The presence radiating from the monument was an suffocating weight, pressing against their chests until the air turned cold and thin.
It was a piercing, razor-sharp pressure that tore through the space of the inverted chamber.
Saint stared at the giant rising from the statue's lap, her violet gaze narrowing as memory surfaced from the depths of her mind.
She remembered the broken wall along the underground river, the carving they had passed after falling from the battle with the Idol. It had depicted a two-horned warrior, blood weeping from the seams of his armor, dragging his battered body through the darkness with the crowned shadow of a King upon his back. She remembered the murals within the temple above, showing that same horned knight bowing before his sovereign, completing his final duty before the city fell to song.
Saint's voice was barely a breath, yet it carried across the pale flagstones.
"Cedric…"
It was the name Esdras had whispered in the visions Cassie witnessed within her unconscious.
Sunny did not nod, but his thoughts had reached the same conclusion.
If this towering figure was Cedric, the loyal knight of Constellia, then the rich red cloth bound tightly around his verdigris plates was the lost weapon of the fallen realm.
[The Wrapped Agony].
Through the accelerated processing of Mind Weave and Silver Weave, Sunny's thoughts moved with frightening velocity.
The crimson bandages wrapped across the knight's body pulsed with countless layered Blessings. The sheer volume of divine and profane enchantments radiating from the cloth was staggering, an intricate lattice of power that even he couldn't quickly analysis.
But what was more terrifying was Cedric's current status.
He was a Corrupted Tyrant.
Had the green knight been a mere Devil, he would have been unable to command the full authority of the Relic. Devils possessed unnatural abilities, but they lacked dominion.
A Tyrant was different. A Tyrant commanded territory and held authority over its subjects, functioning on a principle comparable to how a Supreme commanded a Domain.
Classes and Ranks maintained their own peculiar relationships. A Devil corresponded to an Awakened, wielding specialized, individual power. A Tyrant mirrored a Supreme, possessing the reach to enforce its will upon a defined space. A Terror mirrored a Sacred, expanding that influence outward until the surrounding realm buckled. And a Titan mirrored a Divine, carrying an entire closed world within its existence.
Because Cedric was a Tyrant, he was actively imposing his Will upon the crimson wrappings. He was wielding the Relic as an extension of his own corrupted power.
Saint's jaw clenched, her teeth pressing together with a quiet grind.
Nervousness was an emotion she rarely experienced. Her life in Mirage City Noir had been defined by routine and clinical control, and her existence as a Shadow had been governed by obedience and discipline.
This moment shattered that composure.
If Cedric's combat strength had scaled to a Great Beast, victory would have remained within reach. She could have met him head-on with her Soul Weapon while Sunny poured his shadows and soul flame into her body.
However, his presence was nearing that of a Great Demon.
Through the sevenfold enchantments of The Wrapped Agony, Cedric had anchored his Will to the Boundary Field.
Saint could feel the spatial fabric of the chamber distorting. An unnatural, magnetic pull dragged at the hems of her black silk coat, pulling her toward the monument. Stepping backward remained physically possible, yet the space itself seemed to resist the motion, treating retreat as an error to be corrected.
'What do I do…?'
The question appeared and vanished in the same second.
An answer was already waiting.
They would have to kill the Tyrant here.
Under normal circumstances, an escape might have been attempted if Sunny could cleave open the Boundary Field. Yet Sunny was a Dormant. His rank lacked the authority to manipulate space, leaving him incapable of tearing a path through the barrier.
Saint could cut a rift with Nothingness, but she could not dismiss herself to his Soul Sea while Sunny remained trapped on the killing floor.
They were locked in a cage with a creature that possessed the destructive output of a Great Demon.
At that moment, Cedric moved.
The green giant drove both gauntleted arms deep into the cracked flagstones.
The bedrock groaned. Massive, petrified roots tore through the ground, surging through the earth like colossal wooden vipers.
Cassie had already scrambled onto the back of the Silvershade Harrow. The great owl beat its wings, taking to the air and spiraling into the heights of the low-lit blue sky.
