His hammer was slick with Radahn's blood. His shoulders heaved, every muscle burning, but he had proven it—he could hurt this demigod. Not just wound him, but break him down. Piece by piece.
Radahn loomed above it all. Bloodied, yes—but standing. His twin blades still gleamed wet in the scarlet light. His horse carried him forward with tireless strength, each hoofbeat shaking the battlefield.
The others had given everything. And still, it wasn't enough.
But he had seen it now. The dents in Radahn's armor. The limp in his step. The blood in his mouth.
He could finish this.
The festival of war had burned itself down to this single ember.
One man against the might of a demigod.
And he would not retreat.
For the Elden Ring.
Radahn's mount thundered forward, hooves pounding like war drums. Sand and ash sprayed in great waves as the demigod lowered his twin blades, one sweeping high, the other low, a storm of steel that could cleave a battalion in two.
He moved. Every instinct screamed at him, every muscle tightened. He ducked beneath the high cut, felt the wind of the blade drag across his hair, then twisted his body just as the lower sword tore the ground apart where his legs had been. Dust exploded around him, heat and metal shrieking against stone.
He planted his heel, spun, and his hammer came down in a brutal arc. The strike slammed into Radahn's armored hip, and for the first time the demigod staggered, his horse rearing as a spray of blood burst into the air.
The general roared, a sound like a mountain tearing in two, and swung down with both blades together. The force was enough to split dunes apart. He brought his hammer up two-handed, steel screaming against steel, and though the impact hurled him back, though his arms jolted with pain, he stood.
Radahn pressed on.
Arrows the size of spears screamed down from his bow. He rolled, dirt exploding as they crashed into the earth where he'd been a heartbeat before. The last one cut a gouge across his ribs, hot blood spilling, but already the wound pulled tight, skin knitting, pain fading.
He kept moving. Every dodge closer, every roll tighter. His hammer cracked into Radahn's knee, and the demigod dropped for just a breath. He drove the head into Radahn's ribs next, ribs crunching beneath the blow.
The giant swung wild in fury, carving a trench through the battlefield, but he was no longer untouchable. Each miss left an opening. And each opening was punished.
Still, Radahn was not waning. He called meteors down from the heavens, boulders of flame that shattered against the ground in cataclysmic bursts. He sprinted through them, weaving between falling stars, hammer raised like a thunderbolt. One meteor clipped his shoulder, spinning him across the sand, but he pushed up, flesh burning, and kept going.
He had him. He could feel it—through the quake of Radahn's horse, through the shallow edge of his breath, through the crimson soaking his armor.
The demigod was weakening.
But even bloodied, even wounded, Radahn's eyes burned like suns, unbroken, unbowed. He turned his great blades out wide, lowering his body, preparing a charge that would tear the land itself apart.
And he answered by setting his hammer at his side, crouched low, breath steady, muscles coiled to strike.
Man and demigod. Both ragged. Both bloodied. Both unwilling to yield.
The battlefield was theirs alone.
The charge came like the end of the world. Radahn and his mount surged forward, both swords sweeping in a killing cross meant to erase him entirely.
He met it head-on. His hammer crashed into the first blade, the impact tearing blood from his palms as steel shrieked against stone. The second blade came low — he dove, rolling beneath the storm, dirt and sparks exploding around him. He came up under Radahn's guard and slammed the hammer into his side again.
Bone cracked. The demigod grunted, but his retaliation was instant — a boot the size of a boulder crushed into his chest, hurling him through the air. He hit the ground rolling, ribs snapping, his body screaming.
He forced himself up, dragging in air, flesh already stitching itself together, though slower now, taxed to its limits. His vision swam, but he locked on Radahn.
The general loomed in the distance, blood dripping down his massive frame, breathing heavy. Yet his eyes burned brighter than ever.
Radahn raised his hand to the sky.
The stars obeyed.
They tore free of the heavens in blazing streaks, arcing down in a storm of fire and stone. The battlefield convulsed with craters, firestorms blooming in every direction. The air became a furnace.
He sprinted through it, weaving between flaming boulders, the hammer gripped tight though his hands were blistered raw. A star fell too close, its shockwave hurling him into the dirt. He spat blood, pulled himself free, and kept moving. Always forward.
Closer.
Radahn's blades descended again, each swing able to level a fortress. He ducked and rolled, barely alive between each strike, waiting, waiting for that sliver of an opening.
Then he saw it.
Radahn's left blade caught in the ground, lodged for just a breath.
He struck. The hammer came down on the demigod's knee, then his ribs, then his jaw. Each impact a thunderclap, each one tearing flesh, splintering armor. Radahn bellowed, staggering, blood pouring freely now.
But still he swung. Even dying, his strength was monstrous. The right blade cut across the battlefield, grazing his side, nearly cleaving him in two. His body burned with pain, his regeneration faltering, each breath ragged.
