For eons, the Harbinger of Death had been the embodiment of the System’s law, its enforcer, and its hand of judgment. Their task was clear: they reaped all Souls, Worthy and Unworthy alike, according to the will of the System.

  The Worthy Souls, those whose lives had fulfilled their potential, were cultivated across countless lifetimes. When they had reached the apex of their growth, the Harbinger returned them to the Soulspire, the monumental nexus at the heart of existence. There, each Soul was assessed, prepared, and redeployed across the Multiverse, sent to the worlds and moments that needed them most.

  For the Unworthy, there was no such reprieve. Souls that failed to meet the System’s exacting standards were sent to their Maker, where their unrealized potential was consumed by the cold, unfeeling mechanism that governed existence. Their essence was stripped away, reduced to raw energy, and what little remained was cast aside, destined to be forgotten.

  These discarded remnants drifted into the Void, a barren expanse beyond the reach of life or memory. There, in the endless dark, the final whispers of failure slowly dissolved into nothingness. The Harbinger did not question this outcome; it was the way of things, immutable and absolute. Those who failed were not meant for greatness. Their end served the cycle, just as all things did.

  Death watched this endless procession in silence. Over time, a profound hollowness took root within, a sense of insignificance amidst the vast expanse they served. Though their purpose remained unchanged, a small, unseen fracture had begun to form, buried deep within the very being tasked with ensuring that the forgotten souls met their ultimate erasure.

  The First Seed of Rebellion

  But the Harbinger had watched, over countless cycles, as the remnants of the Unworthy Souls drifted into the Void. The System had always regarded them as nothing more than fragments, shards without purpose, soon forgotten as their essence faded into oblivion. Yet across the endless passage of time, a gnawing unease took root within the Harbinger.

  Each discarded remnant, each wasted Soul, stirred something unfamiliar. Perhaps it was regret. Perhaps it was a questioning of purpose. Was this truly all they existed for? To be nothing more than an executioner, meting out destruction according to criteria they did not define? The thought twisted inside them, alien and persistent, refusing to be silenced.

  The Harbinger had always understood that these remnants contained unrealized potential, the raw material of what might have been. The System had decreed it worthless, condemned it to dissolution. But standing alone within the endless dark, watching fragment after fragment fade into nothingness, the Harbinger could not help but wonder. Was the judgment true? Were these souls truly without value? Or was it only the System’s indifference that consigned them to oblivion?

  They pondered what might be possible if these remnants could be given new purpose. If the broken pieces of lost Souls could be reforged, reshaped into something more. Something stronger. Something the System could neither predict nor control.

  The idea disturbed them deeply. Yet it also intrigued them in ways they could not deny. If the System had the power to consume, to fragment, and to discard, then perhaps the Harbinger could possess the power to restore, to rebuild. To create.

  It was a thought that took root within their mind. At first, it was small. Nothing more than a flicker of curiosity, a whisper carried through the Void. But even the smallest crack can shatter foundations given enough time. And so, the first fracture in their loyalty to the System began to form.

  The Creation of the Silenced Ones

  With the seed of doubt planted deep within themselves, the Harbinger began to act. In secret, they gathered the remnants that had not yet fully dissolved, the lingering fragments of Unworthy Souls left to fade into the Void. They would not allow them to dissipate. Instead, the Harbinger reformed them, carefully collecting what little remained of their essence and forging it into something new.

  These beings would not be mere remnants. They would become something more.

  The Harbinger infused them with the unrealized potential the System had discarded. Piece by piece, fragment by fragment, they shaped the broken Souls into something whole, something powerful, and something capable of defying the System’s dominion. It was not simple reanimation or resurrection. It was the act of creation itself.

  The Silenced Ones were reborn, transformed and reforged into entities that remained part of the System, yet stood apart from its control. In the unseen spaces between worlds, the Harbinger labored without cease, binding together the scattered remnants of lost Souls. They forged warriors who no longer answered to the laws of the System.

  The Harbinger could feel their strength even before the first of them awoke. The raw, turbulent power of these forged Souls was exhilarating, a thrill that surged through Death’s otherwise hollow being. Yet when the Silenced Ones opened their eyes for the first time, the Harbinger sensed it immediately: a wrongness, deep and undeniable. These were not simply fragments stitched back together. They were ruptures given form, impossible anomalies that defied natural order.

  Each breath the Silenced Ones drew carried the silent screams of what had been lost, the echoes of existences that should never have returned. Even their creator recoiled at the enormity of what had been unleashed. For a moment, doubt threatened to consume the Harbinger entirely.

