Location: Southeast China Xi'an Metropolis – 10:45 AM
The sky tore open like the throat of Heaven itself.
People screamed. Alarms howled. Children pointed toward the burning sky as something massive, flaming, and alive came hurtling down from the stratosphere like vengeance incarnate.
It wasn't a comet.
It was Katzuki.
His body, barely holding together, was hurled from the upper atmosphere by a force so colossal it had shattered mountain ranges on the way down. Wrapped in burning demonfire, cracked armor, and blood-thickened air, he slammed into Xi'an like a divine meteor.
Impact.
A shockwave exploded across the city.
Seventy-three buildings collapsed in seconds not just destroyed, but obliterated. Concrete ruptured like bone under pressure, walls folding inward before exploding in clouds of dust and debris. Steel beams twisted like screaming metal, snapping loose and spearing through windows, stairwells, and anyone caught inside.
The asphalt buckled, split open with thunderous cracks, swallowing vehicles and bodies alike. Glass rained from the sky like shrapnel, slicing through skin, tearing into lungs with every panicked breath.
Skyscrapers didn't just tremble they groaned, bent, and fell like dying giants, their frames screeching as they broke apart floor by floor. Inside, people were crushed mid scream, their silhouettes erased by the walls collapsing on top of them.
Civilians ran, but there was nowhere to go. The shockwave hit like a sledgehammer bones shattered, eardrums burst, organs ruptured. Some dropped dead in place, eyes wide with terror. Others tried to scream, but their throats were filled with dust and blood.
From the mile-wide crater, smoke hissed.
Then… footsteps.
From the void above the same bleeding rift Katzuki had been flung from a monster emerged.
Not just a demon.
Not just a god.
This was the final boss: KA'THARION VULT, the All-Rooted Hate.
He was a leviathan stitched from every demon Katzuki and the Plague Doctor ever slaughtered a hundred arms each dragging relics dripping with soulfire. Wings made from shattered swords groaned behind him. A face cobbled from the broken masks of the damned. At his core, a forbidden sun throbbed, spitting out waves of hunger. He didn't walk he floated, and with every step, metal and flesh peeled toward him like offerings to a black star."
KA'THARION screamed across the city in an ancient, god splitting tongue:
"THIS REALITY SHALL DIE WITH YOU, MORTAL FLESH."
He raised his arms.
Gravity cracked.
Buildings floated. Earth split. Civilians were ripped from the ground screaming into the sky like leaves in a hellstorm.
Katzuki crawled from the crater, armor gone. His body broken. Chest caved. Ribs exposed. He spat blood. But he smiled.
"I'm still breathing, bastard…"
Ka'tharion towered like a nightmare carved from galaxies, his blade a forty-foot slab of collapsed dimensions, screaming with the voices of lost worlds. He raised it high, the sky warping above him, thunder splitting the heavens as reality itself bent beneath the weapon's impossible mass. Every soul in range felt it—the weight of extinction in motion. He swung down, a planet-ending blow meant to erase Katzuki from existence.
But it never landed.
Because something else did.
The sky cracked. Time blinked. And something black dropped like divine judgment.
No sound. No light. Just impact.
A blur faster than light, darker than shadow, heavier than wrath slammed into the battlefield. The ground didn't shake. It caved in. Asphalt shattered. Buildings in a two block radius simply folded. Air pressure collapsed with a thunderclap that deafened everyone within miles.
And then silence.
The thing no, the man stood behind Ka'tharion. No stance. No declaration. No emotion.
In both hands, obsidian blades hummed, edges soaked in a cursed sheen not dripping blood, but the memory of every demon they had ever slain.
Ka'tharion didn't have time to turn.
His head detached with such surgical precision it seemed impossible. No gore spray. No lurch. Just a clean, flat sever like a guillotine slicing through fog. The head dropped with a hollow thud.
The god-body engineered for divine war froze, as if its very code refused to believe what had happened.
Then it began to fall apart.
Not slowly violently.
First the knees buckled, then the ribs caved. The torso split diagonally, sliding apart like stone slabs soaked in blood. Steam hissed from ruptured lungs. Divinity peeled away like wet skin.
Organs liquefied, divine ichor spurting in every direction before the body even hit the ground. The spine cracked, then twisted. Flesh tore from bone like paper under flame.
The once unstoppable final boss didn't get a roar.
Didn't scream.
Didn't even resist.
He evaporated shards of his essence crumbling into ash, glowing briefly, then fading into nothing.
And in the silence that followed… he stood there.
A man not cloaked in righteousness or heroism, but in scars, in silence, in survival.
His chest rose slowly. Breaths calm, steady. Like he'd done this a thousand times before.
One eye burned silver. The other dead, dim, human. But inside them both: a storm. The kind that never passed.
Atlas Vale's lost older stepbrother.
The one the world forgot.
The one who clawed his way back from the 7 Chaos of Heavens.
The Forgotten Blade. The Demon Executioner.
Not a savior.
Not a hero.
Just the end.
And with blood evaporating off his blades, he said nothing.
Because he didn't need to.
He was built like a specter forged from war, cloaked in black carbonized exo-steel, with veins pulsing red like molten hatred. His left eye glowed deep violet the mark of the Archons who tortured him for 20 years.
He turned to Katzuki.
"…You look like shit."
Katzuki coughed, a smirk creeping up.
"And you look like a ghost who hasn't quite mastered the whole haunting thing."
The Forgotten Blade walked forward, stepping through the ash of Ka'tharion without a care. "I was never dead. Just lost. But this world…" he looked up at the city skies, then at the civilians trapped in levitating debris, …needs a real purge.
He extended his hand. A black cube unfolded into a dimensional blade. One cut across the sky, and everything stopped gravity returned, people were gently lowered to safety, and the remaining demonic energy imploded into nothing.
It was over.
The Forgotten Blade looked down at Katzuki.
"But this… was just their pet."
Katzuki frowned. "There's more?"
The warrior's voice darkened, colder than the void.
"They're called the Harvesters. And Earth was only the last field."
His eyes narrowed, locked on the western sky, where another tear in reality was forming.
A deeper war had begun.
---TO BE CONTINUED…