The rain of Eryndor tasted of ash and blood.
On the Eastern front, the streets were nothing more than an open-air slaughterhouse. The carcasses of collapsed buildings formed natural funnels where the demonic tide rushed in with blind fury.
At the heart of this maelstrom, Raguel's colossal sword cleaved the air with a divine hum. With a brutal backhand, Gabriel's lieutenant decapitated three of the Lost whose deformed bodies collapsed into the toxic mud. But Raguel wasn't fighting to advance; he fought to protect a specific point.
Behind him, kneeling on the fractured asphalt, Liah ignored the chaos. Her scratched fingers traced wide circular glyphs on the soaked ground at breakneck speed. She wasn't using binding magic. She was weaving an acoustic network.
Her two translucent daggers levitated before her, vibrating with contained energy.
"They're pushing the left flank!" roared an archangel, his armor stained with black blood, as he repelled a multi-limbed abomination.
"Hold the line!" ordered Raguel, his voice drowned out by the howling. "Liah, how much longer?"
"It's ready!" she replied in a clear voice, her amethyst eyes shining with absolute brilliance.
She grabbed the hilts of her daggers and struck them violently together above the central glyph.
The crystal-clear chime didn't evaporate into the air: it was absorbed by the arcana drawn on the ground, then redirected as a colossal sonic shockwave. A frequency of pure Aether, piercing and inaudible to the archangels, swept across the entire avenue.
The effect was immediate. The corrupted Eryndorians, those civilians turned into monsters by the Symphony of Shadows, collapsed like puppets whose strings had just been cut. Their hands shot to their ears as their nervous systems, overloaded by the sonic amplification, instantly short-circuited. They sank into a saving paralysis, unconscious but alive.
Raguel lowered his blade, observing the neutralized human tide. He cast an impressed glance at Liah.
"The sorting is done," the archangel murmured, a carnivorous smile stretching his lips. "Kill everything that's still moving!"
Freed from the moral burden of having to spare humans, the archangels descended upon the demons with the thunder of divine judgment.
***
At the other end of hell, on the Western front, the Legion of Remnants held its position with military rigor.
At the center of the barricade, Nicole Lawyer exhaled a thin purplish cloud. She wasn't a brute-force melee fighter, but an architect of death. Her gauntlets, true masterpieces blending human technology and Aether engineering, hummed at her wrists. With a fluid motion, one of the Legion's commanding officers released a volley of pressurized capsules. The neurotoxic gas, her natural affinity, exploded into the enemy ranks, instantly liquefying the lungs of the Lost who collapsed coughing up black bile.
But the horde was inexhaustible. A Nightmare, a mass of festering flesh topped with four arms clad in bone blades, lunged toward her with a roar, tearing through the toxic cloud.
A blue lightning bolt crackled above her head.
Barachiel crashed to the ground in an explosion of lightning that vaporized the Nightmare into a cloud of burning ash. The Primordial straightened up, his arrogant smile frozen on his face, his hands casually stuffed in his pockets.
"Sorry I'm late," he tossed at Nicole. "We had to take a shortcut."
Before she could even answer, Barachiel struck the ground with his heel. A web of electric arcs spread across the entire Western front, calculated to the exact millivolt. The lightning struck the corrupted civilians with surgical precision, short-circuiting their synapses without stopping their hearts. The human bodies crumpled, inert.
Then, the spatial pressure dropped brutally. The air grew heavy, suffocating.
An immense shadow masked the reddish sky. Seven landed in the center of the demonic horde. His black wings slowly retracted. Before him, dozens of the Lost and Nightmares howled. There were no more humans left to spare.
Gray Aether, cold and mathematical, condensed around his arms. Onyx threads shot from his forearms, coiling at breakneck speed to form heavy chains that ended in the curved blades of his two massive scythes.
"Disappear."
His voice fell like a divine verdict, and Seven vanished.
He wasn't just fast; he dominated the space. A black chain lashed out, wrapping around a Nightmare's throat. With a brutal pull, Seven propelled the beast toward him while advancing, reducing the distance to nothing. His scythe cleaved the air in a perfect arc, separating the head from the torso in a spray of sticky blood.
Without a glance at the corpse, the angel of death pivoted. His chains twirled around him, hissing like shadow vipers. Every strike was calculated to the millimeter. He wasted no movement. He dodged the bone blades with a simple tilt of his torso and retaliated by burying his onyx spikes directly into the vital centers of his prey. The impact made the concrete tremble. The demons were swept away, dismembered, pulverized by the shockwaves his chains propagated with every blow landed.
His face remained marble, his darkened blue eyes staring into the void with the coldness of a machine executing a slaughter protocol.
Behind the front line, Nicole Lawyer watched the massacre, her eyes wide with absolute fascination.
*Such mastery of Aether... such a heavy soul density,* she thought, her scientific mind running at full speed. *His meridians shouldn't be able to withstand such kinetic strain. I have to study him... to dissect those flows.*
Her fingers twitched with excitement. She took a step forward, a vial of stabilizing Aether in hand, but a polar chill crept up her spine.
Barachiel had just turned his head toward her.
The Archangel's mocking smile had vanished, replaced by a gaze of azure and gold of terrifying darkness. A silent warning, heavy with the promise of instant death.
Nicole swallowed hard and slowly stepped back, choking down her urges for dissection.
***
A few hours later, silence had fallen back over the ruins.
In the basement of an old gutted bank, converted into a makeshift command post, the atmosphere was stifling. Lit by the flickering glow of Aether crystals, a large tactical map of the city was spread across a concrete table.
Nicole Lawyer stood at the head of the table, arms crossed, her face hardened by days of slaughter. Around her, Seven, Liah, Barachiel, and Raguel kept silent.
