KAISER – POV
The nightmare took me further back.
It took me to the end of the world.
I was just Tyler again. Small, powerless, hiding in the ash and the dirt while the sky burned. The sounds of the old war echoed around me—the deafening screech of artillery, the crunch of falling buildings, and the heavy, mechanical thud of the soldiers' boots.
They were holding me down. The metal of their augmented hands dug into my back, crushing the breath out of my lungs. I couldn't move. I couldn't fight. All I could do was watch.
"Tyler! Help me!"
Ellie. My little sister. Her voice was high, broken, terrified.
I thrashed against the soldiers, screaming until my throat tore, but I was just a kid. I was nothing.
The soldier standing over her raised his rifle.
I woke up with a violent, gasping breath, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
I sat bolt upright in bed, my chest heaving, cold sweat slicking my skin. The black flames of Convergence had unconsciously flared to life around my right fist, singing the edge of the mattress. I forced myself to breathe, unclinching my hand and pulling the power back down into my core until the flames sputtered out into harmless smoke.
The room was dark and quiet. Beside me, Hawk shifted in her sleep, her breathing steady and calm. Her face was relaxed, the lethal edge she carried during the day completely gone. I watched her for a moment, letting her quiet rhythm ground me back in reality.
I wasn't in the ruins. Ellie was gone.
I rubbed my face, tossing the blankets aside.
"Your vitals indicate a severe stress spike, Kaiser," Clara's voice murmured softly in my neural rig. "Night terror protocols suggest a mild sedative or a warm—"
"No sedatives, Clara," I whispered, pulling my heavy black coat over my shoulders.
"I just need some air."
I walked out of my quarters, moving silently through the underground corridors of the fortress. It was deep into the night. The warlords and the soldiers were asleep. The only sounds were the low hum of the generators and the occasional mechanical whir of a patrol drone.
I made my way to the lower motor-pool. My bike—a heavy, midnight-purple, modified hover-cycle—sat waiting in the dark.
I threw my leg over the seat and hit the ignition. The engine roared to life with a deep, satisfying growl that vibrated up through my boots.
I didn't tell anyone where I was going. I just hit the accelerator and shot out of the hidden exit tunnel, blasting out into the irradiated, neon-lit wasteland of Scarpoint.
The cold night air hit my face like a slap, clearing the lingering fog of the nightmare. I pushed the bike faster, weaving through the ruined, skeletal remains of old skyscrapers. The tires hovered inches above the cracked asphalt, leaving a faint trail of blue exhaust in my wake.
"You are exceeding safe operational speeds by forty percent," Clara noted. "And you are heading toward your old hideouts."
"That's the point," I said, leaning into a sharp turn that nearly scraped my knee against a rusted guardrail. "I need my head clear. The Accord starts in two weeks. We... I have to be ready."
"You are thinking about the war," Clara said, her AI logic cutting straight through my deflection. "You are thinking about your sister."
"I'm thinking about failing," I muttered, gripping the handlebars tighter. "I couldn't protect her back then. At the accord, I'm walking Tara into a room full of Kingpins. If I mess up, history rhymes."
"Your heart rate is stabilizing, but your cortisol levels remain high," Clara observed gently.
"You are not powerless anymore, Kaiser."
"I know, Clara," I sighed.
I pulled the bike to a slow halt in front of a battered metal door tucked discreetly into a shattered building. Above it, a neon sign flickered weakly, half the letters burned out so it just read "CA-- KAISER" in a sickly yellow glow. It was my old place. Casa Kaiser. A vault of weapons, memories, and bad decisions.
I killed the engine. The sudden silence was heavy.
I sat on the bike, staring at the flickering sign, trying to force my brain to focus on the tactical layout of the floating citadel. How many guards will Kazuo have? Where is the blind spot in that hellish place?
But then, the air around me changed.
It didn't get cold. It just stopped.
