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  The golden heat of the afternoon had begun to sour, the sun sinking into a copper dusk as if the sky were exhausted from witnessing the slaughter.

  Long shadows stretched across the continent of corpses, bleeding into a natural twilight that raced to meet the unnatural darkness of the horizon.

  The battlefield was becoming a continent of fear.

  Under the weight of every living being demon or man alike crawling and screaming in a blind, psychic terror that had no name.

  It was in this violet dusk, when the world’s light was weakest, that a space rift opened, its edges breathing with wallowing voices.

  From the tear in reality stepped a hundred-foot titan of blackened meat and spite.

  His eyes were rifts of liquid gold, staring with a clarity that seemed to pierce the veil of the afterlife itself.

  Upon his skull sat a crown of jagged obsidian - the mark of the Devourer’s No. 1 General.

  He did not look at Zayn as a threat, but as an errand. He had promised his Lord he would chop the "red dog" and present the head as a trophy.

  With a roar that vaporized the surrounding clouds, the General swung.

  His blade was a mountain-cutter, wider than a river, a slab of cursed metal that tore the atmosphere into screaming shockwaves.

  The strike landed.

  The edge hit the crown of Zayn’s head and vaporized.

  The mountain-cutter became a cloud of shimmering, glassy dust that refused to settle, suspended in the air.

  Zayn remained a motionless silhouette of corded muscle, absorbing the light of the dying sun.

  A heartbeat later, a phantom flicker of a talon plastered an afterimage, hung in the air above Zayn’s head.

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  No one saw the strike. Perhaps the universe simply decided the Demon general who called Zayn a red dog was simply done.

  -BANG!

  The General’s skull slammed into the earth with such velocity that the ground caved inward, creating a crater to swallow his arrogance and half his skull.

  A clean, cauterized red line gleamed across his neck. The head was gone, but the body remained upright for moments, twitching in refusal to accept its own slaughter from the hands of a being he saw beneath him.

  The cut had been as effortless as a hot knife through butter.

  Even the hallucinating demons paused as they recognised their mighty General’s head lay there who was second only to their Lord the Endless Void.

  They had just seen a God fall like livestock.

  Aditi’s lips dusty and shaking, spoke:

  “Zayn,”

  “Please… stop.”

  Bhumi’s lips were white, she wasted no words anymore.

  Even the strongest operatives stared, hollow-eyed.

  For the first time since the battle began and he transformed, Zayn spoke.

  A single syllable.

  A guttural, seismic rattle: “BURN!”

  The syllable expanded across the planet covered with demons as it resonated, breaching flesh and memory.

  At first, they merely shifted, scratching at their necks as if waking from a nightmare. Then, the scratching escalated slowly becoming tearing of their own selves.

  They were all trying to force an evolution that their low-tier biology couldn't handle.

  It was haunting for humans to see a trillion creatures simultaneously stopping, their heads tilting at the same unnatural angle, before they began the ritual of self-mutilation.

  They mirrored his movements - the tearing, the gurgling, the desperation.

  But it was incomplete, only the wet tearing sound of a trillion beasts trying to become an Apex they were never meant to be, to reach the primal state the monster embodied.

  Zayn watched this with psychotic detachment with a jagged grin hanging across his ruined lips, the expression a man who has seen the end of the world and found it interesting.

  He began to move through the masses of enemies like a creeping nightmare.

  He moved at a speed where the survivors could see every individual he sliced and moved to the next, every drop of blood sprayed, and an indulgent grin on his face.

  He was stabbing the dry corpses of an army whose death was already certain and savoring every inch of it.

  He moved through the demon lines, evaporating millions into a fine red mist, sometimes pausing to taste the scent of their blood from his hands.

  Zayn looked like a possessed entity, dragging his talons through the flesh of a world he had already broken.

  The Devourer, watching from the halls which was turning into dust, his eyes squinted, opening his mouth exposing large fangs with interest:

  “All of them are seeking to become...THAT?”

  The Devourer’s voice was raspy, dripping with shrill bloodlust:

  “Impossible! None could ever reach that primal state.”

  Because Zayn was no longer a fighter. He was a living apex of primal evolution, the culmination of endless struggle and calculation.

  Every demon that tried to emulate him only annihilated itself from within.

  The Devourer’s own army tore itself apart collapsing into panic and blood.

  A symphony of agony filling the air with a stench of iron and heat.

  From the human lines, Zayn’s mother watched through trembling fingers covering her eyes, her voice a fractured whisper:

  “Is this your revenge, son? Killing everything... because of the pain we gave you?”

  Humanity stared in paralyzed horror at demons tearing themselves apart.

  Aditi knelt in the mud, quiet tears carving paths through the dust on her face.

  Bhumi’s hands shook, her pride finally silenced by the horror unfolding before her.

  They realized that the "Good Boy" who ran to outrun life was gone. In his place was a Slaughter-God who found joy in the gurgling of a dying world.

  All because of a single human, this was beyond sanity and beyond creation.

  Then, the sky already dark with the approaching night went dark, a black so absolute it felt like light had never existed.

  An ancient voice, bellowed from the heart of the universe, drowning the screams of the mutilating demons:

  “Your rage is mesmerizing... Endless Flame...”

  The silence between his words could have split galaxies.

  “Let us see if you can stand against the Endless Void.”

  “Let us see...who is truly feral!”

  “The Devourer of Ends...or a tiny rage of creation and end-fire.”

  The "Ends of the Worlds" had arrived.