, leaning forward again, cupping her chin in her hands.
"Still... poor you. It seems you cannot speak very well. Your lower mandible is practically detached from your skull. How tragic. Here, let me help you."
Nesmeranda casually flicked her wrist.
A wave of violet, abyssal energy washed over Damien's face. It wasn't the warm, comforting healing magic of Morgane or the System's automated recovery. It was a violent, forceful restructuring of matter.
Damien's eyes widened in fresh agony as the shattered fragments of his jawbone were telekinetically dragged back into place, grinding against each other as they forcibly fused. Torn muscles knitted themselves together at lightning speed, pulling the skin taut. The nerves reconnected with a searing jolt of electricity.
She healed his jaw and his broken face, but purposefully ignored his crushed left eye, his amputated arms, and his paralyzed legs. She gave him just enough functionality to amuse her.
"Go on. Try it," Nesmeranda smiled, a saccharine, venomous expression. She floated down and gently held his newly reconstructed chin between her delicate thumb and forefinger. "Try to say a word. Like a little baby learning to speak."
Damien inhaled deeply through his newly cleared airways. He felt the structural integrity of his jaw. He tasted the metallic tang of his own blood.
He didn't speak.
Instead, he summoned every ounce of saliva and blood pooling in his mouth, pursed his lips, and spat directly into Nesmeranda's flawless face.
A thick glob of red hit her perfectly sculpted cheekbone, slowly sliding down toward her jawline.
For a microsecond, the universe held its breath.
Nesmeranda didn't scream. She didn't instantly vaporize him. She simply let out a long, slow exhale. She raised a single, perfectly arched eyebrow and used a lock of her flowing, royal purple hair to wipe the blood from her cheek.
"Woah," Nesmeranda murmured, her voice dropping ten degrees, freezing the air around them. "You seem incredibly disrespectful toward me. What exactly did I do to deserve such poor treatment? All I did was kick you a few times while actively holding back ninety-nine percent of my divine strength. And yet, this is the gratitude I receive for healing you."
She raised her bare foot.
-BAM!
"AAAHHHHGGGGHHH!!!" Damien's newly healed jaw parted in a blood-curdling scream.
Nesmeranda had driven her heel directly into his ribcage, shattering the bones inward, puncturing his lung.
"What an ungrateful mortal you are!" Nesmeranda hissed, stepping forward and spitting back onto Damien's face, returning the insult with divine malice.
She kicked him again, catching him under his torso. Damien was launched through the air, his limp body sailing across the vast, ruined expanse of the Fifth Layer before violently crashing against the base of a massive, shattered obsidian pillar.
"Haah... haah... haaaah!"
Damien lay at the base of the pillar, gasping desperately for air. Ironically, thanks to Nesmeranda's partial healing of his airways and jaw, he was able to cough up the blood flooding his punctured lung, saving his dying body from drowning in its own fluids just long enough to continue suffering.
Suddenly, a metallic clatter echoed near his head.
-CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Damien slowly turned his head. Lying on the polished black stone, mere inches from his nose, was his Poignant Dagger. It was chipped, dulled, and stained with the blood of Apostles, but it was there.
"Why did you give me my goddamn dagger?!" Damien shouted, his voice hoarse, fueled by an agonizing mixture of pain and pure, unadulterated anger. He couldn't even pick it up; he had no arms. It was a cruel, twisted joke.
Nesmeranda floated gracefully over to him, landing lightly on the tips of her toes. She shrugged her delicate shoulders.
"Ehh. Because I want to see you struggle," Nesmeranda admitted cheerfully, placing a hand on her hip. "You said earlier that you wanted to die a meaningful death, did you not? You want to be a martyr for your pathetic little species. Then there it is. Your weapon. Use your absolute last shred of strength to try and kill me."
She paused, a spark of wicked inspiration lighting up her heterochromatic eyes.
"Ohh, I forgot. You have no arms. I wanted to make this fair. My apologies."
Nesmeranda raised both her hands.
A torrent of abyssal mana engulfed Damien's entire body. The pain was astronomical. It felt as if a million microscopic spiders were burrowing out from inside his flesh.
From the cauterized stumps of his shoulders, bone erupted, followed by weaving muscles, arteries, and skin, reconstructing his arms perfectly in a matter of seconds. The feeling rushed back into his fingertips—the cold air, the grit of the ash.
The magic washed over his face, entering the hollow crater of his left eye socket. The optic nerve reattached, the eyeball reformed, and suddenly, binocular vision returned to him. The paralysis in his legs vanished as his severed spinal cord was violently fused back together.