And yet he did not stop.
He roared and leapt, putting everything into a final swing. The hammer crashed into Radahn's skull with a sound like the cracking of the earth. The demigod reeled, eyes wide, balance faltering.
Another strike followed — a brutal overhead smash that crumpled helm and bone alike.
Radahn dropped to one knee. His blades slipped from his hands.
The battlefield fell silent.
The general, conqueror of stars, bane of armies, the strongest of Demigods… fell forward into the dirt. Dead.
Breath ragged, arms trembling, he stood over the corpse. Every muscle in his body screamed. His chest rose and fell in shallow gasps. His vision blurred.
Then the runes came.
They surged into him in waves, not a trickle but a flood, countless lives and conquests bound into Radahn's colossal strength. They pressed into his body like molten lead, filling every vein, every muscle, until he thought he would burst. His legs buckled under the weight of it, his body trembling with the immensity of what he had just claimed.
Radahn — a demigod. Slain by his hand.
He looked down at the fallen titan, at the battlefield scarred by their duel, and felt the truth sink in. He was no longer simply clawing for survival. No longer a nameless man lost in this broken world.
The battlefield lay still at last, Radahn's hulking corpse slumped amid churned earth and burning sky. His hammer felt leaden in his grip, his body trembling from the punishment he had endured. He stood over the carcass of the demigod, chest rising and falling, blood and dust drying against his skin.
Then the air thickened.
Above Radahn's body, a shape began to take form. A shimmer of golden light, faint at first, then coalescing into something vast and unmistakable: a Great Rune. It floated high above, a lattice of radiant curves and angles, its glow sharp as moonlight on steel.
It was not so different from the others. The warped grafted rune he had torn from Godrick, the shining rebirth rune of Rennala — each had borne that same alien geometry, that same austere light. This one pulsed with the same solemn weight, no greater, no lesser. Another fragment of the same broken whole. Another piece of the Elden Ring.
And it came to him.
The rune sank into his chest like a brand pressed against his soul, searing but not unbearable. He clenched his teeth, his body stiffening as the power flowed through him. Not the overwhelming tide of a god, nor the dim flicker of common runes — but a steady, immense force, equal in measure to what he had claimed before.
He exhaled when it settled. The power was his, distinct yet familiar. Another shard to be bent, wielded, and, one day, made whole.
He stood a long moment in the quiet, his gaze fixed on Radahn's fallen form. A demigod lay dead at his feet.
He staggered from the field. His legs felt as though they were made of stone, every step weighted by the beating he had endured. The great corpse of Radahn loomed behind him, a mound of armor and flesh, still smoldering faintly under the crimson sky.
The others had already vanished, retreating through grace or carried off by what allies they had left. He alone remained.
At the cliff's edge, a Site of Grace shimmered faintly in the ruined dust. He lowered himself before it, his body folding with a groan. The glow touched his skin, and with it came the steady rhythm of life pulling itself back together. Torn flesh knit. Cracked bones fused. His breath steadied.
He leaned against the haft of the Brick Hammer, its head dug into the dirt beside him, and let the silence wash over him. For the first time since stepping into Caelid, he almost felt like he could breathe without tasting rot.
The memory of the fight lingered in his muscles. Every swing dodged by inches, every counter forced into the smallest cracks in Radahn's titanic defenses. It had taken everything — his strength, his skill, his stubborn will to endure. And yet he had won. A mortal, against a demigod.
He closed his eyes and let that truth settle. The Great Rune pulsed faintly within him, steady as a heartbeat. Another piece of the broken Ring, another step toward his claim.
The Lands Between stretched ahead, fractured and dying. The work of centuries. But sitting there in the quiet, with his body whole and his resolve sharpened, he believed it could be undone. He would make it so.
For now, though, he allowed himself a breath of stillness. A moment to sit, unbothered, the hammer at his side and victory still warm in his chest.
The Grace steadied him, but the land itself did not rest.
A low groan now rose from the horizon, deeper than thunder, rolling across the red-tinged sky. The ground trembled beneath his knees, dust shivering loose from the cliffs.
He lifted his head.
Above Radahn's broken form, the heavens split. A seam tore open in the firmament, jagged and immense, spilling streaks of burning light. Stars—scores of them, hundreds—ripped free from their long stillness, tearing downward in trails of fire.
It was no storm of rain or ash. It was the undoing of a sky too long held in stasis.
The constellations themselves broke apart, shards of night crashing through the void, each one dragging a tail of fire that blazed across the world. The sky wept meteors. The land quaked as though it remembered some buried wound.
One fell brighter than the rest—a blazing spear of violet fire that cut across the heavens and vanished beyond the southern horizon. The shock of its impact thundered through the earth even from miles away.
