The ground was gone, torn upward in slabs that floated like broken teeth around the shattered battlefield. Black holes flickered into being and blinked out within seconds, each forming and collapsing so fast that light itself had no time to run.
And in the center of it all, she hovered.
Pieces of herself flickered in and out, her limbs twisting as space ruptured, her feet not quite aligned to gravity anymore. Her hair drifted in chaos. Her once-glowing starry eyes were empty sockets of cold pitch. Her Celestial aura had become a distortion field.
And in front of her, crawling with one arm torn off and the other half-frozen, was the so-called Frozen God.
He was trying to run.
A Forgotten Rank deity dragged himself along with half his ribs shattered, one leg twisted backward and gaping holes where his ice armor used to be. His Core had fractured under the weight of the Harvesting backlash. His strength was gone but not his awareness. And that awareness? It had turned to fear.
He screamed when the air collapsed around him The scream tore through layers of space like someone had shattered glass inside a vacuum. His body twisted unnaturally as the pressure of gravity slammed him. Blood splashed upward from his mouth.
Narisva didn't even look at him at first. Her hand twitched once. Then she lifted it and space responded like a dog on a leash. One by one, razor-thin silver blades of warped reality materialized around the Frozen God. Not just above him. Inside him.
They didn't strike all at once. That would have been merciful. They began to turn.
The first went slow enough to make the Frozen God choke on his own scream as the spatial blade inside his arm began to rotate, shredding muscle and bone. He convulsed, flailing like a dying fish on a hook. But Narisva didn't watch. She simply turned slightly, flicking her finger again.
Another blade turned. This time near his thigh. Then his stomach. Then through his neck.
His power flared in desperate retaliation, but it flickered out like a candle. He tried to speak, to form words of defiance but they came out as garbled coughs and bloodied sobs.
"Mercy," he croaked, crawling an inch toward her feet.
It was then that she finally looked down.
There was no pity in her stare, no satisfaction, no sadistic pleasure. Just emptiness. Her lips didn't move, but space around her eyes fractured, and the ice on the battlefield began to reverse-melt, as if it was being undone from existence, atom by atom.
"Please…"
He gasped, dragging himself. His fingernails tore off on the glass-like floor, the skin on his face peeling from contact with the spatial instability in the air.
Narisva walked through him.
As she stepped, his entire body froze. His atoms were being pulled apart by microscopic gravitational implosions. He began to beg loudly and desperately.
"I was wrong, I was wrong! I shouldn't have touched him! I shouldn't have killed Erna! I shouldn't—!"
Another twist of her hand. His spine snapped. He stopped breathing but his body wouldn't die. Not yet. She wouldn't let it.
The Frozen God lay before her, or at least what was left of him. His body was no longer recognizable as something once feared. His flesh had become slush from repeated spatial ruptures. His limbs twisted in unnatural directions, broken over and over again. His form had long since degraded into something pitiful. His mind was gone. Only the ghost of fear lingered in the flickering pulses of light beneath his shattered form.
Narisva hovered above him, quiet and expressionless, her black irises now dull and starless voids that swallowed light itself. There was no triumph in her stance. She didn't smile. Her chest didn't rise with vindication. She simply was, as if grief had sculpted her into a monument of punishment given form.
With her outstretched hand, a black hole formed inside of him.
She placed it within what remained of his chest cavity, where his Forgotten Core had once pulsed. And then she let it grow.
The pain he felt—if one could even call it that anymore—was not from being crushed, but from being unraveled atom by atom, his molecules colliding into each other with the force of stars collapsing. The power that made him immortal began to scream as it was torn from him and swallowed back into the black spiral folding tighter and tighter within his chest.
His arms flailed for one last moment.
Then his body imploded, folding into itself like paper set aflame from the inside, his ribs collapsing, his spine folding, his skull bending inward like glass forced into a fist, and still the black hole devoured every spark of him until there was nothing left.
Narisva stood over the empty space. She said nothing. There was nothing left to say. Slowly, without even a whisper of sound, she turned away. Her bare feet hovered above the cracked and frozen ruin of the battlefield.
She walked through the desolation without looking back until she found him.
The destruction hadn't reached him. Even time seemed to have paused around him, as if the world refused to desecrate something so selfless, so noble, so...
Loved.
Narisva sank to her knees and looked down at him. Her fingers trembled as they touched his cheek, still faintly warm from the afterglow of his Divine sacrifice.
"I'm sorry..."
Carefully, she lifted him into her arms.
There was no portal, only a quiet pulse of her Pinnacle Tether as space folded around them.
They were gone, swallowed by her Sight Teleportation, leaving behind only silence, dust, and the ghosts of what had once been a battlefield and a god, and a love that ended too soon.