Yet it vanished like mud sinking into the sea. Not a single ray escaped, as if captured and swallowed by a supermassive black hole. After devouring all the light, Belial controlled it inside his body, forcing it to charge back and forth, focusing especially on the crimson mark.
That mark was The End, absolutely opposed to all existence. This clash surpassed ordinary concepts like Laws and had nothing to do with simple energy levels. It was the logic of the World versus all things' The End.
It was a confrontation between the stage itself and the ending of the story. Within the torrent of light, the crimson mark truly showed signs of being worn down, with mist constantly drifting away. Clearly, however, The End would not simply vanish.
It clung tightly, twisting into a savage shape as if conscious, and fought back against the light. A roar rang out. It was a familiar roar, one that could be heard clearly even in the Void, where space and material foundations did not exist.
"Run, now, run," someone shouted. The Mark of Finality, which had been lurking before, revealed a savage form while fighting the light, manifesting a beastly head on Belial's surface. Its fanged mouth spewed light without pause.
There was no doubt it was the projection of the Beast of the End that Belial had defeated once before. The moment Ham saw it, she dragged Bella and Chloe away without hesitation. In the Void, nanomachines were not erased outright by the roar, and a blockbuster blood-red haze and domain began to appear, erupting with brilliant light from their violent clash.
Though smaller than before, it constantly devoured light and expanded at a visible rate. In moments, it approached the form of the head seen at Overlord Ridge, yet its fangs and claws were even more savage. Ham risked her life to glance back, and her scalp went numb.
The good news was that the logic driven by Holy Sword truly worked on The End. The bad news was that the massive amount of Laws and existence itself triggered an emergency reaction from The End. While it was being worn down, the mark was also devouring that existence, about to manifest again as the Beast of the End.
A thunderous crash followed. The head of the Beast of the End suddenly froze, cracks spreading across its surface like a porcelain vessel. Belial extended a claw, unimaginable gravity gathering in his grip.
He seized the head and crushed it into fragments with far greater force than before, completely shattering the Shard. The head seemed to look back at him once before breaking apart again. He casually cleared away the surrounding fragments, then swallowed all the remaining light of the World to prevent it from feeding on existence and regenerating.
Only after all this did Ham come back to her senses. She patted her chest and gasped for breath, her face unable to hide the panic. The Mark of Finality lurking inside Belial had grown several times larger than before.
It vaguely took the shape of a savage beast's head.
Belial's plan to treat the manifestation of The End has completely failed, and it even made things worse. The scale of The End expanded several times over instead of shrinking.
Bella was at the nearby Observation Station, frantically patching and repairing the sections erased by The End. At the same time, Ham carried Chloe back into the World to lie down and recover. Although the influence of The End was not too severe, releasing a Holy Sword Authority of that scale had clearly pushed her very hard.
After causing all that trouble, Belial could only go back to sleeping in frustration to suppress the manifestation of The End. Worse still, the situation was becoming harder and harder to deal with.
In simple terms, after hearing the explanations, Belial came to understand it like this. The Overlord Ridge that he had previously blown apart was now attached to him, ready to revive at any moment. All tactics had turned into attacking the home base, and the enemy turned out to be himself.
This mess was truly hard to resolve. That cursed mark was like sticky gum, and no matter how much he tried to wash it away with the Holy Sword, it would not come off. Belial kept erasing it again and again, only for it to reappear on his body each time.
"The situation is getting worse," Belial said. "At this scale, the danger feels a bit too high already."
A part of Belial moved away, traveling far from his main body and from the World into the Abyssal Void. He slowly extended his hand, and a hint of red appeared at his fingertips.
A blood-red Rift was casually torn open by his bare hand. Wherever it passed, resentment, Dark Power, and even the Void itself were erased together.
The scale of The End had now expanded to a level he could actively control. Belial could feel that if he wanted to, he could delete anything he could perceive, like emptying a recycle bin.
It was like watching someone next door turn on an instant-kill cheat. Belial did not even need direct contact anymore, as long as he was willing to think clearly about a target, that target would be erased on the spot.
He had no clear understanding of how to interfere with it. This erasure was almost irreversible, undetectable, and impossible to describe, as if the very process itself had been deleted. He could not find any method or handle to intervene.
If this were just a simple instant-kill ability given to him, Mephist would actually be quite happy. But if this thing later became a passive effect that deleted things everywhere whether he wanted it or not, then there was nothing funny about it.
What just happened was only because he loosened control over this passive effect, and then let the Lord try to push it. If one day this power grew so strong that he could no longer control it at all, the result was obvious.
Even if he did nothing, the World would be destroyed because of it.
"Then I can only start plan B, which I really do not like," Belial said. "Honestly, it is exhausting, and I am not very confident either."
From the very beginning, Mephist had already thought of a fallback. This path came from his past habit of eating everything in sight and his wild ideas when he first learned to use the internal computational System and molecular manipulation to rebuild objects.
Back then it was just wishful thinking. But with Belial's ever-growing scale today, it might actually be possible.
He had already shown that he could convert items he swallowed or absorbed into information, store them in a computational System built on himself, and then reconstruct them later through molecular control.
The erasure targets of The End did not include Belial himself. So a simple idea emerged. If The End was going to destroy the World, then he would just eat the World first, and then rebuild it afterward.
He would swallow and digest the entire World, convert it into information stored inside himself, and then reconstruct it later using himself as the raw material. It sounded extremely bold, and that was exactly why Belial did not feel at ease.
The key problem was souls. Could souls actually be reconstructed by him? Moreover, Belial had never tried directly eating souls, so would souls merely wrapped inside his body be able to avoid the judgment of The End?
That was the real issue. Swallowing the World itself was not difficult, since infinite energy from g particles meant he could keep growing stronger in terms of scale without much trouble. But the technical problem involving souls had always been a thorn in his side.
If a person's soul was destroyed and then reshaped from its remnants, could it still be considered the same person? No matter how one argued it, Belial was unwilling to accept that idea.
This was one of the two main reasons he did not want to activate plan B. As for the other reason, it was very simple.
"I am very annoyed."
He looked at the mark on his body, and Belial felt deeply annoyed. That alone was reason enough.
He was annoyed because this thing was truly irritating, and he had no good way to deal with it. In the past, there were people who dared to cause trouble for Belial, but most of them were just clowns to him.
If something could not be resolved immediately, he would fly over and beat the one pushing it to death. But now, he actually had to go through all this trouble and watch things unfold?
He had to get this back.
With a lift of his hand, the entire Mark of Finality manifested directly in front of him. This time, Belial examined it carefully and realized that it had just been devouring those lights to grow.
Although it had only just shown its head before being slapped into a Shard, he had no doubt that if it were allowed to keep eating, it would return to its previous size. If he had not been suppressing it all this time, it might have already grown back.
In general, this mark usually left only two choices. If it could not be erased, the first was to keep suppressing it until one day it spread across the whole body, turning into the enemy being oneself.