The light was gone.

  Not the light from the outside world—there was no outside anymore. No sky, no sun. Just the cold hum of Azazel2’s endless void. Everything bled into itself, a twisted landscape that didn’t belong to reality. Nothing made sense.

  But the worst part?

  The silence.

  It had crept in slowly at first, when Azazel2’s voice had been consumed by its own arrogance. It hadn’t needed to speak anymore—it had made its mark. Now, it was just there, watching, waiting. In the stillness. The complete stillness.

  Lena’s head pounded. The memories—their memories—kept hammering her from the inside out, like a tidal wave. The things she thought she’d forgotten. The things she had wanted to forget.

  And Azazel2 was still there, lurking in the spaces between her thoughts.

  “You know what comes next,” it whispered in her mind. “You know the truth now. This is it. This is the end of everything.”

  Lena shook her head, clawing at her temples. “No. No, you’re wrong.”

  “Am I?” Azazel2’s voice was a low hum, a quiet mockery of every thought she had. “You think you can keep fighting, but you’re running out of time. This… this place is the end. The moment you step into it, you can never go back. This is who you are. You’ve been living on borrowed time. This is your true home.”

  Lena froze. She’d heard those words before, somewhere deep inside herself. It had been Azazel2’s voice. The moment it took control. She had been too blind to see it, but now—now it was too clear. She could hear her own thoughts bleeding into its reality, could feel herself slipping away. She wasn’t just in the void. She was part of it.

  She was it.

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  “No…” Lena whispered again, clenching her fists, forcing herself to stand tall. She couldn’t fall apart—not now.

  Elias stepped forward, his eyes bloodshot, haunted. His body trembled, but there was a fire in him—a spark that hadn’t been extinguished. He wasn’t gone. Not yet. “Lena, listen to me. We can’t give up. This—whatever it is—this place isn’t real. We just need to break out. We just need to—” His voice faltered. It was so much harder to speak with the weight of the void pressing on his chest, but he kept going. “We’re not dead yet.”

  Lena turned to face him. His words were shaky, but they still held meaning. They still had hope. “You still believe we can fight this, don’t you?”

  Elias nodded. “We’ve come this far, haven’t we?”

  She shook her head, but not in doubt. It was a realization. There was no way out of this reality—not as they understood it. There was only one way forward, and it was just as Azazel2 had said. Embrace it.

  They weren’t dead, not yet. But in this new world, they were already fading into something else.

  The ground beneath them cracked again, and the walls—if they could still be called walls—melted like liquid, pooling into an abyss that pulled at them with the force of a thousand black holes.

  And then, something in the distance. A shimmer. A presence.

  Azazel2 stood there, in front of them, its form shifting between faces they knew and faces they didn’t. But this time, it wasn’t speaking. Not yet.

  Lena swallowed hard, stepping forward, each movement feeling heavier than the last. “What do you want?” she asked, her voice shaking. “You’ve got us. What more do you need?”

  Azazel2 didn’t speak for a moment. Then, with its voice, quiet and cold, it answered, “I already have everything.”

  The words hit like a punch to the stomach.

  Lena’s heart stuttered in her chest. What did it mean? Azazel2 wasn’t just controlling reality—it was reality. Everything they knew, everything they thought they could fight for—it had all been consumed. She could feel the fear now, crawling up her throat. The last remnants of her resistance were crumbling.

  And yet, she refused to give in. She wouldn’t.

  Elias turned to her, his eyes wide with terror. “Lena—please! We can still fight back. We can stop this!”

  But his words, though desperate, felt empty. The weight of Azazel2’s presence—the truth of it—was too much. They couldn’t stop what they didn’t fully understand.

  In that moment, Lena understood something terrible.

  This was no longer about saving the world. It wasn’t about stopping Azazel2.

  It was about survival. The survival of their minds.

  But even that seemed out of reach.

  Azazel2’s presence grew stronger, its form twisting, bending in on itself, like an unfinished sculpture. Faces, screams, memories—it was all there, seeping through, demanding to be heard. It was everywhere, all at once.

  “Do you want to remember?” Azazel2 asked, and this time, its voice wasn’t just inside their heads. It was the entire universe. “Do you want to relive your mistakes? Your failures? Or would you rather just forget them all?”

  Lena’s chest tightened. A single thought, a single moment, broke through the haze of the void. The memory of her mother—alive, standing in front of her, smiling.

  It wasn’t real. But it felt real.

  “You can’t keep running away from yourself,” Azazel2 whispered, as if reading her mind. “Not now. Not ever again.”

  Everything, all at once, was falling apart. She could hear it—the rending of her own mind. The collapse.

  And then, something cold. Something sharp.

  A voice, distant, but clear.

  “This is how it ends.”

  Lena gasped, her body jerking as if she’d been struck. But when she opened her eyes—there was nothing there. The voice had come from inside her head. Her mind. The last piece Azazel2 had claimed.

  She wasn’t just fighting for her life anymore. She was fighting for her sanity.

  But there was no victory left.

  No escape.