Chapter Summary: Remember, kids, slingshotting yourself at terminal velocity at your enemies is a bad idea if you are not a noble cockroach.
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The world before him was nothing but shades of gray.
The grass beneath his boots was gray. The withering flowers and trees that populated the vast plain were gray. Every droplet of rain that fell on him was gray. The blood trickling down his hands was gray, still fresh from the battle minutes before. Even the ever-distant horizon -so close, yet somehow impossibly far- was gray.
He, too, would probably be gray if he bothered to look at himself. It had been months since he had done so, so for all he knew, maybe he had always been like that and just couldn't tell.
Step by step, Sunny pressed onward beneath the relentless pitter-patter of rain.
Blades of grass rustled beneath his feet. It was the only sound he could hear beside the constant rain and the red-hot fury screaming inside his head.
The plain looked much like any other in the Tears. So flat that it was almost unnatural, decorated with little more than a few patches of grass, flowers, and trees. All of them looked sickly, downcast, like they could barely hold on to life. The sight was reminiscent in all the worst ways for him, almost enough to bring back old doubts and fears.
On his next step, he stomped a little too hard, and the earth cracked, sending clumps of grass flying everywhere.
The clumps of grass tumbled back toward the earth with the rain, some disappearing into the cracks he had created, others simply sinking into the mud until they vanished from sight.
Sunny watched them fall.
For a moment, he wondered what it would be like if everything else could disappear so easily.
His True Name. His flaw. His mistakes. His conflicted feelings. The voices inside his mind, eager to remind him just how much of a fool he was. The anger that had settled at some point in his chest and refused to leave. Everything else.
If only they could be buried beneath the earth as easily as a few blades of grass.
He stared at the widening cracks for another heartbeat, then looked away.
Sunny kept walking.
The rain continued to fall around him, drumming against his armor and whispering through the grass. His footsteps joined the rhythm, slow and heavy, carrying him farther across the endless plain.
Minutes passed. Minutes that felt like hours.
Time was hard to discern here, and if not for his one remaining shadow in the Waking World, he might have already lost track of it.
Maybe that was the solution. Wait here a century or two. Just long enough to be sure all of his problems disappeared like those blades of grass.
He snorted and cast the thought aside. Tempting as it was, he wasn't going to make it that easy for that Ghoul.
Hours after, far in the distance, Sunny finally saw it. The thing he had been looking for over the past few months.
It was just as repulsive and impossibly immense as he remembered from his dreams. Maybe more so. It had taken longer than he had hoped, but he had found it.
Rather fittingly, it was named The Scar of the World.
Everything around it seemed to bend inward, as though reality itself were still trying to close the wound. Space was torn apart, almost resembling broken glass fitted together in jagged cracks that Sunny knew were capable of cutting anything that came into contact with them. Shapes were twisted and turned, nightmarish, too straight one moment and too fluid the next. Even light behaved strangely, unleashing a gamut of impossible-to-describe colors.
If not for the endless curtain of rain turning everything into shades of gray, perhaps he would have been able to see them. And still, even reduced to gray, they looked wrong.
Once upon a time, Sunny thought, he would have smiled at the sight. Cracked a joke, perhaps. Committed it to memory.
There had been a period in his life when things like this could still inspire something resembling wonder in him. An impossible wound in reality itself, left behind by a clash between beings so powerful that the very world had been unable to withstand it.
It was the sort of thing he would have wanted to study. The sort of thing that would have occupied his thoughts for days.
Now, he simply kept walking.
The Scar of the World had been created during a battle between the Twin Gods and a creature of the Void that had invaded their realm. Sunny knew little about the event itself, as Eirene had never bothered to find out more about it. What he knew, however, was that the creature had been powerful enough to force the two Divines into a battle that had nearly torn the Realm apart.
In the end, the Twin Gods had won, but victory had come at a hefty price.
The damage left behind by the battle could not be repaired. The Realm itself had been wounded, and no amount of power possessed by its Divine rulers had been enough to restore what had been lost. So they had done the only thing they could: sealed the wound and contained it within the Scar so that no other Being of the Void could use it as a passage into their world. The surrounding damage had been patched as best they could manage, too, preventing the wound from spreading any farther.
He walked a few more steps, and then he started hearing it.
At first, the sound was so faint that Sunny thought it was nothing more than the rain. Or that he had imagined it. Then, ever so slowly, it grew louder with each passing second until even the pitter-patter couldn't drown it out any longer.
