In the heart of the darkness, something moved.
Not a step, not a sound, but a shadow that seemed to breathe, pulsating like a sick heart.
Then, slowly, two eyes lit up in the dark, thin slits of burning red, like embers blown by the wind.
When it finally stepped forward, its figure emerged with unreal elegance.
Karna did not walk, he glided through the air.
His body was cloaked in a grim crimson smoke.
His skin, smooth and scarlet like blood-soaked silk, was adorned with black symbols that moved, dancing along his arms and neck like words of a cursed language constantly being rewritten.
His face, sharp and mocking, wore the smile of a puppeteer who already knew the fate of his puppets.
And then there were the horns: two, thin and pointed, curved like the hooks of a soul hunter, black as night and shiny like polished bone.
But the most unsettling detail were his eyes.
Not because they were red and deep, but because they seemed to look beyond, inside, through.
They were mirrors without reflection, windows that showed not reality, but its distorted version, rewritten by a mind too dangerous to be understood.
And then there was his voice.
Soothing, honeyed, it slipped through the air like the song of a serpent.
When he spoke, it wasn’t just a sound: it was a whisper in the mind, an echo that seemed to come from within, as if his words didn’t need to travel through space to reach the listener.
Karna didn’t just exist.
Karna dominated the space around him with his mere presence.
He wasn’t just a demon.
He was a spectacle.
An actor on a stage of terror, a cruel jester laughing as he rewrote reality at will.
And now, that curtain was rising.
At the center of it all, amidst the flickering shadows of flames and the wind that whistled ominously, stood Karna.
He wasn’t moving.
Not yet.
A twisted smile cut across his face, revealing a row of sharp white teeth.
He tilted his head, making his neck crack.
The smile never left his face.
Then, with an excruciating slowness, he clapped his hands, a slow, ironic applause that echoed in the silence.
"Magnificent.
Truly magnificent."
"Two well-trained dogs, loyal to the master.
Too bad they have long tongues and short brains."
Urano clenched his fists, muscles taut under his skin.
"I don’t have time for your games, bastard.
Where the hell do you think you’re going?
Today ends here."
Karna laughed, a low, vibrating sound, almost hypnotic.
He took a step forward, and both emissaries’ eyes followed every movement he made.
"Run?" he repeated, as if it were the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.
"Oh no, my dears.
There’s no escape for me.
Nor for you."
Urano shook his head with disdain, then glanced at Love’s body, still on the ground, unconscious.
A malicious grin spread across his face.
"All this fuss for that bitch?
Christ, Requiem… or Karna, or whatever the hell you’re calling yourself now... really?
You gambled your soul for a whore?"
Something snapped.
Not in the world, not in the ground beneath their feet.
Something inside Karna.
The air changed.
The wind calmed, the silence grew heavy like lead.
The light from the flames flickered, almost as if afraid.
Karna’s smile disappeared.
His eyes, those two live embers, became bottomless pits.
When he spoke, his voice no longer held the mocking tone it had before.
It was something deeper, older, more inexorable.
"Perfect little soldiers, trained to obey and think they know everything.
Convinced the world is theirs.
That power makes them untouchable."
He stopped.
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"You have no idea what you’re up against."
Aton stepped forward, irritated.
"Oh, for God’s sake.
Listen here, clown, if you wanted to put on a show, you could have stayed entertaining the scum of your city.
We’re here to finish you."
Karna smiled again.
But this time, it was a wrong smile.
A smile that didn’t belong to something human.
"And I am here to bury you."
The air around Karna had changed.
He was no longer just a being of flesh and blood.
He was a chasm of pure terror, an incarnation of chaos moving with unnatural grace.
His body seemed to dissolve and reassemble in the shadows, a crimson glow leaving behind nothing but emptiness.
Urano was the first to move.
Or at least, try.
He lunged forward with lightning speed, collapsing the gravity around Karna with a crushing weight.
The ground cracked, the air vibrated, the pressure became unbearable.
But Karna was already behind him.
SLICK.
A dull sound, like severed flesh.
Urano froze.
His eyes widened, a flash of disbelief crossed his face.
Then he felt the heat.
A viscous, pulsing warmth.
Something liquid was dripping down his side.
He looked.
Karna’s sharp fingers had torn through his armor like paper.
