The city of Oakhaven fell silent. In the newly formed crater at the heart of the battlefield, Liam and General Malakor stood locked in place, the poison dagger grinding against the massive head of the demon's axe. The shockwave had ceased, but the air itself still trembled, thick with dust and the palpable pressure of two immense powers meeting. The brief, terrifying equilibrium was shattered as both warriors were thrown backward by the sheer force of their own impact.
Malakor landed with the heavy, solid thud of a falling mountain, his boots digging trenches in the stone street. He let out a booming laugh, a sound of pure, unadulterated joy. "Yes! This is a fight! That Light General was a fool who died for his honor! I fight for victory!"
Liam landed gracefully, his obsidian armor scarred and smoking from the initial clash. He didn't waste breath on a reply. The battle was joined in earnest. What followed was a maelstrom of violence that defied comprehension for the mortal soldiers watching from the city's ravaged walls. It was a dance of god-like beings, a whirlwind of light and shadow, fire and steel.
Malakor was a creature of overwhelming force. Every swing of his colossal axe was a cataclysm, carving arcs of molten fire through the air that melted stone and vaporized anything they touched. He fought with a brutal, straightforward efficiency, seeking to crush Liam under the sheer weight of his superior strength and demonic endurance. He was a battering ram, and Oakhaven was the nail.
Liam, in contrast, was a phantom of vengeance. He couldn't match the General's raw power blow for blow. Instead, he became a blur of motion, using his superior agility and teleportation to his advantage. He would appear behind Malakor, striking at the joints in his volcanic armor with fists wreathed in Dark Force, then vanish a split-second before the retaliatory swing could connect. He would parry a fiery axe blow with a shimmering shield of pure Light, the holy energy hissing as it met the demonic flames. For every ten earth-shattering blows Malakor threw, Liam would land one precise, debilitating strike. It was a war of attrition, a battle of the bull versus the wasp.
For a time, the strategy worked. Liam was a ghost on the battlefield, a whisper of death that the General couldn't seem to touch. But Malakor was no mindless beast. He was a veteran of a thousand wars, a commander of legions. He began to adapt. He stopped trying to hit Liam directly and instead focused on controlling the battlefield. He slammed his axe into the ground, sending out waves of fire and concussive force that tore up the terrain, limiting Liam's ability to teleport and forcing him into the open.
Caught in the blast radius of one such attack, Liam was sent tumbling. He recovered mid-air, but Malakor was already there, his massive form blotting out the sky. The General didn't swing his axe; instead, he slammed his fist, wreathed in black fire, directly into Liam's chest. The obsidian plate armor, a gift from a fallen Demon General, cracked under the impossible force. The pain was blinding. Liam felt his ribs shatter as he was blasted across the city, crashing through the wall of a building a quarter-mile away.
He lay in the rubble, his vision swimming, the taste of blood in his mouth. He healed the immediate damage with a surge of Green Attributes, the warm light knitting his bones back together, but the cost was immense. His magic reserves were finite.
Malakor landed before him, his laughter echoing through the ruined structure. "You are fast, mortal. You are versatile. But you are fragile. You cannot win."
He began a relentless assault. Liam was forced onto the defensive, using every ounce of his skill just to stay alive. He parried with Light, dodged with Agility, and struck back with Dark, but he was losing. Every blocked blow sent jarring tremors up his arms; every dodged attack was a near miss that singed his hair. He took another hit, then another. His movements grew sluggish, his teleportations less precise.
The General saw his opening. He roared, his body igniting with an apocalyptic aura of flame and shadow. "You have been an amusing distraction, mortal. Now, die! SCORCHED EARTH JUDGEMENT!"
He became a meteor, a living engine of destruction, and slammed into Liam again and again. The first hit shattered Liam's remaining armor. The second broke his limbs. The third was a final, crushing blow that drove him into the ground, leaving him in a shallow crater, broken and unmoving.
The battlefield fell silent once more. The human defenders on the walls cried out in despair. Their champion, their impossible savior, was gone. Liam lay still, his breath shallow, his body a canvas of ruin. He felt his life slipping away. With the last of his focus, he looked at his own information.
> Liam – Level 206/∞
> * Title: The General
> * Strength: 1020
> * Agility: 1020
> * Endurance: 1020
> * Magic: 20 / 1020
> * Dark Force: 460
> * Green Attributes: 115 (Harmony - Tier 1)
> * Light Attributes: 90 (Inherited - Tier 1)
> * Health: 50/60000
> * Status: Critical, Near Death, Magic Depleted
>
He was broken. His magic was so low he couldn't even muster the faintest green glow to heal himself. He had failed. He felt the darkness closing in. He was dead.
General Malakor stood over Liam's body, his chest heaving. He threw his head back and let out a roar of triumph that shook the entire city. The demon army roared with him. Victory was theirs.
