The mining town of Ferrum clung to the mountainside like a parasite to flesh—necessary, extractive, and slowly killing its host. Thousands of workers lived in cramped stone buildings stacked in terraces along the slope, their lives measured in the copper and iron they pulled from the earth. The air tasted of metal and coal smoke, and even from a distance, Kami could sense something wrong with the town's collective Pneuma.
"It feels diseased," he observed as their column approached the main gates. "The entire town's life-force is... tainted. Sluggish. Like blood poisoned by infection."
Thorwald's jaw tightened. "How many people live here?"
"According to the reports, approximately four thousand. Most of them miners and their families." Kami extended his senses further, trying to understand the nature of the corruption. "Whatever is affecting them, it is not natural. This is deliberate contamination."
The town's gates stood open, guarded by only two soldiers who looked exhausted and ill themselves. One of them straightened when he saw Thorwald's Centurion insignia.
"Sir! Thank the gods you've arrived. The sickness is spreading faster. We've lost over two hundred already, and the doctors don't know what—" He broke off in a coughing fit, blood speckling his lips.
Kami dismounted and approached the guard, his Devourer senses focused. "How long have you been sick?"
"Three days, sir. Started with fatigue, then the coughing, then the blood. Some folks just... collapse and don't get up. The mine foreman says it is bad air from the deep shafts, but we have never had anything like this before."
"It is not bad air," Kami said quietly. He could feel it now—a foreign Pneuma signature woven through the guard's life-force, something artificial and malicious. "You have been poisoned. Someone has contaminated Ferrum's Pneuma network."
Thorwald's hand went to his sword. "Deliberate? An attack?"
"Or an experiment." Kami turned to his brother. "We need to quarantine the town immediately. No one in or out until I can determine the contamination's source and vector. And I need to examine the mines—if this started in the deep shafts, that is where we will find answers."
The town's administrative building was a squat structure of gray stone near the market square. Inside, they found the local magistrate—a corpulent man named Decimus who looked more terrified than sick—and the mine foreman, a grizzled veteran named Sulla whose Pneuma signature was heavily contaminated but who somehow remained functional.
"Imperial Physician," Decimus wheezed, his relief palpable. "And a Centurion. Praise the Emperor. Can you cure this? The workers are dying, productivity has dropped seventy percent, and the capital is demanding their copper shipments—"
"I care nothing for your shipments," Kami interrupted coldly. "Four thousand people are sick. That is what matters. Now, when did the illness first appear?"
Sulla answered, his voice rough as gravel. "Ten days ago. Started with the deep shaft crews—the teams working the new excavations at the lowest levels. They came up complaining of dizziness and weakness. Within two days, the coughing started. Within four, people began dying."
"And you kept the mines operating?"
"The quotas must be met," Decimus interjected. "Imperial law requires—"
"Imperial law requires you to protect Imperial citizens," Thorwald said, his voice hard. "You should have sealed the mines the moment people started dying. Instead, you let sick workers continue spreading the contamination throughout the town."
Kami raised a hand, forestalling further argument. "What is done is done. Foreman Sulla, I need you to take me to the deep shafts. To the exact location where the first workers became ill. And I need you to evacuate everyone from the mines until I have determined it is safe."
"That will take days to accomplish," Sulla protested. "The deep crews are twelve hours below—"
"Then start now. Every moment you delay kills more people." Kami's dark eyes fixed on the foreman with an intensity that made the man step back. "Do you understand? This is not negotiable."
While Sulla organized the evacuation, Kami began examining patients in the town's hospital—a converted warehouse where the sick lay on straw pallets, coughing blood and moaning in delirium. The conditions were appalling, the air thick with disease and despair.
Kami moved among them, touching each patient briefly, his Devourer senses mapping the contamination. What he found made his blood run cold.
The poison was sophisticated—far more advanced than anything natural. It was a Pneuma construct, artificially created, designed to embed itself in a victim's life-force and slowly drain their vitality while replicating and spreading to others through proximity. It was elegant, efficient, and absolutely horrifying.
