Michael felt genuinely pleased.
An unexpected turn of events had handed him more than he could have planned for.
“Now, let’s see what else I got,” he muttered, curiosity already pulling him toward the updated system.
He wasn’t given the chance.
The Dullahan had returned.
Michael turned and stared at it for a long moment.
When the Celestial Demon had stepped through that rift and pressed the entire dungeon flat with nothing more than his presence, the Dullahan had gone very, very quiet.
It had been statue still and head down.
As invisible as a headless undead knight could manage.
But the moment the being was gone?
Here it was.
“Coward,” Michael said plainly.
He stretched his arms above his head and rolled his neck until it cracked.
“Well.
Let’s wrap this up.
I genuinely need a bath.”
His eyes bled crimson.
His fangs pressed past his lips.
The Dullahan raised its great sword and charged, wasting no time on ceremony.
But the Michael it had been fighting before the Celestial Demon arrived and the Michael standing before it now were not the same person.
Not even close.
The great sword came down in a cleaving arc aimed to split him in two.
Michael sidestepped it.
Casually.
The blade carved nothing but air.
Before the Dullahan could reposition for a second strike, Michael drove his fist straight through its abdomen.
The force sent the Dullahan hurtling backwards, crashing through gravestone after gravestone, its great sword torn from its grip and left spinning in the dirt.
Michael watched it land.
Then he began walking toward it.
No rush.
Each step placed with quiet authority, the kind that didn’t need speed to feel inevitable.
He stopped a short distance from where the Dullahan had fallen and looked down at the great sword lying at his feet.
He reached down and picked it up.
The Dullahan stared.
That sword was saturated with undead energy so concentrated and so violent that any living being who touched it would be consumed from the inside out.
Every experienced fighter knew that.
It was not a weapon anyone living should have been able to hold.
But Michael held it.
And the sword went quiet in his hand.
The violent energy writhing through the blade simply…
settled.
Docile.
Contained.
As though it had met something that outranked it and decided not to make a scene.
“Hmm.
So this is death energy,” Michael murmured, his right eye narrowing as it began pulling the energy apart at the conceptual level, examining the layers of it with focused, unhurried interest.
[You have gained a slight understanding of death energy.]
[Study more to gain control over death energy.]
He smiled at the notification.
Confirmed.
The sword shifted in his hand as the understanding settled into him, and he felt its grade change beneath his fingers.
A rank.
Then S rank.
Just like that.
The Dullahan could not process what it was witnessing.
“How do you even see without a head?” Michael asked, looking at it with genuine curiosity.
He activated Odin’s Eye.
The world restructured itself.
Darkness energy saturating every corner of the space.
The unique resonance the dungeon itself released, like a heartbeat running through the walls and the soil.
And the death energy pouring off the Dullahan in slow, constant waves, threading outward and merging with the dungeon’s own frequency in a pattern that suddenly made complete sense.
“I see,” Michael said quietly.
The Dullahan shivered.
Not from cold.
From the feeling of being looked at by something that could see everything.
It felt stripped bare in a way that had nothing to do with the physical.
“Alright.
Let’s finish this,” Michael said.
He kicked off the ground and moved.
Undead surged up between them immediately, bodies pressing together to form a wall of rotting flesh and grinding bone.
Michael swung the Dullahan’s own sword, now called Dark Star in his mind, and cleaved the first wave into nothing.
Void Slayer appeared in his left hand without being summoned, drawn to the fight like it already knew what was needed.
He used it to skewer an undead that dropped from above, pinning it mid-air before discarding it.
He moved through the horde the way water moves through broken ground.
Not forcing.
Simply finding every gap and filling it with consequence.
The Dullahan rose to its feet.
It looked at what remained of its army.
It looked at Michael.
It clenched both hands into fists.
No sword.
No minions left that mattered.
Just itself.
And its pride.
The Dullahan had never lost.
It was not going to lose now.
It braced.
The moment Michael crossed within a metre of it, the Dullahan locked every sense it had onto the approaching figure and prepared to meet him head on.
Then Michael disappeared.
That was the only word the Dullahan had for it.
One moment he was there.
The next, nothing.
No presence.
No sound.
No trace of him anywhere the Dullahan’s senses could reach.
Panic set in immediately.
The Dullahan pushed its perception outward in every direction, straining to find something, anything, a footstep, a shift in the air, the faintest disturbance in the death energy around them.
Nothing.
“Get some bloody eyes, perv!”
The voice came from directly in front of it.
Right where Michael had been standing.
The Dullahan tried to react.
Block.
Counter.
Something.
But it had no reference point.
No position to aim at.
It threw a punch forward into the space where the voice had come from, hoping sheer desperation would make contact.
Its fist closed on air.
Then it lost the hand.
Clean and Gone.
The pain arrived a moment later, sharp and absolute, the kind the Dullahan had not felt in a very long time.
Its severed hand hit the ground somewhere in the dark.
Before it could even begin to process that, the second hand followed.
The Dullahan stood in the ruined graveyard with no hands, no sword, no enemy it could locate, and no viable response to any of it. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
And then something strange happened.
Something that should not have been possible for an undead.
Memory surfaced.
Fragments of past deaths, rising unbidden through whatever passed for a mind inside that headless skull.
Battles it had fought.
Warriors it had faced.
Men of great strength and hard-won power who had pushed it to its limits and still fallen.
The Dullahan had faced all of them without flinching.
It had faced all of them with honour.
But not once, in any death it could remember, had it ever fought something it couldn’t sense.
Not once had it felt this.
And for the first time in longer than it could measure, the Dullahan realised it missed its head.
Not for pride.
Not for aesthetics.
Simply because more eyes felt very necessary right now.
It turned in a slow circle, two bleeding stumps where its hands had been, searching the dark for the reaper it could not find.
The more it thought about its situation, the more one conclusion kept rising to the surface.
“Run.”
The instinct came from somewhere deep and ancient, something it had believed long dead inside it.
Fear.
Real fear.
The Dullahan ran.
It moved with everything it had left, driven by something it hadn’t felt in lifetimes.
“I see.
So your brainless self decided running was the best option.”
The whisper landed directly in its ear.
Cold.
Amused.
Close.
Far too close.
The fear doubled.
If the Dullahan had possessed the relevant anatomy, something deeply undignified would have occurred.
It lost its left leg before it could take another step.
The ground came up fast.
It hit the dirt and kept moving, crawling with one leg and two stumps, dragging itself forward through sheer stubborn refusal to stop.
Distance.
It just needed distance.
It needed to be anywhere that was not here.
But it already knew.
It had known from the moment the whisper reached its ear.
“Good.
Wriggle like the worm you are.”
The Dullahan stopped crawling.
Not because it wanted to.
But because the last leg was gone.
It lay in the dirt of its own dungeon, reduced to nothing, and felt something settle over it that wasn’t quite peace and wasn’t quite despair.
Its death was coming.
It had no heart.
So the thumping inside its chest made no logical sense.
And yet there it was.
Steady.
Loud.
Getting louder.
The Dullahan stopped fighting the feeling.
It stopped fighting everything.
And in the last moments before Michael ended it, the Dullahan found that it wasn’t afraid of dying.
It was relieved.
Relieved to be done.
Relieved to be free from the torment of the reaper before it.