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Bargain Infernal Episode 198: The Horizon
The light had changed the battle scene, returning what was lost. The earth cracks had closed, and the lifeless land was now dotted with the first green shoots. Yet with all this peace, Alex couldn't shake the unease growing in his chest. The light was pure, potent, and alive, and it had pushed the void back. However, with its presence came something darker, something ancient, which had awakened from its slumber. The battle was far from over.As the warmth of the sphere ebbed away, the air shifted around them. The air, once still and inert, had become dense and heavy; it seemed almost as though it were waiting to break into the daylight, out of the shadows. There was a humming, pulsating vibration through the ground that lay in the pit of Alex's stomach. Like a heartbeat almost, but life's not this: that was deeper, much, much older.Alex: (on point, grave) "It's coming now."Helena: (eyes scanning the horizon) “What is it? The darkness… It’s not gone, is it?”Alex: (tightening his gri
Bargain Infernal Episode 199: Final Descent
The fight had been on for hours, but Alex and Helena were not done. They were drained of their last drops of energy; every punch was a swat of finishing blows. The sky above was split apart by the crash of calamity, the earth below their feet cracked and blood-soaked, the battleground. They were a relentless force of abyssal creatures, clawing their way up from the very depths of hell itself. And above them, the dark creature they had been battling the twisted, monstrous being of molten rock and shadow—did not back down.Alex's eyes were wild with fury, his entire being charged with the hellfire he had summoned. Every breath burned like the underworld's flames. His body had become a vessel of destruction, and he was fighting this battle for what seemed like a lifetime. It was not just the creature in front of him but the darkness within himself, the abyssal power that threatened to consume him with every passing moment.Helena fought at his side, her blade slicing through dark creatur
Bargain Infernal Episode 200: The Day of Redemption
The earth had been rent asunder.The heavens had cracked open.But now, in the aftermath of the battle, there was a stillness.A calm that seemed almost unnatural, as though the world itself had been holding its breath, waiting for this moment. Helena stood alone at the edge of the ruins, her hand pressed to the cool stone of what had once been a great wall, now reduced to rubble.Her fingers traced the cracks, as if seeking some sign that the world she once knew was still there, beneath the destruction.She closed her eyes, taking a slow, deep breath, and the weight of everything they had lost pressed down on her chest. She thought of the faces they had seen fall, the countless souls who had given their lives to this war. Friends. Strangers. Heroes.She thought of the world that had been swallowed by darkness, of the innocence that had been torn away.The battle had taken everything.And yet… A whisper of wind brushed her cheek, and for the first time in what felt like forever, she
Bargain Infernal Episode 201: The Echoes of War
They had started to heal the world, though the scars ran deeper than the earth itself.Fog hung thick over the ruins of what once had been a great city.The morning sun stretched golden fingers across the crumbled stone and shattered glass, bathing the world in light, but light could not repair what had been broken. Not yet.Helena held Alex’s hand tighter as they faced the wreckage. Silence hung about them, hard and heavy.The war was over. The battle cries had long since faded into memory. And yet the air felt tense, haunted with the specter of insurrection refusing to be banished.She let out a breath, slow and deliberate. “It feels wrong.”Alex kept his gaze fixed on the far blue horizon with his jaw set. “It does.”They had fought too hard, sacrificed too much. Winning should have felt sweet; instead, it felt empty.Peace was tenuous, and something about this absence of sound, this unnatural, creepy hush, felt less like the cessation of war than the eye of a storm.Helena turned
Bargain Infernal Episode 202: The Rising Shadow
The world had shattered.Or at least it felt that way.Helen’s body fell to the frozen, pockmarked ground, shaking her bones upon impact.The dark was alive, writhing, shoving tight against her skin, like a strangling fog. For a moment, she could only gasp, her lungs against obliterating weight.Then Alex’s voice.“Helena!”She strained her eyes open to just catch sight of him raising himself, blood wheeling from a gash over his brow. His hand still gripped his sword, its silver edge dull in darting shadows.And then she saw him.Cain.Or whatever he had become.He hung over the gap, cloaked in swirling blackness; his burning eyes, whether amused or pitying, were trained on them. The black mist swirling around his feet writhed outward and consumed the remnants of the destruction it had wrought.“You feel it, don’t you?” There was a smooth, almost soft quality to Cain’s voice. “The weight of it all? Is the truth lapping into your bones? ”Alex rose, standing stock-still in the madness.
