Their blades met like collapsing stars.
The first clash of steel and darkness rang out across the ruined plains—an echo so sharp it split the ground beneath them. The Demon King brought his cleaver down like a judgment from the abyss, but Illio caught it with Oblivion, sparks showering from the contact. The force of it rattled his spine, nearly drove him to the ground again. But he held.
Then moved.
A step in. A twist of the blade. A shallow cut across the Demon King's armored side.
The beast grunted—not in pain, but in acknowledgment.
Illio did not wait.
He surged forward, each movement betraying the state of his body: shattered ribs, torn ligaments, burning lungs. His muscles screamed with every strike. His vision tunneled. But his sword… his sword still danced.
A feint left. A spiraling parry. A lunge that pierced the King's shoulder, driving dark blood from the wound. It hissed as it touched air.
The Demon King reeled, stunned—not at the pain, but the possibility.
"This shouldn't be—" he growled, voice losing composure.
Illio didn't give him time to finish.
He pressed forward again, teeth clenched, blood pouring down his arm. The Sword Saint, reduced to bone and fury, pushed the calamity of existence itself backward across the battlefield.
Every technique was pure instinct now—fighting on memory alone.
He struck with Heaven's Shroud, the execution stroke of a lost northern dynasty.
He weaved through Flickering Edge, stepping through a breath between moments.
He slammed downward with Bastion Breaker, a forbidden style meant to sunder fortress gates, now used to batter the very skin of evil.
And the Demon King—ageless, formless, feared—staggered.
His movements changed. Slower. Defensive.
For the first time in a thousand years, the end of all things tasted fear.
"You… mortal…" the King snarled, eyes glowing like twin furnaces. "You dare—"
But Illio was already swinging again, even as his knees buckled.
The battle was a storm of ash and hate. Steel screamed. Bones cracked. Magic flared and died. Each time Illio should have fallen, he rose. And each time he rose, something else in him—something sacred—began to unravel.
He knew.
He had known since the moment he walked through the castle gates.
There was no winning.
The Demon King's wounds were surface. The kind that closed too fast. The kind that mocked the effort. For every blow Illio landed, his own body shattered further. For every inch gained, his vision darkened.
Time. That was all he had ever hoped to buy.
He locked blades one final time, breathing shallow and wet.
And in that breathless moment between strikes—his sword trembling in one hand, his ribs shattered beneath him—Illio whispered not to the King, but to the world itself.
"I offer all that I am."
The runes carved into Oblivion's hilt—long dormant, unreadable to any living scholar—began to shimmer with a light that no sun had ever cast. Not golden, not silver, but something deeper—the color of memory, of sacrifice, of truth too old to speak aloud.
The Demon King froze.
His eyes—those infernal embers—widened in a way Illio had not seen in three days of battle.
"…those runes," the King breathed. "No… not them…"
They pulsed again.
And this time, the earth screamed.
The King took a step back. "You don't know what you're invoking! That magic was forbidden even before your gods were born!"
But Illio did know.
He twisted Oblivion in his grip and drove it through his own palm, the edge biting through flesh and soul alike. Blood, thick and burning with latent mana, poured down the blade like oil over fire.
The response was immediate.
The battlefield shattered.
Veins of light erupted from beneath their feet, carving sigils into the soil—not drawn, but remembered by the world itself. Great rings of radiant script spiraled outward, wrapping around Illio and the King in concentric patterns of staggering complexity. Each symbol floated in the air like a dying star, drifting and spinning as if caught in the breath of some divine force.
They were runes of Final Binding—the oldest of spells, written by the first heroes who ever faced the dark and chose the world over themselves. Spells that did not kill evil, but chained it, sealed it in suffering, isolated it from time and memory so thoroughly that even the gods could not hear its screams.
The Demon King lunged forward, madness in his howl. "You'll kill yourself! You'll erase your name! Your soul will be nothing but a lock—a lock with no key!"
But it was already too late.
Illio stood at the heart of the circle, sword still buried in his bleeding hand, as the chains of pure arcana began to erupt from the light. They whipped outward—burning, glowing, singing—wrapping around the Demon King's limbs, his weapon, his essence.
The King's form distorted.
He clawed at the air, at Illio, at fate itself. But nothing struck true.
"I deny you your triumph," Illio said, voice hollow and eternal. "I deny you your future. I deny you existence."
The air turned blinding.
The ritual climaxed in a crescendo of divine violence. The sky split open, revealing a darkness so complete it made night seem merciful. Pillars of light fell from that rift—not from heaven, but from sacrifice—and pinned the King in place like spears of judgment.
Illio screamed.
Not in pain, but in release.
His body cracked apart, his skin sloughing off in burning layers of dust and spirit. He was coming undone, each fiber of his being unraveling into luminous threads, wrapping themselves around the prison forming in midair.
His thoughts began to fade.
His childhood.
His name.
The face of his mother.
The smell of rain in spring.
Gone. Given.
He became the key, the chains, the seal.
And still—he did not falter.
Not when the Demon King roared his hatred to the ends of the world.
Not when the skies sealed shut above them.
Not when Oblivion shattered, completing the final bond.
Not even when the very memory of his name was torn from the tapestry of history.
He endured.
And with him—so did the world.
.....
The light faded.
The sky sealed shut.
And with it—he was gone.
What followed wasn't silence. It was something worse—a stillness so profound it pressed into the lungs like drowning. The wind had stopped. The flames had died. The air itself seemed afraid to move, as if it feared breaking the spell of finality that hung over the battlefield.
There were no cheers.
No cries of triumph.
Only a small cluster of soldiers, crouched at the crumbling edge of the ruined stronghold—the ones who had stayed. Not to fight. Not to die. But to watch.
