Tameem launched a vicious attack, but Siyam blocked it effortlessly and hurled him backward. Tameem staggered slightly, sliding back a few paces before regaining his balance and instantly locking back into an offensive stance.
Siyam straightened up, shifting his weight and raising his sword into a defensive guard.
"I don't even know who you are," Siyam said, his voice cutting through the ringing chaos. "So why keep attacking me for no reason?"
Tameem stepped forward, a cold, sharp grin slicing across his blood-stained face.
"You didn't know me before... but you will by the time you die."
With that chilling promise, Tameem vanished into thin air, reappearing directly inside Siyam's blind spot. Before Siyam could even react, a blinding arc of razor-sharp steel whipped through the air. Siyam hastily brought his blade up to parry, but the sheer, overwhelming kinetic force behind Tameem's strike sent a bone-rattling shockwave straight up his arms.
Tameem didn't let up for a single microsecond. He pressed the assault with relentless, feral fury, chaining lightning-fast slashes that battered Siyam's defenses. Every clash of steel echoed like thunder. Siyam gritted his teeth, desperately trying to find an opening, but Tameem's bladework was an unyielding storm–relentless, heavy, and completely suffocating. Step by step, Tameem pushed Siyam back, dominating the pace of the battle entirely.
Siyam's mind raced in frustration, struggling to find a way out, when Tameem suddenly lunged forward again, thrusting his blade straight toward Siyam's midsection. Siyam barely managed to deflect it in time, but the heavy impact threw him off balance, sending him crashing hard to the ground.
Tameem reached up, casually adjusting and straightening the collar of his tunic.
"Honestly, Siyam... I never thought you'd be this weak. Or perhaps I expected too much."
Siyam closed his eyes, taking a long, deep, steadying breath. When he opened them again, he locked his dark gaze straight into Tameem's eyes.
"I am so sick and tired of hearing that word. If it's my true power you want to see... then so be it."
The moment those words left his lips, Siyam's eyes turned pitch black, and the surrounding atmosphere abruptly shifted, plunging into a heavy, suffocating pressure. Tameem, who had been stepping forward, froze in his tracks. The mocking grin vanished from his face, replaced by a sudden, heavy gravity.
Siyam pushed himself up from the ground and stared down at the blade in his hand. The steel suddenly erupted into a blinding, pitch-black glow. Tameem instinctively took a half-step back, though he kept his guard raised.
Without wasting another second, Tameem lunged at Siyam once more, but this time, Siyam met him with terrifying ease, blocking the strike as effortlessly as a grandmaster swatting away a child's toy. The color drained entirely from Tameem's face; in that split second, it felt as though he had struck his blade against an immovable mountain of solid rock.
Siyam let out a low, cold smirk and swung his sword. The impact produced a shockwave so deafeningly loud that it completely drowned out the distant sounds of the war raging between Sameer and Maciej. Tameem desperately tried to block the blow with his own blade, but the sheer kinetic weight blew him away, sending him flying backward to crash heavily into the distance.
He couldn't even force himself to sit up. Suddenly, his blade shattered into a thousand pieces, scattering across the ground like broken glass. As he tried to push himself up, a sharp, burning agony made him look down. His abdomen was cleanly sliced open. He pressed his hand against his wound, staring in horror at the warm blood gushing through his fingers.
Before he could even process what was happening, another massive shockwave detonated nearby.
A dense cloud of dust and smoke choked the air, obscuring the battlefield. As the haze slowly cleared, a towering figure stood in the wreckage: Sameer, wielding his glowing light-sword. He effortlessly scooped Tameem up off the ground with one hand, pulling him close to whisper into his ear,
"Provoking Siyam was a foolish mistake... but thanks for buying me the time I needed."
Siyam froze, his eyes widening as he stared at the man standing just a few feet away. That back... it belonged to his brother, the brother he hadn't seen in three long centuries. Trembling, Siyam reached out a shaking hand.
"Sameer? Is that... really you?"
Without even turning his head back, Sameer held the battered Tameem by the collar and replied,
"We'll catch up very soon, little brother."
In a blink, Sameer vanished into thin air, taking Tameem with him. Panicking, Siyam scrambled to his feet and sprinted toward the spot, desperately trying to catch them, but the space was already empty. Sameer was gone.
Siyam collapsed to his knees, his strength finally giving out. Right at that moment, Su-sung's voice echoed sharply in the depths of his mind,
"I told you so. You should have just killed him when you had the chance, instead of letting him become a massive headache. Look around, he's practically flattened the entire territory to dust."
Before Siyam could even retort, a sudden, chilling realization hit him like a physical blow. Maciej!
Scrambling back up, Siyam sprinted across the ruined courtyard. Pushing past towering piles of collapsed stone pillars and shattered rubble, he finally found him. Maciej was slumped against a broken stone wall, clutching his bleeding chest. His entire body was covered in brutal lacerations, and his face was smeared with dark, drying blood.
Siyam hurried over to Maciej and caught him as he fell. Maciej coughed, spitting up a mouthful of blood. Siyam tried to stop him from speaking, but Maciej pushed through the pain, his voice trembling.
