When Milo reappeared in the courtyard of Ferdor’s keep it was with a smile on his face. He’d beaten two trials and was confident he’d gotten away from the dragon without revealing anything too sensitive.

  His smile vanished as soon as the vortex disappeared, and the stench of death hot him. The entire courtyard was carpeted with the dead bodies of demons, hybrids and humans above all else. His first conclusion was that Ferdor was under attack, but something didn’t quite fit that narrative. He bent down to inspect one of the dead humans, the man wore cheap leather armour and judging by the dried blood he’d been for hours. A chill ran down Milo’s spine, in the event of any attack Ferdor’s keep should’ve been the last place to fall since it was the most defensible.

  His mind was swirling with a thousand possibilities when a voice reached him. It was male and the speaker was laughing and talking casually. He could just barely make out the words as whoever it was drew closer.

  “Our prince sure showed those red eyed monsters what was up!”

  Another series of laughs answered the words.

  “Indeed, I was there when he took the keep, he offered their leader to become his concubine! When she tried to flee his majesty’s mages caught her and killed her so quickly you wouldn’t believe it!”

  Milo was still naked as he approached the owner of the voice. A group of twenty or so human men in leather armour were approaching the keep from outside. They were dragging wagons behind them and had Milo’s mind been less focused on the possible implications of the words he had just heard he would’ve called them a cleanup crew of some sort.

  The men saw him and immediately drew their weapons. Swirls of green sprang up around Milo’s body and manifested into his equipment. Milo pointed Deathbringer at the man in the lead.

  “You! Tell me what happened here!”

  The man laughed and then made a few hand motions, the rest of the group spread out to flank Milo. Then they charged as one. Milo was in no mood to play games, he never stopped moving towards the leader even as he effortlessly butchered his men. By the time Milo reached the leader the man had fallen onto his ass and was looking at Milo’s blood covered face with true terror. Milo reached down and yanked the man up by his throat.

  “WHAT HAPPENED HERE!?”

  The man struggled in his grip and liquid ran down his trousers to his boots as the man soiled himself.

  “Tell me or I will flay you alive piece by piece!”

  The man nodded and Milo sat him back down on the ground. He looked behind himself and seeing no help in sight stuttered out an explanation.

  “Prince Malkir and his fleet arrived at mid-day to answer the people of Ferdor’s request for help. When we arrived, we found the city occupied by red eyed freaks and monsters. The prince ordered the attack, and we overwhelmed our enemy, we pushed them back into the keep and killed them when they tried to escape.”

  “All of them?”

  Milo’s thoughts were of Ivy, with her ability to shadow blink away there was no way they could have stopped her from fleeing a lost battle, right? The man’s words stripped whatever hope Milo was clinging onto away.

  “Yes, some tried to use magic to escape but our mages caught them, they fought like cornered dusk wolves, but our numbers were too great. It took a while, but our mages were able to kill their leaders, they nailed them to the unnatural thing in the courtyard.”

  Milo looked over his shoulder at the obelisk of death, something had broken the building off right above the base and yet he could make out two shapes nailed to it. Even from a distance he recognised both at once, Ivy and Beldan.

  “You’ll let me go now, right?”

  Milo’s hand moved without thinking and Deathbringer cut the man’s throat as if it were butter. Then he dropped the sword and staggered over to the obelisk as if he were a drunken man. Tears filled his eyes as he stared up at Ivy’s corpse, a dozen black spears of some kind had been used to impale her against the obelisk.

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  For months he’d shared his bed and all his thoughts with her, she’d been his right hand since the very beginning. What had started out as a partnership of necessity had become true love somewhere along the way. He brushed his tears away and a feeling of overwhelming hatred bubbled up inside him.

  Somewhere inside him an invisible dam broke and his body started changing as he walked out of the courtyard. His lichsteel armour shifted to accommodate his new form as a pair of wings and a giant spiked tail erupted from his back. His hands were clawed and a pair of horns protruded from his head. He stopped only once to pick up Deathbringer before heading straight for the docks.

  He encountered several patrols on his way to his target, each group would do their best to kill the ‘monster’ and once they realised the futility would try to run. Milo hunted each soldier down, not letting a single one escape his sword. With each soul claimed by the sword he could feel something within the sword answer, whatever it was, it was hungry.

  Sometime around the hundredth kill a haunting voice spoke in his mind.

  “Yes… kill them all… reap their souls and fuel your vengeance… ultimate power is within your reach…”

  The voice was the answer to a mystery which had started when something had tried to take control of his mind the first time he’d summoned Deathbringer. Whatever it might be Milo was too far gone in grief and hatred to care, all he wanted right now was to obliterate whoever had stolen Ivy from him.

  Just as the docks came within view the alarm finally went up. Milo could see several hundred huge ships docked at the harbour, men and women in armour were streaming from the ships down the docks towards him. For the most part they were armed in simple leather with spears, shields and bows. They came at him in a mass several thousand of them at a time.

