The departure from Kusha'zan was a quiet affair, witnessed only by the city's highest generals and the first light of dawn. There were no cheering crowds this time. This was not a parade; it was the first, careful insertion of a needle meant to lance a festering wound. The seven of them—the Sun, the Silence, and their five pillars—stood on the same royal dock where Shuya had first arrived, but the mood was vastly different.
They traveled not on the glorious Solar Barque, but on a smaller, sleeker vessel of enchanted acacia wood called the Wind Dancer. It was built for speed and stealth, its hull carved with sigils of silence and concealment. As it pulled away from the dock, propelled by Zahra's whispered spells more than any wind, Shuya looked back at the white city gleaming in the rose-gold light. It looked like a dream, a perfect, peaceful memory he was carrying with him into a nightmare.
The journey south was a swift descent into blight. The fertile riverlands around Kusha'zan gradually bled away, the vibrant green of the papyrus reeds fading to a sickly yellow, then to a brittle brown. The air, once carrying the scent of lotus and wet earth, grew thick and parched, tasting of ash and despair. The very life seemed to be sucked from the landscape, leaving behind a cracked, bleeding earth.
The Scarabae Dunes did not appear as a gradual change. It was a wall. One moment, the land was arid but alive with hardy scrub grass and the tracks of desert foxes. The next, the world ended in a seething, blood-red expanse of sand that seemed to pulse with a malevolent heartbeat. The air above it shimmered not with heat, but with a visible, greasy distortion, as if reality itself was rotting.
The Wind Dancer settled on a rocky outcrop at the very edge of the corruption, the last island of stable land. The silence that fell was heavy, oppressive. There was no birdsong here, no whisper of insects. Only the low, constant hum of the blight, a sound that felt like sand grinding in the soul.
"The domain of the Scourge," Kazuyo said, his voice cutting through the psychic static. His usual calm was layered with a grim focus. "Its influence is a physical weight. Can you feel it, Shuya? It's not just sand. It's solidified despair."
Shuya nodded, his jaw tight. He could feel it. It was a coldness that sought to leech the warmth from his core, a whisper that slithered into his mind, suggesting the utter pointlessness of their mission. Why fight? Why struggle? All ends in dust. He clenched his fists, and the warm, golden light within him flared in response, a silent, defiant rebuttal.
"The plan remains," Kazuyo continued, his gaze sweeping over their small company. "We are a spear. Neema, Lyra, you are the point. Your job is to clear any physical manifestations that get too close. Zahra, you are our navigator and our shield against the environment. Amani, you are our compass, listening for the Scourge's core song amidst this dissonance. Yoru…" He glanced at the yokai. "You are our shadow. You see what we cannot."
He finally looked at Shuya. "And we two… we are the blade. I will create the path. You will make it permanent."
Shuya met his gaze. "I'm ready."
Kazuyo stepped to the very edge of the rock, facing the wall of blood-red sand. He took a deep breath, and for a moment, he seemed to become less substantial, a man-shaped void in the world. He raised his hands, palms facing the blight.
"Nullify."
It was not a shout, but a command issued to the fabric of reality itself.
The effect was instantaneous and breathtaking. A tunnel, ten feet in diameter, bored directly into the swirling, corrupted sand. It wasn't pushed aside; it was unmade. The blood-red color, the greasy distortion, the psychic hum—all of it ceased to exist within the cylinder of Kazuyo's influence. The path revealed was not the healthy earth below, but a sterile, grey nothingness, a blank canvas waiting for paint.
"Go! Now!" Kazuyo gritted out, the strain of maintaining such a precise and powerful field evident in the tension across his shoulders.
They moved. Neema and Lyra dashed into the tunnel, their weapons drawn, their eyes scanning the walls of nullified sand for any threat. The rest followed. Shuya stepped into the silence Kazuyo had created. It was an eerie experience. The moment he crossed the threshold, the oppressive weight of the blight vanished, replaced by a profound, almost deafening absence. It was safe, but it was also lifeless.
They marched. Kazuyo walked at the center, the living engine of their progress, his null-field pushing ever deeper into the dunes. The tunnel extended before them and collapsed behind them, leaving no safe route for retreat. It was a statement of absolute commitment.
The Scourge was not idle. It sensed the violation of its domain. The walls of the tunnel, just beyond the edge of Kazuyo's power, began to seethe. The red sand coalesced into monstrous, insectoid forms—scorpions with stingers of crystallized fear, locusts with wings of shredded souls. They clawed at the boundary of the null-field, their forms disintegrating into motes of dust the moment they touched it, only to reform moments later.
"It's testing the edge," Zahra called out, her hands weaving patterns in the air, reinforcing the null-field's perimeter with layers of hardened, sanctified sand. "It knows it cannot enter, but it is trying to find a weakness, to drain Master Kazuyo's focus."
A wave of pure psychic despair, a thousand times stronger than the ambient hum, slammed against their group. Soldiers would have dropped their weapons and wept. Lyra staggered, her face paling. Neema let out a savage roar, fighting it off with pure, bestial will.
