The Chain Breaker cut through the liquid glass of the Great River, its hull gliding in total, ghostly silence.
The Mad Prince stood at the helm, his soot-stained coat fluttering softly in the dead breeze.
Behind him, the island of the two dead Plagues receded into the golden haze, its frosted peaks vanishing beneath the horizon.
He was alone.
It was a state of being he had known for centuries—perhaps millennia.
In the infinite, looping labyrinth of the Tomb of Ariel, time had lost all meaning.
He had lived through hundreds of iterations of this Nightmare, repeating the same bloody cycles, watching his friends fall to the Defilement, butchering them, being butchered in return, and picking up the pieces of his shattered mind only to start all over again.
A lesser soul would have collapsed under the sheer, unimaginable weight of that solitude.
A mortal mind would have turned to ash within the first hundred years of isolation.
He had not collapsed.
He had merely broken, reassembled himself out of dark shadow essence, and broken again, until the line between sanity and madness was no longer a threshold, but a distant memory.
A cold, familiar whisper echoed directly into his auditory nerve.
‘Look at you,’ the voice purred, dripping with venomous, intimate sarcasm.
‘Sailing on your little stolen boat, dreaming your little grand dreams.
Tell me, Sunless…
when you finally slaughter everyone left on this river, who will be left to applaud your grand victory?
The empty trees?
The corpses in your soul sea?’
The Mad Prince did not turn his head.
Beside him, leaning casually against the wooden railing, was a dark, phantom figure.
It was a spectre forged of lightless shadow and razor-sharp spite—the spirit of the Sin of Solace.
For centuries, this manifestation of his own cursed Jaded Jade blade had been the primary architect of his suffering.
It had whispered in his ear during every waking moment, feeding on his insecurities, mocking his failures, and amplifying the subtle, festering corruption of the Defilement until his mind cracked down the center.
The sword had driven him mad.
And yet, in a twisted, horrific irony, it had also been his salvation.
By constantly attacking his mind, by endlessly pouring toxic, unadulterated malice into his thoughts, the Sin of Solace had inadvertently provided an anchor.
The agony of the blade’s curse was so sharp, so constant, that it gave his fracturing consciousness something solid to grind against.
It kept him from completely dissolving into a mindless, rabid abomination like Devouring Beast.
It had kept him focused in his insanity.
‘Silent again?’ the ghost mockingly tutted, leaning closer, its glowing eyes fixing on the Mad Prince’s pale profile.
‘Don’t tell me you’re getting lonely.
You could always summon the blind doll out of your soul sea.
I’m sure she’d love to listen to your endless, tragic monologues.’
The Mad Prince slowly turned his head.
His obsidian eyes—lightless, bottomless abysses of absolute madness—locked onto the spectre.
He did not glare.
He did not show irritation.
Instead, a slow, terribly sweet smile stretched across his pale face, pulling his cracked skin taut.
“You talk too much, old friend,” the Mad Prince rasped, his voice dropping into a soft, wet purr.
“Or perhaps… you don’t talk enough. Tell me… are you afraid?”
The apparition of the Sin of Solace blinked, its mocking smirk faltering for a microsecond.
In the beginning, the sword had been the master, holding the leash of his sanity and dragging him into the pit.
But over the centuries of endless loops, something fundamental had shifted.
The Mad Prince had stepped beyond the boundaries of normal madness.
He had plunged so deep into the abyss that he had swallowed the darkness whole.
He had surpassed the curse of the blade itself.
He was far madder than the spectre whispering in his ear.
Because his mind was completely shattered, the toxic mental burden of the Sin of Solace no longer had any leverage over him.
He could draw upon the full, unbridled, terrifying power of the Jaded Jade weapon—amplifying its mind-severing strikes to a Supreme scale—without paying a single shred of additional mental toll.
He had weaponized his own ruin.
‘Afraid?’ the spectre sneered, though its phantom form flickered slightly, instinctively recoiling from the raw, lightless aura radiating from the Mad Prince’s eyes.
‘Of what?
A broken king sailing toward his own funeral?’
“No,” the Mad Prince whispered, turning his gaze back to the river ahead.
“Of becoming obsolete.”
He closed his eyes, ignoring the spectre’s bitter, quiet hiss, and focused his thoughts on the destination ahead.
The board was nearly clear.
Undying Slaughter and Devouring Beast were dead, their soul cores absorbed, their physical forms ground into the dust of the river.
Sunless was executed.
Nephis was erased.
Torment was bound in shadow chains.
Only two major Plagues remained on the Great River.
The Dread Lord.
And Soul Stealer.
Kai and Mordret.
In previous loops, fighting both of them simultaneously would have been an absolute, suicidal ordeal.
Kai, as a Corrupted Terror, possessed the Dragon’s Voice—an absolute authority that could dominate minds and force compliance with a single spoken command.
Mordret, as Soul Stealer, was an insidious, body-hopping parasite capable of taking over thousands of vessels, creating an army of stolen faces that could slip through any physical defense.
If they had joined forces, even a Transcendent Titan like the Mad Prince would have faced a bloody, agonizing battle of attrition.
Which was precisely why he had arranged their grand trap centuries ago.
He had driven them both into the sunken, ancient ruins of the City of Twilight—the legendary realm of the Twilight King, Daeron of the Night Temple.
He had manipulated events, dropped subtle breadcrumbs of corrupted essence, and baited the two abominations into a ferocious, territorial war against one another within the city walls.
And then, while they were locked in an endless, bloody stalemate, he had played his master stroke.
