Shadow Slave

Nothing could consume everything.

But true darkness, it seemed, was especially susceptible to nothingness — more so than even to light. When exposed to Neph’s pure radiance, darkness simply retreated... but when coming into contact with the power of annulment that Saint had summoned, it was directly destroyed.

Erased from existence, as if it had never been there at all.

Which posed a question — how had Nether been able to rule both true darkness and nothingness, to begin with? Sunny had no answer, but then again, the Prince of the Underworld had been a daemon.

And daemons were known to accomplish impossible feats.

In fact, among all the daemons, the Demon of Destiny seemed to have been the most inventive and ingenious, mastering all kinds of sorcery and adapting it to his needs. Weaver had been a schemer, Ariel had been a keeper of secrets, Hope had been a teacher...

But Nether had been an inventor, accomplishing numerous wondrous things in pursuit of his designs, all culminating in the creation of the Stone Saints.

So was there really a need to feel surprised that he had ignored the inherent conflict between true darkness and nothingness, making both elements submit to his rule? And if Nether could, why wouldn’t one of his Children be capable of doing the same?

As the stone shards of the first Dark One to have entered the field of annulment scattered across the cracked floor of the vast chamber, the rest of them seemed to hesitate, halting at the invisible boundary. But Saint denied them time to adapt to the rapidly shifting current of the battlefield — she dashed forward, plunging several more abominations into the area of denial.

They crumbled into stone shards mere seconds later.

By then, the rest of the Dark Ones had already retreated, wary of the vestige of nothingness contained within Saint. Naturally, they weren’t going to get far — while vast, the stone chamber wasn’t endless, and with how quickly Saint could move, avoiding her for more than a handful of moments was not an option.

As Sunny saw it, the Dark Ones had two choices now. They could either abandon their morbid shells and retreat or be destroyed.

At first, it seemed like they had chosen the former.

Saint had only managed to destroy a few more abominations, filling the chamber with the sound of falling rocks, when the rest of them suddenly froze. Then, the towering stone monstrosities all collapsed at the same time — despite not being caught in the field of annulment just yet.

They simply fell lifelessly, the jagged pieces of fallen Stone Saints that composed their lumbering bodies losing cohesion and scattering in all directions.

‘They are retreating, after all...’

Sunny let out a relieved sigh. Encountering a new kind of adversary was always a tense experience, and he was happy to have escaped the first confrontation against the Creatures of Darkness relatively unscathed. Not only that, but he seemed to have discovered a powerful weapon against those of their eerie kind that awaited in the depths of the Underworld.

However, his relief had been premature. Just a moment after the jigsaw abominations crumbled, the innumerable pieces of rock that had scattered across the floor moved once again, just as they had at the beginning of the battle.

Only, this time, they weren’t assembling into countless frightening figures.

Instead, they were being pulled into the depths of the chamber, rapidly congregating at a single point — as if drawn into the orbit of an invisible dark star.

At that moment, Sunny realized that, possibly, he had the wrong idea about this battle from the very start.

Saint froze for a moment, raising her head to look up. Considering her towering height... it took something truly enormous to make her crane her neck.

Out there in front of her, innumerable stone shards — the shattered remains of her fallen kin that had been used to create impenetrable shells for the Dark Ones — were assembling into a single, colossal figure.

The creature was so enormous that its head scratched the ceiling of the great chamber. It had lost all resemblance to a human, as well — or rather, to a Stone Saint. Instead of the familiar form with two legs and two arms, a disjointed mass of rock loomed above the taciturn Shadow in the darkness, dozens of misshapen limbs protruding from its heavily armored body.

It looked eerie and threatening, utterly alien to anything Sunny knew.

He felt a grim premonition.

Perhaps... there had never been a swarm of Dark Ones attacking them. He had assumed that there were numerous Creatures of Darkness around them based on his experience dealing with people and abominations, but true darkness was different from both, foreign to this world.

Perhaps there had always been only one creature, one consciousness, one malevolent will opposing them.

If so, then the Dark Ones they thought they destroyed had never been killed. Instead, they simply dispelled a few minor pieces of that vast, unknowable being.

‘Damn it.’

Just a heartbeat later, a gargantuan stone horror was complete, dwarfing Saint despite her towering, ten-meter-tall figure. In front of the giant assembled from innumerable corpses of her kin, Saint looked like a mouse facing an elephant.

...Whatever an elephant was.

Everything seemed to freeze for a moment. Then, the colossal horror moved forward in an explosion of violent motion, bringing down its unfathomable weight on the graceful stone knight.

Saint moved, as well.

Having abandoned her usual cold indifference in favor of dark and dreadful wrath, she took a step forward and tossed her round shield forward like a discus.

Her shield tore through the air, annihilating it, causing a deafening thunderclap to shake the walls of the fractured chamber.

The field of annulment moved with it, narrowing to fit its form.

In the blink of an eye, Saint’s shield reached the neck of the gargantuan Nightmare Creature... and tore through it, pulverizing innumerable tons of mystical stone in a blinding flash. The creature’s vast neck exploded into a cloud of stone dust.

Its head fractured and crumbled, as well. Even its gargantuan body came undone, turning into a devastating avalanche of stone debris.

That avalanche collided with the floor of the chamber with the fury of a natural disaster. And, finally unable to endure the abuse of titanic forces, the floor of the chamber fractured and collapsed with a deafening roar.

‘Oh, crap...’

Suddenly losing her footing, Saint was pulled into a bottomless abyss of true darkness by a flood of stone debris.