Nix's face darkened, the blood from his shattered mouth a black river down his chin. He didn't want to die here. He had come to destroy this world, not to end like a cornered beast on some broken altar. But what could he do? Anger, frustration, and a galaxy-deep sense of insult boiled in his veins.
He stopped trying to stand. He gathered the last dregs of his Qi, the final embers of a dying sun. The remnants of his divine armor blared with a final, violent light, a last claim of celestial authority.
Gen, encased in the humming, solidified aura of the Eternal Body's Second Door, shot forward. His feet sank an inch into the unyielding altar stone with each step, the ground cracking under the condensed weight of his power.
Nix looked at him. All thought of retreat vanished. If he had to die, he would take them all into the dark with him.
He dashed toward Gen, a final, suicidal charge. His remaining hand formed a blade of nullification, thin and desperate. Gen's crystallized fist rose to meet it.
But Nix's red eyes twitched. At the last possible fraction of a second, he shifted. He didn't meet the fist head-on. He angled his null-blade, sliding it along the leading edge of Gen's forearm, aiming to bypass the hardened aura and carve into the flesh and bone beneath.
***SCRAAAAPE-BOOM!***
The contact was a shrieking tear of energy followed by a deep concussion. The altar floor between them cracked like a frozen lake, but the outer formation held, causing the explosive force to rebound upwards in a blinding plume of white and grey light.
Nix smirked through the pain, his blade screeching along Gen's arm, inching toward his throat. *Die now.*
Gen had seen it coming. He tilted his entire body backward, letting the null-blade hiss past his face, so close it singed his eyelashes. As he leaned back, his left leg rose in a short, brutal arc.
His foot, sheathed in the same solidified energy as his fist, slammed into Nix's sternum.
***THWUMP.***
The sound was a sickening punch of air leaving a body forever. Nix's neck whipped sideways with a sickening *crack*. He was launched off his feet, flying backward.
At the same moment, Lorel's will struck. Her **Supremacy Swords** fell like a judgment of pink lightning. The first landed inches before Nix's tumbling form, carving a clean, sizzling furrow from his eyebrow down his cheek to the corner of his mouth. He screamed, a raw, animal sound of agony, but the evasion from Gen's kick had saved his eye.
Before he could hit the ground, the **Doom Dragon** was there. It didn't bite. It caught him sideways with its coiled, razor-edged body, lifting him into the air. Nix cursed, kicking against the spikes, shredding his boots and legs. With a final, thrashing snap of its malefic head, the dragon's jaws closed on the wrist of his sword-arm.
***CRUNCH.***
The hand, still clutching the ghost of a null-blade, was bitten clean off. It vanished into dissipating grey smoke. Nix fell, crashing onto his back in a spreading pool of his own dark blood.
Li Zhan smiled. He closed his outstretched hand into a fist.
The **Despair Smile** activated.
It was not a visible attack. It was the culmination of all the fine, invisible **Shidow** threads he had been sewing into Nix's spirit since their first clash in the formation. They were threads of psychic weight, of induced apathy, of the whispered suggestion that all struggle was meaningless.
"Kneel," Li Zhan commanded, his voice soft and absolute.
Nix spat blood. "Never—" The word died in his throat. His body betrayed him. His knees, acting on a command deeper than his will, slammed down onto the hard stone. He shook, muscles trembling with internal resistance, but he could not rise.
Li Zhan's smile widened. He opened his mouth to speak the next command—the final one.
A dazzling, condensed point of grey light—a hidden, backup strand of nullification Qi Nix had buried in the altar the moment he landed—erupted from the stone directly beneath Li Zhan's feet. It was a final, desperate trap, triggered by his own imminent death.
Li Zhan's face darkened in genuine shock. He summoned a puppet-shield behind him, but the point-blank blast was too fast, too focused. The shield evaporated. The null-energy tore through his left side. His entire left arm was severed at the shoulder, spinning away in a spray of blood. The force threw him back, skidding across the stone until he lay gasping, his composure shattered.
