Nyx sat on the cold metal chair at the center of the execution platform, her wrists and ankles locked in heavy suppression restraints. Dried blood clung to her skin, darkening the torn edges of her clothes. Her hair hung in uneven strands around her face, stiff and tangled from everything she had endured.
They called her a monster.
Nyx wanted to laugh.
She would have, if there had been any strength left in her.
The heavy iron cuffs around her wrists bit deep into flesh that had long since been rubbed raw. Every slight movement sent a fresh surge of pain racing up her arms. Worse still, the restraints constantly drained and suppressed what little essence remained within her, leaving her feeling as though an invisible weight had been placed over her entire body.
Yet Nyx barely reacted to it. Pain had long since settled into her bones, dull and constant, no longer sharp enough to demand her attention.
Her gaze drifted across the crowd gathered before the platform.
There was no shortage of eyes.
Some stared with fear, shrinking back as if she might break free at any moment. Others looked at her with disgust, their expressions twisted as though her mere existence offended them. A few watched with relief, their shoulders loose, their breaths steady, comforted by the knowledge that whatever she was, it would end here.
None of it mattered. None of them mattered anymore.
Then her gaze stopped.
Standing near the front, just close enough to see clearly, were the people she knew better than anyone else.
Edmund.
Camilla.
Livia.
Her father. Her stepmother. Her stepsister.
They stood together, untouched by everything that had happened, their clothes clean, their posture relaxed. There was no grief on their faces. No guilt. Not even the faintest trace of discomfort.
What she saw instead was relief, satisfaction, and triumph, as though a burden had finally been lifted from their shoulders.
They had used her until there was nothing left to take, and now they had come to watch the final result.
Nyx’s eyes shifted, settling on Livia.
Unlike the others, Livia didn’t bother hiding what she felt. There was no attempt to pretend. She wore a faint, almost bored expression, as if the entire scene before her were nothing more than a tedious formality.
As if she were flaunting the fact that she was safe and untouched.
Nyx’s fingers twitched against the biting iron of the restraints as a memory clawed its way to the surface of her mind.
She saw Lucian’s broken body on the blood-soaked ground, his voice weak and desperate, and heard the beast tearing at his throat. Layered over that nightmare, Livia’s voice sounded bright and careless in her memory.
—"They needed cannon fodder anyway. Might as well get rid of that burden."
"Nyx Arden!" The Base Commander’s voice rang out across the platform, amplified through the speakers above. "For the crimes of espionage, mass murder, and the betrayal of humanity, the sentence is death by Essence-Stripping."
The announcement passed over Nyx like wind through a hollow ruin.
Ignoring the speaker, Nyx kept her eyes fixed on Livia, who finally met her gaze.
Slowly, Livia’s lips curved into a smile.
She leaned forward just enough to be seen clearly by Nyx alone, her bored mask dropping to reveal sharp, cruel mockery.
Her lips moved, silent to the crowd but deafening to Nyx.
"They told me he couldn’t even scream."
For a moment, everything went silent.
Lucian’s final moments surged back, vivid and unbearable: the desperation in his voice, the way he had tried to push her away to save her, and the sound that never fully came out as the beast tore into him.
The pressure in Nyx’s chest became a suffocating knot.
A high, piercing ringing filled her skull.
Then—a voice.
Soft, melodic, and calm.
It resonated directly within her consciousness, wrapping around her thoughts with an unexpected warmth.
A translucent notification manifested before her eyes.
[Realmfall Survival Apocalypse System initializing...]
[Scanning Host: Nyx Arden.]
[Detected: High-Synergy Nether Realm Mark.]
[Designation: Mark of the Withering Hollow.]
[Abilities: Rot Aura, Life Drain.]
[Status: Forced activation due to critical resonance.]
Nyx smiled.
It wasn’t a gentle expression. It was jagged and wrong, something that didn’t belong on a human face.
It caught Livia off guard for a fleeting second.
While Nyx finally understood as everything clicked into place.
The man who had escaped. The timing of the trap. The rapid arrival of the base authorities. Information that should have taken hours to reach the command center.
Livia had known every detail from the start.
Everything had been orchestrated from the moment Nyx stepped back into the base.
Her smile widened.
"You’re right," she said, her voice low and rough, barely carrying beyond her lips. "He couldn’t scream."
A sickly violet light began to flicker beneath Nyx’s pale skin.
The restraints pulsed violently as they tightened in response, struggling to suppress the sudden, seismic surge of energy that defied their limits.
Nyx lifted her head slightly, her eyes locking onto Livia with a clarity that had not been there moments before.
"And you won’t be able to either."
Confusion flickered across Livia’s face.
Nyx reached inward for the last thing she still possessed: her remaining essence.
