The light vanished.
Not violently. Not with a shockwave or a scream. It simply ceased to exist, as if reality had decided Roberto no longer belonged there and erased him without ceremony.
The island felt wrong without him.
Noel remained still for several seconds, his body refusing to react, Revenant Fang hanging loosely at his side. He stared at the empty space Roberto had occupied, waiting for something—anything—to happen. A ripple. A presence. A trace. There was nothing.
What settled in his chest wasn't relief.
It wasn't victory either.
It was absence. Heavy and disorienting, like stepping into a room where someone had lived for years and finding it suddenly abandoned. Roberto hadn't fled. Noel understood that instinctively. He had left because he chose to. Because, in his mind, this wasn't the end yet.
'He postponed it,' Noel realized. 'He didn't run from it.'
