The wind had gone quiet.
Ash drifted sideways through the ruined plaza like snow that had forgotten warmth. The sky above Shambhala was neither night nor dawn — only a red pall cast by burning Aether dust. Every few breaths, the ground shuddered far away, the echo of a battle still happening somewhere beyond the smog.
Aryan moved through the wreckage alone. His boots pressed prints into powder that once had been marble. Each step whispered against the ruins as his weapon dragged beside him, its edge tracing sparks through the soot.
The silence was the loudest thing he had heard since Siddharth fell.
Aether still clung to his skin in faint gold flickers, pulsing like a second heartbeat. He hated the way it throbbed — as if it remembered the man he was trying to forget.
He told me vengeance burns itself out.
He never said what happens when it doesn't.
A piece of shattered statue caught his reflection: eyes too hollow, hair matted with ash, a ghost pretending to still have purpose. He wondered if the others had already won their own fights or died trying. None of it mattered now. Only one name still rang clear in the static of his thoughts.
Virak.
The name felt heavier than his blade.
A tremor rippled through the dust. A rhythm — not the random thuds of collapsing stone, but the measured impact of footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. Metallic echoes from somewhere behind the smoke.
He didn't turn immediately. He just exhaled, the sound half a sigh, half a curse.
"I was wondering how long it would take you to crawl back out," he said.
The voice that answered came rough, amused, carrying a weight that bent the air around it.
"Crawl? No, boy. I never left."
From the haze stepped a silhouette, broad as the broken archways that framed him. Virak's armor was split along the ribs, light seeping through the cracks like molten veins — crimson, pulsing, alive. His right arm was bare now, skin etched with luminous fractures where Aether had fused with flesh. Every heartbeat sent a surge of red light through those lines, as if he were a vessel barely containing what boiled inside.
He rolled his shoulders; flakes of blackened metal fell like dead leaves.
"You've grown," Virak said, voice almost thoughtful. "But growth means nothing when your roots are rot."
He tossed something at Aryan's feet. It clinked once against the stone — a small insignia, burnt along the edges.
Siddharth's insignia.
Aryan stared. For a moment, nothing moved. Then the ground around him shivered. Dust lifted in thin threads, drawn by the hum starting to rise from his palm.
"You came all this way to mock the dead?"
"To remind the living," Virak replied, "that death is honest. You should try it."
The air between them warped — heat bending space, red against gold.
Aryan's voice came lower now, measured.
"You burned that orphanage. You called it balance."
"It was a containment. That much Aether unleashed would've split the city. Collateral for order."
"Collateral doesn't scream."
Virak smiled, faint, pitying.
"Still clinging to morality while wading in ash. You're your master's shadow."
Aryan raised his gaze. His eyes caught the light for a moment — gold rings threaded with black fissures, a storm barely caged.
"Then let the shadow eclipse the monster."
The air stilled — too still, like the world holding its breath.
[Bridge Scene]
Elsewhere amid the ruins, a gust tore through the shattered corridors.
Abhi lifted his head first, halting mid-swing as a tremor pulsed through the air. The troops around him hesitated too, as if their bodies sensed something their minds couldn't name.
"That pressure…" Abhi murmured.
"Aryan."
Ahan's voice came faint from the other side of the broken court. He was kneeling beside Vigil's fallen projection, fingertips hovering over the dissolving fragments of his mind field. The psychic residue twisted upward like smoke.
Ahan turned his eyes toward the far end of the horizon — the direction where crimson light was bleeding into the sky.
"It's starting," he whispered.
The ruins seemed to respond — every shard humming with distant resonance, as if reality itself had chosen to listen.
"Then we move fast," Abhi said, wiping blood from his jaw. "Because when Aryan snaps…"
"The world snaps with him," Ahan finished quietly.
Both looked toward the scarlet flare rising above the city, two stars colliding on the edge of existence.
Back at the plaza, ash spiraled upward like a vortex — gold and red threading into a single storm.
The camera pulled close again: two silhouettes, standing on the brink.
Aether howled.
The first impact landed.
Light devoured the silence.
Stone cracked, and the chapter ended with a single line—
When gods fall silent, monsters learn to pray.