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An indescribable torrent of energy exploded outward from Noah.
His power surged beyond anything he had shown before, climbing and climbing until the air itself could barely contain it. Thunder cracked across a sky with no storm. The ground heaved violently beneath his feet, and a crater over a thousand meters wide split open around him, with cracks racing outward in every direction like a shattered mirror, spreading all the way to the horizon.
The six Demon War Gods who had thrown themselves into the fight watched in horror as their demonic bodies simply came apart. Under the sheer, overbearing expansion of Noah's Magnetic Field Power, they shattered like glass. Their bodies, their Magic Power, every fragment of what they were, ground down into fundamental particles and dissolved into the blood mist of the Black Abyss.
Their forms and their souls were extinguished together. There would be no resurrection.
The Wheel of Fate stared.
The gray spear it had crafted with such patience, the one woven through with the certainty of fate itself, the one that was supposed to be guaranteed to land and guaranteed to kill, had not lasted even a moment against Noah's five hundred thousand units of power. The absolute logic of fate had been overruled by something more absolute still.
It shattered from the tip backward, inch by inch, crushed and swallowed by the rampaging force, until it was gone entirely, along with the last six demon brothers.
"This is impossible!"
"How can power like this exist in this world?!"
For the first time, the Wheel of Fate's voice shook. There was genuine fear in it. The power Noah had just displayed surpassed anything the so-called Lord of Gods or King of Demons had ever brought to bear in the old age. Even the Celestial Spirit King at full strength, before Eclipse had ever begun to constrain him, could not have matched it.
How could the fate of a being like this ever have been shaped by a demon born from nothing more than a fragment of the Demon King?
The Wheel of Fate's body, always so composed, trembled violently, nearly coming undone from the force of what it had just witnessed.
But Ankhseram had taken the full brunt of it head-on, and he had felt it far more directly.
The two colossal divine palms, one black and one white, formed from the combined authority of Life and Death, had been crushed like paper. The shockwave that followed had slammed straight into the death shield Ankhseram threw up in desperation, and the shield had lasted exactly one moment before exploding into fragments.
Ankhseram let out a strangled, disbelieving groan and was sent hurtling backward, tumbling through the air like a broken kite before crashing to the ground. He knelt there, half his body gone, breathing in ragged pulls, the black death particles swirling around him dim and fading. The only thing keeping him from being beyond recovery was the life divine power still automatically working to restore what had been destroyed.
The situation had reversed completely.
The cannon fodder was gone. The top forces of both factions were broken. And Noah stood at the center of it all, a golden aura burning around him like living flame, evaporating great swaths of the Black Abyss's blood mist into nothing. The sky above him, which had never once seen light since the Black Abyss had come into being, had turned a clear, deep blue.
Noah looked at the half-destroyed God of Life and Death and the crumbling Demon leader, and a slow, contemptuous smile crossed his face.
"I barely got started, and you're already down?"
"In the end, that's all you are. Naturally powerful beings who never had to earn it. Your so-called fate and divine power are nothing but slightly sturdier toys once someone brings enough force to bear on them."
"Pathetic. Both of you."
His eyes moved first to the Wheel of Fate, still floating in its churning mist, visibly stunned, and then settled on Ankhseram, who was being flung backward even now while his body frantically tried to knit itself back together.
"Ankhseram." Noah's voice dropped, quiet and deliberate. "You spent an age tormenting Zeref. You let countless innocents die as though it meant nothing to you. So now, repay me for all of it with your life."
He was already gone before the last word left his mouth.
Noah appeared in front of the kneeling Ankhseram at a speed that left no time to react, and drove his fist straight up into the god's chin.
Ankhseram tried to resist. But the punch was too fast, too forceful, and far too powerful for resistance to mean anything. No technique, no skill, just raw power, and it was enough. Ankhseram's head snapped back and his body cartwheeled uncontrollably through the air, spinning over and over before finally coming to a stop.
Noah walked over to him, planted his foot on the back of the god's head, and pressed down.
