The tension in the chamber was a physical weight, thick enough to stifle a scream. Around the obsidian table of the Verizon Council, seven figures sat in a silence that felt like a sharpened blade.
Athyria was the first to break it. She rose from her seat, her movements fluid and mocking, as she swept her gaze over the other six.
"You all seem to be focusing far too much on the political optics of having *him* here," she said, her voice echoing with a terrifying calm. "You sent seven messengers to bring him in. Seven. And yet, all seven were slaughtered—torn apart by bears or something equally... pathetic. It's embarrassing, really."
At the far end of the table, a man sat with his heavy, armored boot resting carelessly on the polished surface. He didn't look up, his posture radiating a bored arrogance.
"Keep your foot down, Dofrimadh," a voice hissed from the shadows of the head chair. The temperature in the room plummeted instantly, frost beginning to creep across the glassware.
Dofrimadh didn't flinch, though he slowly retracted his leg. "The air is getting a bit nippy, isn't it?"
Athyria let out a small, melodic chirp of a laugh, turning toward the heavy oak doors. "Well, while you lot argue over who failed the most, I'll be going now to collect our new member. The 'White Plague' is waiting."
"Are you just going to let her walk out, Kharnolyn?" Dofrimadh asked, his eyes finally narrowing as he looked toward the head of the table.
The central figure, Kharnolyn, leaned forward. His presence was a mountain of suffocating authority. When he spoke, the very floorboards seemed to vibrate.
"Proceed," Kharnolyn commanded. "But do not kill him, Athyria. We need him intact." He paused, his gaze shifting to the woman sitting silently to his left. "Vamarys. Go with her. Ensure the girl doesn't let her bloodlust get the better of her."
A heavy silence followed. Vamarys didn't move.
"Kharnolyn?" Vamarys whispered, her voice like cracking ice.
"Vamarys?" Kharnolyn's voice dropped an octave, turning bone-chillingly cold. "Do you dare defy my direct order?"
Vamarys stood up slowly. The shadows in the corners of the room began to writhe, and her eyes suddenly ignited with a piercing, ethereal blue light that cut through the gloom.
"And what if I do?" she challenged, her tone dropping into a dangerous, guttural register. The mana in the room began to scream, the pressure threatening to shatter the windows.
Before the two titans could clash, Dofrimadh raised his hands in a mock gesture of peace, though a smirk played on his lips.
"Now, now. Let's not do something crazy, everyone," he said, his voice the only thing remaining steady in the brewing storm. "We're all on the same side here. We're only after the Plague, remember? Let's save the civil war for *after* we've caught him.", Before they clashed a small sound broke their collective attention, it was the eighth messenger sent. He had returned after fleeing from a bear.
The survivor didn't realize he was already dead when he crawled into the chamber. He was a messenger, or perhaps he had once been a man, but in the presence of the Verizon Council, he was merely a **biological error.** As he turned his head, his gaze accidentally brushed against **Vamarys**.
"Ok, kill it. It looked at me," Vamarys said. Her voice didn't just carry a tone; it carried a weight that made the shadows in the corner of the man's vision begin to grow teeth.
"Who granted that thing the right to look this way?" Kharnolyn's voice was a low, seismic rumble that vibrated the marrow in the man's bones. "Gouge out its eyes and feed them to the crows. Then, kill it."
The man didn't even have time to blink. The light in the room seemed to reject his retinas. His eyes didn't just bleed; they boiled in their sockets, the vitreous humor turning to steam before the spheres burst with a wet, sickening *pop*. In the sudden, screaming darkness of his blindness, the man lunged forward, his hands clawing at the air until they snagged on the heavy, midnight fabric of **Vorakhan's** robe.
He expected cloth. He touched the **End.**
His arm didn't just wither; it underwent a thousand years of decay in a single heartbeat. The flesh turned a bruised, moldering purple, sloughing off the bone in gray, gelatinous clumps that hissed as they hit the obsidian floor.
"Pathetic, really," Kharnolyn said, his footsteps rhythmic and heavy. "A pig is not allowed to look at the sky, for it cannot. You cannot gaze at the sun and touch the void. Such a... disappointing life form."
The man opened his mouth to scream, a sound born of pure, unadulterated madness.
"Quiet, fool," Vamarys whispered.
The man's throat convulsed. With a sound like wet leather tearing, his vocal cords snapped at the root. They didn't just break; they slithered down his esophagus like dying eels, settling in his stomach. His scream died into a hollow, bubbling gurgle of air escaping a punctured lung.
"I did say don't scream near me," Vamarys added, her blue eyes glowing with a bored, predatory light.
"Unwise, really... provoking Envy," Dofrimadh added. He didn't move, but the air around him grew so heavy with Sloth that the man's remaining limbs felt like they were made of lead, pinning him to the floor in his own filth.
