The Sovereign-V2: C63: Eclipse of Hope

The Sovereign-V2: C63: Eclipse of Hope

Time shattered. The Plaza of Screams, frozen in its tableau of imminent death, Akuma’s void charged gauntlet a breath from Shiro’s throat, Haruto’s dagger poised for a lethal strike, Juro’s axes mid arc, Kuro convulsing in silent torment, vanished. Reality peeled away like burning skin.
For Shiro and Kuro, the world dissolved into
pure, incandescent agony
. It wasn't physical pain; it was the sensation of their very consciousness being dipped in the heart of a dying star and then flash frozen in the absolute zero of the void, repeated infinitely in a single nanosecond. Molten lead seemed to pour into their neural pathways, searing synapses to ash, while glacial scalpels flayed the raw nerves left behind. They felt their minds
unravel
, thoughts shredded into screaming fragments, identities dissolving in the white hot forge of absolute suffering. There was no sound, only the silent, universe shattering scream vibrating in the marrow of their souls. This was the
Eclipse Vision Algol
: not a sight, but an invasive, brutal lesson carved directly onto the bedrock of their being with instruments of cosmic torment.
Amidst the searing white void of pain, two paths crystallized, horrifyingly vivid:
Path One.
The pain receded, replaced by a chilling clarity. They saw the Plaza
now
, but fractionally ahead. Haruto’s face, stripped of all humanity, contorted into a rictus of cold fury. His Polaris dagger didn’t hesitate. It plunged downward with vicious, surgical precision, not into Akuma’s back, but through the cracked horn of his helm, deep into the base of his skull.
CRUNCHHHHH.
Void ichor and fragmented obsidian sprayed. Akuma’s star pupils flared once, impossibly bright, filled with cosmic terror and the phantom echo of Ryo’s mocking voice, then extinguished. His body jerked, then slumped, a puppet with its strings cut.
Victory. But it tasted like ashes and void.
The Plaza
erupted
. Akuma’s uncontrolled void energy, released by his sudden death, detonated outwards in a silent, expanding sphere of absolute negation. Shiro and Kuro saw themselves thrown back, their cries swallowed by the devouring darkness. Ryota’s still form near the wall was engulfed, vanishing without a trace. Juro’s axes vaporized inches from his grasp. Haruto, closest to the epicentre, was consumed mid snarl, his form dissolving into motes of light snuffed by the void. The explosion ripped through the Plaza, cracking weeping pillars, silencing the runes, leaving only a crater of smoking, corrupted stone.
Then, the vision
pulled back
. They saw Volrag, slumped against another wall, witnessing the cataclysm. His glacial eyes, filled with a profound, echoing loss as he saw Ryota consumed, hardened into absolute, desolate fury. The vision shifted: Volrag twisted by Ryo for months, they see the torture the agony then months later, Volrag finding Ryota, broken, barely alive, hidden away. No words. Only a frost blade plunging into the Old Star’s heart, vengeance for the title stolen vengeance for Akuma twisted by Ryo. Then, Shiro and Kuro, consumed by their own grief and the lingering void taint, hunting Volrag down. A brutal, icy confrontation. Kuro’s corruption flared uncontrollably, consuming Volrag in a wave of blue white agony. As Volrag fell, his eyes locked not on them, but on the horizon, filled with a terrible emptiness.
But the victory was hollow. The cycle didn't end; it
mutated
. Standing over Volrag’s frozen corpse, Shiro and Kuro felt a new, deeper chill. A shadow detached itself from the greater darkness, not a hallucination, but an
entity
born of the concentrated hatred of their vengeance. It had no distinct form, only swirling darkness and eyes like fractured stars, radiating pure, predatory
hunger
. It stalked them silently through a desolate, frostbitten landscape, relentless, feeding on their lingering rage and despair. It was the embodiment of the cycle they’d perpetuated, endless, consuming, inescapable. The lesson screamed silently:
Kill the monster, become the monster. Feed the void, and it will feast on you forever.
Path 2:
The agony shifted, morphing into a different kind of pain, the sharp, clean hurt of a bone being reset, a nerve severed to save the limb. Back in the frozen Plaza moment. Haruto’s face, still etched with the cold fury of his father’s memory,
twitched
. The killing thrust wavered. His eyes, locked on the crack in Akuma’s armour, flickered. Not with mercy, but with a dawning, horrifying
recognition
. He saw the flayed corpse of Takeru Isamu, but superimposed over it, he saw the endless chain, Yuki burned, Kaya torn apart, Takeru flayed, Akuma executed and the cycle continues on forever.
Haruto’s lips moved. The words were silent in the vision, but they vibrated through Shiro and Kuro’s souls with the force of tectonic plates shifting:
“This cycle… ends here.”
His dagger didn’t plunge. It swept
down
, but with a brutal, precise hammer blow to the same crack Haruto had struck earlier.
KRACKKKK!
Not a kill, but a shattering impact. Akuma’s cracked chest plate splintered further. Void ichor fountained. Akuma convulsed, a gargling shriek escaping him, not of death, but of profound shock and the sudden, terrifying absence of Ryo’s phantom presence, severed by the unexpected act.
