The acceptance which he was pretending to accept shattered.

Sol snarled inwardly, refusing to surrender even as death tightened its icy grip around him. His fading will igniting like dry tinder struck by lightning.

The cold darkness pressing in from all sides suddenly met fierce resistance.

Not like some worthless insect crushed underfoot. Not after everything I’ve endured. Not after how far I’ve come.

Memories of every battle, every triumph, every moment of growth flashed brighter. He had survived worse. He had risen from nothing. He had bent the rules of this world to his will.

I still have ambitions. I still have desires. Aunt Lyra, his cousins, Nia, Evara, Isylia, Kira, Zephyra, Zeyra. I-i... still have people waiting for me.

He had barely lived in this second chance.

He had barely scratched the surface of what he could become.

The thought of dying here, broken and humiliated by Vane, was unacceptable.

He still wanted to stand at the pinnacle of this world.

He wanted to explore every forbidden secret, taste every pleasure this life could offer, and carve his name into the very fabric of history.

He refused to let it end like this.

A fierce, burning resolve flooded through his dying consciousness. Even as his body lay motionless in a pool of his own blood, something deep inside him... something ancient and unbreakable... roared back to life.

I refuse—!

Just then...

A weak, wet cough echoed right beside his left ear.

That unbreakable resolve, forcibly pulled his fading consciousness back.

Sol’s left eye, swollen shut and blinded by his own blood, cracked open an imperceptible fraction, as he looked around.

He found that he had somehow landed in a shallow trench created by his own previous battle with Malphas, though it was less of a battle and more like him beating.

And more importantly, lying merely two feet away from his outstretched, bloodied hand... was Malphas.

The Zharun layer 4 powerhouse was not dead yet.

When Sol had tortured and crushed him earlier, he had thoroughly destroyed Malphas’s body, but it seems like the sheer, monstrous vitality of a high-layer practitioner had kept a tiny, pathetic ember of life flickering inside his pulverized chest.

Malphas lay on his side, his face half-buried in the dirt, his breath coming in weak, bubbling gurgles as blood leaked continuously from his open mouth.

Malphas’s eyes, clouded with the film of imminent death, rolled slowly toward Sol.

When he recognized the black-armored form lying right beside him, a faint, pathetic tremor of fear rippled through his dying frame. His lips twitched, trying to form a word... a plea for mercy, or perhaps a curse.

Sol stared at him.

Through the haze of dying consciousness, Sol did not feel anger, pain or any other emotion. His mind on the verge of death operated with force that defied the human limits of agony.

Sol’s left hand, buried deep in the dirt and shattered limestone gravel, twitched.

Every single nerve in his arm screamed in pure agony as he forced his broken wrist to move. The bones in his forearm seemed to ground together like crushed glass, but despite that his fingers slowly, agonizingly closed around a sharp, heavy piece of broken limestone sitting right next to his palm.

It was a piece of stone no larger than a man’s fist, stained red with blood.

Malphas saw the movement.

His clouded eyes widened in horror. He tried to crawl away, his elbows digging frantically into the dirt, but his paralyzed body refused to move more than an inch.

"N-no..." Malphas gasped, a bubble of crimson foam popping on his lips. "P-please..."

Sol didn’t hesitate.

Before anyone could notice or do anything, with the absolute last drop of raw, physical muscular force remaining in his dying body, Sol dragged his broken left arm upward and brought the broken piece of limestone down straight into the center of Malphas’s throat.

CRUNCH.

The sharp edge of the rock tore through cartilage and windpipe, pinning Malphas’s neck to the ground beneath.

Malphas’s body violently convulsed once. His eyes bulged out of his head, his hands clawing weakly at Sol’s wrist, before his entire body went completely limp. The tiny, flickering ember of his life was permanently extinguished.

In that exact instant, an invisible, blinding wave of pure, unrefined soul energy erupted from Malphas’s corpse.

To the naked eye of the Coalition warriors across the field, nothing happened. But to the spiritual realm, it was as if a dormant volcano had just detonated beneath the earth.

Because Sol had personally delivered the killing blow, his ancient, hungry soul-siphon authority engaged instantly. The dense, concentrated essence of a peak Layer 4 powerhouse... an essence brimming with vitality, refined spiritual authority, and raw life force... was violently pulled out of Malphas’s flesh and funneled directly into Sol’s shattered, dry chest.

WHAM!

It wasn’t a slow absorption. It was like a violent, catastrophic flooding.

The cold, dead basin of Sol’s chest hollow was instantly struck by a roaring tsunami of pure power.

The liquid soul-essence flooded his dry channels with the force of a hydraulic press, instantly burning away the physical trauma, welding his shattered ribs back together, and igniting his dormant veins with a blinding, terrifying heat.

The thick stream of blood bleeding from his nose suddenly stopped spreading.

The white limestone dust settling around his body was violently blown outward by an invisible, suffocating pressure wave.

A low, deep vibration began to hum through the bedrock... a sound so dark, so heavy, and so utterly unnatural that Chief Vane, the Marauder Chief, and Vane all froze in mid-sentence, their heads snapping toward the edge of the crater in absolute shock.

Inside the crater, Sol’s eyes snapped fully open.

They were no longer dual colors like before, nor did they seem like the weary eyes of a human.

They burned with a blinding, cold, and monstrous neon-crimson light that shone like twin stars born from the abyss.

Slowly... terrifyingly... the black armor began to push itself off the ground.