Someone had weaponized Pneuma corruption.
"Can you cure it?" Thorwald asked, watching his brother work.
"I can drain it, yes. But there are hundreds of infected people, and the contamination is deeply embedded. Curing them all will take time, and I will need to pace myself or risk losing control." Kami knelt beside a dying woman, her breathing shallow and rattling. "But I can start with the most severe cases. Buy them time while we find the source."
He placed his hands on the woman's chest and began to pull.
The contaminated Pneuma resisted, clinging to her life-force like oil to water. Kami had to be surgical in his extraction, carefully separating poison from patient, draining only the foreign construct while leaving her natural Pneuma intact. It took fifteen minutes of intense concentration, and when he finished, the woman was breathing easier, her color already improving.
But Kami felt sick.
The contaminated Pneuma writhed inside him, his Devourer nature struggling to break down something that had been designed to resist destruction. It was like consuming spoiled meat—his hunger accepted it, but his body rebelled.
"I can manage perhaps twenty patients before I need to rest and purge this poison from my system," he told Thorwald. "Prioritize the sickest. The ones who will die today without intervention."
For the next six hours, Kami worked without stopping. One patient after another, draining the poison, fighting the nausea and disorientation that came from consuming so much corrupted Pneuma. By the time he finished the twentieth patient, he was trembling with exhaustion and barely able to stand.
Thorwald caught him as he stumbled. "Enough, brother. You need to rest."
"There are still hundreds—"
"Who will die anyway if you collapse. You are no good to them dead or drained." Thorwald half-carried him to a private room the magistrate had prepared. "Rest. Purge the poison. Then we go to the mines and end this at its source."
Kami spent the next four hours in meditation, focusing his Devourer nature on breaking down the corrupted Pneuma he had absorbed. It was agonizing work—the poison fought back, tried to spread within him, attempted to corrupt his own life-force. But his fundamental nature as a void, as something that consumed and destroyed Pneuma, eventually won. The poison was broken down and neutralized, converted into raw energy that fed his hunger.
When he emerged, night had fallen over Ferrum. Thorwald was waiting with a meal and information.
"The mine evacuation is complete. Sulla says the deep shafts are clear. But he also says three workers never came up—they were in the deepest excavation when the order came, and they have not responded to calls. Either dead or trapped."
"Or they are the source," Kami said grimly. "We go down tonight. I want to see these deep excavations before anyone else enters them."
The mine entrance yawned like a mouth in the mountainside, lamplight flickering in its depths. Thorwald brought ten of his best legionaries, each equipped with Pneuma-enhanced lanterns that burned with captured life-force, illuminating the tunnels with steady blue-white light.
Sulla led them down, following shafts that descended at steep angles, past abandoned excavations and support beams that groaned under the mountain's weight. The air grew thick and hot, heavy with the smell of earth and metal.
"The deep excavations are nearly a mile down," Sulla explained as they descended. "We found a new copper vein three months ago, rich beyond anything we had seen before. The magistrate pushed for rapid extraction, quotas doubled, crews working double shifts. That is when we broke through."
"Broke through to what?" Kami asked.
"We thought it was a natural cave. A pocket in the rock. But when we cleared the debris..." Sulla's weathered face went pale in the lamplight. "It was not natural. It was built. Carved. Ancient."
They reached the lowest level and followed a narrow tunnel that opened into a vast chamber. Thorwald's legionaries spread out with their lanterns, and the light revealed something that made even Kami catch his breath.
It was a temple.
Not Imperial architecture—this predated the Empire by millennia. The walls were covered in symbols Kami recognized from his Academy studies on forbidden history: the iconography of the Pneuma Cults, the ancient religions that had worshipped life-force itself as divine, that had practiced techniques the Empire had banned as too dangerous.
And in the chamber's center, on an altar of black stone, lay three bodies.
The missing workers.
