An eerie and unnatural void of silence consumed the battlefield. Where Mina and the Amber entity had stood just moments before now lay an empty scar on reality, an echo of their abrupt disappearance. The rubble was silent, except for the slow, curling trails of black energy curling away and into the night. Kaiza was shaking, his arm outstretched at the space where Mina had just stood. A cold, merciless emptiness gnawed at his chest worse than any wound, more suffocating than any curse.Then the world twisted, suddenly, without warning.Some force an unseen hand of darkness seized him by the throat and pulled him forward. The battlefield faded to bars of black and red, his body pulled into the maw, consumed in full by the same thing that had come for Mina. It was a fall that had no end, an abyss that had no bottom. The weight of it pressed on his lungs, turning his thoughts to static. The shadows clawed at him, stripping away sensation, devouring everything except pain. That remained.

The void throbbed like a living thing, the slime curling around Mina as though she were its chosen vessel. All that remained was the pitted hush world of loss, the great nugget of her golden light drawn away like a gummy pit, and the black water wave, rising within, crawling in her blood. Kaiza found himself lost for breath standing before her, seeing a girl he had vowed to protect turn into something far beyond him, far beyond redemption.A wave of energy raced out as she raised her hand. The air was a crackling haze, the ground shaking under them. Kaiza embedded his heels into the shattered soil, clutching his ruined sword. Exhaustion weighted him to the ground, yet he walked none lower.“Mina… I know you’re still in there,” he rasped, his voice nearly lost in the howling void.The thing that had taken her let out a breathy chuckle, its darkness winding around her lips when it spoke through her. “She belongs to me now.”Kaiza’s grip tightened. “Like hell she does.”He lunged forward

A chill wind moaned through the ruins, and there was the smell of ash and blood on it. The battlefield was silent except for the crackle of the last dying embers. Kaiza rose to his feet, gasping as if he had just run a mile, limbs protesting in pain. He had battled for ages, known pain without number, but never had he been so close to being completely shattered.Mina was gone consumed by the void. And now, he stood alone.Or so he thought.A low, rasping chuckle rippled through the air, sending a chill crawling up his spine. Kaiza pivoted, muscles clenched, and there stood his next foe.The Abyssborn Tyrant.A figure so enormous, they were draped in shadows that spiraled and undulated like snakes. Its body is encased in spiked, obsidian armor, veins of spearhead dark energy rippling along its frame. Its face—if it could even be called a face was hidden beneath a thyrse of horned blackness, pair void-lit eyes staring into the innermost depths of Kaiza’s soul.“You suffer still, cursed 

A storm churned overhead, twisting clouds writhing like wounded serpents. They were rung through the air, ripe with the smell of melted metal. Kaiza breathed sharply and raggedly as he looked out over the broken battlefield. Every inch of soil underfoot was tainted by war, the blasted craters of explosive wrackings, shattered stone, and the body remnants of the Permanent Dead left behind by the void in its traverse.But the fight, by no means, was over.There was something ahead, a figure of the void unlike anything he had ever encountered. It was not the monstrous shape that towered above them, nor did it have the twisted mutations of the devourers that had come before. This one… was different.A shadow in human shape.Shrouded in shifting black robes that did not even obey the wind, it had its face hidden beneath a deep hood. But Kaiza could see the abyss roiling beneath it, two pinpricks of violet light regarding him, dissecting him, calculating. This was no mindless beast. It was

A storm of embers flitted through the shattered streets, whipping in the caustic air like fireflies in a graveyard. The fiery smell of sultry soil danced with the prick of burnt ozone, the acrid taste of his enemies still in the thick, dry heat. Kaiza stood on the debris, his breath hot, his body sore from seen and unseen injuries. He gripped his reforged blade tighter in his hands, its humming blade edge singing with the steel of his will.He had lost too much. He had bled and fought and suffered more than any man should have to. But the war was not finished not yet.“Joshy” broke through silence instantly, like a viper through the night, a sense of foulness in the air, the very touch of the essences in the atmosphere like a physical force. It was ancient, older by eons than any voidspawn he had faced in the past, and unlike those vermin, this one did not creep in the dark.It welcomed the fire.The ruins rang with a slow, measured clap. Kaiza spun around, eyes narrowing at a figure