The wind died completely. The faint, ambient hum of the distant city vanished. The flickering neon sign froze, the electric buzz cutting out mid-crackle.
Every hair on my arms stood straight up. The Convergence traits inside me—Chrono-Skip, Gravity Compression, Dragon Vein—all violently flared to life simultaneously, roaring in absolute, instinctual panic.
"Kaiser—" Clara started, her voice suddenly spiking with frantic static.
"Alert. Massive temporal and spatial distortion detected. Reality is—"
"Clara, shut down," I commanded instantly, cutting off the neural link. I didn't want the AI anywhere near what was coming.
Ten feet in front of my bike, the air tore open.
It wasn't a portal. It didn't glow. It looked like someone had taken a knife to a painting and sliced a jagged, black hole right through the middle of the world.
From the absolute, crushing darkness of the tear, a young man stepped out onto the cracked asphalt of the old alley.
He looked exactly like he did Years ago.
He was lean, wearing a heavy, weather-beaten trench coat that was slightly too big for him. His dark hair was messy, falling into his eyes. He didn't look like a god. He didn't look like a Kingpin. He looked like the guy who used to steal my synth-beer when I wasn't looking.
Ryzen.
He put his hands in his pockets, looking around the ruined street with a mild, almost bored curiosity. His eyes flicked up to the half-lit neon sign of Casa Kaiser. Then, his dark gaze settled on me.
The sheer, suffocating pressure of his aura hit me like a physical mountain. It took every ounce of willpower I had, and the combined strength of a dozen stolen traits, just to keep sitting upright on the bike. The Nameless power rolling off him was older than the world, hungry and infinite.
I didn't draw the Hellwalker's katana. I didn't ignite the black flames. If he wanted me dead right now, I would already be dead.
I just looked at him.
"So," I said, my voice perfectly steady despite the hurricane of power pressing down on my lungs.
"I was right. You couldn't wait until the party."
Ryzen tilted his head, a faint, recognizable smirk touching the corner of his mouth.
"I wanted a private word," Ryzen said. His voice was horrible. It sounded like his old voice, but layered underneath it was a deep, resonant echo of something ancient and hollow.
"There's nothing to say," I replied, my golden eyes locked onto his dark ones.
"Do you even remember me, brother? Or whatever monstrosity that you've become?"
Ryzen let out a soft, dry laugh. He took a step forward, the concrete of the street instantly rotting into dust beneath his boot.
"Ahhh, Tyler," Ryzen whispered, the ancient echo in his voice vibrating in my teeth. The smirk on his face widened, but it didn't reach his cold, dead eyes.
"Tyler... still the same old Tyler. Playing your idiotic role."
The air was so still it felt like the world had died, leaving just the two of us standing in its grave.
Ryzen took another step forward. The concrete beneath his boots didn't just crack—it rotted. It turned to gray dust that instantly blew away into the frozen air, leaving perfect, boot-shaped voids in the street.
He didn't radiate anger. He didn't project malice. That was the most terrifying part about him. The presence bleeding out of his physical body felt less like a man and more like an endless, infinitely hungry abyss—a force of nature that had merely decided to wear a human skin for the evening.
"Tyler," Ryzen said softly, his voice impossibly gentle. He put his hands in the pockets of his trench coat, leaning his head back to look at the half-lit, sputtering neon sign of Casa Kaiser. "You always did have a terrible habit of building shrines of dead things. But I suppose it fits. And your naming sense is as terrible as ever."
"And you always had a terrible habit of breaking into places you weren't invited," I replied smoothly. I kept my hands resting loosely on the handlebars of my bike. I didn't reach for my guns. I didn't spark my flames. If I showed tension, he would dissect it.
"What do you want, Ryzen?"
The name didn't make him flinch. Instead, a warm, thoroughly human smile touched his lips. But his eyes—dark, bottomless, and devoid of any recognizable soul—remained completely dead.
