The sword left my hands, and then it wasn't mine anymore.

It tore itself free.

The blade of compressed soulflame and death mana didn't simply travel through space; it consumed it, ripping forward faster than sound could chase it, faster than thought could follow. The edge pulsed as it flew, not a steady glow but a living heartbeat, thrum, thrum, thrum each pulse unleashing another wave of annihilation.

With every beat, the world died a little more.

The ground beneath the arc didn't burn.

It ceased.

Ice, stone, soil, everything the swing passed over was reduced to glowing red plasma, the earth screaming as it liquefied into incandescent ruin. Heat washed outward in violent rings, flattening jagged ice formations, flash-boiling moisture into expanding shockwaves of steam.

The air split.

Not metaphorically.

The sound barrier broke with a delayed, thunderous crack, a sound so violent it arrived a heartbeat too late, trailing behind the devastation like an afterthought. The sonic boom rolled across the battlefield, smashing frozen pillars into powder and hurling debris skyward in spiraling arcs.

And then the recoil hit me.

I hadn't braced.

I hadn't been able to.

The moment the blade left my hands, all that compressed power snapped back through my body like a whip. My arms screamed. My spine arched. I felt ribs crack, not break, but fracture just enough to remind me that I was still painfully mortal.

I was flung backward.

Not just thrown.

Launched.

The world inverted as I tumbled through the air, end over end, my senses blurring into heat, noise, and pain. I smashed through a wall of ice, then another, then finally skipped across the ground like a discarded doll, carving a trench through frozen earth before slamming into a jagged outcrop hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs.

I lay there for half a second.

Maybe a full one.

Long enough to register the taste of blood and ash in my mouth.

Kent didn't fare nearly as well.

I saw it happen in flashes as my vision swam. His body lifted off the ground like it weighed nothing, silver residue still clinging to his skin from Absolute Zero. Without mana left to reinforce himself, without space to bend or shield to raise, he was just flesh and bone against a god-level backlash.

Even with his inhuman durability.

Even with skin tougher than steel.

The force caught him mid-collapse and impaled him.

A massive tree, one of the forest's giants, its trunk wider than a car, splintered as Kent's body slammed into it. The broken wood didn't snap cleanly. It twisted. Screwed. Drove itself through both his legs in a spray of bark and blood, pinning him there like some grotesque display.

His scream tore through the battlefield.

Raw.

Unfiltered.

Agony stripped of pride.

It echoed once.

Twice.

Then his body went slack.

I forced myself upright, ignoring the way my muscles protested, the way my nerves screamed at every movement. White life mana surged instinctively, knitting skin, sealing ruptured vessels, dulling the worst of the pain, but I didn't dare divert it all.

Not yet.

My eyes snapped back to the battlefield.

To the aftermath of my strike.

For one delusional moment, I thought—

Did I kill it?

The space where the golem had stood was unrecognizable. The ice wall behind it had been carved open in a massive diagonal gash, its edges glowing faintly red before rapidly refreezing, steam still rising in thick curtains. The ground was a molten scar stretching for miles, slowly cooling into warped glass and blackened stone.

There was no immediate movement.

No towering silhouette.

No retaliatory strike.

Hope, a stupid, reckless thing, flickered in my chest.

Then the howl came.

It wasn't sound alone.

It was pressure.

The enraged bellow tore through the air, slamming into my eardrums with enough force to make my vision blur. Trees bowed. Ice shattered. The very atmosphere vibrated, rippling outward in visible waves as the roar climbed higher and higher, thick with fury and pain.

Something massive moved within the steam.

A shape emerged.

The golem stepped forward.

Alive.

Damaged.

Enraged.

Half its mouth was gone.

Not shattered, melted, the ice warped and wilting as if it had been too close to a star. Its upper torso bore a massive diagonal scar, the wound still glowing faintly from residual heat, cracks racing outward as the ice struggled to repair itself.

One arm was simply… gone.

Not broken.

Not shattered.

Gone.

The stump steamed violently, jagged edges reforming slowly as regeneration fought against lingering death mana. The other arm hung uselessly at its side, fractured into dozens of massive shards barely held together by frozen mana threads.

And yet.

It still stood.

Still towered.

Still lived.

Its remaining eye locked onto me, burning with a cold hatred so intense it felt like knives scraping across my skin. The ground trembled beneath its steps as it advanced, each movement cracking the half-molten terrain.

I didn't let my expression change.

I didn't let the fear show.

Inside, my heart hammered like it wanted out of my chest.

That should have killed it.

Any rational being, any sane monster, would have died from that. But this thing wasn't sane.

Wasn't rational.

Wasn't even truly alive in the way I understood life. And that was something coming from the heir of life.

It was a walking calamity.

And it was still coming.

The golem raised its remaining arm, ice rapidly reforming, mana surging as it prepared another attack, something bigger, denser, more focused than before.

I shifted my stance.

Checked Kent's position.

Pinned.

Unmoving.

Alive, but barely.

I was about to move.

When the sky screamed.

Not thunder.

Not mana.

Atmosphere.

I felt it before I saw it, a violent pressure change, a distant roar growing impossibly fast. My head snapped upward just as the clouds above were torn apart by something descending at obscene speed.

Fire painted the heavens.

A massive chunk of rock ripped through the atmosphere, wrapped in blazing plasma, its surface glowing white-hot as friction turned the air itself into flame. Trails of burning debris peeled off behind it, streaking across the sky like dying stars.

A meteor.

It was enormous, far larger than anything natural should have been, its trajectory too precise, too deliberate. The sheer gravitational pressure warped the clouds around it, dragging them inward as it fell, the roar of its descent drowning out even the golem's furious howl.

The battlefield was bathed in orange light.

Shadows stretched impossibly long.

The golem hesitated.

For the first time.

I stared upward, blood drying on my face, lungs burning, body screaming, and laughed.

A short, breathless sound.

Because of course.

Of course that was happening now.

The meteor burned brighter.

Closer.

Falling straight toward us.

She was finally here.

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