The old cabin was a wreck, a rotting scab on the very skin of the world.
From the outside, it looked like a simple pile of decaying wood and stone,
but the moment you crossed the threshold, the rules of the living world just... died.
It wasn't a room anymore; it was a cold trap, a pocket of existence where time itself had taken its last breath and gone to rot.
Cracked pillars stood along the edges like the ribs of dead giants.
The carvings on them weren't meant for looking at; they crawled into your head,
whispering things directly into the dark, shaky corners of your mind.
It wasn't a sound you could hear with your ears, but a low thrumming in the floor that made every step feel like you were walking over a bed of buried, suffocating screams.
The floor was a mess of black and blood-red tiles,
but they didn't offer any solid ground.
They shifted and groaned under some invisible,
Crushing weight,
As if something massive and ancient was clawing at the underside of reality, trying to wake up.
Every move sent a haunting ripple through the room, making the whole place feel less like a building and more like a living thing—
Or a grand tomb meant for a prisoner who should have stayed asleep.
Up on the ceiling, the shadows were torn open, letting a sickly blue fire leak in from nowhere.
This fire didn't offer the mercy of light; it was a filth that made the dust, the stone,
And the very air look heavier and more broken than they really were.
Old banners hung from the walls like peeling skin—
Once proud royal symbols that now showed nothing but endless war and kneeling kings.
They didn't blow in the wind; they shifted with a slow, sickening crawl,
Like memories that refuse to stay still even after the brain has died.
The air wasn't just heavy; it was spiritually crushing, and every breath felt like inhaling the cold ash of the dead.
Right in the middle of that freezing silence sat Jabar. He was perched on a throne of black stone,
So still he looked like he'd been carved out of it centuries ago.
He didn't blink or move a muscle,
But his presence alone squeezed the air out of the room until even breathing became a chore.
Minutes passed, or maybe hours—time didn't really count in that tomb. Then, the silence finally broke.
Footsteps.
Jabar opened his eyes slowly.
There was no hurry and no surprise in his look;
He was just aware,
As if he had already watched this exact moment happen in his mind a thousand years ago.
A thin, razor-sharp smile touched his lips:
"So... you finally arrived to meet your death ".
When Hatim stepped into the heart of the chamber,
The air didn't just move;
It buckled under the weight of his presence.
The balance of the entire room shifted violently in an instant.
Jabar sat there like the stillness of a lingering death,
But Hatim was an unyielding pressure that refused to be ignored.
One was a darkness looking to swallow everything,
And the other was a light that simply wouldn't surrender.
Hatim's cloak flapped slightly,
As if the thick, heavy air was physically trying to shove him back out the door, but he stood his ground, unshakable.
In his hand, his sword, Noor, was alive.
It pulsed with a steady, rhythmic glow—
A heart of steel that refused to stop beating even in a place built for dying.
His eyes were locked onto Jabar with a focus so sharp it felt like it could cut right through the stone walls.
"I didn't come here to speak,I am come here to destroy your evilness to free my little brother"
Hatim said, his voice sounding as cold and heavy as a tombstone.
Jabar tilted his head, watching Hatim with the bored,
Clinical amusement of a predator that had just found something new to hunt.
A soft, dry chuckle escaped his throat—
Not a sound of joy, but a mocking noise that cut through the silence.
"You look just like your father, brave and fearless like him."
Jabar said, and the name hit Hatim like a physical blade.
Hatim didn't flinch,
But something changed in his eyes.
It was a sudden surge of memory-pressure,
A heavy weight from his father's past that suddenly settled right on his shoulders.
Jabar's smile only grew wider, feeding off that tiny flicker of pain.
"Oh... I forgot,"
Jabar continued, his voice sounding like salt being rubbed into an old, raw wound.
"Your father didn't survive long enough to teach you patience".
Hatim's grip his Noor alfateh a divine sword tightened until his knuckles turned bone-white beneath his gloves.
For a split second,
That iron-clad control of his finally wavered.
The sword's light reacted instantly, flaring up with a sudden, jagged intensity that filled the room.
"Don't speak about My father with your nasty mouth,"
Hatim growled, his voice low and vibrating with a fury he was barely holding back.
Jabar stood from his throne in a single, fluid motion, and as he rose, the very reality of the room seemed to lurch.
The air density spiked instantly, turning thick and heavy, while the shadows on the walls crawled toward him like they were drawn to a dark magnet.