She had healed him. Completely. His body was restored to peak physical condition, the fatigue and physical damage completely erased.
As she finished knitting his left eye back together, she murmured softly to herself, her nose crinkling in disgust. "I really hate that eye color of yours. It is like staring into an empty void. It lacks the passion of red or the royalty of purple."
Nesmeranda stepped back, gesturing to his fully restored body.
"There. Fair, right?" she smiled, opening her arms wide. "Now, since it is officially a fair fight... go. Pick up your little knife, try, and kill me. Oh, and before I forget..."
She snapped her fingers.
Inside Damien's soul, a heavy, metallic lock disengaged. The terrifying, necrotic reservoir of his unique power flared back to life.
"I have returned access to your unique Trait. Though, I have permanently severed your connection to all of your System-assisted abilities and that annoying little status window. You will fight me with your own innate power, not the borrowed tricks of the Administrators. So, you should thank me, alright?"
Nesmeranda did all of this under the guise of offering a "Fair Fight." She wanted to prove a point. And yet, Damien knew the truth. She did all of this simply as a way to mock his struggles. She wanted to build him up to his absolute peak, to give him a fleeting moment of hope, just so she could crush it entirely. She wanted to prove that humanity's 100% was mathematically equal to a god's 0.001%.
Damien slowly pushed himself up off the ground. He tested his newly formed hands, clenching them into fists. He felt the terrifying, familiar coldness of the [Black Death] coursing through his veins once more.
He bent down and picked up his Poignant Dagger. He stood tall, leveling his gaze at the Demon God.
"You know..." Damien started, his voice eerily calm, resonating with a dead, hollow certainty. "Of all the bitches I have ever met in my miserable, cursed life... you are the most crazy, psycho, and sadistic fucking bitch I have ever had the displeasure of looking at."
Damien shouted the insult, his voice echoing across the ruined Fifth Layer. He ridiculed Nesmeranda without a single ounce of hesitation or fear. For any other person watching—if anyone were left alive to watch—it might seem completely insane. It looked like a man aggressively courting a horrific, drawn-out death.
But Damien paid absolutely no heed to what anyone else would think. He didn't care about his life anymore. He didn't care about survival. All he wanted to do, the singular, burning desire anchoring his soul to this plane of existence, was to kill her. To end this nightmare, and to finally rest.
He took a deep breath. He didn't activate the first or second states of his trait. He didn't build up to it. He went straight to the absolute precipice of his existence.
Damien activated his trait with all of his might, burning the remaining decades of his lifespan in a single, catastrophic instant. He was going to use his ultimate conceptual attack—an attack designed not just to kill flesh, but to erase divinity.
"There it is! That's what I'm waiting for!" Nesmeranda cheered, her eyes widening in manic delight as she spread her arms wide, inviting the strike.
The air around Damien turned absolute, pitch black. The light was actively fleeing from him. His hair, previously a striking crimson red, began to rapidly bleach, turning a stark, snowy white from the roots to the tips as his life force was violently drained to fuel the attack.
"Show me!" Nesmeranda shouted, her voice trembling with ecstatic anticipation as she felt the intense, primordial anti-matter power radiating from the human. "Show me how you managed to kill all of my loyal followers! Show me how you plan to punish those filthy Hunters who commit mortal sins! Show me, Damien! Show me!"
Damien's obsidian eyes narrowed into slits of pure, concentrated death. He gripped the dagger with both hands, raising it high above his head. The small, chipped blade extended into a colossal, towering scythe of absolute nothingness, tearing at the dimensional fabric of the dungeon itself.
He roared his final incantation, his voice echoing with the authority of the Reaper.
'BLACK DEATH FINAL STATE: FINAL FORM!'
'INTERFECTOR DEORUM!!!' (God Killer)
-WOOOOMMM!!!
A blinding, inverted light—a darkness so bright it burned the retinas—exploded between Damien and Nesmeranda.
Damien swung the massive, conceptual scythe downward, aiming directly for the crystal embedded in Nesmeranda's chest.
-BOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!!!
"FUCK YOOOOUUUUUU!!!"
Damien screamed, his voice shattering under the sheer cosmic strain.
The blade connected. The impact did not create a mere shockwave; it created a localized big bang.
The physical space of the dungeon could not contain the concept of a "God Killing" strike. The massive scythe of anti-matter cleaved downward, splitting the floor of the Fifth Layer. But it didn't stop there.