From the cut poured dark blood, streaming down his thigh.
"One."
Karna’s voice was a whisper, but it echoed in Urano’s ears like a suffocating echo.
Aton reacted immediately, raising his hand.
His aura exploded in an incandescent wave, and the air between him and Karna deformed for a moment before…
CRACK.
Another red streak.
Aton felt a piercing pain in his right arm.
He didn’t understand immediately what had happened, until his hand fell to the ground with a wet thud.
He stopped.
Looked at his own arm.
The stump oozed blood in torrents, the pain exploded like fire in every nerve.
"Two."
Another whisper.
Aton screamed.
A guttural cry, an animalistic growl of pure pain.
The air around him filled with unbearable heat as, in a desperate move, he unleashed an explosion at the point where Karna was standing.
The explosion shook the ground.
Smoke rose, dense and black.
Urano, still staggering from the wound, gritted his teeth.
He had to be dead.
No one survived a blow like that.
But the silence that followed was wrong.
Too much silence.
Too much time without the sound of a body falling.
Then, a whisper.
"Three."
Urano turned instinctively, his breath broken by panic.
Karna was behind him.
That damn muffled laugh.
That seductive, poisonous voice.
Urano tried to raise an arm to react, but only felt a sudden pressure on his chest.
Then, the pain.
SCHLICK.
Karna’s fingers had pierced him.
Urano remained still, feeling the blood rise in his throat.
The demon had pierced him through and through, his fingers coming out of his back like shadow claws.
Aton, still gripping the stump with his other arm, watched in horror.
Urano spat a jet of blood, while Karna slowly pulled him toward himself, whispering in his ear.
"You were right, Urano."
Today ends here."
Then, with a fluid and almost delicate movement, he let him go.
Urano collapsed to the ground, on his knees.
Blood poured from his mouth, a red jet on the dust.
Aton stepped back, gasping.
His heart pounded in his chest, his stomach twisted from nausea and pain.
They couldn’t win.
They couldn’t win.
The air was thick with the stench of blood and burning flesh.
The ground was covered in dark stains, and the broken breaths of the two emissaries seemed like the last gasps of men already condemned.
Urano was kneeling, his body a disaster of wounds and broken bones.
He was still standing only thanks to his fierce will and his control over gravity.
Focusing the gravitational force around his wounds allowed him to stop the blood from spilling, but the pain was unimaginable.
Every heartbeat was a stab in his chest, every breath a task.
Aton wasn’t in much better shape.
The stump of his right arm was still smoking, the raw flesh burned from within by tiny controlled explosions.
He had cauterized it with his own flames, a process that had made him scream until his voice broke.
His face was pale, his breathing labored, but his eyes still burned with rage.
Karna watched them from above, tilting his head with a hint of disappointment.
"Still standing?" he asked with a soothing voice, moving his fingers as if to caress the air.
"You should be dead."
Urano coughed up blood but got back up, staggering.
His body trembled under the weight of his altered gravity, but his voice was still venomous.
"Too bad we don’t feel like pleasing you, piece of shit."
Karna smirked, twirling one of his bloodstained sharp fingers.
"Oh, but I was having fun... do you really want to prolong this comedy?
You know you won’t win."
Aton shook his head, gritting his teeth in pain.
The veins on his neck pulsed with adrenaline and the dull pain of cauterized flesh.
"Get that smile off your face, asshole."
Then something happened.
The air around Karna grew dense.
The ground beneath him began to crackle, the dust rising as if sucked into an invisible vortex.
Urano slowly lowered his hand, releasing his power.
Gravity around Karna suddenly increased.
The crash was devastating.
The demon didn’t even have time to react: his body was slammed into the ground with a deafening roar, the earth cracking beneath him in a crater several meters deep.
Aton wasted no time. A flash of flames exploded in his healthy hand.
BOOOOM!
A violent explosion shook the earth, raising a massive column of fire and dust.
For a few seconds, there was nothing. Only the sound of the wind and the crackling of the incandescent rocks.
Then, a hiss.
Something moved in the smoke cloud.
Karna slowly emerged from the crater.
He was wounded. For the first time.
His body trembled, his red skin torn in several places, emitting dark, dense smoke, almost liquid.
Urano licked his split lips.
"Look at that... looks like you can bleed too, bastard."
