The sky had not healed. The black wound that split it still widened as if the heavens themselves were bleeding, and the air around it had lost its color, as if existence had forgotten how to be alive. Kim stood amid the ruins of the arena, ash swirling around a body that no longer resembled a human form. Elena watched him from afar, not daring to approach, because something in his eyes told her that this one who returned… was not entirely the Kim she knew.
The souls — those freed by the Field of Eclipse — poured out from the black rift in the sky, screaming without sound, weeping without tears, searching for shelter after being stripped of flesh and rest. In a single instant the sky was filled with them like a flood of nightmares.
But Kim, instead of fleeing, slowly raised his head, and his eyes began to gleam with a deadly silvery light. He lifted his right hand toward those souls and spoke in a low voice that cut through everything:
> "You are mine… you came out of hell, and you will return to it."
The souls surged toward him violently, circling him like a storm of shadows, slipping into his flesh through his pores like smoke trying to flee the light. Screams rose within him, his face flipping between pain and madness. He fell to his knees, clutching his chest, panting as if battling something beyond his strength. The very air began to collapse around him, and with every soul he absorbed he heard echoes of a distant past — voices not his own, memories that did not belong to him.
He saw himself in ages he did not know, fighting battles he had not fought, shouting words he had never spoken. These were the memories of the previous Dark King.
He saw the king kneeling in a sea of blood, his body torn with wounds, his eyes fading under the curse that devoured him. The old king whispered in a windlike voice:
> "Darkness is not evil, stranger… it is a shield that protects from the true evil… from what comes from beyond existence itself."
When the vision ended, Kim felt as if something heavy had been placed upon his soul. He no longer understood whether the curse that had belonged to the king had passed into him, or whether he had become the continuation of that curse.
He whispered, staring at the rent sky:
> "Everyone who bore this throne… was not a king, but a prisoner of his shadow."
---
Suddenly… the air trembled again, and the ground split in seven opposing places with sounds like iron screaming as it was torn. From those cracks emerged massive humanoid shadows, cloaked in black robes that hid their features. There were seven of them, and each step they took made the world shudder. Their faces were not human… smooth, eyeless, featureless, as if formed from the void itself.
The first spoke with a deep voice as if from the depths of graves:
> "Our king died… but the throne is not to be inherited by a blood-stained mortal."
The second stepped forward and said:
> "We are the Seven Heirs of Darkness… Princes of Nothingness. Each of us was created to bear the throne after him, yet you stole it from us, intruder."
Kim smiled slowly, his features reflecting an inhuman chill:
> "Your princes? Then you are the remnants of the body I severed with my hand."
Then he raised his hand, his voice booming like an inescapable decree:
> "Come… I will show you why even your king, in his final moment, feared to face me."