Malakiel no longer had a face. Or rather, he had too many. Under the Chao Mode, his features split with every beat of his wings, like a poorly projected image, an angel and his shadow superimposed without ever truly aligning. His black wings no longer beat the air: they weighed upon it, crushing it, bending the sanctuary's columns like reeds.
Seven stood thirty meters away, the only one still standing in the middle of a crater of pulverized marble. His left arm hung limp, snapped clean at the elbow. A gash ran across his forehead, the blood mixing with the rain to flow in pink rivulets down his jaw. He no longer had access to anything that should have been his—not a chain, not a whisper of a soul, not the familiar comfort of the Abode of the Dead. Only pure Aether, that cold and geometric thing Eden had taught him to wear like a second skin.
It wasn't enough. He knew it. He had run the calculation in a fraction of a second, with the same analytical coldness he had learned on the marble floors of the Garden of Breaths: at this level of power, facing a Blasphemy in Chao Mode, the raw difference between them was measured in orders of magnitude, not percentages.
Then don't fight as if you could win. Fight as if you had nothing to lose.
"Judicium Tenebris."
Malakiel's voice was no longer quite a voice. It emanated from everywhere at once—from the ground, the columns, the air itself. A vertical pressure slammed down on Seven; not a striking attack, but an added weight, as if the entire sky had just chosen to fall on this single point in the world.
The marble beneath his feet cracked in a starburst pattern. His knees buckled. A dull crack echoed up from his right ankle, and he felt, more than he heard, something give way inside his own body.
He didn't scream. He didn't have the time.
He drove what remained of his Aether into the ground, not to resist the weight—that was impossible—but to redirect it, just as Barachiel had taught him with the dust of the Garden. A split second before total crushing impact, he activated Aegis Hex, not above him, but laterally, at an angle, transforming the hexagonal shield into a geometric ramp. Malakiel's weight, instead of crushing him, slid across the angle and catapulted him out of the crater in a spray of molten marble.
He landed brutally on a broken arch, rolled, and pushed himself back up, spitting blood. His ankle screamed with every step.
Malakiel followed him with his eyes, unhurried. A smile, or what passed for one beneath the fissures of his split face, widened.
"You're still surviving a little longer," he murmured, and the sound seemed to come from ten meters to his left and from right behind his neck simultaneously. "Is it courage, or is it stubbornness?"
"Ask those who tried to kill me before you," Seven spat. "They'll answer you."
There was no one left to answer. That was precisely the problem.
Malakiel lunged. This time, he didn't hang back like a judge—he swooped down on Seven with the speed of a being who had ceased to believe in the limits of his own body. Seven barely had time to condense a volley of Aetheris Pilum, gray geometric spears fired at point-blank range, before Malakiel's fist smashed into his improvised shield.
The impact lifted him off the ground. He flew through the air for ten meters before crashing into the remnants of a pillar, the entire column collapsing on top of him in a cloud of white dust.
Silence fell for a moment. Then, within the rubble, something moved.
Seven pulled himself free, one hand pressed against his ribs—three, maybe four cracked; he couldn't really tell anymore, as the pain had merged into a single, continuous mass. He spat out a black clot of blood. His eyes, still an electric blue, remained fixed on Malakiel with a lucidity that pain had not yet managed to extinguish.
He hits hard. He hits fast. But he never feints—he doesn't need to. That's the flaw. He has never fought someone capable of reading the terrain rather than the opponent.
He stood up, staggering, and for the first time since the clash began, he smiled—a thin, exhausted, but genuine smile.
"Do you want to see what Michael taught me?" he asked.
He placed his good palm flat against the ground.
"Aetheris Vinculum."
A network of cold, gray lines unfolded beneath his fingers, racing across the marble in perfect geometric patterns, spreading under Malakiel's feet without him noticing—too busy savoring his own superiority to watch where he was stepping.
"A cheap magic trick," Malakiel mocked, raising a hand to finish him off.
"No," Seven said. "A geometer's trick."
The network snapped shut. The space beneath Malakiel's feet compressed instantly, like a fist closing in on itself, and for the first time, the fallen angel faltered, thrown off balance, his aura crackling with surprise rather than rage.
It was the only opening Seven would get. He took it completely.
He condensed everything he had left—every ounce of Aether, every reserve, until his vision blurred at the edges, until his own heart threatened to give out under the strain of holding the structure. A blinding flash gathered between his hands, taking the shape of four crossed pillars.
"Arcanum Caelestis... Lumen Crucis!"
The cross of pure light exploded from its anchor point, sweeping through the entire sanctuary in a thirty-meter radius. The marble vitrified in its wake. The shattered angel statues still littering the floor evaporated into white dust. Malakiel took a direct hit, his body pierced from end to end by the judging light, and for the first time in the entire battle, he screamed—a cry that was no longer human nor divine, but something in between, broken in the middle.
The silence that followed lasted nearly ten seconds.
Seven fell to his knees, arms trembling, unable to stand any longer. He had given everything in that single strike. He had nothing left.
Then, slowly, within the cloud of incandescent dust, Malakiel straightened up.
His armor was split from edge to edge. A part of his shoulder was nothing but raw, smoking flesh. But he stood up anyway, and his eyes—two points of red light in the fissures of his split face—settled on Seven with an expression where rage had yielded to something much colder.