For the moment, the girl was secure. A Tyrant operated on the instinct of domination; it sought to crush the greatest threats before turning its attention toward the fragile remnants.
Cedric's glowing visor locked entirely onto the two figures remaining upon the ground.
Saint was an Ascended Devil holding the power of Nothingness. Sunny was an Angel — an incompressible union of the Void and an Incarnation of Divinity. To a corrupted sentinel tasked with guarding a sacred tomb, Sunny's very presence was an unbearable insult.
Sunny and Saint invoked [Arweiniad y Tymestl] simultaneously, blue motes of Spirit Essence exploding beneath their boots as they broke in opposite directions.
However, Saint's eyes widened in sudden horror. Sunny was too slow.
Against an opponent possessing the velocity of a Great Demon, the physical limits of a Dormant Devil were an insurmountable flaw.
A colossal root, thicker than a temple pillar, erupted from the stone beneath Sunny's feet. Before he could kick off the air, Cedric's verdigris shoulder slammed into his torso like a falling mountain.
Sunny was launched across the plaza.
His body collided with the pale wall of the chamber, the force obliterating the masonry upon impact. A heartbeat later, the Boundary Field flared, and the stone reassembled itself in an instant, spitting Sunny out as if rejecting his intrusion.
He crashed onto the flagstones. Both of his arms and the right side of his chest had been reduced to a mangled mess of ruptured flesh and pulverized bones.
Before the blood could pool, black radiance ignited across his ruined torso. [Soul Flame] flared with desperate fury, burning away the gore and forcing his shattered ribs to knit together in a violent hiss of smoke.
Saint had no time to reach him.
She twisted her body mid-air, narrowly evading a petrified root that speared upward like an iron javelin.
Her breath caught.
Around the point of impact, thirteen more roots burst through the floor in rapid succession. They bent, split into hundreds of barbed briars, and surged toward her with predatory speed, cutting off every vector of her descent.
Saint gritted her teeth, the muscles in her jaw standing out against the pale contour of her face.
She poured the strength of all four of her shadows into her limbs, channeling the Storm God's Blessing to leap across the sea of briars. Her boots barely brushed the bark of one thrashing root before she launched herself toward the next, her Soul Weapon flashing in dark arcs to sever the wooden tendrils that lunged for her body.
The battle was already demanding an unsustainable toll.
She was forced to constantly shift the augmentation between her physical body and her blade, invoking [Blade of Darkness] to deepen the cutting power of the weapon whenever a root proved too dense for common iron.
Even with that relentless tempo, four massive roots found their mark.
Two struck her ribs with the force of battering rams, while another pair slashed across her thighs, leaving ragged gashes in the black silk of her trousers. The concussive attacks threw her from the sky. As she struck the flagstones, a violent cough forced a mouthful of dark, frothing blood from her lips.
A cold, burning sensation raced through her bloodstream.
'Poison…?!'
It was the necrotic venom of emanating from the Wrapped Agony, rotting her flesh from the point of contact and denying her natural resilience the chance to knit her skin together.
She threw her body sideways, rolling across the ground as three more roots plunged into the floor like siege ballistas, obliterating the flagstones where she had landed. The impact flung her into the nearest wall.
Before her back could fully absorb the collision, she kicked off the stone, vaulting upward just as an iron-hard spike tore through the air, carving a furrow inches from her Onyx Mantle.
Saint cast a swift look toward the upper reaches of the chamber.
Near the boundary of the inverted sky, the Silvershade Harrow hovered, its massive silver wings beating with steady grace. The roots thrashing across the plaza reached for the heights, yet the moment they neared the frozen ceiling of water, their growth recoiled as if burned by an invisible flame. The lake above rejected the corruption completely.
Cassie was safe.
'Good… I can fight without fearing for her life.'
Saint took a breath, turning her focus back toward the floor.