Kami approached carefully, his Devourer senses screaming warnings. The bodies were intact but wrong—their skin had taken on a gray, crystalline texture, and their Pneuma signatures were completely absent. Not dead in the normal sense, but emptied. Drained of every trace of life-force and left as hollow shells.
"They found something here," Kami said, examining the altar. It was covered in the same symbols as the walls, but these had been activated—carved channels glowed faintly with residual Pneuma, forming a complex pattern that Kami recognized as a containment array. "Some kind of Pneuma construct. Something the ancients had imprisoned here. And these workers accidentally released it."
"Released what?" Thorwald demanded, his hand on his sword.
Before Kami could answer, the temperature in the chamber dropped sharply. Frost formed on the stone walls. The legionaries' Pneuma lanterns flickered and dimmed.
And from the shadows beyond the altar, something moved.
It emerged slowly, a figure that seemed to be made of congealed darkness given form. Humanoid but wrong, its proportions slightly off, its movements too fluid and too jerky at once. Where it passed, the very air seemed to die—warmth fled, light dimmed, and Kami felt his own Pneuma being pulled toward it.
"Void Wraith," he breathed, recognition dawning with horror. "The ancients created these as weapons. Artificial Devourers, constructs designed to drain entire cities of Pneuma. The Empire destroyed them all centuries ago. Or so we thought."
The Wraith's eyeless face turned toward Kami, and he felt a sudden, terrible kinship with it. This thing was what he could become if he lost all humanity, if he became nothing but hunger given form.
"Century, combat formation!" Thorwald roared. "Pneuma barriers, maximum strength!"
The legionaries locked shields and projected their defensive barriers, but the Wraith simply walked through them. The Pneuma barriers dissolved on contact, the life-force comprising them drained away and absorbed into the creature's mass.
It reached for the nearest legionary, a young soldier named Marcus.
Kami moved without thinking.
He crossed the distance in a blur of speed, his own Devourer nature propelling him faster than any normal human could move. His hand intercepted the Wraith's reaching claw, and the moment they made contact, a battle of pulling forces began.
The Wraith tried to drain Kami. Kami tried to drain the Wraith.
For a moment, they were locked in stalemate—two voids trying to consume each other, two infinite hungers meeting and finding no purchase. The air around them warped and twisted, frost spreading across the floor in spiraling patterns.
Then Kami did something the Wraith could not.
He chose.
Instead of trying to overpower it, he synchronized with it. Matched its pulling frequency exactly, then shifted just slightly, creating a resonance that amplified both their draining effects but directed them outward rather than at each other.
The Wraith, being a construct without consciousness or will, could not adapt to this tactic.
Kami could.
He redirected the combined draining effect back into the Wraith itself, creating a feedback loop. The creature was pulling on him, he was pulling on it, and both pulls were cycling through and amplifying until the Wraith was effectively consuming itself.
The creature shrieked—a sound like tearing metal and dying stars—and tried to break away. But Kami held on, his Devourer nature singing with dark joy as it encountered something it could drain without guilt, something that deserved to be consumed.
"Thorwald!" Kami shouted. "The altar! Destroy it! The array is feeding the Wraith, maintaining its form!"
Thorwald did not hesitate. He channeled his century's Pneuma through himself, his golden aura blazing to blinding intensity, and brought his sword down on the black stone altar with the force of twenty men behind it.
The altar shattered.
The Pneuma array broke. The containment symbols went dark.
And without the ancient magic sustaining it, the Wraith began to destabilize.
Kami felt the creature dissolving in his grasp, its artificial structure breaking down into raw, corrupted Pneuma. His hunger welcomed it, consumed it, drank in the concentrated life-force that had sustained the Wraith for centuries.
The rush was incredible. Intoxicating. More power than Kami had ever consumed, flowing into him in a torrent. He felt his Pneuma capacity expanding, felt his Devourer nature growing stronger, felt—
"Kami! Let go!"
Thorwald's voice cut through the euphoria. "You are draining too much! Let it go before you lose control!"
