Victory, as it turned out, was fleeting.
The reclaimed kingdom of Vel'Tharon still smoldered with victory's embers when the sky turned dark—not with smoke, but with something far more unnatural. A dense, pulsing blackness rolled across the heavens like an oil spill ignited in the sky. The sun disappeared behind its veil, and even the fires of rebellion flickered uncertainly beneath its oppressive weight.
The Black Inferno had awakened.
It began at the city's eastern ridge, where rebel forces were setting up medical tents and supply stations. Without warning, the air rippled, and the ground seemed to bleed heat upward in reverse. Then, a crackling hum — not of fire, but of hunger. Not a flame, but something else.
From a single obsidian pyre left behind by Drax's retreating forces, a tongue of black flame erupted. It did not spread like fire. It crawled. It clung. It devoured.
A scream tore the sky open.
Raizen was on the ramparts when he heard it — not the scream of pain, but of emptiness. A soldier caught in the black fire dissolved not into ash, but into shadow. His body was gone. His shadow remained — twitching, writhing, trying to reattach itself to a life that no longer existed.
"By the tides…" Zuri whispered beside him, her hand instinctively reaching for her blade.
Raizen leapt from the wall, Cinderfang in hand, and landed in the streets below, where chaos had already taken root. Medics fled as the cursed fire crept toward them, crawling up stone, over sandbags, across steel. But it didn't burn structures.
It burned souls.
"Keep your minds clear!" Flint shouted, dragging a wounded rebel away. "It feeds on fear! It smells it!"
The Black Inferno had no scent of smoke — only the suffocating aroma of despair, old regrets, and self-loathing, as if the flame were dredging guilt from the deepest recesses of every soldier's mind.
Tama's voice crackled over the communicator: "It's not just fire — it's psychic contamination! The Black Inferno isn't physical — it attaches to emotional fractures. You think too hard about your fears, your failures — it'll find you."
Raizen didn't hesitate. He ran straight into the flame's path, Cinderfang glowing with crimson fury. As he swung at the crawling black heat, the sword's blaze collided with it — but unlike normal fire, the Black Inferno didn't retreat. It coiled around his blade, whispering.
"You are afraid you'll become him. That you already are."
Raizen faltered. For a split second, the voice pierced him, not from outside — but from within. The flame was not only cursed. It was alive, sentient — and it knew.
A memory flashed in his mind: the first time he killed. The moment he learned the truth about the Crown of Shadows. The time he hesitated to save a friend.
And then — the future. A vision of his rebellion becoming tyranny. Of him seated on a throne of corpses, of Drax bowing not in defeat, but in kinship.
"No," Raizen growled, clenching his fists. "You don't decide my story. I do."
He plunged Cinderfang deep into the ground, channeling all his focus, not to destroy the Black Inferno — but to contain it. Zuri and Tama joined him, forming a ring of willpower and flame-resistant sigils around the growing epicenter.
But even that was not enough.
The Black Inferno burst outward again — and this time, it took shape.
A towering figure of burning shadows rose from the pit. Not Drax — but something older. Something the Crown of Shadows had once tried to contain but instead buried. This wasn't just a weapon.
This was a curse — born from the sins of the World Government's past wars.
"Is this what he's made a pact with?" Zuri gasped. "This is what fuels him?"
The figure howled — a sound like a thousand regrets dying at once — and surged forward.
Raizen stood alone to meet it.
And in that moment, he knew the truth: Drax hadn't just awakened this inferno.
He had bound himself to it.
This was not merely his power.
It was his penance — and his path to domination.
Raizen's only chance was to seal the inferno now, before it spread beyond Vel'Tharon, before it consumed the seas themselves.
With the help of a combined ritual from Tama's arcane engineering and Zuri's ancestral blade arts, the crew formed a triad around the heart of the fire. Together, they invoked a cleansing burst of light from the sea's memory — ancient water relics hidden beneath the capital — and, at the cost of enormous energy, forced the Black Inferno into dormancy.
For now.
The cursed fire receded.
But the damage was done.
Vel'Tharon smoldered once more, not from Drax's armies, but from the shadows he had unleashed.
The world would remember this day not as a victory, but as a warning.
The Black Inferno had tasted fear.
And it would be hungry again.
END OF CHAPTER11