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Under Noah's puzzled gaze, Ankhseram slowly withdrew his hand, as though erasing ten Demon War Gods from existence had been no more significant than brushing dust from his sleeve.
He looked at Noah again. When he spoke this time, his calm, even voice carried something different within it, something difficult to name. "Your power does not entirely belong to this world. If it is truly you, then perhaps you can do it."
"Do what?"
Noah pressed for an answer, but the faint white light on Ankhseram's body had already begun to waver. The black particles wreathing the other half of him churned and roiled violently, as though something trapped inside was fighting with everything it had to break free.
Something that looked very much like pain crossed Ankhseram's face, and that was the strangest thing of all, because that face had shown nothing until now. He clutched his own head, his expression lurching between anguish and desperation in a way that was deeply unsettling to watch.
Noah's eyes narrowed. He understood immediately.
The being standing before him was not whole. Two opposing wills existed within that single body, each struggling for dominance over the other.
The will that had just acted to wipe out the demons, the one that had changed its stance toward Noah entirely, that had to be the original God of Life.
The other one was almost certainly the will that had seized control over the authority of death long ago, back during the great war between gods and demons, when the God of Life had consumed a fragment of the Demon King.
Even gods, it seemed, were not immune to being torn apart from within.
And judging by what Noah was watching right now, the will of Life could not fully hold the other one down.
Ankhseram caught Noah's gaze. A brief flash of something bitter crossed his eyes. The words that came out of him were fragmented and halting, forced out against tremendous resistance.
"The other me... is about to take over..."
"Human... I hope... things go well for you... from here..."
With those last broken words, the faint white light that had represented the God of Life's will was swallowed completely by the surging black particles, snuffed out like a candle caught in a gale.
The contradictory feeling vanished with it. What replaced it was something far simpler and far worse: a pure, undiluted aura of death, the kind that pressed not just on bodies but on souls. Even the blood-colored mist of the Black Abyss seemed to recoil from it.
Ankhseram lowered his hands from his head.
When he looked up, his eyes had become a depthless, unbroken black. No whites. No depth. Only a boundless, utterly unhinged hunger for destruction.
The gray mist around the Wheel of Fate roiled with agitation. Ankhseram's sudden betrayal had been completely unforeseeable, and it had cost them ten of their number. The Wheel of Fate would sooner face the Celestial Spirit King in open battle than continue working alongside something this unpredictable.
"Ankhseram! What in the world do you think you are doing?!"
The fury in the Wheel of Fate's voice was unmistakable. Ankhseram turned its head toward it slowly, accompanied by a dry, grinding crack of bone, and regarded the Wheel of Fate with undisguised contempt.
"Stop making such a fuss. That other one, Life, managed to seize the body for a moment. I didn't expect that after all this time, his will still hadn't been snuffed out completely. He'd even been storing up enough strength to push back against me." A pause. "But it's been dealt with. The God of Life will never resurface again. Every last drop of authority over life now belongs to me."
"The only god left standing in this world will be me. Ankhseram. God of Life and Death."
The Wheel of Fate let out a low, disgusted sound. So it had been the original God of Life stirring up trouble all along. Ten brothers lost for absolutely nothing.
If those fallen Demon War Gods could not eventually be revived within the Black Abyss by pouring in vast amounts of negative energy, the Wheel of Fate would have made Ankhseram answer for every single one of them.
"Then our cooperation continues as planned."
"Obviously. Isn't that what I came here for?"
Ankhseram's voice was cold with arrogance. His pitch-black eyes settled on Noah, and the killing intent radiating from them was dense enough to feel almost solid. He had not forgotten the humiliation of watching his contingency plan, the one left embedded within Zeref, be dismantled so cleanly.
And Soul Scale had glimpsed it in the threads of fate during one of its readings: this white-haired young man would one day bring the Black Abyss to ruin. That was precisely why he had to be destroyed now, before he ever reached that point.
Ankhseram moved without warning.
Both hands shot outward in a grasping motion, and the entire Black Abyss shuddered in response. The twin divine powers of Life and Death took shape as two colossal palms, black and white, vast enough to blot out the sky, and they came crashing toward Noah from both sides like a god swatting an insect.
Before they even arrived, the absolute stillness radiating ahead of them had already begun eating through the invisible force field Noah had spread across the battlefield, dissolving it layer by layer with a harsh, grating sound.
Noah laughed. He didn't move to dodge. He pulled both fists back and drove them outward to either side.
The air and space around him fractured, dense cracks splitting open in every direction. In the same instant, a destructive force powerful enough to shake the heavens tore loose from him.
Magnetic Field Rotation! Three hundred and sixty thousand units of power!
Demonic Martial Arts: Infinite Shock Zen!
The collision was catastrophic. Divine power against raw force, Life and Death against something that refused to be categorized as either. The energy that erupted from the clash tore long, bottomless ravines across the floor of the Black Abyss.
But while Noah was locked against Ankhseram, a voice cut through the chaos.
"Now."
The Wheel of Fate's thought reached the remaining six Demon War Gods directly. They had been waiting for exactly this, and they moved the moment the command arrived. This time they did not come at Noah with power. They came with precision and cunning, weaving in from every angle, not to hurt him but to disrupt him, to tie up his attention, to steal even a fraction of a second away from him.
One fraction of a second was all the Wheel of Fate needed.
As Noah clashed with Ankhseram and fought to keep the six demons from tangling his movements, a portion of the Wheel of Fate's gray misty body quietly separated from the rest. It condensed, slowly and deliberately, into the shape of a gray spear.
The spear gave off no energy. No aura. No fluctuation of any kind. But it carried something else entirely: a deep, bone-level certainty, the feeling of fate already written. Of a strike that would land. Of a wound that would be dealt. It cut through space without a sound and drove straight for the center of Noah's back.
This was the fate of death that the Wheel of Fate had woven specifically for him. A guaranteed kill. A blow that bypassed defense entirely by the simple, terrible logic that it had already been decided.
Ankhseram's full power pressing from the front. Six demons harrying him from all sides. And the Wheel of Fate's killing blow closing in silently from behind. By any measure, Noah had been cornered.
A flicker of certainty passed through the Wheel of Fate's mind. It could already see it: the gray spear finding its mark, piercing through, ending this.
But then it noticed Noah's expression.
A slow, sharp smile had curved onto his lips. His eyes, far from showing alarm, were lit with something that looked disturbingly like excitement. And that look sent an involuntary thread of unease through both the Wheel of Fate and Ankhseram alike.
"You lot," Noah said, his voice carrying clearly through the chaos around him, "you don't actually think I've been fighting at my limit this whole time, do you?"
It was as though a gate that had been held shut by sheer discipline was finally, deliberately thrown open.
Something erupted from every cell of Noah's body at once: a power that was rawer, purer, and far more violent than anything he had shown before.
"Magnetic Field Rotation!"
"Five hundred thousand units of power!"