The Scarlet King no longer fought to win.
He fought to survive the next three seconds, then the three after that, each exchange reducing him further — a King built from ten thousand years of devoured divinity now reduced to raising trembling arms against a Sovereign who had stopped being a person somewhere around the fortieth strike.
Rehan's fists moved without hesitation, without pattern, without anything that could be called strategy. Pure, undiluted grief translated directly into force, over and over, until the difference between fighting and grieving had completely dissolved.
Below them, Earth screamed in ways only the planet itself could feel.
The crack that had split across its crust during the last exchange had not stayed still. It crawled, slow and inexorable, threading itself through fault lines and ocean trenches, widening with every shockwave that rippled down from the battle above. Entire coastlines shuddered. Volcanoes that had slept for centuries cracked open in sympathetic eruption, spewing ash into a sky already torn by dimensional scarring.
Zahir, from where he stood on a distant, still-intact continent, staring upward at the twin points of colliding light visible even in daylight, felt his knees buckle.
"He's not holding back at all," Zahir whispered, watching golden-black shockwaves ripple visibly through the atmosphere. "He's not even trying to protect us anymore."
He wasn't wrong.
Above the dying planet, the Scarlet King finally managed to create distance, throwing up a final defensive ward woven from the last dregs of his stolen godhood. It held for less than two seconds before Rehan's fist punched straight through it, through the King's forearm, through cartilage and bone, and the King's scream — his first true scream of the entire war — tore through the vacuum in a way that should have been silent and somehow, impossibly, wasn't.
"STOP," the King begged, clutching the ruin of his arm, crimson-black blood spraying weightlessly around him. "Please — I'll retreat, I'll release every soul I've ever devoured, I'll give you anything—"
"You already took the only thing I wanted," Rehan said.
His voice, when it came out now, carried an echo that didn't belong to a nineteen-year-old boy — something ancient and detached had folded itself into his tone, riding alongside the grief, wearing it like a second skin.
He caught the King by the throat.
Below them both, Earth's crust finally gave way along its widest fault line, a scar visible from orbit splitting the eastern hemisphere from the western in one continuous, groaning fracture. Oceans began draining into the opening wound like blood into an incision, the entire planet trembling under the cumulative weight of two hundred chapters of unrestrained divine warfare finally collecting its debt all at once.
Rehan didn't look down. Didn't seem to register it at all.
"I asked you a question, back on that battlefield," Rehan said quietly, tightening his grip as the King thrashed weakly against him. "Are you afraid?"
The King, held aloft by his throat, blood freezing into red crystal beads around them both, finally managed a single, broken whisper.
"...Yes."
"Good," Rehan said. "Hold onto that. It's the last thing you'll ever feel."
He drew back his free hand, aura condensing around his fingers into something that no longer resembled light at all — a black-gold absence, a hole shaped like a hand, aimed directly at the center of the King's chest, exactly where a stolen goddess's fused heart still beat its last, desperate rhythm.