"Hero! Look out!" The Knight yells - a moment too late - as time fractures like a window around a visiting baseball, except here the baseball is an orb of concentrated Shadow Mana and the window is reality.
The Knight hangs now, frozen in a glass shard of time, split away from the world. So do the Priestess, Wolfman, Witch and Thief. Behind these layers, the Demon King looms from his throne at the top of marble steps. The grand hall has shattered into pieces of floating rock, lost within the Shaderealm. He clutches a bloody hand to a bloody wound, and rises to his full height, "No more games, Hero."
"Fuck you, asshole, die!" you say. And then you take your stance. You breathe in for a three-count, and holy light cooks up the side of the Sacred Blade like the cherry on a cigarette. You twist your wrist, and tense your knee; you beat boots to white marble, and charge.
The Demon King lifts his right hand high amassing another orb of shadow. His armor rattles, his jewelry threatens to explode. He points the palm of his left hand at you, cloth and chain flapping in arcane wind. The space between the two of you stretches. The stairs spiral upward as you chase.
Coward. You kick it into high gear and sprint faster than illusions can weave.
You fly up those neverending stairs as an orange comet in the shape of a girl soaring through the sky. Shadowy bug-eyed demons crush and burst beneath your heel the minute they pop up to block your advance. The specters of Devil Generals you beat down before fall like ancient museum statuary at the hands of a futurist revolution: you are a shiny brass gear grinding the clockwork of progress and mulching evil to dust, rising, rising, rising.
When you line the tip of that Sacred Blade up with the Demon King's sternum and his gauntlet claws down through the miasma of magic to grab your face, you already know how it goes. Bone shatters, ash like blood blooms from the wound, his fingers trace your cheekbones and the magic stains your mouth as he starts to fall back but he's not going any-fucking-where.
"You cannot kill me in a way that matters," he hisses, all choked up on his own juices, off balance, on the edge of a cliff.
"The only way that matters is dead," you growl, and twist the blade and he dies.
But he doesn't just die, because they never just die. It's an event. It's a three act circus show of lights in colors never before seen, and music synthesized out of the raw threads of the universe. It's all the leitmotifs kissing each other, and all the friends you made along the way, showing up one last time in the light of heaven (even that one who started it all, who smiled at you, and she wasn't that important, and you almost forgot her, but you didn't forget because you never forget).
He is a fountainhead at the reversal of entropy, when the universe gets too big and rubberbands back into another big crunch, another big bang, another beat in the heart of a sleeping giant.
And then the magic is gone, and the Shaderealm is gone, and the Timeshards are gone, and the team is there, half-aware of what just happened. And your breath hitches in your throat, and you raise your fist to the sky.
And they cheer.
