It was bitter.
I had often wondered, in the abstract way that immortals consider mortality, what my final moment would feel like. Would there be triumph? Regret? The cold peace of a well-fought ending?
Now I knew.
It tasted like copper and failure and the particular, humiliating warmth of life escaping a vessel that could no longer contain it.
But I was not dead yet.
And neither, damn him, was he.
The sky above the ruined city was the color of a bruise. Smoke rose from a hundred fires, threading through the skeletal remains of buildings that had once scraped the clouds. Below, the streets ran with the blood of my children—my generals, my soldiers, my faithful subjects who had followed me across the void between worlds.
The human's army had withdrawn.
So had mine.
What remained was what mattered: him and me. King against Commander. Three thousand years of conquest against two decades of desperate defiance.
The plaza that held us was cratered, shattered, littered with the bodies of soldiers who had strayed too close. The air itself felt thin, drained of mana by the sheer magnitude of what we had already unleashed.
The human stood fifty meters away, his chest heaving, his blade held in a two-handed grip. Black hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and blood—some his, most not. His armor was shredded, his left arm hung at an unnatural angle, and a deep gash across his ribs exposed bone with each ragged breath.
He should have fallen an hour ago.
He should have fallen hundreds of times.
And yet.
"You're still standing," I said. My voice rolled across the plaza like thunder, carrying the weight of royal authority. "I'll give you this, human. You have something I haven't seen in centuries."
He didn't respond. His eyes never left mine—calculating, measuring, knowing.
That was what unsettled me most. Not his strength, though it was considerable. Not his skill, though it bordered on the supernatural. It was the way he looked at me. Like he'd seen me before. Like he'd fought me before. Like he'd already won this battle in his mind, and everything now was just... formality.
I raised my hand.
The sky answered.
Mana gathered above me in visible streams of violet and black, spiraling into a sphere of condensed annihilation. My signature spell. The one that had ended kingdoms. The one that had carved canyons into the earth and boiled seas into steam.
"Behold," I said, "the last light your world will ever see."
The human moved.
Not away.
Toward.
He crossed fifty meters in less than a heartbeat, his ruined arm forgotten, his blade trailing a wake of silver light. I redirected the sphere, sending it screaming toward him—
He cut it.
Not deflected. Not dodged. He cut my annihilation sphere in half with a single stroke of that absurd blade, and the two halves detonated harmlessly behind him, scouring the ruins of buildings that were already rubble.
Impossible.
That spell had killed beings akin to gods.
I had no time to process. He was already inside my guard, his blade seeking my throat. I twisted, my own claws intercepting, and the shockwave of our collision flattened everything within a hundred meters.
Steel against claw.
Mana against mana.
Will against will.
We broke apart, circled, came together again. Each exchange carved new craters into the plaza. Each impact sent shockwaves through the already-shattered city. I struck with the force of avalanches; he met me with the precision of a surgeon. I wove spells that should have unraveled his soul; he severed them at their foundations before they could take root.
He knew my spell structures.
He anticipated my patterns.
It felt like fighting myself.
"You," I snarled, driving him back with a combination that had killed five archmages. He parried the first three strikes, absorbed the fourth on his blade's flat, and answered with a counter that opened a shallow cut across my chest. "You know me. How?"
He didn't answer.
He never answered.
He simply fought, silent and terrible, his calm eyes holding that unbearable recognition.
Minutes passed. Hours. Time lost meaning in the crucible of combat. We were beyond exhaustion, beyond pain, beyond everything except the primal equation of kill or be killed.
My claws found his side. His blade found my thigh. My tail wrapped around his ankle and hurled him through three buildings; he emerged from the dust already mid-charge, his broken arm somehow healed.
He was regenerating.
Impossible. Humans didn't regenerate. Humans couldn't—
I caught the flicker of mana around his wound. Not regeneration. Acceleration. He was forcing his body to heal at a rate that should have killed him, burning through his life force like fuel.
He was killing himself to kill me.
The realization brought something I hadn't felt in millennia: respect.
"You would spend your existence to end mine," I said. "Foolish. Admirable. Foolish."
He didn't respond. He simply attacked again.
And finally, finally, I understood.
This wasn't a battle.
This was an execution.
He had already won. Had won before we began. Every move I made, every spell I cast, every tactic I employed—he had already seen it, already countered it, already built his victory around it. I wasn't fighting a human.
I was fighting a conclusion.
The end came quietly.
One moment we were locked together, his blade against my claws, my weight pressing against his. The next, he was simply... elsewhere. Inside my guard. Behind my defenses. His blade sliding between my ribs from an angle I hadn't anticipated, following a path I hadn't seen.
Perfect strike.
Perfect placement.
Perfect knowledge.
I fell.
My knees hit the shattered stone. My claws scraped uselessly against the ground. The blade in my chest pulsed with each fading heartbeat, a foreign object that had no business existing inside my body.
His blade.
The human stood over me.
He was not what I had expected. Three thousand years of conquest had taught me to recognize power, to measure it in the stance of an enemy, the weight of their aura, the depth of their mana reserves. This human radiated none of those things now.
And yet.
And yet he had dismantled my armies. He had dismantled me.
His face was calm. Not triumphant, not gloating, not even particularly satisfied. Just... calm. The face of a man completing a task that had always been inevitable.
He held no weapon now. He didn't need one. The blade in my chest would finish what it had started.
"You were never meant to exist."
The words fell from his lips like a verdict. Final. Absolute. Unburdened by cruelty or satisfaction.
I tried to speak. To ask what he meant, to demand an explanation, to curse him with the last of my breath. But my lungs were filling with something that was not air, and all that emerged was a wet, rattling gasp.
The human watched me die.
He did not look away.
He did not flinch.
He simply watched, his calm eyes holding something I could not name—not hatred, not pity, but something in between. Something that might have been recognition.
I focused on his face.
On his face.
The face of the human who had killed me.
Aurelion Kade.
The name rose from somewhere—a report I'd read, a general's briefing, a passing mention of humanity's rising star. Yes. I knew this name. I knew this face.
He was the Vanguard's Supreme Commander.
Humanity's strongest weapon.
My executioner.
Darkness crept in at the edges of my vision. The sounds of the dying city faded: the crackle of flames, the distant screams, the clash of metal against claw. All of it receding, growing distant, becoming irrelevant.
But I held onto his face.
Held onto his name.
Held onto the promise that formed in my heart as my vision failed:
This is not the end.
I will find you.
In this life or the next.
I will find you.
And I will make you understand what you have taken from me.
Darkness.
Silence.
Nothing.