They couldn't see it's face, but they felt the stare like heat on the back of their necks. The air turned still. The forest behind them seemed to stop breathing.
The hooded figure stood tall atop the highest tower, unmoving. Then, slowly, he looked down at them.
Even from such a great distance, they felt his gaze, sharp as a blade and as heavy as a star. It cut through the space between them like a knife, pressing down on their chests, making it hard to breathe.
They had no name for him, no warning, no clue who or what he was. But in that moment, they all understood one thing:
They were prey. And he was the predator.
This place had a new king.
And he would not welcome strangers.
They moved carefully through the dense forest, the ground soft beneath their boots, the air warm and heavy. This place was all wrong, alive, beautiful, and nothing like the dead zone they'd been told about. But their mission remained the same: investigate the surge of power, gather what they could, and report back to Ventris.
Sunlight filtered through the canopy in glowing streaks, dancing across thick vines and strange, colorful flowers. The forest buzzed with quiet life, but the apostles said nothing. They stuck to their path, alert and uneasy.
Then, the trees opened up.
They stepped out onto a ridge at the forest's edge, where the land sloped down into white sand and a wide, calm shoreline. Waves lapped gently against the beach below, and just beyond that, hovering above the treetops near the water's edge was Castle Barbarus.
The massive ruin floated in the air, its base cracked and broken, surrounded by slowly circling debris, chunks of stone, shattered spires, and fragments of bridges long gone. It drifted like a ghost above the coast, the ocean wind tugging at its old, faded banners.
It was the only thing that looked familiar.
The apostles stared up at it, then froze.
Atop the tallest tower, high above the castle ruins, stood a lone hooded figure.
Still. Watching. Looming.
They couldn't see their face, but they felt the stare like heat on the back of their necks. The air turned still. The forest behind them seemed to stop breathing.
The hooded figure stood tall atop the highest tower, unmoving. Then, slowly, he looked down at them.
Even from such a great distance, they felt his gaze, sharp as a blade and as heavy as a star. It cut through the space between them like a knife, pressing down on their chests, making it hard to breathe.
They had no name for him, no warning, no clue who or what he was. But in that moment, they all understood one thing:
They were prey. And he was the predator.
The scent of death hung in the warm air. Not old death—but something fresh, waiting, promised. Their hands moved to their weapons out of instinct more than thought. Their training screamed at them to retreat, to call for backup.
But it was too late.
He was watching.
And now… They had to fight.
Olrox, the youngest of the apostles, stepped forward, trying to hide the tremble in his voice. He forced his fear down and shouted up at the looming figure.
"Who are you? We are the White Knights of Ventris, her apostles, here to carry out our goddess's great wor-"
He never finished.
A sharp flash of something cut through the air faster than sound. In an instant, the ground erupted in a blast of dust and broken stone. None of them had seen it coming.
When the dust cleared, Olrox was still standing, barely.
A spear was lodged in his chest, buried deep, thrown from the figure atop the tower. But there was no blood. No spray. No wound torn open in violence.
Just a hole.
Perfectly round, blackened at the edges like it had been burned through by acid. The flesh around it sizzled slightly, the smell sharp and wrong. It didn't bleed. It didn't even pulse.
It was as if the weapon hadn't pierced him, it had erased that part of him.
Olrox looked down at the hole, confused for a moment. Then he dropped to his knees, coughing once, blood pouring from his lips. His eyes glazed over. The spear crumbled into smoke and vanished, leaving nothing but that quiet, clean wound.
He fell forward into the dirt. Lifeless.
The figure atop the tower hadn't moved. He hadn't needed to.
The hooded figure slowly turned his gaze toward Thoron, the leader of the apostles.
For a moment, there was only silence. Then, the figure smiled beneath the hood.
It wasn't warm. It wasn't human. It was crooked and dark, stretched too wide, too still, enough to make a demon flinch. A smile his beloved had asked him never to show again.
Thoron's breath caught in his throat. Beside him, the second apostle stiffened.
Then it hit them.
A sharp pain shot up their spines, sudden and deep, like knives made of ice stabbing straight into their bones. It wasn't physical, at least not fully. It was something deeper, older. It bypassed flesh and muscle and gripped the soul.
Their eyes widened.
Every instinct screamed one thing: Run.
This wasn't a fight they could win. This wasn't even a fight they should have entered.
