The winter dawn was a cruel, grey smear against the horizon, providing no warmth to the frozen cobblestones of Dredge City. Henry stood alone in the shadow of the alley, watching the faint golden glow of Serena's armor finally vanish into the crimson haze of the suburbs.
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the whistling of the wind through broken windowpanes. Henry pulled his collar up against the biting chill and let out a long, ragged sigh that clouded in the air.
"I really shouldn't have come back," he muttered to himself, his voice a low rasp. "Retirement was looking so good."
He didn't waste another second on regret. He moved with a predatory grace, crossing the open square not as a man, but as a flicker of shadow that the "peaceful" citizens failed to notice. He scaled the buttresses of the Cathedral, his fingers finding purchase in the ancient, frozen stone until he reached the high arched roof.
From his vantage point, the Cathedral looked like a massive, slumbering beast. The Ichor signature coming from beneath the floorboards was sickening—a deep, oily purple that felt like a weight on his chest.
He didn't use the front doors. Instead, he shattered a small, stained-glass window high in the clerestory and slipped inside. He landed silently on a velvet-lined balcony, the smell of expensive incense and old blood filling his senses. Below him, a lone nun knelt at a side altar, her head bowed in frantic, whispered prayer.
Henry dropped from the balcony, landing directly behind her. Before she could draw a breath to scream, his gloved hand was clamped over her mouth, and the cold edge of a blackened combat knife was pressed against the hollow of her throat.
"I'm going to ask this exactly once," Henry whispered into her ear, his voice as cold as the winter outside. "If you scream, if you lie, or if you even twitch the wrong way, I will snap your neck before you can finish a prayer. Do you understand?"
The nun's eyes went wide, reflecting the starlit void in Henry's own gaze. She gave a frantic, shallow nod.
Henry slowly eased his hand from her mouth, though the knife remained a fraction of an inch from her skin. "The dungeon. The sacrifices. Where are they?"
"Four floors down..." she whispered, her voice trembling with a mix of fear and fanatical disdain. "Through the right-wing chapel... behind the statue of the Weeping Mother. But you're too late, heretic."
Suddenly, the air in the Cathedral didn't just vibrate—it shattered.
The Great Bell in the tower above began to toll. It wasn't a call to prayer; it was a violent, rhythmic bronze roar that shook the dust from the rafters and made the floorboards groan.
Henry tightened his grip on the nun's shoulder as the building swayed. "Why is the bell ringing? Is that the signal for the sacrifice?"
The nun let out a jagged, hysterical laugh, her eyes fixed on the vibrating stained glass. "No, little ghost. It's the warning. The Great Devourer is at the gates. The 'Creature' from the mist has come to challenge our Lord for his throne."
Henry looked toward the high windows. Outside, the crimson mist was no longer drifting; it was slamming against the Cathedral walls like a tidal wave. Thousands of green-veined shadows were swarming the square, and the sky above was beginning to glow with a sickly, emerald light.
The territorial war had begun. Viroth had finally come for Morgrave's head, and Henry was trapped in the middle of the impact zone.
"Perfect," Henry muttered, shoving the nun aside and drawing his greatsword. "At least I won't have to worry about being quiet anymore."
Henry kicked the door open, the heavy oak thudding against the stone wall as he stepped back into the corridor. A group of robed "Deacons" was already rushing toward the chapel, their hands glowing with a sickly, necrotic violet light.
They skidded to a halt, eyes wide as they took in the man in the black coat and the starlight bleeding from his blade.
Henry offered a thin, razor-sharp smile. "I heard your god has a taste for children," he said, his voice dropping an octave. "I'm here to close the kitchen."
He didn't wait for a response. Henry lunged, a blur of shadow and steel. He swung the massive black greatsword in a wide, horizontal arc. There was no resistance—only the wet, rhythmic thwack of steel meeting flesh. Two of the men were cleaved at the waist, their upper torsos sliding away as a spray of crimson painted the white marble pillars.
He didn't stop to admire the work.
The Cathedral groaned as a massive vine from Viroth's outer army smashed through a high window, grappling with a purple-veined root erupting from the floor. The building was a ribcage, and two gods were trying to tear it open.
Henry sprinted down the spiral staircase, his boots slick with ichor and blood. Every robed fanatic who crossed his path was met with a singular, brutal efficiency—a thrust to the throat, a cleave through the shoulder. He was moving too fast for them to even scream.
"Too slow," Henry muttered, reaching the second landing. The stairs were clogged with fleeing cultists. He didn't have time for the scenic route.
He planted his lead foot, channeled a surge of dark mana into his blade, and drove the point of the greatsword vertically into the floorboards.
The stone didn't just crack; it detonated.
A ten-foot crater erupted beneath Henry as he shattered through the third floor, then the fourth. He fell through a cloud of dust, splinters, and screams, the weight of his descent accelerating his momentum.
