Chapter 84: The King in the Dark
The red haze of my rage did not recede. It intensified, painting the world in shades of blood and shadow. The last vestiges of Kai, the boy from Earth, were screaming in some distant, forgotten corner of my mind, but I couldn’t hear him. All that remained was the monster, and the monster was hungry.
My brutality continued, a relentless, systematic purge of the filth that had infested this sacred, stolen ground. I moved through the remaining goblins not as a warrior, but as a force of nature, a walking apocalypse. My shadow blade was no longer a weapon of precision; it was a cleaver, a butcher’s tool. I didn’t just kill them. I gave them a death that nobody wants, a death that would be whispered in the darkest corners of this world for generations to come. I opened their skulls, their hands, their organs, my movements a blur of cold, detached fury.
And then, I called upon the Phoenix.
A torrent of crimson and gold flame, a raw, untamed piece of the primordial being that now resided in my soul, answered my call. It was not the gentle, controlled flame of a summoned beast; it was a wave of pure, unadulterated annihilation. It washed over the remaining goblins, their terrified shrieks a brief, satisfying chorus before they were silenced forever. They burned alive, their bodies turning to ash, their souls extinguished in a blaze of righteous, holy fire.
It was a terrifying sight for everyone. Liora and Aurelia, who had been trying to tend to the wounded, simply stared, their faces pale with a mixture of horror and a strange, unwilling awe. The few surviving villagers, their minds already broken, simply wept.
I stood at the center of the chaos, the architect of this beautiful, terrible destruction. But my hunger... it was not sated. It was not enough.
My body, however, had other plans. It gave up. The last dregs of my mana, poured into the Phoenix’s flame, sputtered and died. The shadows that had been coiling around me like a royal mantle receded, leaving me feeling naked and exposed. My legs trembled, my vision swam, and a wave of profound, bone-deep exhaustion crashed over me.
[System: WARNING. Mana Core has been fully depleted. Shadow Conduit has collapsed. All mana-related skills are now offline.]
I was collapsing, my body a puppet with its strings cut.
But then, a new figure appeared at the far end of the cavern, stepping from a previously unseen tunnel. He was massive, a hulking silhouette of muscle and menace that dwarfed the other goblins. He was a high goblin, his skin a dark, mottled green, his body covered in a patchwork of crude, iron-shod armor. A necklace of human skulls rattled against his chest, and a twisted, iron crown sat upon his brow.