"That was... truly a beautiful strike," he said, almost admiringly. "The first one to genuinely wound me in centuries."
He stepped forward, each footfall echoing like a death knell.
"But you just emptied your reserves for it. And I haven't even needed mine."
Seven could no longer get up. His muscles refused to respond. He watched Malakiel approach, desperately searching for one last angle, one final trick—and found none. There were no more.
Malakiel stopped in front of him. His hand rose, trembling not from weakness but from an almost tender fascination.
"I am going to offer you something no one ever offered me," he murmured. "The blunt truth."
His palm closed over Seven's face.
"Fall."
The world vanished.
There was no fall, no sensation of emptiness—only an absence so total that the very concept of space ceased to make sense. Then, slowly, shapes began to form in the void. Voices. Faces he knew.
Look at what your faith has cost you, murmured something that had neither mouth nor direction. Metatron abandoned you in Eryndor. Michael used you as a weapon. And your God—the one you still claim to serve—let Nils get devoured right before your eyes. Let Kael bleed on an altar. Let thousands of innocents burn while He watched from His throne without lifting a finger.
Seven clenched his teeth. They're just words.
No, the voice replied, and this time it took the shape of his own face, split like Malakiel's, watching him from the darkness with his own eyes. They are facts. You know it. You've always known it. Deny Him. A single thought is enough. Deny this God who never did a thing for you, and I will give you back all the power you need to save what you have left. Deny Him, and no one you love will ever die in front of you again.
The offer wrapped around his mind like a warm, almost gentle hand. And for the first time, something inside him—that cold, weary part that had seen too many corpses, carried too many names he would never forget—faltered.
It would be so simple, he thought. One word. Just a single thought.
He thought of Nils, laughing in the high school hallway. Of Maya, her small hands trembling against his feathers. Of Kael, asleep against him in a house flooded with earthly light. Of all the dead he had carried to the Abode, one by one, without ever forgetting a single face.
If I deny Him... does that mean all of this never had any meaning?
The question tore through him more violently than any of Malakiel's attacks. He felt something give way inside him—not his will, not yet, but the very structure that held it together, like a wall cracking from within without yet collapsing.
No, he thought at last, and the thought cost him more than everything he had given in this battle. No. I don't know why He did nothing. I don't even know if He exists, or if He's watching. But Nils asked me to win. Kael trusted me. And that has nothing to do with Him. That has to do with me.
Then keep your empty faith, the voice hissed, its tone shifting, the gentleness yielding to something more ravenous. Keep it, and watch it be entirely useless while you die here, forgotten, just like everything else.
The pressure increased. It was no longer a temptation—it was a compression, a vise now seeking to break what hadn't yielded to persuasion. Seven felt his mind tear in places, fragments of himself crumbling into the void like ash.
He could no longer fight back. He no longer had the strength to resist the pain. There was only one thing left for him to do: stop fighting against it.
So he let it come.
The cold invaded him, methodical, silent. The void dissolved slowly, replaced by a new sensation—freezing water against his skin. The smell of freshly turned earth.
Drip… Drop…
He opened his eyes to a gray sky. The rain fell endlessly, a curtain of icy threads striking the ground and vanishing the moment it was born. He was lying on his back, the mud mingling with what remained of him. His fingers no longer responded.
Accepting death... what irony, he thought, a voiceless laugh escaping him. Especially for the one who is supposed to embody it.
He stopped struggling. The heat of the battle, the pain of his broken body, Malakiel's voice—all of it faded away, trivial, like background noise one eventually stops hearing. His heart was still beating, muffled, irregular, but he no longer tried to hold onto it.
Drip… Drop…
A presence stepped forward in the fog. Tall, silent. Two shadows, resembling old broken wings, stretched out behind it. It knelt beside him.
Seven barely turned his head. He saw neither a face nor a precise silhouette—only two eyes of unfathomable lapis-lazuli, meeting his own.
"Are you not afraid of me?" murmured a voice, deep and gentle.
He no longer had the strength to answer. Even fear, now, seemed like a luxury out of reach.
"Thank you," the voice resumed, even softer. "Thank you for accepting this power."
A hand rested on his forehead. Cold and burning all at once.
"But you cannot stop here. Not yet."
Something cracked—not inside him, but around him, an ancient constraint he had carried since the Garden of Breaths without even realizing it, a mark he had eventually forgotten because it had become so much a part of him. It shattered soundlessly, like a dam breaking under too much pressure.
"Then remember," the presence murmured. "What you are. Everything that you are."
The world of black rain tore apart.
In the sanctuary of Eryndor, Malakiel felt the illusion tremble beneath his palm, a second before it shattered completely. He took a step back, almost by instinct.
In the center of the crater, something was rising.
His hair, once dark, now fell in locks of pure silver. His wings were taking shape again, no longer as a mere extension of his body, but as an extension of something far more ancient—black at their core, bordered by a spectral fringe that belonged to no known world.
" Caeli Vocatio : Thanatos Imperium "
He stood up. Slowly. And when he opened his eyes again, it was no longer the tired, electric blue of Seven that stared at Malakiel.
It was a bottomless lapis-lazuli.