The sound was repulsive, maddening. It scraped against his mind like nails dragged across a chalkboard, provoking an instinctive desire to cover his ears and flee as far away as possible.
And yet...
There was something beautiful about it, charming, mesmerizing. It pulled at him with the irresistible allure of a siren's song, making promises of power beyond his wildest dreams, of riches, knowledge long lost, and forbidden secrets. All within reach, so long as he was strong enough to grasp them.
"I was right."
Sunny's voice sounded strange to his own ears. Raspy. Dry. He had gone so long without speaking that even those three words seemed to scrape their way out of his throat.
He continued staring at the distant Scar for a moment longer before resuming his march.
Nightmare Seeds, just like Gateways, formed around places where momentous events had taken place. And if a battle between two Divines and a creature of the Void did not qualify as momentous, then nothing did.
Just now, Sunny had started hearing it. Loud and clear. The call of a Nightmare Seed.
And with every step he took, the call grew stronger.
At first, it had been little more than a whisper at the very edge of his awareness, something that could easily be mistaken for the wind or the rain. Now, it was becoming increasingly difficult to think about anything else.
The sound wormed its way into his mind, caressing his thoughts with promises that became more alluring with every passing moment. Something about how effectively it had found the desires buried beneath all the anger and exhaustion felt almost insulting, carefully presenting each one as though it had been waiting specifically for him.
Sunny continued onward, accompanied only by the rain and the poisoned words of the Seed.
Time passed quickly as he moved, crossing in a few hours a distance that his Sleeper self would have needed weeks to traverse. The landscape blurred around him as he advanced, his movements carrying him over hills, across shallow valleys, and through stretches of dead woodland where only Nightmare Creatures remained alive. After his passing, even they were no more.
As he did, the rain's pitter-patter never stopped, and neither did the call.
By the time Sunny reached the top of another hill, it had become almost deafening, polluting his every thought with nothing but a deep desire to do nothing but rush toward the Seed and take upon himself its harrowing challenge.
Instead of listening to the temptation, he stopped there and looked ahead.
A city lay beyond the slope, and for a long moment, he simply stared.
Even through the rain, even in its current state, there was something strangely majestic about the place. Its architecture was unlike anything Sunny had seen in the Tears before, although it did remind him of the descriptions Teacher Julius had once given him of ancient Greece.
White stone dominated the city, although age and neglect had robbed it of most of its former brilliance. Massive temples rose among the ruins, their columns broken and their roofs collapsed. Palaces occupied broad terraces, surrounded by courtyards and monumental staircases that had long since cracked beneath the passage of time.
The city had been built directly outside the field of influence of the Scar of the World, with a singular purpose in mind: watch the Scar and immediately alert the Twins if something managed to emerge from its abyssal depths. Although that purpose had become somewhat superfluous once the Gods sealed the Void.
Sunny had seen it in its heyday once, in the dream in which he was an Ascended. The sight had taken his breath away.
Beautiful palaces had stood beneath the morning sun. Mighty temples had towered over bustling streets, their white stone shining brightly enough to make the entire city appear almost ethereal from a distance. Thousands of people had lived here, supported by an entire populace whose sole purpose had been to keep watch over the greatest wound their world had ever suffered.
Now, almost nothing remained.
The palaces were dilapidated. Towers had collapsed into piles of rubble, while others leaned precariously against one another as though a strong enough gust of wind might bring them down. The streets lay drowned beneath the rain, their pale stones slick and gleaming slightly in the gray world, with weeds pushing through the cracks and not a soul stirring between the shuttered houses.
A dark part of his mind found it deeply amusing. A sight more wretched than himself at last.
Then, he stepped over the edge of the hill.
For a few moments, he simply fell. The wind tore past him as the ruined city grew rapidly closer, the cape over his shoulders fluttering everywhere. Sunny waited until the last possible moment before summoning a pair of shadow wings to halt his fall.
By the time he reached the ground, his fall had slowed enough for him to land without so much as disturbing the wet grass.
Sunny straightened his cape and began walking toward the city once more.
The closer he came, the stronger the call became, almost unbearable now. The Nightmare Seed was somewhere within those ruins. He could feel it. Almost taste it, even. Yet something else caught his attention before he could fall into the temptation.
