The ritual plains of Dahaka were no longer a battlefield—they were a graveyard in the making.
Ash drifted in the air like winter snow, coating the blood-soaked soil in a thin layer of gray. Bodies, both human and inhuman, lay in pieces. The sky had dimmed, as though the sun itself recoiled from the carnage below.
Smoke slithered from heaps of burning corpses, and through it all, silence held like the moment before a scream.
Until he moved.
Aden Vasco, or what was left of him, staggered forward in the crater where the High Lich's attack had hurled him. His left arm, severed clean at the elbow just moments ago, twitched unnaturally.
Then it grew. Muscles tore from blackened bone, tendons snaking like vipers across charred skin. Veins pumped with something thicker than blood.
Then came the first sound—a grotesque cracking, like someone twisting tree bark.
And the screaming began.
Dozens of soldiers had gathered around the edges of the blast zone, hoping to pull their commander to safety. But when they saw what was rising, they didn't run—they froze.
Aden's back arched as if an unseen hook yanked his spine upward. His skin blistered, then peeled, revealing shifting sigils burned into the muscle beneath. His eyes, once cold and sharp, now bled down his cheeks—black tears that hissed as they hit the dirt.
A voice emerged from his throat—no, from within his chest.
"Let's have some fun, shall we?"
It was his voice, and yet... not. It twisted mid-syllable, as though someone else were speaking through cracked porcelain using his face.
Rhea Joshua stood rooted just beyond the shattered lines, lips parted, blood-spattered hands trembling.
"That's not…" she whispered, "that's not Aden."
Beside her, Vance, the field mage, clutched his staff. "Wards are breaking. I can feel it—every barrier we set is screaming."
Then Aden smiled. Or rather, Egmund did.
In a single movement, he flicked his now-regenerated arm. A whip of living fire burst forth and snapped across the battlefield. It caught a Lich mid-chant, slicing it cleanly in half, its top half still floating for a second before crashing to the ground.
Then Egmund laughed—a deep, delighted sound, childlike and monstrous all at once.
He leapt into the fray.
A Black Knight tried to block his path. Egmund grabbed the man by the face and crushed his helm in his grip, flames bursting from the slits as the knight's screams turned into a wet gurgle.
Another wave of undead surged forward. Egmund moved like liquid death. Every gesture was poetry in gore—each step another body torn apart. He wasn't just killing.
He was enjoying it.
A High Lich launched a barrage of cursed missiles toward him. Egmund vanished in a blink, reappearing behind it and whispering something into the bone-etched ear.
The creature shrieked, contorted, and imploded—its bones folding inward like paper, its phylactery shattering into glowing shards that Egmund casually caught midair.
"Delicious," he grinned, inhaling the soul fragments.
Above the battlefield, the sun dimmed further—and then warped.
A black disc stretched across the sky, like a second sun, molten red and bleeding shadows. The clouds recoiled, forming jagged, unnatural spirals as if the heavens themselves were being torn open.
Flames erupted across the battlefield—but not natural flame. These burned black, edged in sickly violet, rising like serpents that hissed prayers in forgotten tongues. Where they slithered, reality buckled.
The once-flat terrain bent upward, hills rising in an instant, shaped by Egmund's will. Towers of molten earth erupted, each bearing warped faces of the dead. The field was no longer Dahaka—it was a domain.
A world reborn in fire and madness.
Rhea dropped to her knees. "He's… killing everyone...."
Vance looked pale, his hands gripping his staff so tightly it bled. "That thing… is not Aden."
Around them, soldiers screamed—not in battle, but in terror. Some fled, throwing down weapons. Others simply collapsed, clutching their heads as if trying to block out the whispers that had begun to crawl through the air.
Voices. Hundreds. Thousands. Speaking in unison.
"Burn. Burn. Burn. Burn. Burn—"
In the center of it all, Egmund stood laughing, drenched in blood and flame, arms outstretched like a priest basking in divine rapture.
Then he turned to the ruined sky, and roared.
The sound wasn't natural. It wasn't even sound. It was a command—a challenge to the world itself. The air shattered with the force of it, birds dropping dead from the sky, nearby cliffs cracking.
From somewhere distant, a voice echoed back.
A deep, low rumble that made the ground tremble.
Egmund grinned wider.
"Looks like I woke up something."
Behind him, a battalion of Liches began to regroup.
He didn't flinch. He charged.
Searing through them like a god set loose. Fire wrapped his blade, his limbs, his laughter. When he struck, history ended for whatever he touched.
Far behind, Rhea whispered in horror.
"Aden Vasco has gone berserk."
But even she knew, in the pit of her soul, that this... was not madness.
This was something far, far worse.
This was the devil, finally let loose.