And throughout the city… the dead opened their eyes.
The silence that fell over Eryndor bore no resemblance to the calm after a storm. It was not peace—it was absence. A total, unnatural void where every trace of life's vibration had been erased, freezing the autumn wind mid-motion among twisted carcasses of steel.
In the rivers of asphalt mixed with blood, firelight no longer reflected. Everywhere carnage had left its mark, translucent, vapor-like silhouettes began to rise from the ruins—yet with a horrifying clarity. Victims of the massacre, civilians cut down mid-flight, soldiers dismembered with their entrails still staining the streets, even lesser demons slain earlier—all rose in spectral unison.
Their faces were locked in pure terror, jaws unhinged in silent screams, eyes stretched wide at the moment of their deaths.
This was the First Veil of the Séjour des Morts: Memento Mori.
A primordial authority that did not attack the body, but imposed the immutable truth of death upon reality itself.
Nils, kneeling on the frozen asphalt, felt a cold shiver crawl through his dying ether. His vision, clouded by pain, swept across the tide of specters converging toward the center of the avenue.
Among them, one figure caught his eye.
A man with a tired face, shoulders bent under regret, hollow eyes resting on him with infinite sorrow.
His father.
For a brief second, the weight of the apocalypse vanished from the boy's mind, replaced by a searing bitterness. The dead did not lie. They were here to bear witness to the catastrophe.
Vapula, whose smile had frozen, attempted once more to draw power from the ruins of the megacity. But his demonic ether slid across the debris without finding anything to consume.
The curse of Miseria Rex had vanished.
Within this sacred perimeter, the land no longer belonged to the destroyer—it belonged, by right, to those who had been destroyed.
Stone and shattered concrete were now saturated with the will of the dead, refusing to serve as fuel for their executioner. Every attempt at destruction recoiled inward, suffocating the Colonel of the Abyss beneath an overwhelming spiritual weight.
— Unacceptable… Vapula muttered, his voice losing its tectonic resonance, reduced to a hiss of pure rage. A counterfeit… an amnesiac angel will not dictate law to the King of Ruins!
Rejecting the verdict, the demon unleashed the full extent of his occult reserves. Tenebrae Imperium reached its apex, triggering the monster's forbidden final form:
Miseria Rex Absoluta.
With a sickening crack of bone and flesh, Vapula's body tore itself open from within. Violet incandescent fractures spread across his torso and face, leaking black blood that evaporated into toxic smoke before touching the ground.
His size doubled. His muscles swelled violently, at the cost of visible agony, as his own curse began devouring him to extract every last drop of power.
He became a nightmare made flesh—beautiful in monstrosity, terrifying in despair, and profoundly pathetic.
Vapula knew this transformation sealed his downfall… yet his mad laughter echoed once more, determined to drag Seven into his trail of ashes.
At the center of this apocalyptic surge of power, Seven did not move.
Not a single step.
His broken left arm still hung uselessly at his side, while his right hand rested loosely on the scythe planted in the ground.
No stance. No defense. No charge.
His deep lapis-lazuli eyes stared at the monster with cold, infinite calm.
He no longer needed to act.
Vapula's execution was not divine combat.
It was not a heroic duel.
It was a slaughter.
A dirty, cold, brutal execution.
Before the demon could even take a step forward, the tide of the dead fell upon him.
Not warriors.
Not soldiers.
A mass of suffering souls—an avalanche of regret and raw agony that engulfed the giant.
Thousands of spectral hands, soaked in the memory of their own blood, clung to his exposed flesh.
The faces of Eryndor pressed against him, suffocating him in an unbearable embrace, forcing their fear, their final broken thoughts, and their dying regrets directly into his mind and veins.
Chains of Catena Mortis erupted from the shadows—not to bind elegantly, but to violently crush his joints.
At the same instant, Via Dolorosa activated in its most horrific form.
Vapula's body became the living vessel of every wound he had ever inflicted.
His limbs twisted into impossible angles under the accumulated trauma of his victims.
The dead forced themselves into his throat, drowning his screams in black bile and dust.
They dragged him down.
Face-first into frozen asphalt.
Breaking his jaw.
Ripping corrupted flesh against stone.
Vapula thrashed like an animal at slaughter, stripped of all grandeur, trampled and dismantled piece by piece by the anonymity of the crowd he had massacred.
No final words.
No grand lament.
Only the wet, crushing sound of demonic flesh collapsing under the unbearable weight of regret—until nothing remained but a blackened, sterile sludge frozen instantly by the cold of autumn.
Silence returned.
Heavier than before.
The translucent figures slowly evaporated, the First Veil dissipating as Seven's authority faded.
Seven staggered, collapsing to his knees on the soaked concrete. His ether was completely depleted—every fiber of his spiritual being fractured by the inhuman effort required.
Beside him, Nils collapsed entirely, his bat slipping from his hands.
The blue veins climbing his arms had reached his chest, wrapping around his heart like a vice of unstable energy, consuming his life force at an accelerating rate.
Seven turned his head.
And for the first time since awakening in this world without memories, panic shattered his mask of indifference.