But the hunger did not want to let go. The hunger wanted more. Wanted all of it. Wanted to consume the Wraith completely and then turn to the legionaries, to Thorwald, to drain everything in this chamber and grow strong enough to—
NO.
With an effort that felt like tearing his own soul apart, Kami released the Wraith and stumbled backward.
The creature, no longer sustained by the altar and partially consumed by Kami, collapsed into a pool of dark, viscous fluid that quickly evaporated, leaving only scorch marks on the stone floor.
Silence filled the chamber.
Kami knelt on the cold stone, breathing hard, fighting the hunger that screamed at him to feed more, to take everything. His hands were shaking. His vision swam. The power he had just consumed churned inside him like poison and wine mixed together.
"Brother?" Thorwald approached cautiously. "Are you... still you?"
"I... yes. I am still me." Kami forced himself to his feet. "But that was close. Too close. If you had not stopped me..."
"But I did. That is what brothers are for."
Kami looked at the empty altar, at the symbols on the walls, at the hollowed corpses of the workers who had accidentally released the Wraith. "The contamination throughout the town—it was the Wraith's doing. As it fed, it spread corrupted Pneuma through the mines, poisoning everyone who worked here. Now that it is destroyed, the contamination should stop spreading."
"But the people who are already sick?"
"I can cure them now. With the power I just absorbed, I have more than enough Pneuma capacity to drain the corruption from everyone in Ferrum." Kami's expression was grim. "The Wraith's death will save this town. But Thorwald... someone put it here. Someone knew about this temple, knew about the Wraith, and guided the miners to excavate exactly where it was imprisoned."
"You think this was deliberate? That someone wanted the Wraith released?"
"I think someone wanted to see what would happen. Wanted to test whether ancient weapons could still be used. Wanted to know if a Devourer could stop such a thing." Kami met his brother's eyes. "We were sent here, Thorwald. This was not random assignment. Someone knew what was in these mines and wanted to see how I would respond."
"The Silent Legion," Thorwald said quietly. "They are testing you. Seeing if you can handle threats like this."
"Or seeing if I would succumb to them. If I would lose control and become another monster for them to hunt." Kami looked at his trembling hands. "Every mission will be a test. Every use of my power a potential trap. They are measuring me, brother. Waiting for the day I prove their fears justified."
"Then we prove them wrong. Over and over, as many times as it takes." Thorwald gripped his shoulder. "Now come. We have a town to cure and a report to file. And then we find out who knew about this temple and why they kept it secret."
They ascended from the mines as dawn broke over Ferrum, bringing light to a town that had been dying in darkness. Kami spent the next two days methodically curing every infected citizen, draining the Wraith's contamination from hundreds of people. It was exhausting work, but the power he had absorbed from the creature made it possible—he could cure twenty patients without resting, where before he could only manage five.
By the third day, Ferrum was clean. The contamination was purged, the sick were recovering, and the mine could safely reopen.
The grateful townspeople tried to thank Kami, tried to throw celebrations in his honor, but he accepted their gratitude with quiet discomfort. He had saved them, yes. But he had also consumed something that should have remained buried, had absorbed power that made the hunger stronger than ever.
On their final night in Ferrum, Kami stood on the mountainside overlooking the town, watching lamplight flicker in thousands of windows—lives saved, families reunited, a community spared from extinction.
"You should be proud," Thorwald said, joining him. "Four thousand people are alive because of you."
"Four thousand people are alive because I consumed an abomination and became stronger in the process," Kami replied. "The Wraith was a weapon, Thorwald. And now its power is inside me, making me more dangerous. Making me more of what everyone fears."
"You chose to save them instead of feed on them. That is what matters."
"This time. But the hunger grows with every feeding. One day, the choice might not be mine to make."
Thorwald had no answer to that. They stood in silence, two brothers watching over a saved town, both knowing that the real test was still to come.
Somewhere in the shadows of the Empire, someone was watching. Testing. Waiting to see what Kami Van Hellsin would become.