"I wanted to see you, of course," Ryzen murmured, tilting his head with an eerie, effortless charm. "I wanted to understand this little project of yours. You have been very busy, little brother. Tearing down my Kingpins. Making grand speeches. Gathering up an army of rejects and broken toys. You have grown so capable."
"Someone had to clean up the mess," I said flatly.
Ryzen let out a soft, melodic sigh. It was the sound of a patient teacher dealing with a remarkably slow student.
"Mess?" he echoed, shaking his head slowly. "Oh, Tyler. Do you understand my disappointment now? You have limited your own potential by burying yourself in sentimentality. I didn't make a mess. I organized it."
He gestured gracefully to the irradiated, toxic ruins around us.
"Look at what was here before me," Ryzen continued, his tone perfectly even, almost hypnotic. "The old war. The corporations tearing people apart for spare parts. The absolute, screaming chaos. All I did was take the chaos and put it into neat, manageable little boxes."
"You call fifteen psychotic Kingpins grinding the surviving population into meat-paste 'organized'?" I asked, my golden eyes narrowing. I felt a heavy, insidious pressure pressing against the edges of my mind—his aura trying to quietly infect my thoughts, trying to make his twisted logic feel like absolute truth. I pushed back with the Convergence, holding my mental walls firm.
"I've seen your boxes, Ryzen," I spat, my voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "I pulled an eight-year-old girl out of a cage where one of your warlords was harvesting her body parts for fun. I've watched your people slaughter entire settlements just to test out new traits. Killing children. Raping the vulnerable. Carving people up to feed a hierarchy. Is that your grand design? Is that your idea of justice?"
Ryzen didn't look away. He didn't look ashamed. He didn't even look angry. He just looked profoundly, deeply bored by my morality.
"That isn't my justice, Tyler," Ryzen said softly, his voice echoing with an ancient, resonant power that made my bones vibrate.
"That is simply human nature."
He took another step closer. The air pressure dropped, making it hard to draw breath.
"You look at a severed leg, at a child in a cage, and you see a tragedy," Ryzen explained patiently. "I look at it and see the friction of a functioning engine. If you strip away my Kingpins... if you remove the structure I built... what do you think happens? Do they hold hands? Do they build utopias? No. They devour each other. The rape, the slaughter, the cages... I didn't invent those things, Tyler. That is the baseline of this pathetic species. I just built a zoo to contain the animals. Sometimes the animals bite each other inside the cages. It is regrettable, but it is entirely necessary for the zoo to exist."
"By putting yourself at the top of the food chain," I pointed out, my voice hard.
"Because I am the only one capable of perceiving the board," Ryzen answered, his warm smile returning. "I took the burden. I absorbed Valmont. I absorbed the rot so the rest of the world could survive in the margins."
I looked at him. As he spoke, as he held back the crushing, god-like weight of his aura just enough to hold a conversation, the physical toll began to show.
The illusion of his youth finally began to fracture.
The smooth, twenty-something face of my old brother started to shift. The skin around his eyes sagged, turning a sickly, translucent gray. Deep, heavy lines carved themselves into his forehead and cheeks like ravines in dry earth. His dark hair thinned rapidly, turning ash-white at the roots. His shoulders slumped slightly beneath the trench coat as the sheer mass of the Nameless power ate away at his human vessel from the inside out.
He was aging decades in a matter of seconds. The paradox of a god trapped in a decaying, mortal shell.
But his eyes—those terrifying, bottomless voids—remained fixed on me, sharp and calculating.
"You think you understand what's happening here," Ryzen rasped, his voice now sounding like an eighty-year-old man choking on dust, though his tone remained perfectly, chillingly calm. "You've spent years playing rebel. You found Kane. You found that sniper, Artemis. You even managed to convince a time-manipulator that you're worth following."
He stopped pacing, standing perfectly still in the rotting street.