And high above, the figure kept smiling.
Thoron turned, ready to shout a warning, ready to send away his last soldier.
He staggered, clutching the sword on his side, trying to keep his focus. His instincts screamed at him to run but he had a duty. A mission. If nothing else, someone had to warn Lady Ventris.
He turned to his soldier. "Take haste, boy, get out of here and report to Lady Ventris. He's back."
But the words caught in his throat.
Zimel, the last one, was still standing. But something was wrong.
His body was upright, stiff… motionless. Then Thoron saw it.
There was no head.
Just a clean stump where it should've been. Not a drop of blood spilled, just a scorched edge, like the neck had been sealed by fire the moment it was severed.
Thoron stumbled backward, a raw sound tearing from his throat.A yelp. A sob. A curse.
"D-Demon…"
His legs gave out beneath him. He dropped to the forest floor, trembling.
Before he could speak another word or gather himself, the figure was now standing behind him.
There was no sound. No sign. Just a sudden, suffocating presence.
That same wicked smile was still stretched across his face, twisted, wrong, dripping with quiet malice.
Thoron's eyes widened in terror.
Then came a scream, mixed with the sound of metal against flesh.
It ripped through the air like a dying storm; raw, loud, and short.
Then silence.
Later, the figure was seen walking back toward the floating castle, three heads swinging from a rope in his hand.
As he moved, the bright forest and calm beach around him began to flicker, glitching in and out like a broken illusion. The warm light, the lush trees, the peaceful ocean breeze.
The illusion shattered.
In its place was the true Black Zone; dead, broken, and lifeless.
The sky turned dark, the ground was torn apart, jagged and cracked. Giant craters marked where battles had been fought, and deep ravines slashed across the earth like open wounds. The stone was scorched. The air was still. Nothing lived here.
It looked like a battlefield.
And in the middle of it all, the figure walked on; silent, slow, and sure, heading back to the castle that floated above the wreckage.
The figure climbed the floating steps in silence, each one rising through the air like they were waiting just for him. He reached a small door set into the side of the castle and knocked once.
A moment passed. Then the door opened.
A woman stood there, her long white hair flowing like silk in the wind. She smiled when she saw him. Without hesitation, she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around the towering man.
"Good hunting, my love?" She asked softly, her voice warm.
He said nothing.
Instead, he held up the rope, the three heads swaying like grim trophies. Her smile faded.
Then, without warning, he hurled the rope. It flew through the air at breakneck speed, vanishing into a massive crater below the castle. "Sit beloved" Solaria sighed as she went for his tray of food she had been preparing while he was out.
"I thought we agreed that we would keep one alive to collect info." She asked him as he ate silently. Solaria had gotten better at cooking over the years, where Yohan didn't need to cook anymore. She was as good as he was. She continued, "Love, I know you have the need to test out your powers but we can't waste our chances, their security here is so lax it may take another hundred years for any more apostles to come back….I want to leave now, I want us to be free. We must set things right."
Over the past three thousand years, Yohan had grinded tooth and nail to train himself against Solaria with no magic. Training his muscles and learning martial arts from her, he had to train his magic at night by himself, and train with Solaria during the day, getting his teeth rather lovingly kicked in day after day. It wasn't until he got his strength on par with hers was he able to beat her in battle.
It wasn't that he wasn't as good a fighter as her, but the pure might behind her blows made it almost impossible to fight her for a long time. After countless pushups, squats and brawls, he finally got to her level.
At the end of his training that lasted two thousand years after, he was allowed to use his magic against Solaria in a fight. Yohan, who had stopped using his powers for so long and had been suppressing the violent storm of power, found himself almost scared when he finally released his energy.
The resulting explosion when he finally did blew off a piece of the castle, completely erasing a part of the roof but the blast kept going until it hit the border of the Black Zone flying right through it with no resistance, he never saw what the energy blast hit, but even from beyond the Black Zone's force field.
There was a bright light shining from the outside, the result of the blast colliding with a nearby star, both he and Solaria looked up in disbelief at what just happened, both of them realizing that the new power he got way back then was stronger than they could have thought
They tried to take easy steps; Solaria using a hundred percent of what she could muster to try and train him in using his magic in combat. Since they didn't have a way to gauge how volatile Yohan's new energy was, she had to fight him head on and his magic was actually too much for her. It took him another thousand years and one really bad accident to master it completely. During this period of time they found out two things:
Yohan's new energy was incredibly volatile and corrosive.
