Lucien breathes heavily. The ring on his heart blinks with two minutes left. The arena hums like a wound. He looks to the boundary line where his friends are standing, some crying, most cheering. Light rains down in shards. For a moment he lets himself believe: the fight is over. He won the fight against Seryx. He tilts his head and gives a small, tired nod. Karu and Rylen were standing next to eachother. They don't fall apart into tears. They never do. Their faces are strange: not sad, not broken. A hard kind of relief sits on them like armor.
The system should end now. When the the final hunter is finally crushed, the Crucible collapses and a portal opens. Thats what he heard from the council. That was the rule engraved in every memory. Lucien watches the first fragments of light behave like a net. They lift, they arrange, they are supposed to become the gateway home. He expects the air to thin, to break, to bend toward the path home.
Nothing happens. The Crucible stays.
Lucien turned his back to where Seryx had fallen. The body is gone. Like it never existed.
One minute and thirty seconds. His ring blinks: 1:30.
Lucien steps forward to the center. The arena is too quiet now. A thin line of fear crawls under his skin. He searches the empty space where Seryx's body was. A cold thought lowers its hood over his mind: maybe the echo had hidden a trick. Maybe death for Seryx was only a beginning.
He turns slowly to see his friends again but then the world rearranges itself in a single, impossible instant.
Seryx is there. Standing in front of him.
He is at Lucien's back without a step, without a whisper, a blade of silence. The movement is clean as a guillotine. There's no room to breathe, no time to call, no space to think. Steel finds throat. Lucien's head falls on the ground. Light explodes from the wound, bright and wrong. The arena's sound ceases to be a roar and becomes a thin, high note.
Karu's jaw drops. Rylen's face goes pale and then hard. Emiluna starts crying and Jason try´s to break his way into the Crucible.
Lucien his body falls to his knees next to his head. He can see the ring — 1:28 — and the last of his vision fills with the sight of Seryx's back as the echo slips away like smoke.
Then darkness takes him.
Lucien wakes up to a strange quiet place. Pain sings in his throat but his mind is sharp enough to hold the moment like a coin. Seryx sits across the shattered floor with his legs folded over eachother. Seryx still didn´t look like he fully healed. He is not roaring with unearned triumph. He is not joking around. He's oddly calm — like a man who has looked inside a clock and seen the way the gears lie.
"You decapitated me," Lucien says, voice thin. He coughs. Around them the arena breathes and the crowd is a distant storm. "Seryx you should be—"
Lucien can see that Seryx smiles, but it is not warm. "You didn't kill me. I almost died," he says. "You threatened a single version of me. You made me confront an end that I had never allowed myself to face. You pushed me to my limit Lucien. I must congratulate you."
Lucien tries to remember how the spear felt, how deep it sank. "You collapsed onto the ground. The armor cracked. You bled. You fell. You died." His hand goes to the wound across his own neck as if he can feel the memory of that cut. He can still taste the burning edge of it.
"Yes, yes and yes," Seryx answers. "You did all that. Good job you broke a body that called itself Seryx. And in that breaking, I found something I'd never known. Something i thought only you could do. I call it… a fold." He leans forward, and his eyes glow with something that is not cruelty — curiosity. "When I faced the edge and i tasted death itsels, I learned the shape of my possibilities. I felt infinite of me in a single breath. In that collapse, I reached into the nexus — not to copy, not to hide, but to rewrite what I could be."
Lucien blinks. "You mean—you evolved during death. You stole my power?"
Seryx's laugh is small. "You already know it. Evolution doesn't only live in pain. It lives in the choice to change yourself, even the one made in the process of dying. You think you made me hurt and then heal. You did and now that i look back at it i appreciate you for almost killing me completely. I never thought with a hundred layers of infinite immortality that i still almost got killed. But the healing I found is different this time. Yours is forging from loss; mine is folding from many potential outcomes until one fits. Now Lucien we are truly equal."
Lucien's mind scrambles for sense. "But the Crucible. The rules. The arena should have collapsed. If you're an echo, your original self should have been erased. That means that i´ve won right?"
Seryx's fingers trace a line in the dirt, and the dirt rearranges into a miniature map that flickers like a broken constellation. "Rules are built to hold ordinary things. I am not ordinary and so are you. When you pierced me and your pierced through all my versions that could ever exist, I could see what would happen in every branch of time where I died. But with evolution i made a new branch your spear didn´t know about and set my being to reconstruct along it. I used the nexus to stitch my possibility into being. Resurrection, then, was not a miracle. It was a mathematical answer."
"You mean you—coded yourself back?" Lucien whispers.
Seryx's head tilts. "Call it coding, if you like. Call it survival. You did the same thing with that spear of yours that almost killed me. I found in the moment of extinction a mirror that reflected not what I lost but what I could become. Evolution is not just strength. It is adaptability. I had the seed; your attack gave it soil."
Lucien looks at him, at the wound that is more like a scar of light. "So you didn't just come back. You changed completely."
"I changed? Yes i did changed Lucien," Seryx agrees. "I gained reflexes that can dance through branches of causality. You got a forging that hits harder each time. We both grew exponentially. You grew more at first but now that we both have this power we are equal. Knowing that—knowing what we are now—changes everything."
Lucien swallows. He thinks of the portal that never opened, of his friends that are watching him right now at the boundary line and who had been waiting for him to finish. "Why didn't
Silence sits between them for a heartbeat. Lucien's ring ticks: 1:01. He feels the truth of it sink into him like ice. Seryx's voice is fulled with joy and laughter now. "This is not about your victory or my defeat anymore. It is about what we will do with what the world gave us when it nearly took us away."
