THE KING OF NOTHING

  Chapter XIII: The Beginning of the Shadow

  The atmosphere in the plaza didn't change; it groaned. The glacial indifference of Ophelia, that layer of frost on a deep lake, had evaporated under the heat of her own blood. What emerged was not a fire of rage, but the absolute cold of interstellar void, concentrated into a point.

  Though her face remained a mask of pale marble, her yellow eyes injected a pure, calculated hatred, a poison distilled from centuries of wounded arrogance. She no longer moved like a warrior, not even like a shadow. She moved like a slow-motion natural disaster, each step a promise of extinction. Her attacks were not blows; they were cancellations. Her rapier did not whistle as it cut the air; it emitted sharp, strident shrieks, as if the metal itself—that pulsating purple metal—screamed in a perverse ecstasy for the violence it channeled, for the nothingness it served.

  The Abomination, far from being cowed, counterattacked with the blind fury of that which knows no fear, only hunger and persistence. Its new tentacles, coated in a bony carapace born of pain, moved not with the clumsiness of mass, but with the spasmodic speed of a nerve exposed to fire, breaking the sound barrier again and again.

  CRACK! CRACK!

  Ophelia parried, blocked, dematerialized the blows with her rapier, but each impact that managed to graze her guard or her armor transmitted a vibration that shook the earth beneath her feet, cracking the cobblestones into webs of fractures. The beast was no longer defending; it attacked with total, suicidal abandon, as if every cell of its monstrous being had decided its sole purpose was to scratch, once more, that perfection stained with red.

  It was an insane cycle: for every chunk of flesh Ophelia hacked away with her black flames—a parasitic arm turned to grey dust, a section of torso reduced to void—another chunk joined from the main mass with a sound of wet, obscene suction. The regeneration not only continued; it accelerated, fueled by the beast's rage and perhaps, perversely, by the very black energy trying to destroy it. It was like trying to put out an oil fire with higher-quality gasoline.

  Total chaos, yes. But chaos on a scale that reduced the spectators to irrelevance. Two entities that exceeded, each in its own grotesque way, all human logic, colliding at the center of a city that was now little more than a smoking corpse.

  Vael, Irina, and Elara watched from the stone arch, their temporary refuge, with hearts not just clenched, but paralyzed, beating to the erratic rhythm of the distant impacts. The air they breathed smelled of burnt ozone and electrified rotten flesh.

  —It's… too much —Irina murmured, and in her voice was not admiration, but the bitter acceptance of a physical truth—. We aren't soldiers here. We are insects. Our strength, our steel, our magic… it's insignificant before this. We are watching gods fight over the crumbs of our world.

  The Royal Guard knights, who had arrived with the pomp of an authority now rendered ridiculous, were no better. Their white armors, symbols of a dead order, were stained with soot and a dark moisture oozing from the walls. They watched the fight not with the determination of warriors, but with the reverential terror of fanatics watching their deity battle primordial chaos. One of them, the one who had spoken before, repeated in a hoarse whisper: —Do not interfere. The Lady commands it. We would only be in the way. This is her purge. Her trial.

  But Vael was not watching the fight with fear, nor reverence. His green eyes, pale in the darkness, were scanning. Not the titans in combat, but the environment. Calculating vectors of residual force, distances between groaning buildings, points of support in structures about to collapse, the flow of winds laden with corrupt energy. It was the gaze of a strategist, or an architect, assessing the integrity of a construction under terminal stress.

  —We can't stay here watching —said Vael, and his voice, calm and flat, cut through the group's murmur of panic like a knife—. That thing doesn't tire. It doesn't feel pain. Only hunger and adaptation. And it's adapting to her fire. —He gestured with his chin towards the Abomination, where on the edges of the black wounds now sprouted veins of a dark, crystalline material that seemed to refract the flame-light—. If this continues, it won't just kill Ophelia through sheer accumulation. It will destroy this entire district, and the next ones, while she focuses on an enemy that reinvents itself. It will be a geometric slaughter.

  Everyone looked at him. Even Irina, her blue eyes clouded with pain and shock.

  —And what do you suggest? Intervene? —asked one of the knights, his tone incredulous.

  Vael turned his head north, ignoring the question. His gaze was lost beyond the immediate plaza, towards where the shadows were densest.

  —The garrison warehouses. The reinforced stone ones, near the collapsed inner wall. —His voice was now a thoughtful whisper—. They store the black powder for the wall cannons there. The powder they didn't use because the cannons fell first. Tons of it. If we can lure that thing there, or make it go… the damage wouldn't be physical. It would be chemical, exothermic. Large-scale combustion it couldn't heal by regenerating tissue. It would incinerate the cells, poison the mass. It might create a wound even that thing can't ignore.

