The sky was bleeding.
Not the real sky, if there ever was one here—just the false heavens of the 999th floor cracking apart like glass under pressure. Shards of starlight fell in slow motion, drifting past the broken ruins suspended in the void. Every breath I took tasted like ash.
And in the middle of it all, he knelt.
The Fallen God.
Crowned in rusted halos, wings torn and bound by spears. Six eyes dimmed like the last stars before dawn. A ruin of what had once ruled this place. Now, just another thing waiting to die.
"You… were never meant to reach this far," he rasped, voice layered with a thousand dying echoes.
I didn't answer.
Words didn't matter here—not anymore.
I stepped forward, glaive in hand. The shaft hummed faintly in my grip, its edge pulsing with the heartbeat of everything I had left behind. Where the blade scraped the floor, sparks bloomed—tiny, fleeting petals of starlight.
He surged up suddenly, one last burst of divine fury. Chains snapped. Reality screamed.
Above us, crimson lightning ripped through the void.
But I had already moved.
One step. A spin. I let my body flow into the final motion I'd rehearsed in my head a thousand times while climbing.
"Thread of Judgment."
The glaive carved a blooming arc through his chest. Light poured out, and then—
Silence.
He didn't scream. He didn't curse me.
He just… scattered. Like dust. Like stars.
His godhead shattering. And with it, everything that held this floor together.
I exhaled.
My knees almost buckled, but I stood still. I hadn't come this far to collapse now.
[System Notification]
[Challenge Complete]
› Target Eliminated: False God of Collapse
[Final Reward: Ascension]
› Soul has transcended mortal classification
› New Status: [Constellation]
› Title Assigned: "The Bloom Beyond the Spiral"
[Commencing transfer to the Realm Beyond Stars...]
"Wait—what?"
The air around me shifted. The Spiral was falling apart—no, shedding me. Like I didn't belong here anymore.
The light swallowed me before I could speak.
The Spiral was gone.