Cedric remained anchored to the dais, his verdigris-plated arms buried in the bedrock. The petrified briars had woven themselves across the entire plaza, converting the chamber into a suffocating forest of thorns.
Sunny's black flames were already spreading along the root systems, attempting to consume the wood, only for the crimson cloth bound to the giant's torso to pulse with white light and snuff the fire out.
Then, Saint felt the pulse of Sunny's soul through their shared link.
'Shadow of Parsimony…'
Across the plaza, the boy moved at a speed that blurred the air. His hair had turned to incandescent gold, and his eyes had become two bottomless wells of void. On his path, shards of glowing ice inscribed with celestial sigils crystallized out of nothingness.
A torrent of True Darkness erupted from Sunny's hand, swallowing Cedric's massive form before dropping the temperature of the entire hall below the threshold of freezing.
Saint sprinted forward, her black sword descending upon an incoming root. The blade bit deep into the petrified wood, yet the density was too immense to sever it in a single blow.
'He is using everything he has…'
Sunny was invoking his second Innate Ability, [Discordant Amalgamation].
He had forcefully intertwined the crushing, atmospheric cold of Frozen Stardust with the obscuring tide of True Darkness. The surrounding briars slowed, their frantic lashing dampened by the sudden freeze.
The opening was minute, yet for an Ascended Devil, that fraction of a second was plenty.
Saint crossed the plaza like a released bolt. In the span of a heartbeat, she stood directly before Cedric.
The Tyrant's helm tilted upward, his burning visor meeting her violet gaze as her blade fell toward his neck.
A deafening ring of metal echoed through the Boundary Field. Cedric twisted his head, catching the black edge between the curve of his massive horns.
The backlash vibrated through Saint's arms. The shockwave was so violent that her fingers were forcefully pried from the hilt, and the dark sword spun out of her grip.
'Are you serious?!'
Her Fourth Tier Ascended weapon could not even leave a scratch upon those horns.
She flipped backward through the air, landing in a low crouch as the surrounding roots snapped back toward Cedric's body, coiling around his limbs like armor. The Tyrant was preparing to abandon the dais and engage them in direct combat.
A shadow shifted at her flank.
Sunny stood beside her. His golden hair was streaked with a mixture of dark crimson and gold blood, and the abyssal darkness of his eyes locked onto her with terrifying intensity. Looking into his face made a shiver pass down Saint's spine; it felt as though an ancient, otherworldly existence were peering at her through the shell of a seventeen-year-old boy.
When he spoke, his voice emerged as a layered echo, accompanied by a hollow, distant resonance.
"Saint, this will get us nowhere. We need the power of a Transcendent weapon to break that shell of his. However…"
The roots around Cedric coiled tight. The Tyrant threw back his head and unleashed a ferocious shriek that shattered the surrounding air.
Sunny thrust his hand forward, using [Coldlight Aureole] to redirect the incoming shockwave. The air buckled around them, the concussive pressure deflected toward the ceiling, though the residual force still drove his boots back through the ground.
He continued speaking through gritted teeth.
"…Neither of us possesses a Transcendent weapon, and I can't weave. Our only option is to release that stored Spell of yours, and augment you with everything in my soul."
Sunny's face contorted in agony. He lifted one trembling hand and pressed it hard against his temple.
"Besides… my sanity is going to fade in thirty-two seconds."
Saint met his gaze and nodded once. She called upon the [Blessing of Dusk] to send her thoughts through their connection.
[Release it here, Milord. I will handle the rest.]
Sunny nodded.
He extended his right hand, opening his palm to reveal a suspended prism of blue diamond runes.
The runes fractured.
Then, a blinding, screeching radiance flooded the chamber as the contained Spell detonated.
Angels held an unnatural authority over Time. Before entering this abyss, Sunny had used that authority to freeze the temporal state of the Anti-Army spell Saint had woven on the bridge, suspending its activation until this exact second.
Now, he released his grip on that frozen time.
