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. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

For one heartbeat, nobody moved.

Then Aren was already running.

He didn’t give Shadow the chance to stand. The Ancient Devourer came down again before Shadow had even finished sliding, catching him across the shoulder this time, 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 times over — but it rose half-formed 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 came first. It always came 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 name. I am not undone by some—"

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 time Shadow tried to rise, the sword was already there to put him back down. Every time he reached for more power, there was less of it to find.

Fear came next, when pride stopped working. Shadow hurled everything he had left into one final offensive — a dozen shadow spears at once, aimed 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 fragments drifting in the air like dead leaves.

By the time 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 flame finally running out of air to burn.

Shadow swung anyway. One last, furious, half-formed strike.

Aren caught it on the flat of his blade and shoved him down.

This time, Shadow didn’t get back up.

For a long moment 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 me 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 me. I gave up everything I was to make myself small enough to fit inside a single soul." His voice cracked, something 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 same thing, split down the middle. Work with me. 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."

Something 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.

"Consume."

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 time 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 moment 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 moment they saw him. They could see all that Aren had passed through, and yet somehow 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 something 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.