Night fell over the prosperous city like a black shroud spread over a dying soul. The packed houses were soaked in torchlight, and the air was heavy, dripping with tension as if waiting for a blade to cut its last thread. And in the moment the world stood between stillness and the abyss, the sky split open.
It wasn't light, but a glow like a slaughtered heart, red and pulsing, the air whistling around it from the intensity of its heat. The clouds tore apart as if they were flesh being ripped open by an unknown beast, and from above, a bloody beam burst out, dragging behind it a tail of sparks twisting like a hand trying to grasp the entire earth.
Two figures appeared… no, two human meteors falling toward the city with a speed that made the air scream.
As they approached, the night changed. Its shape… its scent… its breath… everything began to suffocate under an aura unlike anything humans had ever known.
The two bodies struck the main square with the force of a mountain thrown by an ancient devil. The ground exploded, stones shot out like arrows, and the sound cut through consciousness itself.
In a single moment, the square roared and turned into a massive crater a hundred meters wide. A hundred meters of destruction, dust, and earth mixed with shattered stone and flesh. The entire city shook as if its soul was crushed under the foot of a giant.
When the dust cleared… and when breath finally returned to the chests of the people like someone rising from the grave… they saw them.
The first was a creature no language could describe except with fear.
Fifteen meters of pure brutality. A body shaped like an ancient sin forged from flesh, blood, and darkness. The face of a raging wolf, but the vertical giant eye… that eye… ignited terror in anyone it looked at, like a window opening onto a pen of living nightmares, hundreds of bloody tongues twisting behind it, waiting to devour anything alive.
Its skin was cracked, pulsing, expanding and contracting as if something else lived inside it… something older, deeper, and more savage than any beast ever born.
The second figure was Ashen.
But the Ashen standing in the crater was no longer the Ashen the world knew a moment ago.
His body was a crimson fog, forming and dissolving, as if his blood were boiling in the air, flowing from him in threads bordering on madness. His features were not fully human. His shadow was no longer a human shadow. He was something born from raw violence, something dripping with a different meaning of existence, a meaning understood only by those who touched the edge of absolute savagery.
The ground around him changed. Stones decayed, soil darkened, the air thickened and grew colder, as if Ashen was not standing on the world but forcing the world to reshape itself in his image. His presence twisted everything around him, making it more bloody, sharper, more vicious. As if he were an extension of a nightmare freshly born from the belly of the night.
The chained man in the center of the square stared at them. His eyes burned with madness, and he burst out laughing. A loud, sharp, insane laugh—the laugh of a cursed man who sees his end walking toward him.
The city lord, the old man, and the clan leaders were no longer men. They were no longer rulers. They were standing corpses, their hearts shaking with terror, unable to find enough strength in their bodies to keep their dignity on their feet.
These creatures… Ashen… and the giant beast… were not opponents.
They were a catastrophe.
Suddenly, the crimson aura around Ashen trembled. The fog rose, then shrank violently. His body faltered, cracked, and fissures burst along his skin as if he were about to break apart. His human form returned, but it was not the body of a man. It was bloodied, broken, releasing smoke, as if thousands of battles had taken place inside him at once.
He collapsed to his knees, breathing with a sound stuck between life and death. Yet the savage aura still leaked from him, as if it refused to leave.
The giant monster stepped toward him. With each step, the ground shook. It leaned forward, and from its throat came a sound beyond description, a voice like thousands of creatures speaking at once:
"Stay steady… There is a lot of blood here… I will heal you."
Then it lifted its head and looked at the city.
That look was not just a look.
It was a death sentence.
The city's silence began to crack beneath the monster's steps. Its footsteps were not just impacts on the ground; they were a reminder that life is fragile, and that death can have feet, a voice, and an eye that gazes at souls the way a starving beast looks at a feast.
The city lord was the first to regain awareness, though his spirit could not bear the shock. His hands trembled as he tried to convince himself he was still the ruler of this place. But what stood before him was not an enemy to control, threaten, or negotiate with.
This was not a creature.
This was an announcement of an ending.
