The giant underground chamber was circular in shape and as immense as the grand hall of the Bright Castle. Its walls were constructed from the same cyclopean grey stone slabs that formed the mighty fortifications of the Dark City, but unlike the dry, scorched stone above, these walls were slick, covered in weeping, whispering streams of cold, nebulous black water. The sound of the trickling moisture was like a thousand voices mourning in the dark.
In the dead center of the chamber, a vast mountain of human bones rose from the ground. It was a harrowing sight, reaching almost halfway to the distant, vaulted ceiling. Thousands… no, hundreds of thousands of people must have perished to create this ossuary.
Kane shifted his gaze, squinting through the gloom. Only now did he notice the veins of deep crimson coral growing from the harrowing hill of white bones. They pulsed with a faint, rhythmic light, looking almost like the muscle tissue of some colossal, subterranean creature. Following the coral pillars upward, he finally saw that the dome of the immense chamber was shattered. Pale, sickly sunlight streamed through the breach, falling directly onto the ghastly visage below.
A giant stone hand was reaching down through the broken dome, its palm open and fingers slightly curled, as though trying to caress the mountain formed from the bones of those who had once populated this forsaken land.
Looking at that stone hand, Kane suddenly realized where they were.
The vast underground chamber was situated directly beneath the headless statue of the graceful woman who had once saved them from drowning in the black waters of the cursed sea. High above, one of her hands was raised toward the heavens in a desperate embrace. The other had broken off and fallen thousands of years ago, presumed lost in the mud and silt at the base of the statue.
But it hadn't stayed in the mud. Reaching into the very depths of hell—that was the hand Kane was looking at right now.
It was also their only way out.
*******
Kane searched the shadows for the source of the dread he felt. To his naked eye, the mountain was still, but when he activated his Aspect Vision, the world shifted. He saw thousands of ethereal threads coiled and knotted around the bones, pulsating with a dark, necrotic energy.
'That is the creature… a Fallen one,' he realized, his blood running cold.
The strongest enemy he had faced to date was a Fallen Beast, but the rank of the entity before him felt leagues beyond that. This was a true Colossus of the abyss. The monster, meanwhile, was slowly waking up. The very air began to vibrate with the grinding of calcified joints.
"Curses," Kane hissed.
Nervously forming the [Sleeper Killer] in his right hand, he glanced toward Nephis. She was already moving, the golden rope in her hands as she prepared to pass it to Kai for an aerial extraction.
But before the beautiful archer could take the rope, the mountainous creature suddenly rippled. A moment later, a twisted pillar of bones shot from its body with the concussive force of a siege ram.
Nephis and Kai dove in opposite directions, the massive pillar of bone whistling past them. Before the thunderous sound of the impact against the chamber wall even reached Kane's ears, the pillar was already moving again, whipping sideways with tremendous, sweeping force.
Sunny and Cassie were lucky to be positioned behind the arc of the strike, but Kane, Effie, and Caster were directly in the path of the scythe-like limb. They reacted with admirable speed, throwing themselves to the stone floor as the terrifying mass of femurs and ribs roared above their heads.
Rising from the floor, Effie screamed, her voice echoing off the grey slabs:
"It's just thrashing in its sleep! Move! We need to get out of here before the bastard truly wakes up!"
The Lord of the Dead was indeed coming to its senses. The bones constituting its repulsive body shifted and groaned, unfurling from within the white mass like giant, twisting tentacles. It was transforming from a shapeless hill into a semblance of a nightmare.
Another twisting pillar shot out, striking blindly at the empty space behind the abomination. The force of the shifting mass separated the group. Kane and Caster were thrown toward the far side of the chamber, cut off from the others by a wall of rising bone. The noise was deafening—the sound of thousands of ancient bones scraping against weathered stone.
Kane looked at Caster, who was already gripping his sword, his face pale but determined.
"We need to hold it off so the others can climb!" Kane shouted.
"Hold it off?" Caster looked at the mountain-sized horror and then back at Kane. "How exactly are we supposed to do that?"
Kane smiled, though there was no mirth in it. "I have a plan."
With a surge of soul essence, he summoned Missy to the battlefield.
*******
The air in the subterranean abyss was stagnant, smelling of millennia-old dust and the cold, lingering static of the grave. Before them stood the Lord of the Dead—a literal mountain of calcified history.
"It has no heart to pierce," Missy whispered, her form already flickering and translucent like a dying candle in a draft. "And no blood to spill."
"Then we break every single bone until there's nothing left to stand on," Kane growled.
His armor, a suit of interlocking obsidian plates, began to hum with a low-frequency vibration. As his irritation spiked into a cold, focused fury, the plates thickened and glowed with a dark light. His physical stature expanded, his muscles swelling to meet the overwhelming pressure radiating from the titan.
The Lord of the Dead didn't speak; it simply existed at them. A dozen massive limbs, woven from hundreds of human spines, erupted from its central mass. They slammed into the ground with the force of falling meteors.
