The second that word left Chaos’s mouth, the atmosphere in the cave turned to iron.

  Kaiser didn’t move, but something behind his eyes did. Something sharp, something focused. The red of his gaze darkened for a heartbeat, not with fear but with recognition, as if a whisper from another life had suddenly breathed down his spine. He hadn’t flinched at chains, hadn’t cowered beneath flame, hadn’t even blinked when his body was torn in half.

  But now? That word had struck something deeper. A memory without form. A phantom echo from a place buried so far down, even death couldn’t reach it. Chaos, ever the predator, caught the flicker in his eyes immediately, and he grinned, wide and slow, like a monster discovering the scent of something long believed extinct.

  “So you do know it,” Chaos said, his voice thick with triumphant mockery, stepping slowly around the still-healing corpse as if circling a sacrificial altar. “That’s good. It means what comes next will matter even more.”

  “I’ve heard… of it,” Kaiser rasped. “But I don’t… understand it.”

  The words had barely passed his lips when Chaos’s expression snapped. He moved in a blur, too fast to track, and with a casual brutality he lashed out, severing Kaiser’s lower jaw with one sweeping slash of his claw. Flesh split, bone cracked and Kaiser’s head twisted violently to the side, blood arcing through the air like ink spilled across molten glass. The cave echoed with the sickening crack of bone and the wet slap of muscle tearing free, and yet—there was no scream. No cry of pain. Only silence and regeneration.

  “Do not interrupt me,” Chaos spat, each syllable a venomous hiss that sizzled in the scorched air. He stood above Kaiser now, a towering silhouette of flame-wrapped shadows and quaking hatred, eyes glowing like miniature suns carved from rage. “You don’t get to speak. You get to learn.”

  He crouched low again, just above the blood-slick stone, and tapped one claw slowly against the center of his own chest, as if tracing the edge of something buried just beneath the skin. “An Origin,” he began, his voice quieter now but colder than before, reverent and cruel in equal measure. “It is not a weapon. It is not a power. It is you. Your legend. Your soul, laid bare to the stars.”

  His hand swept outward, and from his shadow, shapes began to twist and rise like ancient smoke given form. “Some people awaken theirs through glory. Others through agony. Through loss. Through a name, a wound, a city burned to ash. It can be anything—but it is always earned. It is not a gift.”

  Kaiser’s jaw had already begun to regrow, blood clotting and bone knitting with horrifying speed, but he did not speak again. Not yet. His single, red eye remained locked on Chaos, and Chaos stared right back, his grin widening as he saw not fear, but focus. Not confusion, but comprehension in progress.

  “The greatest of us have them. The Hopes, high ranking Liberators. Even that phoenix over there has one,” Chaos continued, glancing toward the unconscious knight who had once bathed the cave in flame. “But he’s too cautious to use it here. He knows it would kill everyone, including that little princess and you. Everyone but me and him.”

  Chaos turned slowly, his monstrous gaze falling once again on the distant figure of Regulus, slumped against a half-melted outcropping of stone. Little flames still flickered weakly from the knight's armor, embers clinging to him like dying stars, but his body had gone still. Only the slow rise and fall of his chest betrayed the life still inside him.

  "You would have done better if you'd used it," Chaos said aloud, his voice dripping with contempt. "At least then, when you died, it would have meant something. It would have taken effort. Maybe even... impressed me."

  His laughter echoed through the cavern. "But no," he continued, tone sharpening into a blade of mockery. "You played it safe. Held back. And look where that got you. Your princess burned, your brother barely breathing, and you? Crawling in the dirt."

  Regulus stirred faintly, his head turning just enough to glare weakly through the blood and soot that clung to his face. He opened his mouth, and the words that came were hoarse, but unmistakable. "Please, Chaos... don’t."

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  Chaos didn’t blink. He didn’t smile. His twisted face tightened into something darker than cruelty. Something absolute.

  "Oh, but I will," he said, turning back toward Kaiser with slow, deliberate steps, his shadow spilling over the broken man. "They always said it was forbidden. Too inhuman. Too cruel. A thing not meant to exist in a world of gods."

  He crouched low again, face inches from Kaiser’s, those blazing red eyes reflecting nothing but hunger and hate. "They feared what it did. What it still does. They said it wasn’t war. It wasn’t punishment. It was something else, something too barbaric for the world of men."

