The blade connected.
It didn’t deflect. It didn’t dissolve into mist halfway through like every other strike before it. The dragon head’s fangs sank into solid resistance and held there, buried deep in Shadow’s chest, deep enough that the impact rocked his entire body and threw him backward off his feet.
Shadow’s eyes went wide.
He hit the ground in a skid that tore a trench through the battlefield, black mist hissing out of the wound in thick ribbons.
For one heartbeat, nobody moved.
Then Aren was already running.
He didn’t give Shadow the chance to stand. The Ancient Devourer ca down again before Shadow had even finished sliding, catching him across the shoulder this ti, ripping a chunk of shadow-flesh away that scattered into the air like ash.
"Get up," Aren said. His voice didn’t shake. "I’m not done."
Shadow snarled and lashed out with a wave of dark spikes, more instinct than strategy now. Aren didn’t bother dodging. He cut straight through them, the dragon head devouring two whole and shredding the rest before they ever reached him.
Another strike.
Another.
Shadow tried to drag himself upright, tried to summon the kind of wall that had stopped Aren a hundred tis over — but it rose half-ford and crumbled the second Aren’s blade touched it.
"This isn’t—"
Aren didn’t let him finish. The sword swept low and took his legs out from under him.
He fell again.
Pride ca first. It always ca first with Shadow.
"You think one lucky strike changes anything?" he spat, hauling himself up onto one knee, darkness boiling weakly around his fingers. "I have existed since before this universe had a na. I am not undone by so—"
The Devourer cut the boast in half along with the construct he’d tried to throw together.
Shadow staggered, and Aren kept coming. He didn’t slow, didn’t ease off, didn’t give the dark a single second to recover its footing. Every ti Shadow tried to rise, the sword was already there to put him back down. Every ti he reached for more power, there was less of it to find.
Fear ca next, when pride stopped working. Shadow hurled everything he had left into one final offensive — a dozen shadow spears at once, aid at every angle Aren could possibly run to.
Aren didn’t run.
He walked straight through the storm, the blade spinning in his grip, swallowing spear after spear until nothing remained but fragnts drifting in the air like dead leaves.
By the ti he reached Shadow again, the darkness around him had thinned to almost nothing. His form, never fully physical to begin with, flickered weaker with every second, a fla finally running out of air to burn.
Shadow swung anyway. One last, furious, half-ford strike.
Aren caught it on the flat of his blade and shoved him down.
This ti, Shadow didn’t get back up.
For a long mont neither of them moved. Aren stood over him, breathing hard, the Devourer humming low in his grip, waiting. Shadow’s chest — what passed for one — rose and fell unsteadily. The mocking edge that had colored every word out of his mouth since this began was gone now, scraped away along with everything else.
"Do you have any idea," Shadow said quietly, "what it cost to get here?"
Aren said nothing.
"Centuries. I clawed my way back from nothing, piece by piece, thread by thread, just to find a body that could hold . I gave up everything I was to make myself small enough to fit inside a single soul." His voice cracked, sothing close to begging slipping in beneath the words. "I am not losing it like this. Not to you."
He lifted a trembling hand.
"We don’t have to end this in a grave, Aren. You and I — we’re the sa thing, split down the middle. Work with . Share this. We could rule whatever’s left standing once the void burns itself out. Neither of us has to lose anything."
Aren looked down at him.
"I don’t want any of that," he said. "I’ve got my own world to get back to. My own people. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, and it has nothing to do with you."
Sothing in Shadow’s expression cracked further — raw, furious, afraid, all at once.
"Then you’re a fool," he whispered. "Throwing away everything I—"
"I’m done listening."
Aren raised the Devourer.
The dragon head’s jaws split wide, wider than should have been possible, a hunger rolling off it that made the air around them feel thinner.
"Consu."
The word left his mouth, and the blade answered. Its jaws closed over what remained of Shadow — the mist, the darkness, the last flickering edges of him — and pulled it all inward, devouring it whole, vanishing into the sword without a sound.
For the first ti since this had started, there was nothing left standing across from him.
Just silence.
Just Aren, alone, breathing air that finally, finally felt like his own.
The mont Shadow vanished, the skies went back to normal, and the air returned to what it was. Everyone everywhere could feel it; they could tell that whatever it was that had been happening had now ended and was no more.
The groups looked at Aren with shocked gazes. They could all tell that Shadow was no simple enemy from the mont they saw him. They could see all that Aren had passed through, and yet sohow he had managed to win.
"I’ll be damned, the kid defeated it. He ended Shadow," Loki said with wide eyes.
"If I had not been here myself, I would never believe that he was capable of doing sothing like this."
While he was speaking, Aren, who had won the battle, was knocked out and no longer conscious. His entire body shut down. His body only stood in place out of sheer stubbornness and not wanting to fall.
The Ancient Devourer fell from his grip and hit the ground after a minute, and finally his body collapsed backward and hit the ground.
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