Colossal pillars of black darkness and starlit radiance erupted from the flagstones. The spell devoured the surrounding essence, rewriting the laws of the Boundary Field to favor their own affinities.
Cedric staggered.
The sudden distortion in his territory drove him down onto one knee, the verdigris plates of his leg screeching against the runic ground. The Wrapped Agony writhed across his torso, attempting to reject the foreign sorcery, but the array was far too potent to ignore.
Sunny leaped backward, shouting over the roar of the pillars.
"It is all you! Do not die!"
A fierce smile touched Saint's lips as she surged forward.
The moment Sunny retreated, a colossal surge of power flooded through their bond.
Under [Shadow of Parsimony], the amplification granted by Sunny's four shadows jumped from one hundred and fifty percent to three hundred percent each. The curse of his Soul Flame doubled its output to two hundred percent.
Combined with her own four shadows, Saint received a thirty-three-fold multiplication of her physical and destructive might.
At the same time, Sunny channeled the curse of his first Aspect — [Black Moon] — directly through her Soul Weapon.
The black sword flew back to her hand, coated in an incandescent, raging fire of darkness that devoured the air around it. The power was so colossal that it threatened to tear her muscles apart from within, yet Sunny bore the brunt of the spiritual backlash, using his own will to prevent the Void's corruption from touching her soul.
Saint felt his suffering through the link, and her heart hardened into ice.
She closed the distance in a single step and brought her sword down in a two-handed cleave.
The strike released a crescent of black flames that obliterated the air ahead of her. The shockwave pulverized the stone, carving a trench three meters deep toward the giant.
Cedric raised his left arm to intercept the blow. The crimson bandages across his forearm flared with white light, shifting into position to catch the blade.
The black crescent struck.
The force drove Cedric backward, his sabatons carving two deep furrows through the bedrock. A spray of dark ichor erupted from his arm as the edge bit into his flesh, leaving a deep gash across his shoulder.
Yet the arm remained attached.
The Corrupted Tyrant roared, swinging his remaining arm in a sweeping counter that sent Saint flying across the plaza.
She twisted mid-air, landed on her boots, and blurred forward again.
The two collided in a tempest of ruin.
Cedric possessed the combat might of a Great Demon, yet the territory had turned hostile to his presence. Saint moved like an avatar of war, her [Heart of Darkness] flaring to its absolute peak, her blade clashing against his limbs in a relentless flurry of sparks and ichor.
Sunny could not even approach the exchange. The atmospheric shockwaves generated by their clash would have torn his Dormant body into ribbons.
He stood frozen in place, his fingers digging into his arms until blood soaked his sleeves, his teeth grinding together as he fought the maddening whispers of Avarice clawing at his mind.
'Hold on… just hold on…!'
He groaned, doubling over as the freezing torment of [Lonesome Soul] spread through his body and mind.
Saint felt every ounce of his agony through their bond, yet she had no luxury to look back.
Cedric was fighting like a moving forest, lashing out with petrified roots and using the enchantments of the Relic to parry her strikes. Sunny supported her from afar — using [Coldlight Aureole] to redirect the weight of Cedric's swings, [Young Heart] to eliminate the delay on her power, and allowing [Black Moon] to erupt from her blade with every impact.
The battle raged across the shattered plaza.
Cedric brought his fist down in a hammer strike that caught Saint's guard head-on.
The black blade groaned under the pressure. A hairline fracture spider-webbed across the steel, only for the crack to instantly seal as Sunny's Soul Flame poured into the shadow weapon to restore it.
The recoil launched Saint through the air.
She slammed into the floor, her gauntlet digging into the ground to arrest her skid, leaving a deep furrow across the ground that restored a second later. She fell to her knees and wretched, spitting a mouthful of blood before rising to her feet once more.
Her mirrored violet eyes narrowed as she watched the Tyrant gather himself.
'Even thirty-three times my strength is not enough.'
Cedric's verdigris armor was cracked and his blood painted the stone, yet his lifeforce remained anchored to the world.
'It is the bandages. As long as he wears the Wrapped Agony, he will not fall.'
