The wind did not blow. It fled.
Behind Rehan, the boiling air condensed into something ancient—something that had been waiting patiently for this exact moment of grief to arrive. Lord Ghost Demon raised his claw toward the fractured sky, and a river of crimson light tore itself free from the horizon: Scarlet, the bound remnant-god, screaming as her essence was ripped from whatever prison had held her.
"A sacrifice given willingly is sweet," the demon lord murmured, savoring the golden despair radiating off Rehan's broken form. "But a sacrifice taken in front of the one who loved her? That is a feast."
The crimson river plunged into Lord Ghost Demon's open chest. His shadowy form convulsed, cracked, and reformed—taller now, crowned in jagged crimson-void antlers, his skin shifting from ash-black to a molten obsidian veined with pulsing scarlet fire.
"KNEEL," the newly-crowned Scarlet King roared, and the mountain range for a hundred miles crumbled to powder from the pressure of his voice alone. "I am no longer a lord who serves. I have devoured a goddess and worn her fire as my crown. I am the Scarlet King now, and the world belongs to me."
Rehan did not look up.
He knelt over Ishita's body, one hand still pressed to her cold cheek, and something inside his chest that had held for one hundred and ninety-one chapters simply... stopped holding.
"You took her voice," Rehan whispered, so quiet the words barely disturbed the air. "You took her warmth. You took the only person who ever touched my face without fear."
Golden-emerald light began leaking from his pores like blood from an open wound.
"I gave you courtesy, Scarlet King. I gave you a fair fight. I gave you mercy."
The ground beneath Rehan's knees split into a spiderweb of light.
"I take it back."
His Zenith Sovereign Domain—which had always burned at a controlled, disciplined ninety percent, tempered by Ishita's gentle presence at his side—shattered its own ceiling. There was no one left to temper him now.
100%.
The sky itself tore open like wet paper. Golden-emerald flame erupted from Rehan's body in a pillar that pierced the clouds, turning night into a false, furious dawn. His hair bled from black to molten gold, his irises igniting into twin solar cores, and the very laws of the battlefield began to bend around the sheer, suicidal density of his aura.
The Scarlet King took an involuntary step back—the first retreat he had made in ten thousand years.
Rehan rose to his feet, cradling Ishita's body gently against the crook of one arm, refusing—even now—to let her touch the dirt.
"Every god you have ever eaten," Rehan said, his voice layered with something that was no longer entirely human, "is about to watch me eat you."
He vanished.
The mountain behind the Scarlet King simply ceased to exist a half-second before the King's own scream of pain reached the air.