The plains of Tashi burned beneath a bruised sky. Ash drifted like black snow, and the scent of iron and smoke clung to every breath. The once-quiet village had turned into a field of echoing roars and shattered ground.

The twins stood across the battlefield Alaric and Selene pale, ethereal, almost untouched by the carnage around them. Their eyes glowed faintly, like dying suns.

Selene tilted her head, studying Khael as her voice rang out, soft yet cutting through the din.

"Who are you?"

The wind shifted, carrying the crackle of energy as Khael stepped forward. The crimson aura around him pulsed, faint scales gleaming under the light of burning voidborn corpses.

He lifted his chin, his voice steady, deep unshaken.

"I am Khael Corzedar."

At that name, Selene froze. Her lips parted, her eyes widening as realization struck her.

"Khael Corzedar… you mean—" she whispered.

Her tone trembled between disbelief and recognition.

"The Dragon Knight."

The title rolled through the air like thunder. Even the voidborn nearest seemed to hesitate, their hissing momentarily silenced by the weight of that name.

Alaric's golden eyes flickered curiosity, then greed, then something like fear. He turned to his sister, a dark grin slicing his face.

"So if we hunt you down…" his voice was low, almost a purr, the promise of violence laced between the words.

He glanced toward the bleeding horizon, the memory of Vince's strike still burned into his shoulder.

"…we're going to be—"

Selene's voice overlapped his, almost whispering, as if finishing a prayer.

"Free."

Khael looked between them, the wounded twins, their bodies still marked by Vince's fury, and yet their will unbroken. His crimson aura shimmered brighter, scales flickering along his neck like molten light.

He repeated their word, voice quiet but sharp enough to cut.

"Free?"

He stepped forward, eyes burning.

"You think freedom comes from killing others?"

Alaric smirked, rolling his sword in his hand, golden eyes narrowing.

"Freedom comes from breaking chains," he said coldly.

"And your existence, Dragon Knight, is one of those chains."

Khael's gaze hardened, his dragonfire aura blazing brighter, the wind itself beginning to hum around him.

"Then come break me."

Alaric's lips curled.

"Heh… we intend to."

Before either could move, Juno's shout cut across the plains raw, alive.

"DON'T FORGET ABOUT ME!!"

He burst from the smoke, blood splattered across his jaw, his body still thrumming with the energy of the Fifth Gate. The ground cracked beneath his feet as he slammed a palm into a cluster of voidborn, the creatures exploded into mist.

"You talk too much!" Juno roared.

He tore through another line of monsters, his movements all fury and precision.

Ceyla Nox, further back, struck down three voidborn with a single crack of lightning, her eyes sharp and unyielding. Her voice echoed faintly, exhausted but steady.

"We're holding them but not for long!"

Andromeda Ban and Matthew Lomwel stood at the edge of the village, corralling terrified villagers into the last safe path. Andromeda, his coat tattered but clean somehow, still found time to grin, shouting between orders:

"This reminds me of my last date!"

Matthew blinked. "How's that?"

Andromeda smirked while deflecting a lunging voidborn with his Echo shield.

"Lots of screaming, and no one listened to me!"

Even through the chaos, Matthew groaned. "Not the time, Andromeda."

"Humor calms the nerves!" Andromeda shouted back, swinging his spear.

"Yours maybe, not mine!" Matthew retorted, cutting down another voidborn as his canine companion Sae barked beside him, her fangs glowing with Echo energy.

Back at the center of the storm Khael and the twins finally moved.

Alaric raised his sword, and the ground beneath him split with a flash of gold and shadow. Selene's fingers twitched, and dozens of voidborn responded instantly, their forms tightening into a spiral formation their movements disciplined, controlled.

Khael drew a slow breath, lowering his stance, the wind around him swirling like a storm contained by will alone.

"So this is the strength that fought Master Vince.." he muttered.

"Then I'll repay his pain with interest."

Selene's lips curved. "We'll see if you're worthy of that title."

And then the world erupted.

Alaric moved first, his golden blade cutting through the air like light itself. Khael met it with his gauntlet, the impact sending shockwaves through the field. The wind screamed as the ground cratered beneath them.

"So this is the Dragon Knight!" Alaric hissed, his grin widening.

"Let's see how long your wings can hold."

Khael's eyes flared with fiery light.

"Long enough to burn you from the sky."

Their battle became a blur light and flame, steel and roar.

Ceyla watched from afar, panting.

"Khael… don't overdo it."

Meanwhile From the ranks of the Tashi Taishin, a dozen voices rose together rough, fierce, laughing despite themselves.

"LET'S FUCK THESE VOIDBORNS!!!" the cry tore across the field.

It was not elegant. It was not noble. It was the sound of people who had lost sleep and loved ones and had finally decided that terror would not take another night from them.

At their center moved a man who did not look like a village guard. He wore no academy colors, no ceremonial sash. Instead he carried the weathered scars of a life that had chosen to hit first and hard. Dark hair cropped stubbornly close, a jaw set in granite; a crimson sash tied around his forearm once an insignia, now a promise. He put himself between a mother and her child and the nearest shadow and grinned a grin that had killed kings in another life.

They called him Robi.

