Eventually, the storm of violence waned— not because Shingen had grown weary, but because there was nothing left that dared move.
The slaughter had run its course, not with triumph, but with quiet, suffocating finality.
The field before him, once roaring with divine zeal and mortal resistance, now sagged beneath its weight, a ruptured land of broken steel, mangled corpses, and blood-curdled soil cracked open like old scars.
Beneath the fading haze of the ruined sky, silence bled into every corner.
Shingen dropped to one knee.
No declaration. No victorious flourish.
His blade, soaked and stained beyond recognition, rested at his side, as casual and patient as death itself.
His armor— less a suit than a cage of jagged bone and twisted metal— clung to him in fragments, oozing ichor and dark blood, as if the armor itself had fed.
The air around him was stagnant, unwilling to stir, weighed down by something heavier than mere death.
A breathless hush coated the battlefield, thick as fog, copper-laced and unmoving.
The few who remained— those unlucky enough to still draw breath— watched through trembling vision.
Gasping. Staggering.
Barely able to hold their limbs together.
Their eyes, wide and glinting with primal fear, saw not a man kneeling.
Not a warrior worn thin. But something is still grinning.
And the grin was not one of madness, or joy, or cruelty.
It was a still thing, quiet and cold, curving faintly along his face like he'd been waiting— patient, deliberate— for this exact outcome.
Not for victory. But for ruin. For desecration.
For this.
"Strange, isn't it?"
His voice crawled over the dead, soft and slow like rot seeping through cracked walls.
It slithered into open wounds, into broken skulls, into the ears of the still-living and those too stubborn to die.
"They say the final breath of a warrior is regret… and yet I don't sense any in yours."
He rose— no haste, no strain.
Just inevitability.
The blood beneath his feet rippled thick as oil, and the bones beneath it cracked like dry branches under a frost.
His footfalls disturbed not the bodies, but the quiet, the sacred, ugly stillness of the aftermath.
All around him, torsos were split open like cursed scripture, limbs twisted into angles unfit for any creation, and the air stank of hot metal and innards.
Shingen stood in the middle of it all, not like a conqueror, not like a man, but like something this battlefield had given birth to.
"I've walked this road so long, I've forgotten where it began. Bathed in so many rivers of blood, the names no longer matter. Mine, theirs— interchangeable."
His exhale came slowly, brittle.
It carried a thousand battles, a million kills, and still asked for more.
As he stood fully, joints cracking and sinew pulling taut, dried blood peeled away from his limbs like old skin.
Pain had left him long ago— or perhaps it still lingered, just too familiar to be noticed.
The shadow that curled from his body stretched long and unnatural, as if it obeyed some other geometry.
It slithered across the corpses like a parasite, tasting each one, reaching into faces, into sockets, into mouths still caught in a scream.
Beneath the stench of rot, there was something else— a scent not of this world, something old, blasphemous, hidden in the lull between dying heartbeats.
He chuckled— a dry, brittle sound.
"Death. That's all it ever was."
He paused.
"And yet..."
A cold wind shrieked across the field, shredding the tattered banners that once heralded divine wrath.
The wind should have carried voices— cries, whispers, final prayers— but it carried only stillness.
Even the sky seemed to hold its breath.
"The winds have forgotten my name today."
And before him stood the remnants— hollow shells of conviction and faith.
Their hands clutched at splintered staves, broken blades, their feet trembling in pools of their blood.
Their eyes no longer saw a man.
They saw something else. Something that should not be.
"You look at me," he said, tilting his head with a slow, venomous grace, "as if this is over. As if I've lost."
His grin widened, peeling back red-streaked teeth.
"Tell me, then… which of you stands victorious?"
Not one voice rose.
"Which of you," he whispered, "can strike me down?"
Their silence was louder than screams.
"If death won't come to me," he growled, flexing blood-slick fingers, "then I'll hunt it. Drag it here. Rip it apart. If my blade still sings, then I will make it scream. If this heart still beats, then I will fight. Again. And again. And again."
He sheathed his blade in a single motion, and the sound— sharp, clean— cut through the silence like a knife across the throat of God.
"I accept my death," he muttered, voice low and cracked with something deeper than mortal defiance.
"But death… does not accept me."
The ground shivered.
He stepped forward, past the corpses of gods and men alike, moving through viscera as if it were morning mist.
Some of the bodies still twitched.
Some had only just fallen.
But he walked on— unshaken, unbothered.