He began to step toward Hatim, each footfall so heavy it felt as if reality itself were buckling under his weight.
"You fight well, But you not strong enough to handle my power of darkness,"
Jabar said in a tone that was both soft and lethal.
He locked his gaze directly onto Hatim's soul:
"But tell me... do you truly believe that you are came here to kill my dominance?".
"If you think that you can eradicate my evil with your power, then you are mistaken."
Hatim didn't waste time with a long speech.
He just threw back a challenge:
"If your evil has so much power, then try to extinguish me!".
That roar shattered the last remnants of peace within the chamber.
The room was no longer a physical space;
It had become a battlefield that had already accepted destruction as its only future.
For a single, agonizing heartbeat,
There was absolute silence. Then, Jabar moved.
He did not dash or run like a human.
He dissolved, becoming a thin smear of shadow that vanished from one point and reappeared instantly at another—
Shadow Step.
The air where he had been standing collapsed inward with a sickening pop,
As if space itself had forgotten how to hold his presence.
Hatim's instincts reacted before a conscious thought could even form.
Wind energy exploded beneath his feet in a violent burst—
Wind Dash Break.
He blurred forward, the ground fracturing where he stood and the air screaming behind him as he cut through the dimension. In that same fraction of a second,
Jabar reappeared directly behind him, his claw already extended.
He wasn't aiming to strike muscle or bone; he was reaching for the soul of motion itself.
Hatim twisted in mid-air without looking, his years of training taking over.
Steel met shadowed claw with a
"CLANG"
So sharp it felt like a physical blow to the ears.
The impact was immense.
A nearby massive pillar, which had stood for centuries, shattered into dust,
Sending stone exploding outward like a collapsing sky.
Jabar landed as lightly as a falling leaf, almost floating, while Hatim was forced back,
His boots dragging across the fractured tiles.
They stood for a moment,
Analyzing each other through the drifting dust.
"My father sacrificed his life not because of hesitation but to save his family.," Hatim said, his voice cold and steady as he exhaled.
Suddenly, the ground beneath Hatim's feet betrayed him.
Black hands erupted from the floor like drowning thoughts—Shadow Grip.
They reached for his ankles and his sword arm with a fluid, desperate hunger.
Hatim reacted instantly with a Wind Step Shift, his body blurring sideways to escape by a hair's breadth.
But as one shadow hand grazed his arm,
He felt it—not pain, but a vacuum.
It was a sickening sensation of his energy being physically pulled inward, hollowed out by the touch—
The drain effect.
"So that's it...touch means consumption,"
Hatim thought, his focus deepening.
Jabar didn't give him a second to breathe.
He snapped his fingers, and a dozen black spheres—
Abyss Shots—materialized in a spiral behind Hatim.
They hissed through the air like heat-seeking missiles.
Hatim spun on his heel, swinging Noor to create a
'Wind Shield Push',
A curved wall of high-pressure air that slammed into the spheres mid-flight.
The resulting explosions rocked the entire chamber,
The sheer force sliding Hatim even further back across the broken tiles while smoke filled the air.
Jabar walked through the drifting haze as if he were taking a quiet stroll in a garden, completely unbothered.
"Your light has survived too much,Your light has endured a lot, but this much light is not enough for me to kill such a devil."
he said, his voice sounding almost kind in its cruelty.
"That is why it is soo fragile".
He glanced at Hatim's sword and added,
"True power doesn't react. It has made its decision before you even move."
The room began to turn on Hatim again.
Shadow Spikes erupted from the ground in jagged,
Unpredictable patterns, and massive black Devil Chains manifested in spirals,
Locking down every path Hatim tried to take.
He realized he was being mapped; every breath and every muscle twitch was being analyzed by Jabar's dark system.
Then, the
'Soul Pressure Field'
Hit.
It was a crushing weight that turned the air into lead and the environment into a cage for his very will.
Hatim's breathing became ragged, and for the first time,
He felt himself reaching a breaking point.
The world around him splintered and then went black.
Hatim fell to his knees in the heart of a collapsing mental space—
The Soul Lock.
The chains of the lock coiled around his consciousness like venomous snakes,
Tightening with a dark logic that sought to erase him.
He was trapped in a dimension that wasn't even supposed to have air,
His mind feeling like shards of a broken mirror.
Noor's presence was faint, just a distant,
Stable pulse in the chaos.
It wasn't trying to pull him out;
It was acting as an anchor to keep him from drifting away into nothingness.