Sunny's Shadow Sense had blanketed the whole city the moment he came close enough, and what he found made him frown deeply.
The city wasn't completely empty after all. Of course it couldn't be that simple.
Without breaking stride, he separated the Gloomy Shadow from himself and sent it to scout ahead.
A few minutes passed before it reached what he was looking for, and what it found was enough to make him grimace. Of all the possibilities he had considered, this was among the ones he had hoped to avoid the most.
Sunny had, rather foolishly, hoped that Fate would leave him alone for once. As usual, it had decided to laugh in his face instead.
Through Gloomy, he watched the ruined palace at the heart of the city. The place in which the Nightmare resided.
Two Nightmare Creatures were resting within its remains, guarding the Seed. Great Demons, if his eyes weren't deceiving him. They lay in the Throne Room as though they were a king and queen waiting to hold court, even after so many years had passed since the city's ruin.
The male one possessed the general shape of a centaur, although calling it that felt almost charitable. Its lower half resembled the skeletal remains of an enormous horse, each bone darkened to a dull gray beneath the rain. Its upper body was that of a gaunt man, though the comparison ended there. Dark-gray bone spikes protruded from almost every part of its body, jutting from its shoulders, spine, and ribs like grotesque weapons that had grown naturally from its flesh.
Its left arm was particularly disturbing. Pale gray, completely devoid of hair or spikes, and almost twice as long as the right, it was connected to a thick tendon that ran from its wrist all the way to its shoulder, stretched taut like the string of a bow. The limb looked impossibly thin in some places and horribly thick in others. The right arm was the opposite. Short. Heavily muscled. Covered in the same dark spikes that adorned the rest of its body.
The second Nightmare Creature was standing beside it, its shape vaguely feminine. At first glance, it appeared to be just a gigantic woman wearing knightly armor. The illusion lasted for half a second. Upon closer inspection, the differences became increasingly difficult to ignore.
The armor encased it from head to toe, bulky enough to make it twice as wide as the comparatively slim centaur. Finely detailed and perfectly fitted, it almost looked as though the artisan had built it directly onto her body. Then Sunny realized a simple fact. The armor was alive. Flesh writhed beneath its surface. What he thought was a sun was, in fact, an eye. The ivory plaques were shifting bones, and the seams and joints were made of dark-gray tendons. Finally, what at first glance looked like a skull-shaped helmet was, in fact, its actual head, perpetually set into a rictus of a smile. Its top had been smoothed and turned dull by the endless rain, but there was no dulling the twin embers burning in its empty eye sockets.
The entire grotesque being rippled continuously beneath the falling rain, as though it were drinking it.
Sunny stared at the pair for a long moment, then sighed. He really should have known better.
The two creatures were the Supremes who had once ruled the city together. The very same ones he had been hoping had died at some point instead of becoming corrupted. Of course things couldn't be that easy.
Looking at the grotesque abominations they had turned into, one could hardly believe they had once been front and center of many scandalous rumors he couldn't be bothered to recall at the moment.
He had more immediate concerns, after all.
Such as the two Great Demons currently standing between him and the Nightmare Seed.
Sunny took a deep breath and dove into the shadows, reappearing less than a second later on the hill overlooking the ruined city.
Now that he knew what to look for, he managed to spot their silhouettes in the distance, though just barely. He remained careful not to watch too closely so as not to alert them.
Absentmindedly, he fixed the [Hiding Cape]'s placement over his shoulders. He had painstakingly woven the same obfuscating enchantment he had applied to the Twin Gods' temple into it. He wasn't going to let it go to waste by committing a rookie mistake.
Normally, at a moment like this, he would carefully study the Great Demons, learn their habits, capabilities, fighting methods, and whatever else he could find. Then, he would devise a strategy that would stack the odds in his favor as much as possible. Finally, he would also prepare the battlefield to serve his interests as much as he could.
Spurred on by the call of the Nightmare and his own desire to get it over with already, he decided against bothering with it.
He raised his right arm, calling on the shadows, and they answered eagerly. All around him, a battery of fourteen giant ballistas formed, each one loaded with a bolt that was bigger than he was and trained toward the duo of Nightmare Creatures. Carefully, he infused his Will into the structure, making sure to coat every millimeter of them with his desire to kill.