Then his steps slowed.
The boy saw them.
The faces.
Familiar.
The team that left him behind.
Dead and broken.
Torn in ways that screamed Why.
His stomach twisted, just for a moment.
The sight gouged at him, a blade turned inward.
Had they come for him? Had they fought? Had they screamed his name while their flesh was peeled away?
The question clawed at his mind, but no answer came.
Only the stillness. Only their final expressions: twisted in regret, in horror, in something too late.
His hand twitched, fingers brushing empty air.
That old familiar feeling— the weight of a hilt that wasn't there— echoed through his bones.
Then came the whisper.
A voice. Thin as thread, but heavy as judgment.
His name.
He smiled.
"Ah… It's nice," he murmured, lost in thought, "to finally be fighting you— The Twelve Apostles of Constellation. The Seven Deadly Sins… and of course… the most delicate, pitiful masquerade."
He halted, just long enough to let the dread pool around him.
"The Nine Noble Virtues," he whispered, voice curling like smoke. "Pretending to be saviors. As if they exist."
His gaze snapped toward them, cutting through armor, through will, through soul.
"I'm flattered."
His shoulders trembled. Not from strain. But from laughter.
A low, breathless thing at first. But it grew.
It surged, contorted, and split into something foul.
Something that sounded too large for a human throat.
A laughter that shook loose the spine, that turned marrow to water, that echoed from some place that no god had touched in millennia.
And then it stopped.
The absence of sound was worse.
When he turned again, the light caught his eyes, reflecting the slaughter not as memory, but as intent.
His face was not human anymore.
It wore humanity like a dying fire wears its last embers.
"But it makes me wonder..."
The ground curled beneath him. The sky rippled.
"Why would the three most vaunted orders waste their strength…"
His hands twitched.
"…on me?"
The glow began— two burning embers flickering in his eyes, slow, dreadful.
And then they blazed, crimson and alive, searing through dust and ruin.
The world recoiled. The heavens twitched.
And then the sound came.
Not thunder.
Not a cry.
A trumpet.
A note forged in madness and woven into the bones of creation.
It tore through time and thought, unraveling silence itself.
Not a call to arms. A sentence.
Then came the rupture.
The sky split— not clean, not celestial, but violently, like flesh torn open by rusted steel.
From it bled light, not salvation, but punishment.
Golden, blinding, all-consuming.
The air thickened, heavy as guilt, and every breath burned with the heat of something divine and merciless.
The battlefield screamed beneath it.
And Shingen stood there, a silhouette in the flood, grinning at the gods who had dared come late.
And then the world shuddered— and ceased.
The wind halted mid-scream, suspended in its fury like a breath forever held.
Rivers froze in their tracks, their surface smooth as glass, silencing the songs they had sung since time's birth.
In the smoking aftermath of ruin, the glowing remnants of flame did not flicker— they simply dimmed, as if ashamed to shine in the presence of what approached.
Not a leaf stirred. Not a soul dared breathe.
The air thickened with a pressure beyond understanding, a suffocating stillness so profound it felt less like silence, and more like a verdict.
Something descended.
Not a fall. Not a glide.
No grace, no violence.
Just a slow, inevitable descent, as though reality itself bent beneath the weight of this being's approach.
As though gravity didn't pull him, but served him.
An angel.
But not the kind painted in chapels or whispered of in prayer.
This was a creature too immense, too merciless, too perfect to belong to any mortal dream.
Wings unfurled, not like banners of light but curtains of annihilation— vast, oppressive, each feather alive with searing light and shadow, their span eclipsing reason.
His armor glistened not with beauty, but menace— etched with a language no tongue could mimic, each glyph alive, mutating, writhing, as though screaming truths the mind could not hold.
He did not wear a face, but a mask sculpted from judgment itself— no warmth, no fury. Just certainty.
And his eyes.
They were not eyes. They were cores of dying stars, gazes that pierced time, thought, and soul.
He did not see the battlefield. He measured it.
He did not watch the people. He weighed them.
And below him, the beast.
A warhorse carved from some forgotten nightmare.
Its hooves struck air with the force of thunder, galloping across the void like it had been born in heaven's slaughterhouse.
The weight of it cracked reality where it stepped, not upon earth, but upon the bones of gravity itself.
Its body bore glowing brands, ancient runes that pulsed like dying hearts, each one whispering secrets that caused minds to rupture.
