The ground beneath my feet liquified. Wrath was no longer a warrior; he was a walking tectonic event. The magma veins on his colossal body erupted, spewing geysers of superheated rock into the vacuum, creating a localized atmosphere of vaporized stone. His aura expanded, a chaotic, burning sphere of influence that turned the grey lunar plains into a boiling sea of glass and fire. He was charging his core for a final, suicidal release, a supernova of miasma and rage.

I had seconds. Maybe less.

I couldn't get close. The heat alone was enough to strip the shielding from a starship. The miasmic pressure was a physical wall, pushing me back, grinding my Grey Divinity against its chaotic friction. Any physical attack would just trigger the explosion sooner.

'I have to cut him,' I thought, my mind racing with cold, divine clarity, my exhaustion pushed into a locked box in the back of my mind. 'Not his body. That's just rock and fire. Cutting the bomb won't stop the blast. I have to cut the reaction.'

I summoned the last reserves of my strength. The Grey Divinity, forged in the crucible of Alyssara's defeat and hardened by Envy's death, hummed in response, a deep, resonant bell tolling in my soul. I gripped Valeria with both hands, raising the blade high above my head. The stance was simple, ancient.

I didn't look at the monster. I didn't look at the fire. I looked at the lines.

My God's Eyes—or rather, the Divine perception that had evolved from them, empowered by Soul Resonance—overlayed reality with a grid of truth. I saw the flows of energy within Wrath. I saw the chaotic, spiraling knot of power building in his chest, the "fuse" of his self-destruction. It was a tangle of miasma and divine will, rapidly reaching critical mass, a point of no return where the energy would overcome the physical form.

I had to sever that knot without detonating it. I had to separate the intent from the energy.

"Sword Sovereignty," I whispered.

The concept of "cutting" expanded in my mind. It wasn't just about separating matter. It wasn't just about sharpness. It was about separating cause from effect. It was about asserting that A no longer leads to B. It was the ultimate authority of the blade to define division.

I initiated the technique. Grey Sovereign: World Severance.

I swung the sword.

From the tip of Valeria, a line of absolute darkness extended. It wasn't shadow; it was the absence of light, the absence of space, the absence of heat. A two-dimensional plane of pure Grey negation stretched out into infinity, slicing through the vacuum, through the boiling rock, through the blinding aura of the Demon Lord. It moved faster than light, faster than thought.

It hit Wrath.

The giant didn't flinch. The blade passed through him as if he were a ghost. The line of Grey bisected his massive, glowing torso, passing directly through the white-hot core of his building detonation.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Wrath continued to roar, the light building, the heat rising, the critical mass approaching.

Then, the line asserted itself.

Space shifted along the cut. The top half of Wrath's energy field slid a fraction of a millimeter to the left. The bottom half stayed put. The connection—the fuse—was severed. The circuit of rage was broken.

The blinding light in his chest didn't explode. It just... went out.

The reaction failed. The critical mass, deprived of its unified structure, dissipated harmlessly into background radiation. The scream of the building explosion died in its throat.

Wrath's roar cut off, replaced by a confused, wheezing gasp of escaping gas. The magma cooled instantly, turning from blinding white to dull red, then to dead, grey stone. The massive, skyscraper-sized body of the Demon Lord solidified, frozen in the moment of its greatest fury, a statue of its own demise.

A massive crack appeared along the line of my cut. Then another. And another.

With a sound like a mountain collapsing, the Third Lord fell apart. He crumbled into a million boulders, a landslide of dead rock tumbling onto the glassed lunar plain. The divine spark was extinguished. The threat was gone.

I stood alone in the vacuum, my sword lowered, my chest heaving. The Grey Divinity receded, leaving me feeling hollowed out, light as a feather. It was over.

Silence reclaimed the Sea of Tranquility. The dust began to settle. The Earth hung above, serene and untouched, unaware of how close it had come to being a debris field.

I felt them before I saw them. Eight streaks of light descending from orbit. My team.

They landed around me in a circle, kicking up clouds of ash. Lucifer, his armor scorched and cracked but his grin wide and victorious. Ren, serene but with a gleam of profound relief in his eyes. And my fiancées—Rachel, Seraphina, Cecilia, Rose, Reika, Luna—rushing towards me, their faces a mixture of awe and concern.

"Arthur!" Rachel cried out, her voice breaking over the comms.

I raised a hand, stopping them. I was too tired for hugs, too fragile. I just needed to breathe.

"It's done," I rasped, my voice thick. "They're dead. Both of them. The Vanguard is gone."

The relief that washed over them was palpable, a physical wave. We had done it. We had defeated the demon army. We had defeated the two Divine Lords. We had protected our home. The cheers began to rise, smiles breaking out, the tension of the last few days dissolving.

But as I looked at their smiling faces, a chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the cold of space.

My Soul Resonance, still wide open from the battle, caught a ripple. Not from the moon. Not from the fleet. But from outside.

Far, far away, beyond the edge of the solar system, something broke.

It felt like a scream across the universe. A sudden, mass extinguishing of lights. Divine lights. It was the sensation of a candle being snuffed out, but repeated seven times in rapid succession.

Luna gasped, clutching her chest, her eyes rolling back in her head as her fate-sense was overwhelmed. "The threads..." she whispered, her voice filled with absolute horror. "They just... snapped. All of them. At once."

I looked up, past the Earth, staring into the deep, dark void. I couldn't see it, but I could feel it. The echo of a massacre.

"The Great Seven," I said, the realization hitting me with the force of a physical blow, staggering me more than any of Wrath's punches. "The Leaders. They were coming. I felt their approach during the fight. They were coming to help us."

"Where are they?" Cecilia asked, stepping forward, her hand on her sword, sensing the shift in my mood. "If they were coming..."

"They're gone," I said, my voice hollow. "They didn't make it."

A shadow seemed to fall over the moon, though the sun still shone. The victory turned to ash in my mouth. We had won our battle. But we had just lost the war we didn't even know was being fought.

"She's here," I whispered, looking into the dark, sensing the approach of something that made Envy and Wrath feel like children. "The Overlord. She didn't send the fleet to kill us. She sent them to distract us while she cleared the board."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.