To end this nightmare, they had to strip the Relic from him — all of it.
The strain tearing through Saint's flesh was reaching its peak.
Cedric pressed his onslaught without pause, forcing her to draw upon Nothingness to preserve her life. Her affinity for the mists ran deep, an authority far too vast to be comfortably contained within an Ascended body. Invoking it unraveled her muscles, setting her essence pathways ablaze with cold agony.
If she lacked the capacity to craft a Spell capable of severing the crimson bindings anchoring the Tyrant, then Sunny was her only recourse.
The problem lay ten paces behind her.
Sunny remained collapsed on his knees, his fingers violently raking across the skin of his throat and skull. The madness of his transformation was eroding his mind, amplified to a terrifying degree by the sheer magnitude of the state he was in.
Saint was forced back into the battle, parrying Cedric's heavy strikes with her own edge. The active Anti-Army Spell blunted a portion of the Tyrant's destructive output, yet the oppressive Will radiating from his crimson bindings remained suffocating. It was the solitary reason she stayed alive, holding her ground on the thinnest razor's edge.
Then, the battlefield tilted.
A blinding, bloody radiance erupted from Cedric's armored gauntlets. Saint recognized the lethal shift in the air and leaped backward across the floor.
The light did not disperse; it condensed into countless rippling rings that coalesced into a colossal greatsword suspended in the air. The Tyrant lunged forward, tearing the remaining fragments of the dais from his lower limbs, and caught the massive hilt, resting the broad blade casually upon his shoulder.
The air shrieked as Cedric vanished.
Saint twisted her torso, throwing her blade into a high guard as the crimson light descended upon her position.
Yet the defense meant… nothing.
The crimson edge passed straight through her black guard, cleaving through her flesh from shoulder to hip. Her severed right arm flew into the air, spinning across the gloom in an arc of dark blood. Saint clamped her jaw shut until enamel cracked, swallowing the scream rising in her throat as she kicked off the ground to retreat.
Black fire erupted across the ruin of her torso. [Soul Flame] flared with ferocious intensity, knitting bone, reconnecting severed vessels, and regrowing her lost limb in a matter of seconds.
Before she could regain her balance, the Tyrant descended once more.
Cedric brought the crimson greatsword upward in a violent, vertical cleave, tearing an open furrow through the bedrock. The runic circles carved into the floor shattered beneath the passing light.
Drawing upon the Storm God's Blessing, Saint threw herself backward to evade the follow-up, yet a trailing ripple of light sheared through her left arm, severing it at the elbow. Black fire washed over the stump instantly, restoring the limb before the blood could even pool.
She recalled her Soul Weapon, the dark steel solidifying in her newly formed grip.
A nerve-wracking tension coiled in her chest.
That crimson blade ignored physical density entirely, slicing cleanly through her [Blade of Darkness] as though matter were an illusion. Yet as she watched the weapon's trailing wake, she noticed a subtle flaw.
The crimson edge was vibrating with irregular, chaotic tremors.
A cold smile touched Saint's lips…
She charged straight into Cedric's reach.
The Tyrant swung the massive greatsword downward in an executioner's arc. This time, Saint released her left hand from the hilt of her weapon, thrusting her bare palm directly toward the descending blade of light.
A concentrated, pale mist shaped like writhing flame erupted from her skin.
[Shield of Nothing].
The pale mist met the unstable light. The blade of pure energy dissolved upon contact, its luminous structure wiped out of reality by the touch of Nothingness.
With her opponent's weapon dismantled, Saint drove her Soul Weapon forward, driving the tip cleanly through Cedric's armored visor.
A guttural howl of agony ripped from the Tyrant's throat as black blood erupted from his helm. Cedric thrashed with primal fury, the space around his limbs caving inward, but Saint had already disengaged, sliding thirty paces back across the floor.
She had inflicted heavy damage, yet a blade of pure energy was an unstable construct; Cedric would not fall for the same counter twice.
