Alex's breath caught.The voice boomed through the empty valley, each syllable sinking into his bones like a curse. The weight of it was crushing, filling the air with an unyielding sense of inevitability."Welcome home, my son."No.No, that couldn't be.The King of the Abyss wasn't just a myth-he was a nightmare. A being of pure, unrelenting destruction. And yet, the voice resonating from the fortress wasn't just familiar.It was part of him.Mara seized his wrist, her fingers like steel. "Tell me I didn't just hear that."Alex couldn't answer. His body felt frozen, his blood thick with something ancient and wrong.Then, the fortress moved.The gates that loomed before them trembled, shifting like the ribs of some colossal beast. The very air pulsed with malevolent energy, the sky above roiling with crimson lightning.And out of the very foundations of the fortress, figures emerged.Hundreds.Tortured parodies of humanity, their silhouettes stuck to twisted, elongated limbs. Some wi

The air stank of blood, fire, and rot.Alex froze, his body shuddering under the weight of the chasm. The pit below him writhed like a living thing, and from its depths something monstrous began to stir a shadow too large, too evil to understand.His father's masked figure loomed beside him, a twisted sense of amusement in his stance."Do you feel it now, Alex?" the man whispered. "The call of your true home?"Alex clenched his fists. His breath was ragged, his mind fraying at the edges. The abyss inside him howled, eager to consume, to unleash.But he wouldn't let it.Not yet.The ground beneath them quaked violently.Then.The sky split open.From above, black lightning streaked down like spears, impaling the already broken landscape. The chasm below expanded, and they emerged.The Abyssal Legion.Hundreds no, thousands of grotesque, armored figures crawled out of the darkness. Their bodies were jagged and contorted, forged from bone, shadow, and suffering. Their eyes glowed crimson

The chasm trembled.Over the battlefield a hush came, so heavy it absorbed lingering war echoes into its depth. The abyssals, kneeling with submission, rose now with nervous movements, those unnatural bodies now quivering in the presence carried by their approaches.The Herald of Oblivion was near.Alex felt it before he saw it: a creeping void in the fabric of reality, a presence that did not step into existence but devoured everything around it. Shadows recoiled from its form, tendrils of darkness slithering away as if terrified of what walked among them.It was out of the ruinous mist that the figure appeared, wearing armor as dark as a dying star, rimmed with veins of crimson fire. Its helm did not carry a face but instead an abyssal void where eyes should be, swirling with endless hunger. With every step, it broke the ground; fissures of molten death spread from the chasm below.Alex's father, the one who had planned his downfall, the one who had breathed power into his veins, st

The battlefield was drowning in blood and fire.There were still echoes of war lingering in the air, a mixture of agonized screams, the wet crunch of shattered bone, and guttural howls to demon screams as they were torn apart. It seemed the Abyss itself was alive, shifting and writhing beneath the weight of the massacre.Alex stood in the midst of it all, the weight of his throne pressing against his soul. His claws dripped with abyssal ichor, the remains of those who had dared to stand against him. The Legion stood at his back, an army of nightmares bound by his will.None of them mattered.Not now.Not with the Harbinger of Oblivion standing before him.This being was so thick with death that it had sucked in light, becoming a void that screamed of dark power. Its armor was from the bones of dead, forgotten gods, blackened and cracked from untold ages of agony. Its shadows snaked around its form, whispering curses that could bring insanity to the weaker minds.Its eyes, twin pits of

A graveyard battlefield littered with dead angels and demons, a mess of charred meat and liquid steel, a pungent taint of holy ichor filling the air. Screams had been replaced with sick crackles, with dying flesh dissolved into nothing.And so there was Alex Mercer standing there amidst that gore.His abyssal wings, four shifting appendages of pure void, cast jagged shadows over the desolation. His body, once flesh and bone, was now an unstable vortex of power, his veins pulsing with an energy that no longer felt bound to mortal or celestial laws.He had become something more.And Seraphiel knew it.The Archangel of Judgment knelt on one knee, the pillar of heaven's might shaken to its knees. His bright armor was cracked and blackened, and a severed golden wing lay twitching weakly on the blood-soaked dust beside him.The sword that once cleaved hellspawn legions in two, shattering with each blow into a thousand shining pieces, lay now broken into useless fragments of light that flick