Jinsu stared at the broken S-Rank hero.
Jin-woo was already half-rendered into grey static, the System forcibly trying to reclaim him — pulling him back toward the puppet it had spent years building from his bones.
"If I erase you," Jinsu said, his voice stripped of all emotion, "there is no afterlife. No respawn. You just end."
"Good," Jin-woo smiled.
A bloodied, genuine smile. The first real expression on his face since the blue code had cleared from his eyes.
"I'm tired of being played."
Jinsu raised the Eraser's Edge. The violet blade hummed — hungry for the dense S-Rank data still burning in what remained of Jin-woo's core. The most powerful thing Jinsu had ever been asked to delete.
He looked at the man kneeling in the ash of his own tethers.
"Elena is alive," Jinsu said quietly. "She's the one who sent me."
Jin-woo's eyes closed.
Something in his expression settled — the particular stillness of a person putting down something they have been carrying for a very long time.
"Tell her," he said softly, "the static is finally quiet."
Jinsu brought the blade down.
"Absolute Arrest."
The violet static didn't explode. It didn't roar or shatter or burn. It simply consumed — washing over Jin-woo in absolute silence, un-writing his golden tethers, his S-Rank core, the corrupted architecture the System had built inside him year by year.
The great hero turned into a fine black ash that scattered slowly across the basement floor.
No sound. No light. Just absence where a person had been.
[Target Erased: S-Rank Anomaly Defeated]
[Massive EXP Influx Detected!]
[Host Level: 21 → 26]
[Nihil Engine Sync: 12.5%]
[Erasure Rank Up: C- → C+]
The basement alarms screamed to life instantly.
Red warning lights flooded the room in a bloody glow, turning the black ash on the floor the color of something far worse.
[SYSTEM ALERT: CRITICAL COMPONENT DISCONNECTED IN SECTOR 02]
[DEPLOYING PRUNER GENERALS]
Jinsu didn't run.
He stood in the red light for a moment, looking at the ash scattered across the floor. At the shape of it — the rough outline of where a man had knelt and smiled and closed his eyes.
The static is finally quiet.
He opened his inventory, secured the glowing Logic Core jar, and pulled the Fragmented Shroud tighter around his shoulders.
Then he looked at the basement stairs. At the clean world above them — the optimized corridors, the golden tethers, the Pruner Generals already moving through the city toward this location.
"Time to leave," he muttered.
He climbed the stairs and walked out into the red-lit night without looking back.