Location Border City of Yanshui
The battlefield reeked of scorched earth, shattered stone, and spilled blood. The ruins of the old temple were nothing more than jagged skeletons as the fight crashed into the edge of Yanshui City. Katzuki's body flew like a broken meteor, slamming into the streets with a cataclysmic impact, sending shockwaves through the earth. Craters opened beneath him; cars, lamp posts, and concrete shattered like paper toys.
Civilians screamed, scattering like ants. Alarms howled across the skyline. It wasn't just a fight anymore. It was a warzone.
Katzuki struggled to stand, blood cascading down his face, his body battered and broken. His armor hissed with leaking black ichor, and each breath was a labor of pure agony.
From the smoke emerged a horror.
The High-Rank Archon.
Not a beast. Not a demon. A living catastrophe, robed in tattered symbols of dead religions, crowned with black fire that churned with the screams of souls. His presence was a claw at the back of the mind, a hunger gnawing at the heart.
Katzuki had no time to react.
The Archon moved.
A streak of black lightning. A shriek of the earth splitting.
A single strike from the Archon's hand smashed into Katzuki's chest, shattering ribs, bursting organs, and hurling him through three buildings before leaving him limp and broken. He skidded across the blood-stained street like discarded meat.
The Plague Doctor, mask gleaming with an infernal light, stood firm.
But the Archon didn't attack.
He spoke.
"You think you wield death, masked one," the Archon's voice was not soundit was infection, slithering into the mind. "But you are nothing but a child swinging a broken sword."
The Plague Doctor said nothing, his blade crackling with cursed power.
The Archon extended a long, clawed hand. His eyes twin voids of endless night bored into the masked figure.
A dark mist swirled.
The ability of Fear Paralysis.
It seeped into the Plague Doctor's mask, into his very soul.
Memories twisted visions of failure, betrayal, death. Forgotten sins clawed up from the grave of memory. His legs stiffened, muscles locking. A primal terror, beyond mortal comprehension, rooted him in place.
The Archon approached slowly, savoring the moment.
"You feel it now, don't you?" he hissed. "The truth. You were never meant to be a harbinger. You were meant to serve. Kneel."
Inside the mask, the Plague Doctor fought the onslaught. His mind, assaulted by terror, began to fracture. Images of past lives, of blood-soaked regrets, flooded his mind.
And still, he refused.
He forced a laugh, broken and ragged. "Your fear is old," he rasped. "It stinks of rot."
The Archon leaned closer, voice a sickening whisper. "Then drown in it."
The Plague Doctor's body convulsed as waves of hallucinated horror battered his consciousness. He saw Katzuki's corpse, saw the world burning, saw his own hands drenched in the blood of innocents. The mask trembled on his face, its ancient magic struggling against the suffocating dread.
"I can offer you salvation," the Archon murmured, voice silken. "Serve me. Together, we shall strip this world of its hollow gods."
The Plague Doctor's fingers tightened around his magical blade, his mind a battlefield of agony and rage.
And he smiled.
"Go to hell," he said.
With a roar torn from the depths of madness, the Plague Doctor broke free of the Fear Paralysis. His blade flared with a black-and-gold light, and he lunged, slashing at the Archon's throat. The Archon recoiled, screeching, black blood spraying from the wound.
But it wasn't enough.
The Archon raised both hands, summoning a maelstrom of pure darkness. The ground buckled. The heavens wept ash. The city began to crumble.
The final boss had ascended.
And just as the Archon prepared to crush them both.
The sky tore apart.
A blazing figure descended, wrapped in chains of burning light.
Atlas Vale's Lost Forgotten Brother.
He landed like the fist of a god, the impact splitting the street for miles. Fire and holy fury radiated from his form a being forged in endless suffering, now unleashed.
Without a word, he moved.
In one instant, he was in front of the Archon.
In the next, the Archon's head was gone, torn from his shoulders in a geyser of black fire and blood.
