It's like a sound that belonged in any realm of sanity.
It crawled from his throat like a blade dragged across gravel, hoarse and defiant, the kind of laugh uttered by something with nothing left to lose.
His teeth bared, but not in joy, not in rage.
In sheer disbelief.
Not at what he was seeing, but at the fact that he was still alive to see it.
And the sky watched him.
Not the angel but the sky.
It was no longer a canvas for clouds and sunlight.
It had grown aware.
It trembled with unspoken thought, a vast mind waking with cold curiosity, as if wondering why this insect hadn't yet turned to ash.
Why this insignificant thing still breathed in defiance of its judgment.
Around him, the dead began to stir.
Not rise. Not return. They twitched.
Mouths opened with no breath inside.
Eyes snapped wide with nothing behind them.
Fingers curled as if remembering pain.
They had become echoes, puppets reanimated not by life, but by memory alone.
They twitched because he remembered them.
Because Shingen remembered every one of them.
Every scream.
Every silence.
Every hand that reached for him before it was taken.
And now, in this theater of annihilation, they were part of the audience.
"On this world…" the angel's voice coiled through dimensions like rot through fruit, every syllable carrying not sound but understanding.
Not an offer. Not a command. But a conclusion.
The wings— no, the limbs— shuddered.
Light bled from their seams.
Not golden. Not divine.
Something more primal.
The color of regret, of forgotten screams, of unborn nightmares denied the chance to die.
They stretched so wide the horizon cracked under their shadow, and even the stars— distant, cold, eternal— flickered as though flinching.
Shingen took a step forward.
And the world did not permit it.
Stone turned to sludge beneath his foot.
Air congealed like oil in his lungs.
Time itself seemed reluctant, each instant dragging like an open wound.
But still, he moved.
Not because he thought he could win.
Not because he believed in purpose or justice or vengeance.
But because something had to stand.
Something had to respond.
"You think I'm afraid?" he whispered.
His voice scraped out raw, flayed by the pressure against it.
"You think this means you've won?"
There was no answer.
There had never been.
He looked at the corpses again.
At the twisted faces, the mangled limbs, the lives that had bled out, believing something greater watched over them.
And he laughed again. It's lower now, not in madness but clarity.
Cold and cutting like frost under skin.
"No… No, I get it now," he muttered.
"This was never about judgment. Never about sin or law or is it rebellion."
He looked up into the void the angel had become.
Into the folds of flesh and nightmare, into the ancient mechanics of thought older than thought, into the glare that bent dimensions into silence.
"This is about entertainment."
And for the first time, there was motion.
The wings halted mid-twitch.
The angel's head turned a fraction.
Not much. Barely a tilt.
But the silence it stirred could have collapsed empires.
"You've done this before,"
Shingen continued, the words tumbling faster now, with the certainty of a man who finally glimpsed the shape of the horror he was shackled to.
"Countless times. To others. To worlds I can't even name. You wait, you break them. You watch."
The sky cracked. A deep, throbbing fracture.
As if the firmament itself winced.
"Do you feed on this?" Shingen snarled.
"Is that it? Some cosmic butcher, slicing through timelines for the taste?"
The thing— angel, god, abomination— responded not with speech but with presence.
A pressure that bloomed behind the eyes, behind the soul, like hands cupping the mind and squeezing.
Shingen dropped to one knee, coughing up blood that shimmered unnaturally, as if it too remembered the stars.
He laughed again.
This time, through bloodied teeth.
"Then you have picked the wrong show."
And he stood.
His body screamed.
Bones cracked. Muscles tore.
Reality refused.
But he stood.
"You wanted a finale?" he hissed, raising his head.
"You wanted a last act? Then watch me."
The wind returned— but not the world's breath.
Shingen's breath.
A singular storm, born from a soul that had no right to still exist.
He stepped again, and the world split beneath him— not from his weight, but from the defiance radiating out of him like flame devouring oil.
The thing before him— the Ace, the Angel, the Unnamed Horror— raised a hand.
And for a moment, the battlefield vanished.
Not visually. Not physically.
It simply ceased to be.
A blink in the script of the universe, a pause in the code.
Shingen stood on nothing, faced with everything, and knew in that infinitesimal moment that this was it.
This is the end.
But he smiled anyway.
Broken. Bleeding. Damned.
And whispered, "Then let's make it count."
Beneath a sky that refused to breathe, heavy and molten with silence, Shingen stood unyielding amid a landscape carved by ruin.
His skeletal armor, fractured and worn beyond memory, caught the dim, suffocating light and shimmered faintly— like a ghost holding on to the last flicker of its existence.
