The skies above the Blackened Citadel wept grey ash, not rain. The crumbling heavens groaned like a dying beast, wounded by centuries of betrayal and divine neglect. The entire world felt suspended in a slow, painful breath—one waiting to be exhaled in screams and fire.
Lucien stood atop the Tower of Judgment, his obsidian cloak dancing in the wind, its ends burning with an eerie, silent flame. His eyes—void-like orbs of swirling shadows—were fixed on the realm of the Gods far above the veiled storm clouds. He could feel it now more than ever. The heartbeat of a being he never wanted to feel again.
"I never asked to be born," he whispered, voice sharp like the edge of a broken soul. "So why does it still hurt?"
Behind him, Seraphina approached. Her footsteps were silent, but Lucien felt her presence in the same way a beast senses a nearing storm. She had changed too. The once gentle priestess, chosen by the Creator himself, now wore blackened armor laced with veins of violet magic—proof of her fall from grace.
"You felt it, didn't you?" she asked, her voice like a dagger wrapped in silk. "He's watching again. The Creator. He knows you're close."
Lucien's eyes narrowed. "Then let him watch. Let him see what he made me become."
Seraphina walked to his side, her crimson hair flowing wildly in the wind. She gazed up with him, her lips tightening. "I used to believe he loved us," she said. "But now, I realize—love without accountability is just cruelty with perfume."
Lucien chuckled bitterly. "He created me to be the End. Not a savior, not a king. Just a pawn with fangs sharp enough to kill the things he feared. Now he fears me."
Lightning cracked in the distance, illuminating the horizon where the armies of Heaven stirred beyond the mountains. They were preparing. They knew what Lucien's silence meant. Every time he stopped moving, it meant something was about to fall. And this time, it was the skies themselves.
"Do you still dream of her?" Seraphina asked softly, glancing sideways.
Lucien didn't answer immediately. His jaw clenched. Memories of Elaria, the girl who had once made him believe he could feel more than vengeance, flashed in his mind. Her laughter. Her tears. The way she'd held him when he was too broken to stand.
"She was the last thing I truly felt," he muttered. "Everything since her death has been just... survival."
"Or revenge," Seraphina said.
Lucien nodded once. "Same thing."
A tremor shook the tower beneath their feet. The Citadel's core was reacting again. The Heart of Death—Lucien's soul-anchor—was pulsing. A warning. Something powerful was descending.
And then he saw it.
A tear in the sky.
It wasn't a portal—it was a wound. Raw, bleeding light spilled through it like divine blood. And from it descended Azrael, the first blade of the Creator. A Seraphim of judgment, wings forged from solar flares, and eyes of unblinking absolution.
"He sent him," Seraphina said in disbelief. "Azrael was never supposed to interfere."
Lucien stepped forward, cloak flaring. "Then he's afraid."
Azrael hovered above the tower, and the air became still. "Lucien," his voice boomed across the winds, "Your vengeance has brought imbalance. Return to your role, or face the wrath of divine justice."
Lucien looked up, eyes burning like twin galaxies collapsing inward.
"Justice?" he scoffed. "Where was your justice when your Creator let mortals rot? Where was your balance when I was cast into oblivion, used like a tool, and discarded?"
"You were never meant to feel," Azrael said.
"Then why do I?" Lucien shouted, a scream that shook the tower's peak. "WHY DO I STILL FEEL EVERYTHING?!"
The Citadel roared in response. Shadows surged like tidal waves from its core. From every corridor, the dead screamed. From every spire, cursed banners of rebellion unfurled.
Azrael unsheathed his blade. "I will end you, Lucien. Not out of hatred. But to restore what you've broken."
Lucien reached behind his back and unsheathed Tenebris, the Blade of Unmaking. Forged from the heart of a forgotten star and cursed with the memory of every life it ever ended, the sword vibrated in his grip.
"You're not the first angel I've slain," Lucien growled. "You won't be the last."
Seraphina summoned her dark staff beside him, her sigils lighting with violet fury. "If you go down, I go with you."
"No," Lucien said suddenly. "You need to survive. You're my only link to Elaria's soul. I feel her inside you."
Seraphina's eyes widened, a single tear sliding down her cheek. "Then fight. Fight like you've never fought before."
Lucien launched himself skyward.
Azrael descended like a meteor.
And in that instant, the heavens shattered.
Blades met. Magic screamed. The world below bent under the weight of their clash.
And the Creator?
He watched in silence.
Like a coward behind a curtain of stars.
A suffocating silence hung in the air as Masaru stood face to face with the Seraphim, the golden-winged executioner of the Creator's will. Its radiant form pulsed with divine energy, yet the light it bore no longer felt pure—it was a blinding lie, a cover for atrocities committed in the name of order. Behind Masaru, the battlefield had turned into chaos: Adolpha clashed with a tri-bladed angelic beast, and the skies swirled with the leftover magic from Shiraz and Aedric's combined spell.
