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Amon sat in a corner of the Spirit World, toying with a Spirit World Creature shaped like a crow.
Suddenly, he raised his head and looked toward the Astral World, watching a star that had hung there for thousands of years quietly fall.
That small patch of sky lost its light, but Amon kept his head raised, staring at it for a long time.
It was not that he had been particularly close to Badheil, or that the God of Combat's death made him mourn another's fate as a warning of his own. To Amon, Badheil was merely an obnoxious nuisance, as well as one of the murderers involved in Rose Redemption. At this moment, Amon simply sank into bewilderment and confusion, as though the powerlessness he had always deliberately ignored had finally caught up with him after he lost Sefirah Castle. Another familiar figure had finally died. Even if that figure was an enemy, it still made the present, the future, and the entire world feel utterly unfamiliar to Amon.
He understood this world less and less. Fewer and fewer familiar things remained, and fewer and fewer familiar people. He could no longer keep hiding and surviving on the strength of his thousand years of experience.
The instant he realized he had been tricked into leaving Sefirah Castle, Amon seemed to hear death's footsteps drawing closer. The final confrontation, delayed since the Fourth Epoch, seemed at last to be slowly closing in on him from behind.
After a while, Amon lowered his head.
By now, he felt nothing toward the crow-shaped Spirit World Creature in his hand. He casually tossed it away and watched it flee madly into the distance, shrieking as it went, without any desire to toy with it again.
In the few short minutes since