His new energy was more than what Solaria, an actual goddess, could handle at her current strength.
Yohan had grown strong, stronger than Solaria. His body was toned and scarred from all those years of training. His eyes were cold and his hands were hard and calloused as his body brimmed with power.
Solaria often speculated that he was stronger than her in her prime.
With training completed they put their plan into motion, gathering information, they planned on kidnapping an apostle to interrogate them, but with three thousand years passing and not one apostle had been sent, they started to wonder if any would come, for the next month that followed, they were happy to find that Yohan's new corrosive attribute was able to burn through Solaria's shackles, enabling her to finally be able to leave the Black Zone. They decided against it however, not wanting to alert Ventris. As lax as the security is, she knew that Ventris would have put measures in place to notify her if she ever left. This last set of apostles was the first to arrive in three thousand years and six months …which Yohan just killed.
Solaria stared at him, slight annoyance all over her face as she handed him his food. He picked up a sandwich from the plate then he reached into his pocket and placed a small device on the table, similar to a smart phone, getting Thoron to unlock it before killing him.
"Calm down my love." He smiled at her annoyed expression, holding up a small device in his hand. "I think I got us something better." He told her, taking a bite from his sandwich.
He proceeded to tell her what the device was and how he got it off an apostle. Turns out that apostles make audio recordings to review after each mission and this device stored said recordings. Yohan proceeded to play the most recent log, his smile fading as the recording progressed.
"Wasn't this place supposed to be a wasteland?" asked Olrox. "The dark prison where no apostle returns from… I remember my parents telling me about this place to scare me as a child, but it's surprisingly beautiful. Doesn't seem like the home of a dark god at all."
"Silence brother, do remember we're on a mission. You know as well as I, the stories of the dark goddess; those tales were passed down from the great queen of light for millennia, you've heard it from her very lips, the great evil that-"
"Oh my Asura can you two shut the fuck up!?" Yelled Thoron. "We're in enemy territory Ventris dammit! And here you two are gossiping like little bitches in a schoolyard! FOCUS you bastards! This is a place where our kind never returns from! I for one would like to not be part of that statistic, we are to investigate that explosion that took place near here, we have to be diligent." He hissed.
Olrox snickered.
"And what pray tell are you laughing at?" Zimel asked in annoyance.
"That explosion happened, what? A thousand years ago?" Olrox asked, amused. "Diligent my ass!" He laughed, hunching over.
"A huge explosion seemingly erased part of a moon near the prison of our supposed greatest threat to ever exist, yet it took another thousand years for anyone to even try investigating it. Yeah we must be diligent. Let's face it brothers. We were sent here because we're outcasts in the order. Powerful sure but in the end all we are, is just a gaggle of demented rejects sent to the boonies." He told them, amusement faded.
A silence filled the audio for a moment.
"Zimel, do you think the beast is as strong as they say? I saw the old murals and she was beautiful, a woman like that could make a lot of men happy. I'm almost tempted to head to that castle and try my luck hehe." Olrox laughed as a dark smile curled his lips, changing the topic.
The rest of the men joined in.
"Fine, lets head to the castle and see what happens. Who knows she might be willing… All the years being trapped here, she should be longing for the touch of a man. Let's go help her… Whether she likes it or not."
The rest of the recording was followed up by explosions and screams, followed by his interrogation of the apostle, then it ended.
Solaria looked at Yohan, her expression changed from annoyed to touched. After all, her husband had defended her honor. Gruesomely so. She walked over to him and kissed his cheek before she picked up his empty plate and proceeded to the sink, returning momentarily with a large tray holding eight large bowls of beef stew, sharing them between the two. "So what do you plan on doing with that thing?" she asked as she began to eat.
"Before I killed that apostle I had him show me how to use the device. It has everything from a voice recorder to a calling function. I'm gonna send a message to our "dear" sister. One that she can't ignore." He smirked as he twirled his fork.
Solaria on the other hand, looked at him perplexed, her cheeks stuffed with beef.
"It's a little thing called trolling. It's a bit childish but it's the best choice in trying to get a rise out of someone, especially those overflowing with pride. Let's finish our meal love, since after this, we'll have to fight again." He told her and she nodded, way ahead of him. "Pass me the bread please?"