"I watched you tear Baron Varn apart," Ryzen continued, his voice dropping into a patronizing lilt. "It was quite theatrical. But Tyler, Varn was an idiot. He was a bloated pig holding onto a territory I let him have because he was useful for keeping the lower sectors distracted. You think killing him makes you a threat to me?"
"I think the fact that you're standing in front of me right now proves I'm a threat to you," I shot back, a faint smirk touching my lips.
Ryzen let out a dry, rattling laugh. He raised a trembling, gray finger, pointing it directly at my chest.
"Look at you," Ryzen whispered, the insidious mental pressure doubling. "Emperor of the wastes. You think you're leading a revolution. You think you're going to march into the Manhattan Accord and tear down my system. You want the world to believe you are a monster... but I see right through the mask, Tyler."
The street was so quiet I could hear the ash settling on the asphalt.
"You don't give a damn about the zones," Ryzen said, his words sliding into my mind like cold needles. "You don't care about the people. You didn't build this army to save the world. You built it as a monument to your own survivor's guilt."
He leaned forward, his ancient, decaying face illuminated by the sickly yellow glow of the neon sign.
"Even after all this recklessness," Ryzen continued, twisting the psychological knife with surgical precision. "Even after all the blood you've spilled... you still want your brother back, don't you?"
I didn't move. I didn't breathe.
"You're still just that pathetic kid," Ryzen sneered softly, his hollow eyes gleaming with a twisted, fatherly pity. "You're still the terrified little boy hiding in the ash, begging for his older brother to come home and make the monsters go away. You want to beat the god out of me and find your brother underneath. That's why you haven't attacked me yet. That's why you're standing there, letting me talk. Because underneath all the stolen traits... you're just a grieving child throwing a tantrum so I'll finally look at you."
I looked at his aged, decaying face. I looked at the terrifying, world-ending aura pressing down on my shoulders. I felt the cold, dead silence of the ruined street pressing in on me from all sides, his words trying to dismantle the very foundation of my sanity.
I closed my eyes for a long, slow second.
I thought about the Spire. I thought about the fire, and Kane screaming. I thought about Tara's missing eye, and the absolute betrayal that had shattered my life.
I opened my eyes. A low, dark chuckle started deep in my chest, completely devoid of the heartbreak he was expecting.
"Actually," I said, my voice perfectly calm, cutting through his mental manipulation like a diamond blade.
"You're right, Ryzen. I wanted to talk to you as well."
The chuckle died in my throat, leaving a cold, absolute silence in its wake.
I kept my hands on the handlebars of the bike, my knuckles white, the leather of my gloves creaking slightly under the strain. I looked at the ancient, decaying shell of the man who used to be my brother. The man who had been my entire world after the fire took Ellie.
"I've spent years running simulations in my head," I started, my voice dropping to a low, quiet hum that seemed to vibrate against the dead concrete.
"Years of waking up with the smell of the Spire burning in my lungs. Years of feeling the ghost of Kane's blood on my hands. I've killed hundreds of people, Ryzen. I've torn traits out of screaming warlords, I've toppled empires, and I've built a fortress out of their bones."
I leaned forward, my golden eyes drilling into his hollow, empty ones.
"But the one thing I couldn't figure out... the one variable that never made sense in any of the math," I continued, the raw, unfiltered truth bleeding into my words. "Why? Why did you do it? You didn't just kill Valmont. You didn't just take his throne. You brought the building down on us. You looked me in the eye, you looked Kane in the eye... and you left us to burn."
Ryzen stood perfectly still. The wind remained dead. The neon sign above us sputtered weakly, casting long, sickly shadows across his heavily lined face.
For a moment, he didn't say anything. He just looked at me with that same, terrifyingly calm detachment. But then, very slowly, he tilted his head. The corner of his mouth twitched, not with a smirk, but with something that looked almost like a distant, clinical sorrow.
"Because you were my weakness, Tyler," Ryzen answered.
