The moment the dimensional tear swallowed them whole, Rehan felt it.
A final, gentle unraveling behind him—soft as a held breath finally released.
He turned mid-flight, his golden-emerald aura flickering for just a heartbeat, and saw it: the patch of untouched golden grass, far below now on the shrinking Earth, where Ishita's body had lain in perfect peace. Her form had begun to dissolve—not into blood, not into ash, but into fine motes of soft golden-white light, drifting upward and outward like dandelion seeds caught in a windless sky.
Her soul aura—the last faint ember of it, the thing Rehan's Life-Reversal Authority had been quietly, desperately trying to keep tethered to her body this entire fight—finally guttered out completely.
She was gone. Not resting. Not dormant. Gone, in the final and total sense that even a Sovereign's power could not touch.
For one silent second, everything in Rehan stopped.
Then the light that had been Ishita scattered fully into the void, joining the stars being born in the widening tear above, and something in Rehan's chest sealed shut like a wound cauterizing itself.
"She's really gone," he whispered. Not a question. Not even grief anymore—grief needed room to move, and there was none left in him. Only a vast, quiet finality.
The Scarlet King, drifting several hundred meters away in the newly-opened black expanse beyond the tear, watched this with something almost like curiosity.
"You feel it too, don't you," the King said, his six weeping eyes narrowing. "The moment a soul truly ends. No more anchor. No more resurrection. No more mercy left to hope for."
Rehan didn't answer at first. He simply floated there, framed by the dying light of Earth's outer atmosphere far below and the endless dark of open space ahead, his golden-emerald aura no longer flaring wildly—now burning with a steady, absolute stillness, like a star that had stopped flickering and simply was.
"I want you here," Rehan finally said. "Not on Earth."
"Sentimental to the last," the King sneered. "Couldn't bear to burn her grave with our battle?"
"That's part of it." Rehan's golden eyes lifted, meeting the King's directly. "But mostly—I need room."
"Room?"
"Down there, I kept holding back. Half my strength went into not erasing a planet by accident. Into not burying her body under a mountain range. Into making sure innocent people three hundred miles away didn't die because you and I sneezed too hard at each other."
Rehan spread his arms slowly, and the black void around them began to hum, resonating with the raw pressure bleeding off his aura.
"Up here," Rehan continued, voice quiet and final, "there's no one left to protect. No world to spare. No reason left to hold anything back."
The stars themselves seemed to dim near him, light bending inward toward the density of his presence.
"Up here, Scarlet King, I finally get to stop being careful."
The King's six eyes widened—the first genuine flicker of true alarm crossing his stolen-divine features. He raised his glaive on instinct, crimson fire flooding through the fused remnant of Scarlet's stolen godhood in a desperate surge of defensive power.
"You think open space helps you?" the King snarled, though his voice trembled faintly at the edges. "Out here even I have to be careful of the scale of my own power—"
"Good," Rehan cut in, and his aura ignited into something new—no longer just golden-emerald flame, but light with actual weight, warping the space around his fists into faint visible ripples. "Then we're finally on even footing."
He vanished into the void—not with a shockwave this time, but with absolute, terrifying silence, the kind only true vacuum could offer.
The Scarlet King barely had time to raise his glaive before Rehan was already there.