He looked at the expression on Ankhseram's face, the humiliation and fury of a being who had never once imagined this moment could come, and the satisfaction on Noah's face was genuine and unguarded.
"Look at that," he said pleasantly. "Even a god can make a face like that. Ankhseram, God of Life and Death, flat on the ground."
"No! AHHH!"
Ankhseram's scream was raw and desperate. And with it came something that had not happened in all the ages he had existed: the divine powers of Life and Death, which had coexisted inside him in tension for so long, finally fused together completely.
The combined authority of both became a grayish-white halo radiating outward in all directions, the kind of force capable of dragging all things into a state of neither life nor death, suspended in a cold, absolute stillness.
Noah looked down at the incoming wave of power, lifted his foot, and brought it down again.
Then everything went quiet.
Noah picked up Ankhseram, his head half caved in, and carried him over to where the Wheel of Fate stood. "Do you understand your fate now?" he asked, in the same casual tone someone might use to ask about the weather.
The Wheel of Fate's gray mist stirred slowly. It looked at Ankhseram's state for a long moment. Then it spoke, with a composure that was almost remarkable given the circumstances. "Fate is not something so easily glimpsed. I was fortunate enough to inherit a fragment of the Demon King's authority, and that fortune ran out today."
"Now it is time to meet my end."
The Wheel of Fate's calm genuinely surprised Noah. He thought, without much sentiment, that none of this would have been necessary if the Eighteen Demon War Gods had simply stayed in the Black Abyss and kept to themselves. They had chosen to come looking for him. That choice had cost them everything.
He let Ankhseram drop to the ground and turned away from them both. He raised his hand and swept it toward the ruins of the Principality of Veronica, and the half of the Phoenix Stone that the Veronica royal family had held for four hundred years flew into his palm.
The two halves joined.
The moment they became whole, an enormous and grotesque bird burst free from the expanding stone, bloated and misshapen, bearing little resemblance to anything that deserved to be called a phoenix. It opened its mouth, drawing breath for a triumphant cry to announce its return to the world.
Then it noticed its surroundings. The shattered, dim wasteland of the Black Abyss. The blood-colored mist. The craters and ravines torn across the ground.
It blinked, deeply confused.
Where was it? Was this still Earth Land?
The mutated phoenix never got the chance to work that out.
Noah had already risen tens of thousands of meters into the sky, and he brought his fist down with everything he had.
"Magnetic Field Rotation! Five hundred thousand units of power!"
"Demonic Martial Arts: Divine Purification, Demonic Annihilation Fist!"
Under a strike that could only be called world-ending, the mutated phoenix, barely freed from its centuries-long seal, disappeared before it had time to make a single sound.
The Wheel of Fate, which had already made its peace with what was coming, stood without resistance. It knew that anything it did now would change nothing.
Ankhseram was a different matter. He was still writhing, still clinging, muttering to himself in a voice that had lost all of its former authority.
"I must survive. I have to survive!"
"I am the strongest god. I consumed part of the Demon King. I devoured the Lord of Gods. How can I die here, like this?!"
"The God of Life is gone for good now. The Celestial Spirit King grows weaker every day under Eclipse's erosion. If I live, everything is still within reach!"
His laughter, fractured and unhinged, echoed through the dying Black Abyss.
A single, colossal impact shook creation itself.
And then the insane God of Life and Death, the last of the Demon War Gods, and the Black Abyss itself were gone from this world, all of them at once, as though they had never existed.
Noah hung in the silence of the void that remained, looking down at where it had all been, and then slapped a hand to his forehead.
"I should have asked the Wheel of Fate how to get back before finishing things," he muttered. "Now I have to find my own way."
He paused, then shrugged. "At least I broke through to five hundred thousand. I can move through space with just my body now. If I hadn't, I'd really be in trouble."
He turned his gaze toward the world on the other side of where the Black Abyss had been, a world that should have been full of stars. It was shrouded in black light instead, with only the faintest trace of starlight still flickering somewhere deep within it.