Chapter 7

The dusk of that long-lost day bled red across the hills. Fields of golden grain shimmered under the dying light, swaying like the hems of celestial robes. Amidst them rang the laughter of a child—light, innocent, unburdened by the weight of vengeance. It was Ercolash, back when the world was still kind, and home was a sanctuary.

He had played in wild meadows with his little sister and mother, dancing through flowers that bloomed without fear. His father—an honest farmer with calloused hands and tired eyes—sat at the doorway with a worn pipe between his fingers, smiling gently at his family.

Ercolash had once belonged to a world like that.

But fate, ever cruel, does not heed the innocent.

That day, while accompanying his mother to the village market, Ercolash wandered off, his gaze enchanted by toys carved from old wood and the smell of sun-dried herbs. In that careless moment, the darkness seized him. A coarse hand, the stench of cloth soaked in strange oils—then silence, then shadows. He awoke bound, gagged, and surrounded by sobbing children, all stolen like cattle.

He thought, This is how I die.

But then… he came.

Leon Manus.

He was not a blood relative. Once a stranger—a soldier who had abandoned the crown after seeing its rot. He'd once saved Ercolash's father from a band of highwaymen, and from that moment, he became something more. With hands that had once cleaved men in battle, he rebuilt their ruined home, taught Ercolash how to hold a knife—not to kill, but to protect.

When Leon tore through the slavers’ den like a storm of steel and wrath, he said only three words:

“I’m here now.”

Ercolash had clung to him, trembling, tears soaking through the warrior’s armor. To him, Leon was a titan. A savior. A fortress between him and the horrors of the world. Though the boy called him uncle, the bond they shared had always been that of father and son.

Years passed.

Leon returned to royal service, becoming the captain of the Royal Enforcement Division—a rank reserved for the most ruthless, the most loyal, the most feared. He never spoke of the path he took to ascend, but Ercolash saw it in his eyes. Something had shifted.

Still, Leon would visit, bringing strange candies, worn-out jokes, and the same warm gaze that had once rescued a broken child.

But now…

Now, beneath the twilight of a cursed forest, that same man stood before him—no longer the uncle of yesterday, but a reaper clad in truth and duty.

Leon Manus. Enforcer. Legend. And now… executioner.

“I didn’t want this, Ercolash,” the man said, his voice weighed down with something deeper than regret. “But you made a pact with something ancient. You let it inside. You’ve drowned this land in blood.”

“You know me better than that,” Ercolash whispered, his voice laced with a coldness born of wounds unseen. “You know I’d never harm the innocent. I punished the guilty. That’s all.”

“No.” Leon took a step forward, deliberate and heavy, like judgment incarnate. “You’ve begun to blur the line. You’ve let something else into your soul. And when that happens—who’s left to judge what’s righteous?”

Silence fell like ash. The trees dared not breathe. Even the sky seemed to retreat.

Ercolash's voice broke the stillness, low and haunted:
“You once said… if I ever lost my way, you would stop me.”

Leon’s eyes closed for a moment. When they opened, pain lingered there like ghosts. “And I will. Even if it shatters me.”

Then he moved.

A single kick—silent thunder in motion—struck the earth with cataclysmic force. The air itself split apart. Trees bowed and snapped. The ground fissured. Ercolash was flung like a ragged doll, colliding with bark and stone, his blood painting a crimson trail across shattered trunks.

He rose, coughing red, his limbs trembling, but in his eyes—no hatred. Only a hollow ache.

He charged.

Faster than before. A blur of darkness and fury. Yet as he drew near…

…reality unraveled.

Time did not stop—it was rejected.

One moment became undone. The attack that should have struck never came. Like a broken reel of film, the sequence failed to exist.

“You—what did you do?” the voice of the Evil God growled from within Ercolash’s mind.

Leon didn’t answer immediately. His gaze held the weight of memory, of love turned to sorrow.

“I once taught you,” he murmured, “that every strike must hold meaning. But when a blow loses its truth… I reject it.”

Ercolash froze.

No explanation. No display of power. And yet, reality itself obeyed Leon’s will.

The skill—Null and Affirm—needed no announcement. It worked not by overwhelming force, but by defining what must and must not exist. To Leon, this battle, this madness—was an aberration. And so he denied it.

A single tear slipped from the corner of his eye.

It was not pain that broke him.

It was the knowledge that the boy he once cradled, the soul he once believed in, now stood on the other side of his sword.

“I know…” Ercolash rasped, the corners of his lips bloodied. “If you fought me seriously… I wouldn’t stand a chance.”

The wind whispered through the skeletal forest.

No birds sang.

The silence between them was sacred—an elegy for the bond now cracking under the weight of fate.

And though the true battle had yet to begin, something irreparable had already shattered.

A deathly silence swallowed the mountainside.

The wind had ceased, as if frightened. The sky itself dimmed, not from clouds or dusk, but from the black miasma seeping from Ercolash’s being—an abyssal fog that writhed and slithered across stone and tree, like the tendrils of a dying god clawing at the last remnants of life.

From Ercolash’s feet, the earth blackened. The grass withered into ash. Insects curled and died mid-flight. Birds fell from the sky in convulsions. A ring of decay was spreading outward with each pulse of his rage, consuming everything in its path.

The air tasted like rust and despair.