Aton bent forward, his breath irregular.
"We bring him down... now."
Karna stood still for a long moment. Then he burst into laughter.
But this time, there was a trace of anger in it.
Karna’s laugh broke into a ragged breath.
He licked his lips, savoring the dark blood dripping from a wound on his temple.
Urano and Aton were standing by a miracle.
Their bodies were destroyed, flesh burned, bones shattered, breathing more like a rattle than a vital function.
But their eyes... those were different.
Those eyes told a different story.
Karna clenched his fists, his sharp fingers digging into his palms like blades.
"Mm. Very well..."
Then he moved.
He was quick.
Too quick.
A crimson shadow cutting through the air.
Urano took a step back, but a claw struck him in the side.
A flash of pain shot through him.
Blood sprayed into the air.
Aton lunged forward, unleashing a blast of fire directly into the demon’s face.
The shockwave ripped through the air.
Karna staggered backward, his face hidden behind a black cloud of ash.
Urano barely managed to stay on his feet, the wound on his side bleeding profusely.
But he raised a trembling hand.
Gravity around Karna increased again.
This time, the demon resisted.
His legs sank into the ground, veins on his skin swelling, his eyes glowing with ancient hatred.
He screamed, an inhuman sound, and with a snap appeared in front of Aton.
CRACK!
A punch directly to the sternum.
The air left Aton’s lungs with a chilling sound.
His body flew like a ragdoll, crashing into a rock pillar.
The sound of broken bones.
Urano didn’t have time to think.
He had to finish the job.
He threw his power with everything he had, turning the gravity around Karna into a crushing vortex.
The demon screamed.
His bones began to creak.
"Die!" Urano snarled, pushing to the last bit of his strength.
Karna bent on his knees.
He couldn’t move.
The illusions shattered.
For the first time, the King of Games had lost control.
Aton, gasping and with a trembling hand, raised the last spark of his power.
A final explosion.
BOOM.
A wave of fire consumed Karna.
The ground split beneath him.
Urano and Aton were thrown away by the violence of the explosion.
And then, silence.
Nothing but ash and wind.
Requiem was kneeling.
His back hunched, his breath broken by painful gasps.
His body was a mosaic of deep wounds, blood running down in thin rivulets along his battered skin.
His fingers, once so skilled at playing with fate, were now inert, trembling, incapable of lifting even a single card.
Karna was gone.
In his place remained only a man, a jester with no tricks left to play.
Before him, Urano and Aton stood like broken statues.
Both were destroyed.
But they were still standing.
They had won.
Requiem slowly raised his head, his hair stuck to his forehead from sweat and blood.
His eyes, once lively and full of mischief, were now dull.
A smile crept across his lips.
"And so, the curtain falls… what a fucking show."
Urano watched him from above, his hands still trembling from the effort.
His expression was no longer cocky, no longer arrogant.
Only fatigue and disgust.
Aton, however, laughed softly, a laugh choked by pain, more of a wheeze than anything.
"Who would have thought it would end like this?"
he said with a grin, spitting blood on the ground.
"The great Requiem… on his knees, with no more cards to play."
Urano turned to his men.
One of them approached, an anonymous soldier, his armor blackened.
"Give me the sword," Urano ordered.
The soldier hesitated for a moment, then obeyed, handing him the weapon with trembling hands.
The blade was long, shiny.
Urano grabbed it slowly, weighing it in his palm.
He turned back toward Requiem.
The man kneeling before him smiled again.
"Come on, let’s finish this, assholes."
Urano didn’t say anything.
There was nothing left to say.
He took a step forward.
Another.
He raised the blade over his head.
Requiem closed his eyes.
The sword fell.
SHLACK.
The head detached from the body with a dull, wet sound.
A jet of blood exploded from the severed neck, staining the ground, Urano’s clothes, his hands.
Requiem’s body remained kneeling for a moment, as if refusing to accept the end.
Then, slowly, it collapsed to one side.
The head rolled a few meters away, eyes still open, that mocking smile frozen on its face.
As if he had just played the last card.
Urano dropped the sword, his breath heavy, his chest rising and falling erratically.
Aton approached, observing the corpse with an unreadable expression.
"Finally, some silence."
The wind carried away the acrid smell of blood.
And with it, the name of Requiem.