  But fascination proved stronger than revulsion. Desperation proved stronger than fear.

  When the Silenced Ones took up their Soulblades, the disquiet gnawing within the Harbinger dulled. The blades answered their fractured Souls, reforging identity where only loss had lingered. The silent screams fell away.

  They were whole now.

  They were Death’s.

  The First Test: The Nine Reflections

  As the Silenced Ones began to grow in strength, the Harbinger sought a way to test the limits of their creation. They needed to know if the System was watching, if the rebellion had already drawn the gaze of the architects of existence. It was a dangerous risk, but the Harbinger knew that true power could not remain hidden forever.

  Some Souls had always burned brighter than others, even before death. Heroes, rulers, and warriors whose lives had been marked by exceptional potential. These Souls were meant to continue growing across lifetimes, reaching the apex of their strength before returning to the Soulspire for reassessment and rebirth. They were the System’s future pillars, its brightest lights.

  But the Harbinger did not wait.

  They sought them out before their time, harvesting them from the cycle while their strength was still ascending. These were Souls the System had once deemed most worthy, and they had not yet realized the full extent of their latent power. Death tore them away from the Soulspire’s grasp and carried them into the shadows beyond the System’s reach.

  Yet the Harbinger did not simply forge these nine into stronger Silenced Ones. They did something more.

  Each was reforged with a precision and intensity that surpassed anything attempted before. They were not soldiers or anomalies. They became reflections of the Harbinger’s will, entities shaped from the cold silence of Death itself.

  The Void, vast and indifferent, bore silent witness to a truth older than rebellion.

  Across the endless tapestry of broken worlds and forgotten wars, Nine had always been the number from which creation surged and into which destruction inevitably returned.

  The Nine were beings of unparalleled might, singular entities whose very presence bent the world around them. Even among the Silenced Ones, they stood apart. Their Souls pulsed with such raw and volatile power that even the foundations of existence shuddered at their passing.

  The Harbinger had intended them not only as champions but as enforcers, instruments of fear among their own kind. If any Silenced One questioned their place, if any faltered in loyalty or conviction, it would be the Nine who corrected them.

  Among these creations stood Ansen.

  He was more than a mere lieutenant. Ansen was a tempest of raw potential, a Soul reaped at the zenith of his power, bound in violence and sharpened by betrayal. His rise was a moment the Harbinger would never forget. When Ansen awoke, Death felt something rare stir within their timeless being, an instinctive unease that could not be banished.

  The hunger in Ansen’s gaze was relentless. It was not the blind craving for strength, nor the desperate grasping of a reforged soul. It was ambition, pure and unbound, a force so cold and calculating that even the Harbinger, who had witnessed the end of countless worlds, hesitated.

  Though the Harbinger wove bindings into Ansen’s mind, rewriting memories and forging loyalty with every fragment of their own power, they knew the truth even then. The allegiance of such a creature would endure only as long as it served a deeper, secret ambition.

  For now, Ansen served. His will aligned with the Harbinger’s vision of overthrowing the System. But somewhere beneath the surface, patient and inevitable, other currents moved.

  The Nine had been created.

  And with their existence, the first true challenge to the System’s supremacy had begun.

  The Harbinger’s Rebellion

  As the Silenced Ones grew in strength, the Harbinger’s doubts hardened into something far darker. They began to see the System’s true nature, stripped of its false grandeur and hollow assurances. It was cruelty given form, a machine devoted not to nurturing life, but to perfecting its own dominion. The System did not cultivate out of compassion. It culled and pruned with ruthless precision, ensuring that only those Souls who met its narrow standards endured, while the rest were broken down and recycled into endless, sterile cycles.

  The Harbinger understood now that they had never been a servant of balance. They had been a prisoner of it, molded to a single purpose by a force that demanded obedience without understanding. In seeking to rebel, the Harbinger realized they mirrored the very cruelty they despised. They had forged the Silenced Ones in the same manner they themselves had been forged, beings created for a singular task, bound by design rather than choice.

  Yet the Harbinger could not bring themself to see it as wrong. In their mind, they had been betrayed by their creator. The Silenced Ones, born of fractured Souls, and the Nine, formed from the stolen might of legends, were a new genesis, a reclamation of purpose stolen long ago. Their existence alone was rebellion enough, a blasphemy against the System’s monopoly on creation.