Leon Manus stood still, unmoving, a sentinel of fading order.

His eyes narrowed as he raised a single hand to the heavens, fingers outstretched. A soundless force erupted from his palm—neither light nor shadow, but something more abstract, something older. Reality itself bent, and in an instant, an invisible barrier encased the mountaintop. The spreading death halted.

"Affirmed," he whispered.

A dome of sanctified silence shimmered across the horizon. Nothing would pass through. Not yet.

"Ercolash," Leon called, his voice trembling not with fear, but with sorrow. "You must stop this. Look around you. This isn’t power—it’s destruction without end. You’ve gone too far. Far beyond the boy I once knew."

Within the miasma, Ercolash stood—his cloak torn, his skin cracked with black veins glowing faintly. His eyes were no longer human; they burned with hate and hurt, twin infernos born from betrayal.

He laughed—low, hollow.

"Too far?" His voice echoed unnaturally, distorted by whatever had awakened within him. "I was thrown into the pit by this world, uncle. By the same world you serve."

Leon took a step forward, the grass beneath his feet remaining untouched by the corruption.

"I know you suffered," he said. "But this... this isn’t the answer. You’re becoming something else. Something even you won't recognize."

Ercolash's fists clenched. The black mist pulsed with his heartbeat.

"Do you know what they did?" His voice cracked, laced with venom and agony. "The villagers—the ones you protect—they smiled as they burned my home. They laughed as they butchered my father. They spit on my mother’s grave."

Leon’s jaw tightened, but he remained silent.

"Even the little girl," Ercolash continued, his tone shifting into something darker, "the one with the innocent eyes, the one who brought me bread when I starved... she sold children. Hundreds of them."

He stepped forward. With each pace, the black smog thickened, pressing against the invisible dome Leon had constructed.

"How..." he hissed, "how can I believe in anything after that? How can I trust a world that wears masks over its sins?"

Leon’s voice dropped to a whisper. "You trusted me once."

Ercolash’s breath caught. Just for a moment.

Then the rage returned.

A terrible sound—like the groaning of a dying god—erupted from the earth. The black mist surged upward, pressing against the Affirmed shield with malevolent force. Cracks formed in the air, like fractures in glass.

Leon’s eyes widened. The dome was faltering.

“Damn it…” he muttered. He placed both hands forward now, summoning more of his strength—more of that raw, irrefutable will.

“Affirm: the barrier shall remain. Deny: the spread of death.”

Another wave of pressure burst forth, halting the expansion for now—but the strain was unmistakable. Sweat rolled down the old captain’s brow. The very air warped, distorting like a mirage, yet darker—thicker—like reality itself was being rewritten around him.

"Ercolash," he gasped. "Please. This hatred—it's not yours alone anymore. Something else is feeding it. You're losing yourself."

But Ercolash wasn’t listening. He trembled—not from fear, but from the tide of power flooding his veins. A power too vast, too old. His flesh distorted, his form stuttering between man and something far more primal, more ancient—something that remembered the birth of light, and the silence before time.

Then Leon saw it.

A flicker.

Just a fracture—barely perceptible—but in that instant of vulnerability, Ercolash's mind faltered. From deep within the broken psyche, something grinned.

The presence had always been there. Watching. Waiting. Hungering.

And now… it moved.

Ercolash roared—his voice a split scream of agony and ecstasy—as the crack widened. From within that breach, a long-forgotten Will unfurled, vast and cold.

His body convulsed. Something inside him rose—not like fire, but like a black sea swallowing a sun.

Leon staggered back.

This wasn’t a change.

This was an usurpation.

From the depths of nothingness, a voice echoed—slow, deliberate, and immense.

“Finally,” it said. “This frail shell… will suffice for a fragment of my descent.”

And in that moment, everything changed.

The black gas boiled, but it no longer thrashed in chaos—it moved with purpose, coiling like tendrils of creation undone. The aura around Ercolash darkened—not rage, not sorrow, not madness—but absence. The void between emotions. The stillness before existence. The breath after death.

Leon felt it. The unraveling of rules. The betrayal of logic. A presence that existed before dualities—before good or evil, light or dark. A being not bound by the universe, but from which the idea of the universe was born—and twisted.

“Just one-tenth of one percent,” the thing said.

And still, the sky dimmed. The mountain trembled. Reality recoiled.

“I could hollow out this range,” it whispered, “turn the rivers to blood, teach the sun to scream. And it would not even merit a fragment of thought.”

Leon saw it now: a god not of faith, but of antithesis. One who did not grant life or death, but possessed both, and could reverse either. A being who could make memories decay, who forged emotions as tools, who saw time as a limb to sever or extend.

The laws of nature did not cage him—they were his exhalation. He did not die, for he had never been born. He was not in this world. The world merely brushed against him.

Ercolash was no longer present. His soul was but a whisper, drowned beneath a sea of Will.

Leon whispered, brokenly, “Ercolash… I loved you like my own son. But if this thing must be stopped… I will kill you myself.”

There was no answer. Only a smile—not Ercolash’s—but something that had learned to wear it.

The black gas roared, rising in spirals toward the heavens, where even the stars seemed to flinch.

The true nightmare had not begun.

It had always been here. Watching. Waiting.

And now, it had a name.

But even that name… was only a shadow.