The Mad Prince stood in the gloomy silence of the throne room, his obsidian eyes resting casually upon the cooling corpse of his former friend.
He observed the lifeless Nightingale for a long moment.
There was no grand revelation, no sudden pang of overwhelming guilt.
The young archer was simply dead, his chest cavity ruined by the absolute malice of the Sin of Solace.
The Mad Prince tilted his head, watching the pool of dark crimson expand across the polished black stone of the dais.
‘How fragile,’ he thought coldly.
‘A single thrust, and all that righteousness simply bleeds out onto the floor.’
Before the Mad Prince could indulge any further in his dark, cynical musings, the world outside violently reasserted itself.
ROOOOOOOAAAAAAR!
The sound did not just echo; it fractured reality.
The acoustic shockwave hit the cavernous palace with the force of a physical battering ram, shaking the ancient obsidian pillars and rattling the very bones in the Mad Prince’s chest.
It was the roar of a furious, confused god.
Out in the central plaza, the Dread Lord had just been released from centuries of temporal stasis, fully expecting to unleash his world-ending breath upon the silver-armored legions of the Night Temple and the sprawling horde of possessed abominations.
But there was no one left to fight.
Because the Mad Prince had just exterminated Soul Stealer inside the Mirror Realm, the thousands of hollow vessels that made up the opposing army had instantly collapsed.
They were nothing but empty meat and heavy steel, crashing lifelessly to the paving stones the exact millisecond the Crown of Twilight relinquished its hold.
The colossal dragon stood amidst a sea of instantly dead corpses, his world-ending fury suddenly starved of a target.
The Mad Prince’s pale lips curled into a razor-sharp, terrifying smile.
“Time to tame the lizard,” he whispered.
He did not walk out the grand doors.
In the blink of an eye, his physical form dissolved into a pool of lightless ink, sinking seamlessly into the shadows of the throne room.
He traveled through the spatial void of the city, bypassing the grand staircases and shattered archways, and reappeared instantly on the blood-soaked stones of the central plaza, directly beside the hind legs of the colossal beast.
Up close, the sheer, hyper-dense scale of the Dread Lord was suffocating.
His obsidian scales were the size of shields, radiating a stifling heat and an aura of pure, draconic majesty twisted by the Defilement.
His massive wings blotted out the purple sky, casting a deep, unnatural gloom over the courtyard.
The Mad Prince did not waste a fraction of a second.
He raised his pale left hand and reached deep into the lightless ocean of his soul sea.
From the shadow cast by the dragon’s massive wing, a pool of absolute darkness began to bubble and rise, slowly taking the shape of a slender woman in a flowing, ragged gown.
But before the shadow of the blind oracle could fully solidify, the air pressure in the plaza suddenly changed.
The Dread Lord had felt it.
Even driven entirely mad by the Nightmare, the hyper-refined instincts of a Corrupted dragon were absolute.
The colossal beast sensed the dense, blasphemous presence of the Mad Prince materializing beside him.
The dragon did not flinch.
He did not rear back.
He did not even bother to turn his massive, spiked neck to look at the insect that had dared to enter his domain.
He simply spoke.
The voice that emanated from the dragon’s throat was not a roar, but a dark, vibrating baritone that resonated with the fundamental laws of reality.
It was a voice that commanded the world itself to bend.
“Kneel down.”
The command hit the Mad Prince like a collapsing mountain.
It was not a physical attack, but an absolute, undeniable law imposed upon the fabric of the waking world.
The Dread Lord’s Corrupted authority bypassed all physical defenses, ignored the density of flesh and bone, and struck directly at the soul.
For a normal Transcendent, refusing this command was biologically and spiritually impossible.
The Mad Prince’s eyes widened slightly as the gravity around him seemingly multiplied a thousand times over.
CRASH.
His knees slammed violently into the shattered paving stones, cracking the ancient basalt beneath him.
His spine bowed under the unimaginable pressure.
It felt as though an invisible, colossal hand had wrapped around his entire existence and violently forced him into the dirt.
His bones groaned, on the absolute verge of turning to dust.
Blood vessels in his pale eyes burst, turning the whites a stark, terrifying crimson.
‘Heh…’
Despite the agonizing, soul-crushing weight pressing him into the ground, a low, wet chuckle vibrated in the Mad Prince’s throat.
It would have snapped the mind and body of any sane Transcendent in an instant.
But the Mad Prince was not a normal Transcendent.
He was a terrifying paradox.
The Spell recognized him as a Transcendent human, a challenger of the Nightmare—yet, in the past, he had fully succumbed to the Defilement.
Through sheer, unprecedented force of will, he had clawed his way back from the abyss, subjugating the corruption rather than being consumed by it.
He was not entirely human, nor was he fully an abomination.
He was a vessel that housed the very seeds of the Defilement.
As the Dread Lord’s absolute command tried to crush his soul, those dormant seeds of corruption within the Mad Prince flared to life.
They were a vile, maddening essence that he had carefully hoarded, kept perfectly isolated in the darkest corners of his soul sea.
He did not fight the corruption; he weaponized it.
He fed the pressure of the dragon’s voice directly into his own madness, letting the chaotic, rabid energy of the Defilement act as a shock absorber against the Dread Lord’s authority.
The Mad Prince was kneeling, his face inches from the blood-stained stones, but his obsidian, bloodshot eyes were burning with a terrifying, lightless triumph.
He was in complete control of the rot inside him.
“You always were… so bossy, Kai,” the Mad Prince rasped quietly to the stone, a deranged smile pulling at his cracked lips.
Beside him, the shadow finished taking shape.
Torment fully materialized.
The slender, corrupted shade of the blind oracle stood perfectly upright, entirely immune to the dragon’s command because she possessed no will of her own to subjugate.
She was merely a puppet of the Mad Prince’s shadow.
Feeling the profound, unsettling silence of the anomaly behind him, the Dread Lord finally moved.
The colossal obsidian dragon slowly, heavily turned his massive neck.
The movement was deliberately slow, radiating an aura of supreme, predatory arrogance.
A single, colossal eye—a dark, bloody orb the size of a carriage, burning with unadulterated madness and draconic fury—rotated to look down upon the intruders.
The Dread Lord expected to see a shattered, broken creature groveling in the dirt.
Instead, the bloody, draconic pupil contracted as it locked onto the figure standing calmly beside the kneeling Man.
It was the shadow of a delicate woman.
Torment did not speak.
She simply raised her pale, ink-like hands.
With a slow, deliberate motion that seemed to freeze the very air in the plaza, the blind oracle reached up to her face, hooked her fingers beneath the fabric of her dark blindfold, and pulled it away.