Believing Liam was dead, Malakor turned his attention to the true prize. With a single, powerful leap, he vanished from the battlefield and reappeared in an instant atop the highest tower of the Royal Palace. The guards there were incinerated before they could even draw their swords. He smashed through the stone wall and stepped into the chamber where the King was trying to usher Lyra to safety.
He backhanded the King, sending the old man crashing into a wall, and grabbed Lyra by the throat, lifting her into the air. She struggled, her fingers clawing at his armored gauntlet.
"I was given orders to kill everyone in this pathetic city," Malakor sneered, his fiery eyes boring into hers. "But I will not kill you. A prize such as yourself should not be wasted. You will become my servant."
"LIAM!" Lyra screamed, her voice raw with terror and grief, a desperate, final plea to the hero she believed was already gone.
Down below, in the crater, something stirred within Liam. Her scream cut through the encroaching darkness, a beacon in the void. It was not the green light of life that answered her call. It was something else. Something older. Colder. He had never used it before, had never known how. But now, in the abyss of his own death, he understood. He reached for the power Valerius had given him. He used Dark Healing.
It was not a warm, gentle mending. It was a violent, agonizing reconstruction. Tendrils of pure shadow erupted from his wounds, not closing them, but forcefully stitching them together with threads of darkness. His broken bones snapped back into place with audible cracks. His pulverized organs were rebuilt not with living tissue, but with solidified shadow. It was a resurrection fueled by pure spite and rage.
He stood up, his body whole but fundamentally changed. His blue eyes were gone, replaced by two burning pits of chaotic energy, swirling with the black of the abyss, the green of life, and the white of holy light. He was no longer just a General. He was a force of nature. He was rage given form.
With a thought, he was gone from the crater and standing in the tower chamber.
Malakor spun around, his eyes wide with disbelief. "Impossible! You were dead!"
Liam didn't answer. He lunged.
He was no longer just fast; he was instantaneous. He appeared before the General, his hand grabbing the arm that held Lyra and snapping it backward with a sickening crunch of bone and metal. Malakor roared in pain, dropping Lyra. Liam caught her, gently placed her behind him, and turned his full, unrestrained fury on the demon.
"Give me the dagger," he screamed
A vortex of shadow appeared, and the poison dagger flew into his hand.
What happened next was not a fight. It was an execution. Liam moved, and Malakor, the great Demon General who had leveled armies, could not even track his movements. One moment Liam was there, the next, the poisoned dagger was buried in the General's gut. Before Malakor could even register the pain, Liam was behind him, driving the dagger into the back of his neck.
Everyone on the battlefield, human and demon alike, looked up at the tower and saw it. They saw the flash of movement, the demonic General stumbling, and they saw Liam, wreathed in an aura of terrifying, multi-hued energy, delivering the final blow. He plunged the dagger deep into Malakor's chest, lifted the massive demon off his feet, and with a final, guttural roar, threw him from the tower. The General's body landed in the street below, lifeless.
An unearthly silence fell over the city. Then, the human defenders erupted in a cheer. But their celebration was cut short.
Liam, standing on the edge of the broken tower, did not bask in the glory. The chaotic energy around him exploded outward. He had lost control. His mind was a storm of conflicting powers, his only instinct the one that had been drilled into him by the System for years: eliminate the enemy. All of them.
He shot down from the tower, a living missile of destruction. He became a whirlwind of death moving through the demon army. He moved so fast he was just a blur, a reaping shadow that left only dismembered corpses in its wake. There was no strategy, no finesse. There was only annihilation. He killed them by the hundreds, then the thousands. His attacks were so wide and chaotic that some of his own people, the very soldiers of Oakhaven who were fighting nearby, were caught in the crossfire, cut down by the indiscriminate blasts of energy.
He didn't stop until every last demon in the city was dead.
When the last enemy fell, Liam stood in the center of the corpse-strewn street, perfectly still. The terrifying aura around him slowly receded. He stood frozen for a long moment, as if his body had forgotten how to move. Then, he swayed, and collapsed to the ground, unconscious.
For a moment, there was only shocked silence. Then, a single voice cried out, "He did it! He saved us!" Another voice joined, and another, until the entire city was chanting. "LIAM! LIAM! LIAM!"
They had won. The city that had once hated a boy they thought was worthless now chanted his name in adoration. He was their savior. He was their hero.
The royal guards cautiously approached his unconscious form. They lifted him gently and carried him through the cheering crowds to the palace, placing him in his bed.
Later, the King stood by his bedside, his face a mixture of awe and fear. Lyra was there too, gently dabbing Liam's forehead with a damp cloth. She looked at his peaceful, sleeping face, but she wasn't seeing the boy she knew. She was seeing the terrifying, uncontrollable force of nature that had leveled an army on its own.
That wasn't Liam, she thought, a cold dread settling in her heart. I know it wasn't. That was a dark force. It was a force to kill, a force to destroy.