  His fingers curled slowly, black mist leaking from under his nails like poison. "But no one will be left to tell the tale. No record. No voice. Just silence. Just you... and me."

  Kaiser’s body was halfway whole again, his breath steady despite the ruin he’d endured. But still, he could not move. Still, he listened.

  "Do you know what it means to suffer in a way even death won’t allow?" Chaos whispered. "I will rip your soul from your flesh, and I won’t do it cleanly. I will gnaw it loose. You will feel every second as it happens. You will know it. And you will not pass on."

  His claws scraped against the stone beside Kaiser’s head, slow, deliberate. "You will not die. You will not rest. You will be aware. Lost in darkness. Dismembered from reality. Nothing but a shadow... trembling in the cracks between thought and time."

  He stood again, slowly, rising like a monolith of despair. "You wounded a Titan, and for that, your soul will burn without flame. Cry without voice. Exist without form. And when all else is gone, you will still remember what you were."

  Celestine had no strength left to shout, no breath left to plead. Her body ached from the burns Regulus's wing had left on her skin, her limbs heavy with exhaustion, her vision still flickering from the darkness that had briefly swallowed the entire cavern. But when Chaos moved, every nerve in her body screamed in renewed alarm.

  He raised his arms, and the chains once entwined around his arms fell like discarded serpents, clattering to the scorched sand with a dull, lifeless ring. The gesture should have offered relief, maybe even a break in the tension, but instead, it was the beginning of something far worse.

  He reached for the ragged, scorched fabric of his robe, and with a slow, almost ceremonial grace, peeled it away from his monstrous frame. What was left behind was not flesh, not armor, not anything Celestine could describe. Darkness poured from his form, and not shadows mind you, but true, living darkness, thick and hungry, spilling out like smoke from a dying world.

  It swept across the cave floor, a choking tide that consumed the ground, the air, and even the faintest traces of warmth. The flames Regulus had left behind were devoured soundlessly, light fading from the walls like it had never existed. The silence that followed was worse than noise. It was not absence, it was suppression. As if the world itself was being muted, suffocated.

  Celestine opened her mouth to say something—anything—but the sound caught in her throat. The words died before they reached the air, devoured by the expanding void. She watched, horrified, as Chaos raised his arms above his head, and crossed his wrists before him in a grotesque mimicry of a flytrap’s jaws. His clawed hands curved downward, twitching slightly, fingers flexing with a predatory rhythm. His body pulsed with shadow, the swirling blackness forming unnatural currents around him like a storm around its eye. And though no wind blew, Celestine’s golden hair fluttered as though drawn into the gravity of a black star.

  He looked at her then, those eyes, two smoldering infernos buried in the dark, glowing hotter than ever before, and spoke. His voice was no longer just sound. It was gravity. It bent everything in the room toward it, forced every soul to feel its weight. "Watch closely, Princess," he said, each syllable rolling over the battlefield like a death toll. "Watch as another fool dies for your dream. Watch as the cost of your delusion is paid in silence."

  His wrists began to slowly close, and with them, the darkness thickened further. It spiraled inward toward him, forming an orb of absolute black that pulsed like a heartbeat. The very air around it vibrated, each tremor crawling up Celestine’s skin like ice through her veins. Her hands trembled, her blade forgotten beside her. Something was happening that should never have been allowed to happen.

  Then came the word. A sound not spoken, but exhaled from the deepest pit of creation—a word so ancient and cruel it seemed to split the world in two. "Origin." Chaos whispered. And then, louder, final, with all the finality of a god casting judgment:

  "Umbragore."

  The name struck like a hammer to the chest. Regulus’s eyes went wide where he lay, his body twitching, mouth slack. The flickers of flame that clung to him blinked out instantly, as if life itself recoiled. Celestine staggered backward, falling to one knee, clutching her ribs as if the very syllables had bruised them. Her vision blurred as her soul tried to comprehend what her ears had heard. And across the cavern, all light dimmed further, until even Kaiser’s crimson fire looked like a candle against an encroaching void that had finally, truly woken.

  Bro tried to fight a raid boss with beginner gear.

  I’ve also gone back and added images to the first 10 chapters, and I’ll be updating 10 more every 3–5 days until all the older chapters are caught up.

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