They were not heroes.
They were the ones who had trembled behind shattered walls as one man walked alone into the storm. They had gripped their weapons. They had whispered their apologies into the dirt. And they had done nothing.
And now, they knelt—not in reverence, but in shame.
The youngest among them was the first to fall.
He collapsed to his knees, his spear slipping from nerveless fingers and clattering against the stone. His breathing hitched, sharp and broken, each gasp a sob he refused to voice. His helmet had been lost hours ago. His face—so painfully young—was smeared with grime, ash, and tears.
It was the boy.
The same boy who had tried to speak, who had begged Illio not to go alone.
He had watched everything.
Every strike. Every technique. Every step Illio had taken into the abyss.
He had watched the man vanish in a pillar of light—erased so completely the gods themselves would forget him.
And he had done nothing.
"I should have followed him," he whispered, barely audible. "I should've… I should've done something…"
His voice cracked, and with it, something inside the others broke.
Because they had all thought the same.
They had stood, bloodied and breathless, as the Sword Saint carved mountains of corpses into the land. And they had hoped—secretly, shamefully—that he would succeed so they wouldn't have to try and fail.
They had let him go.
And now, there was nothing left of him.
No body.
No blade.
No name.
Only a hollow in the air and a burning weight in their chests that felt like punishment.
The boy's shoulders shook. He dug trembling fingers into the dirt, eyes wide and wet and unblinking. "Why did he do it alone? Why didn't I run after him? Why didn't I move?"
No one answered. They couldn't.
He pounded his fists into the ground. "He gave everything. And I just… stood there."
He looked up at the sky—empty, endless, quiet.
And screamed.
It was not a heroic scream. Not battle-born. It was raw, helpless, and human—the scream of a child who had witnessed a god bleed and could not forget the sound.
The others dropped beside him.
Some wept. Others bowed their heads so low they touched the ground. But none dared speak the name they could no longer remember.
"I wasn't brave," he whispered. "I wasn't… enough."
The others said nothing. What words could reach this hollow?
Ash drifted around them like snow. In the distance, the wind carried nothing but the echo of a man whose name could no longer be remembered—even by the gods.
But their hearts remembered.
The boy reached into the dirt, and with his bare hands began to carve.
He etched a single symbol—the first rune he had seen glow beneath Illio's feet. He did not understand its meaning. But he understood what it stood for.
He stood again, hands filthy, face streaked with tears.
"I will not let the world forget," he said. "Even if no name survives. Even if time erodes every statue, every story—I will pass on what happened here. What he did."
The others looked to him—tired, wounded, ashamed. And one by one, they nodded.
They did not deserve to be remembered as heroes.
But they could become witnesses.
"We were cowards," one murmured. "But we will not be liars."
"We will tell them the truth," said another.
They would speak of the mountain of demon corpses.
Of the sky torn open.
Of a dragon born from hate.
Of a single man who stood alone.
And of how the world was saved by a sword that vanished, wielded by hands that time itself had tried to erase.
In the years to come, songs would be sung. Myths would be born. Some would call it fantasy. Others, religion. But among the children of those few soldiers, the tale would always be told the same way:
There once was a man who stood where no one else would.
He gave everything, even his name, to end the end itself.
And though the world forgot him—he never forgot the world.
---
Time did not mourn Illio.
It could not.
For his name was lost, buried by the very magic that had sealed away the end of all things. But even without a name, his shadow remained—etched not into stone or scripture, but into the soul of the world itself.
The earth healed slowly.
The blackened plains where demon blood had soaked the roots of the world for centuries grew quiet. The ash was swept away by wind and time. The bones of the dead, both human and monstrous, were buried beneath new soil. Grass grew again. Birds returned to skies that had once wept only fire.
And humanity endured.
Not at once. Not without pain. But one village became two. Then a dozen. Then a hundred. People rebuilt on the ruins of cities they had watched burn, carving out homes from the remnants of the old world. They farmed where battlefields once stood. They planted trees where monsters had died.
They were afraid—but they remembered.
The story of the man who stood alone was passed in hushed voices, father to daughter, elder to child, always beginning the same way:
"He had no name, but we are here because of him."
From the scattered survivors of the final war rose new bloodlines, new banners. Small tribes became clans. Clans became kingdoms. And over generations, the children of the last war wove the age to come.
The Kingdom of Solmara rose first, founded by a queen descended from one of the two hundred who had watched the final battle from the walls. Its people believed in endurance, not glory. Their motto was carved in stone above their palace gates: Let none forget what silence cost.
To the north, the Freeholds of Ashvane took root among volcanic highlands, built by smiths and soldiers who remembered more war than peace. They honored Illio not with prayers, but with weapons—each blade bearing a single rune etched into the hilt: the one the boy had drawn in the dirt.
And in the southern wilds, mystics and mages raised the Ivory Spire, a sanctuary of study and remembrance. They sought to understand the Final Binding—not to break it, but to learn from it. To prepare, should darkness ever return.
In less than a century, the world had changed beyond what Illio could have known.
But even peace carries its burdens.
Some said the Demon King had not been destroyed, only locked away. Others whispered of cursed places where demons still stirred beneath the soil, whispering in languages older than flame. And still others feared that with Illio gone, no one remained who could stand should fate turn its eye upon mankind again.
But for a time—a precious, golden time—the world rested.
And the age that followed would be remembered by one name only:
The Era of the Nameless Saint.
---
Yet far beyond the reach of kings and scholars,
Beneath roots untouched by light,
In places where even silence fears to linger,
The seal began to pulse.
Not in warning.
Not in violence.
But in recognition.
For fate—like rot—never sleeps forever.