The silence broke.
The demon legions surged forward like a living tide of fangs and malice, howling in a thousand monstrous voices as the ground shook beneath the weight of their stampede. The sky darkened further, as if recoiling from what was about to unfold. Claws scraped earth. Wings tore through wind. War horns forged in infernal pits screamed their wretched calls.
And Illio moved.
Oblivion left its sheath in one fluid motion—no flare of light, no thunderous cry. Just a whisper of air displaced by death. The blade did not gleam. It devoured. As it cut through the first wave, it didn't slice flesh—it annihilated it.
The front line of demons was erased before their minds could register pain.
Illio didn't run. He didn't roar. He advanced like a grim procession, carving a path with mechanical precision and terrifying calm. Each movement of his blade was brutal, clean, and final. Heads, limbs, torsos—demons exploded in showers of gore, black ichor painting the ground in writhing patterns. The shrieks of the damned filled the air, but Illio did not hear them. He heard only the sound of his own breathing, steady and controlled.
He hated them.
Not out of rage. Not even vengeance.
His was a hate deeper than emotion—a primordial loathing that rose from something buried in his blood, older than words. It was the instinctive, soul-curdling rejection of something that should not exist. The demon horde wasn't a force to be reasoned with. It was a blasphemy. A perversion of life, of order, of the sacred silence of the dead.
And so, he killed them not to protect—but to cleanse.
A horned brute, twice Illio's size, charged with a hammer forged from screaming bone. Illio sidestepped, drove Oblivion through its gut, then tore the blade sideways—bisecting the creature before it could scream. Another lunged, wings outstretched. A flick of the wrist, and the head went spinning into the mist.
They tried to overwhelm him, climbing over their own dead in blind fury. They swarmed, a thousand to one. But Illio's sword never slowed.
Because now, the Sword Saint began to dance.
With a breath like a whispered prayer, Illio invoked the first of the ancient arts—Formless Step, an elusive technique said to have been lost when the Eastern Monasteries fell to fire. He vanished mid-strike, reappearing behind an entire battalion with a single blur of movement—and the demons collapsed in unison, clean lines carved across their necks and hearts.
Then came Moon Fang Descent, a technique forged in legend and forbidden for mortals. With one great upward slash, Illio cleaved through a flight of winged beasts midair—forty, maybe fifty, their bodies split before they even reached him. The arc of his sword left a trail in the sky like a falling crescent.
He twirled Oblivion in his grip, shifting his stance low—Cradle of Ash, a technique taught only in dreams by the ghosts of ancient swordmasters. In it, his body moved like smoke through the battlefield, limbs flowing without wasted movement, each strike a sentence, each parry a judgment. Demons impaled themselves upon him before they realized they had been baited.
To the outside eye, it was no longer a battle. It was ritualized execution.
Demons of all shapes—serpents, behemoths, malformed giants—charged, but they died before reaching full stride. The sword was too fast. Too sharp. Too final. It became an extension of Illio's will, his movements more like calligraphy than combat—an artistry of extinction.
He fought like memory incarnate, wielding styles that no other man had ever touched, techniques once thought myth, now manifest in blood and ruin.
The battlefield became a canvas of carnage.
He turned into the heart of their mass like a scythe through grain, his body moving with terrifying grace. Blood sprayed in arcs. Demons howled as limbs were sheared, torsos split, spines shattered. Some tried to fly. Illio leapt and brought them crashing down with cleaving blows that snapped wings like twigs.
His cloak—burned and tattered—was soaked in their filth. His skin was coated in black, steaming ichor. But his eyes, those cursed emerald eyes, never lost focus.
He didn't falter.
He didn't speak.
He just killed.
And the battlefield began to change.
What had been an onslaught turned to a retreat. Not organized—desperate. Even the mindless ones, bred only to feed and feast, began to feel it: that human at the center of the field was not prey. He was not even predator.
He was death, given purpose.
Mountains of corpses formed in his wake. Black rivers ran through cracked soil. The sky itself seemed to grow still, as if watching. As if afraid.
The Great Commanders did not move. Not yet. They watched the impossible unfold. They watched their army—their legion—die by the thousands.
And still, Illio kept going.
Until the killing became ritual.
Until the ritual demanded sacrifice.
He felt it rise from within—the ache in his spine, the tremor in his lungs, the humming fire of mana boiling beneath his skin. The battlefield was choking on corpses, yet the flow of demons did not cease. It was not enough.
They had to know fear.