Around him lay the fallen: broken, gutted, stripped of all but their ragged remnants.
They did not rest.
They could not.
Their eyes— if they still had eyes— were wide and vacant, staring into the empty vastness above, seeing nothing, or perhaps seeing everything and drowning in it.
Shingen's smile was not born from arrogance, nor the brazen defiance of a doomed man.
It was something far darker— an expression forged in the space between awe and despair, a silent acknowledgment of a truth far too terrible to bear.
A truth that whispered, long too late: this world had never been theirs to claim.
A single bead of sweat carved a cold path down his temple, trailing over skin cracked by exhaustion and terror.
His breath came shallow, ragged— a thread stretched taut and trembling on the verge of snapping.
His red eyes flickered, shadows dancing beneath the oppressive gold of the sky, yet still, he grinned.
Not from hope, but from an eerie thrill, the cold rush of standing on the edge of oblivion.
Around him, the angels did not stir.
There was no thunderous decree, no wrathful strike, no sudden flash of divine judgment.
Only silence.
Their wings whispered against the stillness, dry, brittle like ancient bones rattling in a wind long dead.
Their hollow eyes drank in everything, but not with curiosity or pity.
They stripped away the layers of flesh and bone, peering deep into the marrow, into the twisted core of something utterly alien and unspoken.
They waited.
Not for a command or a signal, but for something else— someone.
Shingen exhaled sharply, the sound cutting the silence like a serrated blade.
His laugh was bitter, a cracked whisper that had no right to exist here.
"So this is what you've been hiding," he murmured, his voice barely audible beneath the crushing weight.
His gaze flicked across the divine sentinels, searching for a fissure in their eternal composure.
"All this… brought down for me?"
No one answered.
Even the priestess, usually composed beyond measure, could only gape with trembling lips and wide, haunted eyes.
The Twelve Virtues— those who claimed to understand the will of the divine— stood frozen, terror etched deep into their faces.
They had not foreseen this.
They had not imagined the horror that now unfolded before them.
Then, the weight pressed down.
Not a weight of flesh or stone, but a force more suffocating than death itself— an ocean of despair turned solid, grinding and crushing everything it touched.
One by one, the people surrounding Shingen collapsed, not from wounds or blows, but under the unbearable strain of simply existing here.
Blood seeped dark and slow from noses, ears, and eyes.
Some fell forward like marionettes whose strings had been severed.
Others clawed desperately at the earth, their nails splitting, their hands trembling with a frantic need to hold onto something, anything real.
Still, the angels remained statuesque, unmoving, as if the very air around them was thick enough to freeze time.
The leader's blade hovered, poised yet still. The legions stood silent, their judgment frozen into the moment.
The world itself held its breath.
Colors bled and twisted as if reality itself recoiled in terror.
Then, the sound came— but it was no sound, not truly.
It slithered, a living shadow curling through the bones of the world, winding into the hollows of the mind where nameless fears took root and grew.
The clouds did not break or scatter.
They shrieked— an impossible, writhing cry that reversed the flow of time and sense.
From the golden tear in the sky, slow and deliberate, something began to emerge.
It was not a figure, not a being.
It was a presence.
Older than the cosmos, darker than the void between stars.
Something that had waited through all the silences that came before time itself.
And then the wind stirred— not a gentle breeze, but the last breath of a dying world.
Trees bent, mountains bowed, stones begged for mercy, they would never receive.
And then— He arrived.
He did not fall, nor did he descend.
The world shifted around him as though his arrival had been written into its bones from the very beginning.
His hair, wild and untamed, danced with currents unseen and unbidden, as if reality itself had lost its hold in his presence.
But it was his eyes that stole breath from every living thing: burning gold, not flame or light, but something infinitely older and colder.
Eyes that did not watch but consumed, that stripped away the illusions of flesh and bone and thought until only a raw, trembling core remained.
A core that screamed in tongues forgotten by the living.
He passed through the tear in the sky, and the rest followed— armor of gold and silver, scarred and streaked, not by rust or dirt, but by something deeper, something alive and watching.
His wings unfolded— not feathers, not solid matter, but shifting, living concepts that twisted and writhed in shapes the eye refused to hold.
When his feet touched the earth, it cracked— not with an explosion or quake, but with a slow, deliberate submission.
The air ceased to be air.
Breath turned to desperate struggle.
Bodies fought for oxygen that would never come.
Even Shingen staggered, not from fear, but because the body knew a truth the mind had yet to accept: this was no battle to be fought.
This was the end.
