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PLANET RYUT -
The dead skies of Ryut were thick with drifting motes of black energy that swirled around the Black Central Power Battery. The massive battery pulsed faintly, its surface echoing the will of Nekron through the planet's very crust. Scar hovered before it, and Black Hand knelt beside it.
"You were close," Scar rasped, her voice like dry parchment tearing in the wind. "Very close to getting killed by him."
Black Hand's face twitched with frustration, his gaunt fingers curling as he stared into the battery's abyssal glow. "I don't understand how he found me. I kept to the shadows...I revealed nothing to anyone."
"It matters not," Scar waved dismissively, her hands leaving trails of darkness in the air. "The Black Lanterns thrive. Nekron's will spreads unchallenged across the sectors. Resistance is thin, scattered, pitiful compared to what we've seen on that… inconvenient planet."
She spat the word like it offended her.
"We will leave Earth for last."
The ground trembled.
No it convulsed.
From deep within the planet's core, a pulse tore through the crust. The Black Central Power Battery screamed, and the sky bled with dark light. Then came the voice, vast, cold and furious.
"NO!"
The word itself cracked the surface of Ryut, sending fissures snaking through the blackened stone of the planet. The battery howled louder, veins of writhing darkness tearing free from its base.
"It is not enough!" Nekron's voice rumbled like a world being split in half. "It is not okay! You do not comprehend the importance of that planet, Scar! You do not understand what stirs within it!"
Scar's gnarled lips parted in confusion, but she did not dare to speak.
Black Hand lowered his head further, his spine stiff. "Lord Nekron… I will do my best to.."
"Silence."
The command froze the air itself.
"I do not believe,"Nekron hissed, "that the Shadow Lantern let you walk away untouched. Come forward."
Scar's brow furrowed, her eyes narrowing as she drifted back, wary now. "What are you implying, Lord Nekron?"
"Touch the Battery." Nekron's voice slithered through the cracks in the planet. "I must verify something."
Black Hand hesitated only for a heartbeat before nodding and pressing his cold, dead hand against the slick, thrumming surface of the Black Central Power Battery, and the moment his palm met it.
The shadows at his feet twitched.
Scar stiffened. Her gaze darted down.
The shadow spread unnaturally wide, stretching like liquid tar. Something moved within it.
"No…" Nekron's voice turned strange, like stone grinding against bone. "He…"
From the shadow, a shape rose long fingers, taloned, slick with violet-tinged dark. A figure pulled itself free of Black Hand's very shadow, and both Scar and Black Hand recoiled, their eyes widening.
A Shadow Demon stood there, its form outlined in smoky tendrils of pure, oppressive power. Its eyes flared violet.
Black Hand staggered back. "What...how did he?!"
Nekron's voice roared.
"His constructs! Destroy it!"
Black Hand lunged immediately, summoning the Black Ring's aura, claws stretching to tear the intruder apart. Scar raised her own hand, gathering dark energy, her expression twisting with both anger and dread.
The shadow moved, it shifted transforming into something else.
In one instant, Black Hand's attack was caught mid-swing his wrist snapped to a halt in an unbreakable grip. The air went still. The violet glow flared.
A familiar voice broke the silence, smooth and mocking.
"You know," the figure said, his form appearing, Arthur Blackwynd, the Shadow Monarch a smile on his face, "I said I'll try to find their source of power eventually… just didn't think it'd be this easy."
Black Hand snarled and tried to wrench free, but Arthur's fingers tightened, and with a subtle twist, CRACK. His wrist bent unnaturally, the sound echoing across the void of Ryut.
Scar's eye widened. "You!"
Arthur tilted his head toward her, his violet gaze sharp as a blade. "Patience, Treacherous Guardian. I'll deal with you in a moment."
Then he turned his eyes back to Black Hand, a grin playing at his lips, voice low and confident.
"Did you really think I wouldn't leave a little… souvenir behind?"