Then, without further ado, he chopped down with his arm, and the ballistas unleashed hell upon the unsuspecting Nightmare Creatures. They were so big, and the bolts were released at such speed that they made a sonic boom loud enough to make his bones vibrate and briefly made the rain around him disperse.
For a split second, nothing but the sound of rain could be heard, and then twin roars of pain echoed from within the city.
It wasn't lethal, not even close, but that first salvo had surely wounded them.
He decided to follow up before they had the chance to gather their bearings and come directly for him. Besides, he wanted to kill the two abominations with his own two hands.
At his command, the battery of ballistas fused into a single, gargantuan one. Then, he himself started growing, turning into a shadow colossus.
Sunny pressed himself against the string and started pushing back, building up tension for one final throw. Then, once he judged it enough, he let go and felt himself being launched in the direction of the wounded creatures. Another sonic boom followed, and Sunny had just enough time to wonder if this had been a bad idea before he reached the Knight.
His right hand, encased in a spiked glove that was bigger than a house, collided with the creature's skull.
A shockwave erupted, so strong that the ground beneath them cracked like glass and the ruined remains of columns, the rain, and everything else in the vicinity evaporated. Sunny's momentum hadn't stopped after that, as he bowled into the Knight with all of the considerable inertia he had left.
For a long few seconds, he was unable to move, stunned by the impact and the terrible ringing running through his mind. Had he not turned into a shadow and used his flesh-and-bone body instead, he might have actually died.
Then a horrible pain assaulted his chest, dangerously close to his heart, and he had no other option but to roll out of the way of another attack.
Just in time, he avoided a long spike that would have pierced straight through his head and managed to gain enough distance to recover his bearings.
His assailant was the Centaur. Its lower body had been severely damaged by the bolts, each of its four monstrous legs sporting one of them sunk deep within. Unfortunately, its upper body had fared much better. The right, muscular arm had clearly been used as a shield at the last moment, as evidenced by the three bolts protruding from its forearm.
None of that damage had done anything to stop it from ripping free one of the spikes covering its body and launching it at him with absurd speed and force.
Sunny noticed the way its left, long arm twitched, and he sidestepped yet another spike, this time aimed at the throat.
The sonic boom it caused made the ringing worse, almost enough to make him fail to react in time when the creature started galloping directly at him, far faster than something of its size should have been capable of. He dreaded to imagine just how fast it would have been without the bolts protruding from its legs.
In less than a second, the Centaur closed the distance between them, its head and chest protected behind the bulky right arm as it barreled straight through the shadow decoy he had left without slowing down at all, almost resembling a spiked battering ram.
The shadows coiling around Sunny left him, as he judged that the colossus made for too big a target at the moment to be worth the risk. Of them, only two shadow hands, one protruding from each of his wrists, remained on his body, seemingly pinching thin air. The remainder of them were put to another use.
Sunny dodged the next charge from the Centaur, though not without one of its long spikes dragging a long line across one of the pauldrons of his armor.
Before it could make the next pass, his shadows finished forming, turning into a spiked palisade twenty meters tall and twice as wide, which he hid behind.
Unimpressed -the palisade wasn't even half its height- the Centaur charged again, all relentless fury and aggression. Sunny had dared attack it, and its monstrous companion, and it would offer no mercy. Not that Nightmare Creatures had much of it to begin with. Or that he himself had any to offer.
The moment it clashed against the shadow structure, the whole thing bent back, even the wicked-looking spikes offering no resistance as the Centaur's momentum kept it going forward until, at last, just as the whole thing started groaning as though it was going to break, the Centaur's momentum died down.
For just a brief moment, Sunny, who had shadow-stepped atop an intact column far away the moment he was out of sight, saw what could pass for resignation in the Centaur's dark-grey eyes.
Then, just like a rubber band, the shadow palisade rebounded, sending the Centaur flying with a sonic boom that dwarfed all the previous ones.
It crashed through dozens of ruined buildings before it finally disappeared from sight, though the rumbling of its passing didn't disappear for a long few seconds more, until it got too far away to be heard.
Sunny did not have time to celebrate his victory before the ground started rumbling so much that the column he was using as a perch finally gave up in its long battle against time and started toppling to the side.
Before jumping off it, he looked down, just in time to see a bone knife -though its gigantic proportions made it more akin to a bone pillar- flying at breakneck speed toward him.
Sunny was fast, probably one of the fastest Saints alive, and he still failed to avoid it completely.
