Extra's POV: My Obsessive Villainous Fiancee Is The Game's Final Boss

Aurelius walked the broken streets of Carthage like a magistrate returning to a riot he'd already ruled on.

His cloak trailed over the pulverized stone scattered everywhere. The soldiers around him fought without care, none of them even sparing him a glance, more preoccupied with killing the other person.

His silver mask glinted through the drifting smoke, its expressionless planes reflecting fires and falling bodies as if nothing in them mattered.

He didn't hurry. He did not need to.

Ahead, a wedge of invaders charged. Their leader saw Aurelius and screamed for them to loose, before Aurelius' mask even registered on their face.

A dozen enhancements flared, lances formed from ice, bolts of hardened air, and even darts of iron pulled from the torn railings of a collapsed terrace. The sky turned into a bristling quiver.

Aurelius raised one gauntleted hand.

Time drew down around him, a pale halo that made the air appear viscous.

The projectiles reached the edge of that halo…and slowed to the crawl of falling ash.

He stepped through them as a man might part a bead curtain, the sword in his right hand describing a lazy arc.

The sword didn't cut, it amended. Each missile it touched was sent back, unfired and returned to the moment before it was created.

At the far end of the street, the archers discovered empty bowstrings and Knights found their palms closing on an absence, their firing hands suddenly bare and confused.

Before terror could set in, Aurelius finished the sentence he'd started, a downward stroke that concluded a paragraph of history.

The street blinked.

Where the invaders had once stood, there was now rubble, dust, and quiet. No blood nor bodies could be seen. The moment of their charge had been disallowed, the result was nothingness.

Aurelius continued across the trembling stones, sword low at his side, and passed under a smashed arch carved with the sigil of Carthage.

He was the Warden of Law. In his hands, time obeyed writ.

He turned left into a courtyard where Carthage's own soldiers were buckling under a press of fur cloaked raiders.

They looked up at him with relief they tried to hide, knowing he wouldn't praise them for needing him. He didn't. He simply moved.

A raider leapt, a two handed axe biting for Aurelius's helm.

Aurelius's sword nicked a seam of reality, and the man landed behind him instead, his momentum pouring into empty air, eyes wide as the blade reversed the last second of his leap.

The axe fell from confused fingers, forgotten by a brain that had never swung it.

The Warden's backhand took the man's head at the collarbones, except the head did not fall. It never had. The man never existed on that paving stone. He never…

Ripples of undoing walked out across the courtyard. Raiders vanished as if they'd never joined the charge.

Those at the edges saw it and broke, stumbling over one another to escape the halo of adjudication.

"Hold," Aurelius said to his own soldiers, not looking at them. "Form on the right. Sweep the southern alleys."

His troops moved as if hands had reached into their spines and arranged their bones.

He stepped forward to hunt the next fracture in the line when the air changed. Not the weather. Not a shift in morale. A riptide.

A wave of failing life came toward him from three streets over.

It was not a volley or a shout. It was a hush. The kind that fell on houses when a long sick grandfather finally stopped breathing. The way an orchard feels when blight takes the trees all at once.

Soldiers, both Carthaginian and invaders, went still and toppled. Those outside the sweep screamed and ran. Those inside didn't get the chance.

The wave moved around a single slow heartbeat at its center.

Death.

And braided into that advancing emptiness was its opposite. A pulse, a green, stubborn press of returning growth, of breaths forced back into lungs, of cuts knitting shut.

Not resurrection, Aurelius could feel the boundary, but refusal. Life refusing to fade where one will said it must.

Luna.

Rank 9s changed battlefields in one step. Even if Death himself was still technically Rank 8, the space bent to accommodate this gravity.

Soldiers scattered, dragging the wounded, and abandoning flags. The square emptied, fast. The city itself seemed to lean back from this meeting, exfoliating dust and shards as if to give them room.

Aurelius strode forward through the retreating noise, sketching one final small correction to keep a toppling tower from decapitating his own company, then paused at the center of what had once been a market.

He watched Death approach along a corridor of corpses that formed ahead of him and stopped behind him, like a surf's edge forming and vanishing around a reef.

Death's hood was thrown back, his face cold, and his eyes sitting on them like lightless wells.

He was haloed not by glory but by subtractive shadow, a circumference where all breath refused to be.

Beside him walked Luna, her silver hair bright even in this ruin, and her purple eyes shining. Vines slithered from cracks where her feet fell, flowers opening and withering in a beat, every burst of color throttled by the aura at her lover's shoulder.

Aurelius lifted his sword in salute. "Some would call this impolite to say to guests such as you two, but welcome to your deaths."

Death's mouth twitched into the faintest hint of a smile. "Bold words from a man who hides behind the past."

"I don't hide," Aurelius said. He tipped his sword, and temporal static danced along the edge, making the air around it stutter. "I govern. But we all govern something. Mine is just… more… than most."

Luna spread her hands. Seeds popped out of the dead mortar around them and burst into thorned creepers that braided themselves into hulking shapes.

There were wolves made of vine and bark, stags with crowns of antlers blooming with lilies, and serpents made from knotted roots.

Flesh from the nearby fallen soldiers stirred at her gesture, the living information in it recalled and repurposed to stitch together pale homunculi with too many ribs and too much hunger.

Life, extruded raw, molded into weapons.

Death's aura thickened, and his hands found shapes inside it. Two blades congealed into being, becoming curved scythes of every unthing the world knows, with edges that didn't cut so much as remove.

Even the light around them looked uncertain whether to show the metal or the void.

"Let's begin."