The orb's light had settled into him like a second heartbeat — a slow, twin-thrum of gold and black that pulsed where Megumi's chest met the crystal floor. He tasted iron and rain, and every breath felt like stealing from two worlds.
Leonidas knelt across from him, cloak scorched, eyes rimmed with fatigue. For all the demonic grandeur that surrounded the king — the burning banners, the echoes of battle — in this moment he was simply a man looking at another man whose hands trembled.
Megumi's finger brushed the line of light that ran up his forearm where the orb had threaded itself into his veins. It was not pain that made his face hard; it was decision. He had fought gods and titans, bargained with the dead, carried horrors no soul should bear. Now, in the stillness after the storm, there were only two truths left: the King of Erasure was free, and Megumi's body was the last place the world still did not forget.
"Leon," he said, voice thin but steady, "if we cannot seal him… I have one option left."
Leonidas waited, the muscles in his neck taut. "Whatever it is, we'll find another way first," he said. Old promise. Old armor. He sounded like a man trying to convince himself as much as his friend.
Megumi looked at him as if seeing him for the first time in a long time — not the Demon King who'd been war-sharp and fearless, but the man who had stayed when others fled. "You listen to me," Megumi said. "And you don't try to stop me with honor or duty. Hear what I'm saying."
Leonidas swallowed. "I'm listening."
Megumi drew a ragged breath. "If sealing him fails — if the orb, the rites, every god and Titan that comes together can't bind him back into the void — then I will have to put him back inside me. Not as a cage, not as a prison that just holds him — as a crucible."
He paused, letting the words reshape the air between them. "There's a way the orb works: it's both divine and demonic at once. It's balance. If I let those forces touch in me without harmony — let them collide like matter against anti-matter — the reaction will annihilate what touches. The King of Erasure is not just energy you can wound. He is a logic of absence. You can erase his form, but the idea of him persists. To unmake him, you must unmake the pattern he rides on."
Leonidas frowned. "You speak in riddles."
Megumi's laugh was a thin thing. "Because there are no simple words for this. The gods understand law and force. Titans understand scale. Demons understand hunger. I know what he is because I held him. I also know what the orb can do because it's inside me. If I let both halves of the orb — the golden and the black — collide in my soul without the stabilizing effect of will or balance, the release will be absolute. It will burn the pattern that the King of Erasure uses to reemerge. It will leave nothing for him to latch onto."
Silence sat between them like a weight. Leonidas pictured the last time he'd seen Megumi split — brief, terrifying, a thing that had spoken through Megumi's lips and looked at the world with an appetite. He had also seen what Megumi could do when whole: not merely raze a god, but remake the rules that made gods. He understood what Megumi meant by "pattern."
"You would blow yourself up," Leonidas said finally. The words were low, incredulous, and every muscle in him recoiled at the thought.
Megumi's jaw tightened. "Not a bomb in a city. Not a sacrifice of innocents. An annihilation of a metaphysical anchor. I would let the orb's two natures resonate inside me until they cancel or consume one another, and in that cancellation — in that moment of absolute opposition — the King of Erasure would not be able to exist. He needs a structure to unmake. I would remove the scaffolding."
Leonidas sunk to his heels. "You're talking about dying," he said, and there was no tremor in it now, just plain statement. "You're talking about ending yourself to erase him."
Megumi looked at his hands, at the veins where the dual light threaded. He didn't flinch from the truth. "Yes."
For a long time Leonidas said nothing. He saw every face Megumi cared for — Ava's bright, stubborn eyes; Chloe's tiny fingers curled at a thumb she hadn't even found yet; the friends who'd bled and sworn. He thought of the boy who had laughed in the face of gods. He thought of all the worlds Megumi had saved with blood and stubbornness.
"You can't make me agree to this," Leonidas said eventually. "I won't help you plan a funeral. I won't be the hand that ushers the last light from you."
Megumi closed his eyes, and the orb's glow painted his lashes like a halo and a scorch at once. "I don't want you to 'help me plan a funeral' either," he answered quietly. "I want you to hear me. If the ritual works, I'll never have to do this. If it doesn't… then this is the only thing sure enough to end him."
"So you leave us with a choice between hope and an oblivion built on your bones," Leonidas said, fury and grief fighting in his throat. "You leave me a timeline that runs only to your heartbeat."
Megumi's hand found Leonidas's sleeve and gripped it with a ferocity born of fear. "I wouldn't choose you for this if you weren't the only one I trusted to carry the consequences. If I go through with it, there will be no bargaining, no reversal. The orb inside me will do what it's designed to do: collapse contradictory cosmologies into nothingness and, in doing so, end the pattern that lets him breathe. I don't want to die. But I will if it keeps him from existing."
