Sometimes heroes seem impossibly distant from the lives of ordinary people, but war has a way of closing that distance.
In an age of chaos, great champions rise one after another. They swallow kingdoms, challenge the heavens, and strike stars from the sky. Like hurricanes and natural disasters, they shatter the order ordinary people depend on for survival and cast them into an uncertain future.
In a world like the Lands Between, where strength reigns supreme, an ordinary person entering the battlefield is little more than a firework destined to vanish in an instant. Thousands of lives can be fed into a war and disappear in the blink of an eye, ground into blood and pulp by the meat grinder of battle.
Without strength, even leaving your name in history is nearly impossible, and after death, there may not even be anyone left to mourn you. The grand chapters of history are written by countless ordinary lives, yet the dazzling names recorded upon those pages rarely belong to ordinary people.
The weak naturally cling to the strong because otherwise they cannot survive. Yet once they do, they often become cannon fodder for those very same people.
It was a painful truth.
Radahn was unusual among the demigods.
He was every bit as ambitious as the others. During the Shattering, he had been one of the rebels who besieged the royal capital. He had marched into Caelid and become the butcher who destroyed Eochaid. He carried a mission inherited from Radagon and served the Golden Order.
Those were the roles history had given him, and every one of them fit the image of a ruthless warlord.
What truly made Starscourge Radahn unusual was how deeply sentimental he was.
When Radahn was young, he rode a scrawny horse. As he grew older, his body became massive enough to resemble a small house, while his horse remained thin and frail. There came a point when the poor animal could no longer support his weight without being crushed beneath him.
Radahn did not abandon his beloved steed.
Instead, he traveled to Sellia, Town of Sorcery, and studied gravity sorcery so he could make himself nearly weightless and continue riding the same horse into battle.
Anyone seeing Radahn on the battlefield for the first time would inevitably be stunned.
Here was a man broader than a grizzly bear and built like a troll, riding a skinny old horse beneath him. The sight was almost as ridiculous as a bodybuilder pedaling around on a child's bicycle.
But his horse had never abandoned Radahn.
And Radahn never abandoned his horse.
Even after losing his sanity, wandering the battlefield in a daze and surviving by devouring corpses, Starscourge Radahn never harmed his beloved steed.
They were partners.
The same was true of the Redmanes. None of them had ever been Radahn's slaves or servants.
They were his comrades and companions.
Nostalgia almost seemed like a luxury reserved for the weak.
The strong were always moving forward, constantly energetic and ambitious. The weak, having so little, could only look backward again and again, savoring memories of the past and losing themselves in fantasies of better days just to keep their minds from collapsing beneath the horrors of the present.
But in the Lands Between, someone as powerful as Radahn had no need to manufacture a sentimental image to win people's loyalty.
Whatever affection he showed for the past was genuine.
That nostalgia gave Radahn something few of the other demigods possessed.
Warmth.
He worshiped Godfrey, the First Elden Lord, and adopted the lion as the symbol of his army in imitation of his hero. Even his fiery red hair, reminiscent of the giants, had once been a source of frustration for him.
There had been a time when Radahn was simply a hot-blooded boy, impulsive, competitive, and bursting with enthusiasm.
Yet the last image this deeply sentimental demigod would leave behind was that of a mindless beast.
The warriors and players participating in the festival could only search their memories and stories for traces of the Radahn who had once existed.
"Look! There he is!"
"Marika above, he's as big as a Runebear!"
"Is that really him?"
"Of course it is. That's General Radahn."
The group stood atop a ridge, gazing toward Starscourge Radahn beneath the moon and stars.
An enormous dark silhouette stood bathed in silver light.
Across the lonely battlefield, there was nothing but the weeping wind, Radahn, and the scrawny horse beneath him.
His red hair streamed from beneath his helm like a lion's mane, or perhaps a great battle standard caught in the wind.
Then the banner suddenly twisted.
Radahn had turned his head.
"He saw us!"
"How?! We're so far away!"
"Idiot, Starscourge Radahn could probably spot an ant from fifty miles away!"
Even without his sanity, Radahn remained a master horseman and warrior.
His martial skill seemed carved directly into his bones. It no longer required conscious thought.
