Kaiza's heart pounded in his chest, the burden of war crushing him beneath its weight like an unrelenting tempest. His body protested, the sheer number of wounds and centuries of eternal life holding it down. But he couldn't stop. He couldn't allow the darkness to triumph. Not with Mina's life hanging in the balance.The mermaid's deformed shape towered before him, her scales shining with the pale glow of the moon. Her eyes blazed with an unnatural thirst, as if she could already savor the fear and agony in his blood. Her claws were smeared with blood his blood. She'd already hurt him, had already breached his walls, but he wasn't done yet. He wouldn't be.Behind her, the hellish shadow from the depths arose a monster so immense and powerful that the sea itself seemed to shake. The beast's wide-open maw ripped the air asunder with an unearthly roar, its bared teeth glinting like knives as it pulled itself along, sliding over the battlefield like a serpent of nightmares. Its mere prese

With that explosion of light came a deep silence.What appeared to be smoke writhed in the air, an echo of something unseen gliding through the ruin of war.The creature’s mangled body had fallen upon the broken ground, its once-faithful frame twisted and thrashing. But for Kaiza, there would be no time to celebrate.His sight was grainy, his wounds infinite, and Mina’s drooping body yet unyielding on the spiked pavement.Blood ran down his fingers.He breathed in fits and starts. Move. Get to her.His brain was telling him to deck the guy, but his body couldn’t do it.He lurched ahead, his sword trailing in the dirt. “Mina…”A weak cough. She was alive.He felt relief, then a tangle of dread in his chest. At her side, he collapsed, hands trembling as he rolled her over.A sharp gasp slipped between her lips as her blood-soaked fingers dug into his arm.Her eyes fluttered open and glowed with an unnatural light not her own.But something else had stirred within her.The earth shook be

The void trembled.Kaiza held Mina closer as the abyss rumbled, deep and relentless.The swirling shadows receded, revealing something vast, something old.The air itself felt heavy now, the debilitating force settling into his bones.A form began emerging titanic, monstrous, eternal.Before them loomed a titan of the void: its form a monument of pure darkness, it slaughtered the very fabric of reality. Sentient, malevolent, and endless, two cracking void eyes looked down on them.A deep, guttural voice reverberated into the nothingness.“You have upset the balance, forsaken ones. The girl belongs to me."Kaiza stood before Mina, sword wreathed in blue fire of defiance. His muscles tensed.He could sense the pressure of those primordial eyes weighing upon him, testing him like an insect prior to the mandate of destruction.Mina twitched in his arms, her silver light stuttering. "Kaiza… run.""Not happening." He never took his eyes off Titan. “And if it wants you, it’s going through me

The void crackled in unnatural, eerie silence. It was a heavy weight, cold, suffocating in the air.The blue flame of Kaiza’s sword flickered in the stifling dark as his chest rose and fell with every ragged breath.It had been the blast from Mina that very titan that had devoured her that had slammed him down onto the broken earth, the impact leaving him aching from the force of the attack.A single thought raced through his mind.She’s still in there. She has to be.The darkness writhed around him, beating with an unstuck beat.He climbed onto his knees, fighting back the weight of the bottomless well.His gaze darted back to Mina no, no longer Mina but the monstrous, void-soaked shape she’d taken on.Her body shimmered with dark matter, her movements sickly smooth, as if she were a piece of the shadow itself.Her armor, once silvery, was now a collection of black and shadow, a jumbled mess of the power of the void.Her eyes were sick with ancient hunger, a lust for destruction, but

The void roared.Black flames licked at the ground, devouring the creatures of the abyss as embers at the end of life are sent out upon the wind.The wails of the damned rampaged ever and ever, ringing in the desolate void, as the horror of noumenon mixed and knotted, their forms rotting in the gluttonous conn.And at the heart of it, standing in the inferno, was Mina.But she was no longer only Mina.Kaiza could hardly stand, his body bruised and bleeding, but his breath caught when he saw her.The fragility of the girl he had vowed to protect was gone.The trembling voice that had called his name in the dark was gone.What was left is something older. Something raw.Her form was still human in outline mostly but the air around her hummed with something worse than abyssal corruption.An ultraviolet light burned behind her eyes, cosmic and blistering, crowded with something incomprehensible to my feeble flesh.Her dark hair lashed in the wind, the energy circling her limbs, a moving t