Chapter 261 -
Reynold's body fell downward in slow, helpless descent. The last fragments of divine radiance leaked from him like fading embers, swallowed by the vastness beneath.
You've lost…
The words still rang in the void.
Above him, the Fiend Lord Azeroth watched without emotion.
He turned from the falling body and looked toward the fracturing light.
At the center of the collapsing radiance stood a figure that should not have existed.
The space around it shuddered, splitting and reforming, struggling to decide whether to accept or reject what stood within it.
Half of the figure possessed substance and weight; the other half flickered like a reflection on broken water. Light and shadow misaligned across its form, as though reality itself could not agree on where he belonged.
Azeroth's eyes narrowed.
"It's him."
He recognized the face from the memories of the vessel he had previously claimed, the girl whose resistance had lingered like a thorn in his will.
Her brother, spark.
The translucent figure floated in stillness, neither rising nor falling. His robes stirred in currents that did not exist, edges dissolving into drifting motes of pale light.
Then the ethereal figure opened his eyes. They were clear, untroubled.
He glanced downward, following Reynold's falling form into the abyss.
There was no alarm. No urgency or grief.
Only a passing observation, as if noting a leaf drifting down a river.
A moment later, his gaze lifted and settled upon Azeroth.
Curiosity flickered within it. Then, nothing more.
Azeroth studied him, sensing no hostility, no killing intent, not even the tremor of hatred that mortals always carried toward him. What stood before him did not burn with vengeance or fear.
It simply observed.
"You must be the youngest," Azeroth said at last, "I heard you are his trump card."
His lips curved faintly.
"To think he would even use his brother as a weapon."
The fractured light around Spark continued to waver, threads of existence unraveling and reweaving across his shoulders.
"He even spent the last of his divinity to summon you," Azeroth added, his tone steeped in cold amusement.
Spark did not respond.
He only looked, with almost childlike curiosity, as if Azeroth were an unfamiliar phenomenon worth examining.
Azeroth's gaze hardened.
This presence lacked the sharpness of a living will. There was no emotional fluctuation, no spiritual turbulence, nothing to grasp, nothing to provoke.
Understanding dawned on him.
It was an incomplete summoning. It could see. It could exist. But it could not feel.
"You disappoint me," Azeroth said, his voice flattening into cold verdict. "Mindless being… disappear."
He lifted a hand.
A sphere of condensed destruction formed above his palm, a dense core of annihilating force where abyssal energy compressed into a singularity of ruin.
Space warped around it. Fractures spidered outward through the air as the sphere pulsed with silent violence.
With a slight motion, he released it.
The sphere shot forward.
It traveled without sound yet shattered everything in its path. Space folded and collapsed behind it, leaving marks of splintered void, and collapsing distortion.
It reached Spark.
Only then did the ethereal figure move.
For the first time, something like recognition crossed his expression, not fear, not alarm, but the faint realization of an object approaching.
He raised his hand.
And reached toward the sphere of destruction.
His fingers closed around it.
A faint distortion rippled through the abyss the moment Spark's hand closed around the sphere of destruction, subtle yet undeniable, as though something fundamental had been quietly overturned.
Not far away, the Fiend Lord Azeroth stood motionless, but the stillness no longer carried the same absolute control as before. His gaze locked onto the figure ahead, and for the first time since his descent into this ruin, a trace of genuine surprise surfaced in his expression.
He had expected resistance at most.
What he witnessed instead was far beyond that.
After fusing all his fragmented bodies, his divinity had risen to a higher authority, and every attack he unleashed carried that elevated law within it.
Such power was not meant to be grasped, much less neutralized through sheer contact. Even immortals would treat it with caution.
Yet the ethereal figure before him held it effortlessly, as though the violent force within the sphere had lost all meaning the moment it entered his grasp.
Spark slowly opened his palm and observed what remained, his expression calm and distant, like a novice encountering an unfamiliar concept for the first time.
The sphere had changed.
The dense, destructive energy that once warped space around it had completely dissipated, leaving behind a quiet, steady glow of pure white light.
It no longer carried the oppressive forceof destruction, nor did it emit any sign of danger. It simply existed, tranquil and unassuming, resting within his hand.
Spark studied it for a brief moment, as though trying to understand its nature, before lifting his gaze toward Azeroth.
There was still no hostility in his eyes.
Only that same quiet curiosity.
Then, with a small, casual motion of his fingers, he flicked the light forward.
The white glow drifted into the abyss.
At first glance, its movement appeared slow, almost sluggish, as though it were barely advancing at all.
However, the surrounding space reacted in a way that defied reason. Distance stretched and folded around it, compressing vast spans into nothingness, so that in the space of a single breath, what should have taken an eternity to cross was already behind it.
Azeroth felt it immediately.
A sharp, instinctive warning surged through his senses, far more intense than anything he had experienced.
Without hesitation, he attempted to shift his position, but the moment his will moved the light was already in front of him.
It brushed against one of his heads.
There was no explosion, no visible clash of power, not even the slightest resistance.
The light passed through him like a gentle flame.
For a brief moment, nothing happened.
Then Azeroth's body stiffened.
His vision remained fixed forward, but something was missing.
One of his heads… was gone.
Not destroyed, not severed, not reduced to remnants.
It had simply vanished, erased so completely that even the concept of its existence seemed to have been removed.
There was no pain to register the loss, no sensation to accompany it, only an unsettling absence that his mind struggled to comprehend.