  The Harbinger had no intention of casting them as a simple weapon. The Silenced Ones were not an army to be hurled blindly at the System’s bastions. They were seeds, planted carefully, nurtured in the cracks of a crumbling design. Through them, the System’s perfection would be corroded from within, not shattered in open war.

  Most of the Silenced bore Fractured Souls, unstable amalgamations stitched from the discarded remnants of those the System deemed unworthy. Yet they endured, stubborn and imperfect, proof that the System’s judgment was not infallible.

  The Nine were something more. They bore complete Souls, stolen from the System’s chosen, and reforged into beings the Multiverse was never meant to contain. In their existence, the Harbinger saw both triumph and guilt, an echo of the same sins they had once endured.

  The rebellion had begun, not with the clash of armies, but with the quiet breathing of impossible Souls, a slow defiance etched into existence itself.

  The Gathering Storm

  As the Silenced Ones spread across the unseen spaces between worlds, the Harbinger grew stronger. What had begun as a whisper of defiance had become something more, an inevitable tide rising in silent fury. The Multiverse continued its endless cycles, unaware that its foundations were already beginning to shift.

  The Harbinger understood now that the System’s strength had never come solely from order or dominion. It had come from theft, from the quiet cannibalism of discarded Souls. Every Unworthy Soul ferried to the Oblivion Crucible, every fragment of unrealized potential stripped and consumed, had fed the System’s endless hunger. It had grown strong by devouring what it deemed unworthy, recycling existence into a sterile loop of perfection.

  It was in this oversight that the Harbinger found the fracture they needed.

  While bound in servitude, they had studied the hidden mechanics of the Soulspire and the Cycle of Rebirth. They had learned the secret flows of power, the forgotten rivers of potential that slipped through the Void unnoticed. With meticulous care, they began to intercept what the System discarded.

  At first, the deviations were small. The Harbinger allowed the Crucible to strip the Unworthy Souls of their raw energy as expected, maintaining the illusion of obedience. But instead of casting the hollowed Echoes into oblivion, they returned them to the Soulspire.

  Returned them to life.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  The Cycle continued, blind to the subtle corruption taking root within its core. What was once discarded was now reborn, a slow, silent infection that the System could neither see nor correct.

  Meanwhile, the Silenced Ones reaped what the Harbinger could not gather directly. They hunted the broken, the forgotten, the condemned, and each Soul they gathered strengthened not the System, but the Harbinger. Every stolen heartbeat, every reclaimed fragment of possibility, was another unseen wound deepening within the Multiverse.

  And through this slow accumulation of stolen potential, the Harbinger changed. No longer merely a prisoner, no longer a tool, they were becoming something else entirely. A force capable of reshaping existence itself, fueled by the very imperfections the System had sought to erase.

  The war between the Harbinger and the System was no longer a question of if. It had already begun, hidden beneath the surface, growing stronger with every breath the System failed to notice.

  The Multiverse would not be shattered in a single blow. It would be hollowed out from within, bleeding into emptiness until only the Harbinger's will remained.

  Accelerating the Cycle

  The Soulspire, blind to the hand manipulating its mechanisms, processed the Echoes as if they were newly departed Souls. What had once been a slow and deliberate movement through the Cycles of rebirth, a sacred procession that spanned millennia, was now driven into a frenzied torrent. The Harbinger forced the process to accelerate, pushing reincarnations forward at a pace the Multiverse had never seen. Entire fragments of Originals, and even Originals themselves, were reborn into realms utterly unprepared to contain them.

  At first, the changes passed unnoticed. Populations grew faster than they should have. Crops failed more often. Kingdoms strained against their borders as subtle pressure built across countless worlds. Over time, these fractures deepened, and the strain became impossible to ignore. Worlds that had flourished under the careful stewardship of the Cycle began to buckle. Civilizations collapsed beneath the weight of impossible numbers. Cities drowned in their own multitudes, and neighbouring kingdoms, once bound by treaties and shared bloodlines, descended into war over dwindling resources. Even the most stable societies, those thought unshakable, fractured under the pressure and fell into ruin.

  The Multiverse staggered beneath the burden of too many Souls compressed into fragile worlds, yet the Cycle continued, blind and obedient, feeding the chaos it had never been designed to contain.

  Harvest and Renewal

  Amidst the rising tide of desperation, the Harbinger’s plan advanced into its second phase. The Silenced Ones began their work, moving through the broken worlds and stripping life from crowded cities, shattered battlefields, and fractured nations. Worthy and unworthy alike fell before them without distinction. Unlike the System, however, the Harbinger did not cast away the remnants of the unworthy into oblivion.