Bargain Infernal Episode 203: Beneath the Veil
The darkness was endless.Helena had no awareness of time, no awareness of gravity, only the heavy pressure of the void bearing down on her from all sides. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't move. She had even started to wonder whether she was still alive.Then.A flash of light.Blinding. White-hot.And suddenly, she was falling.She crashed into something solid, expelling the air from her lungs.She hacked, wheezed, petrified as smothering dark unfurled. She pressed herself up, the cold stone hot beneath her palms, her sight swimming.Where was she?All she remembered was reaching for Alex.Alex.Her heart pounded. She turned around, panicked, searching.And then she saw him.A few feet away, motionless and face down on the ground."Alex!" She ran to him, then put her palms against his chest.His skin was cold and clammy, his breath shallow.“No, no, no, wake up, please, no! ”She shook him, her heart thudding in her ears.Then.A sharp inhale.His eyes went wide, and he jerked upri
Bargain Infernal Episode 204: The Blood Oath
The world had changed.It was something Alex knew in the air the moment he and Helena returned to reality. The Veil had vomited them into the ruins of the last great city, but they had not discovered the same place they had departed.Now, the same sky that had cleared after the war was pregnant with storm clouds blacker than the bottom of any abyss. It was as if the air around them was too too thick for the atmosphere, pressing in on their chests, both from the horror that had coalesced out of nothingness, and the anguish screaming in their veins, and some force that made no physical sense. And far above above the shattered blocks of towers and streets there was a monolith of dark a rampart that had never existed.A throne for Cain.Helena exhaled sharply. “He’s already begun.”Alex said nothing. His jaw clenched as he stared at the distant stronghold. He could sense Cain lurking there — more powerful than he had ever been, choking, unnatural.The Keeper had been right.The war had ne
Bargain Infernal Episode 205: The Point of No Return
The city died. Alex felt it. The breath he took was a weight so weighty that it couldn’t be seen.The sky above runs up black clouds like live creatures.The shattered streets extending before them ripple and crack; the earth itself seems like it’s breaking under their feet. Cain stood amidst it all, and he smiled.He waited.Alex’s clutch tightened on the Keeper’s light, and it flickered.Helena’s words echoed in his head.“ One of us will fill the void if we kill him! ” It wasn’t a war.It was a liar. A smooth-whirling wind swept all around them.It smells of blood and worse, something that was many things at once.Cain sighed deeply. “Now you comprehend, don’t you?” His stare shone with silver beams and eventually flashed across Helena. She stayed quiet because she didn’t have to answer.She was aware, and it was more frightening than anything else. Cain approached them.His step puts narcotics on the walls’ bents. “You battled it on.The shadow. But your expectations of it…” He op
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Episode 224: One Final Strike
The world fractured.At the moment the boy lunged towards him, his sword clashing against the Hunter’s blade of shadow-steel, reality shattered like glass.His feet were no longer standing on solid ground.The battlefield the stars, the ruined earth pulsed, tremblied, shifting like an unënded painting.For one terrifying second He felt himself being torn in two.Not by a blade.Not by the Abyss.By time itself.He staggered back, gasping, his vision going double, reality fracturing into two separate lines of incident at once.One he stood here, fighting, existing.In the other he had never been born.Never consumed mermaid flesh.Never imagined, never suffered, never fought.Just gone."This is the correction."The Hunter’s voice remained steady, uemotional."Your existence is an error."Kaiza bared his teeth, pushing forward, screwing his sword back alight."You talk too much."And then he attacked again.The Impossible DuelThis time he moved faster.He could still taste the Abyss
Episode 223: The Last Throne
It was no longer their place of battle.The sunless sky was now a filthy mirror of a world that had perished before history.”Under Ethan and Asha’s feet, the ground shook, not with ruination but with something trying to rewrite existence itself.And the whole thing revolves aroundThe light wasn’t from this world, and now it burned behind their eyes, finally exposed by the broken perishable mask.They weren’t human.They weren’t divine.They’d been something before all of those things.And the closer they got, just their walking warped the air next to them.“You have walked too far, Hollow King.”“You’ve shattered too many chains.“And now you will see what should have been forgotten.”Ethan’s hands made fists.Asha inhaled slowly and deeply.They had no time to think.Because the First King moved.And the final battle began.Before Ethan even had the time to react, he found the First King in front of him.Their move defied space itself—not teleportation, not speed, but the here and
Episode 222: The Ones Who Devour
The sky was breaking.Helena became the epicenter of the battle that should have never been.The Firstborn were no more, their sacred monarchy rent asunder, their celestial kingdom fallen to ruin.But the universe had no love for vacant thrones.And now.It had been supplanted by something else.Reality tore, the sky splitting open like a wound that wouldn’t heal.Out from the void, they came.Not Hollowed.Not firstborn.Something else.Older than war itself, something.They did not have names.They did not have faces.They were churning, writhing aspects of the consummate void, their nacreous flesh contorting into a thousand forms at once—humanoid, monstrous, holy, forgotten.And when they spoke.It wasn’t with voices.It was with thoughts that did not belong to Helena, curling into her thoughts, unwinding her like leaves of an old book."You do not belong here."Helena’s entire body tensed.The Hollow King did not move.The Old One merely watched.Silver fire sizzled along the edge