The attack tore through the bedrock. It sliced entirely through the Fourth Layer, the Third Layer, the Second Layer, and the First Layer. The sheer, incomprehensible magnitude of the strike cut the entire SSS+ Dungeon completely in half.
The dark energy rocketed upward, breaching the surface of the earth in the Nevada desert. It cleaved the clouds, splitting the storm cell above the exclusion zone, and shot into the stratosphere, leaving a permanent, visible black scar across the night sky of Earth.
The resulting backblast of energy within the dungeon was apocalyptic.
"AAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!"
Nesmeranda's scream joined Damien's, a sound of genuine, shocking pain that shook the foundations of reality.
-BOOOOOOOMMM!!!
The Fifth Layer began to collapse in on itself, gravity failing as the realm was fundamentally destroyed.
And yet, Damien didn't end his attack. He refused to release the pressure. He poured his soul, his memories, his love, and his hatred into the blade, driving it deeper into the blast radius. He wanted to be absolutely, undoubtedly sure that the bitch was dead.
When his mana core finally ran completely dry, cracking and turning to dust within his chest, the attack subsided.
"Haah... huff... haah... huff!"
Damien fell to his knees, gasping for air that was too thin to breathe.
He slowly lifted his head. The world around him was unrecognizable. The enclosed, cavernous ceiling of the Fifth Layer was gone. He was staring up a massive, sheer vertical canyon that stretched for miles upward. Through the miles of cleaved earth and dungeon layers, he could actually see the real sky of Nevada—the distant, twinkling stars of Earth looking down into the abyss he had created.
His eyes widened in shock at the sheer magnitude of what his strike had accomplished. He had destroyed a realm. He had cleaved a World-Ender Dungeon in twain.
And yet... he didn't relax. He didn't let out a breath of relief.
The price for using Interfector Deorum was immediate and devastating. His hair was completely white, blowing in the updraft. His vision was heavily clouded, a creeping, permanent blindness encroaching from the edges of his eyes. His body felt hollow, like a dry husk waiting to blow away in the wind.
But he didn't pay attention to the price. He was frantically searching through the settling dust and anti-matter residue for Nesmeranda's remains.
'Did I do it?!' Damien asked himself inwardly, his heart pounding a slow, erratic rhythm. 'Is she dead?'
Then, he felt it.
A massive, oppressive aura—one that hadn't weakened, but had somehow grown more annoyed.
-BOOOOOOMMM!!!!
The dust was blown away by a localized pulse of gravity.
Damien's breath hitched.
Standing in the center of the crater, hovering slightly above the glassed earth, was Nesmeranda.
She was completely unscathed. Her purple hair was unruffled. Her dress of shadows was perfectly pristine.
However, Damien noticed one crucial detail. Her right arm—from the shoulder down—was completely gone. The Interfector Deorum strike had managed to bypass her absolute divine defense and cleanly sever her limb.
But Damien wasn't happy. He didn't celebrate. The sight of her missing arm brought him no joy.
Because he knew what it meant. That attack... it was everything he had. It was a strike meant to slay Constellations. It was a strike that had destroyed a dimensional space. And yet, it had only cost her an arm. His absolute best, his ultimate sacrifice, had failed to deal a final, lethal blow to the Demon God.
Nesmeranda looked down at her missing arm, then looked up at Damien. She smirked, an expression of genuine, terrifying amusement.
"For the first time in millennia, a nobody—a mortal without even a System interface—managed to slice off my arm," Nesmeranda stated, her voice echoing with a chilling clarity. "I was actually excited, you know. For a fraction of a second, I thought you might possess the same conceptual weight as me. I thought I had found a true anomaly."
She sighed, shaking her head.
"And yet... you are still just a damn nobody who ran out of steam."
Then, without so much as a grimace, dark violet mana bubbled at the stump of her shoulder. In less than a second, flesh, bone, and skin re-knit perfectly. She regrew her arm effortlessly, flexing her newly formed fingers.
She looked at Damien, her eyes narrowing.
"Well, I guess I just destroyed your hope of killing me. Though, I must admit—"
-THWACK!
Damien didn't even see her move. She didn't use spatial magic. She was simply there.
-SQUELCH!
A sickening, wet sound filled Damien's ears. He looked down.
Nesmeranda was standing flush against him. Her right hand—the hand she had just regenerated—was plunged directly into the center of his chest. Her delicate fingers had shattered his sternum, bypassed his ribcage, and were currently wrapped tightly around his beating heart.