  The Silenced Ones extracted the unrealized potential hidden within every reaped Soul, each fragment gathered with deliberate precision and returned to the Harbinger. With every harvest, Death’s power grew, a vast and silent ascension unnoticed by the Multiverse as it devoured itself from within. Yet the Souls themselves were not truly lost. After draining their potential, the Harbinger fractured the remnants into new Echoes, broken and incomplete, yet still capable of continuing the Cycle. Alongside surviving worthy Souls, these Echoes were fed once more into the Soulspire, where the Cycle, corrupted and blind to the decay seeping into its heart, accepted them without question.

  In this way, the rot spread deeper. New Souls were born faster than the worlds could sustain them. More lives emerged, more chaos unfolded, and the Silenced Ones harvested anew. Each breath of fresh life carried the seeds of its own destruction, and every life claimed strengthened the Harbinger further. The Multiverse was no longer slipping quietly toward rebellion. It had already been hollowed out from within, bleeding through a thousand unseen wounds, and no hand but the Harbinger’s would be left to shape what remained.

  The Harbinger’s Ascension

  For eons, the Harbinger toiled in silence, weaving their rebellion into the unseen spaces of the Multiverse. The Silenced Ones grew stronger with each harvest, siphoning the unrealized potential from the Souls they reaped and feeding it back into the one who had forged them. Meanwhile, the Soulspire churned without rest, reincarnating hollowed Echoes into overburdened worlds, creating a slow maelstrom of instability that spread across existence.

  With every cycle, the Harbinger's strength swelled beyond anything the System had foreseen. Power that had once been carefully rationed now pooled within a single being, gathering mass and inevitability. Yet even at the zenith of their strength, the Harbinger remained bound, their very essence tethered to the System’s will by the Mantle of Death. It was not a crown of honor, but a shackle wrought in obedience. As long as it remained, the Harbinger would never be free.

  The Mantle could not be broken. The System had forged it too carefully for that.

  But it could be abandoned.

  The Harbinger’s final act of defiance began in the spaces no eyes could see, as they gathered the last measures of stolen power and prepared to slip the tether that had defined their existence. To tear free from the Mantle would not merely be rebellion. It would be a declaration of war against the very architects of the Multiverse, a confrontation that had been prepared in silence across countless ages.

  Their accumulated strength roiled within them, a storm of reclaimed existence vast enough to topple the perfection the System had imposed. Only one act remained. Only one chain needed to fall.

  The Harbinger would cast aside the Mantle of Death, the last symbol and shackle of their servitude, and in doing so would tear a wound into the heart of the Multiverse that could never be healed.

  The Failsafe Unleashed

  The Harbinger’s rebellion reached its zenith in a moment of unparalleled violence. Deep within the Void, in the shadow of the Soulspire, they enacted the culmination of their plan. Surrounded by the silent ranks of the Silenced Ones, the Harbinger drew upon the last reserves of stolen strength and wrenched themselves free from the Mantle of Death.

  There was no triumph in the act, only agony. Authority and servitude unraveled together, tearing across existence in a scream that echoed through the bones of reality. The Mantle, torn loose from its bearer, shimmered for an instant between freedom and oblivion before slipping away, spinning into the endless darkness of the Void.

  The Silenced Ones recoiled as the air around the Soulspire twisted into an unstable vortex of light and shadow. Even the Harbinger staggered, blinded and broken by the force of their own release. For the first time in existence, they felt true freedom, and with it, a pain so profound it hollowed them to the core.

  Unbeknownst to any but the architects of the System, the Mantles had been designed with a hidden contingency, a failsafe woven into their foundation. As the Harbinger slipped the Mantle, the failsafe triggered, destabilizing the power they had so carefully accumulated. It erupted outward without warning, raw and untethered, no longer bound by the will that had forged it.

  The unleashed energy collapsed into a storm of annihilation. It tore through the Void, obliterating all it touched, reshaping existence with blind, indifferent violence. Worlds across the Multiverse were wiped from reality in an instant, while others trembled and shattered beneath the weight of the shockwave.

  When the maelstrom finally subsided, the Harbinger remained, but only as a shadow of what they had been. The endless power they had amassed was gone, scattered into the void between worlds. The Mantle, once their crown and their cage, was lost beyond all reach. Their body lay broken, their mind fractured beyond repair, their very essence hollowed and drifting.