"You shouldn't exist," the Seraphim said again, its voice calmer now, but laced with a cruel reverence. "You were erased, banished beyond the Veil. And yet, you wear the mantle of Death with no shame."
"I wear it with purpose," Masaru answered, drawing in his power. "You speak of erasure, but I remember everything. I remember what the Creator did. I remember my death. And I remember the screams of the innocent drowned beneath your holy fires."
A pulse of darkness erupted from Masaru's body, bending the very light around them. The Seraphim raised its blade, a scythe of celestial crystal, and hurled it like a spear. Masaru dodged midair, shadow wings sprouting from his back. He spun forward and slashed with Umbrafang, their blades clashing in an arc of divine light and abyssal dark.
"You claim to be righteous, yet you serve a tyrant!" Masaru yelled, pushing the Seraphim back. "Your Creator fears what he cannot control. That is why he made you."
"And that is why I exist—to cleanse corruption," the Seraphim answered, its eyes glowing with divine fury. "And you are the seed of corruption, born again through defiance!"
The Seraphim's wings expanded, releasing blinding feathers of light. Each one exploded midair like miniature suns. Masaru weaved through them, shadow-stepping from one location to the next. One feather grazed his shoulder, searing into his skin like acid, but he gritted his teeth and launched a counterattack, tendrils of black flame streaking across the air toward the Seraphim.
Below them, Adolpha howled, unleashing her Demonic Aura in a spiraling vortex. She bit down on the angel-beast's neck and slammed it into the earth, cracking the battlefield. "Masaru!" she roared, "We're outnumbered! They just keep coming!"
Masaru knew she was right. The sky had begun to fracture—literally. Portals opened one after another, each vomiting out angelic war constructs and soldiers of the Divine Realm. It was no longer just a battle. It was a divine invasion.
"Buy me ten seconds!" Masaru ordered, flying high into the storm-touched sky. The winds responded to him, dark and cold, as if the very elements obeyed his rising wrath. He drew his hands into a seal he hadn't used in eons.
"Forbidden Rite of Eclipse—Seventh Seal: Null Genesis."
Darkness gathered. Not mere shadow, but a void that even light couldn't escape. His aura became a singularity, and all divine constructs nearby began to warp and collapse inward, crushed by the pressure. The Seraphim's face finally showed uncertainty.
"Impossible! That spell—no one should survive its casting!"
"That's the point," Masaru growled, bleeding from his nose and ears. The ritual drew not just mana but pieces of his very soul.
Below, Adolpha spread her wings, shielding their wounded allies. Shiraz reached her side, chanting recovery magic over Aedric's body.
The sky above them cracked open completely. The Creator's Eye—an orb of eternal flame and light—opened in the heavens, staring directly at Masaru.
A voice boomed.
"You go too far, Child of Death."
Masaru spat blood but glared into the eye with no fear. "Then come down and stop me yourself."
Light rained from the heavens, but Masaru was faster. He unleashed the completed spell. A tidal wave of dark nothingness surged upward, swallowing the beam of light whole. The two forces collided, time slowing around them, sound ceasing, reality trembling.
The Seraphim screamed in fury and dove at Masaru, but the death wave engulfed it.
Then, silence.
The divine army paused. The Eye above flickered. The battlefield dimmed.
And then the Seraphim emerged—burnt, wingless, but alive. It collapsed at Masaru's feet.
"You... survived the Null Genesis," Masaru whispered. "You really were made by him."
The Seraphim tried to rise but couldn't. Its voice was hoarse. "You... are... a monster."
"No," Masaru replied, leveling Umbrafang at the Seraphim's chest. "I'm just a man who remembered what it meant to die without justice."
He drove the blade into the Seraphim's core.
Light burst outward, but this time it was quiet. A fading sigh from a dying star.
Masaru fell to his knees, panting, covered in blood and sweat. Adolpha rushed to his side, her eyes wild with fury and concern. "That was suicide, you fool!"
"Had to take it down," Masaru muttered, barely conscious. "It was just the first."
"The first?" Adolpha looked up—and saw more rifts forming in the sky.
A new army was preparing to descend.
But this time… something else stirred.
A pulse came from the earth itself.
Not divine. Not demonic.
Ancient. Forgotten.
The ground cracked, and a single voice whispered in Masaru's mind:
"So you are the one… who broke fate."
Masaru's eyes widened. That voice—it wasn't the Creator.
It wasn't Death.
It was something older.
The battlefield began to shift again, and in the distance, a black spire emerged from beneath the soil—an ancient tower sealed for thousands of years.
Adolpha stepped back, growling. "What is that?"
Masaru stood, barely able to walk. "I don't know. But it knows me."
From the tower's entrance, a cloaked figure emerged. Neither divine nor demonic. Neither ally nor enemy.
A herald of what was to come.