Shadow Slave

The reinforcements Morgan had brought helped the defenders of the Lake of Tears buy the civilians more time to flee toward Ravenheart. They might not have lasted two days, as Nightingale had hoped for, but the ferocious battle did rage on throughout the morning and well past noon, almost reaching its second sunset.

In the end, however, it was all pointless. Even while holding his best chess pieces back and spread thin across three battlefronts — Moonriver Plains, Glass Hell, and Chained Isles — Mordret still crushed them.

The Saints had exhausted their essence. The Ascended were riddled with wounds and losing all hope. The Awakened warriors suffered grievous losses, dying in scores despite the blessing of their goddess. Seishan had managed to keep herself alive, but many of her sisters would have been dead if not for Nephis. She witnessed Death Singer and Lonesome Howl receive wounds that would have been fatal if not for the miraculous white flames of their Sovereign. She saw a young Saint who had only recently conquered his Third Nightmare fall, never to rise again.

Just like that, humanity lost one of its Transcendent champions.

It was Godgrave, all over again...

No, it was much worse than that.

Her mother and the King of Swords had committed myriad sins, true, but their goals — misguided as they might have been — had always been altruistic. They wanted to preserve as many human lives as could be saved, according to their cold logic, by sacrificing everyone else. The war they waged upon each other was meant to give humanity a chance to survive.

The true cause of this ferocious slaughter, though, was Asterion — a man who wanted to devour all of mankind.

The perpetrator of the slaughter, meanwhile, was Mordret... who wanted to eradicate as many humans as possible to rob Asterion of excess power.

Neither of them was aiming to save anyone except himself, which made this battle feel far more malicious than anything that had happened in Godgrave.

In fact, what these two Supreme horrors were doing felt more malevolent than even the atrocities committed by Nightmare Creatures. Nightmare Creatures, after all, did not possess concepts of good and evil, moral and immoral. But Asterion and Mordret did, and chose to be no better than nightmare creatures anyway.

For the first time since becoming an Awakened, Seishan felt nauseated by the stench of blood.

‘I want to be a Supreme, too.’

She wanted to become as powerful as they were, so that she could bleed them and rend them apart, so that she could erase their vile presence from existence.

The battle was quickly barreling toward a breaking point. The battered formation of the defending army beneath the Weeping Goddess was about to collapse, and the warriors fighting atop the great waterfall had been pushed to the very edge of the cliffs, mere steps away from plummeting down. Only the Citadel itself still held, stubbornly refusing to be conquered by the King of Nothing.

At some point, Seishan found herself fighting side by side with Nightingale once again.

”We can’t continue!”

Her voice was hoarse.

”We must abandon the remaining civilians and retreat!”

He glanced at her, his eyes betraying a sense of anguish, fear... and fury.

“Not yet.”

Seishan gritted her teeth.

”If you don’t command a retreat, you’ll lose both the civilians and the soldiers!”

She pierced him with a scathing gaze, wondering if the man who had conquered Ravenheart without spilling a single drop of blood was truly worthy of ruling it.

”This is your burden. Carry it!”

Kai’s expression tensed.

He glanced over the battlefield, his mystical eyes seeing every little detail with flawless clarity.

He saw the city and the people who were frantically waiting for the enormous elevators to take them to the top of the plateau, or scaling the endless expanse of stairs carved into the stone, as well.

Kai’s task was to protect these people as they escaped the Lake of Tears... and to defend them on the road to Ravenheart, too.

‘What do I do?’

Somewhere else on the battlefield, Morgan was ignoring the taunting voices of her brother as she calmly and methodically cut down one vessel after another.

‘Kai should be sounding the retreat soon... If nothing happened to change the flow of the battle before that.’

Her thoughts were grim.

She knew that Kai, as the Steward of the West, would want to protect every single one of his people. No, even if he was not their ruler, he would have wanted to save them regardless.

But what they needed to be protected from was not becoming vessels of the King of Nothing. Mordret did not really need thousands more mundane vessels — taking the bodies of these people was not going to add much to his strength.

He simply aimed to kill them all to diminish the future Hunger Domain.

What he really wanted was the Citadel itself, which would grant him far greater power. More important than even the Citadel was access to the River of Tears — that was a far more important prize. Because both the River of Tears itself and the lands surrounding it were home to myriad Nightmare Creatures. It was these nightmare creatures that were his real goal, the true resource that could vastly empower his Domain.

In that regard, the true goal that Mordret pursued... must have always been Godgrave. After all, the scarlet jungle of Godgrave possessed a unique ability to give birth to Nightmare Creatures at a rate impossible anywhere else in the Dream Realm. These Nightmare Creatures grew and climbed to higher Ranks with astonishing speed, as well... in short, Godgrave was a lavish and nearly inexhaustible source of new vessels for Mordret, who desperately needed to match Asterion’s growth.

The Glass Hell was merely the staging ground for his invasion of Godgrave, while the attacks on the Lake of Tears and the Chained Isles were secondary goals at best, and nothing more than distractions at worst.

There was one Citadel in the Glass Hell. There was one Citadel on the edge of the Moonriver Plains, as well, and while there used to be two Citadels on the Chained Isles, only one of them was left.

Godgrave, however, contained no fewer than four Citadels. That was where Mordret’s most powerful vessels had to be at the moment, no doubt. If he entrenched himself in Godgrave, his power would keep growing steadily, endlessly fueling his genocidal campaign against the Human Domain.

‘Why is my brother so ambitious?’

Morgan smiled darkly.

Her brother, Mordret, was like a mirror. The person who had reflected in it first was his father, Anvil of Valor, and the person who had reflected in it the most was his captor and guardian, Asterion.

The wretched boy took the worst parts of both and combined them into one unholy persona.

Perhaps it was a miracle that he had not slaughtered any cities before now.

‘What is taking Kai so long?’

At this rate, they would not even be able to retreat.

An orderly retreat was the most difficult of military maneuvers, after all.

Some distance away, Kai cut down a powerful vessel of the King of Nothing and glanced around.

No matter where he glanced, he saw no path to salvage the battle.

There was only one thing he could do.

So, Kai gritted his teeth, and then whispered:

”...Asterion.”

His voice echoed above the battlefield.