The Gore Behemoth rose, a mountain of screaming faces, tangled limbs, and pulsating organs. Its roar was the sound of a thousand dying worlds. The Soul-Drinker Swarm darkened the crimson sky, their collective hunger sucking the warmth from the air.
They were surrounded. Outnumbered. Outmassed. Their energy was nearly gone.
The Behemoth swung a fist the size of a fortress, made of compressed, petrified corpses.
Jade tried to raise his scythe to block, but his muscles screamed in protest. He was too slow. The fist filled his vision.
Is this it? The thought was cold, clear. After everything... to be crushed by this amalgamation of failure?
NO.
The voice was not his own. It was the scythe. It was Alter-Jade. It was the Obsidian Core. It was the collective will of every ounce of malice he had ever cultivated.
WE ARE NOT PREY.
His scythe MOVED ON ITS OWN, dragging his arm with it, planting the haft in the fleshy ground. The corpse-fist slammed into the blade.
BOOM.
The impact should have vaporized him. Instead, the star-iron blade HELD, black energy crackling around it. A web of purple-black fractures spread from the point of impact through the Behemoth's arm.
Jade felt it then—a hunger. Not his. The scythe's. It was drinking the Behemoth's life force, its rage, its very existence.
"YOU... DARE...?" Jade's voice was a dual-layered tremor, his own mixed with a deeper, ancient resonance. He wasn't speaking to the monster. He was speaking to the universe. "YOU THINK YOUR MASS CAN CRUSH WHAT IS ALREADY A VOID? YOU ARE NOT A MOUNTAIN. YOU ARE A BANQUET."
He ripped the scythe free. The Behemoth's arm crumbled, the fractures spreading, consuming it. The scythe was changing. The bone haft grew warmer, almost alive. The black blade now bled a chaotic, purple-black aura that distorted the air around it.
The Soul-Drinker Swarm dove at him, sensing a power they craved.
Jade didn't look at them. He looked at his weapon, a psychotic grin splitting his features. "You're hungry?" he whispered to it. "THEN FEAST."
He didn't command Obliterate. He and the scythe BECAME it.
He slammed the blade into the ground.
"WORLD-ENDER'S THIRST!"
The glitched System screamed:
{ [DIVINE] World-Ender's Thirst - [ERROR: Lv. ?] - ACTIVATED. }
{ WARNING: Symbiotic synchronization at 41%. Host consciousness may be subsumed.}
The ground didn't crack. It DIED. A wave of absolute nothingness erupted from him, a creeping blight that turned the living flesh-floor to inert, gray ash. It wasn't a blast—it was a cancer.
The Soul-Drinker Swarm that touched the wave didn't scream. They unraveled into static and were gone. The Gore Behemoth, caught in the edge of the wave, watched its body turn to dust, cell by cell.
The scythe drank it all. The death, the fear, the erased souls. It grew heavier, more potent in his hand. The purple-black aura solidified into a visible, crackling sheath of energy.
As the wave subsided, Jade stood panting, the scythe pulsing with satisfied malice. But the cost was dire. He had fed it a piece of his own vitality. He was wounded, exposed.
The remnants of the Swarm, smarter than the rest, converged on him, seeing his momentary weakness.
They never reached him.
Zero stood between them and Jade. His Chinmoku was gone. His usual serene void was now a PREDATORY SILENCE.
"You believe hunger is a weapon," Zero spoke, his voice so quiet it cut through the chaos. "You are incorrect. Hunger is a vulnerability. It means you lack. And I... I am the absence that defines what 'lack' means."
The Swarm dove. Zero didn't draw his blade.
He raised his hand.
"I sever the concept of your existence. Not your form. Not your energy. The very law that permits you to be."
The glitched System shrieked:
{ [FORBIDDEN] Edict of the Empty King - [ERROR: Lv. ?] - DETECTED.}
{ WARNING: User is editing fundamental reality. Attracting [CONCEPTUAL HUNGER].}
There was no light. No sound. The Soul-Drinker Swarm simply... never was. It wasn't destroyed. It was retroactively edited out of the timeline. The space they occupied became a perfect, absolute vacuum that even light refused to enter.
Zero lowered his hand. His eyes now held a terrifying new depth—the void between the lines of reality's code. He had become a walking paradox.
They stood together in the sudden, absolute quiet. One, a vessel for a weapon that consumed worlds. The other, a living erasure of cosmic law.
The Hunting Grounds had tried to break them.
Instead, it had forged two new kinds of monsters.