Chapter 127: The Devil.
The blade descended like a verdict.
Karahad’s sword, wreathed in shadows older than memory, carved the air with the certainty of inevitability. His voice carried across the ruins, deeper than thunder, soaked with the cruelty of destiny itself.
"Your fate was sealed the moment you opposed me. Struggle all you like—chains or no chains, the end is the same."
Lan stood where the broken stones bled dust beneath his feet. His chest heaved, every breath sharp and serrated as if the air itself resented his lungs. His skin was laced with blood, bones shrieking under the weight of wounds that should have felled him long ago.
Yet still he stood—battered, trembling, but unbroken.
’If I fall here, everything means nothing. The chains I tore, the lives I dragged back from despair, every limit i swore to break—all ash, all wasted. No. Not here. Not now.’
He lifted his head. Grey eyes—dimmed but not extinguished—found Karahad’s abyssal stare. His lips parted, crimson dripping from them like a seal of defiance.
"Tell me," Lan rasped, his voice low, mocking despite the ruin of his body. "Does a god bleed differently than a man? Let’s find out."
The shadows seemed to pause, as if even the abyss flinched at such insolence.
Lan raised his hand, fingers curling around the worn hilt of Devil’s Lie.
The sword—rusted, battered, dishonored—answered with a shriek of hunger. Qi, every last flicker within him, tore from his veins and flooded into the weapon. The pain was obscene, like molten hooks ripping through marrow.
He did not care.
The sword transformed.
Its surface darkened beyond black, an obsidian void that swallowed the light whole.
From its edge bled tendrils of intent—malice thick enough to warp the very bones of reality. The ground quaked, stone fissuring in veins of fire.
The air shuddered, collapsing inward as if dragged toward an unseen abyss.
The battlefield bent to the blade.
Walls fractured, dust rose and froze midair, the very rhythm of existence stuttered. Devil’s Lie no longer resembled a weapon of men—it was calamity incarnate, a lie sharpened into apocalypse.
Lan whispered through gritted teeth, words lost between breath and blood:
"Heaven-Breaking Ascension."
He swung.
The world ruptured.
It was not a strike but an ending—close mountains cracking, rivers ceasing, hills splitting in miniature around them.
The slash carved through matter and memory alike, erasing everything in its path with the certainty of oblivion.
But Karahad was no ordinary killer.
He roared, meeting the cataclysm with power enough to unmake kingdoms. His own sword, a black fang of annihilation, cut upward to parry the impossible. Shadow clashed with void.
For a breathless eternity, neither yielded.
The world between them convulsed, collapsing into fragments of night and shards of dying starlight.
Then Karahad staggered.
The force of Lan’s swing ruptured him—armor buckling, skin splitting, veins bursting as rivers of blood cascaded down his frame. He was forced back, boots gouging trenches into the earth. His face twisted, more fury than pain, but the cracks in his form were undeniable.
Still, he did not fall.
Karahad surged, his eyes igniting with something that made even shadows recoil.
He blurred forward, his blade drawn in perfect silence. Its arc was absolute, refined through eternity, a strike so clean it promised the end of all movement.
Lan saw it—saw his own death reflected in that descending edge. His neck tingled, his soul braced for severance.
And then—
He took a step.
Not forward, not back. Not in space, not in time. Something beyond all such measures.
[ The Thirteenth Step. ]
Reality shuddered. Cause stuttered. Effect fractured.
To Karahad, his perfect strike simply missed. It passed through a phantom that had never been, and in the same impossible instant, Lan’s blade slid into his chest.
Gasps of unreality echoed through the battlefield, as though existence itself could not comprehend what had transpired.
Lan’s eyes were dead hollows of resolve as Devil’s Lie pierced through rib, lung, heart.
But the price was immediate.
His body convulsed violently, bones snapping like brittle twigs, blood erupting from every pore as if his veins had decided to evacuate him.
His organs screamed, his spine bent under impossible strain. He collapsed to one knee, sword trembling in his grip.
Karahad staggered back, a hole yawning through his chest, black blood raining.
Lan’s vision flickered, fading into static. He expected the sound of collapse, the body of his enemy finally yielding to ruin.
But Karahad laughed.
A low, hideous thing, bubbling through torn lungs yet carrying the weight of eternity.
"You...think this is where I fall?" His aura exploded, a storm of shadows piercing the heavens.
