But before announcing the next participants the Grandmaster's voice boomed. "Bring healers! Carry the boy!" The wards opened. Mages rushed in, lifting Aric onto a stretcher of conjured stone, carrying him from the Bowl. The crowd roared at last, chanting his name despite his loss in the end. His spirit, at least, had been unbroken as he kept trying.
A moment of quiet settled before the Grandmaster's voice rolled high again. "Step forth! Gravity—against the Storm Fang!"
Two new fighters strode into the Bowl. But before they could even take their stances, a sound tore through the arena—not of thunder, but of tearing fabric on a cosmic scale.
A crack, vast and splitting, ripped across the veil above the city.
The torches went out. The roar of the crowd died, strangled in a million throats. Every face—noble, commoner, warrior—tilted upward in primal horror. From the wound in the heavens, something vast crawled out.
Wings. Not of angels or birds—but colossal, jagged membranes, stretched tight like sheets of night sky nailed to bone. They unfurled with a sound like tearing flesh, blotting out the light. And then the thing itself stood revealed in the unnatural twilight.
Its body was a grotesque mockery of flesh—pale, twisted, carved with ridges that seemed to writhe like scars given life. Its face was the true horror. No lips, only a gash of teeth that spread into a grin too wide for sanity. Black eyes, wet and bottomless, burned with a hunger that was older than the stones of the Bowl.
It was not just alive. It was hunger given shape. And it was smiling.
Its voice rolled like iron dragged across stone, a sound that crawled under the skin. "So this is where you humans hide."
Terror fell like a physical weight. The creature raised a claw. A boy in the stands screamed as an invisible force yanked him skyward. He twisted in the air, a helpless puppet dragged toward the beast's face. The Demon chuckled, a sound so deep it shook the bones. It was the sound of something ancient, hungry, and amused. The nightmare had come again.
But before the boy could be devoured, the Grandmaster rose from his seat, his own voice thundering across the arena like the toll of a war-bell to save the boy.
"At last," he declared, every syllable blazing with conviction. "I stand before one of your kind before it's too late for me to appear. Hear me well—no soul will be harmed today, not while I draw breath. If blood must fall, it will be yours."
He leapt, blade carving a column of light so fierce it turned the arena floor molten. The Demon's claws met the strike. Stone erupted. Shards of fire and shadow spiraled out. The crowd could not even scream—the force stole their breath.
The Ascended laughed through the blows. Its flesh tore, black ichor spraying across the sand—but each wound knitted in the space of a heartbeat. "Strike harder, little sun," it mocked. "Your fury is a banquet."
The clash shook the Bowl apart. But the demon's eyes glowed, two pits of endless night. "Good," it purred. "Rage is the sweetest meat." The grandmaster has managed to free the boy and leave him in the crowd.
Before the Grandmaster could press his next attack, the arena floor split beneath him. Sigils—hidden, ancient, waiting—flared crimson. Chains of shadow erupted, coiling around his limbs, his chest, his throat, dragging him down. His blade still burned, but the radiance was being siphoned away, bleeding into the runes. His light was being stolen.
The Ascended stepped forward, towering above him. "Did you think this was a battle for you to win?" it whispered. "No, little sun. This is my supper. And you came dressed as the feast."
The Grandmaster struggled, roaring, muscles straining against the bonds. "I'll tear you apart! HOW DARE YOU!"
"You'll die screaming," the demon promised, claws stretching toward him. "And then your city will watch."
Chaos erupted. The demon raised one claw and dragged it across its own belly. Black ichor spilled like a waterfall, and from the wound, dozens of twisted, screeching shapes began to crawl out—half-formed demons, all teeth and hunger, writhing as if born of its gore. They swarmed into the panicked crowd.
Lysera screamed, dragging Ryne down with her. "Move! Evacuate the civilians!"
But on the other side, Vaelric was already moving in the arena ahead. He strode forward, sword drawn, planting himself between the tide of spawn and the fleeing civilians. He didn't shout or roar. He just stood, a lone wall against the nightmare.
For Vaelric, this was not the first time he had seen such a monster. The stench of ichor, the sound of tearing flesh—it was a memory that never slept. He saw the towering Ascended, and in its place, he saw the face of another, one that had burned his city years ago. He felt the phantom heat of a fire that had consumed everything he loved.
His brother stood before him then, not much older than Vaelric was now. His body was a tapestry of wounds, his breath a ragged gasp, but his sword burned with fire and water. "Don't fear," his brother had promised him once, a hand on his shoulder. "I will protect you. You're all I have."
But promises were fragile things.
He watched his brother fight that day, like a lone king against a thing born of nightmare. He had watched him empty his very life force into his blade, becoming a storm of tide and flame to carve the demon to pieces. The city was saved. But his brother did not rise again. He had died shielding his only family and people of the city, and what did it leave Vaelric? Only ash. Only silence. And a vow whispered into the smoke: never again.
Now, facing this new tide of darkness, Vaelric's breath fogged. His grip on the sword tightened. Frost blossomed under his boots, crawling across the stone in jagged veins. The first wave came. He moved.
