"You have nothing to give me, Sylvester," said Dex in a quiet, measured voice, yet one carrying the weight of mountains and the depth of oceans. His words reverberated inside the dome like a final, irrevocable verdict.
"Everything you are offering me now is stolen, or built upon the corpses of the innocent. You stole my innocence on that dark night when you sent your hired killers to slaughter me in the forest. You stole my father's health and strength when you cowardly poisoned his cup. And you stole this city's safety and our family's honor when you opened its fortified gates to the mercenaries and hyenas of the Shadow Organization to devour the flesh of our people."
Dex took one slow step toward his crawling uncle. "Do you truly believe, after all this blood that has been spilled, that a handful of tainted gold, or the files of cheap spies, can buy you one more breath? Justice in Seiron, and under the law of the Williams family that you defiled, is not sold in markets and cannot be purchased with money."
Sylvester attempted to rise to his knees in one last, desperate attempt to invoke sympathy, but his violently trembling legs failed him entirely, and he collapsed again onto the scorched marble.
"I am your blood! I am your uncle who carried you as a child! Does this shared blood between us mean nothing to you and your father?" Sylvester screamed in a hoarse voice.
"Blood binds us biologically, that is true," Dex answered without hesitation, his tone growing colder. "But the betrayal you committed severed that spiritual bond forever. You are the one who chose to be a monster, not a member of this family."
Dex took his final step, and stood directly over Sylvester. With extreme slowness, he placed his right hand, still radiating a pure white heat, over Sylvester's collapsed head.
The moment the young man's hand touched him, Sylvester felt an immense pressure, not a physical weight, but a crushing spiritual pressure. He felt as though a sky of lead were falling upon his shoulders to drive him toward the earth's center.
"I will spare you physical death today," Dex whispered, his words falling like successive thunderbolts on his uncle's ears. "But I will not allow you to keep for a single additional second the weapon you used to stab and destroy us."
Dex closed his eyes and focused every ounce of his will and mental power. He connected deeply with his own Mana Core, summoning the purest, most ferocious, most concentrated flame from the white purifying phoenix fire.
"Shatter!" Dex cried within his mind as a decisive mental command, and pumped a violent, devastating, and intensely concentrated wave of magical energy through his arm.
This energy pierced Sylvester's skull like a beam of solid light, and descended like a burning arrow directly to the center of energy concentration in Sylvester's chest: his Mana Core.
Sylvester's Mana Core, which had been abnormally swollen, fractured, and completely contaminated by the black magic of the forbidden compound, had no chance whatsoever of withstanding this direct collision with the overwhelming purity of phoenix mana.
KRAAAAAACK!
A muffled yet terrifying sound thundered inside Sylvester's chest, a sound precisely resembling the shattering of a colossal ball of very thick glass under immense pressure.
Sylvester's eyes widened to their absolute limit until they nearly left their sockets, and his mouth gaped in a silent, horrifying scream from which no sound emerged, because the air was trapped completely in his lungs from the magnitude of the shock.
His Mana Core had exploded from within.
The contaminated mana stored within it flowed out with extreme violence, tearing the delicate Mana Channels throughout his body in a manner impossible to ever repair.
Then this trapped energy evaporated, surging from his pores in the form of thick black smoke that immediately scattered in the dome's air.
In that precise moment, Sylvester felt as though his very soul had been torn with cruelty from his chest.
The feeling of magical fullness, the sensation of power, the subtle sense of connection to nature and the surrounding elements, and the capacity to summon and shape magic, all of that meaning for which he had lived his entire life, vanished in a single second, forever.
The world in his eyes suddenly transformed from a three-dimensional world colored by the mana energy flowing through everything, into a flat, gray, pale, and terribly dull world. Sylvester fell on his face, gasping violently like a fish pulled from water.
His body contracted rapidly to return to its natural size, but it now appeared weaker than before: extremely emaciated, his skin sagging and pale as the dead.
Most terrifying of all, he appeared to have aged suddenly, wrinkles had carved his face as though decades had passed over him in a single second.
He had become mortal, an entirely ordinary human being with no magical capacity whatsoever. No magic, no power, no standing, nothing but an empty body awaiting death.
When the shattering was complete, Dex turned toward Lumia and gave a slight nod of his head. Lumia understood the signal, and lowered her hand slowly.
In one moment, the transparent isolating void barrier dissolved like a soap bubble bursting in the air.
The world returned suddenly. The noise of the concluded battle returned, the sound of winds striking the banners, and the distant cries of soldiers in the city's streets. And most importantly, the balcony became fully and completely visible to all outside.
Thousands of citizens, soldiers, and knights in the square saw the scene with unmistakable clarity: Sylvester, the mighty tyrant who had terrorized them for years, lying like a filthy discarded rag, weeping without sound, beneath the feet of Dex Williams: the young man who had returned from the darkness of death to bring the light back to Seiron.
This was the historical moment of final fall, not only the fall of Sylvester as a person, but the thunderous collapse of an entire era of corruption, injustice, and conspiracy that his rule had represented.