The black hole unfurled from the devil's palm like a wound in the world—swallowing torches, stone dust, even sound itself. The walls of the citadel bent inward, groaning beneath the sudden, unnatural weight. Light itself screamed as it was pulled in.
But Chalice?
He lunged forward.
Straight toward the devil, straight toward the abyss, laughing.
"YES!" he roared, blade outstretched, feet slamming against buckling stone. "Let the stars fall and the heavens tear—I'll still meet you in the center!"
The devil didn't flinch. He pivoted smoothly, his light-rapier flashing into place, catching Chalice's blade with a shriek of heat and pressure.
CLANG!
The two were flung back from the force, only to rebound and meet again—sword to sword, fury to silence. The void behind them grew, a slow, expanding heartbeat of cosmic death. Everything it touched bent or broke or vanished.
Outside the citadel, the golden banners of the Northern Banner rippled violently. The soldiers stared toward the central tower, where the walls looked like they were being dragged inward. A twisting coil of light and shadow spilled through the cracks, yet no sound reached them. Only silence. And fear.
Inside—
The battle raged.
Chalice darted to the side, slamming his sword into the devil's rapier with all the weight of his body. The clash shot out shockwaves—columns cracked, and the floor splintered beneath them like thin ice under fire.
"You call yourself the False Sun," Chalice growled, pushing hard against the devil's blade. "But you wield a black hole—darkness itself."
He snarled, twisted, broke the clash, and launched a vicious downward strike. "How?"
The devil sidestepped like a ripple of silk. "Because I am light," he answered, tone soft, maddeningly calm. "All of it. The first shimmer of day… the last flicker before night. The creator of clarity—" he parried Chalice's next strike— "and the devourer of it."
Chalice flipped backward, spinning once mid-air before landing in a low stance, the dust spiraling around him.
"Then you're not the False Sun," he muttered, eyes wide with a grin. "You're the Final One. The light that burns after the end."
The devil tilted his head, expression unreadable.
"I've been called many things."
"Well," Chalice said, stepping forward, sparks trailing his boots, "I only need one."
He exploded forward—Golden Tempest—a blinding surge of sword strikes, too fast to count. The devil twisted through them like liquid flame, answering each swing with his own—a counterpoint in a duet of annihilation.
The void roared behind them, no longer passive. It pulled on their cloaks, on the broken stones, on their shadows. It began eating the floor, tile by tile.
Neither man moved from the fight.
They clashed under a collapsing arch.
They fought on crumbling stairways.
They dueled inches from the edge of the expanding hole, the battlefield falling apart beneath their very feet.
At one point, Chalice leapt into the air and hurled his sword like a divine spear—
The devil split it in half mid-flight—
—but Chalice was already behind him, catching the falling hilt, swinging the broken blade upward in a crescent strike that exploded into radiant flame.
The devil's cloak caught fire. He didn't react.
He batted Chalice back with a wave of light and reformed his rapier with a twist of his fingers—thinner now, even deadlier, pulsing like a vein of raw starlight.
The entire citadel's interior began to fold inward.
Chunks of ceiling were devoured. Pillars were ripped from their moorings. Even sound was beginning to vanish in pieces.
Still, Chalice laughed.
Still, he fought.
Then came a moment—brief, sharp, eternal—where they paused.
Both stood on the very edge of the black hole, their silhouettes lit by the spiraling absence of light behind them.
The devil's rapier hovered just beneath Chalice's throat.
Chalice's shattered sword rested against the devil's ribs.
Their chests rose and fell, breathless. But neither stepped back.
The devil had been smiling for some time now—a faint, wicked curve that mirrored Chalice's own grin. It was not mockery. It was something deeper. Amusement. Kinship. Respect.
"Why?" the devil asked at last, voice soft, almost curious. "Why do you smile in the face of oblivion?"
Chalice's eyes burned like dawn over a battlefield.
"Because I was born for it," he said, his grin widening like a gash in the world. "I am the Prince of War. The blood in the thunder. The breath before the charge."
His voice rose, cutting through the stillness.
"I am the Flame of the Citadel! The God-Splitter! The Last Laugh of Heaven!"
The devil threw his head back and laughed—a dark, rolling sound that echoed through the unraveling stone. "Then let us burn, Prince of War."
And with that, he spread his arms.
The black hole behind him surged—like a flower blooming in reverse, pulling the world inward.