The words didn't come out as a booming, god-like decree. They came out as a soft, raspy whisper, carrying the weight of a horrific, absolute truth.
"You think I betrayed you because I didn't care?" Ryzen asked, taking a slow step forward. The air pressure around us grew impossibly heavy, a physical manifestation of his suffocating logic. "You think I left you in the rubble because you meant nothing to me? Oh, little brother. It was precisely the opposite."
He stopped a few feet away from the bike. I could see the ash-white roots of his hair, the deep, dark bags under his eyes.
"The Nameless power requires a void," Ryzen explained patiently, like a scholar explaining a mathematical proof. "To hold the world together, to absorb the rot of fifteen different territories and distribute it into a functioning system... a vessel cannot have cracks. It cannot have attachments. Attachments create bias. Attachments create hesitation."
He reached out a trembling, pale hand, gesturing to the space between us.
"You and Kane... you were my everything," Ryzen said, his voice completely hollow, entirely devoid of the warmth the words should have carried. "You were my family. You were my conscience. When I looked at you, I saw a reason to be human. I saw a reason to hope for a better world."
He slowly lowered his hand, his dark eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that made my skin crawl.
"And that hope," Ryzen whispered, "would have destroyed me. If I had kept you by my side, I would have compromised the system to protect you. I would have made mistakes to keep you safe. The throne of the Overlord cannot be occupied by a man who loves his kin. It can only be occupied by a god who feels nothing."
My chest tightened. A cold, heavy weight dropped into my stomach.
"So," Ryzen concluded, his voice flattening into an absolute, chilling calm. "I had to sever the connections. In order to become the pillar the world needed, I had to cut away the pieces of myself that cared. You were my everything, Tyler. So I had to become nothing."
The silence stretched out, thick and suffocating.
I stared at him. I heard the words. I understood the horrific, twisted logic of his god-complex. He hadn't betrayed us out of malice. He had betrayed us because he had convinced himself that our love was a flaw in his grand design.
A sharp, sudden sting hit the corner of my right eye.
I blinked, but it was too late. A single tear broke free, tracking a hot, wet line down my cheek, cutting through the ash and dirt on my skin. It hung on my jawline for a fraction of a second before dropping, hitting the leather of my glove with a tiny, silent splash.
Ryzen saw it.
His eyes tracked the tear. The distant, clinical sorrow on his face vanished instantly, replaced by a wide, patronizing, almost cruel smile. He leaned forward, looking at the wet spot on my glove like an entomologist examining a fascinating bug pinned to a board.
"Ahhh," Ryzen breathed out, the ancient echo returning to his voice, vibrating with sick amusement. "Emotion. It's cute, isn't it? The way the human body physically leaks water when the mind cannot process its own inadequacy. You are crying, Tyler. After all this time, after all your posturing... you are crying because I broke your heart."
He let out a soft, mocking laugh, shaking his head.
"You haven't changed at all," Ryzen sneered, the manipulative edge of his aura pressing down on my mind, trying to crush my spirit into dust. "You're exactly the same fragile, broken boy I left in the Spire."
I kept my head down for a moment, looking at the tear on my glove. The silence hung in the air, heavy with his triumph.
Then, I slowly lifted my head.
The grief that had sparked the tear was gone. The hesitation was gone. The desperate, lingering hope that Morgana had warned me about—the hope that I could somehow pull my brother out of this monster—evaporated completely, leaving nothing behind but absolute, freezing clarity.
My golden eyes locked onto his dark ones. The black flames of Convergence didn't roar to life in anger. They ignited slowly, silently, wrapping around my forearms in a tight, concentrated coil of absolute destruction.
"You misunderstand, Ryzen," I said softly, my voice completely stripped of any warmth.
I reached up with my thumb, casually wiping the wet streak from my cheek.
"That tear?" I whispered, a dark, wicked smile finally breaking across my face, revealing the monster I had built myself into.