Lucien looks at his hands, at the ragged bruise along his throat, and the ember of a new question lights in him: if both of them can change so suddenly, then what counts as a weapon, and what counts as fate?
The one minute time ticks. Lucien and Seryx do not fight with the same hunger anymore; they test the new edges of themselves. Each attack is answered not by chance but by evolution matched.
Lucien launches a Purgeflame Pinnacle attack towards him. Seryx bends the principle of heat for a breath and the flame folds into glass. Lucien breaks the glass with Fractal Cataclysm Edges, and Seryx splinters the shards with Nexus Shard Echo. Each response provokes another layer. It is not brute force. It is a chessmatch disguised as a storm.
They swap strikes that would have killed even some of the stronger gods. Seryx now also unlocked his Cosmic Punch. They trade Cosmic Punches and break and rewrite the Crucible arena over and over again. These are strikes that crack could end infinite mulitverses. Each time Lucien lands with an Absolute Wish Strike. The strike when you hit someone with it you can make anything happen to them that you want, Seryx answers with a Temporal Mirror Haven that reflects intent like a mirror reflecting the sun. Each time Seryx pushes causality back, Lucien slides through with Palindrome Echoes that make time answer him twice.
Everyone at the boundary line is fighting to stay conscious. The aftershocks are so heavy for the brain that Kisuke and Lisa fell to the ground a couple of times. Karu and Rylen both watch with faces carved thin. They know a stalemate when they see one. This is a different kind: two laws converging.
At thirty seconds the ring reads 0:30. For a breath the two stand like statues, facing each other amid the ruin. Both are panting. Both are sweating. Seryx's needs to fight Lucien for thirty seconds and then he will win. Lucien's aura shudders with violet fire. In that space their faces show the same things: fatigue, curiosity, fear, and a bitter, fierce respect.
They do not exchange a single word. Words would be useless at this point. They move in a blur of possibilities, each motion a question about what the other became. For every step Seryx takes to remove Lucien's intent of killing him, Lucien uses Immanence Spear Throw to create a path the echo never saw coming.
For every twist Seryx performs to scatter causality, Lucien knits it back with Absolute Wish.
Time itself seems to hold its breath. The stalemate is not boring. It is the sound of two forces learning one another's language. It is the tremor before a decision. The ring pulses:
0:15. Seryx tilts his head. Lucien's jaw is set hard enough to hurt.
Then the world narrows. The clock becomes louder than the thunder. The stalemate is a teaching for both of them. It tells them both what the other fears most: loss of cause, loss of meaning, loss of the thing that made them fight at all. Neither wants to break the other because to finish would be to make an answer that might not fit the world they both reshaped.
Panic hammers at Lucien's chest. He feels it like a physical thing: cold, sharp, greedy. Seryx watches with an amused, small smile. "You're sweating," he says quietly. "It suits you."
Lucien looks up. His mind opens like a glass and the voice of the Creator returns — thin, beautiful, and terrible. Her silhouette hums at the edges of his vision as if the sky itself remembered a face.
"If you are the true God of Vengeance," she says, voice echoing in the void and in his bones, "then you do not ask for my time. You shape it. Prove it in what you have."
Lucien's gut clenches. He knows the answer he wants. He can imagine five extra minutes, ten. He can imagine rewriting the rules to make Seryx fall and the world return. He wants it with a hunger like thirst. He opens his mouth to beg.
The Creator's voice is quiet as a closed room. "No."
"No?" Lucien hears himself shout without sound. The ring blinks: 0:12. He feels small and huge at once. A truth sits on him: she will not help him. The trial is his alone.
A darker whisper threads under the moment — a memory he has not wanted to feel: the voice of the King of Hell, the offer half-heard in the fight's noise. Power for blood. Crown for obedience. The King had promised tools that twist fate without asking a goddess. The thought of it shines like a trap polished by need.
Lucien's hands tremble. He pictures Karu and Rylen again — their faces are steady, not pleading. They will follow whatever path he chooses. The ring ticks: 0:07.
Seryx tilts his head, watching the storm in Lucien's eyes. "There's always a bargain," he says. "Demons trade in certainty. Gods trade in tests. We both have offers at our feet."
Anger rises inside Lucien; not the hot, useful anger that had powered his strikes, but a raw, aching want. "Give me the King's power," he thinks, aloud without words. He sees the crown: a thing of black iron and voices, a weight that would push the world under his thumb.
The Creator's image folds close, stern and almost fatherless. "If you need another power you did not earn," she says, "then you have not become what you must be. Ten minutes will not teach you a god. They will teach you a tyrant." Her voice is not cruel. It is a blade that cuts certain things away. "If you can do what must be done in these moments, then you will not need breadth. If you cannot, then what you seek will make you hollow."
Lucien's chest burns. He imagines five extra minutes where he could grind Seryx into dust, a neat solution. He imagines the King's crown cooling on his brow, the night obeying his whisper. He imagines the portal finally opening and the world breathing out.
But in the raw space the Creator has left, something else stirs: a cold clarity. The true God of Vengeance is not someone who buys time. She is someone who does what is needed with what she has. The ring pulses 0:02. The King's whisper grows sharp and sweet. The Creator's image fades like a light shuttered by choice.
Lucien stands on a knife-edge. He feels the weight of the world in a single heartbeat. He looks at Seryx, at Karu, at Rylen, at the crowd that will be changed no matter his choice. The chapter closes on him at that crossroads: a man tempted by Hell's throne, a man tested by a goddess, the ring's light dying to 0:00.
He reaches toward a power he never wanted to own.