He had claimed the Crown of Twilight—the ancient, divine relic belonging to King Daeron.
Using the supreme temporal authority embedded within the crown, the Mad Prince had invoked the power of the realm, freezing the entire City of Twilight in an absolute, impenetrable stasis.
He had locked the city in a perpetual, unmoving microsecond of time.
The waves around Twilight were frozen like solid glass.
The clouds were pinned to the sky.
The Dread Lord’s colossal dragon wings were trapped mid-flap, and Soul Stealer’s thousands of stolen bodies were frozen mid-stride, their souls locked in amber.
And the key to that frozen prison—the Crown of Twilight itself—currently rested upon the Mad Prince’s brow, hidden beneath the dark strands of his raven hair, resting against his pale skin like a silent, pulsing heart.
He held the power to restart time whenever he pleased.
‘The math is simple now,’ the Mad Prince calculated coldly, his internal monologue functioning with frightening, clinical precision.
The moment he arrived at Twilight, he would step onto the frozen waves and invoke the Crown to lift the stasis.
First, he would deploy Torment.
With her newly unlocked [Memory Master] ability, the Dread Lord’s absolute advantage would be completely dismantled in the first second of combat.
Kai’s Dragon Voice relied on authority, identity, and target recognition.
The moment the dragon locked eyes with Torment’s blindfold, she would reach into his mind and delete his memories of Sunless, his knowledge of True Names, and his tactical awareness.
A dragon that did not know who it was fighting was merely a large, blind target waiting for the Sin of Solace to sever its head.
And then…
Soul Stealer. New chapters come out on g.com first.
The Mad Prince let out a quiet, dark chuckle.
Mordret’s greatest weapon was his ability to jump from soul sea to soul sea, invading his targets from the inside and usurping their bodies.
Against any ordinary Transcendent or Titan, it was an unstoppable invasion.
But against the Mad Prince?
‘Let him try,’ he thought, his obsidian eyes gleaming with pure, sadistic anticipation.
If Soul Stealer dared to jump into his soul sea, the mirror demon would not find a vulnerable mind to conquer.
He would find himself stranded in a vast, boundless ocean of lightless black water—surrounded by the roaring, ravenous presence of seven Transcendent Shadow Cores, and swarmed by the millions of dead, terrifying shades of every Nightmare Creature and human the Mad Prince had slaughtered across a thousand loops.
In a physical battle, Mordret was slippery.
In a soul duel?
Mordret would be diving headfirst into an abyss that would swallow him whole and grind his soul into fine ash.
He would clear the city, destroy the two remaining Plagues, and then…
the final strike.
He would sail the Chain Breaker directly into the Estuary, seek out the source of the Defilement, and tear down the temporal walls of the Tomb of Ariel once and for all.
For two days, the ship glided across the vast, lonely expanse of time.
The Great River was unusually quiet.
The air was thick, laden with the heavy, sweet scent of decaying temporal essence.
The golden light of the seven suns burned continuously overhead, casting long, stark shadows across the sacred wood of the deck.
The Mad Prince sat at the bow, cross-legged, his dark blade resting across his knees.
He spent the hours in absolute, silent contemplation, refining his shadow essence, tuning his connection to his Shadow Cores, and ignoring the intermittent, bitter ramblings of the Sin of Solace.
On the evening of the second day, the currents of the river began to change.
The clear, liquid glass of the water took on a deep, dark violet hue.
The gentle flow slowed, becoming heavy, viscous, and swirling with thick, temporal eddies.
The Mad Prince stood up slowly.
He walked to the edge of the bow, resting his pale hands against the wooden railing, and looked toward the distant horizon.
There, rising from the swirling, dark waters, was a sights that defied reality.
Bathed in a perpetual, unnatural dusk—where the sky was painted in bruised shades of deep purple, violent crimson, and fading gold—lay the City of Twilight.
It was a magnificent, tragic monument to a fallen age.
Massive, ancient spires built of black stone rose high into the air, connected by sweeping archways and grand, fortified bridges.
Half of the grand metropolis was submerged beneath the dark river, its sunken avenues visible through the crystal-clear water like a giant, underwater mausoleum.
And around the entire city, a absolute, terrifying dome of frozen time hung like a crystal sphere.
The Mad Prince could see it clearly with his Transcendent perception.
High above the central spire, a massive, terrifying shape was suspended in the air.
It was a dragon—a colossal beast clad in dark, obsidian scales, its massive wings spread wide, its cavernous maw open in a frozen, silent roar that had been trapped mid-vibration for centuries.
The Dread Lord.
And along the lower bridges, frozen in chaotic, mid-combat poses, were thousands of silver-armored soldiers, beasts, and shadows—the stolen legions of Soul Stealer, locked in an unmoving picture of total war.
The entire city was a tomb waiting for its undertaker.
A slow, terrifying smile spread across the Mad Prince’s pale face.
He reached up, his clawed fingers lightly brushing the cold, invisible weight of the Crown of Twilight resting against his forehead.
He could feel the pulse of the realm beneath his fingertips.
A single thought…
a single push of his essence…
and the clock would begin to tick again.
The frozen roar would shatter the silence, the blood would flow, and the final massacre of the Great River would commence.
The Mad Prince stood alone on the deck of the Chain Breaker, looking at the frozen apocalypse waiting for him.
“Wake up, my old friends,” he whispered to the twilight sky, his obsidian eyes burning with a lightless, absolute madness.
“It’s time to die one last time.”