The old man swallowed heavily, his expression falling apart. His fingers shook as he whispered to no one but himself:
"That… that is not from this world…"
The clan leaders, who were used to power, influence, and spreading fear… were exposed at last. They were only men, men with hearts, and hearts are weak when facing absolute horror.
Fear tightened around their chests until their breaths became broken gasps. And that aura around Ashen… the aura that altered reality… sank its threads into their souls like a rusty blade sinking into flesh to drink blood.
The giant monster raised its head, and its vertical eye emitted a red-black light. The light was thick, almost liquid. It weighed down the air, weighed down time, and forced hearts to pause between beats.
Anyone who met that eye felt their soul dragged toward an abyss. As if the monster was not looking at them but reading through their blood, searching for a weakness, a scream, a remaining fragment of life to devour.
Suddenly, the city woke up. But it wasn't a comforting awakening—only panic and running.
The people watching from doors and windows turned instantly into a flock of desperate bodies running in every direction, without thought, without purpose, driven only by the instinct of death screaming:
"Run!"
But who runs from something that can kill a city with a single look?
The city lord screamed hysterically, his aura and dignity shattering:
"Release the spells! Kill those two monsters! Kill them before—"
He didn't finish.
The clan leaders and soldiers had already raised their hands, forming dozens of spells. Spell circles made of blood runes, symbols, and geometric patterns spun in the air, glowing, ready to unleash a binding, burning light.
But before they completed the last circle…
Before the energy sealed…
Before the spell solidified…
The monster's eye trembled.
The blackness in its pupil turned into a sea of burning blood. Inside that sea, a thread of light appeared—no, a beam. A beam combining destruction, speed, and savagery. A beam that could burn time if it touched it.
In an instant…
The beam erupted from its vertical eye like a waterfall of blood, shooting in a straight, narrow line. It was thin but dense enough to seem solid.
It passed through the square…
The air…
The city lord…
The old man…
The clan leaders…
The soldiers…
Everything.
One moment later—
Everyone standing there turned into a cloud of blood.
No bodies. No bones. No screams.
Only a massive red mist rising into the air, then pulled as if by an invisible thread toward the giant monster.
The creature opened its mouth slightly, and the blood mist flowed into it like air filling the lungs of something that breathes ruin.
At that moment, the city stopped being a city.
It became an open grave.
The screams of the people rose from everywhere, from alleys, houses, rooftops. Screams that no longer sounded human, but like animals thrown naked before death.
The monster began its total extermination.
It moved with speed that didn't match its size, pouncing on buildings, tearing apart any life nearby, gathering blood, inhaling the metallic scent of bodies. Anyone who saw it died. Anyone who ran was erased.
The city was no longer a city. It became a space filled with screams, blood, crushed stones, collapsing houses, fading lights, and the crimson aura covering the sky like the last cloud before the end.
The chained man was laughing. Laughing as if watching a celebration he waited for all his life. Laughing until blood dripped from his mouth. His laughter rose above the sounds of slaughter until his body began to burn. Burn with the bloody fire erupting from inside him. The fire consumed flesh, bone, and chains, then swallowed him in a whirl of nothingness.
When the fire died, nothing remained. Only the echo of his last words:
"This… this is how every injustice must end… with blood… with ruin… with fire…"
Destruction had reached its peak. The city bled from every stone, and the sky turned crimson, as if ashamed of the amount of blood spilled beneath it.
The screams faded. Only the monster's breathing, the groaning of collapsing buildings, and the rushing sound of blood remained.
The monster stood in the center of the ruins. It raised its hand toward the sky.
All the blood spilled on the ground began to rise, gather, twist, move like a creature being born. Slowly, it formed a massive sphere of blood twenty meters wide, rotating above its head, dark crimson, like the heart of an entire city drained dry.
The sphere pulsed like a heart looking for an owner.
The monster reached down, lifted Ashen like a warrior lifting an injured comrade, then raised him and threw him into the heart of the blood sphere.
Ashen broke through the surface and sank inside, disappearing completely as the sphere swallowed him.
The blood swirled around him, and the whole city was drowned in crimson light.
Then… silence.
A dead silence.
A silence written in blood.