He slammed into the ground with a bone-jarring thud, landing in a perfect three-point crouch. As the dust settled, the sound of the battle outside was replaced by something far more chilling: unison chanting.
Henry stood up, slowly wiping a smear of blood from his forehead. He hadn't landed in a hallway. He had bypassed the security and crashed directly through the ceiling of the Grand Sanctum.
He was standing on the high altar. Below him, the entire congregation—hundreds of citizens in white and black robes—sat in rows of pews, their eyes fixed on him in terrifying, rhythmic silence. At the front of the room, a man in ornate gold-stitched robes froze, his ceremonial dagger hovering over a stone basin.
The Grand Sanctum, once a place of rhythmic chanting and hollow peace, fell into a vacuum of silence. The hundreds of robed figures below didn't move, their violet-glowing eyes fixed on the man who had just shattered their ceiling.
"I hope I'm not interrupting," Henry said, his voice sounding less like a man and more like a grinding tectonic plate. "But I think your service is over."
The starlight within his greatsword didn't just flare—it curdled. The radiant white energy turned a sickly, oily black, and the matte-black steel of the blade began to flow like liquid obsidian. It lengthened, curving into a massive, seven-foot Scythe. The edge of the blade wasn't sharp; it was a literal tear in reality, humming with the sound of a thousand muffled screams.
A heavy, suffocating pressure dropped onto the room, thick enough to make the Ascenders in the front rows collapse to their knees. From the shattered ceiling, a viscous, black liquid began to drip, hissing as it touched the marble floor.
Henry's head tilted back. The starlight in his eyes died, swallowed by a twin pair of abyssal pits. Then, two pinpricks of light ignited in the center—not gold, but a violent, arterial red.
The congregation of Ascenders, men who had killed and tortured in the name of the Black Altar, finally felt it: The Shiver. It was the primal realization that they were no longer looking at a human being. They were looking at the end of a story.
Henry offered a wide, maniacal grin—a jagged expression that looked entirely wrong on his face. He gripped the scythe's handle sideways, his muscles coiling with a terrifying, unnatural strength.
He didn't scream. He didn't roar. He simply moved the blade in a single, lazy horizontal sweep.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened. The scythe passed through the air with a faint, ghostly whistle. The congregation blinked. A few of the Black Altar mercenaries even raised their weapons to counter-attack, thinking he had missed.
A thin, black line appeared across every pillar, every pew, and every human torso in the room at exactly the same height. The sound followed a second later—a wet, collective shuck—as the Sanctum was completely severed.
The upper halves of three hundred people slid slowly from their waists in horrifying unison. The stone pillars sheared away, the roof beginning to groan as its support vanished.
The silence was replaced by a torrential, rhythmic splashing. Blood didn't just spill; it erupted, coating the white marble in a thick, steaming carpet of red. The "sacred" Sanctum was transformed into a slaughterhouse in the span of a single breath.
Henry stood in the center of the carnage, the black scythe resting on his shoulder. He wasn't breathing hard. He just watched the blood flow toward the drainage grates, his red eyes reflecting the flickering candlelight of a dying religion.
The Reverend Paul lay in two pieces near the altar, his golden robes soaked through, his mouth moving in a silent, final prayer to a god that hadn't come to save him.
Henry stepped over a severed arm, his gaze fixed on the heavy iron door at the back of the room—the way down to the dungeons.
Then Henry waled through the destroyed sanctum towards the chapel. Suddenly he felt surroundings go silent. He felt as if death was coming towards him that time a violet ray of suddenly short towards him.
Henry threw himself to the side, his boots sliding through the gore on the floor. He was fast, but at this range, even he wasn't fast enough. The beam hissed as it passed, cauterizing the air itself. It caught Henry just above his left hip, melting through his reinforced tactical coat and searing a jagged, blackened trench into his flesh.
The agony was a white-hot spike. Henry hit the floor, sliding into a kneeling position near a shattered marble pillar. The black liquid of his scythe flickered, the void-energy hissing as it struggled to maintain its form against the new pressure in the room. With a metallic rasp, the scythe collapsed back into the shape of his blackened greatsword.
Henry gasped, one hand clutching his side. Steam rose from the wound, the smell of burnt ozone and charred meat filling his nose.
Through the settling rubble of the pulpit, a figure emerged. He walked over the debris. He was a man of ancient, frozen elegance—long white hair flowed over shoulders draped in heavy, midnight-black robes, and a sharp, well-groomed white mustache framed a mouth set in a thin, judgmental line.
He didn't look like a prisoner. He looked like a god who had been mildly inconvenienced.
Henry looked up, the red glow in his eyes dimming as he forced his breathing to steady. He spat a mouthful of copper-tasting blood onto the floor and tightened his grip on his sword.
"Malachai," Henry rasped.