Lilith had seen what her man did.

From across the void, she watched the distant bloom of fire and light—a sun born and dying in the span of three heartbeats.

The shockwave reached her island moments later, a warm wind carrying the scent of ash and annihilation. Her mouth, which had hung open in shock, slowly closed. Her crimson eyes, wide with surprise, narrowed into something else entirely.

She chuckled.

It was a low, rumbling sound that started in her chest and rolled up through her throat—a sound of genuine amusement, of admiration, of competition ignited.

He really went and did it, she thought. That beautiful, reckless angel.

She had been savoring her kills, playing with her prey, drawing out each death like a fine wine. But Gabriel had just shown her another way. Not better. Not worse. Different. And Lilith, above all else, hated to lose.

Fine. I can play that game too, you know.

Her shadow undeads—those four silent, smoky servants with their flickering blue eye-flames—had been scouting ahead. They moved across the desolate landscape like whispers, their feet never touching the ground, their forms blending with the darkness beneath dead trees and crumbling cliffs. Now, through their shared senses, Lilith saw what they saw.

A settlement.

Not a small gathering of three or five. A true settlement—dozens of crude huts built from bone and hide, arranged in a rough circle around a central fire pit that still smoldered. Mutated cyclopes moved among the structures, their massive gray forms casting long shadows in the crimson twilight. She counted. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. More. They were eating, sleeping, sharpening their stone weapons, unaware that death had already marked them and there was nothing they could do about it.

Perfect.

But Lilith did not strike immediately. She had already decided to change her approach. If Gabriel could erase an island in a single, cataclysmic moment, then she would match him—not with fire and earth, but with something far more intimate. Far more cruel.

She sent a mental command to her four shadow undeads.

Go. Find the closest floating island. Hunt. Kill. Do not stop.

The shadows nodded—a subtle tilt of their smoky heads—and shot forward, leaping across the void from one floating rock to another. Their blue eyes left faint trails in the air, like falling stars moving horizontally. They would arrive on a neighboring island within minutes. And they would begin the slaughter without her.

But Lilith herself was not done. Not yet.

She turned her gaze back to the settlement below—the one her scouts had found. A smile curved her lips, slow and dangerous. Her fangs glinted.

"Thank you, my love," she murmured into the empty air, her voice carrying across the desolation. "Thank you for showing me the way."

She raised both arms to the sides, palms facing outward, fingers spread like the branches of a dead tree. Her tattered dragon wings folded against her back, and her tail curled around her ankle, the heart-shaped tip twitching with anticipation. Her silver hair floated upward, defying gravity, caught in an invisible current of power.

Time to show him what darkness can do.

Although the couple had only reincarnated a few days ago, and although they did not yet fully understand their new bodies, their new strengths, their new limits—each one already knew, with absolute certainty, the elements they were best at. Those elements answered them like loyal hounds. Like limbs. Like breath.

For Gabriel, it was light and time.

For Lilith, it was darkness and space.

As a primordial demoness—not merely a demon, not merely a noble, but one of the original bloodlines that had existed before the first war between heaven and hell—she could wield the darkness element like its overlord. Darkness did not resist her. Darkness did not merely obey her. Darkness yearned for her. It flowed through her veins alongside her blood. It lived in her shadow as a twin.

She closed her eyes.

She reached deep into herself, past the flesh, past the mana core that burned like a black sun in her chest, past the ancient memories of a thousand lifetimes. She found the darkness there—waiting, patient, hungry.

Come, she whispered in a language older than this world, speaking it fluently as if she had known since age. Come and feast.

She opened her mouth and spoke. Not a shout. Not a scream. A declaration, quiet and absolute, as if she were reminding the universe of a truth it had forgotten.

"I am eternal darkness who swallows everything."

At the end of her sentence, the world changed.

Lilith allotted a quarter of her immense mana pool to this spell—the same proportion Gabriel had used for his meteors. A quarter of an almost limitless ocean. The cost would have drained a lesser being to dust. For her, it was merely a generous gift.

The darkness answered.

It did not erupt. It did not explode. It spread—like ink dropped into still water, like smoke curling under a door, like a secret whispered in a crowded room. From her feet, from her fingertips, from the tips of her floating hair, shadows poured forth. They were not the ordinary shadows cast by light. These were primordial shadows—thicker than tar, colder than the void between stars, hungrier than a pack of wolves in winter.

The wave of darkness washed over the floating island in an instant. One moment, the island was bathed in the dungeon’s sickly crimson glow. The next, it was swallowed whole. Complete. Utter. Absolute darkness.

But Lilith could see.

Oh, she could see everything.

Within that consuming blackness, Lilith’s senses expanded beyond their normal limits. She saw every monster on the island—not as blurred shapes or distant presences, but with perfect clarity. Each mutated cyclops was illuminated to her perception as if by a spotlight only she could see. Their gray skin. Their scars. Their single, terrified eyes darting left and right, unable to pierce the darkness that surrounded them, they felt all their luck draining away, doomsday had arrived to claim their lives.