The entire group recoiled from the kneeling, bleeding Nix. Li Zhan bit his lip, a strangled curse escaping him. "What… was that?"
Nix smiled with ruined lips. "Die. You all die." His voice was a gurgling whisper, but his eyes blazed with final, insane triumph. "**Domain Spell: The Last Will.**"
Around him, the last of his life force, his soul's final intention, erupted. It wasn't an attack from him. It was an *extension* of him. A being of pure, ghostly Qi flared into existence—a taller, pristine, fully armored Nix from a distant era at his absolute peak. This was his condensed will to survive, a domain he had never used, for it sealed his fate. He would not die alone. He would take this entire pocket of reality with him.
The ghostly Nix looked at Gen, his eyes empty sockets of celestial fire. "Now. Annihilate."
It moved.
In a flash of impossible speed, its blade pierced through Duo Yi's hastily raised defenses. The blow lifted her off her feet. Her face twitched in silent shock before she crumpled to her knees, a hand pressed to a deep, grey-edged wound in her abdomen.
Lorel summoned all seven **Supremacy Swords** in a desperate cross-formation. The ghostly Nix didn't parry. It *crushed* through them, shattering the pink light into fading motes. Its backswing caught her across the chest, a line of null-energy that sliced through cloth and skin. She was thrown back, landing in a heap, her blood pooling dark on the pale stone.
Now it turned to Gen.
Nix's real body, kneeling and broken, had only about ten more heartbeats left.
Gen bailed his fist. He gathered everything—the grief for his father, the rage for Varja, the burning will to protect the fallen behind him. He condensed it all into a single point at the tip of his finger. The **End of the World Finger**.
He shot forward. The ghostly Nix met him with a blade of condensed null-will.
The clash was silent. A sphere of perfect negation from Gen's finger met a blade of absolute annihilation from the ghost. For a moment, they held, a standstill of opposing ends. Then the ghostly blade shattered. Gen's finger dissipated, its power spent.
Then it was hand to hand. Fist against spectral fist.
***CRUNCH. CRACK. BOOM.***
Each impact was a localized quake. The altar floor, already failing, spiderwebbed beneath them. The outer formation groaned, its light dying. The ghostly swordsman from earlier reappeared at the edges, watching, but did not intervene.
Gen's hands were bleeding, the solidified aura cracking. Blood streamed from his nose. But he kept hitting. This was it. This was one of the beings who had taken his father. This was the reason the Damocles fell. This was the source of the world's pain.
The ghostly Nix felt no pain, only the driving will to extinguish. Its fists carried the weight of dead worlds.
They clashed again. And again.
In a final, desperate exchange, Gen's fist landed on the ghost's divine breastplate. On impact, his fist tightened, all five fingers folding into a single, unified point. He didn't want to break armor. He wanted to end everything that existed in that spot.
**End of the World Finger.**
The touch was light. A tap.
Where his fingertip met the spectral armor, a point of absolute nothingness bloomed. The ghostly Nix, the **Last Will**, simply ceased to be. It unraveled from that point outward, vanishing into the empty air without a sound.
Gen didn't stop. He dashed forward, a bloody, determined meteor, toward the kneeling, gasping source.
Nix's heart was stuttering. Three seconds. Maybe two before my heart stos. *No. I cannot let him… I cannot let the Jiang thing kill me… I must die first—!*
Gen's finger, still smoking with the aftermath of world-ending power, landed softly on Nix's forehead, right between his hate-filled, terrified eyes.
The touch was gentle.
Nix's screaming thoughts ceased.
The last thing his dying mind perceived was not the void, but the burning amber eyes of Gen Jiang, filled with a grief as vast and cold as the space between stars.
Then, nothing.
His heart seized. Stopped.
The last will of Divine General fell forward, a limp, empty husk, his long war finally over.