Black blood poured from the cracked seams of the Tyrant's helmet. Cedric vaulted into the air, his four arms outstretched, and summoned the dormant ecology rooted deep within his corrupted core.
Towering, blue-glowing branches exploded from his flesh and burst from the ground below.
In the span of a dozen seconds, the barren chamber transformed into a suffocating, dense forest of azure wood. Thick roots tore through the foundation, and luminous leaves blocked the ceiling, turning the arena into a labyrinth of shifting blue shadows.
Cedric crashed down through the canopy, lunging from the brush to resume the duel. Saint parried, dodged, and cleaved her way through the blue thicket, but her body was approaching its breaking point. Drawing upon Nothingness repeatedly was tearing her physical body apart from the inside out.
'I cannot… fall here…!'
She parried another sweeping strike, her boots sliding through crushed wood.
…She was entirely unaware that deep within the thicket, Sunny was no longer merely writhing.
He remained on his knees, his chin resting against his chest, with golden tears of blood streaming from a solitary, open eye. Yet above his head, a phenomenon was taking shape.
Sunny was commanding Runic Sorcery without a physical chisel.
Suspended in the air above him was an intricate, multi-layered Runic Array woven entirely out of frozen stardust and pure light.
Runic Sorcery required an physical medium to impose its laws upon the world, and Sunny had created that medium from his own authority. The [Star of Ariamis] granted him Unholy affinity over celestial frost, an angelic power that refused to be diminished by mortal constraints.
A manic, layered laugh bubbled past his blood-stained teeth. Even through the fog of madness, he knew the craft was whole.
Saint was hurled backward through the trunk of an azure tree, the wood splintering under the concussive force. Her spine cracked and reformed under the relentless burn of black fire as she rolled onto her feet, her gaze exhausted and dark.
Then, she looked toward the clearing, and her eyes widened.
Sunny rose slowly to his feet beneath the rotating constellation of starlight.
In his right hand, he held a Transcendent Soul Shard. He closed his fist, crushing the crystal into fine powder, and allowed the dense, luminous soul essence to flood upward into the floating array, crowning the construct with the devastating potency of a Transcendent Spell.
He raised his head, his golden tear catching the light, and spoke in a cracked, commanding voice:
"Saint… lift your blade skyward..."
Saint did not hesitate. She gripped the hilt of her Soul Weapon with both hands and raised the tip straight toward the canopy.
The Runic Array overhead erupted in a cascade of starlit brilliance.
The stardust and light descended like an inverted waterfall, pouring directly into the length of her raised sword.
Cedric tore through the shattered blue trees, his four arms bared to kill, but froze mid-stride before the spectacle.
The weapon in Saint's hands was no longer a blade of dark shadows and white fire.
She stood within the blue forest, holding a radiant, blinding pillar of pure starlight.
—
A-Ah… haah…'
Sunny was drowning in his own power.
He lay collapsed upon the churned permafrost, his consciousness submerged beneath a tempest of alien whispers and unholy signals that no mortal soul should have been forced to bear. The authority coursing through his spirit was perverted, intoxicating, and fundamentally unnatural, bending his ego toward a self he recognized all too well.
Yet his mind remained intact. Behind the veil of angelic delirium, Sunny was still thinking.
'Where have I… encountered such a dilemma before…?'
He plunged through the broken fragments of his Fables, frantically searching through the memories of lives lived and unlived. A battle surfaced through the darkness: the frozen plains of the north, facing Fenrir, the terrible child of the Beast God. An Unholy Devil standing against him when he had walked the world as a Sacred Titan.
'No… that formula demanded a Titan's domain… I need something else…'
He needed a chisel capable of severing the conduit binding a lesser vessel to a higher authority. Had Soul Serpent reached Transcendence, its [Slaying Blade] would have cleaved the link between Cedric and the Wrapped Agony with clean, conceptual death. But the serpent was barred from that Rank due to his own lack of Shadow Dance — and the broken Fable accompanying it.