It exhaled golden mist, thick and toxic with divinity, and the ground beneath recoiled like a child before a whip.
Its eyes— twin furnaces of molten gold— did not glare with hate.
They judged. They condemned.
And then, the sky— no, the heavens— peeled open.
Not with thunder. Not with light but with wings.
An ocean of them. Boundless. Endless.
Wings that spread across the sky like the skin of a slain god stretched over the world.
A legion of beings poured through the breach in the firmament, faceless and pure, each armored in celestial fire, each bearing weapons forged not from metal, but from the screaming collapse of stars.
Blades that shimmered without light.
Spears that thrummed with buried storms.
Hammers that pulsed with the heartbeat of creation itself.
And still— no sound.
No shouts. No cries.
No music to accompany their arrival.
Just the hush of finality, a silence so deep it rang in the bones like an unspoken curse.
On the ground, men and monsters alike froze— not by choice, but because choice had left them. Their bodies buckled.
Their lungs seized. Breath turned to fire.
Around them, seasoned warriors collapsed without a wound, weeping blood, gibbering prayers to gods that had already arrived but would not listen.
Shingen did not kneel.
He smiled.
Not a grin. Not mockery.
Something crueler, more unhinged.
It was the smile of a man teetering on the edge of revelation, who sees the wave crashing and decides to laugh before it devours him.
A single bead of sweat ran down his cheek, slow, deliberate.
He wiped it away, not in fear, but in reverence. In hunger.
Something had arrived, and for the first time… he didn't know.
Was it a storm that rose to meet him?
Or a god come to bury him?
Above, the host of angels hovered— millions upon millions— still as statues carved from judgment itself.
Their eyes, unreadable. Their silence, eternal.
Then the lead angel raised his blade.
The heavens answered.
Not with thunder. Not with a shout.
But with a force that was.
A decree, ancient and immutable, cracked the world like dry stone.
Mountains ruptured— not broken, rejected— slashed open like they'd always been lies.
Oceans recoiled from their shores, tides pulling away as if fleeing from the weight of truth too vast to name.
Cities— far beyond sight— collapsed inward, their spires crumbling without flame, without violence, as if existence itself withdrew from them.
And from the silence… the screaming began.
It came from everywhere.
From the bones of the earth.
From the sky.
From the soul.
It wasn't a cry of pain— it was the world begging.
The air wept. The ground trembled like flesh under a blade.
And somewhere, humanity realized— this wasn't a war.
This wasn't vengeance.
This was a sentence.
A verdict written into the marrow of the world before the first star ever dared to burn.
No trial. No witness. Just the executioner and the condemned.
And the condemned were all.
Across every nation, panic erupted like rot blooming beneath flesh.
People clawed at each other not for survival, but because they no longer remembered how to hope.
Mothers suffocated their children in silence, thinking mercy lay in death.
Men laughed until their throats bled, scratching madness into their skulls with fingers that no longer felt pain.
Civilization unraveled— not from fire, not from war— but from knowing.
Knowing that nothing they built mattered.
Knowing they had already been erased.
Kingdoms emptied vaults in useless tribute, their gold sinking into the dust like tears swallowed by the grave.
Temples crumbled, the faithful screaming into altars that did not answer.
And the skies?
They remained full.
Watching and waiting.
Because the gods had come.
And they had not come to listen.
They had come to an end.
And Shingen— he laughed.
Not as a hero. Not in defiance.
But with the savage joy of a man standing in the epicenter of annihilation and finding something beautiful in the ruin.
The silence that followed the roar was worse than the sound itself.
Because it wasn't absent. It was control.
The wind no longer belonged to the earth.
The air had weight now, thick and hot like metal poured into the lungs.
Breath came like drowning in gold.
Colors faded. Blood lost its shine.
The angels waited.
They did not move.
They did not blink.
They had all the time in creation.
They were not here to fight.
They were here to fulfill.
Another breath from the warhorse.
Another plume of golden mist, descending like a funeral shroud.
Where it touched, life withered.
The battlefield bled not with wounds, but with loss.
Essence faded. Reality dimmed.
And then came the worst truth of all.
This was not punishment.
Punishment means guilt. Means reason. Means sin.
But this— this was cleansing.
A flaw being erased.
A species marked not as wicked, but as unnecessary.
An inconvenience in the machine of eternity.
And Shingen, the mad, smiling blade that had once defied fate itself, stood alone in that golden deathlight…
And he laughed until the heavens cracked again.