The bone pillar continued flying through the air, traversing who knew how far before finally losing force and crashing back down. On its way, it had taken a good chunk of his left side with it.
Had he been just a fraction of a second slower, it would have killed him.
He himself was airborne for a few seconds, falling precariously fast toward the ground before he managed to gather his bearings and summon a pair of shadow wings to smooth his fall.
Not a second too soon, a giant bone blade passed right beneath him, at the exact place he would have been if he hadn't managed to summon the wings in time.
The Knight was back on its feet, the shadow bolts he had assaulted it with already broken and the wounds they had left behind closing before his eyes. There was a mark left of their previous collision, however. The upper-right half of its skull had collapsed completely, revealing more of the baleful fire burning inside. The skull itself was cracked in countless places, making its rictus of a grin even more sinister, though it couldn't compare in that aspect to the maddened fury blazing in its remaining eye.
A twitch of its wrist was all the warning he got, and Sunny put it to use immediately, flapping his wings as fast as he could and drawing away from his opponent.
An idle part of his mind remembered that one time he had tried to catch a fly with his hands. He had swiped at it hundreds of times without success, as the damn thing was both too small and too fast for him to catch. Until at last, more through luck than skill, he managed to kill the annoying thing.
He was reenacting that little chase now, except that he was the fly, and he too would likely die if he was caught. Though in this case, it wouldn't be a matter of luck.
The bone sword snapped at him dozens of times a second, flowing from one strike into the next so smoothly that it looked as though it were following a script rather than reacting to his progressively more desperate attempts to dodge.
Knowing that there was no other option, Sunny spent a good chunk of his remaining essence, and the Knight staggered for a split second. That was all he needed to finally get away from it.
Held within one of the shadow hands, the Great Monster's string of life became darker as he kept pumping essence into it, drawing its death closer. It had taken an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize he could keep his own hands free by manifesting shadow ones to hold them instead.
Sunny allowed himself a moment to take a deep breath. He regretted it immediately when he felt a sensation akin to hundreds of needles stabbing into his side.
The wound was bad. Really bad. A regular Saint would have died already from it. The only thing stopping his organs from spilling onto the ground was the shadow bandage he had constructed around it. At least it would keep things together long enough for the Weaves to patch him up.
If the Great Demons didn't kill him first, that was.
He wasn't allowed any more time to think before the Knight caught up to him, the eye in its chest glaring at him with a hatred that felt almost physical.
The bone sword snapped toward him, the sheer force behind it drawing a gust of wind that pushed the rain back for hundreds of meters and almost blew him away.
Sunny waited until the last moment to react, then leaned down to the left, the blade passing so close to his face that he could have bitten it if he hadn't known that it was a bad idea. Next, he pushed against the ground and launched himself upward, straight at the eye glaring at him on the Knight's chest.
That was a mistake.
A seam that had been invisible until that very moment appeared on the Great Demon's midsection, and then it opened wide. Sunny's blood froze at the sight of dozens of serrated teeth akin to a lamprey's mouth staring back at him. Behind them, he saw what he assumed to be the creature's stomach, though he was faintly certain a stomach shouldn't look like a torture chamber.
Sunny only had half a second to come up with an idea before his momentum would carry him straight into the belly of the Demon. It didn't take a genius to know he wouldn't survive whatever waited in there.
The plan he came up with was as stupid as it was brilliant.
The Knight wanted to eat him? Let it try.
Sunny managed to avoid the teeth with little more than a few -or a hundred- scratches that sizzled like they were coated in acid. He didn't have any time to reflect on that fact before the maw closed, and he was left trapped within the Demon.
Ignoring the sizzling sound of his boots, the burning of his unprotected side, or the pricks against his armor, Sunny hurriedly summoned the [Shadow Lantern].
Outside, the Great Demon's chest-eye gleamed in satisfaction, its baleful gray-red iris ablaze with the high of victory as its whole body shook under the rain, drinking from it in triumph.
For all of one second.
The second passed, and a shadow pike the size of a military PTV pierced through the eye from within, followed by dozens more. The pained roar that followed was among the most harrowing things he had ever heard.
Sunny emerged through one of the holes he had just made, his armor resembling melted wax from the gastric acid inside the Nightmare Creature, and the pain from his side having gone from horrible to outright maddening. Almost comparable in its intensity to that of the Nightmare's call.