The earth cracked beneath Arthur's boots as his gaze swept across the desolate landscape, ash swirling at every step. The sky was void a hollow nothingness illuminated only by the malignant pulse of the massive Black Central Power Battery that towered ahead, its sickly light casting long, unnatural shadows.
Arthur's violet eyes narrowed as they fell upon it. "So… this is the planet where you've been hiding," he said, his voice calm. A faint smile tugged at the corner of his lips as his hand rose, and from the shadows the Promethium Sword emerged with a dark shimmer of steel. He pointed the blade toward the towering battery of death.
"Then I suppose the solution is simple," he murmured, his tone turning into a quiet threat. "Destroy that… and your little soldiers will return to the corpses they were meant to be."
His ring glowed faintly, his cloak and hair swaying as a cold gust swept past, yet his smirk remained.
Scar hissed from the side, her disfigured face twisting with fury. "As if we would allow you to defile Nekron's gift!" Her clawed hand snapped forward, a surge of black energy lancing out with a shriek that split the air.
Arthur moved only slightly his form a blur as the blast missed by inches, detonating behind him and carving a crater into the ground that sizzled with lingering death-light. Dust and shards of charred rock rained down, but his gaze did not leave her.
And then he saw it. The ancient, wretched tome clutched to her chest its black cover writhing faintly, inscriptions and the symbol of the Black Lantern Crops glowing in faint dark light.
His eyes glinted. "Is that… the Book of the Black?"
Scar's lips curved into a crooked sneer. "What of it? Its knowledge is not for your kind."
Before the venom in her words had faded, another shadow moved Black Hand lunged from the side, skeletal fingers reaching for Arthur's throat with a grotesque eagerness.
Arthur didn't mind him. With a flick of his fingers, the invisible force of Ruler's Authority slammed into the Herald of the Black Lanterns, pinning him mid-air as though a giant's hand crushed his body. Black Hand snarled and thrashed, his corrupted ring sputtering.
Arthur stepped toward him slowly, sword gleaming. "You should've stayed dead." In one smooth, almost contemptuous motion, the Promethium blade flashed and both of Black Hand's arms fell to the ground in severed, twitching heaps.
Black Hand's scream tore across the wastes, a ragged howl of pain and fury. Already, black veins crawled up his shoulders as the dark energy began to knit his limbs back together.
Arthur's head tilted, the faintest trace of amusement in his violet stare. "Of course... That means I have to destroy your ring as well, but you are the Herald there is a slight chance that even if I do that you will still..."
The air shifted suddenly heavier, darker. A tremor rolled through the ground as the Black Central Power Battery began to throb with malignant life. The very planet shuddered under an unseen weight, and a voice ancient, hollow, and boundless rose from its depths, rattling the world.
"Shadow Lantern…" it rumbled, each word like a tolling bell of the grave. "Your arrogance festers. You wield the power of death as well, yet you use it to shield the living? You twist the very essence you claim to command. You are a hypocrite! an aberration! and for that, your existence will be snuffed out! All will return to the great darkness."
A gale of necrotic wind blasted outward, scattering debris and ash in a storm that howled across the dead fields. Arthur stood unmoved in its heart, cloak billowing like a living shadow, his hair whipping wildly across his face. Slowly, he raised his chin, the faint glow in his eyes intensifying until they burned like twin amethysts in the dark.
A quiet chuckle escaped him"Nekron,"he said, tasting the name like something bitter and beneath him. "You insult me by comparing yourself to me."
He lifted his ringed hand toward the towering battery, violet light beginning to seep from the seams of his fingers, coiling like smoke. The very shadows around him bent inward, drawn to his presence.
"I am not like you." His voice lowered, resonant and calm, but it carried like thunder. "You spread death like a plague, mindless and hollow, without a real purpose, 'return to the great darkness?' Don't make me laugh."
A small smile ghosted across his lips as the Promethium blade in his other hand thrummed with power. "I am far more than you are, lesser creature of death."
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If you Like this story! Check out my other stories! Solo leveling in Westeros.
&
If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my patreon at
"https://www.patreon.com/FrenzyAren"
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want