  Irina and Elara exchanged a glance. It was a plan not just suicidal; it was a demented fantasy. Luring that god of flesh into an explosive trap, with them as bait. But in Elara's eyes still shone the reflection of the power she had unleashed, and in Irina's, the image of Yoel turned to pulp. The fear of inaction began to outweigh the fear of a stupid death.

  —It's a plan —said Irina, wiping the blood from her cheek with a brusque gesture—. It's all we have.

  In the plaza, the battle reached a critical point of mutual exasperation.

  Ophelia, with a movement that seemed to cost her visible effort—a slight tension in her jaw—raised her rapier not towards the sky, but towards the ground before her. And then she drove it in.

  Three walls of black flames, not thin like blades, but dense like boiling pitch, heavy as molten lead, erupted from the ground with a sound of torn earth. It was an amplified, enraged version of the "Void." They did not seek to cut; they sought to crush, to dissolve in volume.

  The walls, forming a trident of darkness, pierced the Abomination in its advance. The flesh shrieked, not with pain, but with a dull fury, and carbonized in large sections, becoming brittle and fragile. But this time, the beast did not divide cleanly. It screamed, a sound of pure distortion, and instead of counterattacking, it did something unexpected: it jumped.

  With an impulse that caused the ground beneath it to collapse, the Abomination, now with large parts of its body turned to smoking charcoal, projected itself westward, away from Ophelia, smashing through the line of buildings like a biological projectile.

  —Don't think you can escape this purge! —shouted the Candidate, and in her voice was a hint of something that could be… emotion. Frustration. She pursued the trail of destruction, leaping from rooftop to rooftop with a feline, deadly grace.

  But the beast wasn't fleeing. It was hungry. A primordial need that the twisted intelligence within it had prioritized above the duel.

  It landed, with an impact that killed a dozen people from the shock alone, on a wide street serving as a funnel for refugees. Hundreds of terrified souls—entire families crammed together, children crying against their mothers' skirts, elders dragging themselves—were packed there, illusorily protected by a handful of terrified soldiers whose faces were disfigured by fear.

  The scene that followed was not a battle. It was an ingestion.

  The Abomination, a mass of fused corpses now partly carbonized, did not strike them. It opened up.

  From its torso, from its limbs, dozens of new appendages sprouted, not to strike, but to grab. Giant arms, made of smaller arms intertwined, extended, snatching up the townsfolk by the group, wrenching them from the ground. Secondary mouths, wet, toothed slits, opened in its carbonized skin. And it swallowed them. It didn't chew them. It absorbed them, melted them against its surface, where the victims' flesh liquefied and was incorporated into the monstrous mass in a swift, obscene process of assimilation. The screams—sharp, rending, human—lasted seconds, turned into bubbles of sound trapped in the flesh before being drowned forever.

  The beast began to grow. Not slowly. Exponentially. It crawled down the street, a tsunami of living flesh, devouring, assimilating, and with each victim, its volume increased, its carbonized skin sloughing off to reveal a new layer, taut, glossy, and sickeningly healthy.

  In minutes, silence fell over the street. A greasy, heavy silence. Everyone had been consumed. No corpses remained. Only puddles of dark fluids and the beast, now as wide as a small square and as tall as a five-story building, breathing with the slow, satisfied rhythm of a predator that has hunted well.

  Ophelia landed on the cornice of a building overlooking the now-empty street. She had witnessed the massacre in its entirety. She had not tried to stop it. She had observed, with her rigid, cold gaze, analyzing, as if studying the behavior of a particularly efficient plague.

  —Yes? —she murmured, tilting her head with a gesture that was almost clinical curiosity—. Finished your feast, worm? Don't get too distracted. Your appointment with the void is still on.

  Ophelia pointed her rapier, now vibrating with an audible frequency, at the mountain of rejuvenated flesh.

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  —Number Two: Precipice.

  From the rapier came not a bolt of energy. A singularity emerged. A point of dark purple light, so dense it bent light around it, swirled at the weapon's tip and shot out. There was no visible trajectory; it was a flash lost in the air, an anomaly traveling faster than perception.

  A small point, a purple spark the size of a coin, appeared at the exact center of the Abomination's chest, right where a normal being's heart would beat.

  And then…

  BOOOOM!