[Your Memory has been destroyed]
He didn't even have time to check which one it was before he heard a sharp whistle quickly approaching and was forced to sidestep. He was a little too slow, and the spike clipped him, ripping his left arm with horrendous ease. The spike continued long after hitting him, piercing through countless buildings and through the hill overlooking the city without slowing down for a moment.
Left with no other option, Sunny shadow-stepped away from the still-breathing Knight and looked into the distance.
There, using a crumbling building as support, he saw the Centaur.
Its hind legs had been broken by the collisions, and the ones at the front didn't look much better, just barely functional enough to allow it to limp its way back into the battle. Despite its precarious state, its will to fight had not been dimmed in the slightest, and by the moment, it seemed to stand more firmly, its hind legs slowly snapping back into place.
Then, Sunny finally realized what the point of the strange tendon crossing its left arm was. It enabled the Centaur to use the limb as a bow, and its own spikes as the arrows.
Sunny shadow-stepped again, just in time to avoid the next projectile, only to emerge right in the path of a gargantuan bony fist. A quick shadow barrier, reinforced by the weight of his full Will behind it, was the only reason why he had enough time to get out of the way without incurring any more injuries.
The Knight did not stop there, treating the dozens of bleeding holes spread across its body as inconsequential while continuing its mad assault against him with fist and blade in equal measure.
Despite its relentless barrage and the ferocity with which it attacked, as well as the fact that the holes were closing once again, Sunny did not miss the fact that it was slowing down. [Endbringer] wasn't fast, but it got the work done. The damage he had dealt wasn't negligible either.
Sunny weaved between the attacks, on the lookout for a chance to strike while at the same time watching out for the arrows that the Centaur kept firing at him.
A full minute later, an eternity in a battle like this, he finally found it.
The Knight's blade was a second slower than it should have been, the arm wielding it having lost too much blood already, which left it wide open.
Shadows coalesced into a hand that was thrice his own size and pushed the Nightmare Creature a little.
Right into the path of the next arrow.
There was a repulsive, gurgling sound, akin to someone drowning, and the Knight fell to its knees, bony gauntlets holding onto the wide hole that had been opened in its neck, trying and failing to hold back the deluge of blood weeping out of it.
A brief moment of silence passed, and then a furious roar echoed around the broken city, followed by a barrage of spikes being shot at him with unmatched speed.
Sunny shadow-stepped, first at the Knight, then, without attempting to attack, he banished himself again, avoiding the spike that would have impaled him if he had lingered. When he emerged again, it was behind the Centaur.
Wounded and exhausted as it was, it didn't have time to react before a spear a hundred meters long erupted from beneath it, skewering the Demon and leaving it suspended in the air like a ghastly trophy.
Sunny only had enough time to realize that he had not heard the Spell announce its death despite the lethal wound before another hateful roar followed, and within a second, the Knight arrived at their position.
It was, as unlikely as that sounded, even more of a ghastly sight than before. The holes in its body had closed enough to make it look like it had dozens of tiny, weeping eyes, while the one in its neck had been filled by a forest of fleshy tendrils.
He took a long look at it and at his remaining reserves of essence, and decided that it was time to end it before they ended him.
Shadows pooled at his feet in an instant, and Sunny grew into a colossus that matched the Knight in size. A shadow odachi formed in his hand next, just in time to clash against the bone sword of the Nightmare Creature.
A dozen exchanges followed in quick succession before he managed to get past its guard and stab into its chest, right where the heart should be. Surprisingly, he did find it, piercing it with ease.
The Knight fell down, its string of life growing darker and darker by the moment. And still, it tried to fight him, putting all of its monstrous strength and desire to kill into trying to stand up and avenge its partner.
Sunny did not give it time to do so.
He meant to strike at its ghastly skull with the odachi, slice it in half and get it over with already, but instead, it was his gauntlet that ended up colliding with it with enough strength to unleash a miniature earthquake.
Sunny stared at his dark-gray gauntleted hand for a split-second, opening it and closing it uncertainly, almost surprised at the sight of it and the violence it had just unleashed. Then he closed the fist and brought it down again against the skull. It cracked beneath the impact, countless tiny fractures opening across it. No kill notification, so he struck again.
And again.
And again.
Again, again, again, again.
At some point, he stopped seeing the skeletal visage of the Knight and instead saw a horrible amalgamation of the past. Dozens of faces mixed and mashed together. Asterion, Merias, Anvil, Shadow, Oblivion, Weaver, Auro, Fate itself, and many more, all staring back at him mockingly.