From the wound in the heavens, he descended— not an army, not a god, but something worse.
He did not move; the world moved for him.
The sky shrank, stars dimmed, and the air itself forgot how to exist.
He was neither light nor shadow— he was absence made manifest.
A wound burned into the fabric of reality where nothing should be.
Then came the sound, a scream, no thunder, but the ripping of existence itself.
One step fractured the air.
Another killed the wind.
A third sent cracks crawling across the earth as if even the planet knew it could no longer endure him.
His wings were not wings.
They were limbs— countless, vast, bending in impossible ways that tore at the logic of the universe.
Flesh, metal, and thought— stitched together in a grotesque, outer symphony.
His armor did not gleam; it absorbed light and memory alike. It pulsed with a terrible life.
But it was his eyes that shattered reality.
They did not blaze or glow.
They saw.
And all that was seen ceased to be.
Cities forgot their names, mountains bowed in shame, seas froze mid-wave, uncertain of their existence.
The mortals below did not scream or pray.
They did not breathe.
Not from fear, but from something deeper— law.
Their bodies forgot how to function, their souls abandoned the gift of will.
And there, standing alone amid the blood-soaked ruins of a dying world, Shingen grinned.
A bead of sweat traced his cheek— not born of terror, never terror, but born from understanding.
Because now, at last, he knew.
This might be the greatest performance he would ever live to witness.
Amid the world's final execution, Shingen stood, his smirk barely more than a twitch— a fragile crack in the dam holding back something even he could not name.
Awe.
Not reverence, nor admiration, but the raw, harrowing awe of staring down a force that existed beyond consequence.
Sweat slid slowly down his temple, the only thing moving in the suffocating stillness.
His breath came sharp, shallow, like glass cutting into his lungs.
His bones tightened, teeth clenched, and his skin— his armor, his very self— feel painfully insufficient.
And then, the voice came.
Not from the angels, but from the world itself— from the air, the soil, the sky— from inside the skull, behind the eyes, between the ribs.
A single syllable shattered the land with crushing weight.
Cracks spiderwebbed beneath him, creeping like a curse across corpses and blood-soaked stone.
The nearest fallen twitched, as if life had been violently shoved back just to feel agony one last time.
"I…"
The word hung in the air, heavy as a death sentence.
"…have given you a task."
The sky shrank before the people could react.
Colors bled out, drained away, leaving reality pale and trembling.
The sun dimmed— not eclipsed, not clouded— but as though something strangled its very light and whispered, "Not now."
The host behind the voice, no longer angels, warriors, stood frozen, captive.
"And yet, you allow a mortal to stain my decree?"
No accusation. No wrath. Only boredom.
A thunderous crack echoed through the battlefield— not a strike, but a truth sinking into every bone and soul.
It was over.
The sentence passed before a single plea could form.
"You shall all perish by his will."
The world answered— not here alone, but everywhere.
Thousands of miles away, a woman threw herself from a balcony— not out of despair, not by choice, but because her body moved before her mind could intervene.
A boy plunged a knife into his stomach, laughing maniacally, screaming, "I see it! I see it!" while his family recoiled in silent horror.
A priest clawed at his own eyes, sobbing as he tore them from their sockets, desperate to deny witness to this nightmare.
Not one angel had touched the earth.
No blade had been drawn.
No war waged.
Yet the world was already rotting from the inside.
Then the gaze fell upon Shingen.
A mistake.
Because in that single breath, that fleeting instant, Shingen saw Him.
Not the armor. Not the wings.
Him.
Staring into an abyss older than time, older than sound, older than the first breath.
An entity that had never blinked, never wavered, never needed reason or change.
The angel tilted his head— not in curiosity or mockery, but in deep, crushing disappointment.
"You…"
The word settled into the silence without echo or flare. It simply was.
Shingen forgot to breathe.
"…must be him."
A ripple of unseen horror coiled through the air, like cold fingers dragging across the fragile fabric of existence.
"The Ace…"
Wings unfurled— no longer feathers, but endless limbs stretching across the sky, bending and twisting in impossible, grotesque configurations of flesh, metal, and thought.
Something that never belonged to this world, and never to any world.
"Of Clowns…"
The feathers peeled away like shedding skin, revealing what lurked beneath— a grotesque truth unfurling from a lie worn too long.
The wings reached out— not to strike, but to claim.
"On this world."
Shingen laughed.
It was weak, breathy, trembling.
Not defiant, but not yet broken.
He laughed— because even as the body shook, the mind was still sharp enough to savor the dreadful moment that was unfolding.
The curtain was falling.
The show was about to begin.