The sky over the borderlands was no longer blue; it was the color of a bruised lung, choked by the necrotic miasma of the Dark Plague.
Princess Elizabeth Whitewing wiped a smear of black ichor from her silver visor. Behind her, the village of Oakhaven smouldered in a silent, sickly heat. They had done it. The "Tainted"—those poor souls whose humanity had been dissolved into weeping sores and mindless rage—lay still. Beside her, the Male Sage leaned on his staff, his mana nearly spent, while the Female Cleric offered a final, trembling prayer over the fallen.
"We saved them," the Female Warrior grunted, sheathing her notched blade. "The Empire's borders remain pure."
Elizabeth nodded, her heart swelling with the familiar fire of righteousness. She thought of her past triumphs—the routing of the Orcish hordes, the purging of the Sunless Woods. She was a Holy Knight of the Empire, the pinnacle of divine martial grace. To her, these battles were proof of her destiny.
She didn't realize they had only been fighting children.
A sudden, oppressive weight dropped from the sky, crushing the air from their lungs. The ground beneath Elizabeth's sabatons cracked. From the swirling, fly-ridden fog stepped a figure of nightmare. He was draped in robes that shifted like living rot, his eyes two burning embers of pestilence.
Ba'al, the Lord of Plague.
"Is this the 'Holy' power I was told to fear?" the Devil hissed. His voice sounded like the dry rattling of bones in a tomb.
With a casual flick of his hand, a wave of necrotic force slammed into the group. The Male Martial Artist, usually a blur of motion, was sent flying into a stone wall with a sickening crunch. The Sage's protective barriers shattered like thin glass, leaving him gasping on the floor.
Elizabeth lunged forward, her blade glowing with celestial light. "In the name of the Whitewing, I—"
Ba'al caught her blade with two fingers. The holy light flickered and died, smothered by the Devil's sheer presence.
"Fragile. Pathetic," Ba'al mocked, a cruel sneer twisting his features. "You have spent your lives swatting gnats and calling yourselves giants. You have never fought a real adversary. You have only played at war."
"We... we are the shields of the light!" the Female Cleric cried, struggling to raise her staff.
"Then the light is dim indeed," Ba'al retorted. He raised his blackened Greatsword, the metal humming with the screams of a thousand dying souls. He stepped over the broken bodies of Elizabeth's companions, his gaze locked on the Princess. "I shall start with you. A royal head to decorate my garden of decay."
He swung. The blow was a guillotine of shadow, too fast for Elizabeth to parry, too heavy to endure. She closed her eyes, a single thought flickering through her mind: Is this where it ends? In the dirt, like a common dog?
CLANG.
The sound was not the ring of silver on iron, but the thunderous crash of two tectonic plates colliding. The shockwave blew the pestilent fog back for fifty yards.
Elizabeth opened her eyes. She was not dead.
Standing before her was a silhouette of jagged, midnight steel. A heavy claymore, etched with weeping violet runes, had intercepted the Devil's blade. The man holding it didn't glow with the Sun-God's favor; he seemed to absorb the very light around him, a void standing against the plague.
The stranger did not look back. His voice was a cold, low rasp that made the hair on Elizabeth's neck stand up.
"That stench," the dark knight growled, his grip tightening on the hilt as he shoved the Devil's blade back. "It reeks of the same forces that took everything from me. It reeks of a village burning."
He stepped forward, his dark mana erupting in a cold flame that rivaled the Devil's malice. "You've had your fun with these children, Ba'al. But today, you'll find that shadows don't burn."
******
Ba'al's aristocratic composure shattered. The sneer of the Plague Lord vanished, replaced by a twitching, frantic rage as he stared at the midnight steel pressing against his own blade. He leaped back, his robes of flies buzzing in a discordant, panicked hum.
"You..." Ba'al spat, his voice losing its melodic cruelty and becoming a shrill rasp. "The wandering shadow... the one they call the Butcher! Siegfried Darkstar! What is a user of the dark arts doing here, meddling in the affairs of the Great Plague?"
The name rang through the clearing, striking Elizabeth like a blow. She had heard whispers of a man who traveled the fringes, a commoner who had mastered the very forces the Empire considered a necessary evil, yet feared to touch.
Siegfried didn't adopt a noble stance. He lowered his center, his claymore trailing on the scorched earth, carving a line of violet sparks. His mana didn't feel like the chaotic evil of the Devil; it felt like a cold, disciplined tool. "It doesn't matter what I am or why I'm here," he said, his voice flat. "You are going to die anyway."
The battle that followed was a collision of nightmare and void.
While Elizabeth's party fought with rigid, holy forms, Siegfried moved with a terrifying, efficient violence. He didn't just swing his sword; he commanded the dark power beneath Ba'al's feet to rise like jagged spears. The Devil unleashed waves of necrotic rot, but Siegfried stepped through the miasma as if it were a summer mist, his black mana acting as a shroud that consumed the plague on contact.
"Curse you!" Ba'al shrieked, his form flickering as the dark knight's blade carved a deep, cauterized rent across his chest. Cornered against the ruins of the village chapel and realizing he could not win this feat of strength, the Devil let out a final, panicked howl.
Before the finishing blow could land, Ba'al dissolved into a frantic, oily cloud of a million black flies, shrieking in agony as he fled toward the horizon, leaving a trail of foul-smelling smoke behind.
The silence that followed was heavy. Siegfried stood in the center of the crater, his heavy blade resting on his shoulder as the dark energy around him began to settle. Without a word, he turned his back on the royal party, his boots crunching on the debris as he prepared to leave the battlefield.
"Wait!"
Elizabeth pushed herself up, using her broken sword as a crutch. Her white cape was shredded, but her eyes were fixed on the man who had done what the Empire's finest could not.
"Stop," she called out, her voice a mix of exhaustion and authority. "You saved the Princess of the Whitewing Empire and her companions. You wield the dark power with a mastery I have never seen. At least tell me—where does a man of the people learn to fight like that?"