"Scatter!" Caster roared.
His silhouette became a blur. Utilizing his unnatural speed, Caster turned into a streak of silver light. His Jian sword whistled through the air as he danced between the crushing blows. The blade vibrated at such a high frequency that it sent a shower of white shards flying with every contact. But for every bone he shattered, ten more surged from the mountain to replace them.
Missy was gone. She had vanished into the mist of her own making, her Misty Sword trailing a faint, vaporous wake. She reappeared high above the Lord's "shoulder," driving her blade into a cluster of skulls. The steel passed through the bone like a ghost, disrupting the necrotic energy holding the mass together. A limb detached and crumbled into dust, but the mountain simply absorbed the debris from the floor to reform instantly.
Kane took the brunt of the frontal assault. He conjured a massive, two-handed greataxe from his soul-threads. As a bone-fist the size of a carriage swung at him, he didn't dodge. He swung back.
CRACK.
The shockwave rattled Kane's teeth. His armor glowed a deep, angry crimson, feeding off his frustration at the creature's sheer durability. He was being pushed back, his boots furrowing deep trenches into the stone floor, but his strength was climbing as his rage hit new heights.
"It's a hive mind!" Kane yelled over the cacophony of grinding bone. "The threads holding it together are tangled. I can see the knots!"
Kane switched his weapon mid-swing, the axe dissolving into thousands of glowing, ethereal filaments. He lashed out, not at the physical bone, but at the Mind Threads—the invisible necromantic web that allowed the mountain to function as a single entity.
The Lord of the Dead shuddered. For the first time, its movements became sluggish. The limbs spasmed, some even turning to attack the creature's own torso as the "hive" began to conflict with itself.
"Now!" Kane roared, his armor venting steam as his rage reached its zenith. "Missy, possess the core! Caster, find the fracture!"
Missy reappeared, her Misty Sword glowing with a spectral light. She dived headlong into the center of the bone-mass. Instead of cutting, she let her spirit slip from her body, possessing the very essence of the mountain. For three agonizing seconds, the Lord of the Dead froze. Internal, psychic screams echoed through the cavern as Missy fought to hold the "mountain" still from the inside.
Her physical body slumped, unprotected on the cold stone. A stray bone-tendril, acting on a dying reflex, lashed out toward her.
Caster moved.
His speed was so great that the air behind him ignited. He reached Missy, parrying the tendril with his Jian in a spray of sparks, before catapulting back toward the Lord's central "eye"—a hollowed-out cavern of ribs where the necrotic energy was thickest.
Kane channeled everything—every ounce of his anger toward the Nightmare, every thread of his soul—into his armor and his spirit. 'Die, bastard!' he thought, his vision turning red.
He forged his essence into a single, gargantuan spear. He hurled it with a roar that drowned out the grinding bones. The spear didn't break the physical structure; it pierced the Soul-Threads of the Lord, pinning its "consciousness" to the back of the cavern wall.
The Lord of the Dead let out a silent, psychic shriek that brought all three warriors to their knees. Blood leaked from Kane's nose; Missy collapsed back into her body, coughing up bile as her mind was nearly shredded by the strain of the possession.
The mountain began to collapse. The necrotic glue was failing.
But the Lord had one final, desperate reflex. It pulled all its remaining mass into a single, massive pillar of bone—a final hammer to crush the three exhausted humans.
"Caster... finish it..." Kane gasped, his armor cracking and shedding obsidian flakes under the strain of his fading energy.
Caster didn't breathe. He closed his eyes, feeling the Jian in his hand. He pushed his speed beyond the limits of his muscles, beyond the limits of his soul. His legs felt like they were liquefying, his lungs burning with every stride. He became a single, piercing line of light.
He didn't strike the bones. He struck the space between the bones.
With a definitive shink, Caster passed through the core of the Lord of the Dead. He skidded to a halt fifty feet behind the beast, his sword arm trembling violently, the Jian glowing white-hot.
Behind him, the Lord of the Dead didn't just fall—it disintegrated. The mountain of bones turned to fine, grey ash, settling over the underground chamber like a shroud of snow.
The silence that followed was deafening.
Kane lay on his back, his obsidian armor shattered and vanishing into smoke. His chest was a mess of deep lacerations, and his breathing was shallow. Missy was curled in a fetal position, her spirit exhausted, her skin deathly pale. Caster stood for a moment longer before his legs finally gave out,he spoke,'Next,Time,You are not Planning...Bastard.',Kane looked,'Ok.Bitch'. He collapsed next to his sword, his body covered in bruises and internal bleeding, but alive.
They had won. They were broken, battered, and bleeding—but they were whole.
Kane looked up at the ash-covered ceiling, watching the pale sunlight stream through the hand of the goddess, and let out a weak, raspy laugh.
"Extreme... is an understatement."
Caster didn't reply; he just gripped his Jian and closed his eyes, letting the darkness of the cavern finally bring them peace.
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Hey,guys,I killed of Lord of the dead,Way to early