He tried to crawl toward the boy, voice choking in his throat—attempting to stabilize his ether, to force the souls to hold his body together, to do anything to stop the internal combustion.
Nils, coughing a steady stream of dark blood, let out a weak laugh.
— You're really bad at making friends… you know that? he gasped, fingers scraping the asphalt. You always wait until they die before telling them what they meant to you. So… win, Seven. Eliminate them all. That's all I'm asking.
— Shut up, Nils. Don't talk, Seven ordered, his usual severity cracking under a distress he did not understand.
— It's finally over… the angel murmured, placing his only good hand on his friend's shoulder, believing the nightmare had ended.
Then the universe collapsed again.
No warning.
No explosion.
Only a voice—behind Seven's ear—so dense, so absolute, that Vapula's ether suddenly felt like a breeze before a hurricane.
— So this is the one who inherited the Angel of Death.
Before Seven could react, an invisible shockwave struck Nils, sending him flying like a ragdoll into the shattered facade of a building. The sound of bones breaking echoed through the empty street.
Seven tried to turn—
A colossal force slammed into his back, driving him face-first into the ground.
A boot—black and gold with a corrupt divine aura—crushed his shoulder blades, slowly forcing his ribcage into the asphalt with sadistic pressure.
Six halos of broken, dark, corrupted light hovered in the sky above Eryndor, radiating terrifying majesty.
— Stay calm, Azrael, said Abezethibou, the Plague of Broken Halos, increasing the pressure of his foot.
The ground cracked beneath Seven's face.
Agony tore through his body.
But something darker crushed his spirit even further.
Pinned beneath this superior divinity, feeling a destructive attack charging above him, Seven closed his eyes.
Faces passed through his mind.
Kael…
Eryndor…
The fallen angels…
Forgive me.
A familiar figure erupted from the rubble in a primal scream.
Nils—broken, barely functional—moved only through sheer will beyond biology.
He swung his bat engulfed in incandescent blue ether and intercepted the incoming destructive beam, deflecting it into the sky in a violent explosion that tore through the autumn clouds.
— Run, Nils! You can't win this! Seven shouted, blood in his mouth.
Nils did not answer.
He stood trembling, bat raised.
Abezethibou tilted his head.
— Fascinating… it seems your soul made a wish, and your ether responded. That explains this absurd strength. But if that's the case… you don't have long left, do you?
Seven froze.
Nils remained still.
He was no longer looking at the demon.
Nor at Seven.
Only at the grey sky of Eryndor.
He knew.
Deep in his collapsing body, he knew his time had come.
— If you survive… Nils murmured without turning, a fragile smile on his bloodied lips, tell me how it ends. Don't let this be a bad ending, alright?
The demon moved.
Instantly.
His hand pierced through Nils' chest with horrifying precision.
The heart was crushed from within.
The boy's body was lifted, then thrown into the ruins.
Lesser demons swarmed the remains.
Tearing him apart.
Seven's scream shattered the silence of the avenue—no longer human, no longer divine.
Only rage.
Pure, absolute, world-shaking rage.
But Abezethibou kicked him away before he could rise.
Blood-spitting, broken, Seven glared up.
— You'd better kill me properly… bastard… Because if I live… I'll make your death something even Hell won't remember.
A sword of light cut through the darkness.
Then another.
Then another.
Liah stood between executioner and victim.
Calm.
Absolute.
And Malakiel arrived behind her.
Authority older than violence itself.
The Fléau hesitated.
Then retreated.
Liah did not lower her guard immediately. Her gaze remained locked on the retreating abyssal presence until it fully vanished into the sinking darkness, as if confirming that reality itself would not twist again a second time.
Only then did she relax her stance.
She rushed forward.
Seven was already unconscious.
His body had collapsed under its own limits, ether completely drained, consciousness shattered like glass under pressure. Liah knelt beside him and carefully lifted him, adjusting his weight against her shoulder with controlled precision.
Her eyes swept the battlefield.
The streets were drowned in blood.
Concrete channels overflowed with it, like the city itself had begun to bleed out its last memories. The silence was absolute—heavy, unnatural, suffocating.
Then she saw it.
Nils' broken bat.
Half-buried in a pool of dark crimson.
Still.
Useless.
Final.
For a moment, Liah did not move.
Her grip tightened.
A tremor passed through her breath.
Then she exhaled slowly, through clenched teeth, forcing her emotions back into something resembling control.
But it didn't work.
A tear broke through anyway.
Not gentle.
Not soft.
A tear of rage.
It slid down her cheek as she stared at the devastation—at the erased lives, the crushed bodies, the silence left behind like a scar across existence itself.
— What the hell… she whispered, voice trembling under the weight of what she was seeing. What kind of hell is this…?
She tightened her hold on Seven's unconscious body.
As if anchoring him to reality was the only thing preventing her from collapsing into the same abyss that had swallowed everything else.
Behind her, the ruins of Eryndor continued to burn in silence.
No victory remained here.
Only aftermath.
Only absence.
Only the echo of something that had once been alive.
The Symphony of Shadows had ended.
But the true war… had only just begun.