Then **Kāmakh and Kāmaris** leaned in. The man's terror suddenly spiked, then curdled into a grotesque, misplaced ecstasy, then back into a despair so deep it physically bruised his skin. They were "fumbling" with his internal chemistry, treating his nervous system like a broken instrument.
"He's too... unsettling to look at now," Vamarys noted, watching the man's skin twitch in patterns that shouldn't be possible.
Kharnolyn took one final step. The pressure of his **Pride** became a physical force. The man's skin began to peel away from his skull in long, cauterized strips, not from heat, but because the man's very atoms were trying to flee from Kharnolyn's presence.
"I take it back," Vorakhan sneered, his mouth twisting in hunger that turned to revulsion. "I'll not eat that... it looks... disgusting."
"Same," Athyria added, her eyes flashing with a greed that found no value in the melting heap of meat. "I don't want something that is... inedible. A waste of space."
"Neither am I interested," Dofrimadh yawned, the sound of the man's bones snapping under the gravity of the room providing a white-noise lullaby. "A life form as useful as a dung beetle isn't worth the effort of a final blow."
The man wiggled in a puddle of his own dissolved essence, a nameless, faceless smear on the obsidian.
Kharnolyn looked down, his silhouette blotting out what little light remained for the dying creature. "It is truly sad," he whispered, the cold finality of his voice echoing off the walls, "that you existed in the same world as me."
The air in the manor's study was thick with the scent of old parchment and dormant shadows. **Leornars** moved with a mechanical grace, his fingers ghosting over ledgers and secret compartments. With a flick of his wrist, a rift of obsidian darkness tore open at his feet. A maid, porcelain-skinned and draped in tattered lace, rose from the void. She accepted the documents with a silent bow and dissolved back into the abyss of his shadow.
"What is your true objective here?" **Althelia's** voice echoed from within his core, cold and inquisitive. "I doubt this ends with a simple retrieval."
Leornars straightened, his gaze lingering on the empty drawer. "I suspect a move by Selalyndra. If my assumptions hold, this case ends tonight."
"Does it involve the Sullivana girl?"
"Absolutely," Leornars replied, a thin smile playing on his lips. "She is a winning card—deceptive, yet loyal to a fault."
He stepped onto the balcony, the night wind whipping his hair. Without hesitation, he plummeted into the dark. Beneath him, the fog coalesced, shaping itself into the skeletal, leathery form of a wyvern.
"You truly need to level up your flying skill," Althelia remarked dryly. "This is barely more than glorified levitation."
"My, my, aren't you chatty today?" Leornars began, but Althelia's voice suddenly sharpened into a jagged blade of warning.
"**ABOVE US!**"
The sky ignited. A torrent of white-hot, ethereal flame descended like the wrath of a dying star. Leornars reacted with instinct born of a thousand deaths, leaping from the wyvern's back just as the beast was reduced to drifting ash.
He landed on a floating island of rock, the impact cracking the stone beneath his boots. He ripped the scorched sleeves from his shirt, his arms tense and ready. High above, a silhouette descended, wreathed in the flickering aura of a Rare Skill.
"You're quick," a playful voice drifted through the heat.
**Athyria** descended like a falling petal, yet the ground groaned under her weight. She didn't wait for a greeting. She lunged.
Leornars erected a multi-layered barrier, the translucent hexagonal plates humming with mana. Athyria's fist collided with the shield, and the shockwave shattered the surrounding stone. One strike. Two. On the third, the barrier splintered like glass.
Leornars lunged through the shards, his own flame spells erupting from his palms in a counter-barrage. Athyria dodged with predatory fluidity, appearing behind him with a chuckle. Leornars didn't turn; he slammed his palms into the earth, using the momentum to launch a twin double-kick backward.
Athyria blocked, the force sliding her back, but Leornars followed up instantly. He spun, a roundhouse kick connecting squarely with her jaw. The impact echoed across the sky as she was sent reeling back several meters.
She wiped a bead of blood from her lip, her eyes dancing with madness. "You're starting to amuse me, **White Plague**."
"Don't get too comfortable," Leornars muttered. He snapped his fingers. Three high-tier undead warriors materialized, their rusted armor clattering. He ran in tandem with them, a blurred formation of death.
Athyria met them head-on. She caught the first undead by its throat, slamming it into the floating isle with enough force to crater the surface. In that split second, Leornars was in her blind spot, delivering a brutal elbow to her ribs followed by a drop-kick to the base of her skull.
She hit the ground, but the laughter didn't stop. It grew louder.
Athyria's hand shot out, catching Leornars's ankle mid-air. She swung him like a ragdoll, hurling him into the stratosphere. As he soared, she cupped her hands, a sphere of compressed dark flame forming between them.
"**Water Cannon!**" Leornars roared, casting the high-tier spell to douse the approaching fireball. Steam blinded the battlefield for a heartbeat. Then, a streak of purple-black light cut through the mist.
A dark flame struck Leornars's shoulder, sending him crashing into a levitating ruins below. He groaned, pushing himself up as his eyes began to burn with a terrifying, rhythmic crimson light.