The body toppled, the darkness dissipating into shrieking winds.
The Plague Doctor dropped to one knee, breathing raggedly.
Katzuki, half-conscious, managed a weak grin through broken teeth.
The Lost Brother stood above them, the burning chains around his arms slowly dimming.
"Get up," he said, voice like the grinding of a thousand swords. "There's worse coming."
And in the distance, beyond the broken city, something ancient stirred.
Something worse. The dark mist of Fear Paralysis thickened into a living nightmare, crushing the Plague Mask's mind like a vice made of a thousand screaming souls. His breathing grew ragged. His magical blade, once steady as death itself, trembled violently in his hand. In the memories buried deep within the Black Plague's mind, he saw it again the moment frozen in time. A child, no older than seven, standing in silence as a small, unexploded nuclear device fell from the sky like a cursed star. It didn't detonate, but the impact alone was monstrous. The bomb struck the ground and the child's skull with brutal force. The sound was a sickening crack, like shattering porcelain. Eyes burst, brain matter painted the broken earth, and silence fell again… darker than before
His muscles shrieked, nerves splintering, as the suffocating terror wrapped around him like a straitjacket of despair. Visions of failure friends dying, lovers screaming, his own helplessness ripped through his mind in a storm of agony.
Even his iron will, forged in countless blood-soaked battles, began to fracture.
And the High Rank Archon smiled.
A jagged, corpse like grin stretched across his rotted lips, splitting the decayed skin until black ichor dripped onto the ruined ground. He took a single, deliberate step forward.
Gravity itself thickened.
The soil split open. The buildings around them groaned and cracked under the invisible pressure. The Plague Mask's bones ground together, joints snapping under the sheer cosmic weight that pulled at his soul.
It felt like being dragged into the abyss itself a black hole, endless, devouring.
"You smell it, don't you?" the Archon whispered, voice slithering into his ears like a thousand rusted knives scraping bone.
"The death that clings to you... the rotting stench of your sins, stacked high, a mountain of corpses. You call yourself strong because you crawled over them."
He moved in a slow, menacing circle around the paralyzed Plague Mask, a vulture savoring the sweet, slow death of its prey.
"You wear a mask," the Archon hissed, his words venom.
"You hide your fear... your shame... your pathetic humanity. You pretend to be death incarnate."
The Plague Mask, through gritted, bleeding teeth, growled back:
"I'm beyond human."
A pitiful lie.
The Archon crouched low, inches from his face, tilting his mutilated head sideways. His soulless black eyes stared into the very marrow of the Plague Mask's being, tearing apart every layer of pride and defiance.
"No," the Archon hissed.
"You are less."
The air around them dropped into subzero temperatures. Frost crackled across the ground. Blood froze mid-drip from the Plague Mask's wounds. His heart pounded in terror, hammering against his ribs like a desperate prisoner.
Every part of his body screamed flee. kneel. submit.
"You have no idea how tiny you are," the Archon whispered, voice dropping lower, colder. "I have slaughtered angels. I have butchered gods. I have devoured entire worlds until their suns wept and died. And you..."
The Archon grinned wider.
"You couldn't even save yourself."
The Plague Mask shook, whether from rage or terror he didn't know anymore.
The Archon leaned closer, until his breath reeking of death older than time seeped through the cracks in the Plague Mask's gear.
"Why fight?" he crooned, almost tender.
"Why bleed? Bow to me. I could remake you. Strip the weakness from your flesh. Forge you into a weapon worthy of the blood you've spilled."
Silence crashed down.
Only the sound of Katzuki's dying, gasping breaths filled the vast void of the ruined battlefield.
Then the Archon laughed a sound more terrible than a thousand screaming widows.
A sound that shattered stone, hope, and spirit alike.
"You cling to your pride like a rotting man clings to his last breath," the Archon mocked, voice booming across the shattered city.
"Kneel, little Plague Bearer. Kneel and I shall grant you a death worth remembering."