"That wasn't for you. That was for my brother. I just finally realized that he died years ago."
Ryzen's smile faltered. Just for a fraction of a second, but it was enough. The absolute certainty in his dark eyes rippled, the god-complex suddenly bumping into something it hadn't calculated.
"You think you understand the board, Overlord?" I said, stepping off the bike. My boots hit the cracked asphalt with a heavy, deliberate thud. The black flames of the Convergence crawled up my arms, burning so hot they began to warp the frozen air around me.
"You think you're the only one who has been running the math?"
I took a slow step toward him. Ryzen didn't retreat, but the atmospheric pressure of his aura spiked defensively, trying to push me back. It felt like walking through a hurricane of solid lead, but I didn't stop.
"You cut away your humanity to become a god," I continued, my voice echoing loudly in the dead street. "You absorbed Valmont. You took his power. You took the rot. And you thought that made you invincible. You thought it made you the perfect system."
"I am the perfect system," Ryzen rasped, his voice tightening with a sudden, uncharacteristic edge of irritation. The deep lines on his aged face deepened as the Nameless power strained against my approaching presence. "I hold the balance. I—"
"You hold nothing," I cut him off, my golden eyes flashing. "Because you missed the fundamental flaw in your own design."
Ryzen's eyes narrowed. "There is no flaw."
"Then why are you aging, Ryzen?" I asked softly, tilting my head.
The words hit him like a physical blow. He stiffened, the baggy trench coat shifting over his withering shoulders.
"You think I didn't notice?" I asked, gesturing to his graying hair, to the sickly, translucent skin sagging around his cheekbones. "You look like a corpse that forgot to lie down. You think I got Convergence by luck? Did you ever stop to think about Valmont's power? I was the one who scouted Valmont. I gave you the details about his abilities back when we fought him."
Ryzen remained perfectly still, but the air around him grew frantically cold. The silence in the street turned brittle, ready to shatter.
"I knew for a fact I couldn't trust you, or even Kane, power changes people, getting near him," I said, a dark, dangerous grin pulling at my lips. "Because I figured it out, Ryzen. I figured out the secret of your godhood. The true power of the Nameless King isn't absorption. It never was."
I took another step closer. I was now standing just five feet away from the god of the eastern seaboard.
"It's Divergence," I whispered, the word hanging in the air like an executioner's blade. "Splitting. Fracturing. Spreading your disease into fifteen Kingpins to keep the world broken. You didn't absorb Valmont's power to hold the world together. You absorbed it to split yourself apart, because your human vessel couldn't handle the raw mass of the Nameless. You gave the Kingpins their traits because you needed them to act as heat sinks for your own overflowing energy."
Ryzen's aged face twisted. The mask of the patient, bored god cracked, revealing the raw, instinctual truth underneath. The street groaned violently beneath his boots.
"And what happens when someone starts killing your Kingpins, Ryzen?" I asked, my voice rising, the black flames roaring to life around my shoulders. "What happens when I slaughter Kazuo? Or Ignatius? What happens when I finally put a blade through Cassandra, Lee, and the Widow? Their traits don't just disappear. The power has to go somewhere. It returns to the source. It returns to you."
I spread my arms wide, looking at his decaying, crumbling form.
"You are suffocating on your own power," I stated, the absolute truth of it ringing out in the night. "Your vessel is breaking down because I am systematically removing your pressure valves. And what's the exact opposite of Divergence, brother?"
I didn't wait for him to answer.
"Yeah. That's right. It's me," I said, my golden eyes burning with absolute certainty. "Convergence. I pull it all back together. I am your flaw. I was born to be the poison in your veins. Every time I take a trait, every time I kill a Kingpin, I am forcing the rot back down your throat."
I drew in a deep breath, letting the chaotic energy of a dozen stolen traits pool in my chest, my lips parting to form the final threat. I was ready to name his trait. I was ready to shatter his power right here in the street.
