The battlefield did not end when Lust fell.
Magic lingered like smoke that refused to disperse, clinging to the air in thin, iridescent strands. The ground was scorched in spirals and sigils half-erased by collapsing magecraft. Broken stone floated for several seconds at a time before finally remembering gravity and crashing down in dull, exhausted thuds.
He stood at the center of it all, unmoving.
His breathing was steady only because he forced it to be. Each inhale scraped against his lungs like they had forgotten how air was supposed to feel. His muscles trembled—not violently, not visibly—but with the quiet instability of something pushed far beyond its natural limits and only now realizing it had survived.
Lust was gone.
Not defeated in the way heroes defeated monsters, but erased—unmade at the conceptual level. Where she had stood, there was no corpse in the proper sense. Her form had collapsed inward, dissolving into motes of light and shadow that twisted together briefly, desperately, before dispersing into nothing.
No scream.
No curse.
Only disbelief, frozen on a face that had relied too long on control to imagine true resistance.
The illusions were the last to die.
For a moment longer, the world tried to convince him the mage was still there. That familiar figure stood at the edge of his vision—calm, composed, eyes filled with the same quiet pride and exhaustion he remembered from childhood.
Then the illusion fractured.
The mage's face split down the middle like cracked glass, dissolving into strands of false memory and stolen longing. His voice cut off mid-word, unraveling into raw mana that screamed once before collapsing into silence.
The truth reasserted itself.
The mage was dead.
He had been dead for a long time.
The boy closed his eyes.
He did not mourn loudly. There were no tears left for that. What remained was a dull, aching certainty that Lust had never truly been speaking to him at all—only to the parts of him that still wished someone else could decide his path.
Those parts were quieter now.
Not gone.
Just scarred.
He exhaled and felt the last remnants of foreign magecraft loosen their grip on the world. Bounded fields unraveled like rotting cloth. Leylines snapped back into place with painful resistance, sending tremors through the ground beneath his feet.
Only then did he realize how tired he was.
Not the exhaustion of a long day, or even a brutal fight—but the deeper fatigue of a body that had aged too quickly. His limbs felt heavy, movements dragging against invisible resistance. His hands shook faintly when he flexed his fingers, veins dark against skin that no longer held the softness of youth.
Seventeen.
That was what the mirror of the world now insisted he was.
And even that felt like a lie.
He turned slowly, surveying the ruin.
Trees had been carved open by magical backlash, bark split and blackened as if struck by lightning that never bothered to fall from the sky. The earth itself was warped—smooth in some places, jagged in others—like a battlefield remembered incorrectly by reality.
At the far edge of the devastation, something stirred.
Mana condensed.
Not violently. Not explosively.
It gathered with reluctant inevitability, drawn together by rules older than both Sins and heroes. A faint light emerged from the air itself, folding inward until it formed a familiar rectangular shape.
A card.
The Caster Class Card.
It hovered where Lust had fallen, rotating slowly, its surface etched with runes that pulsed faintly like a living heartbeat. Medea's presence was unmistakable—ancient, intelligent, cruelly precise. The card radiated structured magecraft so dense it made the air feel brittle.
He approached cautiously.
Not because he feared it—but because his body reacted before his mind could stop it.
Pain flared across his chest, sharp and sudden, as his magic circuits recoiled. His vision blurred at the edges, heat rushing up his spine as if his very existence rejected what stood before him.
He staggered, catching himself before he fell.
So this was how it would be.
The Rider card had integrated cleanly—dangerously, but willingly. The Archer card had torn him open and rebuilt him from the inside out.
But this—
This was wrong.
Not hostile.
Just incompatible.
The Caster card did not want him.
And more importantly—
He did not want it.
He reached out anyway.
The moment his fingers brushed the card, a spike of foreign sensation pierced him—ritual circles forming automatically behind his eyes, incantations attempting to assert themselves into his breath, contracts clawing for definition.
He gritted his teeth and endured.
"No," he whispered. Not to the card—but to himself.
He understood immediately.
This was not a power meant to be worn.
It was a poison meant to be contained.
Forcing it into himself would not make him stronger. It would fracture what little balance he had left, drown him in rules and control until there was no room left for instinct or choice.
The Sins used the cards because they were hollow.
He was not.
With deliberate care, he withdrew the small, reinforced box from his pack. Its surface was unadorned, deceptively plain, but reinforced with seals he had etched himself—simple, inelegant, and brutally effective.
He placed the Caster card inside.
The moment the lid closed, the pressure vanished.
The box grew heavier in his hand—not physically, but in a way that pressed against his awareness. Two cards now rested within it.
Rider.
Caster.
Two Sins defeated.
Two weights he would carry until the end.
He secured the box and let his arm fall to his side.
Only then did he allow himself to sink down onto a broken stone, sitting heavily as the last of his strength drained away. His heartbeat slowed, each pulse echoing through his body with uncomfortable clarity.
His reflection stared back at him from a shard of broken glass nearby.
Grey threaded his hair now—not streaks, but strands woven in naturally, as though time itself had reached forward and claimed a portion of him prematurely. His skin bore the mark of constant exposure, permanently darkened, weathered in a way that suggested years under open skies rather than weeks on the road.
His eyes were the worst of it.
They no longer searched the world for answers.
They measured it.
He looked away.
The silence stretched.
No applause followed. No validation. No sense of triumph.
Just the certainty that this was only the beginning.
Somewhere beyond the ruined trees, something shifted.
Not Lust.
Something else.
Something that had been watching.
The feeling crawled along his spine—not desire, not rage—but something colder. Sharper. A presence that did not announce itself or distort the air.
A presence that compared.
Measured.
Resented.
He stood slowly, joints protesting, and adjusted the strap of his pack.
Two cards sealed.
Five Sins remaining.
And now—
One of them knew how to wait.
He turned his back on the battlefield and walked on, leaving behind shattered magic and a victory that felt heavier than defeat.
Because desire had fallen.
And envy was already watching.