The sky was a picture of fractured glass. Jagged clouds were torn open by heat and shockwaves.
Dario moved through it as if the air itself parted for him, explosions blooming and dying in perfect rhythm with his breath. Below, the gutted streets of the city writhed under the chaos, buildings gutted, asphalt scorched black, lampposts twisted like bones. The only constants were the roar of battle and the steady, unreadable calm behind his eyes.
Adrian Wolfe was chasing him. Relentless pressure carried on much suspended time of motion, every step, even the small in between's of his heartbeat. Dario had fought him long enough to feel the weight of that power before it even landed.
But today was different.
There was another presence darting in and out of the fight. Small, quick, irritating in the way only the unknown could be. A black combat jacket. Silver-lavender hair. A violet gaze too sharp for her years.
But what really caught his eye was the number nine tattooed on the left side of her cheek.
It was so blatant, it had brought up some unsavory memories. Memories of some of the worse things he had witnessed in his life as he began to have thoughts to change his ways.
He caught her between blinks, literally. Each time her form vanished, it was on the close of an eye, the arc of her body snapping out of existence and reappearing somewhere else in her sightline. At first, he'd filed it away as teleportation. But five, six blinks in, he felt the edges of her pattern. The movement was always linked to where she could see. Always within her own field of vision.
Useful for avoiding a careless strike. Fatal against someone who saw more than sight alone.
She appeared by Adrian's flank, upside down in the air, a knife-hand aimed for his throat. Dario bent back in a fluid arc, letting the strike pass harmlessly above him, then snapped forward with a blast that sent both her and Adrian skidding apart in twin trails of smoke.
Her form reappeared again to Adrian's opposite side, her afterimage slamming a phantom kick into empty space, a delay tactic. Dario's mind catalogued it instantly.
Afterimage. One at a time. No adjustment mid-motion. Useless against his Revelation.
A heel kick from Adrian forced him back half a step. The impact rattled his arms, his Ego was never gentle, but he flowed with the force, pivoted, and drove his boot into Adrian's ribs.
The blow folded the man sideways, sending him crashing through a jagged office font. Glass sang as it gave way, showering his retreat.
Adrian was back an instant later. Again.
Dario met him head-on, their fists colliding in mid-air, the sound like a mountain splitting. But the warlord didn't linger in the clash, he stepped through space on a concussive blast, appeared behind Adrian, and drove a kick into his spine. The force hurled him toward Nika.
She blinked, gone before the impact could land, her reappearance a fraction too far to re-enter the fight instantly. A crack in their coordination. Dario filed that away too.
The next moments were motion without waste. She flickered around him in staccato bursts, her Ego was snapping up debris in photograph frames. Freezing projectiles before they reached her skin. They hung in the air like artwork.
Dario thought it was cool and wanted to learn more about it. But it wasn't time for that.
She fired off another attack, it was a quiet flash of light that was meant to blind him. But his Revelation had always helped him predict his enemies movements.
Nika Laurent to Dario was more irritating than dangerous. A rat scurrying along the trenches in a warzone.
He had indulged it long enough.
When Adrian's next swing came, Dario caught it, their grips locking in a test of raw force. Then his other hand burned white-hot, explosions crawling up his forearms into Adrian's flesh.
The Paladin's jaw clenched against the pain, but his stance held. Dario answered with his boot, a downward blast snapping them into the air like bullets.
The city fell away beneath them.
The higher they went, the more the air thinned, the colder the edges of the wind became. Adrian's muscles coiled against him, the strain in his arms giving away the effort it took to resist.
Nika flickered below, chasing but lagging, her teleportations unable to match the acceleration.
Dario pushed higher still. The air burned against their skin, every upward burst a flash of light across the city.
Adrian snarled, "What the hell are you doing!?"
"Ending this!"
The Warlord's voice was calm, almost bored, but his mind was already setting the stage.
At their peak altitude, he spun, hurling Adrian outward before snapping forward and into his stomach with a punch that cracked the air. The blow with fast momentum was absorbed by Adrian's Ego to control momentum in all things. But that was fine. This wasn't his real attack.
"This," Dario said, "is going to hurt."
The air around them shifted. The heat didn't arrive all at once, it seeped in, rising from the edges inward, a predator's slow grin. Tiny concussive pops rippled through the space, the first sparks of a coming storm.
Adrian felt it too. His stored force was useless here, the air was hot, and only rose in temperature. It had gotten so hot in so little time, it became hard for him to breathe.
The explosions weren't aimed at him, they circled, a tightening noose of fire, feeding one another, climbing in heat and pressure until the space between was nothing but molten air.
The first detonation was the size of a car. The next, a house. Then the flames swallowed the sky.
The blast erupted in a spiralling tornado of fire and concussive force, folding in on itself before ripping outward in a single catastrophic bloom. Clouds disintegrated for miles. The air buckled under the shockwave, bending light, turning the sky into a blinding column of white-gold.