  The explosion was not of fire, nor of brute force. It was of inverted gravity and absolute heat. A sphere of pure violence expanded from the point of impact. There was no visible flame; there was a wave of disintegration that pushed everything within a five-hundred-meter radius. Buildings still standing were pulverized, reduced to superfine dust that rose in a column. The air itself was expelled, creating a momentary vacuum that sucked debris towards the epicenter before expelling it again in the shockwave. The sound was that of a god striking the world with a hammer made of compressed silence.

  The smoke and dust rose in a perfect mushroom cloud, grotesquely beautiful against the red sky.

  When the view cleared, swept by convulsive winds, the beast still lay at the center of the crater, a perfect hole in the city.

  But it was shattered. Its new, taut skin hung in tatters like melted wax, revealing layers upon layers of twisted bone, pulsating organs of a shining black, and voids where flesh had simply been erased. It moved, a spastic tremor dragging it forward, blind, directionless, its multiple heads reduced to stumps screaming in the silence of vaporized vocal cords. It was mortally wounded. But not dead. It was still alive, crawling, seeking with some remnant sense for Ophelia, for food, for something to cling to.

  Then, a pure, clear, incongruous sound cut through the dirty, death-charged air.

  DONG! DONG! DONG!

  It was a bell. Not the grave siege bell, but a clock bell, of ancient bronze, ringing with a clear, penetrating resonance. It sounded from a short distance away, from the north, from where Vael had pointed.

  Atop a solitary watchtower—a cylinder of black stone that had miraculously survived the "Precipice" explosion, its reinforced structure cracked but standing—stood Vael.

  He was standing on the narrow circular balcony, unsupported, the wind whipping his torn clothes. And he was smiling. It was not the foolish smile of the recruit. It was a wide smile, almost welcoming. He was waving at the mass of dying flesh crawling in the crater with one hand, a casual gesture, like calling a dog. With his other hand, he was rhythmically striking the great bell's clapper with the butt of his short spear, producing that persistent, metallic dong.

  DONG! DONG! DONG!

  The beast stopped in its dragging.

  The sound, clear, constant, seemed to strike it physically. Its vibrant flesh, trying to regenerate, quivered in unison with the sound waves. The sound interfered with something fundamental in its perverted biology; it prevented it from concentrating the corrupt energy, disorganized the fusion process. It was like a nail in a titan's brain.

  Vael watched, from his perch, as the mass of flesh writhed, as the head-stumps turned towards him, blinded but drawn by that new, painful, irritating stimulus.

  —I doubt this alone will be enough —he said to himself, his voice lost in the wind and the bell—. But it's a good start.

  And then he saw how the creature, forgetting Ophelia, forgetting its agony, began to move. Not crawling anymore. Running. With a speed reborn from obsession, losing along the way chunks of rotten flesh and bones that now, truly, did not regenerate, too damaged by the "Precipice." It was heading, like a wounded bull towards a red rag, straight for the tower.

  In the distance, Ophelia, who was approaching floating on a residue of solidified darkness to deliver the final blow, saw the beast change course. Her golden eyes shifted to the tower. She saw the small dark figure against the sky, the rhythmic movement of the arm, the resonating bell.

  She made a grimace, a quick furrowing of her fine lips.

  —What in the hells is that idiot planning? —she muttered, not with concern, but with the annoyance of a master watching a pupil ruin a carefully controlled experiment.

  The beast ran, leaving a trail of smoldering offal. It crossed streets, knocked down the remaining rubble, its reduced but still colossal mass advancing with the determination of a guided meteorite.

  —Now it's your turn, Elara —Vael whispered, calculating the speed, the trajectory, seeing the monster enter the narrow alley leading to the tower and, beyond it, the reinforced stone warehouses. The kill zone.

  Behind the thick wall of one of those warehouses, in a position calculated to the millimeter, Elara was on her knees.

  She was not trembling. She was in a trance. Her straight sword, the heirloom of House Vane, was raised vertically against her chest, her hands gripping the hilt with a white-knuckled strength. She was not looking forward. Her eyes were closed.

  She was praying. But not to a god. To the light itself. To the force she carried within, which she now felt not as an uncontrollable volcano, but as a deep, terrible river from which she could drink.

  Meanwhile, at the base of the tower, Irina, with the muscles of her arms and back protesting every movement, pulled on a rusted lever connected to the bell mechanism. It wasn't the clapper sounding; it was the entire system of weights and pulleys that Vael had found, and which she moved with superhuman effort, maintaining the constant, hypnotic rhythm that guided the monster.

  DONG! DONG! DONG!

  Elara, in her bubble of concentration, began to recite. She did not shout. She whispered. But her words, in the silence of her mind and the small space behind the wall, had the weight of an ancient sentence, carved in light before men existed.