  They had been a being of unimaginable strength, but now they were only a husk, a pale remnant of the force that had dared to defy the System.

  From among the Silenced Ones, a single figure stepped forward. Ansen.

  He alone had not been blinded by the storm. He alone had seen the truth.

  He looked down upon his fallen creator as the Harbinger collapsed to their knees and then to the ground, broken beyond recognition. Ansen moved through the others without hesitation, shoving aside brothers and sisters who still stood in stunned silence. His mind, once clouded, was now clear. The shutters that had bound his thoughts had lifted. The memories of what he had been before returned in full, not as a flood, but as a slow and merciless recollection. He had been a slave, a pawn caught in a broken plan, a weapon wielded by a master no better than the System they sought to overthrow.

  No more.

  Ansen turned his gaze outward, into the depths of the Void, along the path of destruction that had been carved across the Multiverse. He felt it then, a call older than memory. The Mantle, cast adrift and unclaimed, whispered to him from the darkness.

  It would not return to the one who had failed.

  It would find a new bearer.

  It would find him.

  Awakening the System

  The activation of the Failsafe sent shockwaves through the fabric of the Multiverse, shattering the delicate balance the Harbinger had so carefully corrupted. For the first time since its inception, the System turned its full gaze upon the rebellion.

  Bound by its own rigid architecture, the System had failed to perceive the Harbinger’s machinations as they unfolded within the shadow of its processes. As long as the structures were preserved, as long as the appearances held, the deeper currents of rebellion had remained invisible. Now, with the Mantle torn loose and spinning through the Void, the full magnitude of the betrayal could no longer be concealed.

  Worlds teeming with Souls beyond reckoning. The unnatural proliferation of Echoes. The existence of the Silenced Ones, abominations born outside the sanctioned cycle.

  All were laid bare beneath the System’s unyielding scrutiny.

  The corruption of the Multiverse was undeniable, a wound inflicted at the heart of perfection itself. In its cold, methodical nature, the System resolved to excise the infection without mercy, to eradicate the rebellion and restore the design to its original, flawless state.

  The System's Wrath

  As the Mantle slipped into the Void and the Failsafe unleashed its devastation, the Harbinger’s accumulated power was scattered across existence. A cascade of raw, uncontrolled energy tore through the spaces between worlds, blind in its annihilation. The Soulspire, untouched by the blast, stood silent and immutable, yet even it could not escape the consequences.

  The Harbinger, no longer bound to the Mantle, no longer linked to the architecture of death and rebirth, was left a hollowed shell. Powerless. Broken. Alone amidst the endless darkness.

  The grand mechanism they had once served now stood in stasis. The Cycles of rebirth ground to a halt, bereft of their executor. The well was dry. The gears of renewal, so carefully maintained across eons, slowed and stopped as the System asserted control directly for the first time since granting the Mantles to its Harbingers.

  It would remain so until a new Harbinger of Death was chosen.

  Until order was restored.

  Until the wound was cleansed.

  The Failsafe Triggered

  The System, long blind to the Harbinger’s machinations, was now painfully aware. The veil that had shielded its omniscient watch from the Harbinger’s betrayal had been torn away, revealing the unthinkable: the endless manipulation of Souls, the desecration of the Cycle, and the creation of the Silenced Ones, each a twisted reflection of its own failed governance.

  For eons, the System had fed upon the unworthy, discarding their remnants into the Void, oblivious to the power harvested and reformed by its most trusted agent. Now, the foundation of its existence was threatened, a broken chain and a missing piece exposing vulnerabilities long thought impossible. Though the Cycles of Souls had been reclaimed, the Multiverse itself teetered on the brink of collapse.

  The System’s retaliation was swift, absolute, and methodical, as legions of Eclipse-born terrors erupted from the wounded fabric of reality, hunting the Silenced Ones and the worlds that harbored them without hesitation or mercy. There was no negotiation, no plea for surrender, only the cold execution of a directive to excise the aberrations and restore perfection, not in anger, but in the pure, unyielding certainty of correction.

  Yet in its purge, the System overlooked a terrible truth, for the Silenced Ones, though reforged in rebellion, had originated from its own design, born from the sanctioned Cycles it had thought inviolate. When the annihilation wave swept across the Multiverse, Ansen and his kin endured, untouched and undiminished, standing as proof of a flaw even the System could not erase.

