Rowan stared at the shattered remains of the clock. The moment it broke, a blinding beam of light burst outward, flooding the entire area. The ground, the sky, the ruins everything vanished beneath that radiance. They could see nothing. They could hear nothing. It was as if the world itself had been swallowed by white silence.
Then, faintly very faintly a voice came from behind Rowan and Zayden. "What happened?!"
It was Nyra.
At first, her voice sounded distant, distorted, as though it were echoing from underwater. Slowly, sound began to return. The ringing in their ears faded little by little.
Rowan and Zayden finally heard her clearly.
But neither of them turned around.
They continued staring forward, unable to fully comprehend what they were seeing… or what they had just done. From within the fading brilliance, a massive sword emerged.
It was dark so dark that it seemed to devour the remaining light around it. Its blade was enormous, pitch black, as if the moon itself had been twisted and reforged into a weapon of night. The surface of the sword reflected nothing. It absorbed everything.
It looked as though someone was slowly withdrawing it from the air itself.
The broken clock was gone. The beam of light disappeared as well, leaving behind drifting mist and fragments of shattered roots scattered across the ground.
Vision gradually returned to everyone. Through the thinning haze, a figure became visible. A single step echoed softly against the debris. Someone placed their foot upon the shattered orb lying on the ground.
Through the thinning haze, the figure fully emerged.
The Knight of Obedience.
Its blade said in whispers to be forged from the moon's very core was a crescent of absolute night that drank in light and severed fate itself. The Deadly Spine Serpent, an ancient monster whose vertebrae still reverberated with the cries of the worlds it had crushed, was the source of its armor. As Rowan and Zayden stared, it bowed before the Fifth Magister's corpse a gesture of cold obedience to its now-dead summoner.
Nyra rushed toward them and shouted,
"Stop staring and start forming a strategy! Everything has a weakness!"
Rowan's gaze shifted to Nyra as he withdrew his spear. Then he shouted to Cedric and Kael, "Go and inform the Officials of the Northern District!." He moved forward, nodding to Zayden as a signal to attack, leaving Nyra behind.
"Huh? Answer me!" she called out.
Zayden glanced back at her while advancing, his voice grave and steady.
"No one who has ever witnessed its full power has lived to describe it so if we don't even understand the extent of its strength, how are we supposed to discover its weakness?"
Zayden and Rowan rushed toward it at the same time. But before they could even close the distance, the Knight moved. In a single blink, it was already in front of Rowan. Its massive blade swung downward without hesitation. Rowan's eyes widened. "How did it reach me this fast?"
His mind flooded with thoughts. Instinctively, he activated his Time Domain. The air around them distorted, and everything slowed to a crawl.
The Knight froze mid-swing, its sword halted inches from Rowan's face. For a brief second, Rowan believed it had worked. Zayden, though unable to speak within the heavy drag of the domain, felt a flicker of relief.
That relief lasted less than ten seconds.
The faint light surrounding the Knight flickered and then vanished, even within the slowed field. In the next instant, the Knight was gone. Rowan's pupils shrank. Before he could turn, a massive hand struck him with overwhelming force, smashing him violently into a jagged rock to his left. The Time Domain shattered instantly, collapsing under the impact. A sharp crack echoed through his body as three of his ribs broke. His left abdomen throbbed with intense pain though he was not bleeding, the internal damage was severe.
Zayden stared in horror as Rowan struggled to remain conscious. Rowan's eyes slowly lost focus, dimming with the weight of reality. With what little strength he had left, he turned his head slightly toward Zayden and whispered in a broken breath,
"We never had a chance."
Zayden felt fear coil tightly around his heart, but he did not step back. Instead, he tightened his grip on his sword until his knuckles turned pale.
"I can't let this thing enter the District".
He rushed forward. The Knight's hollow gaze shifted toward him.Their swords clashed, the impact reverberated through Zayden's entire body. A crushing pressure bore down on him, as if an invisible mountain were forcing his blade back toward his own chest. No matter how much strength he poured into his arms, he could not push it away.
The Knight struck again.
Zayden staggered as the towering figure leapt into the air. A heartbeat later, it descended, breaking the sound barrier as it moved. Zayden raised his sword and barely managed to block. The collision cracked his blade, thin fractures spreading across the steel.
His eyes flickered down to the damaged weapon. "I can't survive another hit".
Before the Knight could press further, chains shot forward from behind it.
Nyra.
Using her dual chained weapon, she wrapped the chains around the Knight's head and pulled with all her strength. The Knight's upper body tilted back slightly. It turned its head toward her with an enraged gaze, even as its sword continued to grind against Zayden's.
With a single motion, it pushed Zayden back and swung its blade upward. The chains were severed instantly. One half of Nyra's weapon blade and chain still wrapped around the Knight's neck was absorbed into its body as if swallowed by darkness, leaving only the remaining half in her grasp.
Nyra let out a short, horrified laugh.
"I don't need the weapon to defeat you."
Her magic surged. A frozen chain infused with molten lava reformed in her hand, replacing the severed half. The new chain hissed with steam and heat as frost and fire intertwined unnaturally.
The chains rotated rapidly, generating countless shards of ice that shot toward the Knight like a storm of blades.
Before they could reach it, the Knight's sword liquefied. The black metal melted into a dark fluid and began to reshape itself, slowly replicating Nyra's weapon. Within moments, it formed a mirrored chained blade.
The Knight swung.
A far more powerful storm of ice knives erupted toward Nyra.
She tried to defend, but the sheer force overwhelmed her. The shards pierced through her defenses one by one. Each impact drove her backward, pain spreading through every part of her body until she was finally thrown off her feet, crashing onto her back.
Zayden steadied himself, breathing heavily, his cracked sword trembling in his grasp.
His mind raced.
Is there even a weakness to something like this?
After witnessing Nyra fall, Zayden gritted his teeth and activated the Destruction Spell within his sword, a faint surge of violent energy pulsing through the cracked blade as dark veins of power spread across its surface. "I have to stop this from entering the District," he thought, and then he rushed forward again.
The Knight was still looking down at Nyra's fallen body. "Kael and Cedric should be bringing help any moment now…" he thought and closed the final distance and swung his sword with everything he had, aiming straight for the Knight's head, but a few millimeters before the blade could connect, the Knight moved.
It was not fast in appearance yet it was already elsewhere, and Zayden felt sudden confusion. Then a profound, heavy impact struck his lower back, and for a split second he did not understand what had happened, until warmth spread beneath his armor a thick, sickening warmth causing his body to stiffen.
Slowly, he looked down and saw that the Knight's blade had cut cleanly through his back, piercing between his diaphragm and exiting through the front of his torso, shock overtook fear, his grip loosened, and the Destruction Spell flickered and died within the fractured sword.
Blood soaked through his armor as dizziness washed over him in waves, his vision blurring at the edges while dark spots spread across his sight, the Knight withdrew its blade without haste, Zayden's knees buckled, his eyes slowly faded, and he collapsed onto the ground, thinking, Is there a chance?