They had to know why men spoke of the Sword Saint in hushed and hurried whispers. Not just out of reverence and absolute respect for the one who achieved the pinnacle of swordssmanship, but out of innate fear, for rumor was it that even his gaze could slice one's very soul.
Illio exhaled, and his breath shimmered in the cold air like oil over flame. The aura surrounding his body began to writhe—no longer a mere extension of his strength, but something alive. It twisted and coiled around him, dark and seething, until the air itself seemed to bend under its weight.
Then he raised Oblivion, plunged the blade into the earth—and spoke the name of judgment.
"Vel'Tharion—Wrath of the Unworthy."
The ground ruptured.
A roar shattered the sky—a sound that didn't come from lungs, but from the soul of the world. From the shattered earth behind Illio burst forth a colossal figure of pure mana, wreathed in smoke and chaos. A dragon—not of flame or light, but of voidfire, stitched from shadows and fury, its scales forged from his will and his wounds.
Vel'Tharion, the Dragon of Judgment, spiraled into the heavens on wings of howling death.
The demon legions froze.
It looked down upon them with eyes shaped like galaxies collapsing, and screamed—a sound that tore into the minds of every beast on the field. They fell to their knees, clawing at their own skulls, driven mad by the presence of something that existed only to unmake them.
The dragon descended.
Where it passed, the world ceased. Demons were burned not to ash, but to silence—stripped of body, soul, and even memory. No bones. No screams. Only empty craters and quaking earth. The legions shattered beneath its wrath, scattering in every direction like rats in fire.
It was not an attack.
It was a sentence carried out by vengeance incarnate.
And at the eye of the storm stood Illio—cloak torn and breathing weary—but still standing.
Still watching and recovering, never wasting a precious second as chaos, desperation, and death permeated the battlefield turned grave.
....
By the end of the third day, the battlefield was quiet.
Not silent—quiet. The kind of stillness that follows the collapse of a temple, or the final note of a dirge played for the dead. Blackened clouds hung motionless above the scorched plains. Smoke clung to the air like grief, and the sun—what little could be seen through the mist—bled red against the horizon.
There were no more screams. No more charging waves. The earth no longer trembled beneath the weight of demons.
Because there were none left.
The corpses were uncountable—heaped across the battlefield in grotesque mounds, some still twitching with residual hate, others burned into oblivion by Vel'Tharion's wrath. What remained of the once-mighty legions was ash, silence, and a wound in the world that might never heal.
And at the center of it all… Illio stood.
Barely.
His cloak was gone, shredded and burned away. His body was a ruin of flesh and blood, scorched by mana and marked with countless cuts, bruises, and clawed wounds. His right arm no longer moved with ease. His breathing was shallow, ragged—drawn through cracked lips and clenched teeth.
Oblivion was chipped. Scarred. Drenched in dried filth. But still in his hand.
Illio's strength, even when drained, radiated like a dying star—dimmer, but no less deadly.
He had not slept.
He had not eaten.
He had not spoken.
And still, he waited.
He knew the truth: the Demon King had not yet come. The legions, the commanders—they were the beginning. The distraction. The ritual he planned required three days of blood. Three days of chaos. Three days of survival. And now the last hour approached.
The last enemy.
Illio fell to one knee, blood dripping from his fingers onto the desecrated soil. His vision blurred. His body screamed. But he forced himself still. There would be no rest. Not yet.
The air changed.
It was not sound. Not movement. Not light.
It was presence.
A shadow peeled itself from the distant fog—not walking, but existing forward. Reality seemed to bend around it, as though the world itself resented its form. Step by step, it came, dragging with it a silence deeper than death, an oppression so thick the remaining corpses began to rot faster in its wake.
The Demon King.
Tall—inhumanly so—cloaked in a darkness that writhed like smoke, adorned in armor that looked molten and ancient, as if forged in the beginning of time. No face could be seen beneath the helm—only two glowing embers, deep red, burning with bottomless hunger.
He stopped several paces from Illio, surveying the battlefield with something like amusement.
"So," the king said, voice low, rich, and thunderous. "You are the sword that cut down my empire."
Illio didn't respond.
The king stepped forward again, dragging a massive cleaver behind him, the blade wide as a man's chest and carved with runes that pulsed with malevolence.
"I expected more theatrics," he said, chuckling. "A hero's last stand. A declaration. A scream. Instead, I find you on your knees. Bleeding. Broken. Alone."
Still, Illio said nothing.
He planted his foot into the earth. Slowly, painfully, he rose to standing.
And raised his sword one final time.