The battlefield drowned in whispers. Countless voices, thousands, millions, layered in a symphony of madness, coiled around Karahad’s broken body.
The air trembled, the world dimmed, and with each syllable reality itself began to unravel.
Lan tried to rise but found his body unresponsive. His bones ground together, his muscles nothing but torn cords. Yet he forced his head up—forced his eyes to witness.
Karahad’s form blurred. The wound in his chest sealed not with flesh, but with nothingness. His shadow stretched, then imploded, folding in on itself.
Then he vanished.
No sound.
No presence.
No shadow.
To the world, Karahad no longer existed.
The Fourth Breath — Null Existence.
Lan’s heart seized. His broken body screamed, but what suffocated him was not pain—it was absence. The absence of everything. Death was no longer a direction, a strike, a presence—death was everywhere.
Every angle, every heartbeat, every possibility ended with Karahad’s invisible blade.
Lan staggered, legs folding beneath him. He coughed black, his lungs collapsing inward. His vision swam, a dimming tunnel of red and shadow. His sword quivered at his side, too heavy to lift.
"This..." His voice broke into a whisper. "This is the end."
The silence was unbearable.
And then, from the void itself, Karahad’s voice resounded. Cold. Eternal.
"No one escapes the dark."
The battlefield fell silent—utterly, finally silent.
Lan collapsed to his knees, the world folding into black. The weight of his every rebellion, every chain shattered, every vow kept, pressed down upon him like a coffin of stars.
Karahad reappeared from Lan’s shadow like a phantom unbound, his form solidifying into brutal intent. The blade in his hand sang low, merciless, and then tore across Lan’s side.
Flesh split. Bone cracked.
Lan staggered, breath ripped from his lungs as hot blood fountained across the ground. Devil’s Lie slipped from his grasp and clattered uselessly to the stone. His knees buckled, body folding to the ground with the graceless collapse of a man undone.
Blood bubbled at his lips. He coughed, choked, and then—madly, impossibly—laughed.
"So... this is where it ends..." His voice was a rasp of ruin, a whisper that should have belonged to a corpse.
Karahad raised his sword, intending to finish it. But the world moved first.
The air shuddered.
At first, it was a shift too subtle to grasp—a tremor in silence, a breath caught in the throat of existence. Then it deepened. The weight of it pressed down like the hand of a god drowning the land in its palm.
The battlefield warped.
Clouds above blackened, twisting into a vortex of bruised sky. The wind howled with voices not of this earth. The Aura of Calamity bled outward, invisible yet crushing, seeping into every crevice of the land.
Birds shrieked once before dropping lifeless from the air, their bodies striking the earth with sickening thuds. Horses reared and tore at their reins until their hearts burst.
Distant soldiers clutched their heads, screaming until their throats split open. Animals in the forest miles away bayed and howled in primal terror, as if they too felt the coming storm.
Karahad froze mid-step. His body refused to move.
For the first time, the assassin’s mask cracked. His eyes widened—not in fury, but in fear.
"What... is this...?" His voice shook. His sword remained raised, but his hand trembled.
The air gnawed at him, stripping away his composure. He saw visions—not of victory, but of failure. Of faces long gone, eyes filled with disappointment, corpses he had left in his wake now rising to accuse him.
His regrets bled into sight.
On the ground, choking on his own blood, Lan smiled.
It was faint, fragile, yet terrible in its knowing. His lips, painted red by ruin, curved upward as though death itself had whispered him a joke.
"To think..." he murmured, the words caught between a groan and a sigh, "she’d come so early."
Karahad’s head snapped toward him. "Who... who is this presence?!" His words rang desperate, the steel in them hollowed out. "What walks here?"
Lan forced his body to lift, just enough to meet his enemy’s eyes. He looked broken—his side a ragged canyon of torn flesh, his clothes sodden with blood—but something in his gaze carried a grim amusement.
His laughter came again, ragged, hacking, but steady.
"The Devil."
That single word struck harder than any blade.
The Aura intensified, pressing reality itself to its knees. The ground cracked. The sky bled. Time seemed to stutter.
Karahad, slayer of kings and specter of shadows, felt himself small—an insect before the abyss. And Lan, shattered and near death, felt no larger.
A figure approached, its form still swallowed by the horizon of shadows. No eyes had yet seen it, but its presence was undeniable, undeniable as hunger, as ruin, as the end.
The world screamed as it came.
And in that moment, the duel ended.
The battlefield was no longer theirs.