"The Aether flow is accelerating," Nicole began, her gravelly voice breaking the calm. "The Legion's readings are conclusive. The ritual will reach its point of no return by tomorrow. More precisely, at sunrise on the second day. If the central dome isn't destroyed before dawn, the rift will become permanent, and the entire region will be swallowed by the Void."
She drove a dagger into the center of the map.
"Which leaves us tonight to launch the assault. And this is where it becomes suicidal. Our scouts have confirmed the energy signatures guarding the ritual. We're no longer dealing with low-tier Nightmares."
She looked Seven in the eyes.
"We have two Scourges: Beltharion and Azariel. The kind of monsters capable of erasing a soul with a single touch. Then, there's Abezethibou. A superior Nightmare, but the density of his core indicates he will evolve to the rank of Blasphemy by the end of the ritual."
She paused, letting the information sink in.
"Finally, Malakiel. A true, complete Blasphemy. He alone possesses the firepower to raze what remains of Eryndor."
Barachiel leaned back in his chair, an amused sneer stretching his lips.
"Two Scourges and two Blasphemies... Oh yeah, they didn't pull any punches," the Primordial let out, visibly more excited than intimidated by the prospect of such a carnage.
"This is not a game," Nicole interjected with an icy tone, stepping toward the assembly. "Listen to me carefully. Until now, we've done everything to spare the corrupted humans. You've risked your lives to paralyze or bypass them. But for this final infiltration... that's over."
Liah's blood ran cold.
"If the infernal guard uses them as meat shields..." Raguel began, guessing what was coming.
"If the Eryndorians stand in your way to the heart of the ritual, you don't try to save them," Nicole ordered, her voice devoid of any pity. "The stakes transcend morality. If we fail tomorrow at dawn, no one can imagine the scale it would take. So if a corrupted civilian blocks your path, you put them down. Without hesitation."
A leaden silence fell over the room. Killing demons was one thing. But deliberately massacring their former neighbors, their teachers, the shopkeepers of their city to achieve the objective... that was crossing a nightmarish line.
Yet, no one objected. The weight of the ashes was too heavy to afford the luxury of innocence.
***
After the meeting, the squad began its preparations. In a half-collapsed corridor of the bunker, away from the clamor of weapons being sharpened, Seven stopped.
Liah was kneeling in the gloom, her gaze intensely fixed on the decaying concrete wall. Her slender fingers meticulously traced complex arcana and resonance seals in the air, memorizing the formulas she would need. She was silently preparing her spiritual arsenal for the dawn. For Abezethibou.
Seven stood watching her for a few seconds. She carried within her a monstrous soul density, a burden she had accepted for him.
He took a step toward her. His boots crunched on shattered glass. Liah paused her tracing and looked up at him.
"Seven?"
He nervously ran a hand through his black hair. The glacial cruelty that possessed him on the battlefield had evaporated. Facing her, he became that fractured teenager again, driven by a deeply human awkwardness he desperately tried to preserve.
"Liah, I... We need to talk about something. Before tomorrow."
She tilted her head, intrigued by his hesitant tone.
"In Eden..." he finally blurted out, his voice slightly raspy, fists clenched in his pockets. "When I put my blade to your throat. I had completely lost control. I was drowning in hatred and... I hate myself for it. I hate myself for daring to threaten you when you are the only reason I haven't yet become a complete monster. I'm sorry."
Liah's eyes widened slightly. Hearing such vulnerable apologies from the Judge of Eryndor felt surreal.
She saw that Seven was no longer looking her in the eyes. He stared at the floor, and beneath the grime and dust, a slight blush tinted his pale cheeks. The incarnation of celestial death was embarrassed.
"Thank you," Seven whispered, his voice almost inaudible. "Thank you for always being there with me. And... for me. No matter the situation."
He finally raised his eyes to her, his dark gaze shining with a new intensity, desperately anchored in the present.
"I will always be there for you, too. I swear it."
Liah's heart skipped a beat. An unexpected warmth rushed to her face, making her blush in turn. This clumsy oath was nothing childish; it was the promise of two fractured souls refusing to sink into the void.
She offered a smile. A radiant, rare, and precious smile that pierced the gloom of the corridor.
"I know, Seven. I always knew."
***
The sky outside was beginning to tinge with a bruised purple. Dawn was approaching, heralding the end.
In the large ruined square, the squad of the last hope was gathered. Elite angels of the Legion, Barachiel, Raguel, Liah, and Seven. Their weapons were drawn, their auras blazing in the darkness, pushing back the mist.
Nicole Lawyer stood before them, her Aether gauntlets glowing with a deadly greenish light.
"Listen to me closely!" she roared, her voice echoing off the destroyed facades. "What awaits us out there defies understanding. Most of us won't come back. But we are the last line of defense! If we have to die spitting our blood on these monsters, we'll do it! We'll do it to save what's left of this world! Move out!"
A fierce war cry rose from the troop, tearing through the deathly silence of the city, and the squad charged into the darkness, toward the crimson spiral that beat like a sick heart.
But as the first clashes erupted in the city center, at the opposite border of Eryndor, a solitary figure calmly crossed the barriers of the dead city.
A man.
His steps were slow, measured. He wore elegant but dark clothes, and his green hair fluttered gently in the ash-laden wind.
In his path, the chaos died down. The Lost prowling the sector backed away, whimpering in terror. Even the proud Nightmares, giant monsters of pride and fire, bent their knees, bowing face-to-the-ground at the mere brush of his aura.
The man stopped. His piercing, almost luminescent lavender eyes fixed on the immense dome of glowing red energy swirling at the center of Eryndor, where the final war had just broken out.
His lips stretched into a thin, amused, and indecipherable smile.
"Interesting..." he murmured, his voice echoing like a promise of disaster.