The Plague Mask's body, breaking under the unseen weight, shuddered.
His hands trembled.
His weapon once an extension of his soul slipped from his grasp and clattered onto the blood-slicked ground with a final, pathetic echo.
And then...
He knelt.
Not by choice.
Not out of surrender.
But because the crushing power of the High-Rank Archon made resistance a lie.
The Plague Mask fell forward, smashing his knees against the cracked stone, bones snapping under the weight. He gasped, blood pooling inside his broken ribs.
The Archon loomed above him like a living mountain of hatred and ruin.
"You see now," he whispered triumphantly. "Everything you are... everything you ever were... is dust beneath me."
Without warning, the Archon's withered claw clamped around the Plague Mask's face, squeezing like a vice.
And then.
He smashed him downward.
The ground ruptured from the impact, a crater spiderwebbing outward for dozens of meters. Blood erupted from the Plague Mask's mask and mouth in fountains, painting the concrete red.
Bones cracked. Skin tore. Spirit shattered.
The Archon held him there, grinding his face into the rubble, sneering.
"Remember this," he hissed into his ear. "The day you thought yourself a Reaper... and learned you were nothing but... meat."
He raised his hand, black fire coiling in his palm for the killing, blow when the sky itself screamed.
A jagged rift tore reality apart above them. A golden blaze, furious and unforgiving, exploded from the heavens.
It wasn't light.
It was wrath made flesh.
And then he descended Atlas Vale's Lost Forgotten Brother wrapped in flaming chains that screamed with the agony of ancient wars.
The ground shattered on impact.
Entire city blocks collapsed. Firestorms howled across the smoldering ruins of Yanshui. The wind carried with it the stench of gods dying.
Without a word.
Without hesitation.
Without mercy.
The Lost Brother moved.
A single blow a fist coated in burning hatred, in memories of a thousand fallen worlds collided with the High-Rank Archon's skull.
The Archon's head erupted.
Black blood and shattered bone geysered into the sky. The god-killer's body twitched once, twice and then collapsed, lifeless, like a puppet with its strings cut.
The Lost Brother stood over the remains, golden chains wrapping around his arms, seething with vengeance. Fire and fury rolled off him in waves, warping the very air.
The Plague Mask, still kneeling in a crater of his own broken blood and pride, looked up.
He saw not salvation.
He saw judgment.
He hadn't defeated the Archon.
He hadn't even scratched him.
He was a lamb, spared only because a monster even greater than the Archon had deigned to intervene.
The Lost Brother turned his smoldering gaze on the Plague Mask, eyes burning brighter than suns.
His voice rumbled out like a thousand tombstones cracking open.
"Next time," he said coldly, voice a blade against flesh,
"Know your place."
And as he spoke, the earth trembled.
Beyond the ruins, past the smoldering horizon, something older and worse stirred from its ancient slumber.
Something darker than the void.
Something hungrier than death.
And the world realized with horror:
They had barely survived the opening act. But then.
The broken body of the High-Rank Archon twitched.
Black ichor, still hissing and boiling, reformed around the shattered skull. Bone stitched itself back together, flesh weaving like cursed silk. The empty sockets of the Archon's face burned with ancient, bottomless rage.
A gurgling, wet laugh escaped his ruined throat.
He had faked his death.
The "collapse," the "defeat" it was an illusion, a deception, a predator playing dead to let the hunters lower their guard.
"You thought... you won?" the Archon hissed, his voice a vomit of venom and malice.
His form rose from the rubble, broken wings of darkness unfolding behind him.
"You are nothing but vermin... and I... AM ETERNAL."
The ground cracked again, but this time it wasn't from the Lost Brother.
It was the Archon awakening, stronger, darker, more monstrous than before.
In the distance, across the smoldering ruins, something even worse began to awaken a darkness drawn by the Archon's resurrection.
A hunger beyond death.
An annihilation older than time itself.
