CHAPTER 440: CHAPTER 440 - THE SIXTH LAYER CONQUERED & DURJAHAN - THE SILENT GRAVE

Glasya-Labolas’ eyes widened as he realized: he had been defeated. Not through debate, not through unraveling of knowledge, not through the endless games of logic and lies he and Orobas so loved. No. His defeat had come with the simplest, purest expression of power, one single slash of Taufik’s katana.

His body trembled, his voice cracked, whispering as if to no one but himself, "... Impossible..."

"Impossible? You tried to reject reality, but in front of me, all of that is mere child’s play. Look at me... and remember the reality you tried so hard to forget"

Glasya-Labolas slowly lifted his head, his ink-dark pupils dilated. What he met was not the face of a weary man nor a wounded foe, but those golden eyes.

The same eyes that had once pierced through him, stripping away every layer of illusion, every falsehood he had wrapped himself in. Eyes that saw not only the truth... but the death hidden within it.

"T-This..." Glasya-Labolas stammered, disbelief tearing at his voice. Before him, Taufik stood untouched, immaculate, his body unmarred by even the smallest cut. As if the battle, the illusions, the very struggle until now... had been nothing. "H-How can..."

He turned, frantically scanning his surroundings. His heart sank.

The proud Library of Lies, his sanctuary, his greatest weapon, was nothing but ruin. The towering shelves, once filled with forbidden tomes and bound truths, now stood bare, skeletal, stripped of meaning. A hollow graveyard of empty wood. Not a single book remained.

"My Library... destroyed? How... can this be...?" His voice cracked, trembling, as if the very foundation of his existence had been ripped away.

"Hm?" Taufik tilted his head, his golden gaze burning with quiet certainty. "Still clinging to your delusion? Still trying to deceive yourself?" He raised his katana slowly, its steel humming with restrained power. "Then allow me to give you something you can’t deny"

The blade caught the void’s breath, flaring alive with an eye-searing brilliance. The light was not warmth, nor salvation, it was annihilation given form.

"...Remember it," Taufik’s voice cut through the silence, cold and resolute,

"... with your death"

His katana shone brighter, the glow cracking the false sky itself. The very air trembled, walls of reality groaning under the weight of his will.

"... Light Form: True Death"

The blinding radiance surged forth, swallowing the hollow halls of the Black Library. Shelves warped and crumbled, pillars splintered into dust, stairways unraveled into motes of ash, everything Glasya-Labolas had built, every layer of deceit, burned away under the weight of Taufik’s strike.

The Demon Duke clutched his head, screaming as the illusions that wrapped his existence came undone.

"No... no! This is not real! This cannot be real!" His words cracked, breaking beneath the undeniable truth carved into Taufik’s golden gaze.

The katana descended, silent, inevitable.

A line of searing brilliance carved through Glasya-Labolas. No blood spilled, for there was nothing mortal to wound, only the countless veils he had hidden behind.

They shattered like brittle glass, fragments carrying the whispers of stolen souls, forbidden truths, and forgotten lies.

The "Profane Scholar" staggered. His form fractured, unraveling into pieces that flickered with memory.

Not just illusions, but the echoes of failure, failures he had tried so desperately to erase.

He remembered.

This was not the first time he had faced Taufik.

It had been countless times.

When the man first appeared in the Sixth Layer, Glasya-Labolas had challenged him. Each time, he rewrote fate with his Books, sacrificing volume after volume to bend reality. He turned back time, reshaped the laws of possibility, and crafted infinite scenarios.

And each time... the blade fell.

One strike. Always the same. Always the end.

He tried again. And again. And again, until there was nothing left but empty bindings and hollow echoes of the knowledge he once claimed as power.

His scream was not only rage but despair. "Knowledge... everything I gathered... all the truths, all the lies, all the sacrifices... and I’m still lost!"

Taufik stepped past him, his silhouette bathed in fading light. His voice was cold, cutting sharper than the katana itself.

"Knowledge that cannot save you is nothing more than another delusion"

The final crack split Glasya-Labolas apart. His body, his Books, his illusions, all disintegrated into silence. Only a faint echo remained, swallowed by the void.

The Black Library collapsed entirely.

The towers, the endless halls, the forbidden tomes, all dissolved into nothing, erased from existence as if they had never been. No ashes, no remnants, only void.

And in that void, in the hushed aftermath of erasure, only Taufik remained.