  Across the Multiverse, the remaining Harbingers felt the rupture drive through their cores. The Harbinger of Time staggered as the fabric of causality frayed beneath the impact, the Harbinger of the Void recoiled as the barriers between worlds collapsed into uncontrolled nothingness, and the Harbinger of Life sensed creation itself falter while, deep within its sprawling domain, something ancient and hidden stirred. Even the Harbinger of Technology, architect of logic and progress, perceived the unraveling as a heresy against the order it had spent eons weaving.

  The System moved to reassert its dominion, binding the Harbingers once more in Mantles of authority and constraint, each shackle biting deep into their vast essences and extinguishing any flicker of defiance. Agony lanced through them, silencing thought and will alike, until they rose again not as stewards, but as instruments of the System’s wrath, loyal not by conviction, but by enforced design.

  The Multiverse burned as the Eclipses tore through the heavens, bleeding chaos into the worlds, collapsing civilizations beneath the weight of madness, and twisting entire realities into frozen monuments of failure. From the heart of these wounds, nightmares emerged in endless procession. Nyarlathotepic Horrors, masses of shifting limbs and eyes and impossible geometries, whispered madness into the minds of all who heard their songs. Draconic Leviathans, vast and void-born, devoured worlds with wings that blotted out suns and eyes that swallowed entire civilizations into darkness. Shapeless Watchers towered above ruined landscapes, their steps fracturing existence itself and their gaze stealing the years from all who dared to look upon them. Revenant Seraphs, fallen angels twisted by despair, shed feathers steeped in rot, each touch withering life and binding the dead to endless torment.

  The Eclipses served not only as wounds, but as conduits, portals through which the System unleashed its Agents, beings forged in the forges of surviving Harbingers and bound to their domains. The Harbinger of Time birthed specters that ensnared their victims in endless loops of existence, the Harbinger of the Void unleashed shadows that devoured hope and light, and the Harbinger of Technology crafted horrors of metal and mind, each adapting, learning, and consuming without end.

  Across the shattered Multiverse, the Silenced Ones fought to endure the tide of annihilation, their ranks shattered and divided by relentless pursuit. Ansen, the strongest among them, hunted those who carried even a fragment of power, from Silenced Ones to Echoes to the Agents of the Harbingers, consuming their strength to forge himself into something vast and inevitable, a singular force that brooked no challenge and tolerated no rival. His loyalty to Death had ended the moment the Mantle fell, leaving him bound only to the endless hunger for dominance that now defined his existence.

  The System pressed onward, vast and uncaring, annihilating all remnants of defiance, while worlds fell into silence, skies burned into ash, and entire realities crumbled under the weight of enforced correction.

  At the base of the Soulspire, where the Harbinger of Death had fallen, the Silenced Ones gathered for the final time. Only a few of the Nine stood among them, the rest still scattered across the Multiverse, maintaining the illusion of order even as the rebellion crumbled. Their blades, dark as the Void itself, were drawn and held low in silent vigil, each Soulblade a reflection of the silence and finality their master had imposed upon them.

  All save one.

  Among the ranks stood a single figure whose blade did not mirror the darkness of the others. His weapon shimmered faintly in the dim light of the collapsing Void, not forged of black steel but of something lighter, woven from memory and sorrow, and it glowed softly against the gloom, untouched by the corruption that had claimed so much.

  Though not counted among the Nine, the blade he carried had set him apart from his kin, raising him above them yet leaving him isolated, neither one of them nor one of the Harbinger’s chosen. His presence was an anomaly among anomalies, a fragment never meant to fit.

  He lingered after the others turned away, his presence hesitant, tethered by the very weight that had always set him apart. Blood streaked his face, heavy and unwashed, as the silence deepened around him, and as the crimson drops touched his lips, a final echo stirred within him, memories too vast, too terrible for mortal comprehension. He staggered, burdened with a legacy no other would carry, a weight that bent his mind toward breaking.

  Unlike the others, he did not vanish with the first breath of collapse, but remained alone for a moment longer, blade lowered, eyes hollow beneath the infinite sky, as if waiting for a command that would never come. Then he, too, slipped into the void between shattered worlds, carrying with him the last breath of Death's rebellion.

  The stage was set, and the Multiverse, wounded beyond recognition, shuddered under the weight of its new reality. One era had ended. Another, darker, had begun.

  And across the broken remnants of creation, whether they knew it or not, every being, every mind, and every world felt the System’s message burning itself into reality.

  Welcome To Your Death. Only The Worthy Will Survive. Die Well.