Sunny dug deeper into the scattered archives of his future mind until his fingers caught the thread of the Spell he sought.
It was an archaic rite designed for apostates — a sorcery conceived to forcibly strip, reject, and sever the hallowed bestowment of a deity.
In this world, Runic Sorcery demanded an earthly, tangible medium to anchor its laws onto reality. Shadow Manifestation had served that purpose in the past, giving form to intangible intent.
Now, he possessed something on the same scale: Frozen Stardust.
A material born of Unholy Starlight, carrying an authority so vast that his Ascended body could barely harness a fraction of its true majesty.
That was why Sunny laughed through the blood pooling in his teeth.
Through [Discordant Amalgamation], he did not merely hand Saint a weapon; he fused the conceptual array of the severance spell directly into the crystalline starlight of her blade.
Cedric recognized the catastrophe an instant too late.
The Tyrant's crimson eyes dilated with primal terror. The abomination thrashed violently, drawing upon the corrupted ecology within its body to raise a towering barricade of iron-hard, azure branches to intercept the descending light—
Saint did not give the forest time to take root.
She took a single, earth-shattering step forward, her voice ringing out like a clarion bell through the crashing timber:
APOSTASY OF GRACE!!!
Severance of the Covenant — Cast Down Thy Hallowed Cord.
Space folded.
The strike was faster than even the thoughts of the Tyrant, faster than it's actions. There was no passage of the blade through the air, only the sudden, absolute arrival of the cut.
Cedric froze.
The towering, four-armed abomination stood suspended in the clearing, its massive greatsword hovering inches above the frosted floor. For a heartbeat, the Tyrant seemed entirely lost, tilting its horned visor downward as black blood dripped from the seams of its helm.
A low, confused rattle escaped its throat:
"A-Ahh…?"
The Tyrant's vision sheared in half.
A hairline fracture of blinding white radiance opened vertically down the center of its skull, through its breastplate, through its defiled core, and deep into the wood beneath its boots.
In that exact microsecond, the backlash hit at once.
Deep in the thicket, Sunny dropped like a marionette whose strings had been severed, his chin smacking the frozen floor as his consciousness gave out.
Saint's arms ruptured beneath the colossal recoil of the spell. Fine sprays of crimson burst from the pores of her forearms, while dark blood spilled from her nose, mouth, and beneath her closed eyelids. Her knees slammed violently into the earth, her grip finally slipping from the blinding hilt.
Then, the true consequence of the strike tore through reality.
A crescent shockwave of pure, frozen starlight detonated outward, cleaving the entire blue forest in two. The radiant arc rose vertically through the canopy, piercing hundreds of meters upward until it struck the ceiling of the cavern, nearly bisecting the subterranean lake suspended above the chamber.
High above in the sky, Cassie stumbled on the Silvershades back. A violent, ontological tremor rippled through her perceptions, and she turned her sightless face toward the depths below, her expression tightening with suffocating dread.
Down within the ruined basin, the silence was absolute.
Slowly, agonizingly, the shattered pieces of Cedric's body began to pull together. Tendrils of dark flesh and jagged bone stitched across the bisected halves, forcing the monstrosity back onto its feet.
For a long, quiet moment, the Tyrant stood amidst the splintered wood, staring at its trembling claws in dazed incomprehension.
Then, it looked inward to its soul.
…An ear-splitting, cataclysmic roar of unadulterated fury and despair tore from Cedric's maw, shaking the foundations of the underground world.
The crimson bindings had unraveled into pure light.
Its sacred umbilical connection to the Wrapped Agony had been permanently, irrevocably severed.
The Tyrant raised its cracked visor, its crimson eyes burning with murderous intent.
Across the splintered glade, Saint met that murderous gaze with identical intent.
The severance had achieved its purpose. Deprived of the umbilical cord, Cedric's authority collapsed back to the natural baseline of a Corrupted Tyrant. The continuous pressure of the Anti-Army Spell pressed down upon the chamber, its pillars of interlocking light and darkness actively suppressing the beast's might until its physical output dropped beneath the power of an ordinary Saint.