But Amani was ready. She began to sing, a low, resonant chant that was the antithesis of the blight's song. It was a melody of deep roots, of enduring stone, of rivers that always find the sea. Her song wrapped around them, a spiritual barrier that turned the despair into a distant echo.
They pushed deeper. The psychic attacks grew more frequent, the physical manifestations more aggressive. Kazuyo's breathing became labored. Maintaining the field was a colossal, continuous drain.
"I can't hold this pace much longer," he admitted, sweat beading on his temples. "We need to find its heart. Soon."
"It is close," Amani said, her eyes closed in concentration. "The song of its pain is becoming a scream. It knows we are a threat unlike any other."
Suddenly, the tunnel ahead of them… ended. Not because Kazuyo's power failed, but because it opened into a vast, cavernous space. They had reached the center.
The chamber was a nightmare cathedral. The walls and ceiling were composed of millions, perhaps billions, of fused, screaming faces made of sand, their mouths open in silent, eternal agony. At the center of the cavern, pulsing like a diseased star, was the Scourge.
It was a colossal scarab beetle, but its carapace was not chitin. It was a shifting, living tapestry of every life it had consumed—faces, landscapes, moments of joy, all frozen in torment and woven into its shell. Its eyes were pits of absolute blackness, and from its gaping maw dripped a black sludge that sizzled and ate into the sand where it fell. This was not just a Demon King; it was a walking monument to entropy.
It sensed them immediately. The countless faces on its back all turned in unison, their silent screams focusing into a beam of concentrated nihilism that shot toward the mouth of their tunnel.
"Shuya, now!" Kazuyo yelled, his voice strained to its limit.
This was the moment. The theory. The practice.
Shuya stepped forward, past Kazuyo, to the very front of the null-field. He did not raise his hands. He simply stood, and willed the sun within him to rise.
He pushed.
His Calm Dominance aura, usually a contained field around his body, expanded. It flowed out of him, filling the sterile, grey space of Kazuyo's null-field. The lifeless grey was instantly replaced with a warm, golden, tangible light. It was not a shield this time, but a reclamation.
The beam of nihilism from the Scourge struck the leading edge of this expanded golden field.
And it did not vanish. It was converted.
Where the black beam of despair met Shuya's field of affirmed reality, it transformed. The corrupted energy unraveled, its components of pain and hatred stripped away, leaving behind only pure, neutral energy that was absorbed into Shuya's light, causing it to burn even brighter. It was the ultimate alchemy: turning poison into fuel.
The Scourge recoiled, a shriek of outraged disbelief tearing from its maw—a sound that was the cracking of a million souls.
"It… it can't corrupt your light," Kazuyo breathed, awe in his voice even through his strain. "Your reality is too absolute for its lies!"
This was their synergy. Kazuyo had created a perfect vacuum, a sterile slate. And Shuya was filling it with a truth so potent that the Scourge's power could not exist within it. They were not fighting the blight; they were replacing it.
"The core!" Amani shouted. "Beneath its thorax! I can hear it—a concentrated knot of its original, wounded spirit!"
The Scourge, enraged and terrified, began to burrow, trying to escape into the depths of its own domain.
"It's trying to flee!" Lyra yelled.
"It won't," Kazuyo growled. With a final, monumental effort, he shifted his null-field. Instead of a tunnel, he focused it downward, into a deep, narrow pit that exposed the fleeing Demon King's underside. The sterile grey void surrounded the Scourge, cutting it off from the corrupting energy of the dunes.
The beast was trapped in a cage of nothingness.
Shuya didn't need instruction. He focused all his will, all the accumulated light he had gathered from reflecting the Scourge's own attack, and poured it into the pit. It was not an attack of violence, but of overwhelming, compassionate truth. A concentrated beam of pure, healing sunlight.
The golden light struck the Scourge's unprotected underside.
It did not burn. It remembered.
The shifting, tormented faces on its carapace stilled. The agonized expressions softened, replaced by looks of peace, of release. The black sludge dripping from its maw turned clear, then evaporated. The colossal beetle form began to dissolve, not into dust, but into motes of gentle, silver light that rose upwards, filling the cavern.
The silent screams from the walls ceased. The seething blood-red sand of the cavern floor stilled, its color fading to a soft, pale beige.
The Scourge was gone. Not slain, but healed. Released.
Kazuyo let his null-field drop, staggering back. Neema caught him before he fell. The cavern was now filled only with Shuya's gentle, golden light and the rising silver motes of a million freed spirits.
The psychic hum was gone. The air was clean.
They stood in silence, panting, surrounded by the first peace this land had known in centuries.
On the pale sand where the Scourge had lain, a single, perfect white lotus flower bloomed.
They had not just won a battle. They had proven their theory. They had healed a Demon King.
As they stood in the quiet aftermath, a new, more chilling thought occurred to them all. If a Demon King could be healed… what did that make the other nineteen? And what did it make the Church of the Eclipse, which sought only to destroy?