"—You are the strongest out of all the humans I've faced, or whatever you choose to call those pathetic losers on the surface," Nesmeranda continued seamlessly, her face inches from his, her breath smelling of lilacs and death.
She leaned in, whispering into his ear, her voice sickly sweet.
"And because of that... I have a proposition for you. How about you serve me? Accept me as your Master. At the very least, with your unyielding willpower, you could be a highly useful, exceptionally loyal servant in my new empire."
She twisted her hand slightly inside his chest. Damien gasped, blood spilling over his lips.
"If you bow to me right now," Nesmeranda promised softly, "I promise I will spare your little world. I will keep your surviving friends alive. I will spare your late girlfriend's family, the Prime Minister and his wife. And I will not touch those two stray children they recently adopted. They can all live in peace under my rule."
She tilted her head, her crimson eye glowing.
"How's that sound, Damien? Will you trade your pride for their lives, huh?"
Damien stood there, impaled, in a state of absolute shock. He couldn't reply for a long moment. He was questioning the fabric of reality itself. How? How could this happen? He had sacrificed everything, his very soul, and it amounted to nothing more than a momentary parlor trick to a god.
He couldn't find an answer.
And then, looking into her mismatched eyes, he realized the cruelest truth of all.
Nesmeranda had known all along that his ultimate attack wouldn't kill her. She had let him build up his power, let him burn his lifespan, let him believe he had a chance, just so she could watch the hope drain from his eyes when he realized all of his monumental struggles were entirely, hopelessly useless. She was savoring his despair.
The realization didn't bring fear. It brought a profound, crystalline clarity.
Damien glared at her. His white hair blew in the wind. The blood poured from his mouth, staining his chin and her pristine hand.
Slowly, painfully, Damien raised his trembling left arm. He curled his fingers inward, leaving only one extended.
He flipped a bloody middle finger directly in the Demon God's face.
"Fuck you! ...Asshole," Damien spat, his voice a gargling, defiant whisper.
And then, pulling his head back, Damien slammed his forehead directly into the bridge of Nesmeranda's nose with every ounce of physical strength he had left.
-BAM!
The impact resounded loudly.
-BAM!
He pulled back and headbutted her again.
-BAM!
He did it repeatedly, a frantic, animalistic assault.
And yet, to Nesmeranda, it was less than a breeze. She didn't even blink. Her skin was harder than diamond. All Damien accomplished was splitting his own forehead open.
He saw his own blood dripping down onto Nesmeranda's flawless, unblemished forehead. He saw the sheer futility of his actions. And yet, he didn't heed it. He paid no mind to the impossibility. He kept headbutting her, over and over, refusing to yield, refusing to beg, refusing to bow.
He was a human, and he would die like one—fighting with his teeth and his skull when his weapons failed him.
Nesmeranda sighed, a look of profound boredom crossing her face.
"Pity," she whispered.
She closed her fist.
She crushed his heart into an unrecognizable pulp inside his chest.
"BWACHK!"
A massive torrent of blood erupted from Damien's mouth. His eyes widened to their absolute limit.
But he expected this. He had expected this to be the end since he walked into the dungeon.
'Is this it?' Damien thought, his vision rapidly tunnelling, the edges of the world turning black. 'All of my struggles, all of my pain... it only resulted in failure. And yet, I'm still questioning if this is the end. Hah! What a goddamn fool I am.'
Nesmeranda casually pulled her hand out of his chest, shaking the gore from her fingers, and callously tossed Damien's body to the side like a piece of discarded trash.
"Interesting," she murmured, watching him fall.
Damien hit the ground. He didn't feel the impact. He couldn't feel anything below his neck anymore.
He lay on his back, his single, dimming eye looking straight up through the massive canyon he had carved, looking up at the false sky of Earth.
As the darkness claimed him, his mind didn't linger on the Demon God. He didn't think about his failure.
He thought of Michael, sitting in his office, fighting a war of politics. He thought of Sasha, crying over a glass of wine, mourning a daughter she couldn't let go of. He thought of his Wombat squad, of Ricky enjoying a meal on that Korean Restaurant, of the two street kids holding the tarnished rings he had given them.
And lastly, he thought of Gayeol, running toward the surface, carrying the weight of his sacrifice.
And yet... as he cataloged his life, he realized he didn't regret any of it. He had lived a life full of trauma, soaked in blood and punctuated by deep, unending regrets. But at the very least, his death right now was his escape. It was his final, eternal rest.
He knew that as long as Gayeol and the remaining Hunters on the surface were able to survive, a new era would be born.
