Everett walked up to the final machine. He smashed the heavy iron locks. He freed the last group of crying peasants. He pointed them toward the dry riverbed. Then, Everett raised his sword high into the air. He brought it down on the thick black wires of the final Faith Amplifier. KRRR-ZAAAP! A massive shower of bright blue and white sparks exploded into the air. The giant machine groaned loudly. The final red light flickered and died. The deep, heavy, vibrating hum of the machines stopped completely. The desert went quiet. The artificial network of Zealotry was entirely severed. Miles away, at the front gates of Apex City, the battle changed instantly. The False God was towering over the broken city walls. The monster was made of the stitched-together corpses of the ancient divinities. It was sixty feet tall. It roared from its hundred screaming faces. It raised a massive, flaming wooden arm to smash the city. But suddenly, the dark red air around the monster vanished. The

The Pilgrim stared at the bleeding air. His hands were shaking. "You are destroying the Continuum," the Pilgrim whispered in horror. "You are forcing the engine to crash! You are pulling the whole world apart just to save your own pathetic life!""I am not destroying the world," Everett said. He took a heavy step forward. His boots clicked loudly on the glitching ground. "I am fighting for the right to live in it. You are the one trying to delete it.""It needs to be deleted!" the Pilgrim yelled. He bent down and picked the combat knife out of the dirt. He pointed it at Everett. "Look at what humanity has done! Look at the pain! The suffering! The nobles starved the poor! The poor murdered the gods! You are a violent, ugly disease!""Yes!" Everett roared back. "We are violent! We are ugly! We make terrible mistakes!"Everett swung his sword. He brought it down in a heavy, sweeping arc. The Pilgrim jumped backward. The sword sliced through the front of his brown cloak, ripping it open

The world was completely, perfectly black. Everett could not see his own hands. He could not see the ground beneath his boots. He could not see the sky. There was no sky. There were no stars. There were no clouds. There was only nothingness. He tried to open his mouth to speak, but he had no mouth. He tried to swing his sword, but he had no arms. He was just a floating mind trapped inside a dark, endless, freezing void. A loud, deep, mechanical hum vibrated everywhere. VVVRRRRRRMMMMMM. The sound did not come through his ears. It vibrated directly inside his soul. It was the sound of the System. It was the sound of the massive, ancient machine that ran the universe, and the machine was working harder than it ever had before. Everett felt a sudden, terrible panic. Did the Pilgrim win? Everett thought to himself in the dark. Did he press the reset button? Are Silas and Lyra gone? Are we all deleted?Suddenly, the pitch-black void was broken. A giant, sharp line of pure white light

Everett hit the ground. He fell two feet and landed hard on his hands and knees. The impact sent a terrible, sharp spike of pain through his broken ribs. He gasped loudly, sucking in a massive, desperate breath of air. He opened his eyes. The darkness was gone. He was kneeling in the red dirt of the desert, just outside the broken gates of Apex City. He looked up at the sky. The violent, twisting, bruised purple clouds were completely gone. The angry red warning boxes were gone. The giant, floating holographic screens were gone. The sky was a perfect, clear, beautiful, normal blue. Small, soft white clouds floated lazily in the gentle wind. Everett listened. He expected to hear the deafening roar of magic. He expected to hear the terrible buzzing of corrupted code. He expected to hear the deep, mechanical hum of the System. But he heard none of those things. He heard the wind blowing softly through the dry dirt. Whoosh. He heard a small bird chirping somewhere in the distance

The sun slowly rose over the quiet, red dirt of the desert. For the first time in a thousand years, it was just a normal sun. It did not glow with golden magic. It did not pulse with deep, ancient code. It was just a giant ball of burning gas in space, casting a soft, yellow light over the broken world. The wind blew across the dry ground. It kicked up small clouds of gray dust. The air felt very different. It did not smell like ozone or burning sulfur. It smelled like plain, wet earth. The heavy, vibrating hum of the System was completely gone. The silence was absolute. Everett stood in the dirt outside the massive, broken iron gates of Apex City. He was breathing heavily. His broad, scarred chest rose and fell. The white bandages wrapped around his ribs were soaked in dark, dried blood. Every single time he took a breath, a sharp, terrible pain stabbed his side. He was no longer the Undying Martyr. He was no longer a Living God. The System had deleted his divine title. His maxi