"I'm sorry, my friend... I couldn't protect the sword."
Siyam offered a reassuring nod, his jaw tight. "Don't worry about that. I know why Sameer came for the light sword. Just rest, I'll handle the rest."
Maciej reached out, grabbing Siyam's hand and pulling it tightly against his chest with a desperate grip. "You still can't use your full power yet. You won't be able to face Sameer alone."
Siyam placed his other hand over Maciej's, his voice dropping to a low, heavy murmur.
"I know. But he has the light sword now, the key to breaking his seal..."
Cutting him off, Maciej shook his head violently. "He can't break the seal with just the light sword alone. He needs Uriel's blessing. And he certainly won't get that from Uriel."
Lifting Maciej onto his shoulder, Siyam began carrying him toward the royal palace. As they stepped through the shattered gates, Siyam froze dead in his tracks, the breath catching in his throat.
Maciej slid down from his shoulder. Limping heavily, staining the stone with his own blood, he began running in a panic toward his wife's chambers.
The entire inner hall looked as though it had been painted in crimson. The brutalized bodies of maids and royal guards were strewn everywhere, mutilated and broken, proving that the slaughter had not just happened outside, but had hunted them down in the deepest sanctuaries of the home.
When Maciej burst through the doorway into his wife's room, he froze completely. He dropped to his knees, burying his face in his hands as a suffocating, unbearable silence swallowed him whole.
Siyam walked slowly behind him, stopping at the threshold. His eyes dilated in sheer horror at the nightmare before him.
Maciej's wife and his innocent children had been hacked to pieces. Her lifeless body lay grotesquely split across the edge of the bed and the blood-soaked floor. The scattered remains of his little children were smeared across the walls and corners, mutilated beyond recognition. Some tiny limbs severed and plastered against the stone, others completely torn apart in a sickening display of pure malice.
Maciej wept in absolute agony, his body wracked with a soundless, shattered grief so profound that it tore at the soul. Siyam closed his eyes tightly, his hands trembling violently as he rested one on Maciej's heaving shoulder.
In that instant, Siyam felt a scorching, unnatural heat radiating from Maciej's flesh. Opening his eyes, he watched in alarm as everything around them began to blister and warp under an invisible, rising inferno. Taking a few hasty steps back, Siyam looked down at his friend with urgent panic.
"Maciej... stop! Pull yourself together, or everything left here will turn to ash!"
But Maciej was entirely beyond reason now. All sanity had burned away, leaving behind a black void of pure, unadulterated vengeance. He wanted to wipe the universe off the map today.
As Siyam moved forward to pull him back, Maciej's back violently tore open, and a pair of massive wings made of roaring, blood-red fire burst into the air with a deafening screech. His eyes flashed with blazing infernal light, and deep, glowing cracks fractured across his skin like molten lava, his veins pumping liquid fire.
The entire room erupted into a violent, blinding blaze as Maciej threw his head back and unleashed a harrowing, earth-shattering roar of pure heartbreak and rage.
Somewhere miles away, a herd of grazing livestock abruptly broke their silence as a terrifying detonation shook the earth's crust. Startled by the cataclysmic shockwave, they stared in primitive terror at the massive pillar of fire blooming in the sky and bolted blindly in every direction. Birds and wild beasts across the region fled in a frantic, directionless stampede.
Siyam stood his ground amidst the raging inferno. Before the searing heat could incinerate his skin, a pair of dark, obsidian wings sprouted from his back, wrapping tightly around him like a protective shell.
When the obsidian wings finally parted and swept back, everything in the vicinity had completely melted into glowing, liquid wax. The royal palace had been utterly obliterated leaving behind nothing to suggest that a beautiful, joyful kingdom had stood proudly there just a day prior.
Slowly, the raging storm within Maciej subsided. The fiery wings on his back flickered and retracted into his skin.
Siyam tucked his own dark wings away and knelt quietly beside him in the smoking ashes. Maciej looked up, his face stained with tears and soot, gazing blankly into the distance.
"So... is this the exact feeling Sameer had back then?" Maciej's voice cracked, hollow and broken. "Was his heart burning with this exact same hellfire, wanting to destroy everything in his path?"
Siyam stared fixedly at the scorched ground, slowly shaking his head. "I don't know... everything is just a blur."
A bitter, fractured smile touched Maciej's lips, instantly dissolving back into a fresh wave of silent tears. Flashes of that fateful day replayed mercilessly before his eyes, the exact moment Sameer had held the light sword, looking at him with a faint, chilling smile and whispering,
"I will return every single feeling to you with interest, exactly what you made me suffer. The only difference is, I am giving it to you with full awareness, while you inflicted it upon me without even understanding why."
Seeing Maciej's heartbreaking torment, Siyam kept his gaze glued to the ash beneath him, utterly lost in the violent storm raging inside his own chest. Grief, guilt, rage, helplessness. He couldn't make sense of any of it. He didn't even have the strength left to offer a single word of comfort. He could only ask himself silently, drowning in the smoke,
"Why did it all have to happen this way?"