His katana shimmered faintly, its edge still carrying the afterimage of True Death, the echo of an absolute strike that denied even memory.

"...One more," Taufik murmured as he slid the blade back into its sheath. His voice was steady, but his eyes, those golden eyes, were heavy with something unspoken.

There was no triumph, no satisfaction. Only silence, echoing in the nothingness.

"...Let’s end this, before everything is gone..." His hand lingered on the hilt. A whisper escaped him, so soft it might have been mistaken for the wind. "...Before I forget everything"

--------

There was no rest. No need for it.

When the void settled, he stepped forward, and the world shifted.

The Seventh Circle awaited him.

Durjahan, the Silent Grave.

A realm of finality.

A land where sins were not punished, but erased.

Endless graves stretched across a wasteland of cracked black earth. Tombstones, weathered and nameless, jutted from the soil like broken teeth.

The air itself carried a funeral stillness, heavy and suffocating. Above it all stretched a starless sky, an eternal dusk where no light had ever shone.

It was not a battlefield like Narakus.

It was not a labyrinth of lies like Zaqqumire.

Durjahan was the end. The silence after the last prayer.

Here, even the dead were forgotten.

And yet, Taufik walked forward, his footsteps echoing against a silence that swallowed sound itself.

---

The moment Taufik crossed into Durjahan, the world collapsed into silence.

Not silence as mortals knew it, but something deeper. A silence that stripped the beat of his heart, the rasp of his breath, even the murmur of thought. He opened his mouth, but no word came.

The very concept of voice had been erased.

The land stretched flat and gray, an endless graveyard of broken monuments. Obsidian obelisks pierced the starless sky, leaning like toppled titans. In the distance, colossal bones jutted from the earth, ribs of beings so vast they could not have been mortal.

Every step he took left nothing. No sound. No trace. As though the realm itself refused to acknowledge him.

Then, the horizon bent.

From the void between the obelisks, a figure arrived. Neither walking nor floating, but simply there, as if he had always existed and only now had Taufik remembered him.

Bifrons, The Silence Harbinger.

A towering silhouette cloaked in stillness. Where a face should have been, there was only a hollow obsidian mask, fractured once, bleeding pale, dying light. In his skeletal hands, he bore a lantern that carried no flame, only a faint ember of entropy, a glow that dimmed everything it touched.

When he lifted it, entire sections of the graveyard dissolved into dust.

"..."

No sound, yet meaning struck Taufik’s marrow like scripture carved in bone.

"All things end. Even silence. Even you"

The graves stirred. Not with corpses, but with the absence of corpses, silhouettes formed from memory alone, hollow shapes of those who once were. They rose in their thousands, empty eyes fixed on him.

Durjahan had noticed him.

And its ruler had passed judgment.

"A mere silence dares to act as Death?"

Taufik’s voice rang, clear, undeniable, piercing through a realm that should have muted him.

His arms spread wide, and Death itself gathered at his fingertips, condensing into a single form: a scythe.

The air shivered as it appeared.

The soil cracked, not from weight but from rejection, rejection of something too great to be contained. Across the horizon, gravestones leaned toward him, bowing as though to their master.

The Silent Harbinger did not move. But the pale light in his hollow mask dimmed. For the first time, silence seemed... unsettled.

"You... dare...?" The voice was not heard but felt, vibrating deep in the marrow of every shadow. Durjahan itself had never turned against its ruler. Yet here it was, bending, quivering, before another.

Taufik twirled the scythe once. Its blade did not sing, it resonated, a hum so deep it was more felt than heard. A lullaby for existence itself.

"Silence is a shadow, Harbinger," he said, calm but absolute. "But Death... Death is the end of the story. Even silence must answer to it"

The wraiths froze. The voiceless sentinels of Durjahan, their march halted. Their loyalty faltered.

Taufik’s aura surged, no longer mere darkness, but the Concept of Death unchained.

Not a domain. Not a power. But inevitability itself, pressing down on Durjahan like a coffin lid.

Every ember of soul-light dimmed. Every lingering whisper recoiled.

The Graveyard listened.

And Bifrons, the eternal Harbinger of Silence, stood face to face with something even he had no claim to.

"...Then show me," his thought-voice quivered, a crack in the eternal stillness.

Taufik’s eyes narrowed. "...Let me show you what true death is"

....

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