Chapter 1107: Purity’s Attack, Peter’s Death

Peter rose from the floor of the closet.

The morning was, by every honest accounting of the man inside it, won. Anastasia lay sprawled across the soft white carpet beside him, naked, flushed, her dark hair fanned out behind her, her grey eyes lazy and pleased and following him as he stretched his shoulders and reached toward the suit rack for the linen tunic laid out for him an hour before they’d ruined the floor.

The bite mark on his shoulder still hummed.

He smiled.

He was about to make a joke about Russian receipts.

He didn’t get to.

His shadow opened.

That was the only honest description for what happened in the half-second before everything changed. The soft underglow of the closet was producing exactly one shadow at his feet—his own, faintly long, gold-edged from the architecture’s flattering light—and that shadow, without sound, without warning, unfolded.

Something stood up out of him—an angelic silhouette of merciless white fire and divine wrath.

A woman in white fire.

She had been waiting for the moment his guard would be exactly this far down.

Two flaming swords erupted from the empty air behind him and drew themselves into existence in her hands and the blades punched through his back with wet, searing thud as they went through him before his nervous system finished registering she was there.

One blade entered his back below the left shoulder blade, exited through the front of his chest in a clean shaft of white fire that punched a hole the size of a fist through his heart, and kept going.

The other entered higher, through his right lung, exited through his sternum, and stopped with its tip glowing six inches from Anastasia’s face.

The closet’s underglow died and reality recoiled.

Peter’s eyes flew open.

He looked down.

Two pillars of fire were sticking out of his chest.

His Eros form tried desperately, to ignite. It flickered once, twice, a stuttering golden corona that guttered and died.

The white fire was already inside him, eating him alive from the marrow outward.

He could feel the meat of his organs liquefying. He could feel the skin of his arms charring inward toward the bone in black, curling sheets. He could feel the System itself screaming.

Thirty-one wives... an entire empire of hearts and souls and futures. Every nerve in every one of them lit up at once as the load-bearing wall of their world was struck and began to collapse.

Peter turned his head.

Anastasia was naked, frozen, grey eyes wide and locked on the glowing tip of the blade hovering six inches from her face.

Her mouth was already open and a scream tore through the estate.

The entire Chasm answered with cataclysm. Every crystal vein in the walls detonated into blinding crimson light. The floors heaved as if the world’s spine had snapped. Distant mountain ranges cracked and slid into abysses.

Towers across the estate imploded in cascades of rubble. The pulse rolled outward in a planetary shudder, shaking the curvature of the earth itself.

Aria ripped into existence in the same fractured heartbeat—midnight silk and roaring spiritual aura exploding outward like the birth of a new cosmos. She saw Purity wrench the twin blades free in one vicious pull.

Flames howled like judgment itself as the angelic woman spun them, the motion alone splitting the sky visible through the shattered dome.

Purity raised the right blade for the killing stroke — and brought it down with the serene, unhurried grace of a being who had performed this exact motion since before stars had names.

Peter’s lips parted.

Whatever last sarcastic farewell, whatever final roast, whatever cocky you got me he might have offered the universe never reached the air.

Purity’s sword descended faster than light, stronger than the grinding of tectonic plates.

His head left his shoulders in a clean, flaming arc, trailing fire and blood and the small, amused half-smile that had been his final conscious expression —

Time fractured for Aria.

She took one step.

That single stride shattered the fabric of reality. Space folded in on itself, time stuttered and tore. The entire estate—every tower, every hall, every inch of stone and crystal—vanished in an instant, vaporized into subatomic mist.

Shockwaves erupted outward at speeds beyond comprehension, pulverizing mountain ranges into glittering dust clouds visible from orbit.

The planet’s crust seemed to have fractured in jagged lightning-bolt fault lines that raced across continents. The spiritual energy ignited in a roaring ring of plasma that wrapped the globe, triggering simultaneous in tidal waves tall enough to swallow entire civilizations.

Her one hand thrust forward, fingers closing around empty space where Peter’s neck had been a fraction earlier; the other palm unleashed a concentrated cataclysm of spiritual energy—a blinding lance of annihilation hot enough to bleach the planet’s crust white, punch a molten shaft toward the core, and threaten to destabilize the world’s rotation itself.

The blast left her like the death of every sun in the sky at once.

Peter’s head, already parting from his shoulders, turned mid-air. His eyes—still burning with fading life—locked on Anastasia where she was naked frozen amid the collapsing floor. The angelic woman’s unleashed fury was about to wash over her, reduce her to less than memory.

"NOOOOOO!" The scream ripped from his dissolving throat. "SAVE HER!"

It was like the last clean, command of a dying demigod, fired through every channel his body still possessed — chip, system, marrow, breath, soul — and it slammed into the small, forgotten part of his souls where the ⟨Protection Mark⟩ had waited in silence since that filthy Lincoln Heights alley.

The Mark answered.

Power surged from somewhere beyond knowing—neither Purity nor ARIA had ever sensed its like. A golden shield of pure, primordial light snapped around Anastasia. It blazed brighter than creation’s first dawn.

ARIA’s world-ending blast slammed into it, hurling the shielded woman skyward and across the horizon in a streak of golden safety, untouched. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

THUND!

The head spun once and toppled forward, trailing blood and embers like a falling comet, and landed with a heavy, wet thud exactly where Aria’s next earth-shattering step would have fallen.

ARIA’s first step had just arrived at that very instant... and her eyes widened a fraction. She sidestepped with precision that fractured the remaining foundations of the continent just to avoid squashing her master’s severed head—

Purity used that opportunity and her kick took ARIA in the ribs.

The impact was beyond sound, beyond existence. ARIA rocketed backward like a comet in reverse, carving a smoking canyon straight through the annihilated mountain range and vanishing into the dust-choked sky on the far side of the world.

Nothing of that mattered to Purity.

She stood amid the annihilation, twin flaming swords dripping molten judgment, angelic wings of pure apocalypse unfurling behind her. The estate lay in smoking ruin. The Chasm howled its death throes across the broken world.

Eros and Peter Carter had just died this very morning.

Eros Velmior Desiderion — Lust Incarnate, Dark Lord, Prince of Endless Ruin, the boy who had not yet seen his eighteenth birthday and yet carried thirty-one wives and the weight of a rising continental empire on his shoulders — bled out across the floor of his own walk-in closet at six fifty-eight in the morning with a half-moon bite mark still cooling on his left shoulder and his wife streaking across the Chasm in a golden dome four kilometres away.

Purity flicked the blood from her blade with a single, elegant snap of her wrist.

She did not register the closet as a closet, the bite mark or the ruined silk robe draped across the suit racks or the architecture’s heartbroken silence.

She had a target, and the target was down.

She turned her head toward the wall opposite the closet.

She raised both swords.

She knew exactly what was about to walk through it.