Even though this era—the era of the System, the era of Constellations using humans as meat shields, the era he had lived and suffered in—was now violently coming to an end, he knew a new hope would rise from the ashes.
A new era where humanity wouldn't take the same subservient path his generation did. A path where the newly Awakened Hunters, inspired by the fall of the old guard, would refuse to be bound by the rules of the gods. They would refuse to be controlled by the System anymore. They would fight for their own destiny.
That thought brought him peace.
Lying in a pool of his own blood, at the bottom of the deepest dungeon on Earth, Damien smiled.
He wasn't terrified of his ending. As his life force slowly faded away into the ether, he didn't think of the cosmic doom that would soon reach his world. He thought only of the new hope. The new era that would be born after the tragic, bloody ending of his generation.
Damien smiled, a soft, genuine, unburdened expression.
Then, his hand dropped limply to the ground. The light vanished from his eye. His chest stopped moving.
It was a silent declaration of his death.
The End of An Era.
***
The Aftermath.
Nesmeranda looked down at Damien's lifeless body, floating gracefully back down to the ground. She saw the peaceful smile etched onto his bloodied face.
She knew exactly what he had been thinking in his final moments. She could read the lingering echoes of his soul.
She scoffed, crossing her arms. She wanted to destroy this world immediately. She was in a rush. She wanted to shatter the dimensional boundaries, march into the celestial realms, and slaughter the Constellations who had sealed her away in that dimension of never-ending, silent suffering for ten millennia.
She raised her hand, gathering an immense sphere of violet energy that would crack the Earth's core in half.
But suddenly, the air warped.
A System window popped out of nowhere. But it wasn't the standard blue of the human interface, nor was it the corrupted purple of the Abyss.
It was a pristine, shimmering Silver.
The silver window expanded, hovering directly in front of Nesmeranda's face, intercepting her attack.
A line of elegant text appeared on the screen, accompanied by a voice that spoke directly into her mind—a voice that was impossibly warm, ancient, and deeply familiar.
[No, it's not the time yet, Nesmeranda.]
Nesmeranda gasped, her eyes widening. The sphere of destructive energy vanished from her hand.
"What?!" Nesmeranda shouted at the floating screen, her tone a mix of shock and sudden, petulant anger. "I thought that after I killed this mortal anomaly, we would proceed with our grand plan! I thought I was going to destroy this world, absorb its core, and then we would march up there and destroy those bastards who killed you and sealed me away!"
She stomped her foot on the ground, cracking the obsidian.
"What is the meaning of this sudden change of plans?!" Nesmeranda demanded, glaring at the silver text.
[Patience, my love. I have found a way to ensure our absolute victory. A path with zero variables.]
"What?! Now you find a way to ensure our victory?! After my cult and I spent ten thousand years doing all of this? After I had to endure being sealed in stone?!" Nesmeranda responded, her anger flaring, her hair whipping around her like a storm.
"Tch! You—!!!"
She raised a fist, threatening to punch the silver screen.
"If you weren't the love of my life, and my eternal Husband, I would have killed you a long time ago for being so dramatic!" Nesmeranda yelled, crossing her arms and pouting, looking less like a Demon God and more like a frustrated wife.
The silver window shimmered playfully.
[And that is exactly why you love me so much, Nesmeranda. My dramatic timing.]
"Tch! Shut up!" she snapped, though the corners of her mouth twitched upward slightly. "Now, tell me. What is this new, flawless plan of yours?"
The silver text cleared, and a new line appeared, hovering deliberately over Damien's corpse.
[That man you just killed. Damien Vincenzo Leone. He is our key. He is the ultimate key to ensuring our victory against the Administrators, my siblings, and my tyrannical Father.]
Nesmeranda raised an elegant eyebrow, looking down skeptically at the broken, white-haired human lying in the dirt.
"Really? Him?" she scoffed. "That red-haired fool whose hair turned white because he burned out his own soul? He's just a mortal. A stubborn one, yes, but a mortal nonetheless."
[Yep! He is our key, after all. He possesses the one thing the Heavens cannot calculate or control.]
The text paused for a dramatic moment.
[He is my 'Meus egomet'. My own self. My vessel of defiance.]
"Hmm. I see," Nesmeranda mused, her anger fading into calculating curiosity. She understood the weight of that title. If the Husband had chosen this soul... then the game was much larger than she had anticipated.
"Then, how many more years must I wait in the shadows?" Nesmeranda asked, tapping her chin impatiently.