"Robi!" a villager shouted, stunned and half-hopeful. "You came back—"

Robi cracked his knuckles. "Came back? Hah. I never left. Someone just forgot to knock." His voice carried the easy arrogance of a veteran and the warmth of someone who still kept a corner of his hearth for home.

Khael's eyes found him through the smoke. For a heartbeat recognition flashed in the Dragon Knight's face, (The Kain Eclipse side stories) a memory of a man who once taught strikes that broke wind, strikes that made the body obey mind. Robi had been a Crimson Veinwalker, once a title he'd worn until his bones decided it could be enough. At thirty he'd traded the road for a captain's post in Tashi, and now that same hard-earned mastery was a living barrier between the villagers and the void.

Robi raised one hand, and the air answered.

"Captain Robi," he called to the closest group of Taishin practitioners, voice commanding but kind, "Form line A wedge in. Keep the flanks tight. No heroics unless you want to meet the ground."

They moved like a unit, a taught thing, their bodies obeying the rhythm Robi laid out. Where they crashed into the voidborn, the shadows tore like paper—because Robi had taught them how bone could be a weapon, how tendon could redirect a soul's momentum into a kill.

Juno heard the roar of the villagers and Robi's calm and for a split second his exhaustion eased. (Damn, that man moves like an old thunderstorm used to crushing things and then walking away.) The thought steadied his hands.

Alaric watched the new formation with a slight, almost respectless smile. "They brought a veteran," he said, the gold in his irises catching the flare of Khael's shinrei. "Interesting."

Selene's face did not change. "More mouths to feed the Hollow." Her tone was careless; her eyes measured the distance between Robi and the twins.

Robi did not waste time speaking to the twins. He didn't need to. He moved. He ran not like Juno's gladiatorial charge but with a different discipline: era-polished, economy of motion honed by a thousand corrections. His first blow was not a shout; it was a lesson. Fist met fleshless jaw, and the creature's head rocked back as though remembering what it was missing.

A cry went up behind him, then another. The villagers fell into the rhythm he set: one-two, strike, pivot, advance. The Taishin captain's presence turned panic into choreographed survival. His hands were cruelly effective: a palm to the throat, an elbow to the spine, a heel to the temple gestures that taught the shadows where the face of the world still bled.

"Keep pushing!" Robi barked, voice gravel and coal. He grabbed a collapsed spearman, hauled him up by the collar, and shoved him into a gap. "You don't stop. Not now."

Matthew and Andromeda, freed to help, shepherded the last of the villagers into Robi's escort. Matthew's iron-field and Andromeda's echo-wall combined with the Taishin wedge to make a moving fortress. Sae and Junjun, bright and fierce, ran along the edges, nipping at the heels of any Shadow that strayed too close to the fleeing families.

Juno, mid-spin, felt the gap close where Robi had opened it. He caught a flash of the man's face a map of victories and losses, a grin that was as much pity as amusement. In that attention there was no vanity, no preening. Robi fought because the next man's life was his concern.

(Keep the line. Keep the hearts. Keep the names.) Juno thought, and his body obeyed.

Alaric stepped forward again, sword singing a note of challenge. "Your village's champion shows more bite than your masters taught him," he commented, voice velvet wrapped around iron. "Perhaps we underestimated the locals."

Robi wiped blood from his knuckle with the back of his hand and chuckled. "We're not locals," he called back, voice bright with a soldier's arrogance. "We're survivors." He pivoted and smashed his elbow into a voidborn's sternum; it crumpled like someone had snipped a support line. "And we don't like teeth on our children."

Selene's smile thinned. "So loud." She lifted a hand; shadow-needles sprouted in the earth and launched with cold precision. One struck the ground between Robi and a small cluster of villagers, and the soil screamed as the voidborn began to crawl through itanother strategy, another threat.

Robi felt the shadow-needle nick his calf small, a cut that burned but he only grinned wider. The cut would scar but not stop him. "Nice trick," he said, eyes bright. "But do you have a trick for a whole village that refuses to die?"

Selene looked at him as if tasting the answer. "You'll find your tricks dull quickly."

Khael's blade flashed, swallowing the shadow-needle as it passed, and in that instant the twins' attention split. Alaric saw Khael's movement and the calculation went through his face, the twins were opportunists; they fed on chaos. Robi, by anchoring the villagers and forcing the fight into a meat-and-bone fray, had denied them the feeding ground they needed.

The battle's pitch changed. It was no longer only a hunt for the twins; it became a test of will. Robi's shouts became the drumbeat behind which villagers stood straighter. Children stopped hiding and watched with wide eyes as their captain, the man who'd once held Crimson turned terror into a lesson.

For a breath, amid the thunder of fists and the hiss of disintegrating voidborn, Alaric's golden gaze flicked toward Selene and softened a sliver before the mask of hunger slid back into place.

"This will be fun," he whispered, and lunged.

Robi met him with both arms, bone and callus answering the blade. The impact rang through the field. Robi's face set in the smile of a man who had been called back into the river of battle and had realized he was not yet ready to drown.

The twins had come to finish what they had begun. The village and its captain had come to make sure they didn't.

And in the center of the roar, Juno's fists kept moving, Khael's wings of wind kept clearing lanes, and Robi crimson-armed, thirty and unbowed kept turning panic into resistance, one brutal, honest strike at a time.

To be continue

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