Rising god

The death of the Darkan commander should have been a moment of grief—a rallying cry for vengeance. But there was no time to mourn. The battlefield allowed no such luxury.

Their enemy—the Blood Deplorable—had turned the tide.

Every weapon the commanders had deflected moments earlier came back at them, as if guided by a will of its own. The ones they dodged didn’t simply fall—no, they embedded themselves into the ground and waited, lying in ambush like vipers in tall grass. The blood weaponry was alive in all but name, weaving itself into traps and horrors.

Panic grew among the ranks.

This had been a carefully planned operation. The enemy they faced was supposed to be weakened. When the battle began, he appeared sickly, exhausted even. There was a collective sense of relief when his rank was observed to have dropped from the dreaded 7th star to a peak 6th.

But now?

Now their most elite warriors were struggling.

And one of them—one of the six—had already fallen.

The soldiers of the allied force—Church and Darkan—watched with helpless eyes. They were paralyzed not by fear but by futility. If their leaders, their paragons of strength, couldn’t handle this foe, what could they possibly do?

Hopelessness and despair spread like a disease, except for one person.

’What are you doing?!’ Tasha’s gaze was locked on a single figure standing apart from the chaos. He was calm, far too calm.