Shadow Slave

The Children of Nether were powerful, supremely skilled, and fierce. They wielded their powers with profound mastery, and their Will washed over the devastated square like a tide. Fighting them felt like fighting Saint — theirs was a grounded, methodical, and indomitable battle style. It revealed the depths of their malevolent resolve and felt suffocating in its relentless inevitability.

However, today, they had met their match. Sunny, Nephis, and Saint were overwhelmingly powerful themselves. In fact, it was astonishing that a group of Great Nightmare Creatures could pressure them — having always fought across Ranks, Sunny had grown used to only being wary of Cursed abominations. A Great Nightmare Creature had to be at least a Terror to make him feel tense.

For now, their strength was evenly matched...

But that was only because the Great Devil who commanded the other Tainted Saints had not joined the battle yet. He was still motionless, observing the battle while resting his greatsword on the ground. Sunny was waiting for the moment when the eerie abominations would attack with somber anticipation, knowing that they would suffer as a result.

But even as the battle progressed, the Devil remained still.

And because he did not move, his warriors fell one by one.

The Fire Saint was the most fearsome and devastating among them, his flames capable of melting steel and turning stone into rivers of lava. However, he was also the unluckiest. And luck, too, dictated the limits of one’s strength.

It would be difficult to find three enemies he was less suited to fight. Saint was extremely resistant to all elemental attacks, after all, so she was all but impervious to his flames. Sunny, meanwhile, had assumed the form of the Jade Titan, inheriting the same resilient trait.

Naturally, there was no point in even mentioning Nephis. As a Supreme Titan who had inherited the Fire of Sun God, trying to burn her was an exercise in futility.

So, the Fire Saint fell first. Saint caught him mid-swing, throwing the towering abomination off balance and sending him crashing to the ground with a push of her shield. Then, she destroyed him in the most brutal fashion — knowing that the enemy would protect the weak points of his armor even while prone, she simply raised her shield and repeatedly brought it down on his helmet.

After the first blow, the helmet bent. After the second, it cracked. After the third, it exploded into a cloud of shrapnel, stone fragments, and ruby dust. The Fire Saint’s head was entirely crushed.

The Ice Saint had not fared much better. This one had a slimmer figure, unmistakably female. Her power was both potent and insidious, capable of rendering most terrible foes weak and vulnerable... however, the lethal cold she emanated was easily vanquished by Neph’s immolating heat.

In some ways, she was even worse off than the Fire Saint in this battle — her power was not only ineffective against the enemy, it was directly countered by one of them.

She fell second. Nephis unleashed her flames to envelop the Ice Saint, and even if her armor managed to withstand the impossible heat, it began to glow with incandescent radiance, having turned softer and weaker. Saint used that weakness to pierce her fallen kin’s chest, ending her profane existence with one decisive strike.

The third of the Tainted Saints, who commanded stone, faced Sunny. His power was formidable and profoundly versatile, but its main application was denying the enemy sure footing — which, of course, was a death sentence on most battlefields, where footwork and the ability to push against the earth to generate force reigned.

Sunny, however, had become both a source of light and a champion of shadows. As long as there were shadows around him, he could step through them to avoid being caught in the trap of liquid stone. He could also summon more of them from the Shadow Lantern and manifest them into a layer of matter atop the ground.

His enemy could have shifted to a different strategy, most likely, but Sunny did not give him the chance. After witnessing the death of the Space Saint, the rest of them knew to guard their shadows — so, this time, he simply used brute force to bat the opponent’s shield aside and drive his sword into his unprotected armpit.

That might not have been a fatal wound, but it became one when Sunny infused the blade of his sword with Death Will.

The Water Saint was the last to die. She was swift and elusive, both fleeting and devastating, but her tidal form could not contend against Neph’s flame and the power granted to Saint by Sunny’s augmentation. In the end, she was diminished by the heat, caged by the shadows, and killed by Sunny’s slaying blade.

All four could have unleashed far more devastation if not for the field of annulment summoned by Saint.

But then again, the same could be said about Sunny and Nephis — if their powers weren’t suppressed, it wouldn’t be just the square of the crumbling settlement that had ended up utterly destroyed. It would have been the settlement itself.

The square had become a scene of chilling devastation... but the tall obelisk at its center still stood.

The last of the Tainted Saints still stood in the shadow of the obelisk, as well.

In truth, the battle was over at this point. No matter how powerful that Great Devil was, he could not be powerful enough to win against Sunny, Nephis, and Saint.

More than that, Sunny had not used all of his powers. If he wished to, he could have swayed the scales of battle in their favor even earlier — all six of the Children of Nether had been slain by him or Saint, after all.

That meant that their shades were now under his command. The rest of the Shadow Legion was engaged in the war against the Barrow Wraiths on the Forgotten Shore, but these new recruits could be summoned at any time.

And yet, he did not summon them.

In fact, after receiving a dark look from Saint, he remained motionless and held Nephis back, as well.

Saint walked toward the last defender of the crumbling settlement with confident steps. It seemed that she wanted to bring down this Great Devil, her equal, alone.