And the final phase of their battle began.
The citadel groaned.
Its walls buckled as the black hole fed like a ravenous beast, devouring stone, light, and memory alike. Stained glass windows shattered in silence, sucked inward. Spires twisted into arcs of rubble before vanishing, swallowed by the vortex's insatiable hunger. And at its heart—
Chalice and the devil of light danced atop a crumbling world.
The ground beneath them cracked, surged, vanished. And yet neither yielded.
Chalice lunged again, his greatsword flaring with golden streaks. The air shimmered around him, broken by the sheer force of his swings.
"Come on!" he roared, laughter tangled in fury. "You call that divine? My old mentor used to slap harder than this!"
The devil of light ducked under a spinning strike, gliding backward across the ruins as if the crumbling earth were ice. His rapier curved through the air like a comet's tail, its trail distorting the light around it. He thrust forward—quick, surgical.
Chalice caught the strike with his gauntlet, a line of blood instantly blooming across his forearm. He didn't care.
"Bleed with me, you shadow-drenched coward!"
The devil responded with a smile that shimmered faintly, almost mournful. "I do not bleed with mortals. I end them."
"You've been talking a lot for someone getting dragged through their own gravity well," Chalice quipped.
Another exchange.
Blades met again and again, the clang of their duel drowned beneath the mounting roar of the black hole now stretching across what was once the grand citadel's inner sanctum.
Columns fell.
Balconies collapsed.
And still, they fought.
The devil of light flicked his hand mid-strike, creating mirrored clones of himself, each blinking into existence in streaks of pale brilliance. Three rapiers stabbed forward at once.
Chalice's eyes narrowed. "Cute trick."
He spun, his blade sweeping in a wide arc—his aura bursting outward in a radiant flare. The clones shattered like glass caught in a sunburst.
"I'm the real one," the devil said from behind him.
But Chalice had already pivoted, their swords clashing in a flash so bright it sent a shockwave across the dying citadel. The light evaporated the last standing gate tower. Ash fell like snow.
"Why a black hole?" Chalice asked suddenly, panting. "Aren't you supposed to be light? Doesn't this go against your whole aesthetic?"
The devil tilted his head slightly, golden eyes aglow. "I am all light. The first rays. The last eclipse. The flicker of a candle. The blinding sun. I am what light becomes when it dies—when it forgets it ever wanted to shine."
"So… both the meal and the fire," Chalice muttered.
The devil nodded solemnly. "And you, Prince of War?"
Chalice smiled again—eyes bright even as the world broke around him. "I'm what marches on after the fire's out. The part of war that never ends."
The black hole surged. It had consumed everything—the citadel was no more. Only floating shards remained, orbiting the singularity like dead moons. The sky above had turned violet, sickly, as if the stars themselves had recoiled.
Only the two of them remained.
The armies were gone—either fled, finished, or crushed beneath falling stone. The Northern Banner's troops had wiped out the Crimson Vale's before the collapse, but now, even they stood at the edge of the battlefield, watching the center from afar, unable to comprehend what they saw.
A godling and a devil. The last light before oblivion.
They charged again—no banter now, just fury. Pure expression. Chalice's strikes came faster than before, not out of desperation, but devotion. To the fight. To the legacy.
To the truth.
Then—
The pages ended.
Torn.
As if the story itself had refused to continue.
Niko's eyes bulged. "You've gotta be fucking kidding me."
He flipped through the book, fingers frantic, breath sharp. No more pages. The last ones had been ripped—violently, angrily. Someone didn't want this tale finished.
He stared at the jagged paper edge for a long moment. Then slowly closed the book and leaned back on the cracked library chair.
"…Damn," he muttered.
Everything he had just read—it confirmed too much.
The Pale Arc had its own stories. Its own legends. Its own devils and gods. Chalice didn't feel like a creation of the House. He felt… older. Wilder. Like the Pale Arc itself had once been whole, long before the House ever carved its gates into being.
And this devil—this False Sun—wasn't just a creature. He was part of that world. As deep and real as the stones in the citadel.
Niko exhaled, resting the book on his knee.
A smirk tugged at his lips. "I was right."
The Pale Arc wasn't just another wing of the House. It was something different. A kingdom swallowed. A story half-erased. And he was standing right in its memory.
"Guess I'll have to finish the story myself."
And with that, he stood up, the shadows of the ruined library dancing around him, and walked deeper into the unknown.