Below, glass melted in their frames. Steel warped in its foundations. Asphalt wept tar. The very bones of the district groaned as the heat sank in. The pressure crushed lungs, forced the air from mouths in silent screams.
Dario stood there in front of it, hands folded, expression unreadable.
Should've gone higher. He thought.
When the flames peeled away, Adrian was screaming, raw like an animal's sound, all pretense was stripped away. His armour of will had cracked and been burned away. His flesh was blistered and torn.
Dario let him fall. The body tumbled, limp in the smoldering air. Just before the impact, he caught him, gently, almost tenderly, and set him down in the blackened ruin that had been a street.
"Don't try to speak," he said, crouching over him. "It'll hurt more. You'll live. Bedridden for a while. But you'll be back on your feet soon. Because you were born strong, Adrian."
Silence answered him.
No Nika. No Ryan. No Otto. And no spiraling portals and spectral hands of Joanne. That was wrong.
His Revelation Ego didn't turn off, it was a passive Ego. But it picked up nothing.
There was only the brittle crackle of hot stone, the sigh of settling ash, and the faint, restless hum of distant fires that came from his last attack.
Dario had lived his life trusting in the unerring instinct of his gift, the way it pulled on his senses when danger was a moment away. For it to give him nothing meant one thing. Either there was no threat or there was something beyond his frame of reference that Revelation could not name it.
His skin tightened as if the air had turned to static. Each hair rose, each nerve humming with a low, electric vibration. The sensation didn't strike like fear, fear was human, a reflex born of survival. This was older. Ancestral maybe. The deep, marrow-born recognition that something was here which had no right to exist in this world.
The light around him dimmed, not in a sudden eclipse, but like the slow suffocation of a candle under a glass dome. Shadows lengthened in impossible angles, bending across the ground toward a single point behind him.
Then the shadow fell over him, so vast it seemed the sky itself had been swallowed.
He turned.
And the world contracted to a single, terrible shape.
It was a skeleton, but not of anything that had ever walked the earth. Each bone was the width of towers, elongated beyond natural proportion, its surface warped and grooved like ancient ivory weathered by centuries of wind. Thin parchment skin stretched across parts of its frame, yellowed and translucent, clinging like a shroud to its skeleton anatomy.
A cloak of black hung from its colossal shoulders, and the cloak was wrong, not fabric, not shadow, but an absence so absolute it devoured every colour around it. Looking into its folds was like staring into the hollow between stars, the place where light had never been born.
The folds were deep enough that, for a sickening instant, Dario's eyes swore they saw movement within.
Its head was a pale mask of cracked bone, featureless save for two deep, emerald orbs within its sockets. Looking at them was like staring down a well underneath northern lights and the water was holding your frame.
On its hunched back was strapped with an enormous obsidian gourd, its curved surface was as smooth as still water but veined with dim, pulsing veins of green light. The glow revealed silhouettes pressed against the inner surface.
Fingers clawed against the glassy barrier, faces stretched in mute screams, their forms flickering in and out as if they were barely tethered to reality.
Its right hand gripped a scythe. The haft was a colossal rib, polished by time, and the blade was a crescent of pure black, so sharp the air seemed to fall away from it. Dario's eyes rebelled at its edge unable to focus, every instinct insisting that to touch it was to be erased.
The thing's presence wasn't merely physical. It pressed. It pressed into the bones, into the blood, into the fragile machinery of thought itself. It was the weight of a collapsing cathedral, the stillness of a tomb that had never been opened.
The Reaper's Cart. One of The First Children.
He had imagined this moment for so long. Decades.
Once, at twenty-two, he'd glimpsed The Stillborn Sun, suspended in the upper atmosphere, gone in the blink of an eye, that was nearly fifty years ago. The most recent was the appearance of The Crowned Worm, it had basically reshaped the earth of the country of Eirath.
But never had Dario stood in the same world, breathing the same air.
At his feet, Adrian trembled, not from pain. It was fear. Fear of this beast. His body understood it even though he had done his best to keep his head facing the ground so as to not even gain a glimpse at it.
Dario crouched, his voice low, calm and absolute. "If you can move, even a little… you run!"
A tear slid down through the soot and grime and hurt on Adrian's cheek. His head dipped once.
Then came a sound.
Not the distant chatter of fire. Not the groaning of broken steel. This was the city's voice, a deep, mournful wail rolling out from every siren still intact, the kind of sound that sent people underground, into reinforced vaults, into whispered prayers. It was a signal for every civilian to find safety in bunkers, for bronze rank Paladin to lead them there.
It was a signal for Paladin closeby to converge, to throw themselves into the teeth of the impossible.
Dario didn't need them.
He rose. The titan above him moved, slow, deliberate, the way mountains might shift in dreams. Those eyes settled on him, and the weight doubled, tripled. Somewhere in his mind, the part of him that kept count of his sins stirred like an old friend.
In his gaze there was no fear. Only exhilaration.
His heels ignited. The ground beneath him shattered. And Dario Kosta, The Star Wished Upon By Humanity burst forth in a streak of fire and light, arcing straight into the darkness.