Leonidas's face crumpled — a man carved by war, broken now by the image of another's willful erasure. "Do you just assume there's no other way? Have you thought of other binds? Other anchors? If there's even a sliver of a way to lure him back to the void we can find it."
Megumi's eyes opened, and when they focused, they were steady enough to hold Leonidas' gaze. "We will try every bind you can name, every rite Cronus and Athena can devise, every cruelty the Titans remember. We will try them all. But I have seen his mind. I know how it eats chains. If all of that fails, I won't allow him to walk free and erase everything out of spite. I will take him with me."
Leonidas swallowed and pushed down the rage that wanted to tear the world apart because a man he loved had chosen the only exit that never leaves a mark. "You'll let me stand there," he said, voice breaking, "and make sure it doesn't become something worse later?"
Megumi's grip on his sleeve tightened. "You'll be there to hold me when it burns. You'll be there to tell Ava and Chloe what we did — to give them a reason to grieve rather than vanish without a trace. You'll be there to carry on."
Leonidas laughed, a sound without humor. "And what if the collision doesn't just erase him? What if it tears a hole in the universe that even Uranus couldn't stitch? What then? We lose everything."
"You can't promise we won't," Megumi said. "I won't pretend the risk is small. But I can promise you one thing: I will pick the moment so that there are no innocents in range. I will steer the blast into the void and fracture only the things that are its scaffolding. If the universe tears, it tears on my terms." The confession was quieter than the air, but it landed like an oath.
Leonidas forced himself to look past the image of his friend's plan to the man who'd stood shoulder to shoulder with him through storms of blood and betrayal. He saw Megumi's exhaustion, the way his fingers flexed around the light in his veins, and he understood the terrible honor Megumi offered.
"I won't pretend I like it," Leonidas said at last. "And I won't stop you if you decide this is the only way. But I will not let you go alone." His voice was small and huge at once. "If you insist on being the hammer, I will be the hand that swings it — and the last mouth to tell your story."
Megumi's expression cracked like glass. "If for nothing else," he murmured, "do it for Chloe. Let her grow up in a world that remembers her father with names, not with blankness." He tried a smile — it was half a child's bravery, half a broken thing. "Promise me you'll tell her the truth about the things she can never know."
Leonidas bowed his head. "I promise."
They sat like that for a long time, two burned men sharing steady silence. Outside, the distant tremors from the battlefield thudded like a dying drum, a rhythm that matched the orb's pulse where it had nested in Megumi's chest. The plan was monstrous and simple: try every reasonable seal, attempt every ritual, and should all fail, collide the two halves of the orb inside Megumi's mortal vessel so completely that there would be no structure left for the King of Erasure to latch onto.
"I'll go to Cronus," Leonidas said finally. "We'll marshal the rites, the binds, the prayers. We'll buy every possible sliver of time."
"And if none of it holds?" Megumi asked.
"Then you tell me the moment," Leonidas replied. "And I'll be there."
Megumi exhaled. It was the sound of someone unlocking a door he'd kept closed for years. "One last thing?"
"Anything."
"If I do this," Megumi said, "don't let them make me a god after. No monuments. If I vanish, let my life be what it was: messy, cruel sometimes, beautiful sometimes. Let me be human."
Leonidas laughed, and it broke him: "No statues. No songs that make you eternal. Only stories told by people who loved you."
Megumi's eyes closed. He felt the orb inside him thrumming, a tide little by little. "Then make sure they tell Chloe about the birthdays. About the way I burned the stew the first time I tried to cook. Tell her about the stupid jokes I told to get her to laugh."
Leonidas's throat tightened, and a sound like a sob escaped him. He could imagine their faces in years to come — an old man sitting a child on his knee, telling a litany of small, human things that meant more than apotheosis ever could.
When he rose it was with the slow weariness of a man who'd carried a mountain. "I'll fetch Cronus," he said. "We start now. We do everything we can."
Megumi's gesture was small — a squeeze of a sleeve. "And if you spare me," he said, "I'll haunt you with bad jokes."
Leonidas almost laughed. Then he left.
Alone, Megumi lay back and watched the twin lights that lived in him pulse and settle. They were dangerous and holy and unbearably honest.
If the world asked him to die to save it, he would not ask permission. He had already seen the face of the monster and tasted the silence it left. He had also seen the faces that mattered. He had chosen.
Outside the chamber, the gods kept to their councils, the Titans readied rituals, and the dark vein of the void wound itself tighter where the King of Erasure waited.
Inside the man who had carried both kings and grief and wars, something ancient and new pulsed once more — a fuse left lit by the hope of people who refused to let nothingness win without giving everything it deserved.