Instead of resisting the restraints, she pulled every shred of her remaining essence back toward her core, compressing it with a will sharpened by years of betrayal and a hatred that had nowhere left to go.
Her heart became the center of the collapse, a singular, darkening void.
The air around the execution platform grew heavy.
The lead executioner, standing at the podium, suddenly paused, his brow furrowing as a sensation of sharp, cold static prickled against his skin.
The suppression shackles, usually a dull matte grey, suddenly began to weep a viscous, unnatural black oil that turned to ash almost immediately.
He didn’t need a sensor to know the situation had spiraled out of control. He felt it in the teeth-grinding vibration that rattled the platform’s steel grating, a frequency that shouldn’t have existed within a dampening field.
He opened his mouth to bark an order, his hand lunging toward the emergency override.
That was the moment the restraints reacted violently.
Their suppressive force spiked with such intensity that the internal capacitors shattered, and the rhythmic, deafening scream of the proximity alarms finally tore apart the silence.
"Contain her!" Someone shouted, but it was far too late.
The energy folded in on itself, collapsing further, and then snapped.
A wave of decaying energy erupted from her body—not as a flash of light, but as a silent, creeping rot.
Everything it touched began to wither.
The metal restraints cracked, then crumbled into fine grey ash as the decay spread through them.
The execution platform beneath her warped and sank, its structure unable to withstand the rot eating through its physical form.
Screams rose from the crowd in fragments as realization spread, and the violet light deepened, swallowing the space around her.
Realmfall essence—the invisible, heavy energy leaking from the fractures in the sky—began to gravitate toward her. It spiraled into a violent, cyclonic vortex, pulling the vitality from the very air and ground.
[Warning: Life-force failing.]
[Host physiological collapse imminent.]
[Detection: Voluntary Self-Destruction Sequence initiated.]
[System Protocol: Emergency Harvest triggered.]
Nyx stood at its center, no longer bound, her body barely held together, yet her eyes clearer than they had ever been.
Livia stumbled backward, the confidence on her face shattering into raw, unadulterated terror.
"What are you doing?" she shouted, her voice breaking. "Stop her!"
Nyx felt her consciousness stretching, being pulled thin as the System began to siphon the raw power through her dying body.
Panic rippled through the crowd, but it was futile.
The base security team and the various ability users of the three realms among the spectators reacted immediately. Barriers of stone, light, and energy flared to life, but the decay wave didn’t bother to break through them.
It simply seeped through the defensive layers as if they were made of nothing.
There was no resistance. No collision.
The wave surged into the front row.
It washed over the guards and spectators alike. Their skin turned grey and collapsed, their flesh losing its structure and dissolving into dust that scattered before it could even hit the floor.
Livia turned to run, but her body refused to respond.
The decay had already touched her.
It spread upward from her feet, creeping along her legs and reaching her torso in an instant.
Her final scream was silenced as her throat dissolved into nothingness.
Nyx watched, detached, as the vortex roared, the System feeding on the excess energy.
[Converting harvested essence into UEU...]
[Energy threshold reached.]
[Unfurling Spatial Seed: The Living Space.]
She watched it all, but she felt no joy or satisfaction.
The world had never been fair, never been kind, and had never intended for her to survive.
The System was frantic, working against the clock of her death, greedily siphoning essence even as her own cells turned to grey ash.
Then—
[Warning: Seed destabilization detected.]
[Binding spatial anchor to Host soul fragment.]
[Forcible Soul-Binding: 30%...]
[60%...]
[100%.]
[Spatial Anchor: Permanent.]
The pressure of the System’s forced extraction at the core of her consciousness was immense. It felt as though her spirit were being pulled through the eye of a needle, one part of her essence anchored to the System, the other tethered to her dying body as it was consumed by the overwhelming power.
The System’s voice flickered, its normally steady resonance breaking beneath the strain.
[Warning: Violent energy destabilizing soul and Spatial Seed expansion.]
[Critical Failure: Host physical vessel disintegrating.]
[Energy reserves: 0%.]
[System Status: Emergency Stasis.]
The violet light surged one last time, and the platform vanished.
The crowd dissolved into chaos, then into silence as the decay swallowed everything within its reach.
Nyx’s gaze lifted.
The sky above was pale, untouched by everything happening below.
For a brief moment, she thought of Lucian, of the way he used to look at the stars.
As a faint breath left her lips, the roar of the vortex faded into a dull hum.
Dark violet light eclipsed her world.
[System Status: Offline.]
[Spatial Anchor: Secured.]
[Spatial Seed: Dormant.]
Darkness reached for her, and Nyx didn’t fight it.
She simply closed her eyes.
Her last regret was that she would never see the stars with Lucian again.