But Ryzen didn't panic. He didn't raise his hand to strike me down.
Instead, the fear that had briefly flashed across his face vanished, instantly replaced by a deep, resonant, impossibly arrogant laugh.
"Ah," Ryzen sighed, tilting his head back. The ancient echo in his voice reverberated through the empty street, shaking the broken windows of Casa Kaiser. The air pressure suddenly shifted, twisting around his amusement. "As expected of my little brother."
He slowly brought his gaze back to me, the bottomless voids of his eyes glittering with a sickening, condescending pride. He clapped his gray, trembling hands together twice—a slow, mocking applause that cut through the tension like a knife.
"Well done, Tyler," Ryzen said softly, his voice dripping with manipulative warmth. "You figured out the mechanics. You saw the board. Do you need a pat on the shoulder? A crowd to cheer for you, perhaps? You are so desperate to prove you've outsmarted me, you completely missed the point."
He stepped closer, entirely unbothered by the black flames of Convergence swirling around me.
"You think forcing the power back into my vessel is a flaw?" Ryzen whispered, leaning in so close I could smell the ozone and rot radiating off his skin.
"Tyler, if the vessel breaks, the power doesn't die. It just stops being contained. You think I am afraid of aging? I am shedding this useless human shell. You aren't poisoning me. You're just speeding up my evolution. You're helping me finally discard the last piece of Ryzen."
He smiled, a terrifying, inhuman expression that stretched too wide across his decaying face.
"So," Ryzen murmured, spreading his hands. "Say the name. Try to shatter me. Or keep killing my Kingpins. Every move you make on this board just pushes me closer to ascension. You haven't won the argument, little brother. You just finally learned the rules of the game."
I stared at him. The sheer, overwhelming arrogance of his manipulation pressed against my mind, trying to crush my victory into dust. He was trying to turn my greatest weapon into a part of his own design.
I didn't argue back. I didn't try to counter his logic. I just let the black flames of the Convergence slowly recede back into my core, pulling the power down into a tight, coiled spring.
I looked the king of the world in the eye.
"Crawl back to wherever you came from," I said, my voice completely flat, devoid of the anger he was trying to feed on. "And wait for me, brother."
Ryzen's smile widened slightly, his eyes tracking my absolute lack of fear.
"I will come for you," I promised, the words ringing out with absolute, chilling certainty. "Watch carefully as I destroy and claim your perfect system. Watch as I take every single piece of your grand design and build my empire out of it."
Ryzen looked at me for a long, quiet moment. The dark aura around him pulsed, humming with a mixture of ancient hunger and twisted brotherly pride.
"Well played, brother," Ryzen said softly, stepping backward toward the jagged tear in reality. The oppressive pressure in the air began to lift as the shadows wrapped around his aging form. "I will be waiting."
He paused right at the edge of the rift, half-swallowed by the absolute darkness.
"Try not to die before that," Ryzen added.
Then, his dark eyes flicked up to the glowing neon sign above my head. A cruel, petty smirk touched his lips. He raised his hand, pointing a single, trembling finger at Casa Kaiser.
"Oléthros," Ryzen muttered.
The word hung in the air for a fraction of a second before reality obeyed.
With a deafening, catastrophic screech of tearing metal and shattering concrete, the entire three-story structure of Casa Kaiser imploded. It didn't just collapse—it was crushed inward by an invisible, localized sphere of absolute destruction, the brick and mortar instantly grinding into a fine, gray dust that rained down over my bike.
The tear snapped shut, swallowing Ryzen whole, leaving nothing behind but the howling wind and the settling debris of my old home.
I stood in the dark street, slowly brushing a layer of pulverized brick off the leather of my coat. I looked at the massive pile of rubble where the half-lit neon sign used to be.
"Yeah," I muttered into the empty air, completely unfazed.
"Right back at you, asshole. That was my favorite place."
End of Volume