Weeks ago, when Adrian killed Darius.
In a shattered star system at the edge of the frontlines, where broken worlds drifted through the void, the war against the demons raged without end.
Inside the fortress that overlooked the fractured moons of the warfront, Patriarch Veythar of the Emerald Serpent Clan sat upon his throne of bone.
The faint glow of his veins pulsed like fire beneath sickly green skin. His features were almost human, if humans had ever been forged from venom.
Bony ridges crossed his forehead, as if his skull itself had rebelled against sanity.
Two essences coiled within him, visible to those with the sight to perceive them. Space, which bent reality around his presence, and Corrosion, which ate at the very fabric of existence.
Then his Node pinged.
Veythar's eyes flicked toward the sound. His clawed hand rose, essence flowing through the gesture.
His node projected a single message, the holographic text hovering in the dim chamber.
"Your son has fallen."
Attached was a recording.
Veythar's expression didn't change. Not yet. He simply activated the file.
The projection expanded, filling the chamber with light and sound.
He watched, first motionless, then trembling.
The recording showed a village, primitive structures of wood and stone. Human women huddled together, their faces streaked with tears and dirt.
And there, standing among them, was Darius. His son.
Then the view shifted.
The projection displayed Adrian, his body wreathed white-grey, a blade materializing in his hand from nothing, piercing upward through Darius's jaw.
The strike was clean. Perfect. The blade split skull and soul alike, emerging through Darius's head in a spray of essence and blood.
Darius's eyes went wide, his mouth opening in a scream that never came.
The recording ended with Darius collapsing in a heap of ash, his form dissolving as his essences unraveled. And the human women around him, those weak, trembling primitives, beat drums, stamped their feet, and sang a rhythm of rage.
Their voices rose in defiant chorus, celebrating the death of their tormentor.
At first, Veythar didn't move.
His hand remained frozen in the air, claws still extended. His eyes stared at the empty space where the projection had been.
The chamber was silent.
Then came a sound that did not belong to the living.
A laugh.
It rose like poison boiling in a pot, first trembling, then cracking, then rising into a scream that shattered the stillness.
Veythar's body convulsed with it. The veins across his body glowed brighter, his two essences leaking through his skin in jagged tendrils of space distortion and corrosion.
The bone throne began to hiss and smoke where his hands gripped it. Stone melted beneath his feet, turning to slag.
The fortress trembled as stone walls began to melt, the very structure groaning under the weight of his fury.
"A human…" he whispered.
"A human killed my son?"
"Drummed to his death. Cheered by worms who should have been wiped from creation!"
He had killed countless humans in his life. Billions, perhaps. To him, the human race was just weak creatures, barely worth the effort it took to extinguish them.
Soft flesh, fragile bones, short lives that flickered and died like candle flames in a storm.
They were nothing. Less than nothing.
And yet one of them had killed his son.
He screamed again, so loud that glass shattered and warriors outside froze in terror.
"I will burn every last one of them! Every human, every wretched bloodline!"
The walls cracked. Formations built to withstand demon assaults flickered and failed under the corrosive essence leaking from his body.
The guards, Viridian warriors of his clan, stepped back from the throne room entrance.
None dared speak.
Inside the throne room, Veythar stood, his form trembling with barely contained rage.
He sent immediate requests to the Imperial command. "Release me from the frontlines. I must attend to clan matters."
Days passed. His requests to leave the frontlines were denied, each response colder than the last.
His orders from the Empire were clear, Hold the sector.
The frontlines could not afford to lose a Stellar patriarch, not when the demons pressed harder with each passing week.
So he held it, his fury turned outward, to the war itself.
If he could not kill the human who murdered his son, he would drown his rage in demon blood until the galaxy itself bent to his will.
...
Outside, the star system was a graveyard.
Fractured planets drifted through the void. Drifting moons tumbled end over end, trailing rivers of molten debris.
Entire worlds had been cracked open like eggs, their atmospheres stripped away, their populations long since consumed or scattered.
The void itself seemed wrong here, darker than it should be, as if the fabric of space had been stained by too much death.
Demons poured from ruptured space gates, each one the grotesque evolution of beasts and monsters from forgotten worlds.
Some were humanoid, their skin black and red like molten metal, muscles wrapped in chitin that glowed with internal heat.
Some were serpentine, massive coils of scaled flesh that could wrap around battleships and crush them to scrap.
Others were winged, their forms skeletal and wrong, trailing essence that corroded whatever it touched.
Some were plated in essence-grown chitin, their bodies more armor than flesh, walking siege engines that shrugged off artillery strikes.
All were intelligent, vicious, and starved for slaughter.
They had been beasts and monsters once, millennia ago. Now they were something else, something that had evolved.
The legions of the empires fought back, wave after wave of SSS-ranked soldiers and Stellar commanders defending the frontline.
Formations blazed across the void. Essence clashed against essence, space folding and unfolding as reality itself became a battlefield.
Ships the size of cities fired volleys that could crack moons. Warriors flew through the vacuum, their domains carving through demon swarms.
And in the middle of it all, Veythar descended.
He didn't fight for glory. He didn't fight for duty.
He fought for madness.
With a blink, his space essence folded the battlefield. One instant, he stood amidst his warriors on the fortress ramparts.
The next, he appeared above a swarm of demons, thousands of them clustered around a dying Imperial fleet.
His corrosive aura erupted outward, a sphere of emerald light that expanded in silence.
Thousands dissolved instantly, their screams swallowed by acid and void before they could even form.
Flesh melted, bones turned to vapor. Essence unraveled like thread pulled from a tapestry.
Each strike tore through space itself, folding reality around his targets.
Demons imploded, crushed by their own mass as space compressed around them. Others were bisected by invisible cuts that appeared from nowhere.
Veythar moved through the battlefield like a plague given form. Wherever he appeared, death followed.
He teleported again, reappearing behind a winged demon commander. His hand thrust forward, corrosive essence pouring through the creature's chest cavity.
The demon shrieked, its wings dissolving as its body collapsed inward, eaten from the inside out.
For days, the battlefield burned under his fury.
He didn't sleep. Didn't rest. Didn't speak except to scream orders or curses.
His warriors watched from a distance, both grateful for his power and terrified of what he had become.
"Patriarch Veythar hasn't rested in days," one soldier whispered to another, both of them crouched behind a barrier formation.
"He no longer rests," another replied, his voice hollow. "He only hunts."
The first soldier nodded slowly, watching as another wave of demons dissolved.
"But the sector still stands because of him."
That much was true. The demons had been pushing hard, harder than they had in months.
Without Veythar's rampage, the frontlines would have collapsed. Entire fleets would have been overrun.
But the cost was written in the eyes of every warrior who served under him. They had seen what he was becoming.
And they knew, deep in their bones, that when the Empire finally released him from this war, whatever remained of Veythar would be something far worse than what had arrived.