Egmund stood over Aden's broken form, his grin stretching wider than any human mouth could. The battlefield around them was silent—even the screaming swords embedded in the earth had gone still.
"At last," Egmund breathed, his voice thick with triumph. "After centuries of being shackled to lesser men... I finally descend."
He turned, stepping over Aden's spilled entrails as if they were nothing more than spilled wine.
"You were the weakest of them all, Aden Vasco," he sneered, not even bothering to look back. "At least your ancestors had the decency to beg before they died."
Aden's remaining eye tracked him weakly, his fingers twitching in the dirt—
—when the ground exploded.
A massive, blackened chain erupted from the earth, its links thicker than a man's torso, covered in glowing crimson runes. It whip-cracked through the air and coiled around Egmund's leg with a sound like a breaking spine.
Egmund stumbled, his smirk vanishing.
"What—?"
He yanked at the chain, his muscles straining—but it didn't budge. His claws slashed at the metal, sending sparks flying, but the links didn't so much as scratch.
For the first time, fear flickered in his hellfire eyes.
"No..."
He planted his feet, his entire body swelling with power, his aura erupting in a maelstrom of black fire—
—when he felt it.
A presence.
Hungry.
Egmund froze, his breath catching in his throat.
"No... This cannot be—!!"
The air shattered.
Memories not his own flooded Aden's mind—visions of a time long past, when the first Vasco knelt before a throne of living shadow.
"For your service," the Demon King had rumbled, his voice the sound of continents breaking, "I gift you Wrath. My most trusted blade. My enforcer."
The memory twisted—centuries of war, of bloodshed, of Vasco heirs wielding Egmund's power like a weapon.
And then, the truth:
The Demon King had never trusted Egmund completely.
Fearing his prized sin might one day rebel, he had split his own essence—burying a sliver of his will deep within the Vasco bloodline.
A failsafe.
A judge.
The chains glowed white-hot.
Egmund screamed as the runes burned into his flesh, searing symbols of submission into his very soul.
Aden's body lurched—his spilled guts snapping back into place, his bones knitting together with a sound like grinding stone. His right eye, once destroyed, regrew—but it was no longer human.
It was void-black, the pupil a slit of burning crimson.
And from the darkness behind him, something stepped forward.
Not the Demon King in full.
But his shadow.
His will.
A figure of shifting smoke and ember, its face a void with only two burning coals for eyes.
"EGMUND," it intoned, the word shaking the earth.
Egmund flinched, his defiance crumbling. "M-my King—"
"YOU WERE GIVEN A MISSION." The shadow moved, its form flickering like a dying flame. "YET YOU SEEK TO FLEE?"
Egmund's lips peeled back in a snarl. "I served you for millennia! I deserve—"
The shadow blurred.
A fist of black fire slammed into Egmund's gut, lifting him off his feet.
"You think just because you sucked up to me for a thousand years that I'll let you go?"
"YOU DESERVE NOTHING."
What followed was not a battle.
It was an execution.
The shadow flexed its fingers—and a blade of shimmering gold manifested, its edge humming with Greed's hunger.
It slashed.
Egmund's arm fell, severed at the elbow, dissolving into ash before it hit the ground.
He howled—
—only for the shadow's other hand to plunge into his chest, fingers wrapping around his core.
Gluttony awoke.
Egmund's power surged out of him, siphoned away into the void, his form withering like a rotting fruit.
"NO! STOP! I—!"
The shadow leaned in, its presence dropping down towards Egmund with a wide grin.
And then—
Darkness.
Aden gasped awake, his body whole, his mind alight with power not his own.
Around him, the subspace was silent.
The sky wept ash.
And in the back of his mind, a voice that was not his own purred:
"Now... we hunt."
Somewhere in the distance, a chain rattled.
Egmund was still alive.
And he was running.