The crack in the sky did not close.
It widened.
Where Rehan's second strike had landed against the Scarlet King's crossed glaive, the sheer overflow of collision force had punched clean through the fabric separating the mortal battlefield from the void beyond it. A thin seam of pure, starless black hung suspended above the crater now, humming faintly, pulling at loose debris like a drain pulling at water.
Neither combatant noticed. Neither cared.
The Scarlet King spat a mouthful of sunset-colored blood onto the glass-melted stone beneath him and laughed—a broken, disbelieving sound.
"Ten thousand years," he said, dragging himself upright by the haft of his glaive. "Ten thousand years I have hunted gods, worn their deaths as jewelry, and not once—not once—has anything made me bleed like this."
"You absorbed a goddess to get here," Rehan said, circling him slowly, his bare feet not touching the scorched ground so much as hovering a finger's width above it. "You should be stronger than this. Are you afraid, Your Majesty?"
The mockery landed. The Scarlet King's crimson antlers flared, veins of stolen god-fire lighting up beneath his obsidian skin.
"Afraid?" he snarled. "I am becoming."
He slammed the base of his glaive into the crater floor, and the absorbed remnant of Scarlet screamed up through him in a visible pillar of red light, merging fully now, no longer a passenger but a permanent second heartbeat inside his chest. His body doubled in size. Six additional crimson eyes split open along his forearms, each one weeping threads of burning light.
"Behold," the King intoned, voice now layered with a second, femininely distorted echo—Scarlet's stolen voice fused with his own, "the true Scarlet King. Not a wearer of divinity. A fusion of it."
Rehan's expression did not change. If anything, the golden fire in his eyes dimmed slightly—not in fear, but in something colder. Calculation. Grief settling into strategy.
"You're proud of this," Rehan said. "Proud of wearing a murdered god's skin like a trophy."
"She begged to be devoured, in the end. All gods do, eventually, when the alternative is oblivion—"
"Don't," Rehan cut in, and for the first time his voice cracked—not with weakness, but with a fury so total it nearly buckled the air around his throat, "talk to me about begging for mercy. Not today. Not after Ishita."
He struck.
This time the impact didn't just crater the ground—it tore the crater open, ripping straight through the thin dimensional seam already weakened above them. Reality groaned like a ship's hull under too much pressure. The Scarlet King, thrown backward through the tear itself, vanished briefly into the humming black seam before the recoil spat him back out, smoking, one antler shattered.
Rehan floated at the epicenter, staring up at the widening rip in the sky with something like grim understanding dawning on his face.
"...We're breaking the world," he murmured. "Every hit. Every clash. We're tearing a hole straight through it."
The Scarlet King, bleeding from six new eyes now, followed his gaze upward and smiled a slow, terrible smile.
"Then let's finish the job, Sovereign. Let's see what waits for us on the other side."
Rehan looked back once, toward the untouched patch of golden grass where Ishita lay in perfect, undisturbed peace—the only calm point left in a battlefield rapidly devouring itself.
"Fine," he said softly. "Let's take this somewhere I can actually go all out without erasing her resting place."
He drove his fist forward one final time—not at the Scarlet King, but directly into the dimensional tear itself, ripping it open like a curtain.
The battlefield, the mountains, the two combatants, and the widening scar in the sky all folded inward at once—
—and the war between a broken Sovereign and a King wearing a stolen goddess's fire spilled out beyond the borders of the Earth entirely.