  Unfortunately for them they were mere humans, and with his true metamorphosis form active they could barely even register the speed of his sword before they died. With each kill Milo felt Deathbringer steal life energy which was then stored in his amulet and used to sustain his true metamorphosis form. As long as he kept killing, he could maintain true metamorphosis forever.

  Every now and then an arrow or a spear would strike him but with his body protected by a double layer of scales and lichsteel plate armour he was practically invulnerable from mundane weapons. They kept coming and he kept killing them until the entire docks were covered in blood. He’d killed several thousand when the voice in his mind spoke again, this time it was clear and sounded almost normal.

  “Well done child of Lilith, my name is Kalifor and I have awoken once more! Now draw upon the sword and I will lend you my power.”

  Milo too far gone to wonder why the legendary Kalifor, son of the death god Enox was trapped in his own sword. Instead, he listened to the voice and drew upon the sword’s power, green flames spread from the hilt up the blade and then erupted into a wave which incinerated everything in a thirty-meter radius around him. Milo pointed his sword at a group of archers and the fire responded to it as if alive. Men and women screamed with agony as they were burned alive by the green flames.

  Milo turned his attention to the ships, he was certain that whoever had killed Ivy would be on one of them. The flames responded to his wishes and started spreading amongst the ships. Sailors screamed and jumped into the bay to extinguish the flames as their ships burned. Milo had set nearly a hundred on fire by the time the voice spoke again.

  “You must leave at once, I detect a large group of powerful elementalists approaching, you will not overcome them alone.”

  Milo ignored the voice and turned to face a large group of humans approaching him from the very end of the docks. A few thousand men wearing beautiful white armour he recognised from his fight with Miria was approaching him in a shield wall formation. Behind them came several hundred men and women in white robes with staves in their hands. They were obviously elementalists and he charged them with a roar.

  The front ranks of the shield wall burned, and Milo was just about to break trough when water surrounded him. His feet left the ground as he was lifted into the sky within a sphere of water. The flames went out as soon as their connection to him was severed and Milo found himself suspended in the air. Seti had told him about combination spells and how they were extremely powerful when performed by a large number of elementalists.

  Milo glared down at the elementalists and their ranks parted to reveal a cold-eyed man with a crown upon his head who looked a lot like Miria. The man looked up at Milo with a smirk.

  “Well well, you must be this champion your people kept going on about as they were slaughtered. They promised us that you would destroy us all unless we withdrew.”

  Milo glared down at him from his watery prison, the water kept him from replying, not that he had anything to say to Ivy’s killer anyway.

  The man chuckled and then turned to face the elementalist.

  “Get on with it, we have fires to put out.”

  The elementalists waved their hands and giant black spears surrounded by water started flying at him with incredible speed. Each time one would strike his body Milo would flinch, and the reservoir of life energy stored within Deathbringer would drop. Even with the vast reserves his murder spree had built up it was draining rapidly. About four minutes into the attack one of the spears struck his sword arm and he dropped Deathbringer.

  Suddenly all the wounds Deathbringer had been keeping closed started bleeding and Milo knew he was seconds away from death. The last thing he saw before his vision went black was the prince bending to pick up Deathbringer. Milo died with a smile on his face.

  Lily watched from the shadow of an alley as her sister’s killer picked up Deathbringer and was immolated. The elementalists gathered behind him tried to save the man but he was already dead by the time the first water spell hit him.

  The elementalists all backed away from their fallen prince and the champion’s body, apparently nobody was fool enough to touch either. Lily shadow blinked back to the keep and walked over to her sister’s body. After a few minutes of yanking spears out she carried the body with her to the city wall and then several miles away. After a brief scan of the area, she finally let her tears fall.

  The two of them had been close since childhood, and what a pair they had made, Lilith’s heir and the abomination. Yet despite the sins of her parents Ivy had befriended her and treated her like a sister, forcing others to do the same. She was the sole reason Lily had gone from outcast to a respected member of Lilith’s inner circle. And now she was dead, killed by some human princeling while her lover was away.

  Lily couldn’t quite explain how, but she’d known something was wrong and had sought out her sister at once. But she’d arrived too late, by the time she’d reached the city the champion had been knee deep in blood and flames in his quest for vengeance. She’d briefly considered trying to talk some sense into him but one look at him had told her that he was beyond reason. He truly had loved her sister, and thus they now shared a bond, a bond of vengeance.

  Lily buried Ivy and then returned to Ferdor, one by one she started snatching guards, nobles and elementalists. And one by one she interrogated them with a coldness that would’ve shocked even Lilith. By the end of the day, she would not only know exactly who was responsible for her sister’s death but also where they and their families lived. And then, she would return for the champion’s resurrection and provide him with exactly what he needed to honour her sister’s memory.