His blade sang—and the world froze. Demons were severed mid-air, their bodies crystallizing before shattering into shards. He was a storm of ice, relentless, a fortress of cold.
But for every spawn he cut down, three more crawled out of the Ascended's body. A claw raked across his side. He staggered, blood spilling bright against the ice. The spawn surged, scenting weakness.
And in that moment, Nameless finally moved.
He didn't think. He didn't plan. His body simply carried him forward, appearing at Vaelric's side.
"Move," was all he said.
The blood on the ground answered him. From the corpses of the fallen spawn, crimson tendrils surged upward, coiling around Nameless's blade like serpents. The spawn turned from Vaelric, shrieking, drawn toward this new hunger. Nameless's blade moved once.
The blood around him erupted like whips, severing limbs, ripping torsos in half. Where Vaelric was a controlled winter storm, Nameless was pure carnage. A beast let loose. Side by side, frost and blood carved through the swarm, turning the Bowl floor into a graveyard.
But then something shifted. Their blades no longer moved as two, but as one. When Vaelric froze a demon mid-lunge, Nameless's blood coiled through the ice like veins, detonating the body from within. When Nameless's strikes spilled rivers of gore, Vaelric's frost seized it, shaping the spray into jagged lances that skewered the next wave. They weren't allies sharing a battlefield anymore—they were a single weapon, sharpened on two edges. The Bowl floor was no longer stone; it had become their canvas of slaughter, painted in scarlet and white.
They were winning against the spawn. But they were losing the war. The Ascended watched them, its grin stretching, endless. It was playing with them.
Nameless knew it. He saw Vaelric bleeding, saw the endless tide of demons. This was futile. He flicked blood from his blade, eyes glowing like coals.
"We go for the head," he snarled at Vaelric. "Forget these pests. We kill it."
Vaelric gritted his teeth, nodding, and they both turned, preparing to charge the chained Grandmaster and the gloating Ascended.
They struck as one. Vaelric's frost locked the demon's wings mid-beat, ice crawling up the black membranes, while Nameless's blood techniques surged like chains, dragging its head low. For the first time, the Ascended demon staggered, its grin twitching into a snarl. The Bowl shook with their defiance—frost and blood forcing a godless thing to kneel. But then the creature's body pulsed, shadows exploding outward. The bindings shattered, and both men were hurled back across the arena like broken arrows.
And just then, a voice, dripping with absolute, terrifying arrogance, echoed from the center of the Bowl. It wasn't a shout. It was a statement of fact that silenced the world.
"Who decided," the Grandmaster began, his voice calm, yet so powerful it made the very stones vibrate, "that you could win by trapping me with something so futile?"
The crimson chains of shadow around him didn't just break. They dissolved. They turned to smoke and vanished as if they had never existed. The Grandmaster rose slowly, his radiant sword flaring to life, a miniature sun in his hand. The light it cast was not gentle. It was proud. It was absolute.
The Ascended's grin faltered for the first time.
Nameless stopped dead in his tracks. He stared at the sheer, overwhelming power radiating from the middle aged man, the grandmaster. A power that wasn't just fighting the darkness—it was scorning it. He grabbed Vaelric's shoulder, pulling him back.
"That's not our fight anymore," Nameless murmured, his voice laced with a strange, unnerving respect. "We clean up the trash."
Vaelric stared, then nodded, turning his blade back toward the remaining spawn.
The Grandmaster looked at the Ascended, not as a warrior facing a threat, but like a king looking at a bug.
"You stand in my city," he said, his voice a low growl that promised annihilation. "You terrorize my people out of blue. And you dared to put your filthy chains on me. For that insult, I will not just kill you. I will erase you."
He charged. Not like a man, but like a comet.
The fight was not a duel; it was a judgment. Steel clashed with claw, but this time, the demon's flesh did not knit back together. The Grandmaster's light burned it from the inside out, cauterizing every wound with pure radiance. The demon shrieked, beams of black fire erupting from its horns. The Grandmaster met them with a single, contemptuous swing of his sword, splitting the beams and carving a canyon of light across the arena.
He hammered into the Ascended with strikes that split the air itself. The demon reeled back, wings cracking under the storm of light. For the first time, its laughter broke into a snarl of genuine pain.
"You dare—"
"I am the Grandmaster of this city," he roared, his voice the only sound in the universe. "And I dare everything."
With a final, blinding thrust, he drove his blade through the writhing black shadow looking heart in the demon's chest.
The demon froze. Its eyes widened, a flicker of true fear cracking through the arrogance. Its body convulsed, its form unraveling into ribbons of shadow as its shriek became a hollow echo. Flesh, bone, and malice dissolved into dust, leaving behind a single, throbbing fragment of brilliance—an energy core, pulsing faintly like a dying heart.
Nameless stared at it for a long, cold breath before curling his fingers around its glow.
The instant his skin touched the core, the world tilted.
Images slammed into him—a rush of heat, screams, and smoke. And then…a face. Clear and vivid.
His breath hitched.
"This face…I feel like I've seen it somewhere."