The ruins of Lord Maldrake's hideout smoldered like a wound in the earth. The abomination's final explosion had reduced the once-feared alchemist to fragments of gore and shattered glyphs. Yet Kael did not leave it as dust.
He gathered the largest surviving remnants — a twisted skull fragment, a broken claw, the charred remnants of Maldrake's torso — and carefully placed them in a battered iron bucket. His movements were deliberate, his expression cold, as though he were assembling a message rather than handling a corpse.
When the grisly bucket was filled, he produced a torn scrap of parchment and scrawled only seven words with unshaking hand:
"I know what you did 10 years back, Arlen."
He set the note atop the remains, ensuring the soldiers who eventually entered the wreckage would find it. Fear would spread like wildfire. Panic would take root. And Arlen would know — the shadow he thought buried had returned.
Kael slipped through Greyspire's alleys like a phantom, his presence hidden beneath the hood of his cloak. Screams and alarms filled the night. The three colossal bosses he had unleashed continued their devastating rampage through the outer wards, soldiers powerless to halt their march. Fire bled across rooftops. Steel clashed with steel. And in that chaos, Kael hunted.
He visited every known den of filth — the slave dens, the hidden warrens where broken men traded in flesh and despair. Chains clinked in the dark as he tore the doors open, not with mercy but with absolute efficiency. Each shackle shattered beneath his hands, each cell opened, the occupants disappearing in a flash of necrotic light into his Summon Space.
Dwarves beaten half to death, elves with their ears cut to mock their lineage, even human prisoners who had been sold to the pits — all vanished from Greyspire's filth, stolen away by Kael's will.
In one of the final dens, Kael's shadow fell across a man bound by chains far heavier than the others. He was ragged, half-starved, eyes haunted. A bandit, by his markings and the scar of his gang etched across his arm.
When freed, he dropped to his knees, not in gratitude but desperation.
"They… they betrayed me," the man rasped. "My own crew… sold me out to the slavers."
Kael's gaze did not waver. "Why should I care for a traitor's words?"
The bandit's eyes darted, panic in every twitch. "Because they told me something before they left. A raid… in two days' time. A noble-backed raid on some backwater village. The slavers were promised new stock from there. A village on the hill… called—"
He spoke the name. Kael's home.
The Abyss Dragon's Core within Kael pulsed violently. His breath turned cold, eyes darkening to a void-like abyss. The walls seemed to tremble with the pressure of his killing intent.
The bandit froze. His mouth opened to beg — but never found the words.
With one fluid motion, Kael's hand wrapped around the man's skull. The crunch of bone echoed like breaking glass. Blood sprayed across the floor as Kael's fingers closed, crushing flesh and bone into ruin.
He let the corpse drop without ceremony.
Kael's jaw tightened. Arlen's treachery, the prince's schemes, the corruption of Greyspire — it all paled before this. His family. His village. They had lived a decade believing him dead, surviving without him. And now, wolves circled them.
He raised his head, eyes burning with cold fire.
Through the link of command, his thoughts cut across the ether like a blade:
"Earth Sovereign. Fortify the hill. Wrap it in stone, root, and abyssal energy. Let no blade pierce it, no fire touch it. My family will not fall."
From the Summon Space, a voice like grinding stone answered, resonant and unyielding:
"As you command, Sovereign."
Kael exhaled slowly, the rage within him not diminished but sharpened into purpose.
Greyspire burned behind him. Slavers screamed as their dens emptied, soldiers faltered as the bosses rampaged, and whispers of a hooded specter spread through the chaos.
But Kael was already gone, moving toward the horizon. His next steps were no longer merely survival. They were vengeance, retribution, and the first threads of a reckoning long overdue.
And far above, unseen beneath the clouds, the Abyss Dragon's Core pulsed in his chest — a reminder that he was no longer a man bound by limits. He was the abyss given form, and the world had begun to learn what that meant.
The screams of Greyspire's night began to fade into uneasy silence. Soldiers and mercenaries stumbled through the wreckage, bloodied and broken, their weapons trembling in hands that no longer believed they could win. The three titanic bosses — Kael's necromantic trophies from the Abyss — stood at the edge of the town's ruined wards, their towering frames lit by firelight.
Each was an unstoppable nightmare: the Stone Colossus dragging chains through shattered streets, the Frost Wyrm exhaling clouds that froze armor to brittle glass, and the Shadow Behemoth blotting out torchlight with each step.
The men and women of Greyspire's army braced themselves for the monsters' next slaughter. Their captains shouted orders to form ranks, but their voices cracked with despair. None believed they could hold another line.
And then, just as the tension reached breaking point—
The three bosses froze. Their heads turned in eerie unison toward the horizon, as though listening to a voice no mortal could hear. For a heartbeat, the soldiers dared to hope they might attack again.
Instead, the creatures began to walk. Slowly. Purposefully.
Away.
The ground quaked as they lumbered into the wilderness beyond the walls, ignoring the defenders entirely. Their shadows stretched long beneath the burning sky until, without warning, they flickered like smoke… and vanished.
Not slain. Not banished. Simply gone.
The silence that followed was worse than battle. Soldiers collapsed where they stood, some sobbing, others muttering prayers. But each one carried the same thought:
What kind of monster commands such things—and withdraws them at will?
Far beyond the walls, Kael stood at the edge of the forest, his cloak fluttering in the heated wind. His hand pressed against a summoning sigil carved into his palm, crimson lines igniting.
The ground cracked.
From the abyssal depths of his Summon Space, the Pyraflame emerged — a blazing infernal beast shaped like a dragon wrought from fire and molten steel. Its body pulsed with magma veins, wings unfurling with a roar that split the heavens. Trees ignited in its wake, and the very air trembled with heat.
Kael vaulted onto its back without hesitation.
"Take me home," he whispered.
The Pyraflame surged forward, a comet of fire cutting through the night sky. Forests below blurred into streaks of shadow. Hills and rivers burned beneath its glow. Kael's jaw was set, his eyes fixed on the horizon. His family. His village. He would not allow fate to steal them from him again.
But as the village's faint outline began to glimmer in the distance, he pulled hard on the creature's reins.
"Enough. Land here."
The Pyraflame screeched, folding its molten wings as it descended into a secluded clearing, far from prying eyes. The last thing Kael wanted was to descend from the heavens on a beast of fire, terrifying the very people he sought to protect.
As its body dissolved into ember and ash, Kael leapt to the earth, boots crunching against soil. His heart pounded, not from battle but from anticipation. He was close. Too close to risk error.
But Kael was not finished.
He lifted his hand, his voice a sharp command that rippled through the necrotic threads of his will:
"Graknar. All goblins. Spread. Surround. Not a single shadow enters these woods without my knowing."
The ground seemed to breathe. From the treelines, caves, and hidden burrows, goblins began to emerge by the hundreds. Warriors with bone-forged blades, scouts with sharpened eyes, shamans whose totems crackled with faint green light. Each knelt for a brief moment in silent acknowledgment of their Sovereign… before scattering into the darkness like a tide of living shadows.
The forest was no longer a wilderness. It was a web. Every root, every path, every ravine now bore goblin eyes and goblin blades.
Kael exhaled deeply. His preparations were set. His return would not be as a lost son wandering home — it would be as a Sovereign, cloaked in silence but prepared to unleash war upon any who dared approach.
His gaze lifted toward the hill that housed his village.
"Two days," he murmured, his voice low, dangerous. "That's all the time you have left, Arlen."
And then, without another word, Kael began the final walk toward the place he once called home.