He rose unsteadily to his feet, staring as the night remade itself. Stars that had been frozen since time immemorial were now scattered, their paths torn loose by Radahn's fall.
A path had opened. Somewhere, far away, the door to the Eternal City had been broken wide, but it was not yet time for him to enter it.
And here, under the rain of fire, it was only silence and awe.
—
He had direction.
The Grand Lift of Dectus. That was the path forward. But to raise it, he would need the two halves of the medallion. The first waited in Fort Faroth, somewhere within the rot-soaked wilds of Dragonbarrow.
The land grew worse the deeper he went. Scarlet rot pulsed like open veins in the earth. Mushrooms split stone apart, their pale caps slick with moisture, and red-tinged growths oozed across tree trunks like festering wounds. The air itself was wrong — thick, metallic, alive with a haze that stung the lungs. This was not decay. It was corruption taking form, spreading like breath through the land.
And then the sound came.
A low thunder, steady as a heartbeat. The scrape of claws against earth, the shifting of wings vast enough to stir the wind even at rest.
Dragons.
They littered the fields before him like toppled statues, some still, others twitching in their uneasy sleep. Their scales glistened with the red haze, their wings shifted in half-forgotten dreams. A tail dragged across the ground with each exhale, carving trenches deep into the rot-slick soil.
And towering over them all lay the Elder Dragon Greyoll.
She was not alive in any way that resembled life. Her body sprawled across the earth, wings sagging and split, her withered necks tangled like roots as her cavernous lungs forced breath after ragged breath. Her scales were cracked, pitted, and half-consumed by fungus. The smell of rot poured off her in waves, sour and wet, crawling into the nose and mouth.
Every exhale shook the ground.
He stopped, Brick Hammer lowered, eyes fixed on the impossible sight. This was his first true encounter with dragons — not the ancient legends of another life, not stories, but the reality of the Lands Between. Even with all his strength, he knew. To face even one was a death sentence. To face this brood, with Greyoll at its head, was suicide.
So he kept low, every step deliberate, weaving between fungal roots and stones as though treading the spine of some slumbering beast. The brood's heat pressed down on him, the stink of scale and scorched breath clinging to his skin. A wing twitched. A throat rumbled. A tail slid through the soil. But the beasts did not wake.
And there, above them, on the ridge — the battered husk of Fort Faroth. Its towers leaned, its walls pitted and split, but it endured.
The medallion's first half was waiting.
The stone steps of Fort Faroth rose before him, worn and splintered, their surface slick with moss and rot. The air was thicker here, the reek of dragon breath clinging to the fort's crumbling walls. He adjusted his grip on the Brick Hammer, then eased forward, each step careful, his boots scuffing against the ancient stone.
The entrance yawned open like a wound. Inside, the dark pressed down immediately, broken only by shafts of pale light slanting through shattered timbers in the ceiling. The air smelled of mold and guano, acrid and heavy. He moved slowly, lowering his breathing, listening.
That was when he heard it.
A sound like wet cloth tearing, followed by the flutter of wings. From above, from the black rafters, something stirred. A bat, massive and half-decayed, claws rasping against stone as it uncurled from its perch. Another answered, then another. The chamber filled with the scraping and shrieking of more.
He grit his teeth, bracing himself as the first dropped from the rafters, claws wide, shrieking as it dove. His hammer came up instinctively, stone slamming into the beast mid-flight with a crack that shook its ribcage apart. It fell twitching to the floor, wings spasming.
Another dove, then another. The chamber became chaos — wings slashing at his face, claws raking his arms, their shrieks rattling the stone walls. He swung wide, crushing bone and wing, the hammer turning each blow into ruin. Blood sprayed, fetid and black, spattering against the walls. Still they came, screeching, their bodies flailing in unnatural spasms as if they were already half-dead.
One clamped its jaws onto his shoulder, tearing into flesh. Pain burned for an instant before his body knit itself together again, regeneration forcing the wound closed as he tore the thing free and caved its skull in against the floor.
At last, silence pressed down like a weight. The bats lay broken across the stones, wings twisted, their shrieks gone. Only the stink of them lingered, sharp and sour in the stale air.
He drew a long breath, shoulders heavy, and pressed deeper into the ruin.
The far wall led him to a narrow ladder, its wood rotting but still intact. He set a hand on the rung, testing, then climbed, each step creaking under his weight until he pulled himself into a higher chamber. Dust and cobwebs coated the corners, the air stagnant, heavy with age.
There, waiting atop a stone dais, was a chest. Its bronze fittings were green with rust, but the lock had long since corroded. He pushed it open with one arm, hinges groaning in protest, and inside, gleaming faintly in the gloom, lay one half of the Dectus Medallion.
He lifted it from its resting place, the bronze cool against his palm, etched with patterns of the Erdtree. A single half — but half was enough to keep him moving forward.
One step closer to the Grand Lift. One step closer to Altus.