Then,
Noor's voice whispered directly into his mind, clear and steady:
"Don't fight the darkness, but remember your true identity even in that darkness."
Hatim's fingers twitched against the cold floor of his own mind. Guided by that whisper,
A memory began to flicker—
Not a legendary battle,
But a quiet,
Unremarkable morning from his childhood.
He remembered the taste of dirt in his mouth after falling during training and the stubborn refusal to let anyone see him cry.
He remembered his father sitting beside him in the silence.
"When you stand up, the world will see your strength. And you will be praised for your work and wisdom,"his father had said, his voice calm and grounded.
"But your greatness will give you strength."
He had looked at Hatim with a gaze that saw right through the pain.
"One decision you make today will determine whether you emerge victorious tomorrow or remain a compromise. Choose for yourself!"".
That single,
Quiet memory hit
Hatim's consciousness like a sledgehammer,
Shattering the dark chains of the Soul Lock from the inside out.
His breathing went still—
Not out of fear, but out of a terrifying new clarity.
He wasn't just surviving the darkness anymore;
He was dismantling its very logic.
Jabar's voice suddenly shrieked through the void,
Sounding jagged and desperate for the first time in centuries:
"Don't even try to run away. I'm watching your every move; you won't be able to take a single step even if you want to !".
Hatim slowly lifted his head.
His eyes were no longer empty;
They were weighted with an unyielding certainty.
He placed his palm against the cold floor of the void,
Not to strike,
But to reclaim reality.
"You made one mistake,"
Hatim's voice echoed through the cracks of the collapsing dimension.
"You assumed that I am alive only because of the light, but you have forgotten that I myself am a light that has been present within me since I was born in this world..
The void began to fracture violently,
Splintering like a mirror under too much pressure.
Then,
Noor's voice rang out, no longer a faint pulse but a command that vibrated through his soul:
"Now... return".
With a sound like a thousand mirrors breaking at once,
The mental void shattered,
And the real world rushed back in with a vengeance.
The throne chamber materialized around Hatim again,
But the balance of power had flipped.
The crushing spiritual weight Jabar had used to pin him down was gone.
Hatim was standing perfectly still,
His body perfectly aligned.
He wasn't fighting the environment anymore;
He was simply existing within it,
Making the room itself bend to his presence.
Jabar remained on his obsidian throne,
But the mocking look had vanished,
Replaced by a surgical intensity.
He was looking at Hatim as if he were a glitch in a perfect machine.
"You broke my Soul Lock,how was that possible?"
Jabar whispered,
His voice a low, vibrating threat.
("How can it be possible,how can a small boy break the lock of my soul,how could the rituals of my years in the move be made by sacrificing countless souls,how. how could it be possible".)
Hatim looked down at Noor.
The light was no longer a jagged,
Angry flare;
It had become a steady,
Solid glow—
As constant and inevitable as a law of nature.
"I have been called here to break this evil system of yours.,"
Hatim said,
His voice calm and devoid of the desperation that had choked him before.
He took a single step forward.
The shadows didn't reach for him; they recoiled.
"Darkness can predict fear… but it can never predict a soul that has already chosen its purpose over its life".
Jabar snapped his fingers, and a dozen Shadow Spikes erupted from the floor in a crisscrossing web designed to impale Hatim from every possible angle.
It was a move with zero room for escape.
Hatim didn't dodge. He was simply... no longer there.
In the fraction of a second it took for the spikes to manifest,
Hatim occupied the only sliver of space Jabar hadn't realized he'd left.
Before Jabar could even blink,
The tip of Noor was inches from his throat.
For the first time in centuries,
The predator felt the cold breath of the prey on his neck.
"Now,"
Hatim said, his gaze unwavering,
"we start for real".
But as the golden light from Noor's edge clashed with Jabar's darkness,
The ground didn't just break—
It splintered like glass under a truth too heavy for reality to hold.
A "Fracture" tore through the very veil of time.
Suddenly, the cold chamber was gone.
Hatim's ears filled with the howling of a scorching desert wind from twenty-four years ago.
He saw sun-baked mud houses and felt the taste of dust and scorched earth.
In the distance,a younger, more visceral shadow of Jabar began its slow, predatory walk toward a quiet,unsuspecting village.
The fight in the chamber remained suspended—
A freeze-frame in time—
As the scene faded into the heavy, terrifying silence of the desert.
The silence that always precedes a massacre.