Evan didn't plead.
He just smiled.
As Kale's blade burned with white-blue light, hovering at Evan's throat, Scarlet stood nearby—bow drawn, arrow laced with soulfire.
"You don't understand what you're undoing," Evan said, voice almost calm. "You think killing me will end the cycle?"
Kale's golden eyes narrowed. "No."
"It starts it."
They struck together.
Kale's sword pierced Evan's chest.
Scarlet's arrow landed in his shadow.
The combination was precise—perfect.
Evan gasped once, blood flecking his lips.
Then his body crumpled, glowing briefly with red cracks across his skin, before disintegrating into ash.
It was over.
Or so they thought.
Kale stepped back, wiping his blade on the grass. But his breath caught in his throat.
"There's no recoil."
"No soul release."
"No rupture in the flow."
Scarlet approached, frowning. "Something wrong?"
"His death didn't change the weave," Kale murmured. "Not like before."
He knelt where Evan's body had vanished, fingers brushing the ashes.
"He wasn't the keystone this time. He was a decoy."
Scarlet froze. "Then who's pulling the strings?"
The wind answered.
It howled—not from the north, but from above.
The clouds cracked in silence.
And a voice—ancient, layered, wrong—whispered through the weave of the world:
"You were never meant to live, Kale Silva."
The sky rippled.
Reality itself groaned, as if something had been peeled back.
Kale staggered, clutching his head.
Images flashed through his mind—faster than thought.
A throne of void.A woman with no face.A broken hourglass bleeding stars.And a name. A name burned into the root of creation.
"Virelsa."
He whispered it aloud, the name foreign and familiar all at once.
"She… was before the gods."
"Before time."
"Before me."
Scarlet caught him as he stumbled. "Kale?! What did you see?"
He looked at her, eyes wild with clarity.
"The one ending the world…"
"…has been watching me. Every loop. Every death. Every rebirth."
"She's not in the loop."
"She made it."
The stars overhead shimmered—then went dark.
One by one.
Scarlet gripped his hand.
Kale, for the first time in hundreds of loops, felt something he hadn't in a long time.
Fear.