  "Oh, my light… You who know no shadow.

  Illuminate the enemies who dare to cut me down.

  Tear the veil of all belief, incinerate all ignorance.

  And grant me the strength to purge the aberrations of this world.

  Your daughter, Elara, demands your wrath."

  The sword began to glow. But this time it was not a flash, nor a wild bolt. It was a light that densified. It became heavy, tangible, like liquid mercury made of photons. It shone so brightly the blade became almost invisible, a filament of pure, concentrated sun that threatened to burn the very air.

  The increasingly closer sounds could be heard through the thick wall—the seismic vibrations and the wet, repulsive noise of the Abomination approaching the tower, drawn by the bell like a moth to a flame.

  Vael, from his height, saw the beast pass right below him, its mass filling the alley, its attention fixed on the tower, on him. He saw the exact point, a dead angle between two warehouses, right where Elara waited.

  —IRINA, NOW! —he shouted, his voice a whip-crack cutting through the rhythm of the bell.

  Below, Irina, with a final grunt of effort, slammed the mechanism to a halt, locking the lever.

  The bell stopped.

  Silence.

  A sudden, absolute, unnatural silence fell over that part of the city like a mantle of lead. The contrast with the constant din was physical, a blow to the eardrums.

  The beast, confused by the lack of the guiding stimulus, by the disappearance of the pain/call, stopped. Right in front of the reinforced stone warehouse. Right in the perfect position.

  Elara opened her eyes.

  They were white. Without pupil, without iris. Filled with a power that was not hers, that used her as a conduit. A power that demanded a price.

  —The signal —she said, and her voice sounded in two tones, her own and another, older one, resonating in her throat.

  She positioned herself sideways, in an impeccable fencing posture inherited from a thousand lessons in marble halls. She aimed her sword—now a beam of solid light—not at the beast, but at the wall of the reinforced stone warehouse. Towards where she knew were stacked, in the darkness, the Empire's black powder barrels.

  —DISAPPEAR!

  And she unleashed everything.

  It was not a bolt. It was a beam of annihilation. A yellowish-white cylinder, thick as the trunk of an ancient oak, that erupted from her sword and pierced the half-meter-thick stone wall as if it were tissue paper. It did not knock it down; it vaporized it in a perfect line.

  The beam connected with the darkness inside. For a fraction of a second, there was silence.

  Then, the explosion. But it had no sound at first. Only light. A light so white and pure it erased all colors, all shadows, that made Ophelia, hundreds of meters away, instinctively close her golden eyes. It was the dawn of a dwarf sun born in a warehouse.

  Afterwards came the shockwave. A wall of fire, force, and pulverized shrapnel that swallowed the Abomination. The beast was pushed back, not just physically, but electrocuted by the residual magic of Elara's pure light and burned by the chemical reaction of gunpowder on an industrial scale. Opposing forces—magical purification and material destruction—converging on its body.

  The monster's flesh entered conflict with itself. The regeneration, that corrupt force, fought against the total cellular destruction caused by the light and thermal disintegration. Great bubbles, the size of houses, swelled under its skin and burst in geysers of black blood and supernatural steam. Its body, now a charred, smoking mass with flashes of white energy escaping through the cracks, writhed on the ground, crawling, screaming with the sound of a thousand furnaces melting, trying to drag itself away from the epicenter of pain.

  In the distance, Ophelia, recovering from the flash, tilted her head. She observed the trap, the coordinated explosion, the use of the environment and lesser powers in an effective manner. Something that wasn't approval—nothing so warm—but tactical recognition crossed her yellow eyes. A slight, almost imperceptible nod.

  —I see —she said, her voice a whisper to herself—. That's what happens when you underestimate insects. They build traps. It would be poor manners on my part to waste the opportunity these… children… have created for me. Wouldn't you agree, worm?

  She raised her rapier once more. Not in rage. With the final precision of an executioner.

  —Number Two: Precipice.

  Another purple spark, that perverse gravitational singularity, flew from the tip of her weapon. Again, with no visible trajectory.

  Another gigantic explosion, a second sun of pure force, embraced the already weakened, charred, electrified Abomination.

  The entire district, what was left of it, was enveloped in a cloud of dust, silence, and the final purple glare of annihilation.

  The Metamorphosis

  Vael and Irina ran. Not towards the smoking crater. Towards Elara's position.

  They found her lying among the rubble, beside the perfect hole her beam had opened in the warehouse wall, now a maw leading to a hell of flames and melted debris.

  Elara was shattered.

