Take Me Away, Dark Lord!

She remembered the Trickster, the terrifying power of the demonic entity.

If the thing buried beneath the Ashen Forest was worse than that, if it had been sealed away by entire generations of Archdukes, then Kaelus and Leonidas were walking into a meat grinder.

Ice and Fire magics sure were powerful. But against ancient, strong demons that had peculiar magic powers, they might not be enough.

”I have to help them,” Seraphina declared, her voice resolute.

She jumped off the tall bed, her bare feet hitting the obsidian floor with a soft thwap.

”My Lady! That is entirely unadvisable!” Bartholomew panicked, floating after her. ”The forest is miles away! You are six years old! You cannot simply march out of the fortress! The guards will stop you!”

”I’m not going to march out of the fortress,” Seraphina replied, walking briskly toward the center of the large, circular ash-bear rug. ”Papa Duke already locked the doors with his magic spells. If I try to leave, he’ll know. And by the time I get there on foot, it will be too late.”

”Then what do you propose to do?!”

”I am going to use the Wifi,” Seraphina stated blankly.

Bartholomew blinked, utterly confounded by the foreign terminology. ”The... the what?”

”Never mind,” Seraphina waved her hand dismissively.

She reached the center of the rug. She sat down, crossing her legs perfectly into a strict, disciplined lotus position. She placed her small hands on her knees, palms facing upward.

She took a deep, shuddering breath, closing her eyes.

She had learned something vital during her confrontation with the Trickster in the Verdant Gate. When she had pinned the demon to the floor, she hadn’t just created heavy shadows. She had used her Supreme Dark Core to connect with the ambient mana of the environment.

Darkness was not just an element. Darkness was the absence of light. It was the void that existed between the stars, between the atoms, between the very leylines of the earth. It was a connective tissue that spanned the entire continent.

If she concentrated hard enough and dropped her barriers completely, she could use her Core as a massive, metaphysical satellite dish. She could cast her perception out, traveling along the shadows, moving at the speed of thought, until she found the specific, familiar, comforting frequency of Kaelus’s icy aura.

She didn’t need to be there physically. She just needed to be there spiritually. She needed to provide long-range artillery support.

”Butt- tolomeow,” Seraphina said, her voice echoing slightly as she began to draw her mana inward, preparing for the astral projection.

”Yes, My Lady?” the ghost butler responded, hovering nervously nearby.

”I need you to stand guard,” Seraphina commanded, her eyes remaining closed. ”Do not let anyone into this room. Not the maids, the guards, or Auntie Lysa. If they try to open the door, throw things at them. Rattle the windows. Make the walls bleed. Do whatever spooky butler ghost things you have to do to keep them out.”

”I shall create a poltergeist disturbance of unparalleled magnitude, My Lady,” Bartholomew swore, bowing deeply, placing his hand over his glowing, purple-bitten chest. ”No soul shall cross this threshold.”

”Good,” Seraphina whispered.

She let out one final, slow exhale.

’You thought you could leave me behind, Papa,’ Seraphina thought, a fierce, terrifying, feral grin spreading across her six-year-old face. ’You thought you could put your Heir to the Sovereign of the North in a time-out.’

The temperature in the guest suite plummeted to absolute zero.

A massive, roaring shockwave of pure, pitch-black liquid shadow erupted from Seraphina’s small body. It didn’t destroy the room; it coated it. The shadows raced up the walls, covering the windows, snuffing out the moonlight, plunging the entire chamber into an impenetrable, suffocating sphere of absolute void.

’You are about to learn,’ Seraphina vowed, projecting her consciousness out into the dark, racing across the miles of volcanic rock toward the Ashen Forest, ’that when the Reaper goes to war, his shadow always follows.’

The physical body of the six-year-old girl remained perfectly still on the rug, her breathing slowing to a shallow, rhythmic hum.

But high above the Obsidian Gate, shooting across the bruised, orange sky like a silent, invisible comet of pure annihilation, the wrath of the Mushroom hurtled toward the battlefield, ready to rain absolute hell upon whatever ancient monster dared to threaten her family.