[It will take around 9 to 10 Earth years for the alignment to complete.]
"Ten years?" Nesmeranda's eyes gleamed as she heard that. "That's incredibly short! A mere blink of an eye for us!"
[For you and I, of course. It is nothing.]
The silver screen pulsed slightly, a hint of genuine sympathy in its glow.
[But for him... it will be like a gruesome, unending purgatory of waiting. I have already begun to proceed with our plans. Just be sure—]
[To keep a very close eye on him, Nesmeranda. Do not interfere directly. And whatever you do, do not let yourself be caught by the Multiversal Enforcers while you wait. Lay low.]
"You know how elusive I am—" Nesmeranda smirked confidently.
"—My dear," she added softly, reaching out to gently trace her fingertips across the glowing silver screen of the system.
[Thank you. I have missed you.]
"Hmph! You should have!" Nesmeranda sniffed, turning her head away to hide a fond smile.
"Though it's just a terrible waste that I have to wait another decade for our plans to succeed. I wanted blood today. But... I am not complaining, as long as it absolutely ensures our victory over those hypocrites."
Nesmeranda smiled, a terrifyingly beautiful expression, as the thought of finally punishing the Constellations, the Administrators, and everyone who had wronged her and her husband filled her with dark joy.
She turned her attention away from the silver screen. She looked up.
Floating high above them, miraculously still transmitting, was the Old Era broadcasting drone.
She floated upward, locking her crimson and purple eyes directly into the camera lens, knowing that billions of humans and countless gods were watching her every move.
She amplified her voice, making it boom across the dimensional layers, reaching all the way to the surface of the Earth.
"HUMANS OF UNIVERSE NO. 6471-3!"
The voice shook the foundations of the world above.
"I, THE DEMON GOD, NESMERANDA, HAVE DECIDED TO HALT MY ADVANCE! I WILL NOT CONTINUE TO ATTACK OR DESTROY YOUR PATHETIC WORLD TODAY! CONSIDER IT A BOUNTIFUL REWARD FOR THE ENTERTAINING SACRIFICE YOUR LITTLE HERO MADE TO AMUSE ME!"
She pointed a finger at the camera, her expression turning lethal.
"AT THE VERY LEAST, HE WAS DIFFERENT FROM THE REST OF YOU COWARDS! THAT IS WHY I WILL SPARE THIS SPECIFIC UNIVERSE FOR NOW. BUT—!"
Her voice dropped, echoing with an absolute, terrifying promise.
"IF I RETURN... NO! IF YOU DO NOT CHANGE YOUR WAYS! IF YOU CONTINUE TO ABUSE YOUR FELLOW KIND AND WORSHIP THOSE FALSE GODS IN THE SKY... I, THE DEMON GOD, WILL RETURN TO PUNISH YOU! AND I WILL BURN THIS WORLD DOWN TO ITS CORE!"
She glared at the lens for one final, heart-stopping second, ensuring her threat was etched into the nightmares of humanity.
Then, she snapped her fingers. The drone shattered into a million pieces, cutting the feed to the outside world permanently.
She floated back down to the ground. The Silver System window was still hovering there, flashing with new text.
[As far as I remember, you didn't make any sort of promise to that boy about sparing his world.]
"Shh!" Nesmeranda retorted, waving her hand dismissively at her husband's interface. "I am acting cool here. I needed a dramatic exit line. It establishes presence."
[Fine. Though you really should get out of here right now. The spatial fluctuations are attracting attention. The Enforcers will be coming here soon to investigate the dimensional tear he created.]
Nesmeranda nodded. She raised her hand and effortlessly tore a hole in the fabric of space, creating a swirling, violet portal leading back to her hidden dimensional pocket.
"Yeah, yeah. Already on it, my love."
She stepped through the portal, her purple hair trailing behind her, and vanished from the ruined dungeon without looking back. The portal zipped shut, leaving behind absolute silence.
The Fifth Layer was empty, save for the shattered pillars, the settling dust, and the body of the fallen hero.
The Silver System window hovered in the air for a few moments longer. It slowly drifted over, floating directly above Damien's lifeless face. The white hair, the bloody grin, the closed eyes.
The screen glowed warmly, casting a soft, silver light over his features.
A final line of text appeared on the screen, a quiet promise whispered to a sleeping soul.
[It is not your time to truly die yet.]
[Your story is not over, my dear... Meus egomet.]
The silver window dissolved into particles of light, sinking directly into Damien's chest, where his heart used to be.
The prologue ended. The true nightmare was only just beginning.