The crimson spear struck Rehan's chest and did not stop.
It should have. Nothing had pierced his sovereign-authority barrier in one hundred and ninety-nine chapters of war. But this was not merely a weapon — it was a goddess's entire stolen essence condensed into a single point, thrown by a king with nothing left to lose, and it went through Rehan's barrier, through his aura, through skin and bone, and out the other side in a spray of black-gold blood that scattered like dying stars across the vacuum.
For one full second, Rehan simply hung there in the void, motionless, the spear's crimson light still humming where it had exited his back.
The Scarlet King, drained, kneeling, laughed — a broken, disbelieving, triumphant sound. "I did it," he wheezed. "Ten thousand years, and I finally—"
Rehan's hand closed around the shaft of the spear still lodged through him.
And pulled it out.
"You threw everything you had," Rehan said, voice a low, terrible calm, "and it wasn't enough."
The wound in his chest didn't close. It didn't need to. Something else was happening now — something older and hungrier than healing. The black-gold blood leaking from the hole in his chest began to reverse, flowing backward into the wound instead of out of it, and where it touched, the golden-emerald flame around Rehan's body turned a shade darker, deeper, closer to the color of a dying sun collapsing in on itself.
Pride, still hovering nearby, took an instinctive step back. Even it, wearing the combined weight of seven sins, suddenly looked small.
"You keep asking how I'm not slowing down," Rehan said, and his voice had stopped sounding entirely human somewhere in the last few words. "You keep asking what it will take to actually hurt me."
His golden eyes lifted, and behind them now was nothing — no grief, no fury, no restraint. Just a vast, silent absence where a person used to be, and in the space that absence left behind, something ancient and merciless had moved in to fill the vacancy.
"You just found out."
He didn't fly at them. He simply arrived, the space between himself and Pride collapsing without transition, and his fist — no longer golden-emerald, now black-gold, now something that had no proper name — passed through Pride's swollen, seven-fold form like it was smoke.
Pride did not scatter into ash this time. It simply ceased, all at once, without even a sound of protest, as if the universe itself had quietly agreed it was no longer allowed to exist.
The Scarlet King, alone now, truly alone for the first time in the entire war, felt something break behind his ribs that had nothing to do with physical injury.
"Wait—" he started.
Rehan did not wait.
The fight that followed had no technique left in it, no strategy, no restraint — only raw, planet-shattering violence, blow after blow after blow, each one detonating with enough force to rip fresh tears through the fabric of space itself. Fragments of nearby asteroid belts vaporized on contact with the shockwaves. A dying star three systems away flickered and guttered out, starved of the light being torn from its own gravity well by the sheer chaos of the collision.
Far below, unseen by either combatant, Earth itself had begun to groan.
The dimensional tears they had ripped open, chapter after chapter, strike after strike, had never fully healed — and now, with this new, unrestrained violence pouring out of Rehan in an endless, grief-fueled tide, the wounds in reality were widening faster than the planet could bear.
The Scarlet King, bleeding from everywhere now, barely conscious, barely holding his stolen godhood together, could only watch with growing horror as Rehan's assault stopped discriminating between him and the world around them both.
"You'll destroy everything," the King gasped between blows, coughing crimson light. "The Earth — your home—"
"I don't care," Rehan said, and meant it completely, driving his fist through the King's raised guard and into his ribs hard enough to send fractures spiderwebbing across half his torso. "There is nothing left down there I haven't already lost."
Far below, the first true crack split across the surface of the Earth's crust — silent, massive, visible even from orbit — a scar that would, chapter by chapter, blow by blow, only continue to grow