The Plaza’s violently crimson runes flickered… then
dimmed
. The unstable void energy lashing from Akuma’s gauntlet near Shiro’s throat sputtered and
receded
, pulling back into the Void Knight like a wounded serpent. Akuma didn’t die. He slumped, broken, gasping, his star pupils wide with confusion and a dawning, primal fear that had nothing to do with Ryo and everything to do with his own sudden vulnerability. He was defeated, humiliated, alive.
Shadows deeper than Akuma’s void coalesced, spectral figures in ornate, frost rimed armour, Juro and Corvin acted. They seized the broken Void Knight, their touch freezing his struggles instantly, and dragged him backwards into the weeping darkness near a shattered pillar. His terrified eyes locked on Haruto for a final, bewildered second before he vanished.
The Plaza felt… different. The oppressive hunger remained, the mountain’s pulse thrummed, but the sharp edge of imminent annihilation had blunted. The cost was still written in Ryota’s still form, Kuro’s corruption, Shiro’s agony, but the
future
…
The vision pulled back again. They saw Ryota, recovered but bearing the deep scars, physical and spiritual. Not in a war room, but in a quiet, frost rimed courtyard within Astralon. Opposite him stood Volrag. Not armed, not armoured in hate. The void taint was gone from his eyes, replaced by a profound weariness and sorrow. They didn’t embrace. They didn’t even speak. They stood in silence, looking out at the recovering city, a shared understanding passing between them, the terrible cost of the path they’d walked, the burden of choices made in shadow. There was peace. Not joy, but an absence of war. The haunting entity born of vengeance was
absent
. There was only the clean, cold air and the fragile hope of a morning after the long winter. The lesson resonated, a deep, clear chime after the cacophony:
Breaking the chain hurts. It leaves scars. But it opens the path. Spare the monster, starve the void. Choose life, choose the harder peace.
The
Eclipse Vision Algol
withdrew as violently as it had struck. The molten lead vanished, the glacial scalpels ceased. Shiro and Kuro gasped in unison, lungs burning as if surfacing from drowning. They slammed back into their bodies in the Plaza of Screams. The frozen tableau was breaking.
Shiro flinched violently backward, his throat untouched but burning with phantom cold, his right wrist shrieking anew. He stumbled, retching, the visions of the stalking entity and the quiet courtyard warring in his fractured mind. Kuro cried out, a raw sound, clutching his corrupted arm as if the disruptive entropy he’d gathered had backlashed internally. The static around his head flared and died, leaving a pounding headache and the searing memory of both consuming corruption and the absence of the wraith.
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Before them, Akuma staggered back, his void gauntlet retracting as if burned. The unstable energy was gone. His star pupils flickered wildly, no longer fixed on a phantom Ryo, but darting around the Plaza in raw, animal confusion and terror. The blow Haruto
hadn’t
delivered seemed to have struck deeper than any killing thrust could. He was broken, vulnerable, momentarily paralyzed by the psychic backlash of the vision he hadn't shared.
Haruto stood frozen, his dagger still extended, his knuckles white on the hilt. His face was pale, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps. He hadn’t seen the vision, but the echo of his own silent declaration,
"This cycle of avenging ends here"
seemed to hang in the charged air before him, a choice suddenly imbued with terrifying, cosmic weight. He stared at the space where Akuma had vanished, then down at his dagger, as if seeing it for the first time.
Juro lowered his axes slowly, his gaze darting between Shiro and Kuro’s evident trauma, Haruto’s frozen stance, and the spot where the spectral enforcers had dragged Akuma away. The crimson pulse of the runes bathed the scene in blood light, but the immediate, crushing danger had passed, replaced by the heavy silence of a choice suspended and a future trembling on the edge of a knife. The Algol lesson, agonizingly learned, now demanded action.
The silence after the Algol vision shattered like thin ice. Shiro gasped, the phantom cold at his throat replaced by the Plaza’s biting reality, the searing brand of the twin futures still scorching his mind. Kuro shuddered, the static receding to a low, painful throb within his skull, the invasive cold fire in his arm pulsing in agitated response to the psychic onslaught. They exchanged a single, lightning fast glance, a shared understanding of horrors witnessed that transcended words, unknown to the others.
Before them, the tableau unfroze.
Haruto Isamu
stood rigid, his Polaris dagger still extended towards the space where Akuma had been dragged into shadow. His knuckles were bone white on the hilt, his breath pluming in rapid, shallow bursts that fogged the cold air. He hadn't seen the vision. He hadn't heard its silent scream. He stood amidst the echoes of his own internal war, the image of his flayed father warring with the chilling clarity of an endless cycle of retribution, Yuki burned, Kaya defiled, Takeru butchered, Akuma executed, Volrag consumed, on and on into a future painted only in blood and frost. The weight of House Isamu’s fall, the burden of vengeance, pressed down, threatening to crack his icy composure.
Then, decisively, his arm lowered. The fierce Polaris light winking along the dagger’s edge dimmed, not extinguished, but banked, controlled. A conscious choice. He turned his head slightly, his obsidian gaze sweeping the battered survivors, Shiro trembling, Kuro clutching his corrupted arm, Ryota’s still form a dark stain on the floor, Juro poised with grim vigilance. His voice, when it came, cut through the Plaza’s oppressive hum with the cold, clear ring of a blade being sheathed, not in defeat, but in resolve.