"Look at the wretched rat," they said with scorn.
"He's running away again."
"Does he never learn?"
"You cannot run from Fate, little rat," they thundered.
"It's as inevitable as the chain wound around your neck."
He roared and punched again. Then again.
Sunny did not know how long he spent doing that, the skull deforming under his assault until eventually, the gauntlet broke down, then the bones of his shadow hand, and finally the limb itself as he refused to stop.
He came back to in a daze and realized that the Knight's skull was no more. Reduced to countless, tiny shards of bone spread all across the ruins of the once-glorious city.
And still, the Knight twitched.
Movement from the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he turned to see the Centaur dragging itself toward them.
Sunny stepped away from the Knight and readied himself, considering whether to use his remaining droplets of essence to escape or to make a last attempt at killing the duo of Nightmare Creatures.
In the end, he needn't have bothered.
The Centaur ignored him completely, dragging itself toward its twitching companion and, with all the strength it had left, enveloped its mismatched arms around its form, almost resembling an embrace. The Knight, too, used its remaining strength to embrace its companion.
For a brief moment, their abominable forms disappeared, and instead, they were human once more. Staring into each other's eyes with love, surrounded by a beautiful city, happy people, and a bright future ahead.
Sunny silently stared at the scene, the blazing fury roaring in the back of his mind smothered by sheer exhaustion and the numbness spreading through him.
The moment passed, and the Nightmare Creatures grew still.
"Your nightmare is over."
His whisper was drowned beneath the relentless rain and the droning call of Nightmare, but the sentiment behind it remained, and Sunny genuinely hoped that they would find solace within his soul.
Then, the Spell finally chose to speak.
[You have slain a Great Demon, Lover's Woe.]
[Your shadow grows stronger.]
[You have acquired a Memory, Fragment of Amalgamation.]
Sunny was silent for a long time, completely still as he watched the remains of the creatures.
Then, he laughed.
A wet, choking cackle tore from his throat, breaking halfway into a gag before surging back louder. His breath hitched between each burst, lungs struggling to draw air that his ruined body no longer seemed capable of taking. His knees buckled from exhaustion, and he fell to the ground. He clawed at it desperately, dragging his nails through the dirt and broken stone as though they could anchor him back to reality.
"Hh—hah… hah… HAHAHA—"
The laughter cracked into a sob. Then came another laugh, harsher than the last.
He laughed, and laughed, and laughed until his voice broke. And still, he laughed.
What were the odds? What were the fucking odds!?
That here, in this very Realm, in this very place and time, he would find a fragment of his newest Echo.
Even now, he was walking down the path Weaver had prepared for him. Even now, he was nothing more than a puppet dancing to someone else's tune. Even now, he was just a damn, wretched slave.
It was inevitable, wasn't it? He was meant to become the very embodiment of that concept, after all.
Still laughing, Sunny stood up again and walked toward the Nightmare Seed.
What was the point of resisting? He had been meant to be here. He had even convinced himself that it was what he wanted, so it obviously meant that he had to go challenge the damn thing!
He returned to the throne room in a matter of seconds, and there he saw it, hidden behind a now-broken column.
A seed of the Fourth Nightmare.
Surely he would find more convenient coincidences. Surely he would find more of Weaver's messages, taunting him for his inability to break free. Surel—
Sunny saw his reflection in a puddle of water and finally realized which Memory had been destroyed.
The [Hiding Cape] wasn't on his back anymore. Melted away in the Knight's stomach, and with it, its shrouding effect had gone too.
As though they had been waiting for him to realize that fact, the dark-gray clouds high above shook like there was a quake going through them before parting, revealing a sight that even now, his brain refused to process.
This time, instead of merely staring at him, the impossible being descended to the ground. Or maybe it had always been before him, and his mind had simply refused to acknowledge it.
"It has been a long time, Sunless."
-------------------------------------------
Five months ago
"For I am here. I alone shall protect humanity. I alone shall drive the darkness back. And I alone can bring forth a new age. An age of kindness and unity as the world has never seen before. I am Asterion, and that is my promise."
Asterion held his arms wide open, golden eyes alight like a burning flame, and a smile that seemed sincere and reassuring.
