The wind howled, cold and eternal, along the jagged flank of the Black Mountain. Above, the full moon hung like a pale, indifferent deity.
Along the ancient mountain road, hemmed in by a ring of fire, men and abominations tore at one another. War cries merged with the roars of beasts in a symphony of crimson spray and shrieking steel. The ash from the campfires drifted inexorably to the ground; the snow had long since lost its pristine whiteness, and the hourglass had seen its sands turn a hundred and twenty times.
Yet, the dawn was still so damnably far away.
Amidst this organic feud, a shadow danced. Swift and feral, it leaped from one front of the battlefield to the other like a gust of wind, as if the night itself had blessed it with the gift of invisibility. Where others lost themselves in the gloom of dusk, he found a home.
[You have slain an Awakened human.]
[You have received a Memory: Deplorable Dagger.]
"Goddamnit! That was a close call!"
Sunny grunted, shoving the corpse of the enemy off him. If not for that fortuitous collision, he would currently be chest-deep in the gastric juices of some Mountain Beast.
---
Name: Sunless
True Name: -
Rank: Aspirant
Soul Core: Dormant
Memories: [Silver bell], [Deplorable Dagger].
Echoes: -
---
Sunny had already received the [Silver Bell] after killing that sentry the night before. But since beating enemies to death with a bell is—notoriously—ineffective, he'd been forced to defend himself with whatever he could scrounge: weapons from the fallen, carcasses to hide under, and even stones or snowballs to distract his foes.
Scrambling to his feet without giving the runes of his new Memory a second glance, Sunny summoned the [Deplorable Dagger].In an instant, a cluster of sparks condensed in his right hand, forming a curved black blade with a wide profile. The hilt was wrapped in vivid red bandages; the edge was serrated like a serpent, while the spine remained perfectly smooth.
"Finally! A weapon."
Armed with the black steel, Sunny threw himself back into the fray. The shadows—his only true allies—swallowed him whole.
***
"Loose!"
Goliath roared at the infantry behind him, his greatsword wedged deep into the maws of a lunging Demon to keep its snapping jaws at bay. No arrows came.
The Champion of War was forced back by the sheer momentum of the creature—a frenzied, clawed monstrosity. Refusing to yield another inch, the giant delivered a thunderous headbutt, the impact of his head cracking the beast's skull and sending it reeling back several yards.
"I said, LOOSE!"
This time, the volley shrieked through the air. Goliath threw his crimson mantle over his shoulder and dropped to one knee, a practiced motion that allowed the wave of arrows to clear the abominations surrounding him. The shafts hissed past like angry hornets in mid-summer, burying themselves in the hides of the beasts, though the tips struggled to bite deep into the abominations muscle.
Goliath rose, resting the flat of his blade against his knee. "Something is wrong," he muttered.
The support was lagging. His voice had carried across battlefields far vaster than this mountain pass; there was no reason for the delay.
Goliath had plunged into the thickest cluster of the enemy to savor the slaughter and, theoretically, to draw the pressure away from his men. But the strategy was beginning to fray.
It wasn't that his soldiers lacked leadership. They were veterans of a dozen campaigns. Usually, as the General spearheaded the assault, the Awakened officers coordinated the ranks, using him as a living battering ram. It was a symphony of violence that allowed him his ecstasy while keeping the legion functional.
No, the true problem was the distance and the encroaching gloom.
Someone was putting out the lights.
The battle against the Corrupted had hit a stalemate that shouldn't exist. Both sides were hemorrhaging lives, but the pitch-black night made it impossible to see a hand's breadth away. And through that darkness, something—or someone—was flickering.
Goliath couldn't pin it down. A presence would bloom at the edge of his perception only to vanish like a phantom. Or a shadow.
A malicious grin tugged at Goliath's lips.
"Once I'm done here," he whispered to an opponent who couldn't hear him, buried somewhere in the shifting front, "it will be your turn."
A pack of Dormant and Awakened Beasts surged toward him, arrow shafts bristling from their bodies like jagged quills. Goliath swung his greatsword in a devastating horizontal arc, bisecting the swarm in a single, fluid strike.
He had to put more weight into his legs than his arms; the loss of his right limb threw his balance off terribly, forcing him to fight the very physics of his own body.
Goliath pressed on. An Awakened Monster lunged from the dark, but his blade, tracing a line through the red-stained snow, rose from the ground up, cleaving the creature in two.
The carnage continued.
***
Auro was having a truly wretched time.
Rolling to the side, he barely evaded a massive, flailing limb intended to crush him by sheer mass alone.
Springing back up, he lashed out with his sword, carving a jagged red line along the creature's flank.
The legion was losing its cohesion.
The grand coordination that usually defined them had evaporated; now, every squad held its own isolated front, collapsing inward and unable to support their neighbors. It had devolved into a frantic "every man for himself," where the risk of friendly fire was as high as the threat from the monsters.
The pitch-black night and the gore slicking both his blade and the earth offered no mercy. More than once, his inexperience had nearly cost him his life—his boots slipping on the blood-soaked snow, his grip faltering on a hilt drenched in slime. The blindness imposed by the shadows felt like a cruel, ironic curse.
"You must be enjoying this, aren't you, Shadow?" Auro thought with a manic, bitter edge to his mind. He was thinking of the shadow-brat from this morning—the same one who had "borrowed" his dagger yesterday.
Shifting his weight, Auro parried a treacherous strike lunging from the abyss. Trusting his instincts over his eyes, he executed a rising diagonal slash that severed a limb. Unable to see his foe in the gloom, he scrambled back toward his squad to keep his rear guarded.
Fragments of lessons from the Nine flickered through his mind like tattered film.
"If you cannot rely on your eyes, follow the pull of your gut," Aletheia had told him.
"If you're surrounded and in a group, try your best not to all die at the exact same time," Eurys had grumbled.
"Auro," Orphne had explained, her voice grave, "when you see a horde of Corrupted creatures made of Beasts, Monsters, and even Demons... know that the Devils are lurking close behind. And mark my words: when the Devils appear, a Tyrant is holding the leash."
Auro's eyes widened in sudden, cold realization. As he fought tooth and nail with his dwindling squad, the truth hit him harder than a physical blow.
'It's true! Their commander hasn't shown its face yet.'
Until now, despite being divided, the legion had managed the counteroffensive without catastrophic losses. Only now did he realize that this was merely the appetizer. When a Tyrant commands the field, the creatures beneath it—from Devils on down—only reveal their true, terrifying potential once the trap is sprung.
The real enemy was out there, submerged in the lightless void beyond the ring of fire, waiting for the prey to exhaust itself before making its move.
"Where are you?" Auro whispered, his eyes darting frantically, hoping against hope to catch a glimpse of the enemy general.
Suddenly... a new sound tore through the night, a cry so foul it seemed to poison the air itself. It wasn't a roar or a shriek; it was a rhythmic, dissonant wail that vibrated in the marrow of their bones, a sound of ancient, starving malice.
At that exact moment, miles apart yet bound by the same chill, a shadow, a veteran, and a hero all turned toward the same dark horizon.
The dawn became suddenly a feverish dream.