"This isn't good," he whispered. He extended his fingers, weaving the **Threads of Abstract**. The invisible filaments lashed out, shimmering with the power to unravel reality itself.
Athyria blinked, and suddenly, her world fell apart. Her limbs, her torso, her very essence was sliced into a thousand pieces by the nearly invisible wires.
Leornars breathed heavily, watching the carnage. But the pieces didn't fade. They vibrated, pulled together by an unnatural magnetism.
"**Sin of Greed: Arth,**" Athyria's voice resonated from the regenerating mass. A black, suffocating aura exploded outward, forcing Althelia to seize control of Leornars's nervous system.
"She is a Sin," Althelia warned, her voice vibrating in his mind. "At your current level, you cannot kill her. She will heal from anything we throw at her... except for the Gatekeeper. We are bidding for time now."
Leornars fired **Helvaria Flames**, the white-blue pillars of fire incinerating the air. Athyria danced through the inferno, catching one of his stray spells and hurling it back with twice the velocity. Leornars ducked, and the island behind him was erased from existence.
"Misdirection? How troublesome," he spat.
He lunged again, a desperate heel-kick aimed at her temple. She caught it, her grip like a vice. He used his trapped leg as a pivot, swinging his other foot in a devastating arc that caught her chest.
She let go, but her counter-attack was instantaneous. A blast of **Dark Aria Flame** erupted at point-blank range. Leornars, his stamina flagging, was a fraction of a second too slow. The blast scorched his face and chest, throwing him back.
Summoning his final reserves, he pulled a blade from a summoned undead's hand. He rushed her, the steel humming with mana. Athyria didn't even flinch. She reached out, her bare hand shattering the blade into a shower of sparks, and drove a fist deep into Leornars's gut.
The air left his lungs. The world went gray. The battle of the Plague and the Calamity had only just begun.
The impact of her fist in his gut should have ended it, but Leornars didn't recoil. Instead, he leaned into the blow, his fingers locking around her wrist like iron shackles. Before Athyria could pull back, he pulled her in, throwing his entire weight into a devastating headbutt.
**BOOM.**
A localized sonic boom erupted from the point of impact, the pressure wave shattering every pane of glass in the distant manor and flattening the forest below. Athyria's head snapped back, her nose fracturing as a shockwave of crimson mana rippled outward.
She stumbled, dazed for a heartbeat, but a jagged grin split her bloodied face. "That... actually hurt!"
"Good," Leornars spat, wiping blood from his forehead. "Because I'm done playing."
The two collided again, but this time the air itself seemed to reject their presence. They became twin streaks of light—one a sickly, greed-stricken black, the other a haunting, spectral silver. They traded blows in mid-air, each strike carrying the weight of a falling mountain.
Athyria swung a heavy hook that Leornars dipped under; the mere wind from her fist caught a nearby peak, shearing the summit clean off as if sliced by a titan's blade. Leornars countered with a palm strike to her sternum, the kinetic energy passing through her and exploding out her back, pulverizing a range of hills behind her into fine dust.
As they descended toward a valley, the collateral damage grew horrific. A herd of massive, prehistoric-grade Behemoths stampeded in terror, caught in the crossfire of their shockwaves. As a stray kick from Athyria sent a shockwave that liquified a dozen beasts instantly, Leornars's eyes flared a blinding, rhythmic violet.
"**Rise.**"
He didn't stop his movement. While parrying a flurry of Athyria's jabs, he flicked his fingers downward. The mangled carcasses of the beasts twitched, their flesh turning a necrotic grey as spectral flames ignited in their empty sockets. The newly turned undead Behemoths roared, leaping into the air with unnatural strength to intercept Athyria's path.
"Undead conversion in the middle of a high-speed exchange?" Athyria laughed, weaving through the massive, rotting bodies. "You're a monster, Leornars!"
"Coming from a Sin, I'll take that as a compliment," Leornars retorted.
He vaulted off the back of one of his undead titans, using the height to build momentum. He fell like a meteor, his fist glowing with a condensed, pressurized vacuum. Athyria met him with an upward thrust of her own, her hand wreathed in the dark aura of Arth.
When their knuckles met, the valley between them simply ceased to exist. The earth buckled, the tectonic plates screaming as a canyon kilometers long ripped open beneath them. The undead beasts were ground to bone meal by the pressure, only to be reassembled instantly by Leornars's relentless mana.
They stood in the center of the devastation, breathing in sync, fists buried in each other's guards. The mountain range that once defined the horizon was now a jagged graveyard of rubble and rising shadows.
"You're keeping up," Athyria whispered, her hair matted with blood and dust, her eyes burning with a terrifying, ecstatic hunger. "But let's see how long that heart of yours can keep pumping at this pace."
Leornars tightened his grip on her collar, his crimson eyes never wavering. "Longer than you'll be able to stay in one piece."