He had lost the calculating mind that once allowed him to decide battles from miles away, making his movements more rigid and predictable.
But that same loss of restraint had made him even more explosive and terrifying.
Radahn reached behind himself and pulled free his enormous greatbow.
He nocked a spear in place of an arrow.
As he drew the bowstring, magical power gathered around the spearhead, forming a dark-purple gravitational vortex. The swirling force compressed into a single point, flooding the projectile with terrifying kinetic energy.
That shot was dangerous.
The festival warriors half a mile away felt their hearts hammer against their ribs.
Radahn's arrow hung over them like the Sword of Damocles, casting the shadow of death across the entire group.
Without another word, everyone scattered.
They sprinted sideways across the dunes, desperately trying to escape the path of the lethal shot.
Only two people remained where they were.
Skyl and Malenia.
Even Millicent had moved away.
She would rather draw the shot toward herself than stand foolishly beside Skyl and hope for the best.
Standing beneath a tree during a thunderstorm was asking to be struck by lightning.
Likewise, standing beside the person who posed the greatest threat to Radahn was a wonderful way to become collateral damage.
Whoosh!
The projectile launched.
It became a streak of violet light, moving faster than sound.
Before anyone could even blink, it was already in front of Malenia.
She raised her prosthetic blade and blocked it with the narrow flat of the weapon.
Boom!
Malenia's feet sank deep into the sand.
The impact drove her backward, carving two long trenches through the ground.
Only after the spear finally exhausted its momentum and dropped into the sand could everyone clearly see what Radahn had fired.
It really was a massive spear.
Radahn immediately drew his bow again.
He could continue doing this until he ran out of ammunition.
There was absolutely nothing fair about his ability to eliminate enemies from absurd distances.
"Charge!"
"Charge!!"
"CHARGE!!!"
The festival warriors roared and rushed toward Radahn.
For a moment, history seemed to repeat itself.
Just like during the war years ago, Malenia had warriors charging beside her.
Radahn stood alone.
Skyl remained on the cold dunes beneath the moon.
He did not join the battle.
Sometimes becoming too powerful was inconvenient.
Being invincible under heaven could become its own kind of loneliness.
So all Skyl could do was remain far away and watch the show.
From where he stood, the warriors charging down the dunes looked like ants.
Radahn released a delighted, deranged howl.
One warrior after another fell to his long-range shots.
When the survivors finally reached him, Starscourge Radahn drew his pair of enormous blades, each nearly thirty feet long, and began swinging them like cleavers.
Nothing could stand in his path.
Anyone who failed to dodge a direct hit was reduced to pulp, like a mosquito crushed beneath an open palm.
Skyl surveyed the battlefield.
He was an outsider.
Not merely an outsider to the battle taking place before him, but an outsider to history itself.
The gaze of a god could pierce through time.
Skyl could see everything that had once happened on this battlefield.
He saw the countless heroic souls buried beneath the yellow sands.
They had once been young men and women.
Before that, they had been children.
They had marched toward war with pride and excitement.
And in the final instant before death, each had watched fragments of their life flash through their mind.
Mora's book floated above Skyl's palm, its pages turning despite the absence of wind.
It continuously recorded the fragments of history Skyl witnessed, gathering them into the foundations of the instanced plane so future players could someday experience them for themselves.
His gaze traveled backward through time.
If history were a river, there was one stretch of that river covered beneath a golden shadow.
The Age of the Erdtree.
The spacetime beneath the Erdtree's canopy had been distorted by Order itself.
Whenever Skyl sent his consciousness wandering through that era, he had to exercise considerable caution to slip into that period of history without drawing attention.
But this time, as he opened the world's soul and began reading its memories, something changed.
From beneath the distant canopy of the Erdtree, a gaze descended.
It locked onto Skyl.
His divine body felt the faint sting of a needle.
Skyl raised his head.
His sight pierced the heavens and traveled beyond the world of the Lands Between.
There, suspended within the chaos outside the world, was an immense existence.
A gigantic hand.
The Greater Will had found him.
And it was not pleased to see the thief who had stolen the Golden Order.
Skyl smiled faintly.
Then he raised a hand and silently waved hello.
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