Malakor fought with precise, economical movements. His void-blade passed through Skodar's energy shields as if they weren't there, disrupting them on a fundamental level. He was the antithesis of life, and Skodar's power was life itself.
Skodar fought with adaptive fury. He used the memory in his scars, shifting his energy's frequency each time, trying to find one Malakor couldn't nullify. He fought with his staff, with his fists, with the echoes of the Arena.
Lyra tried to intervene, but a backhand from Malakor, empowered by his armor, sent her crashing into a wall, unconscious.
It was down to the two of them. The living paradox and the void of order.
Skodar was losing.Each parry cost him energy. Each near-miss from the void-blade left his soul feeling cold and thin.
"You are a fever," Malakor hissed, his blade scoring a line of freezing pain across Skodar's chest. "And I am the cure."
Skodar fell to one knee, panting. He looked over at Kaelen's broken form, at Lyra slumped against the wall. He thought of Dawnspire, of Sukodar's smile.
He couldn't win by fighting the void.
He had tofill it.
He dropped his staff. He let his shields fall.
Malakor paused,sensing a trick. "Submission? Finally."
"No," Skodar whispered. "An invitation."
He opened himself completely. Not to attack, but to feel. He let every emotion he had ever had—the love, the grief, the rage, the hope, the sheer, messy, glorious pain of being alive—rush to the surface. He made no attempt to control it, to shape it into power. He just let it be, a raw, tsunami of experience.
He looked Malakor in his void eyes and empathized. Not with the monster, but with the terrifying, empty loneliness that must exist behind that logic. The universe Malakor wanted was a silent, sterile, dead place.
"This is what you want to erase," Skodar said, his voice trembling with the force of the emotional surge. "This is the chaos you fear. It's also the only thing that's real."
He took a step forward, unarmed, undefended, a walking supernova of feeling.
Malakor raised his void-blade for the final strike… and hesitated. The sheer, overwhelming, illogical pressure of Skodar's unleashed spirit was like a gravitational wave against his ordered mind. His logic circuits, already strained, couldn't process it. It was too much data. Too much noise.
The void-blade flickered.
For a fraction of a second,a crack appeared in the void of Malakor's eyes. Not emotion, but a system error. A fatal one.
"N…no… data… overflow…" he stammered, his hand shaking.
It was the opening.
From the floor,Kaelen, with his last spark of energy, fired a single, concentrated data-burst from his dead cybernetic eye—not an attack, but a single, simple memory file. It was the memory Skodar had shown him in the cell: Kaelen teaching his sister Lira to weave a basket. A memory of pure, pointless, beautiful connection.
The memory-packet hit Malakor's neural interface at the same moment as Skodar's emotional tsunami.
The Architect of Order experienced, for the first and last time, something his system could not compute, could not categorize, could not delete.
He experienced love.
And his perfect,logical mind broke.
He didn't scream. He simply… froze. His form shuddered. The void faded from his eyes, leaving them blank, grey, and empty. His armor lost its sheen. He stood like a statue, a monument to a failed idea.
The war was over.