And the true nightmare was only beginning. The Plague Mask staggered back, heart slamming against his ribs in sheer animal terror.
He had seen monsters.
He had fought horrors that would drive normal men insane.
But the thing rising before him the High-Rank Archon resurrected was something far beyond death, beyond comprehension.
It was a being made of pure, devouring will.
The Plague Mask dropped to one knee instinctively, breath coming in short, ragged gasps, the primal part of his mind screaming submit.
The Archon stood fully now, towering above the battlefield.
Steam hissed from the cracks of his reborn flesh, and the face of fire roared within his skull a seething inferno burning away the last vestiges of humanity.
"You fear me," the Archon rasped, voice thick with ancient power.
The Plague Mask could not answer. His throat was locked shut by terror.
The Archon smiled, a rictus grin of molten fury.
"Good."
He stepped closer, the earth warping with every footfall.
"You should fear me," the Archon whispered, a thousand voices speaking through him, layered with the wailing of dead gods. "For I am the hammer that will shatter this festering world."
The Plague Mask forced himself to speak, choking out the words.
"W-What do you want...?"
The Archon leaned down, bringing the searing heat of his burning face close enough to blister the masked man's skin.
"A deal," the Archon hissed.
The Plague Mask flinched.
"A pact," the Archon continued, voice slithering into his ears like venom.
"You want power. You want survival. I can grant both."
The Plague Mask, trembling, forced himself to meet the Archon's gaze.
"But why...?"
The Archon's eyes flared brighter, a furnace of ancient hatred.
"Because a cancer festers," he growled.
"Not humans. Not gods. Not angels."
He pointed a charred claw toward the blackening skies, where strange tendrils writhed in the distance.
"The demonic hives," he said, voice rumbling like thunder.
"They breed... they infest... they devour."
The Plague Mask stared in horror as the horizon twisted, revealing vast, grotesque hives colossal writhing masses of meat, bone, and void energy growing like tumors on the world itself.
"They do not conquer," the Archon spat.
"They consume. Mindless. Endless. Blind."
His burning face twisted into a sneer.
"I would see this world burned clean before it is devoured by their filth."
The Plague Mask shuddered.
The Archon was no savior.
He was a blade, sharp and uncaring, willing to cut the entire world to save it from rot.
"I do not fight for humans," the Archon growled.
"I do not fight for gods."
He leaned even closer, until the Plague Mask could feel his skin crisping.
"I fight for balance," he snarled. "For existence itself."
A long silence stretched between them.
The Plague Mask's mind raced.
To refuse was death.
To accept was damnation.
But somewhere, deep in the broken, bleeding ruins of his soul, the Plague Mask realized.
He wanted to live.
Even if it meant becoming a monster's tool.
Even if it meant wading through oceans of blood.
He bowed his head.
"...what would you have me do?"
The Archon smiled a terrible, triumphant thing.
"You will become my instrument," he said.
"My sword against the Hive."
"You will burn them," he said, voice low and heavy.
"Rip them out by the root. Salt the earth with their corpses."
"And when they scream," he whispered, "when they beg for mercy, you will show them none."
The Plague Mask swallowed hard, every instinct inside him screaming at the abyss he was stepping into.
But he forced himself to nod.
"I accept."
The Archon roared a sound that shook the shattered city to its bones.
Dark, burning chains snapped out again, branding new sigils into the Plague Mask's flesh runes of allegiance, of destruction, of rebirth.
The Plague Mask screamed once more, his voice joining the eternal howling of the broken world.
When it ended, he collapsed, gasping, the last traces of his former self smoldering in the ashes.
The Archon turned away, wings of black fire unfolding.
"Rise, my Harbinger," he commanded.
"Your true war begins now."
The Plague Mask once a lost brother, once a wandering killer rose from the ruins.
Not as a man.
Not even as a demon.
But as something far, far worse.
And in the churning darkness on the horizon, the Hive stirred, sensing the approach of the storm.
--- TO BE CONTINUED...