“This cycle ends today.”
The words weren't loud, but they carried the weight of a vow. A promise etched not just for Akuma, but for the ghosts haunting Haruto’s steps, for the fractured rebellion gasping around him, and for the bleak future he refused to inherit. It was a line drawn in the ichor stained stone.
Akuma
, staggering back from the void enforcers' grasp but still reeling from the psychic shockwave of the Algol vision's abrupt end and Haruto’s unexpected declaration, misinterpreted the lowered blade. He saw only hesitation. A chink. The phantom Ryo’s mocking voice seemed to crescendo in his terror fractured mind:
"Fucking Weakness! Strike NOW!"
Desperation, feral and survival driven, overrode strategy. With a guttural snarl that sounded more like a cornered animal than a cosmic predator, he lunged.
It wasn't the lethal precision of the Void Knight. It was a wild, panicked swing of his void charged gauntlet, aimed directly at Haruto’s head. Unstable energy crackled around the obsidian fist, a sputtering, uncontrolled eruption of his fear and failing power.
Haruto, his focus still internal, processing his monumental choice, was fractionally slow to react.
Shiro
moved first. The gruesome visions, the stalking entity, the endless chain of death, were still raw, fuelling pure instinct. Ignoring the grinding agony in his wrist, he threw himself bodily
sideways
, colliding with Haruto’s shoulder. The Architect stumbled, the wild void gauntlet whistling through the air where his head had been a microsecond before. Void energy seared the spot, leaving a patch of smoking, corrupted stone.
Akuma, unbalanced by the wild swing, pivoted with feral speed, already bringing his other gauntlet around in a vicious backhand aimed at Haruto’s exposed flank.
Kuro
was there. Gritting his teeth against the white hot brand where the Algol vision had flayed his mind and the invasive cold surging in his arm, he planted his good leg and
shoved
Haruto hard, sending the Architect sprawling clear. Kuro braced himself, raising his corrupted arm instinctively as a frozen shield.
THMPPPPPP!
Akuma’s backhand slammed into the sickly blue luminescence surrounding Kuro’s corrupted limb. The impact jarred Kuro violently, sending fresh javelins of agony lancing from his shoulder to his heart as the invasive cold fire flared in protest. He cried out, stumbling back, the static roaring back to life around his head like angry hornets. The shield held, barely, but the cost was etched in the sudden grey pallor of Kuro’s face and the deeper blue veins now visibly pulsing towards his collarbone. The corruption fed on the strain.
The moment of chaos solidified into a defensive formation.
Juro
stepped forward, placing himself solidly between the staggering Kuro and Akuma, his twin axes raised in a guard position.
Shiro
, gasping from the effort and the renewed pain in his wrist, scrambled to Haruto’s side, helping him up. Haruto’s icy composure was back, his obsidian eyes fixed on Akuma with renewed, calculating focus, though a flicker of acknowledgment passed between him and Shiro. Ryota remained a still, grim reminder of the cost on the periphery. They formed a tight, battered semicircle facing the Void Knight, Shiro and Haruto on the left, Juro anchoring the centre, Kuro leaning heavily but defiantly on the right, his corrupted arm held low, still crackling from the impact.
Akuma stood hunched, panting, void ichor weeping steadily from the cracks in his armour and the wound Haruto had inflicted. His wild attack had failed, leaving him more exposed. He looked from one resolute face to another, the gutter rat’s defiance, the disgraced lord’s icy resolve, the Frostguard heir’s protective fury, the corrupted prince’s pained endurance. He saw no fear. Only determination. His star pupils, wide with residual terror and dawning realization, darted to the shadows where the enforcers had retreated. No help would come. The tide had irrevocably turned. His void aura, once a crushing mantle, flickered erratically, sputtering like a dying flame. The intense cold radiating from him lessened perceptibly, replaced by a faint, unnatural warmth emanating from his damaged armour, a sign of his failing grip on the void’s power, the energy leaking out uncontrolled.
A low, guttural snarl escaped Akuma’s cracked helm, part fury, part desperate bravado.
“You’ll regret this mercy,”
he hissed, the void voice distorted, thin, lacking its former cosmic weight. The threat rang hollow against the backdrop of his visible wounds and destabilizing power.
Haruto
took a single, deliberate step forward. His voice cut through Akuma’s fading snarl and the Plaza’s groan, cold, precise, and utterly final.
“The cycle of vengeance ends here,”
he repeated, the words resonating with the force of a judicial decree.
“But your actions today will be remembered along with the atrocities you committed but, tell Ryo a storm is brewing.”
It was more than a statement; it was a pronouncement. A challenge flung at the retreating shadows of Ryo’s regime. A promise of accountability. And a warning, not just to Akuma, but to any who sought to perpetuate the Butcher King’s legacy of blood and ice. The words hung in the charged air, a line drawn not just in the Plaza, but in the soul of the rebellion.

.
!
V2: C63: Eclipse of Hope