The world did not end when Pride fell.
That was the cruelest truth of all.
The battlefield did not erupt into light, nor did the sky tear itself apart in some final act of judgment. Instead, reality did what it had always done—it endured. The fractured heavens slowly stitched themselves closed. The warped land settled into something resembling stillness. Smoke drifted lazily upward from craters that would never truly cool.
And the boy stood alone among the ruins.
Pride was gone.
Not dead in any way the boy could confirm—there was no corpse, no lingering presence, no final declaration—but absent. As if the world itself had decided that the King of Pride no longer belonged within its rules.
The Gate of Babylon had collapsed entirely. Not sealed. Not dismissed.
Erased.
Golden light bled out of existence like a dying memory, portals folding inward until nothing remained but empty air and the faint echo of authority that had once ruled everything beneath the sky.
The boy swayed.
Only then did his body remember that it was allowed to fail.
His knees struck the ground hard, stone biting into bone as his strength abandoned him all at once. The box slipped from his grip and landed beside him with a dull, solid sound—unchanged, unmoved, uncaring.
He did not try to rise again.
He could not.
His chest burned with every breath, lungs scraping for air that felt too thin to sustain him. Blood dripped steadily from his hands, his arms, his side—so much of it that he could no longer tell which wounds were new and which had never truly closed.
Unlimited Blade Works was gone.
Not quiet.
Not sealed.
Gone.
The forge inside him that had once answered every desperate thought now returned nothing but emptiness. No steel. No echoes. No horizon of blades waiting to be called.
Just silence.
And beneath that silence—
Pain.
He reached weakly toward his chest.
The Archer card pulsed faintly beneath his skin, its presence unfamiliar now. It had not been uninstalled since Lust—not properly. He had relied on it, leaned on it, let it remain embedded far longer than was ever intended.
Now it felt… wrong.
Foreign.
Heavy.
"…Enough," he whispered.
There was no strength in the word. No command. Only tired certainty.
His fingers trembled as he pressed against his sternum and focused—not on power, not on battle, but on separation. On letting go.
The Archer card resisted.
Not violently.
Instinctively.
It had carried him this far. It had been his scaffold, his crutch, his borrowed foundation. Removing it now felt like tearing out a vital organ.
Good.
That meant it was time.
He exhaled shakily and pulled.
Pain flared—white-hot, surgical, precise. His vision blurred as the card tore free from its anchor, light bleeding out through his fingers as the imprint unraveled.
He screamed.
Not loudly.
There was no energy left for that.
Just a broken sound torn from his throat as the Archer card finally separated, dissolving into motes of fading light that scattered into the air like dying embers.
And then—
It was gone.
The silence inside him deepened.
He collapsed forward, forehead resting against the ruined ground, breath hitching uncontrollably. He felt smaller now. Lighter. More fragile.
More human.
For a long time, he did not move.
The demon gate waited.
It loomed at the edge of the battlefield like a wound that refused to close—a massive, circular distortion in space, its interior churning with black and crimson light. Countless voices whispered from within it, overlapping and indistinct, promising nothing and everything at once.
This was what remained.
The reason any of this had happened.
The boy dragged himself upright inch by inch, using the box as leverage. His arms shook violently, threatening to give out at any moment, but he forced himself to stand anyway.
"If this is it," he muttered hoarsely, staring at the gate, "then let it end."
He approached slowly.
Every step felt like punishment. His body protested with sharp, stabbing reminders of everything it had lost, but he ignored them. He had ignored worse.
When he reached the edge of the gate, the box grew heavier in his hands.
Not physically.
Conceptually.
The lid rattled faintly, reacting to the presence before it. The six cards inside—Rider, Caster, Assassin, Lancer, Berserker, Saber—remained silent.
Dormant.
Unknowable.
The boy did not open the box.
He did not need to.
He simply held it forward.
The gate reacted instantly.
Light flared violently as the box asserted its existence—not as a weapon, not as a seal, but as a container. Something that defined boundaries by its very nature.
The demon gate screamed.
Not in rage.
In denial.
Darkness surged outward, tendrils of warped reality lashing at the boy, trying to tear the box from his grasp. His feet skidded backward, boots carving furrows into stone as the force threatened to drag him into oblivion.
He gritted his teeth.
Blood poured freely from his mouth now.
"No," he whispered. "You're done."
The box snapped open.
Light—not divine, not demonic—spilled outward. Something colder. Older. Absolute in a way neither side understood.
The gate collapsed inward violently.
Not closing.
Condensing.
The screaming voices were cut off one by one, swallowed by the box's impossible interior. The distortion shrank rapidly, folding into itself until only a single point of darkness remained—
—and then vanished.
Silence followed.
The world exhaled.
The moment the gate sealed, the cards reacted.
One by one, they dissolved.
Not violently.
Not dramatically.
Rider faded into light.
Caster unraveled.
Assassin dispersed like smoke.
Lancer cracked, then vanished.
Berserker burned away in a brief, violent flash.
Saber was last—lingering for half a heartbeat longer than the rest before dissolving into nothing.
The box snapped shut.
It was suddenly light again.
Empty.
The boy stared at it, breath hitching.
"…Huh," he murmured weakly.
Then the world collapsed.
Not reality.
Civilization.
He did not hear the first arrow.
Only felt it.
Pain bloomed in his shoulder as the projectile buried itself deep, spinning him sideways. He staggered, barely staying upright as a second arrow struck his thigh.
Then voices.
Human voices.
Shouting.
Fearful.
Angry.
"—That's him!"
"Don't let him move!"
"He sealed it—did you see that?!"
"He's still standing—kill him!"
Soldiers emerged from the ruins, weapons raised, faces twisted with terror and awe in equal measure. They had watched from afar. They had seen gods fall, demons sealed, reality bend.
And now they saw him.
A blood-soaked boy standing where kings and monsters had fallen.
And they were afraid.
Very afraid.
The boy did not raise his hands.
He did not resist.
When the spears came, he let them.
Steel pierced flesh. He gasped, stumbling backward as pain flared anew. Hands grabbed him, dragged him down, forced him to his knees.
Chains followed.
Human chains.
Crude.
Unremarkable.
They bit into his wrists anyway.
"You're too dangerous," someone shouted. "We can't let you live!"
The boy laughed weakly.
"…Yeah," he said softly. "I figured."
They did not execute him immediately.
They argued first.
They debated.
They decided.
And when the sword finally fell—
He did not fight it.
The blade descended.
The world moved on.
And somewhere far beyond human sight, something ancient stirred.
The Age of Gods had begun.
Long after the battlefield was abandoned, long after blood dried and ruins were reclaimed by silence, one thing remained where everything else had collapsed.
The box.
Unbroken.
Unchanged.
Waiting.