The sky was bleeding again.
A jagged tear stretched across the clouds, dripping silver light that burned anything it touched. The ruins below shivered — broken towers, sunken cathedrals, the skeleton of a world too proud to die properly.
Isaac Killoran walked beneath that sky without fear.
He didn't flinch when the light grazed his coat. He didn't look up when a demon's roar echoed in the distance. He only adjusted the black gloves over his cursed hands, let the wind tousle his white hair, and kept moving — silent, steady, unreadable.
Behind him, the boy wouldn't shut up.
"You ever wonder why my father let you live?" Lucien Arclight asked, boots crunching over broken glass. "Instead of cutting your head off like everyone begged him to?"
Isaac didn't answer.
Lucien kept talking. He always did.
"Because I do. All the time. You killed how many people? Angels? Demons? Saviors? Don't bother denying it — I read the reports. You're the damn White Wrath."
Still nothing. Just Isaac's quiet steps through the corpse of a church, hands in his pockets, storm-gray eyes fixed ahead.
Lucien clicked his tongue and stepped over a collapsed altar.
"I don't even care that he spared you. I care that I have to work with you. Babysit you. And if you screw this mission up, I swear I'll—"
"You'll what?" Isaac's voice was soft. Like a knife being unsheathed.
"Smite me with your daddy's sword?"
Lucien stopped walking.
Isaac turned his head slightly — just enough for a glint of white to show beneath his lashes.
Lucien flinched.
Abyssal Eyes. He'd almost forgotten.
Isaac didn't smile. He never did.
"If we're done with conversation," he said calmly, "I'd prefer silence while I scout."
And then he vanished.
Not in smoke. Not in a flash of light. Just… gone. The shadow behind a broken pillar rippled, and Isaac stepped out of it like he'd always been there. Silent. Clean. Deadly.
Lucien exhaled. His hand hovered near the Luminblade at his hip.
I hate this.
I hate how fast he moves. I hate how calm he stays. I hate that he doesn't care if I live or die.
He followed anyway.
---
They moved through the shattered ruins of New Solari — a former angelic capital turned cratered wasteland after the last Crown War.
Isaac raised an old sniper's scope to his eye. He didn't blink as he locked onto the Crown Fragment lodged in the heart of the old citadel.
"There it is," he said.
"The Crown's echo."
Lucien peered through the scope next. The fragment floated like a bleeding star — glowing, humming, radiating pressure. Essence storms churned around it like a hurricane of light and madness.
"How stable is it?" Lucien asked.
"Unstable," Isaac replied. "Like you."
Lucien ignored the jab. He was used to them.
"We grab it. Bring it back to base. No killing. No vanishing. And definitely no vanishing me, got it?"
Isaac slid the scope back into his coat.
"I don't kill unless I'm allowed to," he said flatly. "Your father made sure of that."
And I've hated him for it every second since.
---
Far above them, something ancient stirred.
A watcher without a face.
The First — older than time, hungrier than war.
It had no eyes. It had no name. But it felt the fragment pulse, and its curiosity stirred.
The assassin and the hero's son had entered the arena.
Let the game begin.