That was the last image of him that people saw before the cameras turned off. Sunny cared not for it. His whole sight was tinged red by the sheer wrath coursing through him.
Asterion straightened up the moment they turned off, all of his showmanship gone.
He was still smiling, his lips curved upward into a serene smile, but the rest of his face didn't follow. His eyes were as cold and indifferent as those of a dragon being forced to interact with mere garden lizards.
"I apologize," he said calmly, looking at them with a repentant expression that looked drawn on. "I must have ruined your nights with my little show."
Still smiling, Asterion calmly walked through a great ball of white fire thrown at him, coming out the other side looking like a burnt corpse before his flesh started restoring itself with insulting ease.
"I must commend your determination, little Nephis, but that's not going to work against me," he chided softly.
So focused on the more destructive one of the two, he failed to notice the shadow tendril sneaking behind him and climbing up his leg swiftly. It pierced into his brain a moment later, punching from one end of his skull to the other without resistance.
Asterion gave him an unimpressed stare, the shadow tendril still piercing his head, and he merely raised a hand to break it like a dry twig.
"I can see what the two of you see in each other now," he commented dryly.
Sunny was readying himself for another strike, too furious to even consider stopping at the moment, when the sound of breaking glass invaded the studio.
He turned his eyes as much as he could, just in time to see a tear in reality open in the middle of the room, through which Ki Song's main body walked a moment later.
"You are finally here!" Asterion exclaimed happily, almost sounding elated to see her.
"Dream Spawn," she said coldly.
Ki Song's eyes roamed across the room quickly, sparing him and his Cohort only a glance to make sure they were all right before taking note of everything else.
"Is that all the welcome I receive after such a long separation, old friend?"
"I am no friend of yours."
"Ah, I understand," he said in a placating tone. "Maybe my return was a little too shocking for you. It's fine. I'm in no hurry; we can chat at another moment. Maybe we should also include Anvil and have a proper reunion of our Cohort."
A sweet, rotten smell invaded the room, and before his eyes, the Mundane staff started decomposing while still alive.
"Why should I let you go after what you have done?" the Supreme asked coldly.
Asterion's serene smile quirked up a little, looking all too amused by her overt hostility.
"Come now, old friend. You know as well as I do that I wouldn't risk myself like this if I didn't have failsafes in place." He leaned forward, a conspiratorial glint in his eyes, like he was about to reveal a secret. "Just between you and me, if you force my hand, I will unleash a rather voracious Great Terror I have tamed on your precious Domain."
"Do you really think I cannot handle that?" She asked, sounding almost insulted.
"You can, that's true." He admitted easily. "I just wonder if you can do so quickly enough. Believe me, that fellow is quite hard to kill."
Ki Song did not flinch, but the pause that followed was just as telling.
"You are bluffing," she said a few seconds later.
Asterion's smile widened. "Are you ready to gamble on it? Or that your precious heirs and their little friends will survive a fight between the two of us?"
"Why let them go that easily?" Ki Song asked suspiciously.
"Why wouldn't I? They will be mine sooner or later anyway. What does waiting a little more change?"
Had Sunny been able to speak, or to do anything but rage within his own mind, he would have screamed at her to throw caution to the wind and attack, like she clearly wanted to.
Ki Song hesitated for a little longer, then took a long look at Nephis and him, a strange mix of emotions he couldn't discern passing through her eyes before she finally nodded her head in Asterion's direction.
The Will pressing him down disappeared right after, and Sunny was finally free to move.
Without hesitation, he lunged toward Asterion, shadow odachi in hand, only to realize that Ki Song's Dream Gate had moved, having expected such a reaction from him. He crossed the threshold before he could stop himself, and while he managed to grind to a stop a few steps later, someone collided with him before he could try to return.
Nephis was the one responsible, having lunged at Asterion too and being just as unsuccessful as he was at stopping herself in time.
It only took a second to recover their bearings, and yet it was a second too long.
Cassie hurriedly stepped through the Dream Gate, carrying in her arms the unconscious forms of Effie and Kai. Then Ki Song did the same, and the Gate closed behind her.
He stared at the wall that had lain behind it for a second, a myriad of thoughts violently swimming through his mind, demanding attention. It didn't take long for one of them to drown all the others.
Asterion had revealed his darkest secret, made it so that the whole world knew how to enslave him, and worst of all, he had gotten away with it.
All across the Jade Palace, people heard his scream of rage.