Yet Saint stood upon the edge of exhaustion.
Sunny lay motionless among the broken roots behind her. The radiance had abandoned his vessel; his hair had returned to its natural raven black, and the abyssal void in his eyes had died away into pale slumber. Without his conscious guidance, [Soul Flame] had extinguished, depriving her of its restorative warmth. Only his five shadows remained bound to her body, their silent reinforcement granting her the strength to stand.
She turned her head slightly, glancing over her shoulder at the fallen youth.
"You did well… now leave it to me."
Her Soul Weapon materialized in her grip, the dark blade humming with cold resonance.
She advanced through the shattered timber, her sabatons grinding against the crushed stone. Cedric matched her stride, dragging his true silver-greatsword across the forest, his two arms tensing to strike.
The distance faded away, and a thunderous shockwave tore through the cavern as their blades collided.
—
The exchange of attacks turned into a blur of black steel and splintering wood.
Cedric pressed forward with monstrous momentum. His four arms swung in rapid coordination, two driving the massive greatsword down in heavy vertical arcs while the lower pair directed thick, azure roots to close off Saint's retreat.
Saint met the assault with everything that made up her entire existence. She deflected the flat of the greatsword with her Soul Weapon, spun through a narrow gap between two sweeping branches, and severed three incoming roots with a backhand slash.
The kinetic shock rattled through her body. Her ribs cracked under the displacement of air, yet without Sunny's consciousness to channel [Soul Flame], her physical injuries remained open. Sunny's five shadows clung tight to her, their dark mass reinforcing her strained muscles and forcing her legs to keep pace.
Cedric stepped forward, raising his weapon with all four arms for an executioner's strike.
Saint dropped her stance, driving her left palm flat against the cracked ground.
Nothingness surged from her skin.
A pale, lightless mist bled outward through the subterranean soil, expanding into the [Field of Annulment].
The concept of the nothing took hold. The magical reinforcement supporting the blue thicket withered instantly, turning the living wood brittle. The floor caved inward under the sudden absence of structure, dragging Cedric's massive feet into the collapsing dirt.
The backlash was catastrophic.
Saint coughed violently, vomiting a heavy spray of dark blood across the ground. Her internal pathways ruptured beneath the strain of forcing a Transcendent authority through an Ascended body, sending sharp agony shooting through her skull.
Cedric's balance vanished. His heavy greatsword struck the dirt yards wide of its mark, throwing his upper torso completely open.
Saint surged forward off her lead foot.
The distance closed in a single bound. She drew her Soul Weapon back, the dark blade humming with dark focus as she met the Tyrant's fractured visor.
"Farewell, knight of the stars."
Her edge swept horizontally through the air.
The dark steel sheared cleanly through the dense wood and armored plating of his neck.
The colossal head separated from the shoulders, spinning into the dirt with a heavy thud.
The remaining four-armed bulk stood upright for a solitary heartbeat, black ichor fountain-spraying into the canopy, before toppling forward onto the crushed roots.
Saint's legs gave out.
Her sword clattered against the soil as she tumbled forward, her knees striking the ground beside the fallen Tyrant. Sunny's five shadows detached from her body, gliding across the ground to settle back beneath their master's unconscious form.
A faint, spectral whisper echoed in her ears:
[You have slain a Corrupted Tyrant, Cedric of the Constellian Kingsguard.]
[You have slain a Great Demon, Defiled Remnant of the Asteria's Will.]
[...You have received the Relic: The Wrapped Agony.]
Saint turned her head with agonizing effort, looking upward through the cleaved canopy toward the subterranean fissure.
Descending at blistering speed was the luminescent, winged shape of the Silvershade.
Riding atop the silver beast, her golden hair whipping violently against her pale face, was Cassie, her sightless features twisted in raw, terrified panic.
Darkness rushed over Saint's vision, and consciousness abandoned her entirely.