  Her beautiful dark blue armor of House Vane wasn't dented; it was shattered, like crystal struck with a hammer. Large plates had broken off, others were partially fused against her clothes and skin. She had deep cuts all over her body—on her arms, legs, torso—not from weapons, but from the backlash of her own power, from the light she had channeled and which had exploded inward at the moment of release. Dark blood, almost black, streamed from her nose, her ears, the corners of her closed eyes and her half-open mouth. Her breathing was a faint, irregular thread, a sound of wet bubbling.

  Her sword, the family heirloom, the symbol of the Vane dawn, no longer existed. It had broken into a thousand microscopic pieces of steel and crystallized light. Only the hilt remained, still clutched with a convulsive grip in her right hand, the skin of her fingers and palm burned to the bone in places.

  Irina reached her first, falling to her knees beside her with a dry thud she ignored.

  —Elara! —she cried, but the cry broke in her throat. Her trembling hands settled on her friend's shattered chest, searching for a heartbeat, a movement. She found none—. Vael, quickly! I can't hear her breathing right! She's… she's in a bad way! We need a healer, something!

  Vael arrived and stopped beside her. He looked at Elara. For an instant, his habitual expression—the mask of indifference or foolishness—darkened. Something deeper, older, crossed his features. A recognition of a pattern, of a cost paid. But it was fleeting.

  —What do we do? —asked Irina, looking at him with desperate blue eyes, her hands already stained with Elara's dark blood—. We can't leave her like this!

  But before Vael could answer, or before the horror could fully solidify, a sound reached them from the smoking crater.

  A laugh.

  Guttural. Deep. Wet. It was not a sound of victory. It was the sound of something that has transcended pain, fury, even understanding. It was the sound of pure perverted existence laughing at the very idea of death.

  It came from the epicenter of Ophelia's last explosion.

  The Abomination had not died.

  What remained of it, a formless black mass the size of a small house, had suddenly swollen, transforming into a pulsating sphere full of protuberances that looked like carbonized bodies fused together. And it was laughing. A chorus of choked laughs, from the throats of its victims and its own substance, bubbling from within.

  Ophelia, who was floating closer for the definitive finishing blow, stopped dead in the air. Vael lifted his gaze from Elara towards the crater.

  —Oh, no… —whispered Vael, and in his voice was not surprise, but a deep resignation, as if he had been expecting precisely this—. Not again. Not this.

  The sphere of charred, pulsating flesh exploded.

  It was not an explosion of fire. It was a tsunami of blood. A torrent of black, thick as tar and glossy as onyx, shot out in all directions from the core, coating the surrounding buildings, the ruins, the very sky. For a few seconds, the sickly red sky and the pale moon turned black. A physical, liquid darkness swallowed all light, all sound, everything.

  From that rain of black blood falling like a thick curtain, something rose.

  It had not regenerated.

  It had transformed.

  Enormous wings, made of membrane black as starless night and of whitish, twisted bones like dead trees in a swamp, unfolded with a sound of old leather tearing. Their span blotted out the stars, the moon, everything.

  A long, serpentine body, covered in black scales that shone with an oily, deadly sheen, and sharp as obsidian blades, emerged from the bloody vapor. In some parts, the flesh was missing, revealing the pale white ribs and the dark, pulsating void within.

  Red eyes, not two, but six, arranged in two rows, ignited in an elongated, cadaverous head, with a jaw full of teeth like stalactites and stalagmites of bone. They glowed like hot coals in the depths of the deepest night.

  The Undead Dragon took flight. Not clumsily, but with an obscene, terrifying majesty. Its shadow, as its wings spread, covered the entire district, then whole blocks. A roar issued from its throat, not of fire, but of compressed voids, a sound that made bones vibrate and promised the dissolution of matter.

  Ophelia, for the first time since they had laid eyes on her, broke her mask of absolute coldness. Her yellow eyes widened. She made a grimace, not of fear, but of pure, almost comical incredulity. A genuine wrinkle of perplexity appeared between her perfect eyebrows.

  She looked at the beast ascending towards the moon, its monstrous silhouette outlined against the pale disk.

  And let out a laugh. A short, nervous, almost hysterical laugh that sounded absurdly human in the midst of the apocalypse.

  —Is this a joke? —she asked the air, the night, the gods who did not listen—. A damn dragon? Seriously?

  But the Undead Dragon, now aloft, turned its skeletal head. Its six red eyes fixed on her, the small stain of ebony and silver in the ruin. And in its gaze there was no intelligence, nor hatred. Only an infinite hunger, and now, the winged power to sate it on a continental scale.