— Any last words, Zario?..
The question, devoid of any expectation of an answer and spoken in a voice that no longer had anything human in it except a smoldering determination, hung in the hot air, thick with soot, blood and destruction, as if the space itself, saturated with countless deaths, refused to allow these sounds to dissipate, holding them between two figures standing in the middle of a distorted, almost dead world.
Zario watched.
Through a blurry, heavy gaze, drowning in scarlet reflections, in which was reflected the silhouette of a man who knows no fear, who does not recognize hesitation and who nourishes such a deep, time-purified hatred that it lost its chaos and became something cold, verified, almost sacred in its direction towards the soul of the one who stood before him.
Zario's body, once the embodiment of absolute power, obeying only his own will and rejecting any laws except those imposed by himself, no longer belonged entirely to him, for every attempt at movement was met with a dull, viscous pain that spread along the broken lines of his flesh, while blood, thick and dark to the extreme, burst from his lips, flowed down his chin, fell to the ground, where there was no longer a distinction between what was alive and what had long since lost all meaning.
The realization, slowly and inexorably penetrating the remnants of his consciousness, did not carry within itself any panic or resistance, since even in this extreme state he perceived what was happening not as a defeat, but as a pattern, to which, perhaps, he had been moving from the very moment when he first called himself the embodiment of the balance between good and evil, without noticing how this balance began to line up against him.
The words were born with difficulty.
Every sound that broke through the blood, through the destroyed breath, through the disintegrating sense of one's own self, became an effort comparable to the last attempt to hold on to an elusive reality.
"I…" his croak broke off, dissolving in the thick air, but his will, stubborn and unbroken to the very end, forced him to continue, "I… lived… the best life…"
The meaning of these words needed no confirmation, since there was no justification in them, no regret, no attempt to be understood, but only a calm, almost indifferent recognition of one's own completeness.
— I don't regret anything…
The silence that followed these words was not empty, for the tension within it, like a spring compressed to its limit, was building, ready to burst at the next moment.
The face of the man standing opposite changed.
Not harshly, not outwardly, but enough that the air around him became even heavier, as the anger, previously contained, measured and directed, began to rise from the depths in which it had long accumulated, turning into a force devoid of doubt.
The fingers gripping the hilt of the sword slowly tensed, conveying to this movement not haste, but the finality characteristic of sentences that are not subject to review.
The bixbite blade, the only weapon capable of breaking the very nature of Zario's invulnerability, reflected in its cold, alien surface the very crimson reality it was meant to complete, as if it were not a tool, but a necessary condition for the existence of balance.
Raising the sword was not a gesture.
He was a solution that had already happened.
And in the next moment, a movement, devoid of hesitation and doubt, cut through space, leaving behind a thin, almost elusive trace, in which there was no longer a future for the one who stood in the line of attack.
The division took place without resistance.
Without sound to convey the finality of the moment.
Zario's head, severed from his body, lost its connection to what had only moments before been his existence, while his body, deprived of its center, slowly succumbed to gravity, falling to the ground with a heavy, final inevitability.
The world fell silent.
Not because there are no sounds left in it, but because what made them meaningful has disappeared.
The man remained standing.
The sword, weighted with blood, remained in his hand, as if even after the blow had been completed it could not be released, for something more than just a weapon was held together with it.
Drops of water, slowly flowing down the blade, fell down, dissolving into the ground, where the boundary between past and present, between cause and effect, no longer existed.
His breathing, previously even and controlled, became deeper, heavier, as if his body was finally allowing itself to feel what had been suppressed until the very end.
And in this state, in which victory had already been achieved but not yet accepted, in which the goal had been fulfilled but its meaning had begun to slip away, something arose within him that did not fit into the expected completion.
A feeling devoid of form, but already possessing weight.
A feeling that never went away.
A feeling that was beginning to destroy the clarity with which he had approached this moment.
Doubt.
A growing, heavy, formless feeling, like a slowly closing ring, haunted the one called a hero, because at the very moment when his blade completed what every second of his existence had been lived for, something arose in the depths of his consciousness that defied explanation and suppression.
A vague but persistent feeling of incongruity, as if the action he had performed, while perfectly right from the world's point of view, did not coincide with something deeper than duty or hatred, and this contradiction, having neither words nor a clear form, began to slowly eat away at him from within.
He couldn't pinpoint the source of this feeling, since neither logic, nor memory, nor the losses he had experienced gave reason to doubt it, and yet there was an emptiness inside him that didn't feel like relief, didn't feel like completion, but rather like a hole that had formed where the end point of his journey should have been.
***
At the same moment in which everything ended for the world, nothingness did not come for Zario.
The rupture that occurred between his body and consciousness did not lead to the expected disappearance, since, contrary to the natural order of things, his perception did not crumble, did not dissolve, and did not lose integrity, but retained a strange, distorted form of existence in which there was neither a body nor the usual sensations, but there remained a clarity that kept his "I" from final disintegration.
He remembered.
Not in scraps, not in fragments, but as a whole – the moment of impact, the cold of the blade passing through flesh, and that brief, almost imperceptible flash in which his existence should have ended, but for some reason did not.
And then…
A transition that has no extension, no time, no form.
It was as if the very concept of distance had lost its meaning, and instead of movement there was an instantaneous shift, tearing him out of one reality and plunging him into another, leaving nothing between them that could be called a boundary.
Zario ended up... somewhere.
The space in which he now existed defied description by conventional categories, for it lacked landmarks, lacked gravity, lacked any sense of direction, while the surrounding emptiness was neither darkness nor light, but something in between, fluid, barely perceptible, as if the very structure of this place had not yet been fully formed.
The realization did not come immediately, but once it took shape, it took the form of a question in which there was neither fear nor hope, but only an attempt to correlate what was happening with the laws known to him.
— The afterlife... world?..
The word, having barely formed in his perception, immediately turned out to be insufficient.
Because this place did not bear the signs of an afterlife that legends spoke of, it did not possess either peace or the emptiness in which everything that has lost its connection with life dissolves.
It was not meant for the dead.
It was meant for... others.
This thought did not arise as a guess, it manifested itself as knowledge that had no source, but possessed undeniable clarity.
The place he found himself in did not accept everyone.
It took away.
And the very fact of his presence here meant not the end, but the beginning of something that did not obey any of the laws that he had followed before.
Then, breaking the viscous, oppressive silence, in which existence itself began to lose its shape, a single voice rang out – flawlessly pure, devoid of the slightest distortion, permeated with such an unearthly, almost frightening beauty that Zario had never heard in his entire existence.
— Here is the last candidate.