A roar unlike thunder echoed across the fractured horizon.

It was not fire. Not wind. Not fury.

It was finality.

The explosion was so vast, so absolute, it erased half the Hellscape in a single breath. Land folded. Stone unraveled. Dust rose not as smoke, but as silence made visible. The sound resonated through bone, blood, and memory.

And then came the void.

A silence that devoured echoes.

Akron jolted upright.

Her vision swam, her chest heaved, her body slick with sweat and memory. She rushed to the window, eyes wide—yet her breath caught before words could form.

The landscape was gone.

What remained was a wound carved across the world.

She had known. They all had. It was part of the plan—one of the darker possibilities they had calculated down to decimal and detonation.

But seeing it...

Seeing it was another thing entirely.

She tried to speak. To curse. To cry.

Nothing came.

Only tears, warm and soundless, rolling down her cheeks like silent apologies.

But in the quiet of her core, she felt it.

The pressure that had haunted her for months—the creeping corrosion, the internal rattle of a biocore slowly failing—was gone.

Nioh had kept his promise.

He had taken the poison from her veins.

But at what cost?

"No..." she whispered, her fingers trembling as they pressed against the glass. "No, he promised…"

He said he'd take her up there.

Up into the sky.

He promised.

"I'm sorry," Lithaa murmured, drawing her into a trembling embrace.

The other heirs stood quietly behind them, shadows against the red-lit cabin walls. Magnus. Neil. Aquila. Silent. Waiting. Listening to the echo that refused to fade.

The air inside the ship was thick with a grief no one dared name.

Until—

Akron wiped her eyes.

Her voice, when it returned, was clear.

Sharp.

"Turn around," she said.

"We're going back."

Aquila flinched. "There's… nothing left."

Akron didn't blink.

"There'll be something. Trust me."

Her voice held no room for argument.

The ship banked silently and turned. Below, the Hellscape no longer bore its name.

Gone were the shrieking fiends, the crimson vapors, the cursed bones. Even the residual aura of corruption had fled.

What remained was silence. And ruin.

As the heirs descended, boots hitting shattered earth, they moved through the wreckage like ghosts in a land that no longer remembered its war.

The crater awaited them. Massive. Perfectly symmetrical. Yet wrong.

There was no burn. No ash. No blackened scars.

Just absence. Destruction so pure it had erased the evidence of itself.

On the crater's edge lay a body—Aphrodite.

Her form was crumpled like parchment left too long in rain. Her skin was pale. Blood leaked from her ears, and her face was twisted in something far worse than pain.

It was the face of someone who had seen something she could not comprehend—and never would.

Across from her was Hermes, his torso and legs split cleanly apart.

No blood pooled. No entrails spilled.

Just division, as if the world itself had drawn a line and said: no further.

Akron stood between them, eyes scanning the silence, heart drumming a rhythm only she could hear.

"Just like he promised," she whispered.

Then, louder:

"Pick up the bodies. They're our reward."

Magnus hesitated, voice low. "Are you sure you don't want to stay longer? To… look for him?"

Akron turned, her face unreadable.

"There's no point. That bastard's already gone."

Her voice cracked—not with grief, but something stranger.

Certainty.

"You won't find him unless he wants to be found."

Neil frowned. "You think anyone could survive that?"

She didn't answer immediately.

But then came a grin—small, sharp, and wicked.

"He's Nioh," she said. "Even after spending every waking hour with him this past month, he still managed to disappear without leaving a trace."

Her gaze turned skyward.

—

She was right.

Because far away—buried deep within the Expanse, where gravity twisted and shadows moved on their own—Nioh was still alive.

Barely.

He stood on shaking legs, breath ragged, holding Hephaestus by the throat. His grip was tight, unmoving, even as blood dripped from his cracked lips and sparks hissed across his fractured skin.

He was dizzy. Lightheaded. The toll of detonating two fused biocores was catching up fast. His energy was leaking—his body screaming—but he still had one last thing to do.

Right after the explosion, he'd used the teleportation device he'd stolen from Atlas. It wasn't meant for living tissue at that energy level. He didn't care. It threw him into the Expanse. Dragged Hephaestus with him.

Now here they were. Both half-dead.

But only one still fighting.

"Kuh… kukuku…" Hephaestus coughed, lips split, face bloodied. "That's all I know, I swear…"

Her limbs had been torn off. Her body was wrecked. But she still managed to smile through the pain.

"You're already dying," she muttered. "You burned your core. Once the charge fades, your body won't hold. So why… why care about a dead woman's secrets?"

Nioh stared down at her for a long moment. Then released her.

She hit the ground hard. Didn't move.

But she was right. His biocore was cracking. Energy was pouring out faster than it could stabilize.

Still—he smiled.

"That's the thing. You never figured out who I was because you never paid attention to who you were."

He stepped closer. Looked her in the eyes.

"Granny Leah—your mentor—saved my life. Just like she saved yours."

Something clicked.

Her eyes went wide. "No… no, you were the orphan… the one they couldn't find."

"I was," he said. "Which is how I know she gave you the same thing she gave me."

"She didn't give it to both of us," Hephaestus whispered, barely breathing. "She gave it… to you."

He nodded.

"Back then, I didn't understand what she meant when she talked about 'biocore insemination.' I thought it was metaphor. A fancy term. But now I get it."

He looked down at her ruined body. Then back at his hand.

"You were the first version."

He clenched his fist.

"I'm the final one."

Without warning, he drove his hand into her chest.

Crack.

She gasped once. Then went still.

Nioh pulled free her biocore—dark, unstable, pulsing with fragments of the Sins.

He stared at it for a moment. Then swallowed it whole.

His body jerked. Twitched. His breath hitched.

Then something inside him snapped.

The golden chain that had bound the red-haired version of himself in his mental core—the one he thought he'd locked away—broke.

It surged into him, red lightning fusing with his core.

A new biocore formed—red and pulsing—wrapping itself around the central golden one like a shield of flame.

Five more cores orbited it, like moons around a collapsing sun.

Lust for manipulation

Envy for transformation

Greed for absorption

Gluttony for fusion

Pride for control

In his mind, a voice stirred.

Ekko.

"You followed through," it said. "Two Sins in one move. You purged the impurity, and I've sealed the leak. The central core is stable—for now."

"I know," Nioh said, breathing hard. "But it still hurts like hell."

"You now hold five sins. Once the other two are claimed—"

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," he muttered. "Let me breathe."

He looked down at Hephaestus' body one last time.

Then he noticed the moving shadows.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.