created as the creature who was like the war against takobo,T akobor's shadow fell like a storm. The creature was vast — not merely a beast but a broken god stitched together from old wars and rancid promises — and it moved across the battlefield with the certainty of ruin. Around it lay the bodies of those who had tried to stop it: Jhonathan's friends, his squad, the faces that had taught him how to laugh and how to stand again. They were scattered like rag dolls, pale under the violet sky, their breath gone and their hands slack.
Jhonathan stood in the center of the ruin, Brunhilde coiled at his side like a living spear. Phase Three burned hotter than sun: the four horsemen's forces thrummed in his bones. Conquest made the air listen to his heartbeat. War rasped at his teeth like distant blades. Famine curled in his gut, hungry for sacrifice. Death hummed at the edge of hearing, patient and absolute.
Takobo advanced, and the battlefield shook with each step. Its maw opened, a wound that swallowed light. Sylviana — alive, star-touched and dangerous — darted forward to buy a single moment, blades singing with borrowed constellations. Her Star of Death flared and struck splinters from Takobo's hide, but the thing only snarled and bled shadow.
Around them the fallen lay quiet. Ruby's hair — dusty with ash — fanned across the ground. Jhonathan's throat tightened at the sight. Rage flared, raw and all-consuming, but under it ran something colder: a hard, clear decision. He would not lose them again.
He planted both feet, raised his arms, and let Phase Three answer him.
First came Conquest: a ripple of dominion that rolled out like a low bell. It sought not to command flesh but to seize the thinnest threads left between soul and silence. The spectral rider that formed at his shoulder bent a lance not toward the enemy but toward the dead. Invisible anchors — promises, oaths, the memory of touch — were pulled taut. Where Conquest touched, the world remembered that these bodies had once belonged to beating hearts.
War answered in a crack of thunder. The battlefield itself became a furnace of will; tears in the air came alive and began to stitch. War didn't create life — it hammered free the bindings that kept life from returning. Muscles twitched where they were meant to twitch. Tendons hummed. The dead's wrists flexed, like ropes finally cut loose.
Famine was the cruelest tool: it siphoned the surrounding life of the Shattered Realm in a slow, terrible bloom. It drew light and blood from the ground, from roots and floating isles, from the very breath of stars, and fed it into hollow shapes. It should have felt monstrous — and it did — but Jhonathan steered it like a surgeon, directing hunger into a slow, steady reweave of flesh and warmth rather than a ravenous void. The cost would be paid; he felt it as a cold that gnawed at his own core.
Finally Death — the smoothest, sharpest of the four — whispered the last permission. Not to claim, but to un-claim. Death's power here was not an end but a hinge: it let closed doors swing open again, if the will behind them still pushed.
Light collapsed in on the fallen. A pale chorus rose — memory and oath and the soft, fierce hum of things that refused oblivion. Jhonathan felt each return as a knife of joy and pain; each heartbeat that fired in the ruined bodies wrote its name on him.
Ruby coughed first, eyes finding his like lanterns in fog. She swallowed, sitting up slowly as if waking from a long winter. Her fingers found his arm and squeezed, disbelief and fury mixing in her gaze. Around her, others blinked back into the world: a blade-forged veteran who had once stepped between Jhonathan and a death blow, a soft-voiced healer whose herbs had saved men by the dozen, a young scout who'd laughed even as arrows found him.
Takobor reeled. The beast had expected corpses and silence — trophies to be trod — not rising ranks of those it thought broken. Sylviana's blades found new rhythm, and beside her the revived soldiers took formation as if some old training had been waiting patiently for their hands to remember.
Jhonathan staggered as the last of the life was fed back into the bodies. The price was immediate. Where he had been tall and roaring moments before, a weight pressed him down; his breath came in shorter measures. His vision gilded at the edges with violet and gold; the four horsemen's chorus demanded both obedience and tribute. He had siphoned vitality not only from the Shattered Realm but from the thin store of himself the God of Benevolence had allowed him to keep.
"Jhonathan!" Ruby called, reaching for him across the churned ground. "You—"
He managed a crooked, exhausted smile. "I couldn't—" he rasped. The words caught. "—leave you."
Around them the tide of battle turned. The revived, angry and whole, charged with the kind of raw force that only desperation and second chances can give. Takobo struck back, throwing ruin and shadow, but now it faced not defeated corpses but a team — scarred, furious, and breathing — who fought like men given back what had been stolen.
Yet even as they rallied, something darker watched. The forces Jhonathan had used sang hungrily in his bones; Death's voice in particular lingered like an echo promising return. He felt its interest in him as if a hand slid along his spine, curious and patient.
He tried to stand, to drive Brunhilde into the beast once more, but his knees buckled. Someone caught him — the blade-forged veteran, eyes fierce, hauling him upright with an arm like iron.
"You did it," the veteran said through gritted teeth. "You did the impossible."
Jhonathan closed his eyes. Around him his friends roared, blades and stars and vows rising like a thunderstorm. Takobor staggered back under the newfound onslaught, caught between an army that refused to die and a knight who had become far more dangerous than any of them expected.
But beneath the noise, the whisper remained: a debt unpaid, a hunger waiting for an opening. Jhonathan had won the day. He had stolen life back from nothing. He had become the reckoning.
And in the hollow left by what he had given, the horsemen murmured, patient as graves