The sky was bleeding.

Not the real sky—if one had ever existed here—but the false heavens of the 999th floor, cracking like glass under pressure. Shards of starlight drifted in slow motion, falling past broken ruins suspended in the void. Every breath Astreya took tasted like ash.

And in the center of it all, he knelt.

The Fallen God.
Crowned in rusted halos, wings torn and bound by spears. Six eyes dimmed like the last stars before dawn. A ruin of what had once ruled this place. Now, just another thing waiting to die.

“You… were never meant to reach this far,” he rasped, voice layered with a thousand dying echoes.

Astreya didn’t answer.

Words didn’t matter here. Not anymore.

She stepped forward, glaive in hand. The shaft hummed faintly in her grip, its edge pulsing with the heartbeat of everything she had left behind. Where the blade scraped the floor, sparks bloomed—tiny, fleeting petals of starlight.

The god surged up, one last burst of divine fury. Chains snapped. Reality screamed.

Above them, crimson lightning tore through the void.

But she had already moved.

One step. A spin. Her body flowed into the final motion she’d rehearsed in her mind a thousand times during the climb.

“Thread of Judgment.”

The glaive carved a blooming arc through his chest.

Light poured out—and then:
Silence.

He didn’t scream. Didn’t curse her.
He just… scattered. Like dust. Like stars.

His godhead shattered. And with it, everything that had held this floor together.

Astreya exhaled.

Her knees nearly buckled. But she stayed standing. She hadn’t come this far to fall now.

“Wait—what?”

The air around her shifted. The Spiral was falling apart—no, shedding her. Like she no longer belonged.

The light swallowed her before she could speak.

And then—

The Spiral was gone.