Episode 221: The Thing That Should Not Wake
The Silence Before the EndThe battlefield was quiet.Too quiet.Helena found herself in the ruins of a war that had rewritten history. The Firstborn's God-King was vanished, their form crushed into void, their heavenly horde blown away like dust.The Hollowed had won.And yet.The heir was wrong.Heavy. Tainted.Like something was waiting.“Yup,” Cain gasped, running a bloody hand through his hair, his silver eyes showing some signs of uneasiness. “Please tell me it’s not just me that feels this.”Helena gripped her throbbing fingers, the black-fire dagger still buzzing in her hand. "You’re not."The Hollow King hadn’t budged.They froze there, their shape like a void, their head cocked slightly, listening.Helena stepped forward slowly, the ground crackling beneath her boots. The Firstborn were disappearing, their godly light blinking out like red stars in the firmament.They had lost.So why did it seem like something worse had just begun?Then.The world shifted.The Veil Splits O
Episode 220: The Forsaken vs. the Divine
Helena did not kneel.Not to kings.Not to gods.Not to the Firstborn, who had cut history to shape and made it fit.She had stood against death.She had stood against fate.And she would stand now.Even as the God-King of the Firstborn loomed before her, his celestial fire coiling in the air like an executioner’s blade.As the burden of their command bore down upon reality itself, compelling everything to bend.Helena stood tall.Her dagger blazed with black flames, oscillating between the Hollow King’s strength and something more ancient.Something that was hers and hers alone.The battlefield was silent.Even the Hollow hesitated.Because no one had ever disobeyed the Firstborn’s command and survived.Until now.The God-King’s expression did not change.They took a slow step forward, their silver eyes calm and infinite, burning with cold.“Then I will break you.”The world shattered.A void pulled inward, the air itself ripping apart as the God-King began his assault, faster than l
Episode 219: The Forsaken Queen
Helena felt everything.The Hollow King thrummed through her as she surged forward, a scintillation of wicked pleasure that burnt in her blood like a fire that would never run soft. Not only did it fill her, it transformed her.No longer was she Helena, the fighter who had resisted destiny.She was something more.Something that never was meant to exist.And as she stood at the very center of the battlefield, surrounded as she was by another ruin crumbling around her, one of a war older than time itself, she understood.The Firstborn knew it, too.They had expected a rebel.They had expected resistance.But they hadn’t expected this.They had not believed she would survive the Hollow King’s might.And they did not expect her to turn it against them.”His silver eyes, previously flooded with naught but icy apathy, now sparkled with another emotion.Fear.And Helena?Helena smiled.Then she attacked.Her movements were like a storm, her new blade slashing through the Firstborn’s ranks.
Episode 218: The Moment When the World Picked a Side
The battlefield froze.Helena’s voice still rang in the ruins, suspended in the air like a blade poised to fall."I will fight for the truth."And just like that.She had chosen a side.The Hollow King turned its void-like eyes to her, unreadable.Cain gaped, his breath ragged, his silver eyes bouncing between disbelief and something else. Something closer to fear.The Firstborn did not speak.They didn’t scream in rage or throw accusations of betrayal.Instead.They smiled.And Helena learned something a little too late.She had walked into a war older than she could understand.And each side had been waiting for her to make a choice.Now.There was no turning back.The Gods Strike FirstThe Firstborn moved first.Helena didn’t have time to react before the sky itself lit on fire.The clouds parted, hurling javelins of heavenly fire onto the battlefield. The Hollowed howled, their flesh caught alight, their bodies liquidizing beneath the assault.The pallor of the air cracked apart b
Episode 217: The Gods Must Bleed
A Sky That ShattersThe heavens collapsed.The sky literally ripped apart, opening like a wound in reality itself, and Helena hardly had time to scream. The battlefield below was engulfed in golden fire and infinite darkness, as though the universe itself was tearing in two.The Firstborn were the falling stars, their weapons blazing with heavenly fire, their silver eyes lit with righteous fury. The Hollowed howled back, their broken voices rising like a war hymn, thair void-forged blades craving vengeance.This wasn’t a battle.This was annihilation.Helena moved.She ducked, avoiding a sweep of a Firstborn warrior that cut through the air where her head had only seconds before been. The heat of their blade seared against her skin, too near, too quick.But she was faster.She spun, her dagger slicing through their divine armor, and, for the first time, she heard the sound she never thought she’d hear.A firstborn screamed.Helena’s breath hitched.She could kill them.And if she coul
Episode 216: The Ah Which Ends Worlds
A Throne of Lies, A War of TruthHelena’s breath was quick and brittle, her heart pounding against her rib cage.The Hollow King knelt before her.Not as an enemy.Not as a monster.But as a warrior awaiting a response.The gods had walked the earth before her, and the earth had been their altar. They stood behind their King, all soulless eyes on her, waiting for her to make a choice.And in the distance.Something else was coming.Something worse.Cain moaned next her, spitting blood from his mouth. “Well,” he muttered, “this complicated fast.”Helena barely heard him.Because she wasn’t looking at Cain.The throne of the Hollowed, upthrust from the ruins, split reality like a jagged wound.It was waiting for her.And deep inside, she knew.If she did that, if she chose the Hollowed, there could be no undoing it.She would not only be battling the Firstborn.She would be waging war on the very gods themselves.And it was a war no one had ever won.The Hollow King’s voice was gentle,