The Ashen Forest was not a forest in the traditional sense. It was a jagged, petrified graveyard of ancient timber, born from a volcanic cataclysm centuries prior.

The trees here did not possess leaves or sap; they were towering, twisted monoliths of gray, calcified ash and black obsidian, their branches reaching up toward the bruised, orange sky of the Valen Archduchy like the skeletal fingers of drowning men.

The ground was not soil, but a thick, abrasive layer of pumice and pulverized rock that crunched loudly beneath the boots of marching soldiers.

It was a dead, silent place, devoid of wildlife.

No birds nested in the petrified branches. No insects crawled through the abrasive dust.

The air was perpetually stagnant, smelling sharply of sulfur, old iron, and the faint, unsettling metallic tang of ancient, sealed corruption.

In the dead center of this geological graveyard sat the excavation site.

It was a yawning crater, easily two hundred yards in diameter, ringed by heavy iron scaffolding and the steam-powered drilling rigs of Archduke Leonidas Valen’s industrial surveyors. The crater spiraled downward in terraced, jagged tiers, leading into the pitch-black, suffocating depths of the earth.

Standing at the very edge of this colossal pit, looking down into the lightless abyss, was Duke Kaelus von Nacht.

The Archduke of the North was not projecting his usual stoic patience. He was vibrating with a tense, deeply irritated kinetic energy.

He unclasped a small, silver pocket watch from his belt, flicking the intricate cover open with his thumb.

11:45 PM.

Kaelus scowled, snapping the watch shut and shoving it back into his pocket.

He had left the Emerald Crown exactly three hours and fifteen minutes ago, successfully administered a potel spell disguised as sweetened milk to his six-year-old daughter.

The dosage was precisely calculated by Dr. Thorne to ensure eight uninterrupted hours of deep, restorative REM sleep.

Which meant Kaelus had exactly four hours and fifteen minutes to descend into an unmapped subterranean cavern, locate an ancient, world-ending anomaly that had terrified the ancestral ghosts of the Valen bloodline, eradicate it from the face of the mortal plane, ride back to the Verdant Gate, wash the monster blood from his armor, and be sitting casually in the armchair beside her bed when she woke up, reading a book as if he had never left the room.

It was a tight schedule.

And Kaelus von Nacht despised tight schedules.

”Leonidas,” Kaelus barked, his voice echoing sharply over the crater, cutting through the tense silence of the assembled troops. ”Your surveyors are moving with the speed of arthritic snails. We do not have time to meticulously map the structural integrity of every single stalactite.”

Archduke Leonidas Valen, standing a few yards away, surrounded by a dozen of his elite Fire Mages and Captain Pyros, threw his hands into the air in a gesture of exasperation.

”We are dealing with a sealed, containment vault, Kaelus!” Leonidas roared back, his amber eyes blazing in the dark. He was armored tonight, wearing a articulated breastplate that glowed faintly with internal heat. ”My ancestors collapsed this mine for a reason! If we just breach the ceiling blindly, we could trigger a tectonic collapse and bury ourselves under a million tons of volcanic rock! The Ward-Breakers need twenty more minutes to safely dismantle the primary arcane locks!”

”I do not have twenty minutes,” Kaelus snapped, his violet eyes glowing with an impatient radioactive light. He stepped closer to the edge of the pit. ”Every second we stand here debating geology is a second the anomaly has to sense our presence and prepare. I am ending this.”

”Kaelus, wait! Do not be a reckless fool!” Leonidas bellowed, realizing exactly what the madman of the North was about to do.

”Sir Lucas! Secure the perimeter! Shield formation!” Kaelus roared, completely ignoring the Fire Archduke.

The commanders of the Black Bastion, Lucas, Boris, and Gallahan instantly dropped into a defensive crouch, slamming their shields into the dirt, raising them high to create an interlocking wall of angled steel.